Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Pastor Talk Podcast.
Glad that you’re here.
Glad that you’re with us as we continue through this discussion about spiritual practices,
the things that are a part of a life of discipleship and the ways in which they offer us an opportunity
to grow in our faith and our service to Christ.
Last week, we started this conversation on confession and forgiveness.
If you’ve not seen the podcast on confession,
I really think that you’d be well served
to put this one on pause and to go back and check that one out as it really is kind of
chapter one.
And as we move into chapter two today,
we consider explicitly, Michael, what I think is one of the most difficult aspects of a life of faith,
and that is forgiveness.
It’s a wonderful promise.
It is a wonderful doctrine.
It is the central,
in many ways, foundational thing that we believe as Christians.
But when it comes to the practical of claiming it and offering it,
boy, I think it’s a place
that a lot of people of faith struggle.
I think so, too, Clint.
I think that the reason why it’s important for you to go back to the conversation about
confession is because it is the doorway to this part of the journey.
And I want to make it clear that it is really the next leg of the journey.
It’s not a moment unto itself.
And sometimes Christians have historically overemphasized the moment of conversion.
I want to be clear here.
I’m not suggesting that there are times in which that that space between God and us seems
to break away and everything seems to change.
This idea of conversion,
of doing a 180,
of everything before that moment being one way
and it being transformed into a new reality in the other way.
And God,
by the miraculous power of his spirit,
is able to transform in our hearts and spirits
in moment’s time.
And it’s beautiful when that happens.
But what is challenging is the reminder that we are always living into new dimensions of
forgiveness.
No one has completely mined the depths of what forgiveness means for both ourselves
and also for others.
And so this is a central tenet of the historic Christian faith.
It’s very appropriate that we talk about this in a series where we’re talking about practicing faith.
But I think, Clint, where we get tripped up to your point is in that first world of our
series.
It’s in the practicing part.
How do you practice forgiveness?
What does it look like to allow forgiveness to be a reality that has a practical difference
in our own life?
And friends, the reality is if you felt like you got beat up a little bit in the conversation
about confession, about the honest truth telling about where we’ve missed the mark,
there’s also some lumps to be taken in the world of forgiveness because it is another
level of recognition that we need someone to do something for us that we couldn’t do
for ourselves.
If you live your life with the idea that your choice and your agency is the only thing that
matters and has moved you forward,
first of all,
asking for forgiveness or confessing
where you have aired is going to be hard.
But it is going to be just as hard, if not more,
to recognize the reality and necessity of forgiveness.
I think that’s really well said, Michael.
Confession sets the groundwork for us to be able to move into forgiveness.
And I do think that’s somewhat linear if we skip the step of confession.
In other words, if we lack the humility that facing our sin brings us and we jump right
to the idea that we are forgiven,
then it is easy to think that our sin doesn’t matter.
Paul says, “Should we go on sinning after we experience grace?”
And the clear answer is no.
And if we move ahead easily through confession,
and if we jump straight into the idea that
my sins are forgiven,
I’m cleansed, I’m washed without the pain of admitting that I desperately need forgiven,
then I think we are not ready.
And so, yeah, not to beat this point into the ground,
but if you’ve not done the other podcast,
we think that it would be helpful for you to prepare for this one by watching that one.
Having said that, we move today into this topic of forgiveness.
And we want to make it clear that we are not forgiven because we confess.
In the Protestant church,
that’s not the idea.
When I was a kid,
I had this idea that if I had not named a sin.
So in my prayers at night,
I would say, “Forgive me for this,
and forgive me for that.”
And then I had this line,
I thought it was kind of a loophole I could sneak through,
and I’d just say,
“And if I’ve forgotten anything,
forgive me for that too.”
And somewhere in my young mind,
I got the idea that if I didn’t specifically confess a sin,
I couldn’t be forgiven for it.
And that’s not what we are saying.
We are not forgiven because we confess.
We are forgiven because Jesus Christ offered us grace in His life, death, and resurrection.
And we claim that grace,
and our forgiveness comes from God through Jesus Christ.
It is not something we do.
We are not agents of it at most,
at the very most.
We accept it, and we allow it to be at work in our lives.
So we want to be clear on that.
When we talk confession and forgiveness,
our forgiveness comes from God to us.
We do not instigate it.
We do not bring it about.
Confession is the thing that awakens us to it,
not the thing that produces it in us.
And that’s an important distinction, I think,
Michael. Completely.
And I think it’s natural.
I think most of us can relate to the experience of children’s understanding of forgiveness,
Clint.
I think we’ve all been there in our own life.
I would call it a kind of moralistic understanding of forgiveness,
that you commit an act,
and it’s the act that needs forgiveness.
And to a child,
that’s exactly what we try to teach.
You stole the Legos.
That’s the act that you need to ask forgiveness for.
Or you went and you tore all of your sister’s craft items up and threw them into the garbage.
