Lysa Terkeurst Forgiveness Quotes

Forgiveness is mandatory; reconciliation is optional.

My ability to heal cannot be conditional on them wanting my forgiveness but only on my willingness to give it.

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.

Hope is the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to that melody right now.

I am a soul who likes the concept of forgiveness . . . until I am a hurting soul who doesn’t.

It is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.

Forgiveness is the weapon. Our choices moving forward are the battlefield. Moving on is the journey.

My ability to heal cannot depend on anyone’s choices but my own.

Forgiveness releases to the Lord your need for them to be punished or corrected, giving it to the only One who can do this with right measures of justice and mercy.

I forgive this person for how their actions back then are still impacting me now. And whatever my feelings don’t yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover.

Bitterness isn’t usually found most deeply in those whose hearts are hard but rather in those who are most tender. It’s not that they are cold; it’s that they’ve been made to feel unsafe.

Staying here, blaming them, and forever defining your life by what they did will only increase the pain. Worse, it will keep projecting out onto others. The more our pain consumes us, the more it will control us. And sadly, it’s those who least deserve to be hurt whom our unresolved pain will hurt the most.

You can’t fake yourself into being okay with what happened. But you can decide that the one who hurt you doesn’t get to decide what you do with your memories. Your life can be a graceful combination of beautiful and painful.

In the meantime, we must hold fast to the truth of who God is and His unchanging nature: God is good. His plans are good. His requirements are good. His salvation is good. His grace is good. His forgiveness is good. His restoration is good.

We can’t live in an alternate reality and expect what’s right in front of us to get better.

As soon as sin was their choice, the cover of darkness was their preference.

At some point we must stop: 1. Replaying what happened over and over. 2. Taking what was actually terrible in the past and tricking ourselves into thinking it was better than it was. 3. Imagining the ways things should be so much that we can't acknowledge what is.

But weeping with them and rejoicing with them does not mean trying to take control of their out-of-control choices and behaviors. We can forgive them. But we cannot control them. And we should not enable them.

Relationships were reduced to attempts at managing what I feared about them rather than enjoying what I loved about them.

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”1

I only needed to bring my willingness to forgive, not the fullness of all my restored feelings.

My broken perspective is not proof of His broken promises.

My counselor says, “Adults inform, children explain.” I will state my boundaries with compassion and clarity. But I will not negotiate excuses or navigate exceptions with lengthy explanations that wear me down emotionally.

Cynicism dressed like a security guard, making me believe that if I hoped for less, it would protect me and prevent more pain.

Unresolved pain triggers unrestrained chaos.

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

What we look for is what we will see, what we see determines our perspective, and our perspective determines our reality.

It's necessary for you to not let pain rewrite your memories, and it's absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.

Grief is devastating no matter how it comes. But when there’s a person or people whose choices struck the match igniting the grief? It’s only natural to clench your jaw when you think of what happened.

Forgiveness is both a decision and a process. You make the decision to forgive the facts of what happened. But then you must also walk through the process of forgiveness for the impact those facts have had on you.

And that’s when I just want to lie down on the floor in a very dramatic way and loudly declare, “BUT I AM NOT JESUS!!” Ugh. However, as hard as this seems, I think it’s harder to keep letting circumstances and complicated people kidnap my peace.

Not forgiving someone isn’t teaching the other person a lesson, nor is it protecting you in any way. It’s making the choice to stay in pain. It’s ratcheting the already too-tight belt tighter and tighter with each remembrance. Undealt-with pain and a mind at peace cannot coexist.

ever validated that what I went through was wrong. Forgiveness feels like it trivializes, minimizes, or, worse yet, makes what happened no big deal. I can’t possibly forgive when I still feel so hostile toward the one who hurt me. I’m not ready to forgive. I still feel hurt. They haven’t apologized or even acknowledged that what they did was wrong. Being back in relationship with this person isn’t possible or safe. Furthermore, it’s not even reasonable for me to have a conversation with the person who hurt me. I’m still in the middle of a long, hard situation with no resolution yet. I’m afraid forgiveness will give them false hope that I want to reestablish the relationship, but I don’t. It’s easier to ignore this person altogether than to try and figure out boundaries so they don’t keep hurting me. What they did is unchangeable; therefore, forgiveness won’t help anything. The person who hurt me is no longer here. I can’t forgive someone I can’t talk to. I don’t think any good will come from forgiveness now. When your heart has been shattered and reshaped into something that doesn’t quite feel normal inside your own chest yet, forgiveness feels a bit unrealistic.

