If I Forgive My Offender, Will God Save That Person?
Question : Thank you for your postings, they are always very helpful. Recently I have forgiven a person (a member of my family, who is now suffering from dementia, who caused me much harm when I was a child through rejection and criticism. I asked God to forgive this person and I asked with all my heart as I want this person to be saved. Will God forgive and save this person who can no longer think for themselves, because of my prayers and forgiveness? I would like to know what the Bible says and what you think. Very many thanks and blessings to you and your family.
Answer : Greetings in Jesus wonderful name! Praise the Lord! Yes I understand that dementia is a serious illness that causes "deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain. It is sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes which leads to insanity of madness." I feel sad to hear that the person who has caused you much suffering through rejection and criticism is suffering from such a severe mental illness. Mental illness is actually a curse which is caused because of demonic intrusion in to a person's mind to disrupt its normal working by taking possession of it forcefully without the person's willingness (Deut 28:20, 61; Matt 17:14-15). It is due to disobedience to the laws of God that these demons begin to take control of people's mind (Deut 28:45). The Gentile unsaved people have the law of God written in their hearts (Rom 2:14-15). When they begin to harden the hearts from the time when they know there is a God deep in their conscience and start to live a selfish life devoid of any Glory to the Creator God, being unthankful for the life that God has given to live on this earth, a deep darkness of Satan begins to fill their mind (Rom 1:21). They become foolish enough to worship idols, self or the world and its lustful enjoyment (Rom 1:22-23). By creating a idol in their mind or outwardly they become senseless about the Creator of them willingly, then like the idol they worship they become futile in their thoughts and imaginations (Psa 115:8). After a period of time, they become like the God they worship. This is the root cause of all suffering and curses that comes to people.
It is good that you have forgiven this person from your heart as a child of God, by doing so you must have found your freedom in Christ. Only when we forgive those who have harmed us, we can expect our Havenly Father to forgive our daily sins and continue to give His blessed Presence to strengthen and comfort our heart (Matt 6:12). Receiving forgiveness as a believer is contingent on us forgiving others who have wronged us, that too unconditionaly like Christ forgave all our past, present and future sins at the time we received Him as our Lord and Saviour (Matt 6:14-15). When we live in unforgiveness, we do not lose our salvation as it is not based on our work that we are saved, but purely by God's grace through our faith which is a gift from God (Eph 2:8-9). God considers unforgiveness to be a serious sin because we have been unconditionally forgiven by Christ when we were still sinners when coming to Christ (Rom 5:8, 6; Eph 4:32). Without us doing anything to save ourselves, God in Christ forgave all our sins when we first accepted Christ and then wiped out the requirement of the law which was actually against us because of our inherent sin nature to fail when we are tempted again and again (Col 2:13-14). Finally God made Jesus as a substitude embodiment of sin who actually knew no sin and made us sinners to be the divinely exchanged perfect righteousness of God in Christ so that we could live in peace with God and also with the peace of God by giving all our burdens day after day to God who has promised to work it all together for our good (2 Cor 5:21; Rom 5:1; Php 4:7; Rom 8:28). Because of what Jesus has supernaturally done for us, we have become as righteous as Jesus is before God! O what a wonderful divine exchange!
