Sessions Include:

1. Do You Thirst for God?
2. Are You Increasingly Governed by God’s Word?
3. Are You Becoming More Loving?
4. Are You More Sensitive to God’s Presence?
5. Do You Have a Growing Concern for Others
6. Do You Delight in the Bride of Christ?
7. Are Spiritual Disciplines Increasingly Important?
8. Do You Still Grieve Over Sin?
9. Are You Quicker to Forgive?
10. Do You Yearn for Heaven?

The unforgiving spirit … is the number one killer of spiritual life. — JAMES COULTER

I WAS TWENTY-FIVE when I became the pastor of a small, rural church in a southern state. I became the seventeenth pastor of that church in twenty-one years. Today that statistic tells me far more than it did when I was twenty-five.

Although I’d grown up in a small-town church in the same state, I had no idea in those days how horribly some churches treat pastors, no matter how hard-working or loving the ministers may be. I assumed that if I loved the people, preached the Word of God to them, and gave myself to serve them that they all would respond well and be grateful. That was the most naive mistake of my life.

A woman I’ll call Patsy increasingly opposed me. Her disagreements quickly deteriorated into criticisms. The criticisms became more caustic until they spewed forth into confrontive, brazen challenges. “If you had the faith you preach about,” she once taunted, “you’d leave [with no place to go or to live] and trust God to provide for you.” When, after twelve months, I went on my first week away from the church, she managed to arrange a meeting of some of the deacons for the purpose of getting me fired. Later she admitted “forgetting” to call those deacons who were known to be my strong supporters.

Despite her desire to see me go and all the work she was doing to make it happen, when Patsy heard secondhand that while on vacation I had interviewed with another church, she called that church and misrepresented herself in an effort to find out what I’d been doing there. Prior to my first Sunday back, she asked if I’d be willing to come to a meeting Saturday night (that she had already secretly organized) “to discuss some problems in the church.” I was the pastor; how could I not go?

Upon arrival, I learned that I was there as an accused to stand trial and Patsy was the self-appointed prosecutor. Although most of her efforts that night were frustrated, she had done her best to humiliate me before the church and to undermine my pastoral leadership.

After fifteen months of stomach-churning, the Lord opened a new door of ministry as pastor of a church where He “turned for me my mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30:11) for almost fifteen years. But the stress of our pressure-cooker pastorate took its toll. Between us, Caffy and I experienced five hospitalizations and three surgeries, with one of the results being that both of us were told we could never be parents. (Indeed, it was sixteen long years before the Lord gave us bifocals and a baby in the same year.)

I knew I had to be willing to forgive Patsy, but I found it hard because she had treated us in such ungodly ways. In the last month of our time there, Caffy was diagnosed with a life-threatening, stress-induced thyroid difficulty that soon required the removal of the gland. When the physician she first consulted—an unconverted man—examined her, he asked, “What are those people out there doing to you two?”

Patsy had been merciless, relentless, rapacious. Why should I forgive her? Every day for months on end, if I didn’t see her in person, I saw her face in my mind. Mentally I replayed each of her verbal assaults, only now I said the things I wished I’d said when she attacked. I might be driving, trying to sleep, or even praying, and find myself gnashing my teeth at her, even bursting out in angry shouts at the Patsy in my imagination. Often I would awaken from my imaginary conversation glaring, fists clenched, stomach acid boiling, breathing hard.

I can’t remember ever emerging from one of these frequent episodes without an awareness that God’s will was for me to forgive Patsy. Especially when her specter would invade my praying, I would recall Jesus’ words:

Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. MARK 11:25

I knew it was useless to pray unless I forgave Patsy. It was one thing for her to accuse me of failures as a pastor; it was another for my own conscience to accuse me before God because of her.

But at last I found the grace to let go of my bitterness. I realized that I could either continue to stoke my smoldering grudge against her and allow her to control me in absentia, or I could move toward forgiveness like one who has been forgiven.

Real Christians Want to Forgive

Although my heart was a volcano of anger, by God’s grace, I was also inclined to forgive Patsy. I knew forgiveness to be the will of God, as well as the path back to freedom and joy. When God makes “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) of someone, He gives him a disposition to love and obey His will (as in Psalm 40:8). And this Spirit-implanted, Spirit-empowered heart desire to do God’s will—such as to forgive—beats within us even during the times when we sinfully resist it.

Donald S. Whitney, Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health (NavPress; Tyndale House Publishers, 2021), vi–3.

Check out our Bible Study on Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health . A bible study on the book of Lamentations as well as some Psalms of Lament.

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