Hello, friends,
and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is a joy to have you with us today.
We are continuing on with our series Unhindered.
And we’re going to be talking today about Clint,
I think, a particularly challenging point
in the conversation about being unhindered,
because many of us carry around a lot of things in our life.
And among the things that we carry,
I think our grudges are places where we are unwilling to
or unable to forgive our own kind of self-hatred,
even in some cases,
our own kind of unwillingness
to let go of the things that we have done
can become for some of us a substantial
and even unbearable burden.
So as we’re seeking to live into this idea of being unhindered,
we have to stop and we have to have a more full conversation
about those things that do burden us with the awareness
that this is a pretty difficult conversation.
Yeah, I think any conversation in spiritual growth,
in discipleship, you’re going to have to cross the bridges of grace,
forgiveness,
mercy.
You’re going to have to struggle with that.
And for most of us,
it is a struggle.
There are, for many of us,
people in our life
who have hurt us deeply,
sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally, but we carry some of that pain
and it can make it very difficult to extend grace to those people.
In other cases,
it may be very difficult to own up to the places
that we have intentionally or unintentionally affected others.
And we have to come to terms with that as well.
And so really, I think the struggle,
Michael, is in a couple of different regards.
On one hand, some of us really struggle to forgive others.
Sometimes we really struggle to forgive self.
Sometimes we believe in forgiveness.
We trust God’s ability and willingness to forgive others.
But we somehow think that that can’t apply to us and to our situation.
Or sometimes we think it wouldn’t apply to someone else
who is a bad person.
Sometimes we get confused as to what forgiveness is.
Does forgiveness mean, “I have to trust a person again”?
No, it doesn’t.
Does forgiveness mean, “I have to restore a relationship with somebody”?
You know, it may not mean that.
What forgiveness means in light of our series,
Unhindered, is that we put down those things that we’re carrying
and we let them go,
which is essentially forgiveness.
We forgive them.
We put them in the past for ourselves and for others.
And that allows us a certain freedom to move forward.
And we want to recognize right on the front end of this conversation
that it’s going to travel some difficult ground.
It is very hard to have conversations about forgiveness
without getting into territory that for some of us is very sensitive,
very raw.
Some of the wounds,
particularly that we may have received in childhood
or in the context of a marriage relationship,
will remain painful for us for a long time.
And it is not flippantly that we go into this arena.
We go in knowing that this is some difficult stuff.
We have wrestled with it ourselves,
as we know many of you have.
But there’s simply no way to talk about growing in grace
and moving forward in discipleship without having this conversation.
And we think it’s worth having and it’s important to do.
It’s always striking to me when I am reading the gospels,
in particular, the accounts of Jesus and his life,
that among all of the things that he does,
the thing that he does that consistently riles up the people closest to God,
the people of God,
the ones who have the scriptures and prayer and worship,
the thing that most consistently gets them upset is not even when Jesus performs healings,
not even when he goes into people’s lives and he transforms their body or casts out demons.
It’s when he forgives them of their sins.
This is the act that he does that in so many of the stories
becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
And, Clint, I think that this account of Jesus as the one who forgives is radical.
And in some ways,
it’s elementary to the faith.
If you’ve been a Christian for a long time,
you know the words of grace and forgiveness.
And you know this idea that everything that we’ve been given is a free gift,
not one that we deserve.
But yet,
though we might know that,
the reality is we need to, like,
ways upon a shore be overtaken by that promise over and over again.
Because as those who also have the gospels and who seek to worship
and seek to be people who live our faith in more than just moments of worship,
we recognize how much we desperately need to be renewed in that promise of forgiveness.
Because, Clint, we catch ourselves if we’re open-eyed enough to look.
We catch ourselves getting upset with people
when they do something we don’t think that they should do.
When they make bad choices,
we hold on to that.
Or when the person who serves us makes a mistake,
we hold that against them.
Or when we look back on our past,
we see things that our parents did,
or siblings did, or our spouse did.
And we hold that against them.
We have a hard time letting things go,
whether they were done to us,
or by us, or against us,
or maybe even not connected to us.
But yet we hold on to these things.
When we do that,
we have found ourselves in a position
where this tidal wave of grace,
the reminder of forgiveness,
has escaped us.
We’ve missed it again.
And I think that this is not just a thing that happens at one point,
Clint.
I don’t think that this is a single point in time.
I think that a life of faith is a life of constant renewed imagination,
of the greatness of the gift of grace.
And so turning to a conversation like our need for forgiveness,
it’s a struggle for us because it reminds us of how often we are pulled away from it.
But it’s essential because it’s the very core of the gospel.
Right.
And I think grace is difficult on both ends of that spectrum.
It is difficult to give.
It is difficult to receive.
And that’s why I think Jesus so often preached and taught
that those two things are connected.
It is in receiving grace.
It is in being forgiven that we should also receive an impetus,
a motivation to extend that grace to others.
Really a responsibility, even a burden to extend that grace to others.
And the thing that is interesting about grace,
and we know this if we stop and think,
but we often find ourselves hiding from it.
Grace presumes guilt.
In other words,
the people that you and I need to forgive in our life,
they really did those things.
They are actually guilty.
So when I say,
I don’t need to forgive that person,
they lied to me.
Yes,
they really did that.
They are guilty of that.
Hence the need for forgiveness.
When I stand before God,
God knows that I have really sinned.
I am really guilty.
Hence the word grace.
One of the greatest struggles we have is disconnecting our idea of grace
from our idea of somehow earning it,
being worthy of it,
being somehow deserving of what we give to others.
