Dharius Daniels - How Do You Forgive Yourself for Past Mistakes

Listen, I know you’ve probably heard a lot about the word «forgiveness.» I want to tell you that the most important person you can ever forgive is yourself. In this video, I’m going to explain why and how—stay tuned.

Forgiveness is a word that is often thrown around, whether in sacred or secular spaces. Very often, when the word «forgiveness» is mentioned, it relates to your pardoning someone, which is really what forgiveness means; it means to pardon, to write off bad debt, because you realize and recognize that what someone took from you, they could never pay you back. So, even if they stole money from you, they can give money back, but they cannot give you time back; they can’t give you sleepless nights back; they can’t give you the inconvenience back. So, when you forgive a person, you are writing that offense off as bad debt because you recognize that holding onto this grudge changes nothing about them, but it changes everything about you.

It’s important to understand and practice forgiveness when it comes to other people, but the most important person you’ll ever forgive—and often the hardest person to forgive—is yourself. Here it is: I think many of us can look at seasons and situations in our lives where we see decisions and choices we made, or did not make. Sometimes, choosing not to decide is a decision in itself. We can look back at these seasons and situations and see where something we decided, or didn’t decide, caused some damage to our lives. We’ve damaged our own dreams, and we’ve contributed to our own chaos and calamity.

It’s one thing for the inner me to be responsible for my lack of progress, but it’s another thing entirely when the inner me is responsible for my own stagnation. Very often, that is the case, and people struggle to forgive themselves. Not only do we find it hard to forgive ourselves for what we did to ourselves, but there are also times when we struggle to forgive ourselves for what we did to others. Our actions have the potential to directly or indirectly impact someone else, and when we hurt, injure, or negatively affect someone we love, that guilt and shame can be hard to shake off.

Maybe you’re watching this and you have been the absent father. You were in the home, but you were so focused on providing and protecting—rightfully so—to a degree—that you were so zapped and drained of energy that you were physically present but emotionally absent. By the way, I’ve been there, and I know what that feels like. Now you look up and realize there’s an entire season of your child’s childhood that is a blur to you, and you know you can’t recapture that time. You feel like there are things they needed from you that they couldn’t get, and perhaps you’re grappling with a lack of forgiveness.

Or maybe you’re a mom who feels like you had your child while you were still growing up. I’m not necessarily referring to teenage pregnancy, but it’s possible to give birth to a child while you’re still growing up simultaneously. As a result, you may not have been the best version of yourself, which led to damage for the one you love the most. You might be having a hard time forgiving yourself for that.

Maybe you’ve made some career choices during a season of your life you now look back on and think, «Man, I squandered that. If I had managed that season differently, I would be further along right now; I would have more than I do now.» But now you feel like you’re too old to start over yet too young to quit. You’re frustrated and struggling to forgive yourself.

I’ve been there; I know how that feels. But here’s what I want you to know: you can’t keep revisiting what you can’t revise. When you get better spiritually, everything gets better. Your spiritual life is not only an important part of your life; it is the most crucial aspect because it affects every other part that matters. But you don’t get stronger spiritually by accident; it takes intentionality. You need to get fed, and you must learn how to interpret, apply, and explain the Bible. The Bible is the blueprint to your best life, and I’m telling you that Sunday is not enough to provide you with the tools you need to grow with the Bible.

I want you to join my community called Bible You, where I help you elevate your understanding, application, and explanation of the Bible to another level. No matter how much you revisit it, you can’t revise it. No matter how often you think about it, you can’t go back and change the past. No matter how upset you are with yourself, you cannot go back in time and undo those actions.

You need to make a decision, and that decision is simple: are you going to continue wasting your energy in the present, beating yourself up about the past, or will you use that energy to transform your future? The remedy for a bad past is creating an amazing future. The only way to get over what happened yesterday is to…