Forgiven to Forgive

If you have God’s forgiveness you will be transformed everyday into a more forgiving person.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Well, this morning we’re going to continue our exploration of the forgiveness of Christmas. Here’s what I’m picturing for you in a couple of weeks. You can tell me later, uh, if I got it wrong. But here’s what I’m. Here’s what I’m picturing for you. Just just a couple weeks. I’m thinking that most everyone in the room here will be preparing to have dinner with some family that you do not see too often. At some point there will be a Christmas meal or something. You’ll get together with some people you do not see too often, and for some of you this will be a meal with your in-laws. Who said something hurtful to you about 1520 years ago? Uh, maybe before you were married. And they they never took it back and they never apologized for it. And so you just sort of exist now in a world where you feel mildly judged all the time, and you’re looking forward to that ride home, or that ride home is going to be so, so nice. Others of you will be visited by your adult son, who moved to Oregon a few years back. And now, instead of Jesus, he’s into fair trade, coffee and Marxism and horn rimmed glasses for some reason, right? And somehow you became the enemy. You’re not sure how that happened? Somehow, now you’re the enemy. And the rest of you will spend the meal stepping around the landmines. Uh, you know, they’re they’re, uh, you just don’t know quite where they’re buried or what will set them off.

Someone will say, I’m so glad Covid is over and someone else will go. Actually, it’s not over yet. And you’ll be, oh, isn’t this ham delicious? Relationships with with, with underlying unresolved conflict are tough, aren’t they? They’re hard. Those are hard. They’re basically two, two ways that we as normal, sinful human beings make things worse. And we have a tendency to pick a lane here where one kind of person or the other, either we avoid the conflict or the person with whom we have the conflict. So we those are our flight folks. And then and then we have the other group that’s the the fight group that goes right after the other person, but usually with some anger or with some, some sarcasm and or at least a desire to win and to be right. And both strategies lead to the same place. They don’t resolve the conflict, the pain remains. The no progress gets made. I find it ironic that these will be our chosen strategies for Christmas gatherings that are, at least in name, supposed to be celebrations of the coming one who brought divine forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s my hope that this year will be different for you. My hope is that it’ll be just different for you this year. I hope that this year that you’ll see the forgiveness that lies at the heart of Christmas and of Christianity and of Christ, and that by the power of the spirit at work in you, you would see transformative reconciliation in those relationships, that you would bring forgiveness.

Last week. We we we learned of God and sinners reconciled as the carol goes. Right. We saw in Colossians two how the debt of our sin was paid by God Himself. That God came and took the debt of our sin. He died in our place. Christ met the legal demands of our sin. Our sin was nailed to his cross. Today we’re going to turn to the effect of that forgiveness, the effect of that forgiveness on the person who has been forgiven. If you have God’s forgiveness, you will be transformed into a more forgiving person. Let me say that again. If you have God’s forgiveness, you will be transformed into a more forgiving person. We’re going to look carefully at what is going on in the heart of a person who has the forgiveness of Jesus. You say to me, Christ is forgiven me. I, I’m, I’m my debt has been cancelled. That is fantastic. I hope that’s true of you. What will that forgiveness do inside your mind, though? What will it do? How will it affect you? What will it change inside of you? In short, what it’ll do is it will make you increasingly a more and more forgiving person. So turn with me to Matthew chapter six. You might have it open from the reading earlier, but that’s where we’ll be today.

Uh, we’re going to be just in the last two verses of that passage, verse verses 14 and 15. Um, this is a warning passage, actually, uh, actually, our parable next week is also a warning passage. So I feel two in a row is a very Christmassy approach. So but what I hope is by looking at these, these, these, these passages, I hope that you will agree that that, that there’s no use celebrating Christ’s coming if Christ hasn’t changed us. Right, is that it’s not just a historical thing that happened. It’s a true reality of a transformative life that we now have. Jesus often used hard words to make soft hearts. And so while these these sayings are hard warnings that we’ll be looking at, what they do is they mold our hearts, allowing us to truly celebrate Christmas. So let’s begin by looking at a heart of forgiveness, the forgiving heart. Now, before we can apply this verse, we have to do a little work on the logic of the sentence. So let me just read it for you. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you. Okay, seems simple, but we need to work a little bit on this, because if there’s one way that you could read this sentence and it would put you pretty far, actually from the gospel, this is a conditional sentence.

