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Grace-based biblical teaching and sermons with Pastor Jason White. Messages that focus on Life in Christ and practical application as New Covenant believers.
So earlier in the week I heard this story about a pastor who gave a sermon on the importance of forgiving your enemies. And about a third of the way through the sermon, he said to his congregation, “I’m curious, how many of you are now willing to forgive your enemies?” And only about half of the people raised their hands. So…he kept preaching.
Well, he got about 2/3 of the way through the sermon, and he paused and asked them again, “Now how many of you are willing to forgive your enemies?” And this time about 75% of them raised their hand…so he kept on preaching…
Finally, he gets through the entire sermon, and he asked one more time, “Now that I’m finished with the message, how many of you are willing to forgive your enemies?” And this time everyone in the congregation raised their hands EXCEPT for one elderly woman.
So the pastor just could not let this go. He asked the elderly woman, “Why is it that you are STILL unwilling to forgive your enemies?
She said, “Oh that’s simple Pastor, I don’t have any enemies.”
The pastor was just stunned and said, “I’ve got to ask you if you don’t mind, how old are you?”
She said, “I’m 96, why?”
He said, “That’s incredible. I’ve got to know your secret. Can you please tell everyone here today how it is that you have absolutely no enemies in your life?”
She said, “It’s easy, Pastor, I outlived them all!”
Well, most of us have probably not gotten to the point where we can say that we have no enemies in our lives. And forgiving them is a really difficult thing to do.
Honestly, forgiving someone in general, can be a really difficult thing, even if they’re not an enemy.
It just hurts when someone wrongs you or lets you down in some way…
Your best friend forgets your birthday…
A church member spread gossip about you…
A co-worker used you to get ahead and get a promotion…
Your mom or dad criticized your career path or the person you wanted to marry…
Your spouse treated you poorly or called you out for something in front of the kids…
Whatever it is, it hurts to be wronged. We are all familiar with the gut-wrenching pain that hits us in the pit of our stomach when we have been mistreated.
And because of that, it can be really difficult to forgive those people in our lives.
I mean, we want them to hurt the way we hurt. We want them to suffer because we are suffering.
And we feel like if we were to forgive them then it’s like they get off easy and like we are just ignoring the wrong they did to us.
And so we don’t. We don’t forgive the people who hurt us.
And yet, often times, instead of it having the intended effect we wanted to have on them, it tends to affect us in ways that we never thought it would.
Because when we withhold forgiveness it is like carrying around a huge weight, and the longer we carry it, the heavier the burden becomes.
It affects all of our relationships…it affects our emotions…and it even affects our bodies.
Studies have shown that unforgiveness can cause stress, anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, physical back and neck pain, and a lot more things I don’t have time to mention.
It’s been said that “Withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die from it.”
It often hurts us worse than it does them.
And so I wonder this morning if there is a way to manage our hurts before they become hates?
Well, last week, we spent a lot of our time in Ephesians as we opened up this “One-Another” message series, and I showed you how the apostle Paul set up the commands that he gives in the last several chapters…
In the first 3 chapters, he shows us who we are in Christ. He teaches us about the new creation we become in Christ the moment we put our faith and trust in Him for salvation…
And then as he gets into the last few chapters, he shows us the behaviors that now line up with who we are in Christ.
In other words, we said that the behavior commands are descriptions of who you are…the new you that you’ve become in Christ.
And so last week, we looked at the command to love one another, and we saw from a biblical perspective that God is saying, “Since I’ve made you into the kind of people who are loving in Christ, then go and love one another.”
You are in union with the God who is love itself, and He will express that love through you towards one another!
Well, just a little bit later in Ephesians, we see the apostle Paul address the issue we are talking about today. In Ephesians 4:32, he says…
32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
And this isn’t the only place that Paul says this. He says almost the exact same thing in Colossians 3
13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
So we see in both cases that Paul is grounding the “forgive one another” command on the Lord’s forgiveness of us.
We forgive one another as the Lord has forgiven us.
We are going to be participating in the Lord’s Supper at the end of the service today which we are told to do in order to remember Jesus and the forgiveness we have in Him.
And so I want to take you back there for just a second… Look at Matthew 26:26-28…
26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” 27 Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
In other words, Jesus was headed for the cross, where He was going to take all of the sins of the world (past, present, and future) and place them upon Himself.
Being born fully God and fully man, He had no sin to pay for Himself, so He willingly was headed to the cross out of His love for us to take your sins and my sins upon Himself and pay the penalty for them.
And He did. And while He was on that cross, we even know that He cried out, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” He is truly a loving, compassionate, and forgiving God.
And at the time it came for Him to die, He took His last breath and cried out, “It is finished!”
All of the work that He had come to do in order to secure our forgiveness and enter into a new covenant with us was accomplished. And of course, 3 days later Jesus rose from the grave defeating the power of sin and death forever…
And that is why the author of Hebrews could write after Jesus’ finished work on the cross and say…
26 He has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9:26)
So this is why the apostle Paul could say to forgive one another, as the Lord forgave you.
Notice it’s past tense. He didn’t say as the Lord will forgive you when you sin. He said as the Lord forgave you…past tense. You have been forgiven completely for all sin of all time.
And I think that’s the reason that you and I can forgive others now…because we are completely forgiven.
