Where does another person’s free will weigh into the results of my prayer map?    

Christine, I can spend many hours prayerfully crafting a prayer map for someone, but in the end, they could reject Christ or choose not to change.  Isn’t that true?

Yes, that is true.  God never overrides free will.  However, Prayer Mapping is valuable because of what it sets up in, and around, a person ~ giving them the best possible scenario to make a decision toward Jesus and away from the evil one.  

The god of this world lives to deceive and to distort.  Paul says in II Corinthians that ‘he blinds the minds of the unbeliever so that he cannot see the glory of God.’  For anyone to come out from under deception, there must be prayer for that person.  In Prayer Mapping, we learn to take our God-given authority and restrict the enemy’s ability to continue to deceive them.  We give them a war-free zone to consider the Gospel.  They are able to hear the truth and make their own decision apart from the swirling activity of the enemy.  If they are bent to believe and allow God to open their eyes, it will be in this spiritually calm atmosphere.  Will some still reject Jesus?  Certainly.  Wide is the road that leads to destruction.  But the ones who will choose Jesus need every spiritual advantage, accomplished through prayer, to see His glory and believe.  

Christine, I can spend many hours prayerfully crafting a prayer map for someone, but in the end, they could reject Christ or choose not to change.  Isn’t that true?

Yes, that is true.  God never overrides free will.  However, Prayer Mapping is valuable because of what it sets up in, and around, a person ~ giving them the best possible scenario to make a decision toward Jesus and away from the evil one.  

The god of this world lives to deceive and to distort.  Paul says in II Corinthians that ‘he blinds the minds of the unbeliever so that he cannot see the glory of God.’  For anyone to come out from under deception, there must be prayer for that person.  In Prayer Mapping, we learn to take our God-given authority and restrict the enemy’s ability to continue to deceive them.  We give them a war-free zone to consider the Gospel.  They are able to hear the truth and make their own decision apart from the swirling activity of the enemy.  If they are bent to believe and allow God to open their eyes, it will be in this spiritually calm atmosphere.  Will some still reject Jesus?  Certainly.  Wide is the road that leads to destruction.  But the ones who will choose Jesus need every spiritual advantage, accomplished through prayer, to see His glory and believe.

Next week, we’ll look at some sample prayer maps.  I’ll walk you through some life scenarios and show you how to problem-solve them with the concepts we’ve learned over these past months.  But for today and tomorrow, I’d like to answer some questions that are commonly asked.  I’ll address the first two today.

Q & A

1. Christine, I don’t know where to start.  You’ve addressed many issues: generational bents, soul ties, hearts of stone, inner vows, and how the enemy works to compromise someone’s boundary lines.  Frankly, everyone in my life needs a prayer map.  Where in the world do I start?

While so many can benefit from a prayer map, not everyone is ready for one.  God knew you’d be learning this material.  He also knew there would come a day when you’d be ready to construct a customized prayer for someone in your life.  So, in preparation, He’s been working behind the scenes in the heart of someone close to you.  He’s been readying them to respond to the prayers you’ve yet to write and bring before the throne.  Only He knows the right person for you to focus on.  Start asking God to show you who that person is.  Perhaps as you read this, a face/name dominates your thoughts.  Chances are, God is already speaking to you.  If not, He will.  

• Someone in my family has abandoned their faith.  They say they no longer believe.  How do I approach this in a prayer map?

No one abandons their faith out of the blue.  Unbelief is preceded by something that happened. Reactions based on wrong interpretations of events took off like a runaway train.  Remember ~ the enemy is anxious to interpret painful things when they happen.  Unless a believer diligently examines his thoughts to keep or discard what is true or untrue, there is a risk of becoming a casualty to the distortions.  Someone who decided he didn’t want, trust, or love God anymore dealt with anger or disappointment that colored everything.  God’s character was maligned.  The resulting pain became a stumbling block.  If you’re writing a prayer map for them, ask God to show you the origins of their unbelief to target those roots.  

Prayer Mapping is all about being as specific as possible with our requests. It’s about getting to the roots of an issue. Praying generalized prayers such as ~ “Lord, help them change” Or “Be with them and bless them” ~ is easier, but praying such things lacks the specificity to track the miracle God wants to do.  There is a ‘Goliath-sized spot’ on the enemy’s head, a target that the tip of the ‘sword of the Word’ wants to penetrate.  Prayer invites us to take aim.    

