The Protocols of Forgiveness
Bart Blair: What are the Protocols of Forgiveness? Why do we call them protocols rather than steps? What do they actually mean?
Bruce Hebel: That's a great question! We understand that forgiveness is not a process, it's a transaction. Now, every transaction has elements that lead up to it or are part of it. If you're going to buy a house, you've got to get inspections, all these things kind of go into it. But it actually happens at a moment, a transaction. You go to a closing office and you are signing papers — some people might call those steps, but they're really just parts of the transaction. We kind of describe it like a recipe. Your grandma had a recipe. She wrote it down for you and on that recipe, you had all the ingredients that had to be in the recipe for the cake to turn out well. And there's an order that she gives to you sort of set, but not completely. But when everything is in place and it is coming out of the oven, it's done and everybody in the family enjoys it. So forgiveness is a choice. It's a transaction. But there are certain elements required by heaven, by God himself, to say, "Yeah, the forgiveness cake is done. You've got everything there. These are the elements." And a protocol is — you want to go into this?
Toni Hebel: No, you go ahead.
Bruce Hebel: Okay. A protocol is, in an official capacity, like a state dinner. There are certain, what they call protocols or requirements that you have if you're going to be attending this state dinner. So the president and another foreign head of state is there. They're going to sit down and tell you these are the things you do. These are the things you don't do. When this happens, this is what you do; when this happens, this is what you don't do. This is the fork you use, for those of us who may not know that. But there are certain protocols. This is how things are to operate in an official capacity. That's the reason we called them protocols, because they're the way heaven wants things to work in this forgiveness framework. As we choose to forgive they are certain things God says have to be there. But when they're there, he says, "Yep, you have forgiven. Tormenters, you have to leave."
Toni Hebel: We use Jesus as the model. So when he hung on that cross and he said, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," he forgave. He said it is finished. It happened immediately, he didn't go through some kind of process. It was said and done. And in Matthew 18:35, God is requiring us to forgive from our heart. So that's why we are steering away from the word steps and saying, "these are the steps you need to go through to forgive," because steps carry with them the thought of if I do this, I check it off, then I've done it. It's more of a head thing rather than from our heart. If we're going to forgive from our heart, we need to forgive like Christ did, which was to actually forgive those deep wounds that have happened in our life, not just do a checklist. It can't just be a set of steps. It has to be something that's deeper than that. So we call it the Protocols of Forgiveness.
Bruce Hebel: Yeah. It's more like a relationship. If I were to say to a husband, "These are the steps to love your wife" and the wife is sitting in the room, she's going to go, "I'm not impressed by that."
Toni Hebel: Like, you really don't mean it.
Bruce Hebel: There are no steps, but there are elements, there are certain things that are going to be there that are an expression of your love. So, kissing her goodbye when you leave, that's not a step, that's just what we do. When I leave the house, I give her a kiss and I say goodbye. That's not a step per se, it is a protocol. We have protocols in our life.
Toni Hebel: We do, in the way we relate.
Bruce Hebel: I think protocols actually indicate more relationship.
Toni Hebel: So what are the Protocols of Forgiveness? Do you want me to start?
Bruce Hebel: Sure.
Toni Hebel: Okay, so the first Protocol of Forgiveness, we state it this way, is: thank God for forgiving you. It's getting our hearts in that place of gratitude and recognizing that we have sinned and we have wounded people and we need the forgiveness to be given to us first before we can even give it out. So if we walk into forgiveness all heady and we've got it together and this person deserves whatever, then we're not really living from that place of gratitude. So we start by thanking God and going deep. Not just "thank you for the cross" or "thank you for forgiving me" or "thank you for saving me," but really getting into and recognizing just how much he's forgiven us. Thanking him from our heart. Being grateful from our heart for the blood he shed for covering all of our sins, for taking it all, for the grace he's given. We spend a little bit of time in that protocol of thanking him for forgiving us.
Bruce Hebel: Yeah. And in that, we're recognizing that in the Matthew 18 story, we're the first servant, the one who owes the insurmountable debt that God has forgiven. And it puts a comparison to what someone has done to us, it just changes the whole dynamic as we view people.
Protocol number two is simply: ask God, who do I forgive and for what? Because, again, we don't forgive people, we forgive wounds. The things that people do, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do." There's oftentimes a wound that's driving the torment that goes way, way back. A hundred percent of the time, couples who come to us in crisis, it's never not happened that the torment that's causing the conflict in the relationship predates the couple knowing each other. Oftentimes it goes to childhood. So how do you know where that wound is? Well the Holy Spirit is involved in the process. He's the one who wants us to forgive and he knows where the wound is we need to forgive. So it's his job to reveal those things to us and he's pretty good at his job. Just ask him, "Father, who do I forgive and what for? What are the wounds that I need to put at the cross?"