God, I give this situation to You. I release my evidence of all the reasons they were so wrong. I release my need to see this person punished. I release my need for an apology. I release my need for this to feel fair. I release my need for You to declare me right and them wrong. Show me what I need to learn from all of this. And then give me Your peace in place of my anger.

Need to Be Honest about My Issues Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (PSALM 139:23 – 24) Thought for the Day: Avoiding reality never changes reality. Mostly I’m a good person with good motives, but not always. Not when I just want life to be a little more about me or about making sure I look good. That’s when my motives get corrupted. The Bible is pretty blunt in naming the real issue here: evil desires. Yikes. I don’t like that term at all. And it seems a bit severe to call my unglued issues evil desires, doesn’t it? But in the depths of my heart I know the truth. Avoiding reality never changes reality. Sigh. I think I should say that again: Avoiding reality never changes reality. And change is what I really want. So upon the table I now place my honesty: I have evil desires. I do. Maybe not the kind that will land me on a 48 Hours Mystery episode, but the kind that pull me away from the woman I want to be. One with a calm spirit and divine nature. I want it to be evident that I know Jesus, love Jesus, and spend time with Jesus each day. So why do other things bubble to the surface when my life gets stressful and my relationships get strained? Things like … Selfishness: I want things my way. Pride: I see things only from my vantage point. Impatience: I rush things without proper consideration. Anger: I let simmering frustrations erupt. Bitterness: I swallow eruptions and let them fester. It’s easier to avoid these realities than to deal with them. I’d much rather tidy my closet than tidy my heart. I’d much rather run to the mall and get a new shirt than run to God and get a new attitude. I’d much rather dig into a brownie than dig into my heart. I’d much rather point the finger at other people’s issues than take a peek at my own. Plus, it’s just a whole lot easier to tidy my closet, run to the store, eat a brownie, and look at other people’s issues. A whole lot easier. I rationalize that I don’t have time to get all psychological and examine my selfishness, pride, impatience, anger, and bitterness. And honestly, I’m tired of knowing I have issues but having no clue how to practically rein them in on a given day. I need something simple. A quick reality check I can remember in the midst of the everyday messies. And I think the following prayer is just the thing: God, even when I choose to ignore what my heart is saying to me, You know my heart. I bring to You this [and here I name whatever feeling or thoughts I have been reluctant to acknowledge]. Forgive me. Soften my heart. Make it pure. Might that quick prayer help you as well? If so, stop what you are doing —just for five minutes — and pray these or similar words. When I’ve prayed for the Lord to interrupt my feelings and soften my heart, it’s amazing how this changes me. Dear Lord, help me to remember to actually bring my emotions and reactions to You. I want my heart reaction to be godly. Thank You for grace and for always forgiving me. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

...I can't expect a perfection in others I'm not even capable of living out myself.

But then we also must walk through the much longer process of forgiving and healing from the impact another person's actions have had on us. Forgiveness is a command by God, but reconciliation should be very conditional on many factors—most of all whether all parties involved can stay safe ad healthy if they stay together.

WHAT YOU GIVE UP: the right to demand that the one who hurt you pay you back or be made to suffer for what they’ve done. God will handle this. And even if you never see how God handles it, you know He will. WHAT YOU GET: the freedom to move on.