My soul finds rest in God, my hope comes from him.  My salvation and my honor depend on God, he is my mighty rock, my refuge.  Psalm 62:7-8 

How I’ve prayed for you over the weekend.  Many of you have written to tell me that you’re  relieved to finally have a way to apply the act of forgiveness.  You’re ready to disentangle yourself from your offender.  You’re ready to rid yourself of the bitterness that has tied you to the vivid memories of whatever it was that they did to you. You’re ready to rid yourself of torment and know the peace that Jesus gives when we leave matters of injustice in His hands.    

Allow me to give you some guidelines as you get ready to take this foot-washing journey.  Your offender will take the chair and you will assume your position on the stool.  Jesus will be ever with you, giving you what you need to move forward. He will always be your encourager to propel you upward on this steep path of obedience. As you prepare, here are some things to keep in mind ~

1. Feel the hurt.  Most likely, you haven’t been able to forgive because the pain scared you and, quite frankly, it felt unjust to forgive.  With their face ever before you in prayer, you will re-live the critical moments.  It will be emotional.  You may be surprised at the depth of your feelings.  You may wonder if you are strong enough to bear it.  Jesus is with you and, if needed, He will bring other people to walk alongside you during these next weeks.      

2.  Wash their feet until you have quiet tears.   The pain you will feel is necessary.  What will come out will be what has been trapped inside.  The emotional outpouring will be confusing and messy.  Tears will express grief, anger, and many other things.  Persevere.  Over time, the nature of your tears will change.  As you wrestle with God’s will, you will move to accept that His providence and sovereignty is over all things.  Tears will quiet as you believe Him for redemption. 

3.   Wash their feet until you feel a release in your spirit.  How will you know when you have finished?  Listen closely to the small, spontaneous voice in your spirit.  The Holy Spirit will lead you to a new threshold.  You will breathe fresh air, feel the turn in the road, maybe even sense a ‘well done’ being spoken over you.

Everything has been leading up to today.  Jesus stands with you on this threshold of freedom.

You have promised to lead the blind in a way they do not know.  All of this is foreign for so many who are reading this.  It was foreign to me, Lord.  But You are faithful to unveil each next step with grace.  Amen 

My salvation and my honor rest on God, my strong rock; my refuge is in God. Trust in Him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts before Him.  God is our refuge.  Selah   Psalm 62:7-8 

Washing my offender’s feet in prayer became my template.  (It still is.)  The process of doing it daily spanned the course of several months.  Just as David had to affirm things out loud in today’s scripture, I had to make audible confessions that centered on truths like these:  Lord, You will come to my rescue.  Your honor is really all that’s important.  My trust is in You.  I will pour out my heart to You and You will be gracious to help me when I can’t continue in my own strength.

Each day when I went to prayer ~

1. I pictured myself sitting on the stool.  My offender was in the chair and I was attempting to wash her feet as Jesus did the disciples.  My struggle was ever before me, and I talked to Jesus about how I was feeling.  Every day was a crisis as I wanted to flee the scene.  
2. I felt the hurt of her offenses as I reviewed every detail of them.  This was not some cerebral exercise but a purging of my heart.  I asked all the questions that erupt when painful events are re-visited.  “Why?” “How could you?” “Did I really deserve this?”  These were honest feelings but, in them, I also saw my own sense of entitlement.
3. Over time, I saw the nature of my tears change.  For a few weeks, they were tears of anger and injustice.  I couldn’t imagine I would ever get beyond them.  After crying, my face broke out into an ugly rash where the tears came down.  It quickly dawned on me that the tears I had held inside were toxic to my body.  What would they have done to me internally if I’d held them in for another 10 years!   Eventually, I came to peace with God’s sovereign rule over my life, and the nature of my tears changed.  They were no longer angry tears but quiet tears that reflected submission and trust.  I realized that God allowed betrayal to become a theme in my storyline.  I shared in some of the sufferings of Jesus, and because of His resurrection, I chose to believe that my pain could also lead to something redemptive.
4. God showed me that He qualifies the kinds of tears we cry. Israel wept when they were taken into captivity.  God told them that their tears were for deliverance from pain, not because they were mourning their sin.  Understanding that, I knew I had to continue washing her feet in prayer until the bitter tears changed to surrender to God’s providence.
5. Many months later, deep in my spirit, I heard Jesus say.  “Well done.”  I was free.

Still, every now and then, there are days I still have to wash her feet in prayer.  I discover new evidence of the damage she caused.  Each time, I need the wind of the Spirit to fuel obedience.