When we forgive another person,
we are giving them a gift.
They do not deserve it.
They really are guilty.
Forgiveness is our choice.
It is not their action.
It is not in them apologizing.
It is not in them being sorry.
It is not in them getting better.
Forgiveness is a thing that I do.
And I do impart because it honors the forgiveness that I’ve received.
And it sets me free to live past being chained to that event.
And that moment in relationship with that person.
And so I think on the front end,
Michael, it’s just important.
Yes, we know as we talk forgiveness and as we talk people who have heard us,
you’re going to be tempted to say,
“But they did this.”
Yes,
they did.
They are guilty.
We are guilty.
That’s where forgiveness lives.
That may be one of the great dangers of the moment in which we live,
Clint, where we live with this unfortunate cultural movement to sort of a team mentality,
where you have people who are on your side and we think the same,
and we’re working on the same goals and working towards the same ends.
And in the midst of that,
we might be tempted to think that because the other side is wrong
or is missing the point or whatever,
that there’s an adversarial we just need to win,
almost like an athletic contest.
The problem with that worldview is it misses the fundamental presupposition of the faith.
And that is that both our team and their team are fundamentally flawed,
that the reality of sin is such that none of us deserve forgiveness.
None of us deserve a second hearing or a second chance.
And yet every single one of us has been given it.
Every single one of us.
That’s the struggle, is that we are so quick to spin up within ourselves a secondary argument.
Yeah, but Michael, what about this person?
Or if you knew how flagrant this problem was and we start counting how far off they are
from the mark and how close we are.
The moment that we start counting is the moment that we have fundamentally missed
the core of the gospel,
which is there is no counting that will add up in the end.
That there’s no amount that you and I can do.
There’s nothing that they could do.
There’s nothing that they could say,
whoever they are, that group might be.
There’s nothing that can be done that can atone for the wrong that has been committed.
And Clint, you’re right to point out the real wrong that has been committed.
The problem is that as we come to a conversation about forgiveness,
it’s really a mirror by which we immediately see our own struggle to receive the forgiveness for
our own faults, because for some of us,
that will require admitting those faults.
And then the sort of the reverse or the simultaneous turning of that out from our
inward experience or receiving it to the giving it.
And that is such an amazing challenge as people of faith to continue to practice
this kind of transformational mindset where what has been given to us is not a thing to be hoarded,
but rather an example of a life that we are called to live.
And that in practicing that life,
we become what we hear in the Scripture,
the hands and feet of Christ.
We become the ones who live in the world in the very way that we have been gifted
in this world, and that is with the grace of Jesus Christ.
And maybe one last word before we get into some of the specifics of what we want to go through.
We understand and we hope you understand that grace is not always a switch.
It is not as simple as saying,
“I’m going to forgive that person.”
If we have been deeply wounded,
particularly if that happened over time,
especially if that perhaps happened when we were young,
when we were children,
forgiveness is going to be a process.
And it normally begins with something like,
“I want to be able to forgive them,”
or maybe, “I want to want to forgive them,
but I’m not sure I know how.”
This is not easily one territory.
Sometimes it is a struggle.
Sometimes it may involve speaking with a mentor or a guide or a counselor.
Sometimes it’s going to be dealing with the anger first and trying to let go of that animosity,
and then moving toward understanding.
And then it may be a multi-step process,
and we don’t want to insinuate that we think
forgiveness is easy because we understand that it is not.
But it is attainable.
It is doable.
It takes work on our part.
It is not as simple as just saying,
“Okay, now I’m done with that.”
For most of us,
it is nowhere near that simple.
It is a job.
It is a task,
and it takes some work to get it done.
Yeah, Clint,
most of us, especially when we’ve been wounded deeply and we’re really
reflecting on some of the most scarred and difficult experiences of our life,
most of us can’t see it from here.
For most of us,
it’s a long way down the road,
and it’s going to be a path with some winding turns,
some back steps.
It’s going to look like some moments of great courage and even some moments where we struggle.
But the reality is,
it is a place that we can,
by the grace of Christ,
travel.
And the way that we get there is a willingness to enter into self-reflection and an honest
conversation about where we are and what the next appropriate step of the journey is,
which is, I think, what the spirit of our assessment is today.
I hope,
as we sort of turn into the questions that we have for today,
if you would pause the video right here,
go down into the description, download.
The assessment is called Forgiveness and Grace.
You’ll find that wherever you’re listening or watching the podcast here today.
We hope that you’ll print this out or you’ll get a version of it on your phone,
whatever is convenient for you.
And we hope that you will go along with us through this because some of the experience
of this unhindered series is about being honest with ourselves,
and that is why having this in front of us is a great first step as we’re seeking to
identify places we can move forward in this forgiveness conversation.
And the place we start may seem like a strange one,
having talked about forgiveness.
Our first question here on this scale of one to five,
one is a strong yes,
five is not so much,
is about grief and loss.
Do you feel that you have unresolved issues regarding grief and loss?
And, Michael, that may seem counterintuitive in a conversation about forgiveness,
but if we live from a place of pain,
whether it’s pain that was done to us or pain that we
experienced in losing someone,
it really creates for us a similar pathway in that we are chained to that.
Now,
to be honest,
if we feel that we are consumed by grief,
if we feel the pain of loss
acutely,
consistently over a long period of time,
the conversation that we likely need to have
is about forgiving either ourself or God.
If we are blaming God,
if we are holding some grudge against God,
we often think of forgiveness
and sort of the discord in relationship between other people,
between human to human.
