So you notice now I'm required to extend forgiveness so sometimes there is a bit of a process in coming to the place of forgiveness. It's a decision. It's always a decision from your will to release the person from the debt they owe. You owe me, you've got to pay me back. You've got to say sorry or something, whatever it is. You know wives and husbands get like that. They'll have a silence, no speaks. No speaks is really just a demand you pay me back. It drives a husband crazy. What's up? Is anything wrong? NO! There's a heap of hurt and unforgiveness there, so you notice that sometimes what is needed is to sit down and have a think what happened to me and how did it affect me? I need to be honest with what I really carry in my heart and if I find that there's huge amounts of grief and huge amounts of anger and I really am very bitter about what's happened, I need to come out in the open and process that stuff with God. Then forgiveness becomes effective because I now know what I'm actually forgiving. I know exactly what it is I'm letting go. It's my demand or right to extract justice from them, to extract punishment, extract a repayment. I'm releasing my rights. I'm putting my rights at the cross. I'm letting Jesus deal with this and so I will bless those who cursed me. I'll forgive those who despitefully used me, pray for them.
Can you see what you're called to do? So we're all called to forgive but it can be a process and sometimes the journey requires sitting down and acknowledging before God and to yourself how deeply things have affected you. What we tend to want to do is to control the pain and block it into our heart and not admit how deeply this has impacted me. If you've got the fruit, you've got the root. That's how it is - and if you don't deal with the root, the demons - now you've got to understand this - if you don't deal with the root then the demons have a legal ground to afflict you. Of all the areas I have found that consistently invite demonic spirits to come into people's lives, it's the issues of bitterness and unforgiveness. It just is an open door for demons to come in.
If you're harbouring bitterness and unforgiveness you have an open door where spirits can come in and manipulate your life and affect your current relationships, so your current relationships become polluted by what you've been in the past that you never dealt with. That's why if you're getting married and you've got a history of some broken relationships with your parents or broken sexual relationships, you need to resolve them or you're going to reflect your baggage to your spouse and defile the marriage. Getting the idea? Demons use this. They ride in on the back of that. Well that's enough on that. Okay, so give someone a dig and say you need to listen ... [Applause] ... to that one, that was for you.
So sometimes when we're dealing with a person who's been abused you've got to actually take a bit of time to hear their story and let them grieve and weep and feel the pain, then allow the Lord to come and heal the pain and bring the process of forgiveness. It is a bit of a journey. Sometimes I encourage people to write an anger letter, sit down and write a letter, write to the person, acknowledge what's good about them, what you appreciate, what you value and then write down what they did, how it's affected your life. Be really brutally honest and then release forgiveness after you've grieved and felt the feelings of it - but don't post the letter whatever you do, you know. ... [Laughter] ... Don't post the letter and don't even leave it lying around or someone else will post it. Just burn it up - you've got to the end of it. ... [Applause] ... It's about you engaging your own heart, not about using it as a chance - I hate you! you know? I've had people do that. They come up - I've had a bitterness against you for three years! I'm thinking really? I'm so blessed you told me that. [Laughs] It's all I can do not to say well I didn't feel a thing you know, but ... [Laughter] ... I've been getting on with my life. [Laughs] I usually just have to say I'm really sorry that you didn't process this earlier. It would have been so easy to have saved yourself a lot of pain. ... [Laughter]
Okay, so the next phase - so pillars: recognise, take responsibility, repent of sin, release forgiveness and then renounce bondages that are in our life. We've actually got to learn to speak things off our life. We've got to use the power of confession, renounce bondages, agreements you've made with evil spirits and various kinds of things, bitter judgements, inner vows. I'll talk about that next session, but we need to speak off our life what we came into agreement with, so if you come into agreement with an evil spirit you need to speak that off your life - I break that agreement. I break that bitter judgement. I cancel my agreement with that spirit right now. We need to break those things, to speak it off your life. What you're doing is you're agreeing with God I'm no longer in agreement with that devil! Devil, I break my agreement with you. I'm in agreement with God! I'm walking with God, see?