Patient Forbearance

Patience, forbearance, and forgiveness are the path to perseverance. Your marriage will not only survive with Christlike perseverance; it will strengthen and shine. Your marriage will become a public demonstration of the gospel of Christ. It will serve his mission, and the strength of your marriage will be a blessing to you as well.

[00:00:06] Unloading the dishwasher works smoothly. Loading the dishwasher. We have different methods on. Yeah, he’s very much more organized and I’m just like, get the dishes in the dishwasher so we can run it. From what I’ve heard, in every marriage, there’s a dishwasher loader and somebody who is like chaos. In every marriage one is organized, and one is chaotic. I guess I’m the chaotic. I don’t like washing dishes, so I’ll do the drying and putting it away while she tends to wash the dishes. He doesn’t like cleaning the bath or the shower is like your big thing. I’d rather clean the toilet than the shower. Yeah, so a fair trade off there. We really separate in this area. We don’t do a whole lot of household things together. It just doesn’t work well. In the beginning, when we were first married, we tried to cook, do things in the kitchen, and we realized real quick that we each had different thoughts on how this should go. And we just agreed to disagree, I guess. I’m a little bit of this, a little bit of that and taste it, see what it’s like. And he follows recipes to the nth degree. So that was our first sign that, oh, we maybe shouldn’t do this task together. What do we do household wise together? I’ll declutter everything and he loves it when I do that and he is more of the he’ll go do the bathrooms, the floors, that kind of thing.

[00:01:38] So, we definitely agree on that. I don’t know, I mean, I think cleaning the bathrooms. I Was just gonna say that. Just because it’s kind of a coordinated effort. It sounds silly, but like I’ll clean the showers and the bathtubs and then she’ll clean like the vanities and the mirrors, and then we even get Christian involved. He gets toilet duty and we can both agree on that. Gardening outside work. I tend to follow your lead because you know how to do it efficiently. You know what you want to have done. Yeah. And cleaning the house. I would do the same thing. I’d follow your lead. I mean, maybe we’re old fashioned. I do the outside work; she does the inside work. But there are things that I know that she does better. And it’s like, just tell me what to do. I don’t want to have to think about what to do, but I’ll do anything you tell me. And there’s probably other times that it’s the exact opposite. We make the bed together every morning. Oh, yeah. That’s our big chore of the day. It goes really fast. After a few hundred times we’ve got it down pretty good. We won’t agree on how to do it, but what is it? I’d say vacuuming. Oh, yeah, we do work together for that. Jennifer usually does the upstairs and then I’ll do the downstairs.

[00:02:59] And when it comes to dishes, no, there’s no agreement on when they get done or how they get done. Right. We do agree on who’s gonna do them, but it’s not me. It’s nice they can agree, don’t you think? Yeah. The funny thing about household chores is it’s one of the few areas where you learn over the lifetime of your marriage to stay in your lane. Uh, you can grow to like the same foods. You can adjust to that. You can appreciate each other’s hobbies. You can adjust to each other’s way of communicating and learn to love each other with each other’s love language. But when it comes to loading that dishwasher, you’d better do it right or don’t do it at all. Haven’t we all learned this? I can’t put a dish into the dishwasher correctly. I can’t do it. It’s physically impossible. See, when I put one in, it looks correct to me. It does. It looks correct to me, but it’s not. And it never will be. And how dare you? The one tiny contribution I have been able to make in this area of our marriage is that after a few years, I was able to convince her to stop loading the knives blade up, and I literally had to be stabbed several times to make this point. It was worth it though. They say the one thing that you have to be careful in praying about and praying for is patience.

[00:04:34] You’ve heard this? You got to be careful when you pray for patience. If you ask God to make you a more patient person, buckle up, because the only way to do that is to give you something that will try your patience. It’s the only way to do it. You can’t learn patience in theory. You can only learn it in practice. God will bring something into your life that will make you go slower than you want to go. Or he’ll bring a change into your life that will change more slowly than you want it to change. And there is no greater example of this than the slow changes that are necessary to make you and your spouse a one flesh union, spiritually united as one entity that together pictures Christ. No one will test your patience or expose your lack of patience like your spouse. And you say, Kyle, I got a kid who’s on my last nerve right now. Uh, aren’t children the tool that God uses? Aren’t they a bigger test to our patience and I would tell you, there is no doubt that God can use kids as a great tool to form us into the patient people that we need to become. I mean, your life can be going along very nicely, and all of a sudden one of your kids decides that all of the white clothes, plus one new red sweatshirt need to be washed together.

