Is real forgiveness even possible?
In this heartfelt episode of our frequently asked question series, we dive deep into one of the most challenging emotional journeys a person can face: forgiving a spouse who has betrayed our trust.
Join us as we explore the complexities of forgiveness, the importance of self-compassion, and practical steps toward healing and rebuilding after betrayal.
Let’s discover the transformative power of forgiveness together.
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Now, you just may have to come back to yourself and remind yourself, no, I, I forgive them still. I step into this forgiveness. I release that, that, and I’m going to choose right now, even in the midst of this pain, even in the midst of this anger, to put my attention on the faithfulness of God to me in this moment in the future of where he’s guiding and directing. It doesn’t mean reconcile that maybe that’s not what God’s called you to. Maybe that’s not his plan for your life, but I can tell you this, without choosing forgiveness again and again and again, you will never actually experience the resurrection of your, of your purpose in your dreams
Tagline: Created on purpose and for purpose.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for another episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast. Can’t wait to jump into this next question that you guys sent in as a part of this frequently asked question series we’re doing this summer. And once again, just wanna say thank you guys so much for downloading this episode, wherever you watch or listen to the podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you consume your content. Thanks for being a part of the Daron Earlewine community. And as I say, often the podcast, we’d love to hear from you. Whether it’s more questions from maybe a future frequently asked question series or just something that’s hitting you. Maybe you’re you know, you’re listening to some older episodes and you’re thinking, man, I really, really have some questions about this. You can always email me, Daron, d a r o n, Daron@blackbirdmission.com.
You can also reach out through the website, daronearlewine.com. You can reach out through direct message me on all the socials, or you can also text 317-550-5070. And I wanna jump into this question that came in as part of this series, and it’s a doozy. All right? Let’s jump right in. It says this, how do you forgive when you’ve been betrayed by a spouse? Right? So we’re not screwing around on the, on the f a Q series, and neither were you guys when you were sending in these questions. And, and I I wanna answer the question specifically, but also even a little more broad, because the reality is I think if there’s, it’s gotta be top three. And, and, and this is just in my brain. I, I, I didn’t, you know, Google this for stats or, or ask ai, right?
But I would say one of the top three things, if not very possibly, top two things that are going to determine your future, they’re gonna determine your ability to actually live life to the fullest that Jesus wants you to live. One of the top two things is gonna be unforgiveness. And so this question comes through very specifically of how do you forgive? And you’ve been betrayed by a spouse, which is, I mean, absolutely gut-wrenching, right? This is a very deep level of betrayal and pain at the spousal level. But the reality for us all, if you’ve not experienced that, I, I, I think one of the most common unfortunate circumstances that we walk through as human beings is the need to forgive. And I think as we look at through our life, whether it’s something that’s, that’s, you know, this big as an, a spousal betrayal, or it’s something that may seem you know, a little more trivial to you, I think if, if, if you look at your life, I want you to start asking your question.
Ask yourself the question, like, as you look at the scoreboard of your life you know, what’s winning instances of forgiveness or levels of bitterness? Because it can be a spouse, but I, I, I think about how many things come at us in a weekly or a daily or a monthly you know, rhythm of things that, that can stir up bitterness, that can stir up anger. They can st stir up what, what begins to become rage or contempt or and these things will, will, will ruin our whole life. They’ll ruin our whole outlook on our future and our present. And, and, and even in our past. I mean, think about in your life, right? Like, you don’t get the promotion that you are wanting, you feel betrayed by your boss. When you have kids, this is one of the things I think it’s, it’s, it’s difficult when raising kids is that you can take on offenses, you know for your kids, from your kids, but all, all things wrapped around to it.
I mean, your kid doesn’t make the team, right? You know, that it’s, it was a whole, maybe it’s a whole political situation. You didn’t know the right people, whatever. And we get so wrapped up in, in our kids accomplishments and what they do, and all of a sudden you’ve got problems with your spouse, you’ve got problems at work. Now they, your kid gets cut from the travel team. Now maybe this thing doesn’t happen, and maybe the church lets you down so people let us down all of the time, right? You find out that some of your best friends are hanging out, but for some reason they don’t invite you to hang out. And you find out there’s a text message going around behind your back about what might be happening over here. We, we go through scenario after scenario after scenario. And if we’re not careful, we can begin racking up a scoreboard of resentments that absolutely dwarfs the scoreboard for forgiveness.
