Why You Can’t Forgive until You’ve Gotten Angry

As we teach and write about Christian identity, we find one of the biggest obstacles to really finding and walking in our true identity is forgiveness. Nothing will derail the calling on your life more than unforgiveness. Yet, we find many Christians don’t really understand forgiveness. There’s a key ingredient to forgiveness that’s counter-intuitive, that you wouldn’t expect. Anger. You can’t forgive until you’ve been angry.

Now, we’re talking about the really bad stuff here. I not talking about somebody cutting you off in traffic or taking your parking space. Hopefully we can forgive petty things without needing to get angry. But to forgive the big stuff – abuse, abandonment, rejection, neglect, manipulation, betrayal, rape, coercion into an abortion – you have to get angry first. For a season.

Forgiveness is a process, not an event. “Oh yeah, I forgave him last Tuesday at 4:00.” It doesn’t work like that. For really bad stuff, it takes months or even years to completely forgive someone who’s done heinous evil to you. And it goes in cycles. You think you’ve forgiven, and then something triggers that old resentment to rise back up. That’s actually the Holy Spirit prompting you to take another journey through the process of forgiveness. If you submit to the process, it’ll go deeper this time, bringing you a greater level of healing and freedom.

The process of forgiveness parallels the process of grief. You may have seen the 5 stages of grief:

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression (sadness)
• Acceptance

These stages aren’t numbered because they don’t necessarily go in order and often repeat. They are all healthy and necessary. For a season. The trick is not to get stuck in one of them.

Forgiveness works the same way because you’re grieving a loss. Maybe of innocence. Maybe of trust. Maybe of a relationship that wasn’t what you thought it was. Maybe of dreams.

The thing is, to truly forgive, you have to be angry first. For a season.

Although as humans we’ve perfected getting it wrong into an art form, anger is actually a good thing. The truth is God made anger. He gave us the potential for that emotion. And used correctly, it’s a good and necessary thing. Anger is the godly response to injustice. Now, what we consider unjust displays our maturity, but we should be angry over true injustice. That’s not wrong. It’s godly.

If someone has committed a serious injustice against you, you should be angry. In fact, you can’t come to a place of forgiveness unless you get angry. It’s part of the forgiveness process. Here’s why.

You can’t forgive something that’s not sin; there’s no reason to. “It wasn’t that bad.” Unless we get angry to the level corresponding to the heinousness of the sin, we’re minimizing the sin against us. If you were raped, abused, lied to, manipulated, coerced, don’t minimize the sin against you. It was really bad. If you’re not angry, you’re forgiving the wrong sin. You’re not forgiving the real sin against you. You’re forgiving some other sin that wasn’t that bad.

It’s important to acknowledge the full extent of the sin against you. And that should make you angry. It’s only from that place that you can bring your anger to the cross and let it all out. Let Jesus have it. It’s only by acknowledging how much the person owes you that can forgive, coming to the place where they don’t owe you anything. It’s only by acknowledging the debt that you can forgive the debt.

We don’t want to get stuck in anger. Some people do and their unforgiveness tears them up. But it’s important to be angry for a season. Unload on God. He can take it. He wants it. When you yell and scream to God and let all that anger out to him, it goes straight to the cross. And it stays there. He gives you healing in its place. And you can then, from that place, forgive. Which sets you free.

So how about it? Have you gotten angry over the sin against you? Or are you minimizing it? What are you learning? Where are you in your journey of forgiveness? Tell us your story in the comments, and please share if it would bless someone else.