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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses how ministry leaders can practice deep forgiveness when the people who hurt them never apologize, never admit they were wrong, or are no longer even in their lives. Drawing from his own leadership journey, he unpacks four practical steps to help leaders lay down the right to revenge, break the control offenders hold over their hearts, and move forward without carrying bitterness into future relationships.
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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. From time to time, I remind you, podcast listeners, that if you have an idea or a concern or a theme or a topic that you'd like for me to address on the podcast, reach out to me. The best way to do that is by email. You can email me at jefforge@gs.edu.
Jeff Iorg:Yes. Still using my Gateway Seminary email. They're sponsoring the podcast and so they help me by sharing that information with me when you reach out with an idea. Now, sometimes I get ideas from you listeners, but other times, I get ideas in the midst of teaching or leading or working on training people in leadership.
Jeff Iorg:That's what happened to me recently. I was asked by a group to speak,
Jeff Iorg:in video call format to a group of leaders, and I do this, from time to time and enjoy it immensely, quite frankly. But I was speaking with this group, and one of the things they'd ask is if they could submit some questions beforehand and that I would try to answer those as a part of our dialogue time together. I was glad they did that because they submitted some very insightful questions, one of which I'd like to answer today on the podcast. The question that was asked was this. How do you forgive people in ministry leadership when it's hard?
Jeff Iorg:How do you forgive people who have wronged you? I mean, really wronged you. And they seem to not either want to be forgiven or they don't ask to be forgiven or they've not acknowledged what they've done to you. How do
Jeff Iorg:you forgive people and move on when it's hard?
Jeff Iorg:Well, I thought that was a particularly insightful question, partly because I've seen ministry leaders struggle with this issue, but also because I've had to deal with it myself. So today, let's talk about forgiving when it's hard,
Jeff Iorg:and particularly focusing on forgiving others as ministry leaders when we've been wronged in some way. Now one of the myths about forgiveness is that it can only be granted when someone asks for it. The reality is forgiveness is something that you grant to another person whether they ask for it or not. Now, here are some examples of what I mean, some examples of situations when forgiveness cannot depend on the offender asking for it. In fact, in some of these cases, the offender may not ever even acknowledge that there has been a problem.
Jeff Iorg:Now the first and most obvious of these situations is when the offender is dead.
Jeff Iorg:That came to me in a pastoral ministries class many years ago when I realized that there were people in my life who defended me that had passed on. And the only way I was ever going to be able to forgive them and move on from those relationship harms that I had experienced was to forgive a dead person.
Jeff Iorg:Yes. That is possible. So one example of when offender does not or cannot acknowledge what they've done is when the offender is dead. Another one is when the offender is incompetent. Now, I don't mean just acting out in a way that you think is frustrating or in that way incompetent.
Jeff Iorg:I mean, when they really are incompetent. They have dementia or Alzheimer's or in some way have limited intellectual capacity, and they simply no longer have the ability to even acknowledge what they may have done in the past. I have a mentally ill family member who falls into this category. This particular person has done some things over the years that were really hurtful. But we were able to forgive and move on relatively quickly because we recognize that this person is just really not competent.
Jeff Iorg:They don't always even know what they're saying and the impact of the words they're using or the actions that they're taking.
Jeff Iorg:Another example is when the offender has moved on in life. In other words, the person,
Jeff Iorg:has moved on to another city, moved on to another location, another occupation, moved on to another relationship, but in whatever way you would define as moving on, they have done that. They have moved on and are really no longer a part of your life and no longer in any practical way accessible to you. But there's one other category of people that leaders struggle to forgive, and that's when the offender considers themselves
Jeff Iorg:the righteous person in the situation. When the offender feels like that what they did to you was actually the right thing to do. What they said, what they meant, what they did, it was the right thing.
Jeff Iorg:In fact, sometimes these offenders will say, I prayed about this. God led me or directed me. Now sometimes when we look at these behaviors or listen to these words, it's quite frankly hard to understand how God could be behind them. But the offender, the person who does those things to you, is absolutely convinced that they are righteous in doing what needs to be done. Now quite frankly, this is where I live some days.
Jeff Iorg:Most of my current critics are other ministry leaders, many times other pastors, people who have a relationship with God, who are involved in prayer and bible study, and who still find themselves offering significant criticism of what I'm doing. They believe they're righteous and that they are actually doing God's work in confronting me on some issue or some perspective or some action that I've taken. Well, these are the kinds of situations that I mean when I say that forgiveness is hard when the offender either does not or cannot acknowledge what they've done. Either the offender is dead or incompetent or they've moved on in life or they consider themselves righteous in the situation and so therefore have no reason to ask for or even think about being forgiven. So when you're faced with these kinds of situations in leadership, how do you forgive these kind of offenders?