Not that that’s happened in our house,
but that that’s the kind of that that act is the thing that you must ask for forgiveness for.
And that is what we do with our children.
We’re trying to model for them what forgiveness looks like.
This is the temptation, though,
is for us to go into our more mature spiritual lives,
believing that’s what forgiveness is from our heavenly Father.
That it’s about us being able to keep an accurate list of where we’ve aired
and then sort of delivering that list to God and saying,
“I’m sorry for these things.”
If you joined us last week,
you would remember that when we talked about confession,
we said that that’s just the most basic thing that we confess.
The things that we do or leave undone.
It’s really the heart from which that springs,
that we must confess the reality and the truth of our brokenness.
And so therefore,
it is that thing that we must also ask forgiveness for.
And that’s what Jesus is speaking of.
When he says to the Pharisees,
you know, that you say that committing adultery is a sin.
Well, I say when you look after a woman with lust,
that is the sin of adultery.
And what Jesus is saying there is it’s not just the act that we must find forgiveness for.
It is the heart from which it springs.
And now,
as we mature spiritually,
we begin to realize even at a deeper level
how desperately we rely upon the saving grace,
to use our Protestant language,
of Jesus Christ.
This is a gap that we cannot bridge because we know if we’re truthful about ourselves,
that that forgiveness is a thing that we do not possess for ourselves.
I think one way we could say that,
Michael, is that we tend to think of the acts as the problem,
but they aren’t.
The acts of sin are the symptoms.
And the problem is that we are sinful,
that we are broken,
and we fall short.
We are unrighteous.
And confessing the acts points us to the deeper reality of being sinful.
And forgiveness addresses both of those realities.
Forgiveness does erase the power of the acts.
It does provide for us grace for the things we have done.
But more than that,
forgiveness is a kind of healing for the deep brokenness within us.
Now, it doesn’t make it go away.
As long as we breathe on this earth,
we will continue to struggle with it.
But forgiveness is bigger than the things we’ve done.
It is designed to offer us the hope of changing from the inside out,
not just the outside in.
And as such, I think in our tradition, Michael,
we’re pretty well equipped.
I’m biased here, but I think as Reformed Christians,
we are pretty well equipped to talk about
forgiveness and grace and atonement and some of those things theologically.
You know, we have a different understanding of forgiveness than, say,
our Catholic brothers and sisters who have a kind of penance approach where you confess your sin and then there is a
punishment or a requirement of sorts that goes into the process of forgiveness.
Or at least as an example of penance that moves you toward forgiveness.
Maybe it doesn’t do the forgiveness itself,
but it embodies it or incorporates it.
In our tradition,
we skip that middle step.
We understand that the penance was already paid.
The punishment has already been met in Jesus Christ.
And so we are free to move directly into accepting that forgiveness.
And we’re not really — our job is to repent.
Our job is to be grieved by what we’ve done,
to be grieved by our sin.
And as we are,
really, that’s enough.
Right.
I think one of the core aspects of forgiveness is also one of its greatest hurdles.
And that’s the reality that we often are separated from God because of our unwillingness to reach
out and to confess and accept the forgiveness on offer from God.
And that’s what gives this such a very personal notion, Clint.
Later, we’re going to talk about that struggle for forgiveness for others,
this reality of the need of reconciliation in human relationship.
But let’s start where we often most stumble.
And that is in the recognition that forgiveness is on offer.
And we all know people who struggle with it in many different ways.
Some simply struggle to receive forgiveness full stop.
The idea that God has given the gift of grace to say that you are forgiven,
that this can be wiped clean,
that you can be set free of the guilt.
You can be set free of this thing that you’ve carried,
this burden that you’ve owned.
For many of us,
that’s too good of news.
That’s too hopeful.
And yet that is exactly what the Christian gospel proclaims.
That’s what we mean when we say good news,
that God has done for us what we couldn’t have done
for ourselves.
But Clint,
let’s not make this seem easier than it is.
For some people,
the proclamation of forgiveness might be something that some people say, yes,
for others,
that’s totally true.
And maybe philosophically, maybe mentally, I can assent to the idea it’s true for me.
But I can’t imagine that being a practical reality for me.
I’m amazed through the years at the number of people that I’ve encountered who are faithful
people, people of faith,
people who are practicing disciples of Jesus Christ.
And yet,
harbor internally this gnawing sense that a thing they’ve done is never behind them,
that they carry this guilt.
Maybe it’s a failed relationship.
Maybe it’s a moral lapse.
Maybe it’s pain that they unwittingly or even intentionally visited on others
if they’ve come out of addiction or if they had struggles in their life.
And this sense of guilt just gnaws at them and never really goes away.
And I don’t want to call that a lapse of faith because it’s not,
I think, that we don’t believe enough.
And in fact,
I think we should probably not use that language maybe at all.
