Hi, and welcome to Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, and our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Well, I hope you came with an open heart, because that's what's going to be the necessary ingredient to what

we're going to talk about today. I like how it says in Matthew 614 through 15 in the message,

in prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can't get forgiveness

from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself

off from God's part. You know what we're going to talk about today, don't you? Yeah.

So let's just go ahead and say it and own it.

Forgiveness is hard.

It's so hard to forgive ourselves for things, and it's really hard to forgive others.

I'll go right ahead and tell you that I'm a justice-driven person, so forgiveness is tough for me.

Let me not use that as an excuse, even in my right desire to see people do the right thing and be held to what I believe is a spiritual level of accountability for things.

I'm wrong if that bleeds into a place where I harbor or hold things against them because I feel

my sense of justice demands it. So I wrestle with this at times and I just want to be honest about

that. And I've said before and I believe it to be true, forgiveness is perhaps the greatest

exercise of self-death a human will ever face. I really believe that.

To open or reopen our hearts that have been broken by injustice, offer another person grace

and love without their being worthy of it, that one's really tough. It's to deny our very

flesh and what pulls against us. When we forgive,

we make ourselves vulnerable and many of us don't like this feeling or putting ourselves in

that position so we resist that. We take a risk when we forgive that person, that they will

hurt us again, and that is a risk, that we feel like

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