Jeff Iorg:How do you forgive when forgiveness is hard? Well, let me give
Jeff Iorg:you four suggestions and then we'll branch it out a
Jeff Iorg:little more from there. Number one, make a spiritual transaction with God to extend forgiveness to one of these persons.
Jeff Iorg:A spiritual transaction means you make a moment, perhaps where you get down on your knees, or whether you sit down in a quiet place, or whether you go to a retreat center or to a place in nature where you really enjoyed meeting with God. And you specifically get before the Lord and say, father, this person wronged me in this way. And in this moment, I am extending full and complete forgiveness to them. This is the moment when I'm doing this spiritual transaction with you, God, to extend the forgiveness that is needed into this situation. And I'm doing it in this moment of prayer and devotion and commitment, consecration, you pick the word.
Jeff Iorg:But it's a serious moment where you're doing real business with God. You meet with him and you have a spiritual transaction where you acknowledge what's happened to you, the offense and all that it has meant, and then you make the decision to extend forgiveness to this person.
Jeff Iorg:You know, I had to come to grips with doing this with my biological father. He,
Jeff Iorg:left our family when I was just a little boy. I don't have any memory of him. But when I reached my twenties, I started getting in touch with the wound that he had left in my life by abandoning us. And in doing that, many emotions had to be processed and many factors had to be considered, but ultimately, the solution to dealing with all of that was granting forgiveness and doing that in the kind of prayerful way that I'm describing where you meet with God, you acknowledge the gravity of the situation, and you have a transactional moment where you pray and extend forgiveness and ask God to solidify that in your life and make it permanent from that moment forward. So number one, have a spiritual transaction with God, a serious moment of doing real business to bring about the declaration of forgiveness for someone who's offended you.
Jeff Iorg:Second, write down or in some way record a record of this meeting with God in which this forgiveness has been granted. Now there are several ways you can do this. You might write a letter to the person. I don't suggest that you ever send it, but you can write a letter expressing this forgiveness. And especially if the person is dead or incompetent or gone on with their life, they're not gonna receive it from you anyway.
Jeff Iorg:There's no way you could even get it to them. But by writing it, you have a written record of this forgiveness that you've extended to another person. File that letter where you can keep it and bring it out from time to time. When those doubts or accusations or condemnations rise up in your mind about this person or about what has occurred in the past, you can bring out that letter and remind yourself that you've already dealt with this matter and it's final. Another place to make a note like this is in a journal.
Jeff Iorg:If you're a journaling person, good thing to do is to carve out a page or a section and write there the places where you've granted forgiveness and what that means and why that matters so much to you. Another example of this, though, can be something as simple as making a date notation with the person's name in the flyleaf of your bible. Just writing their name and the date that you granted forgiveness to them. Now, one of the reasons why writing something down in a letter or a journal or even in the fly life of your Bible becomes very important is because the devil the devil wants to bring this back up in your life. And so you grant this forgiveness, you have this particular moment where you bring it to a to a conclusion, you write the letter or the journal entry or the flyleaf bible note, and then a few days, a few weeks, a few months, even a few years, the devil whispers in your ear, man, what that person did to you was so wrong, and tries to resurrect inside of you all those feelings of anger and bitterness and resentment and frustration.
Jeff Iorg:And in those moments, can
Jeff Iorg:say, oh, wait a minute. I have a written record
Jeff Iorg:that this
Jeff Iorg:incident has already been resolved. I've got
Jeff Iorg:a letter. I've got a journal. I've got a flyleaf note in my Bible that reminds me that reminds me this is over. So have a spiritual transaction with God. Write a record of it in some way that you can access to remind you of what's happened.
Jeff Iorg:Third, another key thing for me has been to memorize some key verses about forgiveness that apply to your particular
Jeff Iorg:situation. Now there are, of
Jeff Iorg:course, general verses in the Bible about forgiveness, but there are also some specific verses in the Bible about forgiveness in different situations or forgiveness of different kinds of people or individuals. Perhaps bringing out some of those scriptures might be more helpful in a particular situation if you're dealing with it. And so memorize some key passages on forgiveness. So that once again, when those thoughts come to mind about how something needs to be resurrected and dealt with all over again, you can say, no. Wait.
Jeff Iorg:I had a transactional moment with God. This has been resolved. I kept a written record of it in a letter or a journal or a flyleaf entry in my Bible. And beyond that, the word of God says about this particular situation, and you can quote those scriptures reminding you of the forgiveness that's been granted in those moments. Now, this fourth step this fourth step may surprise some of you.