And I think what can happen in that is it can become part of our ethos of our life is am I a person who the spawn, right? We talked about this I think before in a podcast like Ethos. I love the word, it’s hard to say, but it looks cool, even when you spell it. It’s the spontaneous reoccurring habits in your life, okay? We’ve talked about it before. It’s like brushing your teeth, okay? You have a high value for oral health and having your breath not stink, right? So no one has to remind you to brush your teeth in the morning. I’m hoping if they do, listen, we’re gonna have another podcast after this called Oral Health, right? Keep your Teeth, is what it’s gonna be called. No. But if someone has to remind you to brush teeth every day, it means you don’t have value for all of those things, but you do.
And so every day, you know, there’s even days I I that I brush my teeth, and I think to myself, did I brush my teeth today? Because it’s just so much of a rote part of my life. And either holding on to bitterness or choosing forgiveness, I think can become one of those things. If I live a life of grace and forgiveness, what happens is it becomes, it starts to become. Now, some of ’em are, are difficult, but it starts to become the, the spontaneous reoccurring habit of my life is that when I’m wronged, I choose forgiveness, and I choose grace. Okay? Same is true. On the opposite end of it, you can get to a place where, and you’ve met people like this, I’m sure it’s not you, okay? That you, it feels like they’re walking through life like looking to get offended, right?
Like, like their, their magnetic force of their life is towards resentment. I’m just looking for another person to hurt my feelings. I’m just looking for another reason, for me to have proof that the world’s not fair, which it’s not. And what happens is, is you’re around those people, and then you begin realizing, I don’t know that I want to be around this person too long. Because what happens is their resentment and the lack of forgiveness and grace in their life, it leads to, right? It leads to resentment, it leads to anger, it leads to contempt, it leads to an environment around them that makes love, that makes peace, that makes mercy inaccessible. And I know that’s not what you want. This question comes in specifically about how do you deal with forgiving a spouse? And what I wanna say is the principles are the same, whether it’s a spouse, whether it’s a boss whether it’s a travel coach, whether it’s a brother or it’s a sister.
The principles remain the same. And as I was thinking about answering this question what came to my brain is actually one of my favorite chapters of my book, the Death of a Dream Resurrecting Purpose, when Life Doesn’t Go As Planned. We spent last year, a good portion of last year, the first part of this year, going chapter by chapter through the book. If you haven’t checked out those episodes, wanna highly suggest you do. So, we just added some extra content, maybe some stuff that didn’t make the, the editing process when we wrote the book and edited it. And you can go chapter by chapter through episodes. And we’re about to release actually, a small group curriculum that will be a video and audio base where you could get together in a book club and actually go chapter by chapter with the book study.
But one of my favorite chapters of the book is the book is the chapter on forgiveness. And so I thought about that, and I thought, you know what? I, I, I wanna re-highlight some of that because I think it could really help us in this moment. One of the scriptures that I think speaks to this is, I love the words of Jesus and, and, and the beatitudes in, in Matthew five nine, where he says it like this from the message paraphrase, you’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are and your place and God’s family. I love that, as we just talked about, that ethos of your life, in your life. Are you the kind of person who shows people how to cooperate instead of compete and fight? And there’s no doubt that grace and forgiveness as a part of the spontaneous reoccurring patterns of your life are gonna be true if that’s the kind of person that you are.
But it’s so key is that Jesus says in that second part there, that’s when you discover who you really are, your place in God’s family, and, and, and who are we, we or who God says that we are. We’ve talked about covenant a ton of times in the podcast, is you understand that, right? You discover who you really are. You’re a dearly loved child, the God who has been forgiven, right? When you were an enemy of God, right? While we were still sinners, enemies of God, Christ died for us. We were extended forgiveness. That’s who we really are, we’re people who have received, we are recipients of divine forgiveness. That’s how we get our place in God’s family. Then the opportunity then for us is to actually extend what we have been already the recipient of. And I think it’s when we lose sight of that fact that it becomes more and more difficult to actually forgive.
