#142- Forgiving Others

Today we conclude our three-part series on forgiveness by facing one of the hardest commands Jesus gives us: forgiving those who have hurt us. Together we’ll look honestly at the reality of our wounds, why unforgiveness is so spiritually destructive, and how the forgiveness we extend to others can only truly flow from the forgiveness we ourselves have received in Christ. Far from trivializing our pain, we’ll explore how Jesus meets us in it and, by His Spirit, gives us strength to do what often feels impossible.

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Transcript

Transcript: Forgiving Others

 Today is week three in our series on forgiveness.

We have spoken about God forgiving us, the fact that we need to seek forgiveness of those whom we have harmed, and today we're going to talk about the fact that we need to forgive those that have harmed us.

This is the third and the final part in the series.

We've anchored this in a saying that we use in our liturgy.

Forgiveness is God's way of bringing healing and wholeness to our lives and our world.

 It's the way of the cross in the heart of our relationship with God and with others.

I've said this over the last two weeks.

We have two choices in this world.

Either we live perfectly and have absolutely no need to deal with the imperfections of others, or we have to somehow figure out how we will deal with our own imperfections and the imperfections of those around us.

And God, in His wisdom, gives us the beautiful gift of forgiveness.

 Sin breaks down relationships, but forgiveness is able to heal broken relationships.

Our relationship with God is healed through the forgiveness of Christ on the cross, and our relationship with others is healed when we offer forgiveness and we receive forgiveness.

 And so we talk a lot more about that.

Forgiveness is essential to building, maintaining healthy communities that rightly reflect Jesus Christ.

In speaking about forgiving others, we will draw on Matthew 6, verses 7 to 15.

In the middle of this passage is the Lord's Prayer, but it kind of is framed between one and two verses on either side, starting at verse 7.

 When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.

Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

Pray then in this way.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

 Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

 It's a powerful statement in there.

In fact, it's quite challenging to us.

Even in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our debts, and then it says, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Embedded within this passage of Scripture is this notion that the forgiveness we receive from God is in fact conditional, and it's conditional on us extending forgiveness to others.

As we read that, we might ask ourselves, what are we to make of Jesus' words here?

 Is he coming across as inconsiderate?

Does he truly understand the harm that we have felt and the pain that we've had to experience, the damage that has been done to us by others?

Is he perhaps detached or even unloving when asking us to forgive those who have caused us great harm?

 Well, I would like to suggest today that instead of seeing it in this context and framework as a command, which it actually is, and almost as an imperative that is placed upon us, can we ask this question?

Is it possible that we read this passage and somehow are able to see the love of Jesus that we know is in there shining through?

And I believe that if we understand the dynamics of forgiveness, then

 Unfortunately, in the church,

 It's common that as we deal with stuff like forgiveness and the Christian mandate of forgiveness, that we unintentionally trivialize people's pain and we actually diminish what they have gone through.

Christianity has not always been good at dealing with these things.

In fact, you might hear things like, I know what you're going through.

When you know for a fact the person speaking to you has no idea what you're going through.

You might hear someone say, well, just forgive.

 And you might say, well, I wish it was that simple.

Or you just need to move on from this.

And of course, even as we've alluded to, somebody might say, well, it's a command.

You have no choice.

You just have to do it.

 Matthew 6, verse 14 and 15 shows us that conditional nature that comes across almost.

We can wrestle with it and try to find God's love in there.

If you forgive others their trespasses, then your father will forgive you.

If you do not forgive others, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.

 So how do we balance Jesus' command for us to forgive others and the real hurt that we've experienced and actually for many of us are still processing?

Let me start with this.

The first thing I want to say is this.

Our wounds, your wounds, my wounds, they are real, painful wounds.

 And forgiving others can be and is hard.

There's another misconception that we find in Christianity.

It's almost the sense of denial where we almost are encouraged to ignore or deny or reject any form of hurt or pain because, well, you know, all of that has been crucified with Christ and we now live in new people.

And so the pain shouldn't get to us and we shouldn't be living in that world.

Truthfully, that's not helpful.

 The pain and the hurt that we experience is real.

And I don't think Jesus wants us to ignore or deny it.

He wants us to move to forgiveness, not reject or forget or pretend that it never happened.

The journey of pain and hurt is common to each and every one of us, and it in no way reflects a lack of spirituality on our part.

