What are the signs of unforgiveness?
Toni Hebel: The scriptures say that the number one sign of unforgiveness is bitterness. Bitterness is that ranking in your spirit, that anger, that wanting to have revenge or vengeance towards someone. We all know what bitterness looks like. But we have found as we have coached people individually and even from our own lives, that it goes a lot deeper than bitterness. What we see is that when people are exhibiting signs of things like depression, great fear — I'm not talking about getting afraid of a snake or having something cause fear in your life — I'm talking about fear that controls you. Paranoia. All the addictions. If you're addicted to pornography or alcohol or drugs, sexual addictions, all of those things are rooted, we have found, in unforgiveness. We've also seen some physical issues. Not all physical issues are related to unforgiveness, but we have seen people heal just by forgiving. When that first happened, it was shocking to us. We were not expecting it at all. We've also noticed one of the main signs of unforgiveness is anger. And again, I'm not talking about just general we get angry — we all get angry. But the outbursts of anger, the controlling anger, the anger that just is seething underneath the surface at all times.
Bruce Hebel: Ephesians 4 says, "Let all bitterness, wrath and anger, clamor and slander and malice be put away from you. But be kind to one another, forgiving each other just as God in Christ forgave you."
Bitterness, we think, is the overarching big umbrella category. But all these other things like: wrath is the loud, boisterous anger. Anger is that seething, underneath the surface. Then you've got clamor and slander, which is this screaming — you see it in the community today. We see it in the protest. We see it in the counter-protest. We see all these people yelling. They're not listening, they're just screaming at one another. There's anger, there's unresolvable issues in their life. Then there's slander, taking inside information and twisting it to someone else's hurt. So you're twisting things to make someone look bad. Then malice is just outworking of evil. It's a physical action to take against someone.
When you're seeing all this, I can't get this issue resolved. There's nothing that person can do that will satisfy me about this. I'm always wanting for reparations. I'm always wanting for something to happen to them. Those are signs that you've got a torment inside of you. There's a payment that you've not accepted from the Lord to resolve that person's wounding or offense to you. And as we've said, in many different ways and many different times, if the blood of Jesus is not enough to satisfy you, exactly what would be? If you're not satisfied with the blood, there's an unsettledness inside of you and it comes out in so many different ways. The only way you resolve it is forgiving it.
Bart Blair: Let me ask you to reflect on some of your own personal experience, because there was a time prior to you personally discovering the power of forgiveness that you had stuff in your life that people had done to you and it wounded you and hurt you. Can you reflect back on on your own personal experience and some of the things that you might have been dealing with personally that were signs that you can look back on now and say, I was struggling with that, or these were issues that I was having specifically because I was holding on to unforgiveness?
Bruce Hebel: Well, there's about a year in my life that I would describe that I was in torment. The scab from an old wound got knocked off by a current event. This thing that was going on currently at the time was reminding me and poking an old wound that I had not resolved from the past. I'm a pastor. We're not supposed to have problems. We're supposed to fix problems, we foolishly think. So I didn't tell anybody. But inside I was replaying these things. I was replaying the past, but I was also imagining what was going on here currently and what this person was thinking and doing. It was all internal inside my head.
Toni Hebel: How would you experience your torment during that time?
Bruce Hebel: The DVD would just keep playing and I would be kind of short fused. I was distracted; I was into my head a lot. I'm a feeler, not a thinker, per-say. I'm just replaying the conversations. I was arguing a lot.
Toni Hebel: Intense. You were intense.
Bruce Hebel: You always win the arguments in your head. My outside would look like I was intense and I was on edge. I was thinking I was fine on the outside, I was covering it. But I was impacting other people and everybody kind of felt like what's going on? Is anything happening?
"Oh, I'm fine. I'm fine," but I'm not really fine because inside I keep replaying this old stuff and rehashing the new stuff with the old stuff kind of interlaid on top of it. I'm just not happy, basically. I'm unsettled until God revealed where that root wound was. I dealt with that root wound and that's when I found freedom. Then my joy returned, my peace returned, my ability to help her returned. When you're really in torment, you're self-focused.
Toni Hebel: Yeah, totally self-focused.
Bruce Hebel: It's about you. It's about what's happening to you, or what has happened to you or what might happen to you. You can't really love when you're hurting. And the hurt isn't because of what happened, it's because you haven't forgiven it.
Toni Hebel: Right. And for me, I was very depressed. Extremely depressed. I went and saw counselors, I was taking prescription medications and just felt like I couldn't breathe, I couldn't get above. Depression makes you feel like you just don't want to do anything. You just want to sleep — for me anyhow — I just wanted to sleep all the time. Then it progressed to where I didn't want to live anymore. Coupled on top of that, I began having panic attacks. I'd have great fear, nightmares, middle of the night, things that I won't even say publicly what happened, because I don't want to give any credence to that. All kinds of stuff was swirling around in our home. When God revealed to me I had unforgiveness — and I didn't even know towards who. He just convicted me, "You have unforgiveness," but there was no person's name that came to my mind — I went off by myself to a lake and laid on my back and watched a plane go across this lake with this white tail. Was that called? There's a name for the white tail. Anyhow, as it dissipated I asked God, "How do I forgive?" Actually I said "Who do I forgive first?" And a name came to my mind. So I had faith, I said, "Okay." It was somebody that had betrayed him. Bottom line is when I forgave all that I felt so free. It was like something lifted off of me. The depression was gone. The fear and panic attacks stopped. The nightmares stopped. Everything changed. I became a new person just by deeply forgiving as God led me. And it never has returned. Now, do I get afraid? Yes. Do I feel sad sometimes? Yes. But not like anything like that. Not even close. And I stopped immediately taking the prescription medication. Didn't need it anymore and literally was changed.
Bruce Hebel: And we're not recommending that to everybody who gets free. Don't necessarily do that (stop taking medication), that's not what we're saying. That was in your case. What was interesting to me and I was observing you is you have a lot of doer in you. You weren't doing anything. So I'm covering a lot of stuff and she's just not present. I wasn't really present. I was functioning and doing things, but I wasn't in the room even though I was in the room. And we see that a lot.
Toni Hebel: And that was 14 years ago for me.
Bruce Hebel: Yeah, and about 13 or 14 for me, too.
Bruce and Toni are still free, and continuing to share the message of the power of forgiveness around the world! You can learn more about their story here.