[00:05:53] And suddenly you become a very impatient person. You’re going to learn grace and patience through your kids, no doubt. But here’s the thing about kids: eventually they will move away. And if they don’t, that will also try your patience. But eventually they will move away. And who’s there? Your spouse for your lifetime, right? God is using your spouse to build your patience. No one will present you with the opportunities to grow in the depth of Christ-like patience and forbearance like your spouse. So, patience, forbearance, or tolerance and forgiveness. These are the qualities of our new life in Christ that we’re going to explore this morning. When a couple gets up every day and puts on these qualities of Christ, it is armor. It is armor against the attacks of Satan and the world that try to take your marriage down. Patience, forbearance and forgiveness are the path to perseverance. Your marriage will not only survive with Christ-like perseverance, it will strengthen and it will thrive. It will shine. Your marriage will become a public demonstration of the gospel of Christ. It will serve his mission, and you will very much enjoy it. It will be a great blessing to you as well. Church, it’s my hope that the marriages of Calvary would serve as hundreds of gospel demonstrations throughout our region. That’s what I’m hoping for, that we would just be known as a place that has incredible marriages that serve as demonstrations of the gospel.

[00:07:39] Not because they’re perfect, don’t hear me wrong, not because they’re perfect, but because they persevere. They’re demonstrations to a world that needs Christ, that there truly is forgiveness and peace that can be found in Jesus. Ironically, it’s the imperfections, not the perfections. It’s the imperfections of our marriages that provide the opportunity for us to demonstrate Christ-like perseverance, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. I want you to begin to see your marital struggles as opportunities. I know that’s not how they feel, but I want you to begin to see them as opportunities for you to become more like Jesus, to build a stronger marriage, and to show Christ to the people who are around you. If you have your Bible, you can open up to Colossians 3:12. That’s where we’ll be today. I’ll also have it on the screen. First thing I want to do this morning is I want to make a note. Just a quick note on the structure of our two verses this morning. And then we’ll look at patience, forbearance and forgiveness both in Christ and in our marriages. So let’s start with a pretty important note, I think, on the structure. Here’s our verses put on then as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience bearing with one another.

[00:09:03] And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. I want to start by noting how these two verses work together, because it’s pretty important. The first five items in the list are internal character qualities that result in attitudes. They result in ways of acting. They deal with our heart and the heart’s effect on the way we interact with other people. So, for instance, I put on a compassionate heart. That means I also need to put on kindness. I put on humility, which means I’m going to be gentle. Today we’re going to talk about the internal quality of patience. You can think of these five qualities as the impact of the gospel on you. So now I’m following Jesus. I’ve received the gospel. I’ve trusted in Christ. I believe the gospel. This is the impact that it makes on you. These qualities describe Jesus and what he did for us and so increasingly, they describe us as we follow Jesus. In verse 13, we switch from adjectives to imperatives. So now we have two instructions, two commands that are given to us: bear with and forgive. Now these are not attitudes. These are actions that we are to carry out that flow out of the five attitudes. Here’s why I’m pointing this out this morning. You can’t carry out these two commands unless you put on those five attitudes.

[00:10:43] You have to be properly dressed. You ever go to a place and you’re not properly dressed? You’re going to go to a place and everybody’s dressed up and you’re in flip flops? You show up and you’re all dressed up. You thought this was going to be an important occasion. Everybody’s casual. You feel very overdressed. Have you ever been in a situation like that? It’s hard to function because you’re not ready for the occasion. When the time comes for you to bear with and forgive a person, especially your spouse, you won’t be able to do it unless you’re dressed for the occasion. So often, people in troubled marriages are told to bear the sins of your spouse and forgive them. And the person says, I can’t, I can’t forgive. And then a well-meaning Christian comes along, maybe a pastor, someone like me comes along and says, well you have to? That’s what Christ would do. You know, forgive 70 times seven. That’s what Jesus said. And the person says, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how. I don’t have it in me. I don’t want to. And again, the well-meaning Christian comes along and says, well, you just gotta. You just gotta do it. Just. Just do it. Just try it. Try harder at it. Fake it till you make it. Say the words I forgive you. Act as if you forgive.