But it is to say that there is a line there for some people that
genuinely believe that the grace of God is more powerful than our sin,
but for some reason,
they’re unable to trust that or to embrace that promise fully
in their own soul,
in their own life.
And they carry that guilt.
They carry that regret.
And we all have regrets.
I mean, there are consequences to our sins and some of them are deep.
Some of them are painful.
But I do think the idea is that,
I do think the hope of the gospel is that there comes a moment
when you understand that what Jesus did was so powerful and so complete
that nothing you did can get in its way.
That what God wanted done gets done.
And your sin, however painful or however important or however devastating you think
it might have been,
is nothing to God.
It’s not as if God ever goes,
“Well, I’d like to forgive you,
but you did that.”
Oh, boy, that’s a lot.
That’s not how it works,
that God’s grace is total,
is complete,
is able to handle
and to destroy any kind of sin we could throw at it.
And when we claim that forgiveness,
what we are offered is the confidence and the hope of knowing
the sure and certain forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ.
And I think, Michael, as we talk about practice and as we think about this idea of forgiving self,
I think that is a place where people could really use the idea of making progress.
That may be, for some of us,
a thing that happens all at once.
Maybe there’s a moment that we trust that grace and we’re able to come to terms
with our past failures.
But for some people,
I think that’s going to need
some unpacking and a little more of a prolonged effort over some time.
And that’s where we could talk about things like journaling,
talking to a pastor,
talking to a counselor,
I think making a list.
A while back, we did the thing where we wrote on stones.
We asked people to write their sins on stones.
We threw them in the lake.
I’ve seen that done with paper that is then put in a fireplace.
The idea of something that helps us enact that moment in which we understand that our sins really are gone.
Right.
And what is happening in that moment is an encounter with a living God.
I think what we sometimes forget is that the guilt that we carry tend to push us away from
the one who wants to engage with us in a meaningful way.
Our very sense of sinfulness and shame is the thing that keeps us from the one who seeks to
remove from us that burden.
And the story that comes to mind is the story that Jesus tells of the prodigal son,
this this young person who takes their portion of the inheritance and goes
and spends it all with wayward living.
And you have this powerful scene where this young man is eating the slop with the pigs
and is reflecting on what do I do and says,
you know, even my father’s servants eat better than
I do and decides to take the steps literally to go home,
to walk the path back that he took
with all of the money of his inheritance.
But now it’s gone and he’s going to retrace his steps thinking his father is going to turn him
into a slave of the house only to find his father sitting there waiting actively watching
for the return of his son.
And not to turn this into a translation of scripture,
a study of scripture,
but I think what we see in that Clint is a real movement that each of us needs to take in our journey towards forgiveness.
We have to on some level be willing to return to the father so that we might see that he
desires to have us home.
And so many of us,
when it comes to the moment of confession and that recognition of brokenness,
it builds up within a such feeling of guilt and shame.
It becomes itself a blockage from us receiving the freeing grace and forgiveness of our lord and savior.
And so I think if you want to make this simple,
the simple child Sunday school version is we
should seek out the one who wants to forgive us.
And we do that in many ways.
We do that in prayer.
We do that in scripture,
a journaling.
There are going to be practices that,
as you’ve already mentioned,
Clint, we can actually do
that we can act out and remind ourselves of this forgiveness.
But I do think many of us should pause and ask,
do I have a spiritual practice which brings
me into regular and consistent relationship with the one who seeks to offer forgiveness?
Because friends, if we don’t,
we’re fools to think it’s going to just appear one day.
It’s a practice that we must make part of our daily lives.
It’s fascinating that there are people who really struggle with confession,
but don’t struggle with the idea that they’re forgiven.
And there are others who don’t struggle with confession at all.
They feel very in touch with their sin and their brokenness,
but who in turn mightily struggle with the idea that they’re forgiven.
And I think especially if you grew up,
not to turn this into psychology,
but if you grew up in
a house where you felt evaluated a lot,
where your failings were always front and center,
where you felt like you were made to feel like you’d fallen short a great deal.
I think it may be for those of us in that boat,
a kind of experience where forgiveness is tough.
It’s hard to believe that we can be made clean,
that we can be washed,
that we can start over,
because we have this idea that somehow being wrong or having gotten it wrong is the worst
thing that could possibly happen,
and the idea that it’s almost unforgivable to fail.
And if that’s the case,
we really have to work on our ideas of grace.
We need to dig into the gospels.
We need to see those pictures.
We need to read,
“Father, forgive them.
They know not what they do.”
We need to read,
“Neither do I condemn you.
Go and sin no more.”
We need to spend some time with those biblical images of forgiveness.
We need to maybe do some reading.
Michael and I could help guide you toward some reading that
would help you embrace that idea of being forgiven.
And this isn’t a biblical story,
but I remember it from a sermon years ago,
and it’s just really a vivid image.
A woman is sitting at the airport,
and this was in the days where people could go to gates and
wait for people getting off planes.
