Dharius Daniels - You Can't Heal Unless You Forgive

There will be times when you and I are affected by the imperfect decisions that somebody else makes. See, it got quiet. Here’s real life: sometimes we will suffer not because of what we did; sometimes we will suffer because of what someone else did. One of the most powerful superpowers that I want to highlight today, that everyone in this room has, is similar to the superpower Wolverine possesses, and that is you and I have the ability to facilitate our own healing. What? Yep, you and I have been given the power to facilitate our own healing. Pastor, when did He give us that power? Is that what the gift of healing is? No, no, no, no, that spiritual gift is for other people; it’s not for you. Well, when did God give me the ability to facilitate my own healing? When He gave us the capacity to exercise forgiveness. Yeah, the 8:45 and 10:30 responded the same way when I said He gave us—the ability to facilitate our own healing when He gave us a superpower called forgiveness. What the enemy doesn’t want us to do is to gain a revelation on how to use this superpower. He wants to present this superpower as some sort of weakness, a capitulation and cooperation with someone abusing, misusing, and exploiting you, not realizing that this is a superpower. When you know how to use it right, it insulates you from the injuries being perpetuated on you by imperfect people. Come on! This superpower is the way you fight against the enemies of bitterness, resentment, cynicism, jadedness, hard-heartedness, and emotional ups and downs. The absence of forgiveness leads to the presence of emotional torture. You do not forgive as a sign of weakness; you forgive as a sign of strength. You do not forgive because you like the person that hurt you; you forgive because you love yourself and refuse to stay a victim of somebody else’s selfishness. Listen, when you get better spiritually, everything gets better. Spiritual life is not the only important part of your life; it is the most important part of your life because it affects every other aspect that is important. But you don’t get stronger spiritually accidentally; it takes intentionality. You need to get fed, and you have to learn how to understand, interpret, apply, and explain the Bible. The Bible is the blueprint to your best life, and I’m going to tell you, Sunday is not enough to give you the tools that you need to get better with the Bible. I want you to join me in my community called Bible You, where I help you take your understanding, application, and explanation of the Bible to another level. God gives us this superpower because He gives nothing that He intends for us to waste. He gives us this superpower because there is a reality that many people fail to embrace—a reality many people fail to accept. So they’re living life in this bubble of deception, moving with the assumption that the world is the way they like it to be, as opposed to the revelation that the world is the way God says it is. So here’s life: can we just talk about life? Here’s the reality: the truth sets us free from living lives of deception. Being deceived—you know, the nature of deception is that you don’t know you’re being deceived. Y’all missed it; I said the nature of deception is that we don’t know we’re deceived. And so when we’re living life thinking life works one way and it doesn’t work that way, we need truth to set us free from that deception so we can move the way we need to move, based on the reality of life, not the way we think it should be. So here’s the way it is: we live in an imperfect world that’s filled with imperfect people who make imperfect decisions. As a result, there will be times when you and I are affected by the imperfect decisions that somebody else makes. See, it got quiet. Here’s real life: sometimes we will suffer not because of what you did; sometimes we will suffer because of what someone else did. Come on! We become the victims of someone else’s imperfections. This is life. We can dislike it; we can dismiss it, but we can’t alter or adjust it. This is the truth about life, and this truth sets us free from the false expectations that this won’t happen. If I’m moving like this won’t happen, I’m going to be unprepared for the inevitable, and to be unprepared for the inevitable is to be naive. It’s like seeing rain and refusing to take an umbrella because you’re denying it’s raining, but your denial of the rain doesn’t stop you from getting wet. I wish I had a church that would talk back to me at this 12:30 service. The reality is this: the only way you can avoid injury due to other people’s imperfections is to cut off total proximity. Proximity means vulnerability. Did you hear what I just said? You can get sick not because you went out of the house without a coat. Y’all missed it! You can get sick because someone else went outside of the house without wearing a coat or hat, caught something, and because of your proximity, you suffer from what they did. Come on! Proximity means vulnerability. When you date somebody and you say it’s me and you, you trust in their decisions. I don’t hear anybody! Come on! You are vulnerable to their decisions when you say, «I do.»