[00:12:01] Stop being angry. Just stop being angry. You know, I might as well have told you to go for a spacewalk without a spacesuit. Or go for a scuba dive without an air tank. You can’t do it if you’re not dressed for it. You can’t bear the sins of your spouse and forgive if you are not clothed in the compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience of Christ. If you’re not clothed in the character of Christ, you can’t carry out the actions of Christ. Not really. You can say the words. You can sort of do it. You can have a cease fire for a while. But to truly cover over the sins and find forgiveness that sets your marriage free, you have to trust in the one who sets you free from sin and then clothe yourself every day in that gospel of truth. That’s the note. That’s why we go over the grammar. Okay? That’s important. Now let’s look at each one of these three items and let’s start with patience. As I mentioned, patience is the fifth internal character quality that’s listed. It might be the hardest of the five to put on. See patience is delayed gratification. It’s saying I’m willing to not get what I want right now. Normally when we tell someone to have patience, we only mean for a short time. So have patience. Eventually, you’ll get the thing that you want.

[00:13:31] And if we don’t get the thing we want in the amount of time that we’re willing to have patience, we say we’ve run out of patience. Sometimes our patience runs out so fast, and we’re so irritable during the delay that it’s not really patience that we have at all. We’re just really unwilling participants in a scenario that we’re forced to be unhappy in, and we will let everybody know it. That is not patience, okay? That’s not patience. That’s a hostage situation. That’s being ornery. You’ve heard of ornery? That’s being ornery. Biblical patience. Biblical patience is an act of willingness. It’s an act of willingness to sacrifice for someone else. You choose to sacrifice on behalf of the other person. In the biblical scope of patience, it could mean delaying our gratification on into eternity. That in this life we don’t ever quite get what we want so that you can serve the needs of another person. That’s biblical patience. And usually if we have to be patient, that means that that other person’s sin affects us personally. Jesus teaches a great parable on patience. We looked at it in detail back at Christmas time when we had a whole series on forgiveness. If you haven’t had a chance to watch that series, you can watch it on our website. It’s called The Forgiveness of Christmas, and I invite you to check that out. He teaches a parable. We look for one week at a parable in Matthew 18.

[00:15:03] Now, I’m not going to go into all the details of this parable this morning, but I want to point out one part of it to you. There’s a servant that can’t repay a great debt to his master, okay. He owes him far more than he could ever pay him back in so many lifetimes. He just never could pay it back. And the master has pity on the servant and forgives him the debt. The same servant has a fellow servant come to him with a much smaller debt. But the servant shows him no pity, and throws his fellow servant into jail until he can pay everything that he owes. I want you to see the two verses from this parable side by side. These are two appeals. These are the appeals that each servant makes. The first servant to his master, the fellow servant to his fellow servant. And I got a little crazy with the color, I see that. Um, but I wanted you to see the parts and how much parallel there is between these two verses. Um, I want you to see that. In the parable, the first appeal pictures our debt to God. A debt that we can never repay. We are that servant. In the parable that’s all of us. We’re in this situation with God where we recognize our debt, great sin debt before God.

[00:16:26] But all we can really do is throw ourselves at his mercy. Now, our first thought when we first learned that we’re at odds with God is, I can repay it. I can do it. I can repay my bad deeds with my good deeds. I can make it up to God. That’s what a whole world of people is trying to do, is make it up to God, right? All I need is some time. So, I need God to be patient with me so that I can make it up. It’s a debt that’s so big, the servant will never be able to repay it. The master can only forgive the debt by absorbing the debt himself. It’s a beautiful picture of Jesus absorbing the debt for us so that we can be set free. But I want you to see that the first impulse was that he asks for patience. He knows he needs the master not to collect on his debt right now, He’s not in a position to make it right right now. So, I need a little time is what this servant is saying. And then the fellow servant comes to him in the exact same position. He owes the servant. The only difference here is that the debt is much smaller. It’s a much more manageable debt, one that could actually be repaid with some patience. And this servant says the exact same thing word for word.