So she sees a mom and a small child waiting at the airport,
and the child is a mess,
been eating candy.
Mom’s been trying to keep him quiet.
His hands are full of chocolate.
He’s got, you know, Kool-Aid stains on his mouth.
He’s got stuff all over him.
And dad comes walking off the plane,
and dad’s wearing some slacks and a white shirt.
And the kid,
this messy, sloppy little kid starts running to dad,
and the woman watching this remembers thinking,
“Oh, dad’s going to, you know, stiff arm him and keep him.” And instead,
dad reaches down,
grabs the kid, gets mess all over himself because of how much he loved and wanted to hug his child.
And she turns, the preacher turns that story into,
“This is what God does with each of us,
accepts our mess and loves us more than hates our sin.” And if that’s a struggle for you,
that’s a place to really dig in and to ask yourself the tough question,
“Why do I struggle
to trust God’s forgiveness?
Why would I think that the grace of God could extend to other people,
and yet I have a hard time accepting it for myself?” Those are going to be tough questions.
Those are going to be maybe some paths that are very hard to travel,
but they’re going to be
important for you because when we talk about freedom,
that’s what we mean,
the idea that we
live unchained to our past failures,
that we are able spiritually at least to move past them and
begin to grow in new ways.
And if that’s a struggle for you,
it’s one that I think is worth spending
some time with to try and make some progress.
I’m glad that you mentioned that,
Clint, and I think it’s worth noting that our Christian forebearers have had a significantly more nuanced
and robust understanding of what salvation is than we sometimes bring ourselves.
We sometimes
think of forgiveness as God giving a pass for the wrong thing that we did.
We think of it legally
that there’s a transfer of “I’m bad” or “I did a bad thing” and God writes that one off like a
judge would and says,
“Your punishment on that count is forgiven.” And that is certainly a part
of it.
In fact, we see that theme throughout the scriptures,
but that’s only one part.
There’s more
depth to it than that.
When we are forgiven,
we’re actually released into a new way of being.
You use the word freedom.
We’re actually set free to live the kind of life that we were intended to live.
So forgiveness also has an aspect of healing that we recognize a sin-sick soul,
but when we encounter the grace and forgiveness of a loving God,
that mends some of that wound.
It’s always been striking to me that when Jesus appears to the disciples after his crucifixion and burial,
the doubting Thomas is able to see Jesus’s wounds.
He’s able to feel his wounds,
right?
The pain
of that reality still existed on Jesus’s body but was now healed.
And that is, I think, some image of what it means for God to work that transforming grace inside us is we still may have wounds.
Our past still happened,
but, Clint,
wounds have a way under the hands of the master physician,
the God who loves us,
of being mended,
of being healed and transformed in ways that we could have never imagined.
And so if you are someone who does live in that camp and you seem to be able to offer
forgiveness for others or believe it for others,
but you just don’t seem to be able to accept it for yourself,
I think my invitation for you is to consider what gift of healing might God invite you to accept?
How might you be transformed in such a way that you could live your life more fully?
Because God the creator wants you,
his beloved creation,
to live the fullest,
most vibrant life possible because that’s the reason for which he created you.
And I think sometimes,
Clint, that’s where we miss it.
We begin to think of forgiveness as transactional to make up for the
bad stuff we do instead of God’s movement into our life to forgive,
to reform,
to heal and transform
the broken places of our lives so that we can therefore go be vessels of that for others.
Yeah, this may be a stretch,
Michael, but I think sometimes it’s more helpful to think of
God as a physician than a judge.
And what I mean by that is that God offers us a treatment
for the things that ail us.
And just as in our world,
some of the things that are good for us
are initially painful, shots,
immunizations,
surgeries,
joint replacements.
Those things sometimes cause some pain in the short run,
but the idea is they deliver us,
they heal us, they make us better in the long run.
And I think many of us,
again, especially those who grew up with a lot of guilt,
we embody this idea that God is sort of a sour-faced judge
who kind of grudgingly lets us get away with things but would rather punish us if he had the chance.
But we play the Jesus card and we get out of it,
get out of jail free.
I think that’s ultimately not a very helpful kind of image.
I think a much more powerful image is a God
who invites us to a better life,
a God who wants to work with us to bring healing,
to bring wholeness, to bring release and freedom.
And some of the things that we need to be set free from,
in fact, Michael, I would say many,
possibly the majority of the things from which we need to be set free,
we chain ourselves to.
They’re prisons that we built for ourselves.
And those doors are
open but we sometimes hesitate to leave the cells.
And so I think the idea of invitation is a powerful
one there.
And again, if this is a struggle for you,
there are lots of ways to begin to make some progress.
And if you can’t,
if we’ve thrown out some ideas,
but if you need help on those,
reach out to us and we’d be happy to talk to you about it.
Fortunately, the good news is in our
tradition through 2,000 years,
some very, very smart and faithful people,
wise and learned and
obedient and gracious people have given a lot of thought to forgiveness.