It’s it’s an if then sentence. If you do something right now, then something will happen in the future. That’s really clear from the next part of the sentence that we’re going to look at here in verse 15 in just a moment. But you might interpret this first part, verse 14. You might interpret it to mean that God’s future forgiveness is determined by our present day forgiveness of other people. That would make our forgiveness a work that we have to do in order to earn God’s forgiveness. Someday, if you take this sentence out of the rest of the Bible, and even out of the language of the verses that surround it, you could interpret it like salvation is conditional on whether or not we have forgiven everybody in our lives. And so you could end up picturing God waiting around to see if he’ll forgive you based on whether or not you’re willing right now to forgive other people. And that would actually be the opposite of the gracious forgiveness God has given to us in Christ. The logic of verses 14 and 15 don’t don’t work like that. These verses are simply describing the reason that Jesus tells his disciples to pray that the capstone of the prayer. So he tells them to pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Now, why would we pray like that? Why? Why has God. Instructed us to pray in that way. Well, it’s because the two types of forgiveness always go together.

They’re inseparable. God’s forgiveness to us in Christ and our forgiveness to people who have wronged us is is completely linked. You can’t separate those two forgivenesses. You can’t have one kind of forgiveness without the other kind of forgiveness. And if you try to separate them, then you have something that is less than biblical Christianity. You’ve actually ruined the gospel. You’ve broken the gospel. The Apostle John wrote in First John chapter two, verses 4 to 6. He writes this whoever says, I know him, meaning Jesus, whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. By this we may know that we are in him. So obedience, then, is the proof of what is true of your spiritual standing with Christ. And that’s the logic of verses 14 and 15. Do you do you want to know that that you will how you’re going to fare when you stand before the father in judgment for your sins? Do you know what? Do you want to know how that’s going to go, whether or not you have the father’s forgiveness in that future moment? Well, then look at your own heart.

And how you treat people who have wronged you now. Assess your own heart. Jesus says, the person who can truly trust in the forgiveness of the father someday are are those who have forgiving hearts right now. That’s verse 14. If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you if you have the Holy Spirit at work in your heart. If you’ve been forgiven and you have the Holy Spirit at work, and he’s leading you into obedience to Christ, and if he’s reminding you of your forgiveness in Christ, you will turn and give that forgiveness to those who have wronged you. You’ll be compelled to. It’s what will be happening inside of you. If you have this forgiveness, you’ll you’ll be you’ll be drawn to it. You it will be your default setting in your heart to want to be at peace with people. And that forgiveness will be an indication that to you that you can you can rest in the fact that when you stand before God the Father, someday you will receive his forgiveness. In fact, it’s been my own experience and and the experience of a lot of mature Christians that I know, uh, that to be at odds with someone to have, uh, something between you and someone else hurts. It actually hurts. It hurts your it hurts your soul for that to remain there. It’s interesting. Non-christians and newer Christians who aren’t yet mature in their faith have a hard time forgiving people.

Mature Christians have a hard time not forgiving people. It’s hard. It’s harder not to. It’s harder to let that go on than to to forgive. They they have an ongoing stress. And when there’s a lack of resolution, that’s what they, they’re losing sleep over, is that this relationship is not the way it ought to be. That’s one way that to tell if you’re if you’re growing in Christ, you can’t allow for relationships to continue on without bringing peace to them through forgiveness. That’s that’s an indication that you’re maturing in your faith in Jesus. The reason for that, that pain, that anxiety you feel is the nature of the gospel itself. It’s it’s the nature of the gospel that’s transformed you itself. As we saw last week, the good news of Christ is divine forgiveness. That’s what the good news is. It’s divine forgiveness. The cross is forgiveness. It’s divinely secured debt repayment given to us for free at the cost of Jesus life. Jesus takes our debt into his own body. He bears the weight of our debt. But when you when you put your trust in Jesus and you receive that forgiveness, you also receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he fills you and guides you to become more like Jesus. You see where this is going? So the longer you live as a Christian, being transformed day by day by the Holy Spirit, the more you become a debt bearer like Jesus.