But if we have experienced deep grief and it never seems to change,
in other words, it stays at volume 10 all the time.
Perhaps it’s been years and it still feels fresh and raw.
Then I think that merits a conversation about what does grace mean in regard to moving out of
that grief.
Now, I don’t mean that we ever finish grieving.
When we have loved someone and lose them,
there will always be sadness in that.
But we cannot function in the place of the deepest,
most painful grief very well.
And if that continues to be our experience,
day after day, month after month, year after year,
we are likely seeing signals that we need some help.
We need to find a way to let go of some of that deep pain so we can grow into a place
where we’re able to have good memories,
where we’re able to celebrate what was best in those relationships.
They will always sting.
Losing will always hurt.
But if it paralyzes us,
then there’s some work to be done.
So we all have different ways of expressing grief and letting that process happen.
I think maybe one word to add to this conversation is if you score yourself as a number one here,
and that’s been true for a long time.
One question you might want to ask yourself is how have I or how much have I expressed
that grief in some way?
Some of us have bottled it up.
We’ve not let it be expressed in any way.
In any conversation with any trusted person,
we haven’t expressed it in any kind of diary.
We haven’t sat down to take time to admit our anger and frustration at God.
You might be surprised if you turn to the book of Psalms, for instance,
how many Psalms of David are very strongly worded accusations against God.
That might make many of us uncomfortable.
But the reality is Scripture is not uncomfortable with the reality of human guilt
and the struggling with grief and what we do with it.
And even when that’s leveled against God,
if you have carried these things,
if you’re high on this scale,
you might want to ask some questions about
what are healthy ways of expressing that and have I allowed myself into those places.
And there’s lots of ways to do it, Clint.
But that’s a first step that we can take is look forward to how I can engage someone
or some idea that’s going to help me in expressing this in a meaningful way.
Yeah, I think that pain and grief are similar in this regard.
That walling them off and ignoring them is ultimately a very poor long-term strategy.
They will wait.
They will fester.
And at some point,
they will begin to bubble into other parts of our life
and they will begin to taint various parts of our spirit.
And so at some point,
as painful as it may be,
pain and grief need to be addressed.
And that is an act of grace.
That’s when one becomes a recipient.
You may not,
it may not be that in giving grace,
you find a path forward,
but in receiving it in those moments.
Receiving love and generosity and graciousness from others.
Receiving that from a mentor or a counselor.
Receiving being able to rebuild a prayer life.
There are various parts of that step.
And if you are in a place where you feel like grief is overwhelming,
I’m going to encourage you to think seriously about getting some help.
Because if it has been many,
many years and it still feels like only that few days,
that is evidence.
That is a signal that there’s work to be done.
And that work is likely best served by partnering with somebody who can help you do it.
Our second question here,
Clint, I don’t think it’s going to surprise anyone,
though it may be a challenge for all of us.
The second question we come to is,
do you have any unresolved issues regarding your childhood?
Maybe there’s some kind of trauma there or some issues that you know linger.
You know, Clint, I can’t think of an area of life that is more difficult to untangle.
Than some of those things that we acquired at the earliest points of our life.
And anyone who is parented knows how unbelievably difficult.
I would even say impossible parenting is.
You’re trying to bring the best of you to the task.
And there’s not enough of you to do the task.
Well, the reality is no one escapes childhood without bearing some burden.
Now, some of us have bore greater burdens than others.
I mean, some have had, as even we called here,
traumas that need dealt with.
And as we become adults,
and I would even say deeper women and men of faith,
we will inevitably bump up against some of these things.
And I think we discover in scripture a beautiful image.
Maybe we don’t apply it all the time, but,
you know, we see in Jesus’s miracles as he walked,
even the casting out of demons,
this idea of freeing us from the things that oppress us.
And some of us continue to be even in our present day life,
oppressed by the things that were given to us or handed to us or done to us
or all of the things that we might add on that list.
And today may be the first step in admitting that that is true,
that I today am bearing an unresolved issue or moment or trauma
that I’m going to need to face at some point.
Maybe I’m not going to face it today,
but this analysis or this assessment gives us a moment to step back and ask,
how true is this for me today?
All families, Michael,
have some degree of messiness in them
because no family gets it right.
But if you had the misfortune of growing up in a family
in which there was a lot of trauma,
a lot of anger,
a lot of dysfunction,
if you grew up with people who battled addictions and lost,
if you grew up with people who were abusive,
if you grew up with people who had untreated or out of control mental health issues,
the difficulty that provides is that as children,
we’d never really get a chance to develop healthy coping mechanisms.
We’re so busy trying to survive this chaos of our childhood
that it never allows us to kind of put together
adult level coping skills and processing skills.
And therefore we sort of stay in that childlike realm in regard to those issues.
And we never really get to grow past them subconsciously.
And so if that’s you,
if that sounds like,
if you think, yes,
a lot of my life,
I just still feel connected
to some of the wounds of my childhood.
I’m going to suggest to you again,
as we did in question one,
that some therapy,
a counselor, a pastor,
someone trained to help you begin to navigate that,
the idea of forgiveness is going to be important,
but it is not the first step.
You cannot simply heal all of that darkness by saying,
yeah, I forgive my family because you don’t yet understand what that means.
And until we process what I’m forgiving them for and what it did in me and to me,
I’m not going to be able to do that.
And so these in some senses,
these first two questions are safety net questions,
because if you rate either of these high,
it may be that your prior conversation,
the first conversation you need to have is really not so much about forgiveness.