 If we experience pain, it's not because we've been lesser Christians.

If we go through situations that hurt us or we even experience suffering in our lives, it's got nothing to do with the fact of our spirituality.

It has to do with the fact that we live in a world that is sinful.

And in a sinful world, we will find suffering.

 Sometimes it is pain inflicted upon us.

It could be illness.

It could be disease.

But regardless of what it looks like, it all comes from the same place.

It is sin.

It doesn't make us less spiritual or less loved by God.

It is real, and God still loves us.

The Apostle Paul wrestles with God in 2 Corinthians 12.

 speaking about this thorn in his flesh, a suffering that he experiences.

And as he wrestles with God, he comes to this point where he feels God saying to him, my grace is sufficient for you.

What a beautiful passage of scripture.

In the middle of his suffering, God says, I have a grace that will carry you through this.

And then he says, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

 And he goes on to say, so boast more gladly of my weakness, mentions a whole lot of other things.

Your pain is real.

You don't have to deny it.

And what's more, not only is it real, Jesus knows that it's real.

And he knows that pain all too well.

The one who went to the cross knows your pain, knows the injustice that you have suffered, knows the hurt and the damage has been inflicted upon your life.

 Hebrews 4.15, The injustice of the cross, that which Jesus had to endure, serves as one of the greatest temptations to harbor unforgiveness

 And yet Jesus did not hold on to the unforgiveness.

He reached out and offered forgiveness.

Let me give you a second thing as we build on that.

Firstly, our wounds are real.

Forgiving others is hard.

 Forgiving others, this is the second point, forgiving others is what we need to do, even if it's not what we want to do.

So there's that big word, we need to do this, even if we don't want to do this.

 I've made the statement before, Jesus loves you just the way you are.

And I'll add to that, Jesus loves you just the way you are.

And Jesus fully understands your hurt and your pain.

But he loves you too much to leave you in that place.

 Consider the opening words that Jesus uses to introduce the Lord's Prayer.

We know it is the Lord's Prayer.

Teach us to pray, his disciples say.

And then he says this in verse 8.

Do not be like them, speaking of the Pharisees, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

There's that whole question of need versus want.

We might not want to forgive.

 But our Father knows that we need to forgive.

Jesus speaks about forgiveness more as something that is essential to us, as a part there in the very prayer.

Forgive us our sins.

We need forgiveness of our sins, even as we forgive others.

 The devastation of forgiveness is this.

The longer we live in unforgiveness, and Jesus knows this, the longer we live in unforgiveness, the clearer it becomes to those around us.

As we harbor that unforgiveness, we let it fester inside of us.

We let it grow.

As unforgiveness grows and grows, turns into bitterness and into hatred and into resentment,

 The pain is just magnified in our lives.

What happens is we start to decline spiritually.

There's a process of spiritual degeneration that takes place in our lives.

We starve ourselves from the love of God.

We cut ourselves off from the grace of God and the mercy of God and the goodness of God.

Ultimately, we cut ourselves off from life.

 to see a person who's grown old and just withered up in their own sense of unforgiveness.

I've seen people, I'm sure you've seen people like that.

It's a sight to behold because unforgiveness is a spiritual disease that kills.

 Now let me tell you something about unforgiveness and why it's so dangerous to us.

There's a twofold harm that we experience.

The first harm we experience is the initial hurt that is inflicted upon us.

When somebody comes to us and injures us and hurts us and damages us and offends us, something happens to us.

That's the initial hurt that's inflicted upon us.

 But then what we do, the second damage, which is even more dangerous, is we harbor that unforgiveness and we carry it with us, refusing to offer forgiveness to others.

And that just grows and grows and grows.

And that develops into hatred and malice and resentment.

And our spirit dies and dies and dies.

 A good way to think of it is if you go out and you get a really big open wound, maybe you cut open your leg and it's got a big, big gash in your leg and you're not even sure what to do with it.

And there it is bleeding.

You've been hurt.

You've been wounded, whether intentionally or accidentally.

But instead of going and getting the wound disinfected,

 You leave that wound open and you continue to expose it to more and more infection.

And the disease just gets in there.

It becomes septic.

It doesn't only affect the wound.

It affects the entire body.

And that's what unforgiveness is like.