You become a debt bearer. In your heart, you start to have this monologue, sort of some version of this inner monologue comes up when you are not at peace with other people. If God has forgiven me all my sin. If God has forgiven me all my sin entirely on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice for me, a forgiveness that I do not deserve, I didn’t earn it, and I don’t deserve it. How could I not forgive my friend who sin against me? How could I not? I’m compelled to because of what I know is true. It just doesn’t make sense to be both incredibly grateful for God’s forgiveness to you in Christ, and also unwilling to forgive far less sin that’s been done to you. We’ll see a story from Jesus next week that illustrates the tension between those two. Relationships vary dramatically. Very seriously. Clearly, a forgiven person who’s increasingly shaped by the gospel will hear the call to forgive others sacrificially. And you won’t just hear it, and you won’t just feel it, you’ll respond to it. You’ll respond to it. Now, that’s not to say that you won’t wrestle with this, okay? I’m not saying that you there won’t be any. I’m not saying once you follow Jesus, it’s easy to forgive all people all the time. I’m not saying it’s easy. You will wrestle with it if you’re. If you’re familiar with Tolkien’s work, the Lord of the rings, if you’ve ever read those books, or if you’ve ever seen the movies, you’ll remember the part where where Gollum is is wrestling with his inner desires.

He’s got this wrestling going. He’s being he’s being changed. He’s he’s friends now with these hobbits, and he’s being changed by this friendship with the hobbits, and it seems to be transforming him into the the kind and happy creature that he used to be. But but just as he starts to to show that kindness, an evil thought jumps to his mind. Kill the hobbits. Take the ring. Right. There’s this wrestling that’s going on inside of him. You will wrestle with the application to forgive. You will wrestle with forgiveness. We all do, all of us do. Those of you who have received the father’s forgiveness will know in your mind. You’ll know it full well that we are commanded by God to give the gift of forgiveness to other people. We know that’s the right way to make peace. We know that that actually will bring peace in a way that that bitterness and ongoing strife and vengeance that’ll never bring peace. We know that. And yet, because we’re not yet perfect in our walk with Christ, sometimes what we’ll wrestle with is what we’ll reason to ourselves that that, you know, forgiveness right now just isn’t right, we’ll say, or forgiveness isn’t appropriate in this case or or you know what? We we need to wait for the other person to come to us.

And then and then we’ll grant forgiveness. But the person who will stand someday before the Lord, completely forgiven of his sins, is not going to succumb to those lies of our enemy that tells us to withhold forgiveness from others. We are forgiven to forgive. We are compelled by the spirit to be peacemakers, and to model the grace that we’ve received by giving that same grace away to other people. That’s. That’s the forgiving heart. Okay. Now let’s look at the other side. Let’s look at the unforgiving heart. Now I’m going to spend less time on this point this morning, because we’re going to look at the problem of unforgiveness in detail next week, as I mentioned earlier. But I want you to note here exactly what this says. So that next week when we look at that Jesus story, you will see that Jesus words here in the sermon on the Mount match up very clearly with his his parable in Matthew 18. Let me read it for you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses. Notice how this is the logical conclusion of verse 14. If an indication of your future forgiveness from God is your present forgiveness of others, then your lack of forgiveness of others would indicate your future lack of forgiveness from God. Makes sense right? And that’s the warning.

That’s the warning in this passage. The sobering warning. This is the part where you need to be honest with yourself. When you take a rugged spiritual inventory of what’s going on in your heart. This is important. Do you withhold grace and forgiveness from other people in your life who have wronged you? Is that what you do? Do you withhold it from them? If so, that should be a flashing red light to you that you don’t actually have God’s forgiveness in Christ. Your heart hasn’t been made new by God’s grace. You know that phrase? Find it in your heart. You know that phrase we use? You know, find it. Find it in your heart to love someone or find it in your heart to to be kind or find it in your heart to to forgive someone. It’s actually a pretty good phrase. I kind of like it. Find it in your heart. But we usually mean something when we say it like something like muster up the right words to say to someone else. God would actually have us do something more. Search your heart and find something in there. If there is someone in your life that you won’t forgive, why not? Why not? Why do you not forgive? This person? What’s preventing you from forgiving them? Maybe you should. And you know you should and maybe you even want to. But it’s difficult, and I want to I want to come back to that in just a few minutes.

I’m going to come back to that that person that’s that knows they’re supposed to and is finding it difficult. But maybe. And more concerning and far more spiritually dangerous is you just don’t want to. And so you refuse to forgive. Maybe what you find in your heart is a disconnect between the grace from God that you claim for yourself, and the grace you’re willing to give to other people. Friends, this verse is a very grave warning to us about that disconnection. If that’s where you are. Jesus words here to you is that future judgment isn’t going to go the way you think it will go. You think that you have the father’s forgiveness of your sins, but you haven’t considered the truth, that your unforgiving heart is the warning sign of your unforgiven status before the Lord right now. We’ll return to this next week. We’ll come back to this idea of unforgiveness. But but right now, what I want to do is I want to talk about the difficulty of forgiveness, how difficult it is. And and I want to talk about what what I, what I’m calling the daily deposit of forgiveness. I am fully aware it is easier to speak about forgiveness in the abstract than it is to apply it when real wrongs and hurts and emotions are involved. If ever there was something easier said than done, it is forgiveness. And that’s because there are a lot of other factors at play, like justice and anger.