And where am I in my journey?
And do I need some help moving forward?
You will get to forgiveness.
You will get to grace.
But you probably can’t start there if you feel locked into one of these issues.
You know, Clint, my experience is that oftentimes when we find ourselves trapped
in the cycle of behavior that we’ve had since our very earliest years,
for us, that often doesn’t feel like unforgiveness.
It feels like another day.
It feels like me being me.
It feels like my personality.
And when we get caught in that cycle and we fail to step back and honestly evaluate,
no,
this is me holding on or this is me acting like my father.
This is me behaving in a way that is reactive to a thing that happened all the way back.
These revelations don’t happen in an instant.
And oftentimes we catch ourselves trying to keep ourselves from even looking in those places.
So maybe the goal for today is less,
you know, what do I need to go or what hill do we need to
take, but rather slowing down to taking some deep breaths and courageously asking ourselves
the question, you know,
maybe the last time that I did get angry,
I was acting a lot like
fill in the blank.
That may be the place to start.
And then that helps us orient ourselves to the next place we should go.
Yeah,
there is a struggle that happens when you grow up in a family with issues.
And that is that the frame of reference you have is not a very good one.
So you use what you’re familiar with.
You use what you know to paint the picture of what you would call quote unquote normal.
But you don’t have the benefit of knowing that it’s not a very good picture.
It’s not a good standard.
And you have to unlearn that.
And for some of us,
that is a task, again,
that we need some help with because we won’t
get it.
We likely won’t get it until we have had significant contact with an alternative viewpoint.
That leads us here as we go to our third question here.
Do you feel that you have any unresolved issues regarding past sin or struggles?
Clinton,
this might be surprising to some that we include this idea of forgiveness for past sin.
I think many times when we are aware of things that we have done or said or left undone,
we can oftentimes want to just put that in a forget it kind of category.
We find a closet in our heart.
We jam that thing closed and we turn the key.
We try to throw it away.
And the reality is,
if we have things that we’ve not received forgiveness for,
we’ve not actively worked to allow the grace of Christ to work within us,
maybe even confess
to another person or certainly to ourselves or certainly to our creator.
We find ourselves in the circumstance where not only will that be a burden that we carry,
but oftentimes and very unfortunately,
we find ourselves turning back to it.
It continues to hold power over us.
And so the danger of answering this high is not just the question of,
do we feel guilty about things that we’ve done?
But at a much higher level,
it’s how much control do these things have in our life even today?
Yeah, well, guilt is often a wonderful fuel toward more sin.
And many of our brokennesses are propelled by guilt.
As we feel guilty,
we feel worse about ourselves.
We’re driven back to the very thing that we were using to hide from that guilt in the first place.
I’m not going to get this exactly right,
but there was a pastor who said something
very close to,
it is painful to be guilty.
It is hell to be responsible.
And I think this question puts us in conversation with those moments that we have been wrong.
We hurt another person,
maybe our children,
maybe our spouse, maybe someone we work,
maybe who knows what,
but we were responsible for some pain that they had.
We said something or did something that caused pain, that caused hurt.
And how often do we walk in that?
Have we forgiven ourselves?
Have we been able to say,
“I did that and I want to do better and I don’t want to repeat that.”
But I’m also not going to let that bad moment define me.
I want to move past it.
I want to make amends.
I want to apologize,
whatever that case may be.
But I think this is a tough one because it does presume that we really did drop the ball.
We really did let our sin intrude on someone else’s life in a way that caused some damage.
And I think it can be easy to beat ourselves up with that and feel like we deserve it,
but there is a point at which guilt is no longer helpful.
Initially, guilt might help us feel convicted of the thing we did,
but then later on,
it is only going to hold us back from moving forward.
This is one of those questions where a one is meaningful to say,
“Yeah, that 100% identifies me.
That’s difficult.” But a five may also be a place that we should raise our eyebrows a little bit and ask some
questions because if we cannot see the ways that we have injured people,
it is likely we have injured a lot of people.
The reality is it takes a very difficult level of self-awareness,
a kind of courageous humility to say,
“No, yeah, it’s true.
I have hurt people.” And so I think a healthy spiritual aptitude here would live somewhere
closer to the middle to admit that, yes,
there are some unresolved issues as I’ve heard others,
because every human person who’s lived their life is living with some baggage of harm that we’ve
done to others.
That’s a reality of living.
So this is a case,
I think, Clint, where living on either of the extremes may be a place where we should apply some prayer and discernment.
Yeah, I think that’s a good word,
Michael, and it may be true in our next question as well,
failed or strained relationships.
And these may be family relationships.
It may be a broken
relationship between siblings or parents or children.
It may be a marriage relationship that failed.
But to what extent does that relationship continue to fuel us,
continue to harm us, continue to—how often do we still carry that around?
And how often is that relationship
the lens that we see,
“Oh, that person’s just like my mom,” or,
“Oh, I can’t stand that,
because that’s how this person acts,” or that’s what they used to say.
How often does that
relationship influence us, have some gravity in our life?
I think if a failed relationship is a
lens through which we see some of our own life,
a significant portion of our own life,
it is likely the case that it is unresolved in our spirit and needs some attention.
Yeah, you know, I think the thing that makes relationships so difficult is the wounds go so deep.
There’s really no human experience like losing someone,
a relationship with someone who we loved.
And then to have that love break,
to have it in some cases break spectacularly,
especially as the relationships get closer and more intimate,
we discover a break of trust,
we discover that we find ourselves wounded at a very,
very deep level.