In the book, it says this, one of the greatest obstacles to maturing into the weight of our calling is forgiveness. Because it’s so much easier to wallow and self-pity and anger blaming the person who hurt you than it is to trust the unbeaten path of forgiving those who have hurt you. And if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself continually harvesting the pain of your past instead of reaping the sweet fruit of God’s faithfulness. And I think that’s a part of the what makes it difficult, right? If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself continually harvesting the pain of your past when we’re wronged by someone, right? That happens in a moment. And then we wake up the next day and we try to put the pieces back together of our life, whether it’s our marriage, whether it’s our friendship, whether it’s something with our parents, whether it’s something with our job.
And the reality is, we are still moving through life day by day in this wrong, this betrayal is back in our past. And that can either become something that shapes and, and transforms us, or it can be something that tethers us to our past. And one of my favorite quotes that I’ve used a million times from Irwin McManus, right? He talks about that that hope is found in the future. And it’s not just from Irwin, that’s, it’s all over the Bible, specifically in Hebrews, right? Is if we’re going to be someone who lives with hope, the trajectory of our life has to be into our future. And if our whole life is being tethered, right, it’s being chained up to these betrayals or these, these hurts of our past, we will eventually find ourselves living with very little hope, because we can’t hope for what’s already gone.
And especially when it’s something that has hurt, something that has been a place of betrayal, something that has been a place of pain, and the life of Joseph is a big part of the theme of my book. And and, and one of the most powerful stories, I mean, basically the, the, the Old Testament, right? The first book of the Bible, Genesis, you have the, the majority, or I guess at least half of that book, right, is dedicated to this life of Joseph. And there’s so many amazing parallels with the life of Joseph and, and, and Jesus. But one of the most powerful moments, I think, in this idea of Joseph being able to come to a place of having these dreams, being betrayed by his brothers, if you don’t know the story real quick is basically Joseph had these dreams that God gave him where, where he saw wheat these sheaths of, we blow bowing down to him.
And then he had another dream where the sun and the moon and like 11 stars were bowing down to him. And he interpreted those as basically God letting him know that his family would eventually bow down to him. He was gonna be in a place of leadership. And these were dreams from God. These were dreams from God. That I think he placed there to begin to give Joseph a vision of what his future would look like, and those dreams would eventually come true. That’s the end of the story. The middle part of the story is something that Joseph would’ve never dreamed, would’ve never chosen, would’ve never wanted to have gone through, because what happens is his brothers get sick of him. They hate him actually for his dreams. They hate him for the fact that he’s, he’s the, the favorite son of his, of his father.
And so they plot to kill him, then they decide to be merciful, not kill him, but sell him into slavery for 20 shekels of silver, which is about 200 American dollars. And he sent down to Egypt to a foreign country to be enslaved in the in work for a guy named Pharaoh. And a leader named Pharaoh. And there’s a lot of other things that happened with Joseph, right? The good thing is that God’s with him through all these betrayals, he goes down to Egypt and he’s put in charge of Pharaoh’s household. He thinks things are gonna go great for his life. And then before you know it, Pharaoh’s wife notices how handsome Joseph is. She makes two sexual advances at him. He, he, he resists the temptation. He’s a man of character. She falsely accuses him of being inappropriate.
And she’s believed, and he’s then put in prison. Now he’s been betrayed by his boss. He’s been betrayed by this friend. He is been betrayed by his brothers. Life in general just looks like it’s, it’s conspiring to betray Joseph and move him so far away from the dreams he had for his life. It’s not even funny. The interesting thing about the story, and that now that we can see the, the, the all how all of its unfolded is, is God was actually at work in every one of these situations, setting Joseph up to be at a place where he would be able to, to be trusted with the weight. God’s calling. God’s macro purpose for Joseph’s life was to set him up to become the leader of really the leader of Egypt to lead the country in a way where they were prepared for seven years of famine, so that God’s people would not die of starvation, and neither would the Egyptian people.