Jeff Iorg:I I know that, those of you who know me well know that I'm a pretty matter of fact guy, like the facts, like things driven and written and precise and all
Jeff Iorg:of that. So here's number four.
Jeff Iorg:The fourth suggestion I have for helping you to forgive these kinds of offenders is to perhaps adopt a song that reminds you of the forgiveness you've granted in this situation.
Jeff Iorg:Now, let me tell you how I came to this, and then we'll talk about what it means to do it. When I
Jeff Iorg:was at Gateway Seminary and we started the process of trying to redevelop our campus in Northern California, as most of you know, we ran into withering opposition. And some of that opposition was personal. I was verbally threatened on several occasions. One of those was so alarming to seminary leadership that for the first time in the school's history, they put a security system on the president's home. Our security advisers also, asked my wife to stop walking in the neighborhoods around our home and around the seminary by herself.
Jeff Iorg:Some other kinds of things that we did, I won't talk about here, but we we took some real steps to protect us during that really stressful time. And quite frankly, some of the, attacks not only were personal, but they were very painful. I was accused of things I had never done. I was accused of motives that were totally wrong. I was accused of all kinds of, nefarious activity.
Jeff Iorg:It was it was really hard to live through it. Ultimately, we were picketed, protesters marching in front of the campus and different things like that. It was a
Jeff Iorg:hard time. And yet I knew that if
Jeff Iorg:I was gonna survive that, that I had to find a way to extend forgiveness to these people who were attacking me. I knew that they were never going to come to me and ask for forgiveness. I knew that they believed they were righteous. They were doing the right thing to defend their community and to defend themselves and even to defend their own livelihoods or their own financial position. But I also knew how painful what they were doing was to me and to my family, and so forgiveness became a very essential response.
Jeff Iorg:In doing that, one particular chapel, we sang a song, a song that was at the time relatively new and was certainly new to me. The song is called, Lord, I need you. It starts this way, Lord,
Jeff Iorg:I come. I confess. Bowing here, I find my rest, and without you, I fall apart. You're the one that guides my heart.
Jeff Iorg:And then, Lord, I need you. Oh, I need you. Every hour, I need you. And then this great line, my one defense, my righteousness, oh God, how I need you. And then the song continues, where sin runs deep, your grace is more, where grace is bound
Jeff Iorg:is where you are and where you are Lord, I am free. Now I won't read the rest of the song, but that song one day in chapel brought me to tears.
Jeff Iorg:I was able to sing, Lord,
Jeff Iorg:you are my one defense. You are my righteousness.
Jeff Iorg:No matter what anyone is saying or writing about me,
Jeff Iorg:I know. I know I'm doing what's right. And I know that you can defend me and your righteousness will prevail in this situation. And where sin runs deep, your grace is more.
Jeff Iorg:And it's not only more grace for the people who are offending me, but it's more grace for me in this situation as well. This song became very important to me that day in chapel.
Jeff Iorg:I never made a big thing out of it. I think I did tell the chapel leader, you know, I
Jeff Iorg:like that song. Let's sing it again sometime. And it went into the rotation, and not not only because I liked it, but because at the time, it was a very popular new song in Christian circles.
Jeff Iorg:We sang it, and every time we did, Those words, my one defense,
Jeff Iorg:my righteousness, and where sin runs deep, your grace is more. Those words gave me hope and confidence and solace, if you will, and a sense that God was with me in this process of forgiving and living with the pain of what people were saying or doing to me. So when I think about these four steps, these four steps have helped me to forgive people when it's hard, and especially forgive people who have wronged me deeply, who are never going to ask for forgiveness or take any step to try to rectify the situation or make anything about it right. Make a spiritual transaction with God. In some way, make a written record of that transaction.
Jeff Iorg:Memorize,
Jeff Iorg:some key verses that that apply to your situation. And then if possible, find a song
Jeff Iorg:that you can sing which summarizes all of this and gives you a sense of emotional release and devotion and worship before God about this situation. Now,
Jeff Iorg:you will likely never forget what
Jeff Iorg:happened to you, but you can remember it, as I like to say, without the stinger. You can remember it without the prod. You can remember it without the poke. You can remember it without the stinger. You can remember it as forgiven.
Jeff Iorg:And when one of these situation rises back up inside of me, I go back to these four steps. Lord, you and I had a meeting about this. We transacted business and forgiveness was extended.
Jeff Iorg:And Lord, I've got a written record of that moment. And Lord, here's some
Jeff Iorg:verses that have helped me in this situation. And then finally, Lord,
Jeff Iorg:here's some worship that I offer to you that helps me to solidify my response on this matter.