It's like an untreated wound that gets infected, becomes septic and kills off the body.

It will kill you.

 Somebody said it this way, unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.

Think for a second as that unforgiveness grows inside of you.

And let's go back to a scripture we used last week in Luke 6, verse 45.

The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil, for it's out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

 Now, when you allow that unforgiveness, that bitterness, that hate, that malice, that resentment to grow inside of you, guess what?

It produces evil.

Unforgiveness produces evil treasure.

If that's the word we want to use in Luke 6.45, evil treasure in our hearts, and that evil treasure will eventually come out.

 It comes out in the way we relate to one another.

Broken relationships with one another.

Our world, our communities start to break down.

The people around us struggle to connect with us and communicate with us.

We see things.

We experience things.

We just allow that treasure to cloud our minds.

And instead of seeing God and his beauty and his love, we just allow that evil to be pervasive in our lives.

 This is something that's very important.

I've realized this even in ministry, in my ministry, and everybody who's involved in ministry.

It just tends to be whenever we engage in acts of looking after people, whether we look after the poor or we're just shepherding people, these are opportunities where our grace and goodness can be kind of thrown back at us.

And it's a place where a lot of hurt can take place.

And if we're not careful, especially within the church,

 that will eventually come out because something will grow inside of us.

No wonder the writer of Proverbs says, keep your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the springs of life.

 So how do we do the seemingly insurmountable, the seemingly impossible, and we forgive others?

We realize we have to forgive because the disease, it grows inside of us.

If we don't forgive, unforgiveness is something that needs to be dealt with.

But how do we overcome this huge thing in our lives?

Well, that brings me to the last point.

Our forgiveness of others flows from God who forgives us.

 Ephesians 4, verse 32, a similar passage is found in Colossians 3, verse 13.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

If we stop for a second in Christ, through the cross, many things have taken place.

Through the cross, we have had our sins forgiven.

 Through the cross, our relationship has been restored with God.

Through the cross, we've been given life, life abundantly in this world and life in the world to come.

But I want us to think for a second what happens when we surrender our lives to Jesus.

In that moment, our hearts become the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us and the Spirit of God lives inside us.

And so the very Spirit of God in us

 gives us the power to love the unlovable, to forgive the seemingly unforgivable.

Have a look at 1 John 4, verse 19 to 20.

It says, We love because He first loved us.

The love we have comes from the love that He has given us.

The love we have is because Christ dwells in us, and through us His love can be made manifest.

 Is it reasonable to think that maybe even in the same way forgiveness as Christ forgives us, so too we can take the strength of Christ to forgive others?

He goes on to say in verse 20, those who say, I love God and hate their brothers and sisters are liars.

For those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.

 It's impossible to say that the love dwelling in us and the love of God is dwelling in us and yet act hatefully towards others that God loves.

There's something inherently wrong with that picture.

You see, when we give our lives to Jesus, we become a new creation.

It's Paul's language in 2 Corinthians 5.

If anyone is in Christ...

 There is a new creation.

Everything old has passed away.

Everything has become new because Christ is in us, in Christ.

We are in Christ, Christ in us.

Jesus is the new that lives in us.

And with him comes love for the seemingly unlovable.

With him comes forgiveness for the seemingly unforgivable.

 And so as much as we want to forgive in our own strength, actually we need to learn how to forgive in the strength of Christ.

Matthew 6, 14, we return to our scripture we started with.

If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

We return to the question, is this a condemnatory statement or

 We feel condemned if we don't forgive.

Is Jesus trying to guilt us into forgiving?

Or is it possible that there is love in there?

There is love.

Love is all over Jesus' command to forgive.

It's Jesus loving us too much.

 to leave us suffering in our own unforgiveness, or to put it differently, to leave us suffering in that terminal disease called unforgiveness.

So how are we to forgive?

Very, very simply, we emulate, we allow the God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit,

 to dwell in us.

And the very same Jesus who on the cross turned to the Roman soldiers who would crucify him, brutalizing him, killing him, murdering him, all with injustice.

 He said, Father, forgive them for they do not know what they're doing.

That same Jesus that can extend forgiveness to them, that same Jesus lives in you and me and will give us the strength to forgive even in the most unforgivable situations.

Let's open up our hearts and let Jesus speak to us and move us in the way of forgiveness.