It is the cornerstone of
our faith and so we have a lot of good resources. Very much.
And I think maybe my last word on the
individual aspect of forgiveness here,
Clint, is I think it’s interesting,
almost quizzical to me
a little bit, how often Christians are tempted to think of forgiveness like life insurance.
We think of it as time limited.
It’s a thing you go in,
you sign the paper,
and then it’s good for
as long as the life insurance is good for.
And that is really a thing that cuts against the grain of the gospel.
The gospel is something that calls us by name in every moment of our life.
It is a form of calling like Jesus called his disciples out of their vocation and into a new way of living.
That’s a better analogy for the faith.
So forgiveness is about immersing yourself in a way
of being and God’s intention for you in the world.
And I’m hoping that that sounds all
encompassing.
It is.
It’s a thing that affects every aspect of our life.
If we understand it
properly, it’s beyond our mind.
It’s our bodies and it’s our souls.
It is our relationships.
Forgiveness is an invitation to a level of freedom that most of us don’t even conceive of.
And that’s why worship,
fellowship,
study,
prayer are all practices that we encourage,
not so that we have these moral expectations of what you should do to be a good person,
but because these are all ways that we’re reoriented as we seek to follow this journey.
And instead of thinking of forgiveness as a thing that we just need to say the right prayer,
we need to have the right spiritual experience and that that’s going to make a difference forever.
I think it’s much better to wake up daily with our hands outstretched saying,
God, I’m ready again to be renewed in your promise of forgiveness for me this day so that I might not just understand
it, but be transformed by it.
I think if you have ever had the experience of being wrong,
of having said or done something that hurt another person and being in a position where all you could
do was say you were sorry,
that you couldn’t explain it.
You couldn’t give excuses for it.
You could simply say,
I don’t know I was wrong and I am sorry.
And if you have received forgiveness
from that person, then you understand that it does something to you.
The experience of being
forgiven is a changing kind of experience.
It’s humbling,
it’s inspiring,
it’s resetting,
it does something.
And I think theologically that’s exactly the idea of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not simply that our sins get crossed off some list in God’s like Santa Claus.
It’s the idea that in the experience of being forgiven,
we are invited to the changes that
lead us to be the people that God invites us to be.
And if you’ve had that experience
where you’ve been wrong and had to apologize,
and by the way,
if you haven’t had that experience,
you need to think about that.
But if you’ve had that experience,
then I think you begin to see
some of the intention of what it means to be able to embody that forgiveness,
to accept that forgiveness for ourself.
And then we pivot,
Michael, then we turn.
Having received forgiveness,
we then move to talk about forgiving others.
And I don’t know,
it’d be interesting to talk to people
and ask them which do they find more difficult,
forgive self or to forgive others.
My sense is that many of us would say self,
but we would often say that knowing there’s a couple
of people on our list who may have been there for a long,
long time, that we’ve never quite been able
to take the step and offer forgiveness.
So let’s talk about the practice of forgiving others,
why it’s important,
why it’s difficult, and what it means.
Yeah.
Well, let’s start at the highest level.
The reason why it’s important
is because that is the way that God shows us in Jesus Christ.
We see in Jesus God’s determination
to forgive people who have no interest in forgiveness.
I don’t see how you read the
gospels without taking that away,
that the people whom Jesus came to forgive were the very person
he forgave despite their interest on the cross.
Yeah. And I would say that the people Jesus most
deeply criticizes, in fact, some of the only times Jesus criticizes people are the people
who refuse to forgive.
Yes.
Yeah.
And what we fail to see in our grudges is that it closes off
our ability to connect to the one whose life is shown to us in scripture as forgiving.
The very one who connects to us through the mechanism of forgiveness,
we reject for our
unwillingness to participate in that very thing.
You can’t firewall, you can’t keep out
forgiveness from leaving you and reconciling other relationships and also have a vibrant
relationship with the living God.
It just doesn’t work that way.
We have to be people who practice,
who are imitators in the language of scripture of God.
And in order to do that rightly,
we must be people who forgive.
And for some of us,
Glenn, I’ll just own right from the start that theological
idea we try to keep from being practical because of how painful it is to try to practice it.
Sometimes
even just baby steps in forgiveness,
just trying to work up the courage to even start trying
the first step can be unbelievably painful.
And we miss the gravity of God’s determination in Christ to forgive us.
And yet God not only chose to do it,
but God lived it out, God died,
God shows us that path.
And so as people who are seeking to follow the shepherd who calls us ahead,
we must therefore grapple with forgiveness for our neighbor.
I can still remember the moment that it kind of
occurred to me, Michael, I said the Lord’s Prayer hundreds,
maybe thousands of times
when it occurred to me that we read that line in the middle that says,
“Forgive us our debts
as we forgive our debtors.” And we think “as” means “while.” So in other words,
forgive our debts while we are forgiving others.