Jesus himself told a parable in which He indirectly pointed to the truth that whosoever as a child of God gives place to unforgiveness for any reason valid or invalid, God the Father will send the demonic torturer to make them suffer until they realize to forgive their debtor unconditinally like the Father God has forgiven them of all their debt of sins through Jesus (Matt 18:21-35). This is the reason Apostle Paul said, " 26 “Be angry, and do not sin”: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, 27 nor give place to the devil." (Eph 4:26-27). In other words, if we allow our anger to continue beyond the day, it becomes an opportunity for the devil to be allowed by a righteous God to take over our blessings and bring all kinds of evil to make us miserable until we ourselves choose to forgive the offender unconditionally and allow God to drive the presence of the devil in our life in a righteous manner. I know in my life, when God first awakened me out of spiritual slumber through a severe physical infirmity in my early twenties, the first thing God told me to do was to forgive all of the people against whom I had unforgiveness in my heart. I tried to tell God that some of these unforgivenes were caused by real people causing real hurt for real justifiable reasons, God told me that the only real thing I have to do is to let all unforgiveness go as I was unconditionally forgiven of all my mistakes two thousand years ago itself. That fell on my head like a thunderbolt and opened up my darkened understanding which the devil had caused because of my unforgiveness until then. The devil ran away after I chose to forgive unconditionally all the people I know who were indebted or atleast I thought they were, and I was progressively made free to enjoy God's abundant life for the past ten years. Max Lucado the best-selling author, writer and preacher beautifully says, "Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and...realizing you were the prisoner!" How true it is that we set ourselves free when we forgive others unconditionally. Praise the Lord! Glory to God!
We can forgive a person who has harmed us and set ourselves free from the prison of the devil, but it no way affects the offender who has caused us harm until they realize that they have caused hurt to us and by their own choice choose to ask God forgiveness for their mistakes and also to us whom they have caused much harm. If a person is saved who has caused hurt, he or she will be convicted by the Holy Spirit to set things right (John 16:7-8), if they choose to ignore the promptings of the Spirit continually, it will cause a demonic oppression to come upon them for their unforgiveness. But as for their eternal salvation which is given as a gift apart from their work remains and stays intact with the sealing of the Spirit until the day of redemption during rapture (Eph 2:8-9; Heb 5:9; Eph 1:13-14), because the eternal price for our redemption has been paid once for all time by our eternal saviour Jesus Christ who has called all believer to receive eternal inheritance (Heb 9:12, 15; 10:10, 12, 14; Rev 22:13; Jude 25). If a unsaved person is the one who has caused us hurt, that person already is under condemnation and in the domain of darkness that operates with the power of Satan (John 3:18-19; Acts 26:18). A human who is not saved by Jesus is by nature a children of wrath and the wrath of God abides in him (Eph 2:3; John 3:36). The unsaved self walks in the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the Satanic spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience who do not believe in the good news of the gospel of God to be saved through Jesus (Eph 2:2). Thus the darkened unsaved mind that lives in unforgiveness need salvation light from Jesus to first realize that they are living in the sinful darkness of unforgiveness (2 Cor 4:4).
As a child of God, your prayer and desire towards this person who has caused harm against you to be saved is good and commendable. But God has given all humans a day of salvation in which He expects them to realize that they are sinners and therefore take a good choice to receive the Savior Jesus and be saved from sin for eternity (2 Cor 6:2). The days before that dementia attacked that offending family member of yours might have been the time of God's grace in her life. Your prayer and forgiveness cannot make some one get saved, but I believe it can cause a positive influence for salvation and healing in the life of the one whom you are praying for because the Bible says that "the boiled up effective prayer of the righteous saint of God availeth much" (Jam 5:16). Who knows? I too pray that the person who has caused hurt to you might get saved. God is a just God, and nobody can say after the end of their lives, standing before God on the day of judgment that they had not heard the gospel or do not know how to be saved because no one told them about it. All men who are born in this planet earth know God through seeing His invisible attributes in nature and their conscience through which God speaks to them (Rom 2:12, 14-6; Prov 20:27), but loving to continue in doing evil they voluntarily reject the conscience within them that speaks to give glory to God and live a thankful life of gratitude towards God (Rom 1:20-32). God says all those who seek Him will find Him (Jer 29:13; Prov 8:17; Deut 4:29). God himself desires all people living on planet earth to receive Jesus as their Saviour and be saved from sin and hell fire (1 Tim 2:3-4). For this to happen, God has given the responsibility for us to pray for all of them so that God will have more opportunity to reach out and touch the lives of needy people. Even though every person's eternal destiny is dependant on their own wise choice they make to receive Jesus as their Savior while living on this earth, still God has chosen not to work without us because of His faithfulness to His promise to "let [us]..have dominion over the earth [legally]" excluding himself out of it without permission or cry for help in prayer (Gen 1:26; Psa 115:16). This is why Paul asks how can someone hear the gospel unless a preacher is sent to do the job (Rom 10:14-16). It pleased God to choose the foolish things of the world as intruments to preach the foolishness of the gospel message according to the worldy wisdom and as a result of it save people for eternty ahead (1 Cor 1:27, 21). Because Christ is the head and we the Church are His body, God has brought salvation to mankind by the might and power of His own hand in Christ Jesus (Isa 59:16). In other words, Jesus told that all that the Father has given me, I will lose no one for eternity ahead because Jesus after becoming a perfect human has chosen to intercede for all the humans who are seeking God to be saved (John 10:10, 27-30; Rom 8:34). In other words, just because the Church slept at the end time doesn't mean that God will not be able to save any seeking souls on earth because of our failed prayer, instead the opposite will happen because of the faithful prayer of Jesus and the saints who have done it all and are continuing till now (Matt 25:1-6; Heb 7:25; Rev 5:8). The bottom line is, God will not work without us and we cannot work without Him.