And so that can often
turn into a new form of rage,
a kind of anger that’s directed at that person.
And so when we
look at those relationships in particular, Clint,
I think to talk about forgiveness at the start
can seem unbearable or unachievable to say,
“No, there’s no possible way I could reach it with
that person.” And the reality is we’re not asking you to reach some sort of conclusion.
We’re not asking you to make it to the promised land in that relationship.
Instead, what we’re asking is to take a step back and to evaluate how deeply that has wounded you.
That task unto itself will
be unbearably difficult at some turns.
But the Holy Spirit is with you.
God will enable you,
give you the strength and courage to find those broken places.
And by grace, you will be given
the gift of moving forward.
And once again, this isn’t about tomorrow being the day in which it’s
done.
It’s about an awareness today of to what extent we’re living with unresolved,
ungiven up hindrances,
particularly in relationships.
And most relationships that get to that point don’t simply blow up all at once.
They build patterns of people who are hurting each other,
who are opposed to one another,
who are not doing
well with one another.
And so when that relationship ultimately divides,
say in the case of a divorce,
it may never be the case that you and a previous spouse are going to get together and have lunch
and talk about your days.
That ship has most likely sailed.
What we’re talking about is not
adding anything else to the arsenal,
putting down the weapons,
letting it go.
And neither of us
have lived through that situation.
So we understand that we’re saying something that is
impossibly difficult, that fortunately we have not had to try and do at this point in our lives,
but it needs to be done.
If we’re going to continue to operate towards someone with bitterness,
with anger,
with resentment,
with hatred,
then that’s going to poison the well in our own spirit.
And it is not easy,
but a commitment to do no more harm I think is a great place to start.
So that leads us here to our next question,
number five,
bad memories.
How many unresolved issues do we have with bad memories?
And this Clint is an interesting prompt.
I think this could go in many different directions.
The place it leads me right away is it’s striking to me how
much we can learn about ourselves and others when we hear ourselves talk about what things were.
If you’ve ever noticed,
especially couples who are getting married or people who are having kids
for the first time,
folks will come up to you and they’ll share advice.
They’ll give you know,
do this when you’re getting married or do this with your first kid.
And it’s striking because
some of those people will tell you about,
you know, marriage is tough, but it’s beautiful.
It’s a gift or kids are challenged,
but there’s nothing but joy that comes in being with them.
And then the reverse.
Yeah, have fun.
You know, put on the ball and chain or yeah,
you’re never going to do anything right.
Your kids are always going to be rebelling.
It’s amazing when we look back on our story and how we remember it.
Those things, if we hold on to them,
especially if they’re negative,
it has a way of coloring everything has a way of coloring,
not only what we remember about what was,
but it transforms what’s possible in the future.
And it’s an unbelievably difficult cycle to interrupt,
but slowing down and asking,
am I always negative when I remember my past?
Am I,
when I think about the things even that
I think were good things and I have negative pessimistic things to say about them.
That may be a clue,
Clint, that that’s a place where we need to dig into some grace and forgiveness.
Yeah, I think on a surface level, Michael,
you know,
those kind of things can lead us to be what
most of us don’t want to be, which is Eeyore,
which, you know,
nothing’s ever right.
Nothing’s ever good enough.
It’s all, it’s all bad.
And, you know,
nobody has ever said of an Eeyore,
they’re really a gracious person.
You know, they, I really,
I get a grace vibe from them.
I think on a deeper level,
a thing like bad memories,
again, can be an indicator,
a red flag to use that language.
You know, think of the warning lights on your dashboard.
There are some,
and your tires a little low,
whatever you might, there are others that you need to stop,
you need to get attention.
And if you spend a great deal of time with bad memories,
with
troubling dreams of past events,
again,
those are your, your mind, your spirit, trying to tell you that it’s feeling overwhelmed and that it’s,
it’s time to look into getting
some assistance to talk through some of those things.
The same could be true with our last one here,
betrayal or abuse.
And, you know,
those two words cover a very big spectrum of what we could
use them to mean,
but they unfortunately often convey a kind of message.
If you grew up with abuse,
if you’ve been betrayed,
you may have received that message intentionally or otherwise
that you’re not good,
that you’re not good enough,
that it was somehow your own fault.
And again,
these can be moments and opportunities for us to think about what would it look like
to quit listening to those voices?
What would it, what would it feel like to say,
I know where that message comes from,
but there’s another message,
the message of Jesus Christ
saying, you’re a beloved child.
And what if that was the voice that I heard instead?
Now, again,
that’s not something we can all do on our own.
I don’t want to be a broken record here,
but if you’ve suffered significant abuse,
it is likely not a skill set you’re going to develop single-handedly,
but what would it be like to replace those messages or to let go of what we
thought those moments taught us and instead put something positive in there in replacement?
All right, Clint, we’re a few episodes into this series now and each time we turn to a new aspect
of the faith.
And we aren’t here providing the roadmap for the way that you’re going to go as
you address these issues.
But if we’ve gone through these six things and certainly two or
three of them have landed in the one or two side,
you know that this is going to be a spot where
you’re going to need to start.
Some of those other conversations that we’ve had,
those may be applicable down the road.
But if we are operating from a place of deep personal pain,
if we’re in a position where this is absorbing an inordinate amount of our time and spiritual energy,
then you’re exactly right.
This is not like a low tire light.
This is like a low
oil light.
If you keep running the engine,
it’s going to seize and that engine is done.
