Healing and Forgiveness

How many times have you heard someone say, "Even if God could forgive me, I could never forgive myself"?

I thought of the apostle Peter and how he denied Jesus. (See Luke 22:61-62.) What if Peter had been so full of self-condemnation that he had languished for the rest of his life, refusing God's forgiveness because he could not forgive himself? A life of valuable witness and all that Peter did in the early church would never have come about. But Peter, despite his failures, accepted God's grace and moved forward.

Lack of forgiveness can keep us from serving God. For that reason we are called upon not only to forgive others but to forgive ourselves.
--Taken from the Upper Room Daily Devotional

To be an effective leader it helps to have as little unfinished business as possible. Forgiveness is one of those things we tend to push to the back. As a result, this unfinished business saps our energy, drags us down and even unconsciously distracts us from the current work before us. To not forgive ourselves when God has forgiven us is to set ourselves up as a higher court than God. Finally,there is strong evidence that when we have not forgiven ourselves of something, we become more judgmental of others. From the Kingdom point of view, a judgmental leaders is an ineffective leader.