Jesus, You washed Your disciple’s feet on the eve of their desertion of Your darkest hour.  You didn’t withhold from them in disillusionment. Give me that same grace. Amen 

You call Me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, because I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example so that you should do as I have done for you. John 13:13-15

We’ve worked our way through what forgiveness is, what it is not, and also given thought as to why it’s so hard. Hopefully, you’ve allowed your heart to open up to old wounds that are yet unhealed in hopes of being freed from the torment of remembering. I suspect it’s been difficult and you’ve wondered how this series would come to a conclusion. Would there be instruction, then closure? The answer is yes. I hope you are poised to take action because these next few days are pivotal to take you to the freedom God promises.

I have been humbled by what God’s forgiveness of repentant sinners really looks like. It is only through feeling gratitude that I can think of giving away the same gift. It is only then that I am able to ache to live a different way….a way that is realized when forgiveness is worked out between God and me for my offender. If so, what’s next?

I asked that in May of 1997 as God showed me that I had not forgiven someone who hurt me over the course of many years. It was entangled and messy. As I asked God how to begin, He took me to this passage in John. I panicked and then thought about what it would take to wash this person’s feet. I began to talk to God about it everyday in prayer. I spent the next three months working on this. This is what happened.

My prayer time became all about forgiveness. I couldn’t think of much else.

I could see a foot washing scene in my mind as I prayed. A basin. A stool. A chair. And a pitcher of water.

My offender came and sat in the chair. I took my place on the stool.  I could sense Jesus near, watching me.

In my anger, I momentarily wished the basin was filled with scalding water as my hurt fully resurfaced. Immediately, I had to deal with my desire for vengeance.

I began to wash her feet and for many weeks, I re-lived the experience and began to pour out my hurt. What that looked like will be for tomorrow. Until then, think about whether this foot washing ‘template’ would be helpful to you.  If you decide to proceed, and that will take courage, Jesus is waiting to help you.

Jesus, I need You because with You all things are possible. Amen

Forgiveness is messy. Why would I look forward to that! It will require a review of what’s painful, asking God to show me how I internalized it, feeling anger, grieving a loss of some kind, and many other things not easy to navigate. I fear that if I start feeling angry or begin to grieve deeply, I’ll never be able to escape the cycle.  

What’s the safe alternative? The one the church so often adopts, a paradigm that goes like this ~ A person goes forward during an invitation, they kneel at the altar, they cry a few tears and tell God that they will forgive their offender. They get up and truly believe that it’s finished. Issue and person forgiven.

This person’s brief encounter with the edges of forgiveness leads others in their Christian community to expect them to be all better. When this person’s heart fails and hurts again, they will beat themselves up over being a failure of a Christian. And if they confess their struggles to another, they will probably hear sermons that stir up added layers of guilt.  

What is the answer? To understand that forgiveness is not cerebral, nor is it momentary. The bigger the hurt, the longer the process, and the messier it is. I must not surround myself with confidants who have the false expectations of an unbiblical kind of forgiveness. To be vulnerable to hardliners who diminish God-given emotions  is a mistake. I don’t know what they would have done with Jesus when He modeled a very wide emotional spectrum. He was free to express joy and also free to grieve to the point of sweating drops of blood. We here in the western world have numbed out to the extremes. We believe that to be stoic is to be holy.  

If you are one who has walked the aisle, said the words, cried briefly, and then wondered why – with time – you didn’t feel much better, perhaps you have been the victim of poor teaching and unreasonable expectations. What should you do? Start over. Find a journey partner or prayer partner. Be yourself and acknowledge what you have been afraid to disclose to anyone, including yourself. God already knows it’s there. He will lead you into the dark, by faith, and turn on the light as you go. 

I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. Isaiah 42:16 

After teaching on forgiveness, I give an invitation to women to respond, to indicate publicly that they are ready to follow Jesus in the lifestyle of forgiveness.  I encourage them to abdicate their self-imposed right to sit on the throne of judgement and give God back His place as sovereign Ruler.  I ask any who are ready to do this to stand and then lift one hand toward heaven and say,  “Long Live The King!”  Oh, how I wish I could take each of you with me to witness what happens. 

The battle begins. Some people do it quickly as God prepared their heart to desire freedom and the things of the Spirit.  But for most, the struggle to respond is evident in their body language.  Tears flow, weeping can be heard, and there are tentative beginnings of arms slowly being raised.  But then, they are lowered again.  Raised/lowered; this battle continues.  Other than salvation, I believe this is the biggest spiritual war any child of God faces.

