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.
When the master found out, he was furious with that first slave. He called him in. He had him thrown in jail until he paid every penny, which meant forever.
And Jesus makes the meaning of this parable crystal clear in verse 35, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."
To a large extent we get to choose how strictly God will judge us. We can choose to live a lifestyle of grace and forgiveness towards others and if we do, God will be very merciful to us. If we refuse to forgive others, then that will be the standard he will give us. That’s scary. But it’s so fair.
What did the second child, the little girl, tell us about forgiveness? Forgiveness gives people a second chance. Is there anyone here who has needed a second chance from God? It’s all of us. When we forgive we break the cycle of retribution. When we forgive we start healing the relationships we are in. Oh, how our world needs that. How every family needs to let its members have a second chance, and a third chance and a fourth chance to start again. We all need mercy.
And the third child, another boy? He said that each time we refuse to forgive we lose a friend. And if we don’t forgive other people, pretty soon we won’t have any friends left.
In one of the churches I served in the past there was a woman who had some very painful things in her past. Her relationship with her mother was terrible. And she carried a core of anger deep inside of her. And that core kept exploding in anger at people, pushing them away. She could take the smallest little incident and blow it up into full take-no-prisoners combat instantly. It was the anger she carried inside. We talked about it once and I told her she needed to let that anger go or it would poison her. But she insisted she couldn’t survive without it. She had a group of friends from her adult class and she kept pulling them into one conflict after another. There were a lot of Sundays when it was no fun being in church because of all the conflicts. She eventually left to another church. The last I heard she had alienated her best friend. And here was a woman who had many gifts and a lot of energy to serve, but the bitterness in her heart just poisoned everything she touched. She needed to let it go.
When you choose bitterness instead of forgiveness, you poison yourself. A forgiving heart can be open, available to others, generous, free. A heart that is closed, refusing to let go of a slight, remains closed and hard, closed and hard towards God and closed and hard towards other people as well. And that gets lonely. Bitterness poisons you.
When you choose bitterness instead of forgiveness you lock yourself into a self image as weak and vulnerable, you diminish yourself. When you choose to forgive and move on, you are taking control of your life and moving ahead with strength and faith.
Now, so far I’ve been talking about forgiveness as something you can just do any time you want, something easy to do. And probably we have all forgiven lots of things. Your kids can’t sleep and wake you up, they get overtired and misbehave in the store, your spouse is late for supper and you forgive them without even thinking about it, because you love them. You’ll be miserable if you let things like that bend you out of shape.
But sometimes forgiveness is hard, really hard. And let me give you some guidelines for how to handle those situations.
And I invite you to turn your bulletin insert over now and make notes on the back side about how to forgive.
I think it’s really important to recognize the difference between being hurt inside and being bitter. If someone hurt you inside, someone you loved and trusted, that’s not going to heal overnight, no matter how hard you try. It’s gonna hurt. And the day may come when you are completely reconciled with that other person, with no hurts between you. But often that takes a long time. And so there will often be two steps to forgiveness.
The first step is to lay down any right to retaliate or to punish the other person. And Jesus calls us to do that right away. You may still feel angry with them. You may still be really preoccupied with the hurt they caused you, but you can’t retaliate. Christians don’t do that.
And there are days when that is all the forgiveness you can give, just to discipline yourself not to do anything to retaliate. You may still be bleeding inside. Your imagination might run to ideas for getting them back. But you choose not to do it. That’s the first step of forgiveness and sometimes that’s all you can do.
And if you can lay down any right to hurt them back, your heart may heal in time.
One of our dear friends was the son of a Baptist pastor who believed in living out his faith and so from time to time ended up taking needy or homeless into their home. One of those houseguests abused our friend when he was a young boy, sexually. And his father gave him some very wise advice for how to deal with that pain.
He said that if you have a cut on your hand you need to wash it out right away and cover it to give it time to heal. That’s what forgiveness is. But if the cut is too deep to heal overnight, it will still hurt in the morning and it will still be in danger of getting infected. So you will need to take the bandage off tomorrow and clean it again. That means forgiving again. And, depending on the hurt, you may need to do that simple wound care many times. And there may always be a scar. But your healing will come.
But if you keep pulling off the bandage, picking off the scab and rubbing dirt in the wound, it will never heal. Wash out your wounds with forgiveness as many times as it takes and trust that God will bring the healing some day.
Step two of forgiveness comes when there is a real reconciliation between you and the person who hurt you. If a husband beats his wife, she may need to call the police in for her protection. But she can pray for the day when that husband will deal with the anger in his heart, will face up to the root causes of his violence and they can talk it out and she will see that it is safe to come together again.
And when someone has hurt you, even a much smaller hurt than wife beating, there is a temptation to pull away, to clam up. And when you do that you start to lose sight of what that person is, with all their hurts and fears and longings to do what is right. And you start building up a case in your head of how bad that person is, expecting the worst of them at each possible encounter. Full reconciliation requires seeing the other person as a real person, a sinner, not that much different from you, someone loved by God, someone wrestling with their own life stresses and obstacles, someone who does try to do what’s right at least sometimes.
Full forgiveness and reconciliation may require sitting down together to talk it out, doing something together to rebuild trust, having a real heart to heart conversation about what went wrong between you.
And, as always, our God gives us the model for how we are to forgive. Our text says that we are to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. Jesus never takes our sin lightly. But he always works to break us free from it. He is that dear father of the prodigal son, who was deeply hurt when his son demanded that he sell off half of the farm and give him his inheritance early, and was still watching the road every day, longing for his son to come home, longing for the day when he and his son would be truly reconciled. AMEN