Toni Hebel: And then wait — like, literally — for a minute. Just sit there in silence and wait and expect God to bring a face or name to your mind or your heart. And take that by faith that that person that has come to you, maybe somebody you haven't thought of in a long time, is who God is asking you to forgive first.
Bruce Hebel: And number three?
Toni Hebel: Number three is: Repent of your sin of unforgiveness. Because unforgiveness is not just a bad idea, it is a sin. And we believe it's the most harshly disciplined sin we can commit because there's no other sin in the Bible that God says he's going to discipline us by handing us over to the tormentors. And that's pretty hard. So we need to repent. We need to recognize what our sin of unforgiveness is saying about him, about the cross, about the blood he shed, that we are devaluing his blood.
Bruce Hebel: We're changing our mind and coming in line with the value that God places on the cross. The blood of Jesus is more valuable than whatever happened to us and we're aligning our thinking with that. "God, I was wrong to dishonor your blood."
Toni Hebel: So we need to confess that. We need to repent of that. Change our mind.
Bruce Hebel: That that cleans our pipe. That opens up our ability to hear the Holy Spirit operate and do what we ask in protocol number two. Which leads us to Protocol number four, which is you forgive each offense from your heart. Why from your heart? Because that's where you are wounded. The heart is our core, it's a part of the soul. It's the center of who we are. As she was saying earlier, doing it from your head doesn't work. Doing it from your heart, it's from the core where I was wounded. I choose to forgive this person for these things. So we would say it this way, "Lord, from my heart, I choose to forgive this person" — you name the name — "for" — and you list the wounds they injured you with. You can cluster them. You don't have to say, "On June 13th, 1979, my dad did this and then on June whatever..."
"All the times my dad" or "all the times my mom" or "all the times whoever" did these things. But you want to make sure you're listing in your declaration the things that have wounded you so that you know at the end of the protocols you have outlined all the things that have wounded you.
Toni Hebel: And again, as you're walking through these, you will get periods of silence and you'll wait for the Holy Spirit to bring memories back to you of how you were wounded. And if no other memories come, then you're done. You are done with that person and those wounds because we just rely on Him. It's not about us.
Bruce Hebel: In that silence you can say, "Holy Spirit, is there anything else?" And just listen. If He brings up something, you forgive it. If He doesn't, it's silent, you say I must be done today. We conclude that by saying, "I declare this person is no longer in my debt because I transferred the debt to the cross of Jesus where he paid for it all. If there's anything unresolved, it's no longer between them and me. It's now between them and God." So we're transferring the debt to the cross.
Toni Hebel: It's a declarative statement.
Bruce Hebel: It's like a debt being sold. You're your mortgage being sold and now you're sending the check to somebody else. You're transferring the debt. You've received enough. It's now between them and God.
Toni Hebel: To me, it's a similar meaning of when Christ said, "It is finished." It's like a declarative. This is finished. I have forgiven.
Bruce Hebel: It's like somebody runs into you in your car and you no longer have to talk to the person who hit you because their insurance company is covering it. Jesus has already covered this.
Toni Hebel: And then we wrap up the first five Forgiveness Protocols – number six and seven is how to deal with something when it comes up in the future — but number five is: bless those who have wounded you. Ask God to bless them. What we mean by that is we are sealing our forgiveness by asking God to bless them. And we want you to be very generous. It's not just using the words, "O God, bless them." No. "God, would you please bless my mom by — " and then list the things that you want good for your mom. Not by making her do this or this or this for me, it's not about me. It's about what do you want God to do for that person that would bring them joy and peace and happiness even. We seal our forgiveness by blessing. Now, if you're at this point and you have a hard time blessing — let's say I can't think of anything to bless them with or I have nothing to give — then that's a sign that you haven't fully forgiven, that you have not really let everything come from your heart. There's something missing, there's something you haven't dealt with. We deal with this a lot. So we will go back to protocol number four and we'll say, "Okay, you probably were in your head a little bit too much. Let's get back to your heart. So when you said" — I'm just making this up — "I forgive my dad for having an affair." Let's throw that out there. And that's where you left it. Maybe we need to go a little deeper. "I forgive my dad for having an affair, for not displaying what a good husband looks like. Therefore, I did not have the understanding of what to expect in a man. And I married someone just like my dad and it embarrassed me."
Bruce Hebel: Or changing how I view men. For damaging my view of men. So, again, if you can't bless you want to go back and get a little bit deeper. Oftentimes people ask, "Well, how do I bless them?" We find if you're really looking for something, bless them in the way in which they wounded you. If they stole something from you, ask God to bless them financially. Because unforgiveness wants payment, they want vengeance. But blessing is wanting something good.
And remember, it's the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. While we were still sinners, God blessed us with the greatest blessing of all, the death of his son for us. We want to be generous to them. We want to be open to them, and maybe even in the area in which they wounded us, to ask God to be especially good to them in that area.