Jeff Iorg:So this is how you respond when forgiveness is hard and particularly in situations where the offender is never going to come to you and make the situation right. Now, why is doing this so essential? Well, here are some things to remember. It's essential to forgive because when you do, you break the control the offender has over you. You know, when someone has harmed you or hurt you or in some way damaged you, you naturally have a a mental and emotional response to that.
Jeff Iorg:But what you'll find is that that response can turn into control, where the other person dominates your thinking, dominates your planning, dominates your emotional well-being. The other person has control of you because of what they've done to you. And the only way to break that control, the only way to break that control is to extend forgiveness to them. Man, listen. I've spent time driving down the freeway and thinking about what someone had done to me and mulling over what I'd like to do in response and thinking about the email I'd love to send or how I'd like to get even with them.
Jeff Iorg:And I look up, I've missed three exits, and I've gotta go back. I've been doing this before, and I've been sitting at my computer trying to work. And I look down and an hour has gone by as my brain has just gone somewhere else for that hour instead of getting productive work done. I I think about the times that I've been laying awake at night, 02:00 in the morning, thinking about someone and what they've done
Jeff Iorg:to me. They've robbed me of my sleep because I've let them control me. These are ways
Jeff Iorg:that harboring unforgiveness allows another person to control you. Forgiveness releases the control an offender has over you. Second, when you give forgiveness, you eliminate the baggage from one of these relationships or one of these situations, and you move forward. So for example, if you've been in a relationship with someone, a romantic relationship if you will, and they wronged you deeply, until you give forgiveness to them, you're never gonna be able to move on freely into a new relationship because you'll carry the baggage of the brokenness of the bad relationship into the new relationship, and you'll poison the new relationship, not because of what that person has ever done to you, but because of what happened to you in the past. Now most of us have worked with people who've experienced this in romantic relationships, but now let's talk about
Jeff Iorg:it in leadership relationships. If you've had
Jeff Iorg:a bad experience with some deacons, for example, in a church and you go to another church, you gotta resolve that by forgiving those men and what they may have done to you because if you don't, you're gonna poison your future relationships with the deacons you're gonna work with in the next church. Same thing with staff. You've had a bad experience with a staff member in a previous location. Don't let that poison. What you do is you go into staffing with a new opportunity with new people.
Jeff Iorg:Listen. When you've had something happen in a relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship or a ministry relationship, it doesn't matter, you cannot afford to carry forward or to let new relationships be tainted by what's happened to you in similar relationships in the past. Don't bring that baggage to bear. Another reason to forgive is when you do, you surrender something very important, and that is you surrender your right to revenge in the situation. You surrender your right to get even or to make things right.
Jeff Iorg:When you forgive someone, you release yourself of a tremendous amount of burden because no longer are you responsible to make things right. Now
Jeff Iorg:you turn it over to God and let him handle it.
Jeff Iorg:And then finally, when you forgive someone, you you trust God with the future consequences
Jeff Iorg:and with what needs to be done to rectify the situation. You know, I've
Jeff Iorg:been living this Christian life long enough now that I've been through some of these situations, and I've been able to look back over ten or twenty or thirty years of what happens.
Jeff Iorg:I'm thinking about one particular situation. Happened in the mid nineteen eighties. A woman really wronged my wife. Man, it was ugly. It was made even more, difficult for us because my wife is the sweetest, kindest, and most gentle person,
Jeff Iorg:and for someone to attack her was so out of character and so unfair, but yet it happened. And it was not resolved well. We we tried, but we were unsuccessful, and then we we finally moved on in our lives and went on to Oregon to plant the church. And after we'd been there for a couple years, one day we get a letter in the mail from this woman who had been attacking my wife some years before, and we thought there's no possible way that we need to read this letter, but we did. We were glad we did because it was a letter saying, I've come to understand that some of what I did to you was wrong, and I want to, I want you to forgive me, and and I'd like to put this behind us.
Jeff Iorg:And and and it was it was a well crafted letter, better than I'm explaining here on the podcast. It was a a well crafted letter of apology and remorse and of asking for things to be made right. And my wife wrote her back and and said, of course, and let's make this right
Jeff Iorg:and let's move on. But that wasn't the end of it. Several years later, my wife and I were in another country.
Jeff Iorg:I was teaching at a seminary. And when we arrived there, the leaders of the seminary said, you know, it's interesting. You had committed to come here months and months ago, but we have another team from America here at the same time,
Jeff Iorg:and they're here as a
Jeff Iorg:volunteer team working to improve our facilities. I said, well, that's great.