When one believer prays by faith for another sick believer by anointing with oil, symbolising and calling on the power of the Holy Spirit symbolically for the sickness that has been caused by sin or without sin, the Lord has promised to raise the sick person up by healing and forgiving that person, but this promise is only for a believer who is in a fellowship of believers (Jam 5:14-16). This James 5:14-16 should not be taken out of context to mean that God will save the person whom we anoint and pray for. Instead it also reveals that when a believer chooses to forgive someone in their life and prays for the offender to be forgiven by God, this will cause God to come and heal that person from their sickness or any curse of the evil one (James 5:16). This happened to Job in the Old Testament, that when he chose to forgive his friends who has caused hurt in his life, immediately God restored double blessings in Job's life (Job 42:10).
So I want you to encourage to keep praying, for something good will happen through your prayer. It is not over until it is all over. May God quicken you to pray more and more for the salvation of your family member and also for all men. Let me finish with this encouraging exhortation of Apostle Paul in which he says, "1 Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, 2 for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. 3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." (1 Tim 2:1-4). May our heart beat be passionate enough to beat inline with the heart of God to pray for the salvation of all men and desire all men to be saved like we are for the glory of God.
Much Blessings.....
Answer : Greetings in Jesus wonderful name! Praise the Lord! Yes I understand that dementia is a serious illness that causes "deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain. It is sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes which leads to insanity of madness." I feel sad to hear that the person who has caused you much suffering through rejection and criticism is suffering from such a severe mental illness. Mental illness is actually a curse which is caused because of demonic intrusion in to a person's mind to disrupt its normal working by taking possession of it forcefully without the person's willingness (Deut 28:20, 61; Matt 17:14-15). It is due to disobedience to the laws of God that these demons begin to take control of people's mind (Deut 28:45). The Gentile unsaved people have the law of God written in their hearts (Rom 2:14-15). When they begin to harden the hearts from the time when they know there is a God deep in their conscience and start to live a selfish life devoid of any Glory to the Creator God, being unthankful for the life that God has given to live on this earth, a deep darkness of Satan begins to fill their mind (Rom 1:21). They become foolish enough to worship idols, self or the world and its lustful enjoyment (Rom 1:22-23). By creating a idol in their mind or outwardly they become senseless about the Creator of them willingly, then like the idol they worship they become futile in their thoughts and imaginations (Psa 115:8). After a period of time, they become like the God they worship. This is the root cause of all suffering and curses that comes to people.