I mean, if you aren’t forgiven, then you can’t really forgive someone else. I mean you have to hold onto that because you need it in order to justify yourself. You need to be able to point to those things in order to use them to defend that you are a good person compared to what other people have done to you.
But if you’ve been completely forgiven, then you don’t have to hold on to unforgiveness to be justified. You already are justified and made righteous in Christ, so you are now simply free to forgive others who hurt you and wrong you.
Okay, so here’s the next thing that it means though. If we are to forgive one another AS Christ forgave us, and He has forgiven us completely then that means we are also to forgive others completely.
And I don’t say that to diminish what happened to you. What that person did to you was wrong. They shouldn’t have done it. And no doubt it hurt you and has created a lot of pain in your life.
But Jesus will give you what you need to be able to forgive them. He isn’t going to ask you to do something without being willing to empower you to do it.
I was reading a story this week that took place several years ago during the Rwanda Genocide in 1994. It was a story of a kid named Jean Claude, who was around 11 years old when another tribe just began killing people from his tribe just because they were a part of that tribe. And it was horrific.
The killings and the things that happened to people were unimaginable, and Jean Claude watched as they killed his own father with a machete. He watched as his mom was brutally tortured. She wasn’t killed but she never fully recuperated from the attack and lived with major disabilities the rest of her life.
And it wasn’t just his family but friends and their parents. It was awful. But Compassion International had started ministering to the people in that area, and Jean Claude was brought into their program where they provide schooling and teach them about Jesus.
And after sharing the gospel with Jean Claude, he became a Christian and learned about not just how He was forgiven, but how Jesus asked God the Father to forgive those who were torturing Him.
He learned how the apostle Paul taught us to forgive as the Lord has forgiven us…and he said it wasn’t easy, but eventually, Jesus gave Him what he needed to forgive those who had killed his father and injured his mother.
The Lord led him to even eventually start a ministry for Rwandan children and many of them were from the families who committed the genocide.
One of the children who showed up to his ministry was part of the same group that had killed his own father…but he didn’t turn Him away.
Jesus gave Jean Claude what he needed to forgive and to even love and serve those who had committed these horrible crimes against him and so many people he loved.
And the Lord will give you what you need too. He is a faithful God, and you are in a spiritual union with Him.
You have access to His love, His power, His strength, and His forgiveness. And if you turn to Him, he will give you what you need to forgive.
And for some of you that’s been something that just happened this morning on the way to church…
Or it happened to you last week or a month ago…
But for some of you, it may be something that happened a long, long time ago.
One time after preaching a message about forgiveness…
I had an older gentleman in his 80’s who approached me with tears in his eyes, and he said, “Jason, I haven’t spoken to my son in over 20 years.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry…what happened?”
And I’ll never forget what he said. He said, “I don’t know.” It had been so long ago that he didn’t even remember…OR he didn’t ever quite understand what had happened in the first place.
And that’s the thing. A lot of times these things can happen that are so small or incidental that get turned into the biggest things ever. And the longer they go, the bigger of a deal you make it in your mind and it just festers and the next thing you know, it’s been 20 years or more.
And maybe some of you have someone or something that happened similar to that in your own life and the Lord is saying it’s time to let it go. It’s time to approach them and try to talk through this.
And that brings me to the last few things to say about this topic of forgiving one another as the Lord forgave us.
The goal of forgiving someone is reconciliation.
The goal is to forgive and restore the relationship. To live in unity as the church with each other.
Now, sometimes that is not possible.
Sometimes, the person who wronged you may have passed away.
Sometimes, it may not be safe to be around the person who wronged you.
But also, if they are still alive and even if it’s safe to pursue reconciliation, they may not be open to restoring the relationship themselves.
And you of course, can’t do much about that.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t forgive them for their offense and quit holding it against them.
In those cases, pray for them sincerely. Give them time. Let them know that your heart is to reconcile and if and when they want to talk that you’ll be there.
And that can be scary…
The older gentleman in my church who hadn’t talked to his son in over 20 years told me that he was scared to approach his son. And I said, “That is totally understandable, and it’s okay to feel that way.” I just told Him to remember that Jesus would give Him what He needed.
I told him to be sure not to go in with an agenda, but rather to just be humble. Just say, “Son, I’m not here to fight. I just want to say I’m sorry. I want to listen. I want to seek understanding for what happened, and I want to try and see what I can do to help us work through this.”
And I was so proud of him because he did do that. And it took some time, and it wasn’t like they were instantaneously best friends, but they began to take steps in that direction…and he got to meet his grandkids and begin to be in their lives before he died.
So, again, just know that you can’t control what everyone else will do. But you can trust Jesus to forgive others through you so that first of all, you don’t have to carry around that big weight that gets heavier and heavier and has so many negative effects on you.
And second of all, you can trust Him to give you what you need to make yourself available to restore and reconcile those relationships when it’s appropriate to do so.
So, as we turn our attention to the Lord’s Supper, “Is there someone that you need to forgive today?”
As we are reminded by this bread and this juice that Jesus gave His body and shed His blood for our own forgiveness, is there someone that He has placed on your heart that you need to forgive today?
If so, while we pass out the elements and you listen to this song, I want to encourage you to spend some time praying about that with Jesus. Thank Him for your forgiveness, and ask Him to give you what you need to forgive that person.
And if there isn’t anyone in particular, then just spend some time praying and asking Him to give you what you need to walk in forgiveness and to quickly forgive and reconcile with those who will hurt you in the future.