But in the Greek,
that literally means “like.” Forgive us our debts
like we forgive others.
And the day it dawned on me that I was asking God to use the way I forgive
others as the pattern to forgive me,
that I was literally praying to use my grace toward others
as the yardstick to put grace in my own life.
I didn’t want to pray that anymore.
I mean,
the idea that week after week,
millions of Christians say,
“Use the way I forgive as the
way you’ll forgive me,” is a very humbling,
slightly terrifying kind of thought.
But the Scripture is
of one voice on this.
It is a unanimous,
and it’s a loud voice,
that the experience of being forgiven
is always to then move us to be forgiving.
Forgiven is always related to forgiving,
and there really are no exceptions to that in Scripture.
And I understand as we have this
discussion, there is a broad range.
For some of us,
that’s, “Yeah, okay, I’m still mad at the guy
who cut in line yesterday at the grocery store.” And for some of us,
we have deep scars and painful
wounds of things that happened to us and were done to us that we had no recourse over.
We didn’t deserve them.
We didn’t earn them.
They happened to us,
and the attempt to try and learn forgiveness
is full of deep struggle,
deep hurt.
And we talk about all of that in this word that we use, forgiving.
And we understand, I just want to be clear,
we understand that that’s a deep and broad subject,
but it matters.
In fact,
often,
the deeper the hurts,
the more it ultimately matters
to one day be able to offer forgiveness and grace,
to use grace as a kind of salve on the wounds.
Because until we do that,
we may often find in our life that we just get stuck.
We get to a certain
place, and we can’t get past it.
And eventually, we are going to need to
let God direct us past that roadblock in order to grow.
Otherwise, we simply get hampered there,
and it’s not far enough.
And God always wants to help us go that extra step.
I think two quick things there,
Clint.
I think the first is this,
that this is a very similar
principle to the idea that forgiveness for our own personal sins is not permission to continue to sin.
In fact, it should move us and free us to a life of righteousness and truth in the world.
So forgiveness for another is not equal to permission for them to continue to harm.
And there are some people for whom forgiving a person is not forgiving someone in the past,
but forgiving someone who’s already currently in your circle.
This is especially true for those
who experience abuse in many different kinds.
Hear us clearly.
We’re not saying that forgiveness
is to give a pass for things that are to give permission for something to continue.
If you’re in danger, if you’re in a position where you need to have help,
then pursue that.
But forgiveness
also should not be defined by its end.
And let me explain what I mean by that.
I think many times
we look at the call to forgiveness and we look at it from the base of the mountain looking up
to the peak and think to ourselves,
I could never get there.
I could never embody forgiveness
at its fullness.
Like Christ has forgiven me for this person,
for whatever reason that might be.
But friends, you’re not called to magically transport to the top of the mountain.
Your goal isn’t in one day to have all of the forgiveness of the risen Christ.
That’s not at all
what we conceive of as people of faith.
What you’re called to is the first step of forgiveness.
And sometimes, for some of us,
that is literally the first inkling of the intention that you want to pursue it.
Sometimes the first prayer is,
“God,
help me begin to forgive this person.” And if that
is the only prayer that you can pray,
friend, that is an invitation to God to start setting you free.
And I think what you might discover is as you make those small steps of the journey,
as you open yourself to God’s act of forgiveness both within you and then flowing through you,
what you might find is the path that to you looked impossible at the bottom of the mountain
becomes achievable as you slowly make steps forward.
Darrell Bock I think,
Michael, we often – there’s so much wrapped up in these conversations
about forgiveness.
You know, you hear people say,
“Well, I forgive them, but I’ll never forget
what they did.” And often,
that seems to me to be a way of saying,
“I haven’t yet forgiven them.”
It means, “I don’t wish them any harm.” Sometimes we think not wishing harm is the same
as forgiving – the idea of forgiveness is reconciliation.
And certainly, we don’t mean that in every case,
relationships can be restored.
But it means that that thing we hold against
somebody we let go of,
that ammunition we keep in the bag just in case,
so that time they said this,
the time they did this,
that that goes away,
that we truly wish for them good things,
that we don’t any longer harbor ill will toward them.
And again,
you know, it doesn’t take long for these
conversations to get pretty uncomfortable as we begin to think, “Okay,
where do I hide some of
that ugliness in my life and who do I point it toward?” And the other thing that I think we have
to be very careful of,
and if you’re a person who’s been deeply wounded,
I want to be very
careful in saying that this is not an insinuation,
but often we find in our lives that in the places
we struggle to forgive,
there is ego in it.
In other words,
I may look at someone’s action and
blame them because I feel like they kept me.
At some point, I have to take some responsibility
in my own life.
And to whatever extent I look back and I say,
“Well, if my mom had done this,
or if my dad hadn’t done that,
or if somebody had,
then this would be better,
and this would be
better, and I wouldn’t be stuck where I am now.” And there may be some truth in that.