I’ve had women tell me, “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t do it.  I don’t have it in me to forgive this person.”  I assure them that I know this is true.  They do not have it in them.  That’s because forgiveness is not natural, it’s supernatural.  What’s natural (and of the flesh) is revenge, and how we love to fantasize about it! 

When I can’t forgive, I cry out to the God for help.  He offers it no matter how great my need may be.  His Spirit, inside of me, is ready to equip me for obedience. He infuses me with grace.  Yes, it’s a war.  Everything in me says that someone has to make them pay, someone needs to make sure things are fair, and if I don’t do it – I fear God won’t.  This is the language of the devil and once I know that, I can reject those thoughts and focus on what the Spirit is saying in the Word.  His way leads to life and freedom.  Satan’s way leads to anger and bondage.

So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For the flesh craves what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.  Galatians 5:16-17 

If someone in my family had been one of the casualties of 9/11, would it have been hard to forgive the pilots who hijacked the planes that leveled the World Trade Center?  If my parents had been victims of the Holocaust in Auschwitz, would it be hard to forgive Adolph Hitler?  The worse the crime and the more personal it is, the more the ability to forgive is impaired.  

It’s easy to forgive lesser sins committed against me.  It’s also easier to forgive someone when they have hurt me rather than someone close to me.  I wonder if every person has a hidden category in their heart of sins they consider unforgivable.  I suspect it’s pretty common.  When that awful thing happens, we relegate the person who did it into a special category of people.  We believe that this person is outside the veil of a pardon.  His crime was too great.  You’ve heard this saying, right?  “I can forgive most things but definitely not that!”  

Aren’t you glad God doesn’t have special categories of sins?  The Apostle Paul admitted that of all sinners, he was the worst of them.  I believe it’s Steve Brown, the founder of Key Life, who said, “I am the worst sinner I know.”  I often feel that way.  It’s humbling to come to realize that God’s heart is driven by love and mercy and mine is not.  I have limits.  He does not.  If He did, I wouldn’t be His child.

What do I do when I come up against an offense so devastating that I swear I just don’t have it in me to extend forgiveness?  I talk to God about it and confess it.  “Lord, I’m not like You.  I don’t understand your radical love and mercy.  It is simply out of reach for me to produce it.  Forgive me.  Give me a heart of mercy like yours and the grace to extend it.  Live through me and do what I can not do.”

If Hitler had seen Jesus in all of His glory, moments before he died, and then cried out to be saved, would he be in heaven?  Absolutely.  At that point, he’d be no different than the thief on the cross.  When I think I’m better than he is, or my sin hasn’t offended God as badly, I have work to do.  I must ask the Holy Spirit to obliterate my special categories.

This is a faithful and trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance and approval, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost. I Timothy 1:15

When I am isolated from others, I lose perspective about the story of my life. It becomes normalized which is dangerous because ‘normal’ can very well mean ‘unhealthy’. My story also becomes cobwebbed and no matter how much I try to make sense of it, wisdom is lost in the complicated weave of the strands. Sooner rather than later, I need someone to listen to some personal stories so that clarity can come. 

I have found that until I tell my story to someone, I don’t have an accurate perspective of it. It isn’t until there is a safe, empathetic listener, that I can begin to sort things out. Sometimes, I surprise myself at what I’ve been holding inside. Speaking something makes it become real. Unspoken pain remains surreal and is easier to ignore. 

One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. Proverbs 12:26

How does this pertain to forgiveness? If my story is locked inside, swirling around without clear definition, I will be unclear as to what and whom I should forgive. If I need to forgive a blamer, chances are that I have assumed the guilt they have imposed like a sponge. I can’t sort it out myself. If I’m someone who minimizes my pain, I won’t forgive the real offense. I’ll say, “Maybe it really wasn’t all that bad.” 

A Jesus-kind of listener will give me a barometer for assessing how good or bad something was. I’ve never had real clarity about something important without talking about it first. I’m a very private person so that is difficult for me. I’m the kind who only makes a few close friends.  I share almost nothing personal on Facebook. I’m an introvert and that puts me in the minority. Introverts can get lost in their head where extroverts tend to spill everything without a filter. Only spiritual maturity gives balance to both sides. 

If you find yourself stuck in what you suspect is unforgiveness, could it be that you don’t have clarity about the offense? Maybe you say to yourself, “Maybe I was the one who was wrong.” Or, “Maybe I”m making too big a deal out of this.”  Or even, “Maybe it’s worse than I thought!”It’s probably time to open your heart to someone.