BLOG SERIES: WHEN FORGIVENESS IS HARD – Part 3
“Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” — Ephesians 4:26–27 NIV
There have been seasons of my life where unforgiveness was so woven into my daily experience that I stopped recognizing it as unforgiveness at all. It had become the wallpaper. The background hum. I was going to church, reading my Bible, praying, showing up to lead — and underneath all of it, in rooms of my heart I didn’t let anyone into, I was holding things. Wounds from a marriage that broke. Wounds from people who should have known better. Wounds from a child I love deeply and cannot always reach. Some of those wounds were years old. Some of them were fresh enough that writing this still costs me something.
And for a long time I told myself I had forgiven. I had said the words. Prayed the prayers. Done the work — or so I thought. What I didn’t understand yet was that performed forgiveness and actual forgiveness are not the same thing. You can say all the right things and still be holding a verdict in the quiet places. And the enemy is not bothered one bit by performed forgiveness. Only the real kind gives him trouble.
Real Estate
Paul writes to the church at Ephesus and says don’t give the devil a foothold. That word — foothold — is worth sitting with. In the original language it means a place. A location. Actual territory.
Paul isn’t being poetic. He’s being literal. He’s saying that unresolved anger and unforgiveness create an opening, and the enemy is extraordinarily skilled at walking through openings you didn’t realize you’d left. He doesn’t need an invitation. He just needs a door you forgot to close.
The enemy doesn’t need an invitation. He just needs a door you forgot to close.
I had a lot of unclosed doors. I’d been so focused on surviving my wounds — on functioning in spite of them, on keeping everything moving — that I hadn’t paid much attention to what was living in the space they’d created. And what I eventually had to reckon with was that some of my spiritual dryness, some of the low ceiling I kept bumping against in my prayer life, some of the flatness in my creativity — it had an address. It was living in territory I’d unknowingly handed over.
When Bitterness Spreads
Paul goes on in that same chapter to say, “do not grieve the Holy Spirit.” And then he names what grieves him — bitterness at the top of the list, followed by rage, anger, slander, malice. The image underneath the word bitterness in Scripture is a root. Something that grows underground, out of sight, until one day you notice that everything around it has a strange taste and you can’t figure out why.
That’s how unforgiveness actually behaves over time. It doesn’t stay contained in the room you put it in. It seeps into how you interpret new situations, how quickly your guard comes up, how you respond to people who remind you — even faintly — of old hurts. You may not notice it happening. The spreading is slow and quiet and it is very effective.
And underneath all of it, the Spirit is grieved. Not absent — you are still his, that doesn’t change. But grieved. The way someone who loves you is grieved watching you carry something alone that they’ve already offered to carry for you.
He’s not standing at a distance, disappointed. He’s standing close, waiting for you to let him in.
The Lie It Tells
Unforgiveness convinces you it’s doing you a favor. It presents itself as self-protection. As wisdom. As refusing to be naive about who hurt you and what they are capable of. And there is a version of that which is true — discernment is real, and healthy limits on relationships are real and sometimes necessary.
But holding unforgiveness and maintaining wise boundaries are not the same thing. You can have firm, clear, healthy limits on a relationship and still release the person from the verdict you’ve been quietly carrying against them. In fact, you cannot hold those limits well from a place of bitterness, because bitterness keeps pulling you back into the wound. What you actually need is to be free of it.
Forgiveness is not saying what happened was acceptable. It is not pretending the cost wasn’t real. It is not the same as reconciliation, which requires two people and is not always possible. Forgiveness is something you do in your own soul, before God, for your own freedom. And for the ground you are refusing to let the enemy keep.
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” — Ephesians 4:32 NIV
Forgive the way God forgave you — not because the other person deserves it, but because you have been shown what undeserved forgiveness looks like and you are being invited to pass it on. That’s the whole invitation of this verse. Not a command issued from a distance, but a reminder of what you’ve already received. You know what this feels like on the receiving end. You are being asked to let it flow through you.
Taking Back the Ground
When I finally understood that unforgiveness wasn’t just an emotional burden but actual territory — space in my soul that belonged to something other than God — something shifted in how I approached this work. It stopped feeling like a personal failing I needed to manage and started feeling like something worth fighting for. The ground was mine. It had been given away without my full understanding. And I wanted it back.
Not because I was owed peace, but because what God wanted to grow in me required the space that bitterness was occupying. The retreat. The writing. The capacity to sit with women in their pain without my own unprocessed pain flooding the room. None of that had space to grow while I was giving square footage to wounds I’d refused to fully release.
Taking back the ground didn’t happen in one dramatic moment. For me it was slower — a long season of choosing, again and again, to bring the specific person and the specific wound before God and say, “I am releasing my verdict. I am not the judge here. I trust your sovereignty over what happened and your justice over what I cannot fix. Fill the space that bitterness has been holding with something that belongs to you.”
Some days I meant it more than others. The direction mattered more than the feeling. And over time, the ground came back.
You don’t reclaim territory all at once. You reclaim it one act of surrender at a time.
What You’re Actually Protecting
When you hold onto unforgiveness, you are not protecting yourself from the person who hurt you. That ship has already sailed — the wound exists whether you forgive or not. What you are actually doing is protecting the wound itself. Keeping it present. Keeping it in a position to inform your decisions, color your relationships, and quietly limit your capacity for joy.
When you release it — not because it was okay, not because the person deserves it, but because you trust God enough to hand him the verdict — you are not letting them off the hook. You are unhooking yourself. You are taking back the interior space that was meant for something else entirely.
The enemy has wanted your ground since before you knew you were handing it over. And you have the authority, in Christ, to say: not this room. Not anymore.
That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.
Questions to Sit With
- Is there a wound you’ve survived but haven’t released? What would it mean to hand God the verdict?
- Where have you confused maintaining wise boundaries with holding onto unforgiveness?
- What might be living in the territory you’ve left unguarded? What has it cost you?
- What would it look like to take back that ground — not all at once, but one surrender at a time?
‘This is part 3 of 7. Start at the beginning with Post 1: The Weaver in the Dark.’