There may even be some explanation that is helpful in that to unpack.
But the truth is,
at some point, we are responsible for us.
And moving forward looks like letting those things go.
I once had a conversation with a woman who had very painful relationship with her sister.
This woman was in
hospice care.
She was going to die soon.
And she began to tell me all the things her sister had said and done.
And I said, “Aren’t those things heavy?
Do you really want to go to your grave,
holding all of those stones?” What would it feel like to simply say,
“I’m done with those.
Those don’t matter anymore,” which is exactly what God has done for us and invites us to do for others.
And that’s a powerful moment when we can look at someone who’s hurt us and say,
“I’m not going to carry that anymore.
I’m going to let grace cover that.” Now,
does that mean it’s going to restore relationship?
Possibly.
Not always.
There is a place for repentance
on the other end, and that matters.
And we probably need to talk about that in a minute as well.
How do we forgive people who aren’t sorry?
But the truth is,
I think we will often struggle to make
progress until we are willing to explore some of those places where we’re reluctant to forgive
those who we’ve struggled with.
And until we do that,
I think that we’re going to be kind of
Luther’s conception that we find in our broken relationships ways of excusing our own unwillingness
to forgive because of the other person.
And we’ll say something like,
“Well, they don’t want forgiveness.
In fact, they won’t even recognize that they did something.” Or maybe you’re in a
sort of say, “Well,
the window’s behind us.
The chance is gone.
There’s no way to reconcile with
a person who won’t talk to me,” or whatever the case might be.
And I just really want to emphasize
that image that you’re sharing,
Cliff, the idea of letting go.
I think that’s a more helpful image
of forgiveness than what we all often conceive of.
It’s deeper than just what it sounds like.
It’s not just like our kind of passive forgetfulness.
So just try to forget it.
It is actually an active practice.
Letting go requires intentionality.
And what we sometimes
fail to recognize is how hard the process of letting go is.
It’s a thing that you first choose
and then we pick it back up again.
You let it go and then,
“Well, yeah, but that part’s still
useful.” Or once we make this rut of unforgiveness,
it becomes a rut that we stick in unless we
purposely work our way out.
And we will continue to re-pick up these things that we’ve held
grudges for others because of all of this self-talk and what we think are good reasons.
I think for me,
an image that’s helpful to return to my memory is I ask myself,
“What did you do, Michael,
to deserve forgiveness?” Well,
the answer to that is simple.
Nothing.
I did nothing to deserve it.
That’s what we mean by the word grace.
The forgiveness comes to us by God’s
grace, a free gift given to all of us.
Well, then what does that person need to do to earn my forgiveness?
And if we’re going to be honest or if we’re going to see it through,
they deserve the same thing that Christ has done for me.
And then that’s an opportunity for me to recognize the
chasm between me and the other and invite Christ to bridge it as he bridged the chasm between me
and the risen Savior.
And if we’re willing to invite the living one into our life,
then we are not forgiving from a sense of moral obligation or from a sort of forced commitment,
but rather with the life of the one who is forgiveness working through us.
And I think don’t hear in a conversation
about forgiving others another moral failing that you should beat yourself up over.
That’s not it all.
It’s in fact to say once you recognize the salvation and forgiveness that’s true for you,
then that same thing should like a dam that’s broken flow out of your own life into the lives of others.
And the more and more we recognize those living waters in us,
our prayer is that
those living waters will reach into the relationships around us.
Yeah. And from a practical standpoint,
I would say if you were going to make a conscious effort to embody forgiveness,
I would start with a list and I would work your way down.
In other words,
I would start with those
people who have in some way wronged you or sinned against you debt,
if we’re Presbyterian language,
in minor ways.
And I would not start with those people who are at the deepest,
most painful places in our soul,
because that’s going to take,
and the word we use in this podcast is practice.
That’s going to take some ability,
some repetition.
And as you do that,
you will find that as you work
your way down your list,
there will inevitably be a moment out on the edges.
Okay.
I’ll forgive that person.
That was an accident.
Sure.
Okay.
They were having a bad day.
Somewhere down the line,
as you make this list,
you will inevitably hear within your voice,
within yourself, a voice that says they don’t deserve it.
There’s a line at which you get to and you say this person I need
to forgive, and then you’ll hear it in your heart.
They don’t deserve it.
And the thing you need to
know is you’re exactly right.
You are correct.
They don’t deserve it.
And you don’t deserve it either.
Forgiveness is not a wage.
It is a choice.
It is a gift.
And you, as the one who have been wronged,
have the choice whether to give that gift or not.
It is the gift you offer.
But the thing is,
while it may not do anything for the person you forgive,
it is also a gift you give yourself.
It is the gift of freedom.
It is the gift of release.
It is that moment in which you say,
those things that hurt me,
they may always be there.
Some of those scars may always remain,
but I’m not going to dwell on those.
I’m not going to live in that ugliness.