Boundaries aren’t to push others away. They are to hold me together. Otherwise, I will downgrade my gentleness to hastily spoken words of anger and resentment. I will downgrade my progress with forgiveness to bitterness. I will downgrade my words of sincerity to frustrated words of anger, aggression, or rude remarks. I will downgrade my attitude for reconciliation to acts of retaliation . . . not because I’m not a good person but because I’m not a person keeping appropriate boundaries. And boundaries are 100 percent my choice, not theirs. Therefore, a much healthier place to exert my energy is with choices I can make to stay healthy while still staying available to offer as much compassion as my spiritual capacity will allow. And staying humble before the Lord, asking Him to grow me and mature me so my spiritual capacity will stay ever-increasing. So, how do we apply this practically? Remember,

It took time to get to this place. It will take time to heal and find these healthy perspectives. None of this could be rushed for me, and none of it should be rushed for you. We need to feel what we feel. We need to think through what we need to think through. We need to get it all out and sort it all out. And, most of all, we need to stay put and be present for it all. Here is what I challenged myself with throughout this process whenever I felt ready to return to old patterns and give up. I want you to read this next part aloud as a personal declaration: I DON’T NEED TO RUN AWAY. What I’m looking for will never be found somewhere out there.

The things marking us from yesterday are still part of the making of us today.

God gives it to us because He knows what our hearts and souls really need. It is His truth that sets us free.

If our reaction is hysterical, it is historical.” We can

which also makes me feel powerless to change.

Forgiveness isn’t an act of my determination. Forgiveness is only made possible by my cooperation.

A heaviness settled in that I couldn’t explain or pinpoint exactly. I’m not sure how to properly describe it, except to say on different days it crept up with varying personas that seemed to hold me together and rip me apart simultaneously. Cynicism dressed like a security guard, making me believe that if I hoped for less, it would protect me and prevent more pain. In reality, though, it was a thief in disguise, out to steal every bit of closeness between me and those I love.

Remember those markings of time? BC: Before Crisis. AD: After Devastation. Well, there’s a third line I’ve discovered. It’s RH: Resurrected Hope.

is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.

What we look for is what we will see. What we see determines our perspective. And our perspective becomes our reality. I want

And whatever my feelings don’t yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover. Amen.

For me to move forward, for me to see beyond this current darkness, is between me and the Lord. I don’t need to wait on others to do anything or place blame or shame that won’t do anyone any good. I simply must obey whatever God is asking of me right now. God has given me a new way to walk. And God has given me a new way to see. It’s forgiveness. And it is beautiful.

And walking confidently with the Lord from hurt to healing is the freedom that awaits.

The cross was the most holy act of forgiveness that ever took place. And it was His blood shed for our sins that was the redemptive ingredient that accomplished a forgiveness we could never have obtained or earned for ourselves.

While the truth is sometimes hard to hear, God gives it to us because He knows what our hearts and souls really need. It is His truth that sets us free.

forgiveness is the greatest evidence that the Truth of God lives in us.

We can only heal what we’re willing to acknowledge is real.

Forgiveness isn’t something hard we have the option to do or not do. Forgiveness is something hard won that we have the opportunity to participate in.

Not forgiving someone isn’t teaching the other person a lesson, nor is it protecting you in any way. It’s making the choice to stay in pain.

Undealt-with pain and a mind at peace cannot coexist.

The sign of progress is to let the pain work for you instead of against you. Use it as an opportunity to let the pain drive you to the new healing habits and perspectives we’ve been discovering together

Have one better thought. Have one better reaction. Have one better way to process. Have one better conversation. Have one boundary you lovingly communicate and consistently keep. Have one better choice not to reach for that substance to numb out. Have one better heart pivot toward forgiveness instead of resentment. Have one less day when you stay mad.

wish I could say I turned it all around after that. I didn’t. I let the triggered emotion settle in and become a bad mood for the rest of the day. And all the people around me who didn’t deserve to catch the brunt of my chaos felt the completely unsettled state of my heart.

Once pain has been inflicted, it’s impossible to remain unaffected.