I mean, the reality is that we cannot go bearing some of these deep relational spiritual burdens forever.
We will not be able to bear it.
We are communal people and we need to accept grace not only for
ourselves, but we need to be able to find ways to let go of some of the strings that other people
continue to operate over us,
whether they’re doing that intentionally or whether we just
simply have allowed that to continue in our imagination.
So, I think these six are important
and if they’ve been challenging for you,
maybe this isn’t good news,
but there’s some very
pointed questions to come.
I mean, this is a very sort of sensitive place to be asking questions,
but I think he’s central.
Yeah, I think we’ve front loaded the most difficult and the most
demanding questions in this session because they’re the most important.
I mean,
from here on, we’ll talk about things that are sort of normal live your life kind of things,
but there are moments again where my experiences and some of the struggles I may have encountered pushes me
past the kind of everyday struggles of discipleship and pushes me into territory that I really need
to have an answer to.
Michael, this might be the worst illustration in the history of
the church,
but bear with me.
Wow, okay.
All right, here we go.
At some point in my
mid-20s,
I had horrendous back pain,
felt terrible.
The short story, it was a kidney stone.
Well, when a kidney stone passes,
as some of you know,
it hurts a lot and then there is this
glorious feeling of being done with it.
The interesting thing is as long as the kidney stone stays in,
all those other symptoms keep coming back.
The pain of passing the kidney stone
was well worth it to be rid of the overall condition.
And again,
this is a stupid example,
but it is not dissimilar with our souls.
If there are symptoms happening,
some of them will remain
with us until that thing that is causing the pain is out, is passed,
and it will likely not be pain
free to pass it,
to get rid of it, to move on.
But it has to be done if those other things are
ever going to be addressed.
Yeah, it’s a good word,
Clint. And I think that leads us then to the next question.
So we ask you,
do you carry any grudges against specific people?
And we ask you often or rarely.
And that could be both often,
yeah, I find myself doing that with a lot of people.
Or maybe I find myself doing that with one person very often.
And the reality is,
we do often attribute grudges against people or groups of people.
And finding that pattern is
essential because it means that we’ve built into our living and our imaginations and even our daily
sort of connective process with other people,
this assumption that they’re going to wrong me,
they’re going to say that thing again.
The moment that you start anticipating,
oh, here it goes again.
That is a moment in which we might want to do some self reflection because
we’ve identified a place that we expect a person to create a new grudge.
And so we need to be
careful if we find that happening with specific people or specific groups of people.
Clint, that’s a place where maybe we need to practice some grace.
I don’t want to be flipping here,
but if your crap list has a hundred names on it,
you need to think about that.
I mean, if you’re a file of people who have wronged me or people who have bugged me or people I don’t want
to deal with is just daily growing,
that would challenge us to think, hmm,
am I gracious?
Do I understand grace?
The same would be true of our next question.
Are there people who have wronged
you that you’ve not forgiven?
This is a soul searching question.
Is there any one in my life
that I have not yet been willing to,
able to, or tried to forgive?
And we’re going to remind you
that only you see this if you choose,
but who is that and why?
If you know you’re holding a grudge
that you’ve not given up yet,
you’re holding on to someone’s sin and you have not let it go,
whether they care or not,
whether they know or not, that’s irrelevant.
We’re talking about you
and your spiritual life.
Have you not forgiven someone yet?
If so,
who and why?
And I don’t mean
why what they did.
I mean, why have you not forgiven them?
That’s the more important question.
Whatever they did, you know.
I want to know or I want you to wrestle with why have you not forgiven them yet?
Yeah, and this is challenging because the why may be substantial.
It may almost be immovable.
You know, maybe they have committed a harm that’s grievous,
a harm that you are
approaching them.
You know would be dangerous.
There’s a lot of aspects here,
Clint.
We know that this is highly contextual.
We know that this is nuanced,
which is, by the way, why I think we’ve
mentioned already numerous times,
it’s often essential that we have a partner walking alongside
us as we do this,
but sometimes the enormity of the task shields us from the reality that we must undertake it.
And the reality is,
if you find yourself and you have been wronged and you know
that wrong and you have chosen either consciously or unconsciously that you are not open and willing
to pursue a forgiveness and restoration,
in whatever sense that that restoration would look,
you’re not even willing to consider it,
then that is a place where we’re going to need to be reminded
of the fundamental core of the Gospel that reconciliation lives at the center of who Jesus
Christ is.
That may sound far off to us,
but that’s how great grace is.
It lives at the very edge of
our imaginations and we’re always moving closer to it because of God’s spirit living within us.
I want to proceed with a little bit of caution because I don’t want to give the impression that
there are formulas and things to follow step one, step two,
but I think I would say this at this point.
Letting someone know you’ve forgiven them is particularly important if you understand they
have apologized to you.
If they have not,
I don’t know that I would be in a hurry to rush toward
letting them know, “Hey, just so you know,
I forgave them,” and they say,
“For what?
I didn’t do anything
wrong.” Restoration is a hopeful goal of forgiveness,
but forgiveness is the place to start.
So, I think
it may be that you’re forgiving someone who has passed away.
It may be that you’re forgiving
someone who is not currently in relationship with you.
You’re not currently communicating with them.
That’s okay.
Forgiving them is still the first step.
Now, whether you need to do more than that,
you and God will sort that out.
There are lots of resources you can turn to.
You can talk to pastors,
et cetera, but that first step is simply saying,
“I think I’m going to try and be willing to just
let that go and see where that takes you.” That leads us here,
Clint, to our next question,
and that is, “Is there anyone you feel you owe an apology,
and if so,
who is that?”