He was there to actually bring salvation in some ways, not spiritual, but physical salvation life to this whole country. And God was preparing him. God was with him in that whole process. But we see a couple different moments, and one I wanna bring our attention to here where we see that I don’t believe Joseph fulfills that purpose. I don’t believe he steps into that sense of calling without the ability to forgive the betrayal of his brothers. And there’s this amazing moment where Joseph’s brothers find out, right, that there’s food in Egypt. And so their dad sends him down there to try to get some food, and they think Joseph’s, they send him out. They don’t know. They don’t know if he’s alive, dead. They’ve not heard from him forever. And in chapter 42 of Genesis, right, it says, when Jacob learned that there was grain in Egypt, he said to his sons, why do you just keep looking at each other?
Why do you just keep looking at each other? He says, he continues. I have heard that there’s grain in Egypt. Go down there to buy some for us so that we may live and not die. Then 10 of Joseph’s brothers went down to buy a grain from Egypt, but Jacob did not send Benjamin, Joseph’s brother with them, with the others, because he was afraid that harm might come to him. So Israel’s sons were among those who went to buy a grain for, there was famine in the land of Canaan as well. Now, Joseph was the governor of the land, the person who sold grain to all its people. So when Joseph’s brothers arrived, they bowed down to him with their faces to the ground. As soon as Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he prepared, he pretended to be a stranger and spoke harshly to them.
Why do you come? Where do you come from? He asks, from the land of Canaan, they replied to buy food. Although Joseph recognized his brothers, they did not recognize him. Now, here’s a moment, verse nine. This is, this is powerful here. Then he remembered his dreams about them. You have these moments all the time. Joseph’s had this moment, right? You can just see it like he’s there. He’s seen, you know, God’s, you know, given him some favor. Things have worked out. He’s been putting in charge. Now he’s overcharge of all of Egypt. God’s brought him out of the prison. He’s seen God’s faithfulness to them. And now here’s this moment where for the first time in forever, he’s standing face to face with the person of betrayal, right? And he’s actually seeing his dream fulfilled. There they are bowing down before him. And Joseph says, then he remembered his dreams.
And undoubtedly, there are moments if you are living a portion of your life right now that does not look like you thought it would because someone has betrayed you, spouse, coworker, friend, brother, mom, dad, travel, baseball coach. Fill in the blank of, of your most recent betrayal. Because like I said, as I’ve been paying attention in life, it, it’s, it’s not like these don’t happen often. People are letting us down and in need of forgiveness from us all of the time. And so it’s these moments, right? Where we remember something triggers our mind and we remember I had a dream that was so much different than what my life was gonna be. And in those moments, those are those trigger moments where we have to decide it’s a fork on the road. Is, am I a person who has received forgiveness on the divine level and will take the risk to courageously extend it? Or in this moment, is this another time to put another notch on the scoreboard of resentment?
Joseph remembered his dreams. So I wonder what it is for you. I wonder what those moments are for you. I, I joked around in the book, and I think I said it in the chapter breakdown we had is that for a long time, tour buses were, were, were my trigger when I had to remember my dreams. And you know, my dream was to be in a band and travel the world. And I am. And man, that’s one of the dreams that I never fulfilled, was going on tour, on a tour bus. And there’s still some times now where I’m driving. I was just got, actually just got back from New York taking my youngest son up to play baseball up in Cooperstown, New York, awesome trip. And the whole way back for whatever, there was a handful of tour buses that went past one time I about wrecked the car.
Because I like turned around to see if it was a cool tour bus, right? And then every time I see it, I always make up a story of my brain wonder who’s in that tour bus? Maybe that’s Dave Matthews, you know what I mean? Or whatever it is. And, for years after the betrayal that I experienced in my dream, these were a triggering moment where I would see the bus and I would remember my dreams. And with Joseph, not only is he remembering his dreams, right? Here are the people who have, who tried to destroy his life, and he’s remembering these moments and he’s having to make a decision. And this is what kind of person am I going to be? So the question is in this, like, what prepared Joseph’s heart right? For this moment? What prepared this moment for him to actually choose forgiveness instead of resentment?
