by Vicki Campbell

Would you knowingly pick up a bottle of poison, drink it, and honestly believe that it’s not going to hurt you, but that it might very easily hurt someone else? No! None of us in our right minds would believe such an absurd notion.

Now, imagine watching your best friend walk into a room, pick up a glass of poison and start drinking it. You don’t have a problem with this. In your efforts to console her, you let her know that you understand that she doesn’t have any choice but to drink it. If you were in her shoes, you would do the same thing. Hogwash! What kind of a friend would let another friend destroy themselves this way?

Yet, I see this happening all the time. This poison that so many people, even Christians, are drinking is packaged and promoted by Satan himself as Unforgiveness. His advertising campaign is so full of deceptions that many times, even the best of us, fall prey to his scheme of self-destruction. We believe the lie that everyone else in our situation is doing it. What else is there to do but to join the crowd and gulp down a big bottle of this readily available poison called Unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness is deadly. It torments our minds. It brings on sickness and disease. It ushers in stress. It robs us of our happiness. Worse of all, the Bible says that if we don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive us. That means our own eternal salvation is at stake when we choose to allow Unforgiveness in our lives.

Satan tells us that we don’t need to forgive our offenders because they don’t deserve it. Well, maybe they don’t, but your Unforgiveness isn’t hurting them; it’s hurting you! Many times the person or persons we refuse to forgive don’t even know that that they need to be forgiven, and even if they do, most of them don’t care one way or another. Let me repeat myself, “They’re not hurting because of your Unforgiveness; you are!”

What a con! Satan even has Christians believing that we can’t forgive even though the Bible not only says that we can, but that we must. God wouldn’t command us to do what is impossible. The Devil has us believing that it’s normal to hold onto Unforgiveness. I’ve even heard people brag about how good they are at holding grudges — a form of Unforgiveness. They’ll boast about how they’ve held a grudge now for 20 years or more.

I even know one Christian lady who had been active in her church for years. She wanted prayer because she was tormented with recurring nightmares about snakes and she suffered terribly with Parkinson’s disease. It was amazing when we watched God’s healing hand transform her from taking painful baby steps, barely able to move to literally running around her house pain-free. Yet, when she adamantly refused to forgive the men she worked with years earlier for treating her badly, she lost her healing and spent her remaining days tormented in both her mind and her body.

Don’t think for one minute that I’ve not battled with this deadly poison myself. I couldn’t begin to tell you the number of times and the circumstances which kept this poison so close to me. There have been many long, hard battles to get it out, and keep it out of my system.

You have to stay on top of it! What I’ve found is about the time I’ve rid myself of it all, something will happen to remind me again of the injustices done to me. I find that if I start dwelling on that thing and reliving the horror in my mind, I’ve once again taken a big gulp of Unforgiveness. Then, I have to start all over again to get rid of this deadly poison.

However, if I choose not to replay that old re-run in my mind again; rather, if I begin praying and reminding myself that I’ve already forgiven, I’m not haunted anymore by that deadly, tormenting poison. Philippians 4 says that we must think on the good things, and then we’ll have the peace of God.

I know many of you are thinking, “But you don’t know what was done to me.” No, I don’t, but God does, and for your own good, He still wants you to forgive. We’ve seen and heard about every horrible thing that can happen to a person from a family member being murdered to a war veteran sitting in a wheelchair, hating an entire nation for what was done to him. Is life fair? Is it right for Christians to hurt each other? Is it right for family to turn against us? Was it right what they did to Jesus? No, but follow His example and forgive anyway.

Do yourself a favor and stay healthy. Don’t drink the poison.

Vicki