Clint, these are some challenging words.
I think if you find yourself in a position
where you know of a person,
you can name them and say,
“Yeah, they deserve an apology,” it’s likely
that you have not apologized because it’s not going to be easy.
The reality of that requires
that maybe putting that name on this piece of paper is the very first step in achieving what
may be a very long process.
It may be unspeakably difficult to make your way in that direction,
but for some of us,
Clint, just the first name is what’s required.
Yeah, this is the other side of the fence.
If you feel like there’s someone out there who
you hope has forgiven you,
then you may owe them an apology.
You may try to communicate that you’re
sorry.
Again, there needs to be some caution involved,
but if you approach that conversation
saying, “Well, I need them to understand why I did,” you are not explaining something to them.
If you feel that you have wronged someone,
then your best approach is to say,
“I know I was wrong.
I’m sorry that it caused pain.
It was not my intention,
or I’m sorry that
that was the result,” and you really need to leave it there.
It needs to not be a justification.
It is because I’m sorry for that thing.
All relationships need that.
A marriage that doesn’t
do that is going to struggle.
Any relationship where there’s not some give and take and some
willingness to let go of things that irritated us or hurt us,
that’s a part of it.
I think this is
a good challenge for all of us.
Is there anyone that I need to apologize to,
and who is it,
so I can begin praying about when and how that might happen?
Next question here.
Do you tend to hold people’s faults against them?
Just very briefly,
if you find yourself with a whole list,
if you could name off right now four or five things,
people who said a stupid thing,
did a stupid thing,
or a thoughtless thing,
if you have a list of people
who you’d say, “Yeah, man,
their faults are bugging me,” that is a reflection of not only
your scorekeeping, but it’s a reflection of a heart which is looking for those bruises.
When we are looking for that,
we’re by definition not looking at the central figure,
which is Jesus Christ, the one who’s forgiven.
It’s likely,
if we’re seeing all of their faults,
that we’re not looking full in the face of the one who’s forgiven our own faults.
That’s maybe one of the struggles of this conversation,
is the recognition that though the separation seems to be with other people,
those people over there,
they’re the ones who are grieving me,
or they’re frustrating me,
when in reality,
the problem is I’ve not been open to grace.
I’ve not been open to the forgiveness
for my own grievances and faults.
This is the transformation that happens when we find
that this mirror showed us the thing that is a problem in here,
and then that becomes for us
an opportunity to return to that face of grace,
to come back to Christ,
to confess,
“I,
too, need to be honest with myself of the places I’ve fallen short.”
I think another good indicator here,
Michael, is the time involved.
If you can regularly call stuff
up that happened five,
six, seven, ten years ago, when this person said that,
or when they did that,
or when that thing happened and they didn’t apologize,
or whatever it is,
if you can instantly think of things that happened years ago,
and you are still holding on to them against other
people, it is a pretty good sign that you tend to hold on and sort of catalog people’s failures,
and that’s an opportunity for grace.
The same thing would be true as we point that mirror
to ourself.
Do you struggle to forgive yourself for anything?
This is interesting, Michael, because some of us,
I think, struggle to hold ourself accountable at all.
We’re too easy on ourself.
Somebody said the sins of other people shock us,
but ours seem perfectly reasonable.
There’s truth to that,
like, “Well, yeah, I yelled at that person,
but they really made me mad,” or,
“They treat everybody like that,
and they deserved it,” and we can tend to justify
our sins or our actions and not be hard enough on ourself.
On the other end of the spectrum,
and I think this is the particular struggle we have in mind in this case,
are people who hold
their own sin against themselves,
who use it to kind of reinforce this model that I’m not okay,
I’m not good enough, I failed,
I let that person down,
I’m not worthy, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, guess what?
You’re not.
And yes, those things happen,
and it’s part of life and the grace of Jesus Christ.
And I think in some ways,
I want to be careful here because I don’t want to produce
guilt, but in some ways,
this is a trust issue.
Because if we can say,
“I believe that Jesus
Christ died to save Michael from his sin,” whatever it was,
but me,
oh, gosh, I don’t think, I don’t know if Jesus can forgive me,
then we don’t understand grace.
Jesus is grace.
We don’t understand God’s mercy because God’s mercy isn’t tied to my guilt.
It’s not tied to my personal assessment.
And if that’s you,
I can only tell you,
you need to begin doing some reading,
the Gospels,
come talk to us about stuff that we can help you with.
But at some point, really,
you’ve got to let that go.
Martin Luther once famously said,
“Sin boldly,” and he didn’t mean sin.
He meant when you sin,
trust the grace of Jesus Christ to erase that sin and don’t get
hung up thinking somehow your sin is worse than other people’s.
That’s really good.
I think the only thing I would add to that,
Clint, is it is not a sign of humility when you turn the lens on your
self and say, “I’m a no-good, rotten sinner,
and there’s nothing good that can come from me.” That
kind of self-flagellation,
that kind of turn against ourselves,
is not God-honoring.
We discover from the very beginning of Scripture,
God created you in God’s image.
You are well-made.
You are beautiful.
You’re known by name,
by the creator of the universe.
And if you call yourself trash,
if you look at yourself and see nothing but dung,
you are not seeing the one who God made,
and that is actually a sign that you are in desperate need of the full vision of who God
has made you on the other side of God’s grace.
God can do beyond what you can imagine,
and if your imagination does not let you see any glimpse of that,
then that’s a place to grow.