Because if you dive in this story, I want to suggest you do it. Read the whole last half of, of the book of Genesis. You’re gonna get all the ins and outs of this story. But Joseph has a little fun with his brothers. It’s a great part where I won’t even, he, he screws around with them, he sends it back to his dad, but he puts silver in their back. So they look like they were stealing it, and they have to come back and they have to fess up and be like, come clean and be repentant. It’s, it’s actually genius what Joseph does. But even though he kind of screws with his brothers in this process, what we see is, is once he, it was before he came to this moment of remembering the dream, he had already chosen to forgive. He had already stepped into the process of forgiveness.
So when he steps in this moment, even though he screws them a little bit, you can see that he’s not responding from a heart of spite. He’s not responding from a heart of revenge. He’s not responding out of a out of a heart of resentment. He has become a person of peace. He’s become a person of forgiveness. And here, here’s what I think it is. I think it is for Joseph, and I think it is for us, is it, it matters. Where we fix our attention is do we fix our attention on the faithfulness of Jesus, right? The faithfulness of God or on the failure of man, because I, I, there may be a third way, but in, in my brain, when we’re talking about betrayal, like you’ve been betrayed by your spouse, whether it’s your husband or wife, and maybe that was six days ago. Maybe it was six months ago, maybe it was six years ago, and you’re still at a place, you’re like, I cannot let go of the resentment I feel for how I was betrayed.
And I would ask you the question, if it was six months ago, on a daily basis, what do you find yourself paying more attention to? The daily faithfulness, forgiveness, guidance, wisdom, compassion, love of Jesus, or on the unfaithfulness of that individual. Because whatever is consuming your mind, most, whatever’s consuming your thoughts, most, it’s consuming your emotions. And when your mind and your emotion comes together, it’s going to consume your actions. It’s going to become who you are. And what we see in Joseph’s story is in every situation where he is wrong, his brothers wrong him. Then the, the Bible tells that God was with him and set him up with poter. Then Potiphar’s wife wrongs him, and he ends up in jail. And the Bible says, but guess what? God was with him right? Then. He steps into this moment. And God is with him to guide and direct him and know that if you will focus on how faithful I’ve been to you on how much I love you.
And in our case, through the, through the, we and Joseph didn’t even have this ability to look through what we’ve received as recipients of the grace and forgiveness of God, we focus on the faithfulness of God doesn’t excuse, I’m not saying we excuse what others do, right? We’re not endorsing, we’re not excusing, we’re not defending, we’re giving ourselves the gift of forgiveness. We focus on the forgiveness. We focus on the faithfulness of God, and then we begin to look in the future. That’s what our hope is. Fortunately, unfortunately, I I I would say fortunately, I’ve had the, the privilege of, of getting to walk with, with many friends who’ve walked through the betrayal of a spouse. And it’s not easy. It’s not pretty. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But in every one of those situations, I’ve seen some people really recover, find a lot of hope, find a future, see God bring amazing things from that betrayal, whether that was with something that was reconciled with that same spouse or something new in the future.
But I can tell you this, that, that, that the probably number one deciding factor of how someone comes out of that situation is the person’s ability to put their focus on the faithfulness of God, not the unfaithfulness of the person who hurt them. And this is not a, Hey, poof, there it was magic trick. You know what I mean? I just thought that once and everything was great. This is something that you grind through. This is something that you fight through. This is something you, you, you get up every day and continue to remind yourself of the faithfulness of God, what you’ve received for him, and begin to extend that. And we see that in the life of, of Joseph. We fix our eyes on the faithfulness of God and we extend what we’ve received. But this is not easy. And I had a conversation this past week with a friend, and they’re wrestling with this.