Healing will take time. But I must move forward toward it if I ever hope to get there. And forgiveness is a good step in the right direction. Not just good, but necessary. When we don’t move forward, when we get stuck in our hurt, unable to escape the grip of that threatening pain, trauma takes root. When we keep reliving what happened in our mind over and over, we keep experiencing the trauma as if it’s happening in the present time. Time comes to a screeching halt, our hearts race with wildly unpredictable and terrifyingly uncontrollable pulses, and our brains keep sounding internal alarms that we are no longer safe. This is helpful for a time, as we need to get ourselves out of immediate danger, but remaining in this mode long term is definitely not healthy. We need to eventually move toward a state of healing, of rest. We need to eventually get to the place where we stop replaying over and over what hurt us. “Brain and body are programmed to run for home, where safety can be restored and stress hormones can come to rest.”1

What I really feared I would never escape was being me. The common denominator of all the pain was that I was in the center of it. The greatest hell a human can experience here on earth is not suffering. It’s feeling like the suffering is pointless and it will never get any better.

I’ve heard it said that people fall in love. I wish the expression was more like, “We found love, and then we chose it over and over together.” I much prefer that to falling.

people who are quiet are sometimes the ones in the most pain. It’s just that their screams are silent. Or, they are acting out in secret.

And maybe that’s the first lesson for what makes vulnerability so complicated. If we risk being open, we risk being hurt. We risk the other person taking something from us. And we know to fear this pain, because, unlike Adam and Eve, we’ve experienced this pain. So we pull back and we get bitter and we become more and more easily offended and less and less willing to be vulnerable.

At the very same time we grieve a loss, we gain more and more awareness of an eternal perspective. Grieving is such a deep work and a long process, it feels like we might not survive it. But eventually we do.

Loss is never the end of the story.

There are hurts and losses we’ve experienced in our past that feed wrong beliefs and unhealthy tendencies, holding us back in the present.

We can’t change what we have experienced, but we can choose how the experiences change us.

In relationships we have experiences both good and bad. We develop perceptions about the world and other people that affect what we see as we move on through life. Those perceptions interpret and fill in the gaps, and that belief then informs our reality.

We need to feel what we feel. We need to think through what we need to think through. We need to get it all out and sort it all out. And, most of all, we need to stay put and be present for it all. Here

I’m not a victim. I am a healed woman walking in victory.

You must empty enough so you can shift from griever to receiver. There’s new to be found. The new healing you discover will be wonderful, but it probably won’t give you answers for why all this hurt happened. Making peace with the past doesn’t mean that you’ll ever be able to make sense of what happened. Good thing there’s something better than answers. To get better you don’t have to know why. Why they hurt you, why they misunderstood you, why they betrayed you, why they didn’t love you, protect you, or stay like they should. Their reasons are multilayered with a mysterious mix of their own pain. They are dealing with their own heartbreak and their own soul wrestling.

Remember, forgiveness shouldn’t be an open door for people to take advantage of us. Forgiveness releases our need for retaliation, not our need for boundaries.

it’s time to train some people how to treat us.

I try not to personalize what other people say or do, but it’s really hard when I’m a deep feeler. I get hurt. And sadly, though I never want to hurt others, I do. Even when I do everything I know to do to make things better . . . sometimes things don’t get better. Some relationships don’t survive in the long run. Sometimes we never really know why.

It’s important to start making these connections between what happened in our growing-up years and the reasons we do some of the things we do, say some of the things we say, and believe some of the things we believe right now.

Instead of vulnerability meaning “I expose myself to harm,” what if it can be “opening myself to know and love other people while also allowing them to know and love me”?

Together, we’ll fight the shame threatening to bully its way into your mind. I will not add to your shame. I will speak the truth but always with the goal of helping you and helping us to stay healthy. I will not reduce you to being a sum total of your struggles. I will speak life by reminding you who you really are

Yes, loss is certainly part of what shapes us. But it doesn’t have to all be detrimental. Loss can also shape us in wonderful ways if we will let it.

inside every loss, a more wise, empathetic, understanding, discerning, compassionate person of strength and humility has the potential to arise within us.