It’s a scary light to see,
but it’s an unbelievably life-changing light.
And so, yes, once again,
find a trusted conversation partner, a person of faith.
That is an amazing step.
You cannot imagine what
lives on the other side,
but it is not laudable to call yourself or see yourself as something
that you are not made to be.
And I just want to be clear about that.
Yeah, and the good news is you’re halfway there.
When we say, “I don’t deserve God’s grace,” yes,
that’s a good starting place.
But when you say,
“I can’t receive it,” you’ve gone the wrong
way.
So the good news is you’re almost where you need to be.
You just have another step to take.
That brings us to the next one, Michael.
Are you quick to judge others?
I think,
you know,
do you attribute malice where some other thing might be explained?
When someone is confused,
when someone makes a mistake driving,
do you assume they did it to you on purpose?
Are you quick to be judgmental and critical?
Those are often low-level indicators that
maybe grace is not our go-to reaction,
maybe not our leaning.
And it’s, I think, a good indicator that we have stuff to work on.
Our next question is simple but challenging.
Is there anyone you refuse to speak to or plan
never to speak to again?
You know, that is a kind of break of relationship that,
if you can answer yes to that,
you know, that’s a person that you prayerfully bring up to God and say,
“You know, I’m seeking a way forward here.” And,
you know, once again, we’re not talking about
a miraculous reconciliation that happens tomorrow.
But it’s to say that if there’s someone who
firmly fits in that category,
Clint, that we would say,
you know, that’s a place to submit
to some spiritual discernment.
Yeah,
we want to make sure that we understand.
We’re not saying you necessarily should
speak to them.
We don’t know the ins and outs of that situation.
What we’re saying is that if you
can say yes and put a name with this question,
it’s a sign that you’re holding on to something
that you may want to consider,
“How could I let go of it?” If you have enough animosity toward
an individual that you can say quickly,
“No, I’ll never speak to them again,” and maybe you don’t
need to, but you do need to get rid of or to wrestle with the reasons behind it.
And I think that’s where we’re coming from.
Which brings us then to the last question,
speaking of letting go.
What burden would feel best to let go of in your life?
In other words,
what do you carry?
Your own sin,
someone else’s sin, the pain of the past,
grief, a memory.
What is it that you feel
is a hindrance and not a help in your life?
What is it that you feel is a weight
that you’re strapped to and you carry around with you every day?
And what can you imagine
of how good it would feel to put that down?
As scary as it might be,
because it may have
been with you for a long time,
but how would it feel to say,
“I’m not going to carry that.
It’s too heavy.
It’s not helping me.
It’s hindering me.” And as per our title,
I would like to be unhindered.
I would love to let go of that.
And that gives you,
I think, a wonderful place to start in prayer and in thinking about,
“How do I do that?” Which,
again, may not be a simple, easy process,
but it is a beautiful goal for us to let go of the things
that drag us back and don’t let us move forward in faith.
We are talking about being unhindered,
letting go of these things, right?
And the way that we do that as we talk today is we are talking
about growing in grace.
And I think growing is exactly the right word here,
because if you’ve been around a child,
you know that the path of growing is unbelievably messy.
It means that you
run into things while you’re trying to learn how to walk.
It means that you miss your mouth while
you’re learning how to eat.
It means that you say the wrong words all the time while you’re trying
to learn new language.
And it goes on and on and on,
day after day, mistake after mistake.
But you know what?
Kids grow up.
They grow, and they go from walking to running,
and then they go from
to running marathons, right?
The reality is each and every day we show up as people of faith,
and we grow a little bit.
And that often looks like we grow spiritually with two left feet.
We sometimes say an apology,
but it’s a really bad apology.
Or sometimes we admit to ourselves that
someone hurt us, but we actually are still holding on to a lot of grudges.
You know, the reality is we judge ourselves far too harshly.
If we could be like children, we would know,
to whatever extent you grow in grace today,
that is enough.
We’re called to be people who trust
that Jesus Christ is leading us day by day like a good shepherd.
And if we’re willing to entrust
ourselves to his care,
we will grow.
We will grow in grace,
and as we do so,
we will grow in our
relationships and our ability to let go of those things that stand in between us and the relationships
of our life.
Yeah, in many ways, we could speak of grace as the foundation of our faith,
and we want as people of faith for grace to be active in us and through us,
to be working in
our own souls and to be working through us into the lives of others.
We endeavor to be gracious
and forgiving people, and that we seek in Jesus Christ because that’s what he has brought to us
and how he leads us to be like him.
So we want to thank you for being willing to have some hard
conversation with us and to think through some very difficult questions.
These are not easy
for any of us because facing sin and trusting grace is hard,
maybe the hardest part of being a disciple.
We want to encourage you, though,
to think about what you’ve answered,
to think about what you’ve thought of,
and to wrestle with how might I be able to let go of some of the things
that are hindering me and move forward in my own life of faith.
We’re certainly grateful that you
would join us for this conversation,
and the only word is if this has spurred a thing for you,
if there’s maybe a place that you know you need to go but you don’t know exactly the first step to do so,
you’ll find a contact link right in the description of wherever you’re engaging.
Sometimes a comment on YouTube is not the right place.
Click that link,
send us a message,
and we’ll get back to you.
It’s an honor for us to be able to walk beside you as you take forgiveness and grace seriously in your life.
That said, we’re glad that you spent time with us today and look forward to
seeing you next week as we continue this series that we’re calling Unhindered.
Thanks, everybody.