And it’s, it’s not specifically a spouse. It’s it’s a very close family member. And the person’s struggling with substance abuse pretty aggressively. And they, they said they said, Daron, how do I, how do I know if I’ve forgiven? Like, I want to forgive. And the struggle they had, and this may be where you’re at, is they don’t think it’s safe for them or their family, and maybe even for this family member to reconcile a relationship right now. And so they’re battling constantly and feeling guilty all the time. Like, like they haven’t really forgiven because they don’t have any desire to reconcile. And, and that would apply, my guess is if you’re at a place where you’ve had betrayal from a spouse and say, you know what, this is what happened. And, and I don’t want to be married to her anymore. I don’t wanna be married to him anymore. Like, this is a done deal. This was five years ago, this was six years ago, whatever it is. And, and I, I struggle because I don’t wanna go back there. I don’t wanna have that connection to fact. I don’t even wanna see him anymore, right? Like, when I see him, I get angry. Why? It’s like, Joseph, you remember your dreams. You have all these thoughts of how you thought your life was gonna go before this thing happened.
And I was able to sit down with, with this friend and talk about the fact that the reconciliation, right? That, and we’ve talked about this in the podcast. I feel like sometimes I’m such a broken record, but I feel like I just keep coming back to these things in my life. ’cause They’re, they’re coming up in your life. Reconciliation. Reconciliation is a two-way street, right? It’s the reconnection of the friendship, the connection, the love. And we’re not called in every situation to reconcile a relationship. We are called to be people of forgiveness. Forgiveness is, is a one-way street and was able to talk with this friend about the fact that, that they need to forgive. And that forgiving is a releasing the debt that they, that person owes them, right? L l releasing the anger, releasing the resentment, releasing the bitterness from it. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t set up a strong boundary in their life and say, Hey, listen, you don’t, you don’t get to be a part of this part of my life anymore. And I’m doing that to protect the people in my life to maybe to protect you, to protect myself. Like this is a loving decision for me to make. And this was not gonna be reconciled, but I’m not going to allow the bitterness of unforgiveness to ruin my future.
And what I encouraged, you know, this friend with is, I’ll encourage you today, is that sometimes we have to come to the place where we wake up and we, we tell ourselves, I forgive you still because your emotions they, they, they can get crazy, can’t they? Like, where you’re at a place where it’s just like you wake up and you remember your dream again, it’s a bad day. It’s a bad Wednesday. It’s a bad Monday. And you remember what you wish you would’ve had and what you could have had. And all of a sudden, this, this, this grief, this anger, this stuff wells back up. And you start thinking things of like, I’m want to, whatever it is, pain, anger, sorrow. And you go, oh man, I, this is a negative emotion. I guess maybe I didn’t forgive them. And you just may have to come back to yourself and remind yourself, no, I, I forgive them still.
I step into this forgiveness. I release that debt, and I’m going to choose right now, even in the midst of this pain, even in the midst of this anger to put my attention on the faithfulness of God to me in this moment in the future of where he’s guiding and directing me, doesn’t mean you’re reconcile that maybe that’s not what God’s called you to. Maybe that’s not his plan for your life. But I can tell you this, without choosing forgiveness again and again and again, you will never actually experience the resurrection of your, of your purpose and your dreams. Joseph’s life’s it points a out, right? Because he gets to this place where eventually, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s an amazing end to his story where at the end of this whole situation, Joseph’s relationship with his brothers is restored, is reestablished, his connection with his father is reestablished and resurrected, right?
In fact, fact, his whole family ends up moving down to Egypt and, and Pharaoh and the whole, you know, Egyptian government, whatever, gives them a big piece of land and takes care of ’em. God blesses them so much and he gives them such an amazing hope and a future that, that Joseph would’ve never imagined when he was first being betrayed by his brothers. But all of this does not happen without Joseph’s ability to forgive. I mean, he could have been so mad, so angry. His brothers come down, they bow down, he’s in charge of everything. And that’s in, in, in, in the palace there of, of Pharaoh. He could have been like, you know what? I don’t know who these guys are. I think they’re thieves. Guess what? Hey, guards come in, murder them right now, right? Execute ’em. And it would’ve been done in a heartbeat. He could have chosen revenge. He could have chosen revenge. And I, I don’t know how that plays out, but my guess is if he chooses revenge and murders all of his brothers, for one, he never has a relationship with his father again. And for two, I’m gonna guess that God may have been like, Hey Joseph, now I don’t think I can trust you to actually lead all of this, because now you’ve become a murderer. Right? His forgiveness actually paved the way for the resurrection of God’s purpose in his life.