[00:17:49] Have patience with me. Whenever you see words in Scripture repeat like that, you want to pay close attention, because repetition is a way to bring emphasis in all the biblical languages, both Hebrew and Greek. If you see repetition, especially word for word repetition, that’s a point of interest that you should be focusing in on. The reason these verses parallel each other so closely is that Jesus is teaching us that the patience that we cry out to God to receive is the same patience we need to show to everyone else. I want you to picture that fellow servant there in that second verse, verse 29. I want you to picture that fellow servant as your spouse, even if he or she hasn’t asked for patience. I want you to picture that fellow servant as your spouse. That impulse, that urge inside of you that hopes that God won’t bring the consequences of your sin crashing down on your head. Other people who have sinned against you have that same impulse toward you. They need you to be patient with them, the same way that you are hoping that God will be patient with you. Biblical patience is a full recognition that other people are going to sin against you. They are. You need to know this. We need to remember this all the time. Other people are going to sin against us.

[00:19:22] Biblical patience means you won’t require them to pay that sin debt back immediately. That they won’t be required to pay it back right away. You leave space. You bear their debt in yourself for a while. Now we’re going to get to forgiveness here in just a minute. But right now, what we’re talking about is putting on patience, and patience says you have to stop making everybody pay you back immediately. That’s biblical patience. Patience is the internal, Christ-like attitude that creates the space between your happiness and the sins of others that allows for the slowness of spiritual growth. Have you ever noticed in yourself that your spiritual growth is relatively slow, and that you often find yourself struggling with old sins, and that you mark your growth by years and decades, and not days and hours? Have you noticed this about yourself? That’s true of everybody. That’s everybody in the world. Everybody’s going that pace. That’s true of your spouse. And I get it, I get it. Church, you want that spouse to change in the next few hours, because you have to be in their presence for the next few hours. Right? So, you’d like that time to be nice. You’d like it to go a lot faster. But the cleansing work of the Holy Spirit, it’s a lifelong process. You’re going to work through these things with your spouse. There is going to be victory.

[00:21:01] But it will take time. And that time will require you to be patient. And you say but Kyle, I’m not a naturally patient person. Repent of that. Okay? Repent of that. Look, nobody is a naturally patient person, okay? Nobody. You are opting out of a category that does not exist. No one is a naturally patient person. Nobody says I enjoy taking the brunt of someone else’s sin and not getting what I want. Nobody says that. Nope. Nobody feels that way about things. Patience is one of those things that has to be cultivated. It has to be cultivated in your heart. It comes through daily remembering God’s incredible patience shown to you every day as you progress slowly toward Christ’s likeness. That same quality of patience that’s shown to us very clearly in Jesus’ parable is what we need to have for our spouse. Now, if we have this patience, what must we do with it? Well, two things. First, we are to bear with each other. Bear with each other. This is a very interesting command to me. This is one of those verses where sometimes we smuggle in the teaching from other parts of the Bible and assume that this verse must be saying what those verses are saying. If you’re like me, as soon as you hear the word bear and you’re reading your Bible and you see the word bear, you immediately think, bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

[00:22:37] Okay, that’s Galatians 6:2. You hear bear, you think bear another person’s burdens. That’s a very beloved verse, talking about seeing brothers and sisters who are in need and helping them. And usually we apply this very, very broadly to mean helping people in all sorts of predicaments. As a side note, though, if you go to Galatians six, what you’ll find there is that the burdens that Paul is talking about are seeing fellow Christians in their sin and helping them out of their sin, helping to restore them. That’s what he’s actually talking about there. But here in Colossians three, Paul is not saying bear each other’s burdens. He’s not saying bear each other’s burdens. He’s saying, bear with each other. If there’s a burden in this verse, it’s the other person. The other person is the burden here. Did you know that there’s a place in the Bible that tells us just to put up with each other? This is it. This is it. This is the verse that says, just start putting up with each other. Tolerate the stupidity and foolishness of your spouse. Put up with your spouse’s terrible behavior. Put up with it. Now, I know your initial reaction to that because it’s my initial reaction too. I’m not going to just take it. I’m not going to just take it.