It is good that you have forgiven this person from your heart as a child of God, by doing so you must have found your freedom in Christ. Only when we forgive those who have harmed us, we can expect our Havenly Father to forgive our daily sins and continue to give His blessed Presence to strengthen and comfort our heart (Matt 6:12). Receiving forgiveness as a believer is contingent on us forgiving others who have wronged us, that too unconditionaly like Christ forgave all our past, present and future sins at the time we received Him as our Lord and Saviour (Matt 6:14-15). When we live in unforgiveness, we do not lose our salvation as it is not based on our work that we are saved, but purely by God's grace through our faith which is a gift from God (Eph 2:8-9). God considers unforgiveness to be a serious sin because we have been unconditionally forgiven by Christ when we were still sinners when coming to Christ (Rom 5:8, 6; Eph 4:32). Without us doing anything to save ourselves, God in Christ forgave all our sins when we first accepted Christ and then wiped out the requirement of the law which was actually against us because of our inherent sin nature to fail when we are tempted again and again (Col 2:13-14). Finally God made Jesus as a substitude embodiment of sin who actually knew no sin and made us sinners to be the divinely exchanged perfect righteousness of God in Christ so that we could live in peace with God and also with the peace of God by giving all our burdens day after day to God who has promised to work it all together for our good (2 Cor 5:21; Rom 5:1; Php 4:7; Rom 8:28). Because of what Jesus has supernaturally done for us, we have become as righteous as Jesus is before God! O what a wonderful divine exchange!
Jesus himself told a parable in which He indirectly pointed to the truth that whosoever as a child of God gives place to unforgiveness for any reason valid or invalid, God the Father will send the demonic torturer to make them suffer until they realize to forgive their debtor unconditinally like the Father God has forgiven them of all their debt of sins through Jesus (Matt 18:21-35). This is the reason Apostle Paul said, " 26 “Be angry, and do not sin”: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, 27 nor give place to the devil." (Eph 4:26-27). In other words, if we allow our anger to continue beyond the day, it becomes an opportunity for the devil to be allowed by a righteous God to take over our blessings and bring all kinds of evil to make us miserable until we ourselves choose to forgive the offender unconditionally and allow God to drive the presence of the devil in our life in a righteous manner. I know in my life, when God first awakened me out of spiritual slumber through a severe physical infirmity in my early twenties, the first thing God told me to do was to forgive all of the people against whom I had unforgiveness in my heart. I tried to tell God that some of these unforgivenes were caused by real people causing real hurt for real justifiable reasons, God told me that the only real thing I have to do is to let all unforgiveness go as I was unconditionally forgiven of all my mistakes two thousand years ago itself. That fell on my head like a thunderbolt and opened up my darkened understanding which the devil had caused because of my unforgiveness until then. The devil ran away after I chose to forgive unconditionally all the people I know who were indebted or atleast I thought they were, and I was progressively made free to enjoy God's abundant life for the past ten years. Max Lucado the best-selling author, writer and preacher beautifully says, "Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and...realizing you were the prisoner!" How true it is that we set ourselves free when we forgive others unconditionally. Praise the Lord! Glory to God!
We can forgive a person who has harmed us and set ourselves free from the prison of the devil, but it no way affects the offender who has caused us harm until they realize that they have caused hurt to us and by their own choice choose to ask God forgiveness for their mistakes and also to us whom they have caused much harm. If a person is saved who has caused hurt, he or she will be convicted by the Holy Spirit to set things right (John 16:7-8), if they choose to ignore the promptings of the Spirit continually, it will cause a demonic oppression to come upon them for their unforgiveness. But as for their eternal salvation which is given as a gift apart from their work remains and stays intact with the sealing of the Spirit until the day of redemption during rapture (Eph 2:8-9; Heb 5:9; Eph 1:13-14), because the eternal price for our redemption has been paid once for all time by our eternal saviour Jesus Christ who has called all believer to receive eternal inheritance (Heb 9:12, 15; 10:10, 12, 14; Rev 22:13; Jude 25). If a unsaved person is the one who has caused us hurt, that person already is under condemnation and in the domain of darkness that operates with the power of Satan (John 3:18-19; Acts 26:18). A human who is not saved by Jesus is by nature a children of wrath and the wrath of God abides in him (Eph 2:3; John 3:36). The unsaved self walks in the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the Satanic spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience who do not believe in the good news of the gospel of God to be saved through Jesus (Eph 2:2). Thus the darkened unsaved mind that lives in unforgiveness need salvation light from Jesus to first realize that they are living in the sinful darkness of unforgiveness (2 Cor 4:4).
