If you’ve lived with the day in and day out abuse or hurt from a boundary-busting offender for very long, it’s easy to feel so fed up that you don’t want to forgive him or her. You may have come to believe the half-truth that forgiving someone means “you’ve let them off the hook.” Or worse, you’ve embraced the half-truth that feasting on resentments “tastes good and eases the pain.”

But like a steady daily diet of bon-bons and Doritos (or whatever your favorite junk food is), you’re going to regret that momentary bliss, because it’s slowly destroying you on the inside, while not changing your offender one bit! And it’s certainly not helping you grow or move past the pain, even though it feels like you’re stronger when you recall over and over how your offender has hurt you.

So how do you do what you don’t want to do?

The apostle Paul referenced this dogged human condition …

“ … What I want to do {refrain from sinning} I do not do, but what I hate {continuing to sin} I do.” Rom. 7:15

Based on Paul’s God-inspired insight {outlined in Romans 7:4 – ch. 8}, we are to have our “minds set on what the Spirit desires” {Rom. 8:5}.

Lately I’ve become keenly aware of the disparity between how my heart feels during sweet moments of communion in prayer and the moments that immediately follow as I step away and interact—bump into—other “do-not-want-to-do-what’s-right” doers.

{How’s that for a confusing sentence! Just wanting to keep you on your toes!}

The simple truth of this conundrum is that the Spirit does the work of changing our “want to.” But we must turn our wills and “want to’s” or “don’t want to’s” over to God. And if you’re like me, which I suspect you are, you need to turn your will over to God every single second of every day!

But instead of dreading this yielding, I want to learn to embrace and find joy in it. For, after all, isn’t that what “delighting in the Lord” is all about?

So may you delight yourself in the Lord in 2014, and not in devouring and savoring those delicious but deadly morsels of bitterness!

What gets in the way of you wanting to forgive a particular boundary-buster in your life?

What is the “half-truth” of your resistance in this situation and what is the “whole truth of God”?

Click the link to read more posts in this Forgiveness Series.