Jeff Iorg:And to our shock, one of
Jeff Iorg:the people on that volunteer team was the woman who'd attacked my wife almost twenty years before. But that letter of apology, had been written, the letter of forgiveness had been sent,
Jeff Iorg:and when we saw this person, there
Jeff Iorg:was no acrimony, no difficulty, no anything negative about what had happened in the past. God had made things right. He had ultimately brought conviction to this person, helped them to see what they had done was wrong. He had shaped the circumstances into her life that really forced her to face up to what she had done. Those were painful in some ways for her.
Jeff Iorg:But we look back now, we see how God was at work all along. So why is forgiveness like this essential? Because you break the control the offender has over you. You eliminate the baggage and keep it from poisoning future relationships. You surrender your right to revenge in the situation.
Jeff Iorg:You don't have to get even any longer. Now you trust God to take care of it all, and you trust God for the future consequences and the fact that sometimes he will do something so beautiful by making things right that it becomes worth it to see his grace in action. Well, let me close the podcast with just a few additional ideas that have helped me in this issue of forgiving people when it's hard. First, one of the things that's helped me is to realize that sometimes in these circumstances, I have been the offender. Now, this came to me in lots of different ways, but a few months ago, my wife said something that was really helpful to
Jeff Iorg:me in this area. She said, Jeff, do you know how some people
Jeff Iorg:are just annoying? And I said, well, yeah, I do. I live with that every day. She said, no, seriously. She said, do you know that some people are just annoying?
Jeff Iorg:And a person that you may find annoying, I don't, and a person I may
Jeff Iorg:find annoying, you don't. But some people are just annoying. And I said, yes, I I fully agree with that.
Jeff Iorg:And then she said, recently God has been convicting me that for some people out there, I'm the annoying one. And I said, oh, Anne, you're you're so kind. She said, no. No. I'm the annoying one for someone out there.
Jeff Iorg:I don't know who it may be, but I know that my personality, my way of looking at life, the way I am, somebody probably is annoyed by that. And she said, I'm not
Jeff Iorg:really spending a lot of time worrying about that aspect of it, but it's just humbled me and made me more patient with people that I find annoying. And God used that
Jeff Iorg:to speak to me that when people wrong me and I need to forgive them, that sometimes maybe without even me knowing it, I've been the offender who's wronged others. And just like I'd want them to extend forgiveness back to me,
Jeff Iorg:so I must do it to others.
Jeff Iorg:And then the last thing I'll say is this, sometimes this whole issue of forgiving others changes your perspective and especially your perspective on time and how God works over time. You know, I had one situation like this that really helped shape me in this area. Many years ago when I first became the executive director in the Northwest Baptist Convention, a pastor really opposed me. And I reached out to him in the lovingest way that I could and tried to extend a relationship to him, and he was receptive. And we developed a bit of a working relationship, and that relationship continued over about the ten years that I was the state executive.
Jeff Iorg:Then I went off to the seminary, and I was there for several years. Then I came back to speak at an event, and I had been fifteen years or more since the initial offense, and I thought we'd put it all behind us because we had developed an amicable working relationship over the years. But this older man, he was quite old by this time. He's on a walker. He came to hear me speak that night, and afterwards, he stayed around to talk to me.
Jeff Iorg:And I worked my way over to him, and I said, I can see you've stayed. You look like you wanna visit. He said, I do. I need to talk to you about something. I said, alright.
Jeff Iorg:And he said, remember the incident? And he told about the incident, and he said, and when I attacked you publicly and what I said about you. And I said, well, certainly I remember that, but also I remember that we forgave each other and moved on from that. And he said, no, we didn't. He said, we worked through it, but I never admitted to you what I did was wrong.
Jeff Iorg:And I should have never said to you what I said, never done to you what I did. And I came here tonight to tell you that I was wrong and to ask you to forgive me and let's move on. And I said, brother, I thought we had already worked this out, but I can see we have it. So I want you to know tonight I do forgive you. And he smiled and said, man, thank you, that means so much.
Jeff Iorg:And he walked away with a little different step in his gait, he was relieved at what had happened. I walked away from that experience thinking, you know, Lord, sometimes it just takes more time for people to come to see what needs to be done. And in this case, took about fifteen years. But finally, a brother said, I need to make this right. And it's changed my perspective on these hard situations to recognize sometimes God is at work, but he's got a timetable that's different than mine.
Jeff Iorg:Well, if you're out there today and you're struggling with a hard situation, my heart goes out to you. Someone has hurt you, offended you, wronged you, and it's deep. The solution is forgiveness. Put into practice some of the things I've said on the podcast today to help you forgive when it's hard, to especially do this as a part of your leadership discipline and recognizing that forgiveness is essential as you lead on.