I’m going to, with God’s help,
release those things and move forward because I don’t want to be a person
who carries in myself that kind of ugliness toward others.
It doesn’t help me.
It doesn’t hurt them.
There was a pastor who once said,
not forgiving others is like drinking poison and hoping others get sick.
It’s not something.
It poisons us.
It has an effect on our soul.
And forgiveness is that
moment which we say,
that’s not who I want to be.
I’m going to be gracious.
I’m going to let God be the judge.
I am not going to try and be the judge.
I’m not capable.
I’m not qualified.
And I’m going to let grace have the last word here.
And that’s very easy to say.
We sit here in this podcast and
say those things in our own lives.
We understand the struggle and we know that some of you understand
it even more so.
But that is what forgiveness means.
It is the doorway to grace.
It’s the
be done with.
There will always be reasons to hold on to the sins of other people.
But in Jesus Christ,
there is always a better reason not to.
And that’s part of what it means to follow Him.
As we come into the conversation here,
Clint, I can’t help but really reflect on
for something that’s such good news.
Forgiveness is great good news.
It is so incredibly hard.
It’s a great thing to talk about.
And yet it’s a challenging thing to practice.
And I think that
that is exactly the kind of tension we find at the heart of the gospel.
It’s great good news.
It’s encouraging.
I might even use the word inspiring.
And yet in the practice of it,
we are challenged to the edge of our limits.
And I do think that as you really consider,
maybe in this conversation, that you’re not just going to learn something about forgiveness,
but you’re going to commit to practice it,
that you might find yourself coming to that person on your list
where you find that it now is becoming difficult.
You know, I encourage you to ask yourself,
is it that you won’t forgive this person or is it that you can’t forgive that person?
And I realize that’s a tough line to draw when you’re in that moment.
But when it’s us seemingly caught up and
sort of isolated and we just,
we’re not willing to offer forgiveness to the other.
I encourage you, that’s the place to pray and to open yourself to scripture and to counsel.
But when you say I can’t,
you might have bumped up against the thing that you need someone to go along with you.
That may be the time to call your pastor.
That may be the time to go to a counselor.
That may be a time to
speak with a wise spiritual mentor or someone who can help be a shepherd in that time.
Because,
friends, there are moments where we bump up against these things,
where that’s an honest reality that can’t maybe true.
But that’s only true in that moment,
that we are called as Christians to
continue to take the step that we can.
And sometimes that means bringing in someone else
to help us with what is a truly challenging journey.
Yeah,
I do think that in the areas
that we are wounded deepest,
we may be talking about something that takes weeks,
months, for some it may be years,
that the full process of being able to move into a new place in regard to
those things that have happened or been done to us.
And we certainly don’t want to give the
impression that we think that is simple or easy.
In no way is that true.
And we don’t want to
communicate the idea that,
you know, that’s a switch because it usually isn’t a switch.
It usually is a struggle,
a hard-won struggle.
But it’s a struggle that we must undertake.
Jesus tells us we have to do it.
Jesus points out that that’s the better way.
Jesus models that in
His own life and in His own death.
Even from the cross, forgive them.
They don’t know what they’re doing.
And it is an invitation for us not only to be better people,
but to be healed.
Forgiveness in those moments is intrinsically tied to healing from those traumas and those wounds as well.
And so it is all tied together in a pretty powerful way.
So we realize there’s been kind of a heavy
conversation for a topic that sounds great on the front end.
We celebrate forgiveness, but for
many people, forgiveness is more of an idea.
And when we get into the actual doing of it,
it goes to some difficult ground fairly quickly.
And that’s not a bad thing.
In fact, that’s a good thing.
We want to thank you for listening.
As always, if you have
additional thoughts, additional comments,
we’d love to hear them.
You can post them.
You can have some resources available.
If this has sparked in you a kind of interest to explore
more, either theologically, practically, or spiritually,
the themes of confession and forgiveness,
let us know.
We might be able to suggest some things to read.
If this has really
unsettled you, if this has rattled you at some level,
you may want to give us an email or a call
and we can talk to you about some referrals and somewhere to go next with the conversation.
And we hope that at whatever level it has landed on you,
it’s been helpful or ultimately will be
helpful in your journey.
And we are especially grateful for the knowledge that we are forgiven
and that we are covered by grace,
even as we struggle with what that means.
Well, friends, that is the conclusion of this conversation.
Please be sure to tune back in
again next week as we continue this series on practicing faith.
We’re actually going to shift
gears a little bit,
and I think we’re going to have another good conversation about practical
ways that we can seek to allow Jesus Christ to transform us and our lives.
So we look forward to that conversation.
Please be sure to share this with those that might also benefit from it.
We might encourage you to pass along the confession conversation first as these two really fit together.
But until then, we look forward to seeing you next Wednesday,
9 o’clock Central Standard Time, wherever you might want to watch it on video or listen to it on audio.
Until then, friends,
be blessed. Thanks.