Forgive One Another

You can’t live on this fallen earth of ours for very long without taking some hits and accumulating some scars.

There’s somebody that you really trust and the day comes that they let you down. And it really hurts. And suddenly your mind is filled with questions: What is that person going to do next? What am I going to do about it?

There are a lot of people who are under a lot of stress right now and carrying deep pains in their hearts. And sometimes they act out of that stress or their personal pain and say or do some really hurtful things.

Every parent messes up sometimes. Every neighbor messes up sometimes. Every co-worker messes up sometimes. Every pastor messes up sometimes. And if you aren’t careful you can find yourself strangled by hurts from the past, crippled by holding on to all the hurts.

Hanging on to those hurts makes your heart bitter. Somebody said that holding bitterness in your heart is like drinking poison yourself, hoping it will hurt the person who hurt you. But it doesn’t work.

Often times the biggest hurts are the hurts that come where you have the highest expectations, in your family or at church. When kids are young they think their parents are perfect. But the day comes when they realize that isn’t true. And that can be painful. Husbands and wives go into marriage with very high hopes. My next younger brother is a psychologist. He says that the courtship period of preparing for marriage is a time of maximum self-delusion. Some folks go into marriage figuring it is going to fix all their problems. And that might last for a honeymoon period of a week or a month or even several months. But the day always comes when you realize your spouse isn’t going to meet all your needs. And that can hurt. Some cutting words that you would brush off from someone at work, cut much deeper when they come from your new life partner, a parent or a sibling or a child. And so forgiveness is a very important part of making families run smoothly. If you and everyone else in your family is perfect, this sermon won’t be for you. But for all the rest of you, forgiveness can be a life saver.

The Bible talks about forgiveness in many places, but today we’ll start with Ephesians 4:32-5:2.

“and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

Now people often treat forgiveness as not being very important. It’s a nice thing to do, but you don’t really have to do it. Or some people even make a point of hanging on to revenge or bitterness, the direct opposite of forgiveness; as if refusing to forgive is something they just have to do, even a point of honor. But whether you forgive or not makes a really big difference.

You should all have a bulletin insert laid out to help you list the things that happen if you do forgive and the things that will happen if you refuse to forgive. I encourage you to fill that out as we move through our topic today.

And I have a quick video with some very wise points about how important it is to forgive.

[Play Video: Kids Talk About Forgiveness]

So the kids got us off to a good start. What did they tell us happens when we don’t forgive?

The first little boy said that if we don’t forgive, God won’t forgive us. One day Jesus told a parable about a slave who owed a crushing debt to his master. You can read about it in Matthew 18. The debt was 10,000 talents, which would be millions of dollars. I don’t know how a slave could get that far into debt, but there he was. I imagine that Jesus picked a huge number to reflect the debt that every one of us owes to God for all he has done for us.

The slave knew he was in big trouble. It was common practice that his whole family would be sold off as slaves to other masters to get some of the money back. The man begged for mercy, and, wonder of wonders, his master forgave him a debt of millions of dollars. Don’t count on your credit card company doing that for you.

But that slave went out and ran into another slave who owed him a much, much smaller debt, just a few dollars. And that second slave begged for mercy, but the first slave, who had just been given such incredible mercy, refused to pass it on to the slave who owed him so much less.