After Joseph’s family comes down, and, and I’ll wrap it up with this, Joseph’s father Jacob dies, and after he dies the brothers see that, that, that, that the father was dead. And they start thinking, you know, Hey, what if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for the things for the wrongs that we did to him, right? So the dad dies and like, man, maybe Joseph was only being cool and he only forgave us for a moment ’cause he was trying to be cool with dad, but now the dad’s dead. I bet he’s gonna get mad again. He’s gonna remember his dreams, he’s gonna remember our betrayal. He’s probably gonna kill us now. The dad’s dead. And so they come up with a plan, right? So they send word Joseph saying, your father left these instructions before he died.
This is what you’re to say to Joseph, I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly. Now, please forgive the sins of the, of the servants of the God of your father. When their message came to Joseph, he wept like they can make up a story. J Joseph Jacob didn’t say that. Like they’re, they’re making up a story. Hey, go tell him that Dad said to be cool with us and forgive us ’cause we made some sins there, but whatever. ’cause We still don’t believe that he actually forgave us. And I don’t know everything that was in Joseph’s weeping here, but here’s what I think it was because of what he says here in this passage. I think he began to weep because he knew he had already forgiven them. He knew it was real, and he knew it because his life was such a testament of the faithfulness of God, even as he walked through the valleys of the shadow of death in his life.
’cause Here’s Joseph’s response. His brothers come and they throw themselves down before him again and say, we are your slaves. Here’s his dream once again, them bowing down. Joseph says, don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children. And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them. More redemption, more resurrection, more reconciliation, more peace, more joy, more mercy flowing outta this fact that Joseph Nuno, God has been faithful this whole time. I will choose to forgive as he has forgiven me. And as that mercy and that grace flowed through it brought about resurrection and hope in his life.
So that’s where you are. I’m sorry, sorry that you’ve walked through and you’ve experienced this pain through the, the betrayal of a spouse. But I also know that for everyone else that’s listening or watching too, you’ve had a recent betrayal. You’ve had a recent hurt. You’ve had a recent thing that is threatening to allow bitterness to be the, the ethos of your life. And you can hold onto it if you want. God gives you the free will if you want to become a bitter, angry person. But you don’t have to because you have experienced the faithfulness, the forgiveness of God and the freedom that you’re looking for is to release that debt they owe, that the person owes you. And to do that day in and day out, choose the fact of forgiving as, as fully as God forgave you, even if your feelings haven’t caught up with it yet.
And you may need to do that daily for a while. And I would say this too, this is not a journey that you can walk through alone, in my opinion, is I would encourage you to surround yourself with follow fellow followers of Jesus that you trust, that know your story, that can walk with you, that can help you, that can process this. I would also suggest you find a Christian counselor, somebody who’s you know, steeped in the word of God. And, and that could be a trusted Christian counselor to, to walk through this process and help you gain some of the, the coping skills, some of the thinking skills, some of the feeling skills that you’re gonna need to walk through this. ’cause It’s not easy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying it’s, it’s, it’s the only direction to choose if you’re gonna experience hope in your future.
So appreciate you guys tuning in. Hope that was encouraging to you. Hope it was instructive to you. Hope you have any follow-up questions. Please don’t hesitate to send them in. I’d love to answer them and just to continue to grow together. So we’ll be enjoying this frequently asked question series. We’re back with answering another question next week. And until that time, remember, God’s for you. He’s not against you. He’s near you. He’s not far away, and he’s created Jew on purpose and for our purpose. We’ll talk to you guys next time right here on the Daron Newly Wine Podcast.