Forgiving yourself is one of the hardest things in life. You might intellectually believe that God forgives you but emotionally you can't let it penetrate your heart.

Recently, Joanna Simpson asked me to be on her podcast. She wanted to talk about my book, Starting Over and the issues surrounding forgiving yourself. She sent me some questions in advance that I'd like to attempt to answer here... at least a few of them today and maybe a few more in days to come.

Q: Why is forgiving yourself so hard?

One answer has to do with your belief in God. If God is not part of your worldview, then forgiving yourself is very hard because, what's the basis? What's your claim on forgiveness? Maybe if the person you offended offers you forgiveness you could claim it. But even then there is often lingering doubt. It's easy to determine that your victim had no right to forgive you.

So, in order to claim forgiveness for yourself you need to appeal to a higher power... an authority over humanity that has the moral right to offer forgiveness to you. If you reject the idea of God, there is no authority giving you the right to forgive yourself.

But even if you believe in God, you might still find  forgiving yourself hard to do. That's because people can't comprehend God's unconditional love. There are very few models of human unconditional love. We try as humans to offer it, but typically we fail. So most people have never seen pure forgiveness and can't comprehend it. If anything, we might think that God has fewer reasons to forgive us than another human since God is so perfect.

God's forgiveness often sounds good in theory, but people struggle applying it to themselves. There's something inside of them that believes they deserve justice for their actions: payback. So they are intent on punishing themselves in various ways, often with no end in sight.

Q: How can I be sure that God has forgiven me?

That's a good question because sometimes people just assume that God forgives them without ever asking for the evidence for it. But the best evidence of God’s forgiveness comes from the people that walked with Jesus. The Bible tells us that…

By one sacrifice God has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

Hebrews 10:14

This is in reference to the sacrifice that Jesus made by dying on the cross for us. And look at these other verses.

He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself (on the cross). Hebrews 7:27

Look, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. John 1:29

God forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:14

God's forgiveness is so thorough that it leaves us perfect in his sight. There is no residue of sin left on us. Jesus made us fully acceptable to God. He came into the world for that reason, to cleanse us of sin so we could be restored to God.

Q: I don’t feel forgiven. Shouldn’t I feel forgiven?

Feelings are nice.  Ideally it would be great to feel forgiven. But feelings don’t have anything to do with what Jesus did on the cross. Your feelings can’t negate the work of God. Your feelings are always changing but Jesus' work on the cross is an established fact of history.

Our feelings are based on what we truly believe. So if you don’t feel forgiven, that tells me that deep down, you don’t really believe that Jesus’ death paid for your sin. You either believe that your sin was too big to be forgiven or you can't believe that Jesus' death on the cross did all that the Bible says it did.  

I deal with these questions and others about finding God's forgiveness in my book, Starting Over.