Soft hearts don’t break or beat or belittle, but broken hearts with unhealed pasts can often be found traveling wrong paths. They hurt, they sting, they say words they don’t really mean. The pain they project is just an effort to protect all that feels incredibly fragile inside of them.

But when you are grieving over something or someone that was taken away, you wish you could go back in time. You dream in reverse. Instead of hoping for what will one day be, you long for a more innocent time when you lived more unaware of tragedy. But the griever knows they can’t go back in time. So healing feels impossible, because circumstances feel unchangeable.

saving someone isn’t possible if they don’t agree they need to be saved. Even if I get them off these tracks in this moment, they’ll climb right back on them tomorrow. If your heart is more committed to change than theirs is, you may delay the train wreck but you will not be able to save them from it. And from what I’ve experienced, the more you keep jumping onto the tracks to try and rescue them, the more likely it is that the train will run over you both.

The term enabling is often used for friends and family who seem to perpetuate addictive behaviors in a loved one by covering up their choices, rescuing them from consequences, and smoothing over issues they cause. But the term can also be used for how we handle family members whose behaviors aren’t caused just by an addiction but also by other issues they refuse to acknowledge and expect others to go along with and accept as normal.

Maybe it’s time to reeducate some people in our lives with clearly stated, gracefully implemented, consistently kept boundaries. It’s for the sake of your sanity that you draw necessary boundaries. It’s for the sake of stability that you stay consistent with those boundaries.

I can say no. I must not confuse the command to love with the disease to please.

I can be honest about what I can and cannot give. It doesn’t make me a bad person to communicate the reality of my capacity. Dysfunction diminishes my capacity in every area. Boundaries increase my ability to function with more regularity within the capacity I have.

I felt I was working so hard to keep my heart in a good place—a forgiving place, a hopeful place—that I almost decided it would just be easier to let the bitterness have its full way with my heart. The payoff of forgiveness didn’t seem to be there like I’d hoped.

Remember, the decision to forgive acknowledges the facts of what happened. But the much longer journey of forgiveness is around all the many ways these facts affected you—the impact they created.

Forgiveness isn’t just about what’s in front of us. Sometimes, a bigger part of the journey is uncovering what is informing us from long ago. Woven throughout our experiences is a connecting thread that pulls the beliefs we formed from our past into the very present moments of today.

LOSS IS A CRUCIBLE. It presses into the deepest places from which we loved, causing such pain we often don’t know how to make sense of the despair. Memories as crystal clear as if they were happening right now dance in front of us, letting us see the beauty of what used to be our life on replay. But those replays make us cry. Seeing what once was is as cruel as it is beautiful.

However loss comes, it hurts. We all identify with the pain of loss. We have all lost people we once hugged and held and allowed a kind of merging of us with them. And whether they walked away, moved away, drifted away, shoved away, faded away, or passed away, the awayness created a phantom feeling where, out of habit, we reach for them but they’re no longer there. We dial their number to no avail. We run our fingers across photographs but cannot feel the warmth of their skin. The loss of inside jokes and shared late-night whispers and conflicts and carpools and cookouts and differing opinions and all the other million little daily ways “together” is made. The story of our lives included us both. And now it doesn’t. This is loss. Loss is maddening. Loss is shrinking. Loss is reducing.

Even if every best-case scenario played out with the people who hurt me suddenly being utterly repentant and owning every bit of all they’d done, that wouldn’t undo what happened. That wouldn’t erase the damage. That wouldn’t take away the memories. That wouldn’t instantly heal me or make any of this feel right.

Progress is hard to see when triggered feelings make our vision clouded with intense emotions.

emotional trauma hits us with as much severity and impact as just about anything else.

There’s an amazing person I want to make sure you don’t miss truly meeting. The one and only glorious you that you look at each day in the mirror . . . full of the most interesting experiences, delightful quirks, honest hurt, inspiring resilience, hilarious family oddities, and absolutely astonishing reflections of our heavenly Father. I’ve never been so honored to meet someone. Hello, beautiful, beautiful you.