And resentment and sometimes embarrassment. Sometimes irreversible consequences. Victims of graffiti can buy paint. Victims of assault cannot buy a new body. Trust can be rebuilt, but childhoods can’t be relived. Adulteries can’t be uncommitted. We can heal from violence, but we cannot unremember the violence. And sometimes when we hear people talk about forgiveness, they will couple it with forgetting, won’t they forgive and forget? We need to forgive and we need to forget. Or they’ll assume that forgiveness is the end of the pain, and that there would be no lingering consequences if there. If there really was forgiveness, there would be no lingering consequences. And that’s plainly wrong, by the way. You can’t make yourself not have knowledge of something. That’s what forgetting is, is not having. It’s not having it in your mind. It’s not having knowledge of something. You can’t make yourself not have knowledge of it. And yet remembering sometimes prompts resentment that lingers in your mind, in your heart, to the point that that you relive the hurt and then you wonder if you’ve actually forgiven at all. It’s hard, right? A professor at Boston University named Charles Griswold, wrote a book that is considered by some to be sort of the best secular philosophy on forgiveness. So it’s not Christian philosophy, it’s not biblical philosophy, but it’s it’s secular philosophy on forgiveness. So he’s not writing from a Christian perspective, but he sees the problem of resentment.

How can we say that we’ve forgiven and still harbor bad feelings toward the other person? And Griswold writes. I say that we recognize professions of forgiveness when some resentment lingers, only so long as there is commitment to its continued abatement. So, so what he’s saying is that that the only real forgiveness is if the resentment that you feel toward the person who’s wronged you continues to decline, and you’re committed to making sure that it declines, it’s abatement, right? It’s going to decline and it’s going to continue to decline, and you are committed to it declining. And Griswold would argue that it has to decline to the point that the resentment is actually gone. And if you’re not committed to eradicating your resentment, well, then you haven’t really forgiven at all. Well, that sounds good. But how how, how how do you actually do that? How how do you forgive in a way that addresses the ongoing resentment that spurred along by the the ongoing pain? You can’t just wish it away. We can’t just say it’s wrong. It’s gone. When it. When it’s not gone, it’s still there. We can be committed to the abatement of our resentment. But how does it actually abate? How does it actually decline and go away? Well here I want to turn back to what Jesus teaches us, what Jesus teaches us here in this passage. See verses 14 and 15 are the capstone teaching of the Lord’s Prayer, meaning that he’s elaborating on what we are to pray.

He says that we’re to pray, forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors. You can see the connection there, right between God’s forgiveness and our forgiveness. It’s right there in the prayer. But notice how this is part of a daily prayer. It’s really important. It’s part of a daily prayer, isn’t it? Before we pray for forgiveness, we pray for daily bread. That’s the phrase we all know, right? Give us this day our daily bread. It’s daily bread. What we’re saying there, of course, is that we we trust that today, just like yesterday. Just like last week, today. Lord, as I pray to you, I. I’m trusting that you’ll provide today for today. And after that, Jesus instructs us to pray that God will lead us today, steering us clear of the temptations that that we’re going to face and and not, you know, delivering us from the dangers of the evil that will be all over, around us, around us today. The whole prayer has this vibe of asking God for to to act this moment on this day, because we want to live this day for his glory. And right in the middle of that. We ask for God’s forgiveness. Now, why is that? What is that? Because God’s forgiveness for our sins expires every day, and we have to renew it every day.

Like a library book. Is that what it is? No, of course not. That’s not how God’s forgiveness works. It’s not something we got to renew every day. We’re praying that way because we’re saying in this relationship of grace that we have with you, Lord, we acknowledge our lingering sin and our need to walk in step with your spirit. The whole Christian life is a life of repentance, constantly acknowledging where we have failed the Lord, constantly reaching out, remembering that forgiveness that we’ve received from him. We do not renew God’s forgiveness, but we acknowledge our need for it every day. And right after that, daily need to right our minds and to right our hearts with the gospel is the commitment to forgiving other people the debts that they owe us. Daily. Forgiving others is not always a one and done transaction. You know, you don’t just forgive and then it’s all over with. No, no, no. Every day you get up, it’s a commitment to the abatement of your resentment through the daily remembering of what Jesus has done for you and what you are now called to do for others. Every day. Remember, forgiving requires pain. The other person’s debt. You may not pay it all at once. Some debts can be paid rather quickly. Some will be paid over a lifetime. Author Dan Hamilton wrote an essay on forgiveness, where he describes it as a gift that you paid for on credit card that hits home for Christmas, doesn’t it? It’s like a debt that you.

