Can Unforgiveness Affect My Eternal Salvation?

Can Unforgiveness Affect My Eternal Salvation?Colossians 3:13 “Bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.” I recently attended a boot camp to learn about the unbound method of deliverance. Unbound is a technique to set people free from the things that weigh them down. The reality is that our enemy, the devil, wants to keep us from living out our destinies as children of God.  Evil spirits can gain influence in our lives through open doorways. These are opened, often in childhood, by us or by other people.  Through these doors, Satan’s lies and deceptions limit our access to the blessing of the kingdom of God. Sometimes we open doors to the enemy in ways we don’t know, for instance, participating in the occult, holding on to bitterness or unforgiveness, harboring resentment, and so on. On our first night of training, we learned about the first two essential steps. The first one was repenting of sin and expressing faith in Jesus. We all sin, it is a part of our daily life, and yet when we sin it hurts our relationship with God. When we sin we are opening a door for the enemy to come in. Repentance for our sins is a big part of our freedom. If we truly want to be free we can’t have our sins hanging over us. One way our sins can invite the enemy in is because he will then use that sin to make us ashamed of what we did. Shame is straight from hell, it is not from God. Once we start to feel ashamed then we pull away and we tend to isolate ourselves because we feel as though we aren’t worth anything. Once we repent we bring our sins out of the darkness and into the light and they no longer have hold over us. The second essential step that we talked about is forgiveness. This is the one that left the biggest impression on me. This is the one that I don’t think we realize how important it is. I remember when I was at a Bible study and they were talking about forgiveness. We were talking about Matthew 6:14, “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” When they said that God forgives us the same way we forgive those who trespass against us, I was so surprised. I had no idea what they were talking about. Now, I have been a Catholic for my whole life and this was only about 10 years ago. I have probably said the Our Father prayer more times than I can count and yet I never really put two and two together. Have you ever had a time when you heard something or realized something and it was life-changing for you? I can remember two times this has happened for me with scripture. The first one was when I discovered Romans 8:11, “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” When I discovered we have the power of the one who raised Jesus from the dead, the same power Jesus had, that was life-changing for me. The second time was when I discovered what I am really saying when I say the Our Father prayer. “Forgive us O Lord as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Did you know that is what you are saying? How many times have you said that prayer? Each time you say the rosary you say it at least 6 times. We also say it every time we attend mass. When I heard this I was determined to learn how to forgive better. I was determined to not hold things against people. I have done my best to do this. Over the course of the last 10 years, I have learned quite a bit about forgiveness in my quest to become better at it. First I learned what forgiveness is and is not. Forgiveness is making a decision that you are no longer going to give the thing that happened any space in your brain anymore. You are not going to think about it and you are not