As a child of God, your prayer and desire towards this person who has caused harm against you to be saved is good and commendable. But God has given all humans a day of salvation in which He expects them to realize that they are sinners and therefore take a good choice to receive the Savior Jesus and be saved from sin for eternity (2 Cor 6:2). The days before that dementia attacked that offending family member of yours might have been the time of God's grace in her life. Your prayer and forgiveness cannot make some one get saved, but I believe it can cause a positive influence for salvation and healing in the life of the one whom you are praying for because the Bible says that "the boiled up effective prayer of the righteous saint of God availeth much" (Jam 5:16). Who knows? I too pray that the person who has caused hurt to you might get saved. God is a just God, and nobody can say after the end of their lives, standing before God on the day of judgment that they had not heard the gospel or do not know how to be saved because no one told them about it. All men who are born in this planet earth know God through seeing His invisible attributes in nature and their conscience through which God speaks to them (Rom 2:12, 14-6; Prov 20:27), but loving to continue in doing evil they voluntarily reject the conscience within them that speaks to give glory to God and live a thankful life of gratitude towards God (Rom 1:20-32). God says all those who seek Him will find Him (Jer 29:13; Prov 8:17; Deut 4:29). God himself desires all people living on planet earth to receive Jesus as their Saviour and be saved from sin and hell fire (1 Tim 2:3-4). For this to happen, God has given the responsibility for us to pray for all of them so that God will have more opportunity to reach out and touch the lives of needy people. Even though every person's eternal destiny is dependant on their own wise choice they make to receive Jesus as their Savior while living on this earth, still God has chosen not to work without us because of His faithfulness to His promise to "let [us]..have dominion over the earth [legally]" excluding himself out of it without permission or cry for help in prayer (Gen 1:26; Psa 115:16). This is why Paul asks how can someone hear the gospel unless a preacher is sent to do the job (Rom 10:14-16). It pleased God to choose the foolish things of the world as intruments to preach the foolishness of the gospel message according to the worldy wisdom and as a result of it save people for eternty ahead (1 Cor 1:27, 21). Because Christ is the head and we the Church are His body, God has brought salvation to mankind by the might and power of His own hand in Christ Jesus (Isa 59:16). In other words, Jesus told that all that the Father has given me, I will lose no one for eternity ahead because Jesus after becoming a perfect human has chosen to intercede for all the humans who are seeking God to be saved (John 10:10, 27-30; Rom 8:34). In other words, just because the Church slept at the end time doesn't mean that God will not be able to save any seeking souls on earth because of our failed prayer, instead the opposite will happen because of the faithful prayer of Jesus and the saints who have done it all and are continuing till now (Matt 25:1-6; Heb 7:25; Rev 5:8). The bottom line is, God will not work without us and we cannot work without Him.
When one believer prays by faith for another sick believer by anointing with oil, symbolising and calling on the power of the Holy Spirit symbolically for the sickness that has been caused by sin or without sin, the Lord has promised to raise the sick person up by healing and forgiving that person, but this promise is only for a believer who is in a fellowship of believers (Jam 5:14-16). This James 5:14-16 should not be taken out of context to mean that God will save the person whom we anoint and pray for. Instead it also reveals that when a believer chooses to forgive someone in their life and prays for the offender to be forgiven by God, this will cause God to come and heal that person from their sickness or any curse of the evil one (James 5:16). This happened to Job in the Old Testament, that when he chose to forgive his friends who has caused hurt in his life, immediately God restored double blessings in Job's life (Job 42:10).
So I want you to encourage to keep praying, for something good will happen through your prayer. It is not over until it is all over. May God quicken you to pray more and more for the salvation of your family member and also for all men. Let me finish with this encouraging exhortation of Apostle Paul in which he says, "1 Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, 2 for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. 3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." (1 Tim 2:1-4). May our heart beat be passionate enough to beat inline with the heart of God to pray for the salvation of all men and desire all men to be saved like we are for the glory of God.
Much Blessings.....
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