It’s like a gift that you have paid for on a credit card. And then you give the gift to the person all at once. Here you go. Here’s your gift. You get to use this. This is yours now. But the the person who paid for it, Hamilton writes. The giver. Will continue to pay unseen until the full debt is paid. Some of the debts of others. We pay. In our part, we pay for in small deposits every single day. We remember the forgiveness we have in Christ and we apply that grace to our hearts. And then we apply it to the people who wronged us. And that’s how resentment abates. You want to know how you can, how you can see this resentment for the other person. Move away. Lesson get smaller. You begin to see that person the way the father sees you. And you remember your sin, and you remember that that that he softened your heart. Your heart softens toward your enemy because you understand what grace did to make God your friend. I want you to see your friends and your family this Christmas through the lens of Christ and His great act of forgiveness. That’s how I want you to see him. See your friends and your family, even your enemies, through the lens of Christ’s great act of forgiveness to you. If you’re holding on to the hurt, if you’re waiting for justice, if if you refuse to forgive, you need to take an honest look in the mirror of Jesus words and ask yourself, what does that say about my sin? What does that say? I know it’s hard.

Nothing we’ve talked about this morning is easy. I know it’s hard. Those scars remain. They can linger for a long time. But if we see our own sin debt for what it is, we can make daily deposits of forgiveness to other people. I knew a man with scars, actual physical scars in his body. Ionce hosted a podcast in the Detroit area, and my guest one week was a guy named Kevin Ramsby, who wrote a book called A Fight to Forgive. Kevin did ministry in Detroit. And one night he was attacked in his home by a drug addict who had broken in. And Kevin tried to beat him away with a tennis racket, which I suggested him. Maybe not his best choice in that moment, because the other guy had a knife and he stabbed Kevin 37 times. Now, if I hadn’t had the man sitting right there in front of me, I would have assumed that that meant that Kevin was dead. He was left for dead. And I won’t share with you the details of what happened to get him to the hospital, because they are pretty hard to hear. But by God’s grace, Kevin got medical help and recovered.

And when we started in my interview with him, when we started talking about forgiveness, Kevin said, people often ask me when I forgave this guy, they wanted to know the timing on it. When did you forgive him? And he remembered turning to his wife in his hospital bed and telling her, I have to forgive him. Uh, in his hospital bed. Church. He doesn’t even know at that point if he’s going to live. His wounds are still open and will be for weeks as he heals. The addict at that point hadn’t even been caught yet. He was out. He’d been. He would run for three months before they would finally catch him. But Kevin said, I just knew how much I had been forgiven, so I knew I was going to have to forgive this guy. But that wasn’t the end of the transaction. It wasn’t as if he turned to his wife, forgave him, and it was all over. That’s not how it worked at all. Kevin said that when he started to see the impact that the attack had on his family and the the trauma that they had experienced, and when he started to see the physical toll it took on him and the mental toll it took on him with his own growing fear, he said he wrestled with thoughts of revenge all the way through. When his attacker was finally caught, Kevin’s thoughts turned from revenge to justice. He said he had some very dark moments during that journey, but what brought him through all of that darkness was the gospel.

It was. It was amazing to listen to Kevin shift the focus away from his attacker to Christ. He carried the wounds of this man’s debt to him physically in his body, but he was able to forgive him because he knew the one who carried the physical wounds in his body for his sins. When he was given the opportunity in court to give his victim impact statement, which is a statement where you can come up and you tell the court what this person has done to you. Kevin didn’t want to do that. Kevin instead took that time. He chose to reframe the story through the gospel and in court, in open court. He talked about how with Christ at the center of this story, God would take what happened and use it for his glory. Every day Kevin wakes up choosing to forgive this guy. Can you imagine having a relationship with your attacker? Kevin does. Kevin writes this guy every month, sometimes twice a month. He’s helped him buy Christmas presents for his family. He’s helped him get supplies in jail that he needs. And some day, Kevin believes that he’ll meet his attacker face to face, not as his enemy, but as his friend. That’s what divinely given grace will do in your heart. That’s what it does. Do you have that grace? Are you giving it away? Let’s pray.