Toni Hebel: And if there's somebody in your life that wounded you deeply and you're forgiving them, but they're deceased, you can still forgive them. People ask us, "Well, how do we bless someone who's deceased?" Here are some suggestions. First of all, you can ask God to tell them that you have forgiven them and that you're okay with them. Everything's fine. You're at peace with them. Secondly, you can ask God to bless the impression or the reputation that they had. That people would think of them differently than what they did, change that perception. Ask God to bless their reputation, bless their image, and the thoughts people carry about them.
Bruce Hebel: Change the perception that people have of them.
Toni Hebel: Yeah. And then the third one is we could—.
Bruce Hebel: Bless their descendants. Bless the name.
Toni Hebel: So that's some ways you can bless people who have been deceased.
Bruce Hebel: So at that point you have forgiven and there will be a shift and change in your life. We hear all sorts of stories like—
Toni Hebel: "My heart is free, I can breathe again. I've never felt this way. I feel like the body I've been carrying has been lifted off." Or even "I'm not depressed. My anger is not driving me anymore. My fear is not there." Sometimes we have the physical healings.
Bruce Hebel: So at that point you have forgiven, but there's an issue with memory. Some people say you can forgive and forget. Well, that's impossible. You can't choose to forget something because you have to focus on the thing you're forgetting and you'll never forget the thing you're focusing on. We can't choose to forget, but we can choose what to do with the memory. We say you choose not to remember. When a telemarketer calls, you don't have to have a conversation. Just because the memory comes — and understand, you're not bringing the memory back up, God isn't bringing the memory back up. He's already dealt with it. It's God's enemy that's bringing the memory up because he wants to tempt you back into unforgiveness — choose not to remember. And the way you do that is say, "I specifically remember forgiving that." That's why we say these things out loud.
Toni Hebel: Definitely say them out loud.
Bruce Hebel: That's why we declare them so the enemy himself can hear our declaration of forgiveness and we can remind him. "I specifically remember forgiving that. And I was with Bruce and Toni" or "I was at this place. This is when it happened. And God, you gave me this great freedom. My heart was light. I was free. Thank you for the freedom you gave me when I chose to forgive. And God, the person must really need a blessing today. Could you just bless them again? Would you just pour something really special on them?"
And what's interesting, that's counter-productive to the enemy's work. If you keep doing that every time he brings a memory to you — you either give it to a praise or a blessing or "I forgot about that. I choose to forgive and forgive it" — he'll leave you alone.
Toni Hebel: We see great power in those things and Protocol number six. And then wrapping it up, protocol number seven is: pre-forgive. So people ask us, "what do you mean pre-forgive?" When we wake up in the morning, we make a decision that whatever comes our way that day, however we're wounded because we all get wounded probably every day, that we will choose to forgive it immediately. Once you get free, I mean really free through the protocols, which is just incredible, you don't want to ever go back to where that was. You keep your accounts very, very short. When you wake up in the morning, you make that decision that whatever comes my way this day, I will choose to forgive it immediately. I will not hang on.
Bruce Hebel: I will not carry an offense. I will not allow offense in my heart because the blood of Jesus has already covered it. Friend of ours, a pastor of a church we taught, did the seminar. The next week, he's kind of recapping it and he made a statement talking about this. He said, "I wish I had a prepaid debit card, a prepaid forgiveness card." And the next week, somebody at his church brought in, literally, debit cards that had their church's name on it and our "Prepaid Forgiveness Card."
Toni Hebel: Paid in full.
Bruce Hebel: Whenever anything happens, they all pull out their card and go paid in full and just swipe the air with it. That's what we mean by pre-forgiveness. It's already been settled 2,000 years ago on the cross. So those are the seven protocols.
Toni Hebel: Yes. In a quick way.
Bruce Hebel: Very quick.
Bart Blair: I want to know more about the Protocols. If I want to really get into how to apply them, what resources do you have? Where should I go? What's my next step if I think that I'm ready to dig into this further?
Bruce Hebel: Well, on our website, forgivingforward.com, there are three primary resources to help you in forgiveness. One, we have the Protocols or I think it's listed as the Forgiveness Guide, that you can download the Protocols.
Toni Hebel: Just go to our homepage, it's right there.
Bruce Hebel: You can also take the course. We have an eight-session video course that will teach you not only the reason for forgiveness of torment — the mandate, the model, how Jesus forgave — the method, which the protocols are, and then the mission part, how to help somebody else. Because I'm pretty sure everybody who's watching this knows somebody who's caught in the torment of unforgiveness and needs help. So that's one. Also, you can order the book in our store. So those are the three ways you can get it. By getting the Protocols, taking the course — and you can actually take the course and get other people to take it with you. It's actually designed for a small group — or you can just get the book.