[00:23:59] I’m not going to tolerate his anger. I’m not going to just put up with her nagging. We’re not supposed to just look at each other and look the other way and forget about the sins of other people. Agreed. You’re right. We’re not. We’re not supposed to do that. But one of the things that we must do is fully embrace the truth that our spouse will sin against us, and we must have the patience to create the space that’s necessary for growth. And the only way to do that is to be willing to bear, to put on our shoulders the weight of our spouse’s sin. Some of you have a zero-tolerance policy for your spouse. You might not have it for other people, but you have it for your spouse. If he or she steps out of line in any direction, it’s all wrath until there’s full repayment. Oh, I’m going to let him know about it. Oh, I’m going to make sure she knows where she went wrong. That’s actually on you. You’re the problem in that scenario. Your spouse’s sin has exposed your sin. You may have been sinned against. You probably were. But you are sinfully unwilling to bear with your spouse in an understanding way. And that’s because you haven’t put on Christ-like patience. You’re not dressed for the occasion here. We need to look at our spouse and say, I don’t require an eye for an eye.

[00:25:36] I don’t need to be paid back. I don’t need to require payment immediately in full. For what you’ve done to me. I want to use a pretty extreme example here, and this may hit close to home for for some of you. And I don’t mean it to be hurtful, but to inspire you to bear with each other. Do you ever wonder how it is that there are some marriages that survive sexual infidelity? Do you ever wonder how that’s even possible? Sometimes you can even talk to Christians who have been flourishing in their marriages for a while, recount the time in the past where they worked through the greatest betrayal possible. Look at this sin list that Paul tells us to put to death back up in verse five. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Sexual infidelity covers that full list. It meets the requirements of everything in the list that Paul tells us to put to death. It’s a sin so emotionally troubling that even the world calls it cheating. Have you noticed that? Even the world goes, oh, he cheated on me. Or she’s cheating on me. Even, uh, not even married couples. Just people dating will talk about cheating. There’s a law written on our hearts that being unfaithful is wrong because it violates the sanctity of the one flesh union of marriage.

[00:27:04] So how is it possible to see marriages surviving, even thriving, after such a great betrayal? Well, it’s because of this aspect of the new life that we have in Christ lived out in its most extreme form in marriage. It’s a man or a woman willing to bear the sins of a spouse for a long period of time. It’s spirit-empowered patience that created the space for repentance and forgiveness, and eventually, restoration. Its Christ-like willingness to suffer for the sins of others. That’s how. If you are in this spot, if you have this, if this is part of your story, I want to tell you that there is hope. There’s hope. The gospel of Christ at work, through the power of the Holy Spirit brought into your marriage, can rescue and restore even the most broken marriage. But again, I want you to hear me on this church. Bearing with each other is not the only step here. I’m not saying marriages survive because people just put up with each other, okay? That’s not good. That’s how you get two old people living as roommates, just griping at each other all the time. Okay? That’s how you get there. They’re still married because they’re not supposed to get divorced. That’s not what Paul is saying here. He’s not just saying, put up with each other. Try to keep going somehow.

[00:28:39] Bearing with each other, with a heart of patience creates a space to do the second command, which is to forgive each other. Patience and bearing don’t pay the sin debt. Patience and bearing create space, but they don’t pay the sin debt. Forgiveness does. Patience and bearing make the space for the medicine of forgiveness to do its work. God is patient with us. He suffers our sins. He puts up with us. He puts up without immediately exacting his justice on us. Have you noticed that? And when you sin, you don’t immediately get the consequences for it. And what that means is it creates space and time for us to hear the gospel and to feel the weight of our conviction, and to repent of sins and to receive his grace and to be forgiven. As Christians, we are now carriers of that gospel. We are gospel ambassadors. We are conduits of God’s grace to other people. It’s very telling what Paul includes here about forgiveness and what he doesn’t. Did you notice how he starts with complaint and then he jumps right to forgiveness? Do you see that there? If you have a complaint, forgive he said. Aren’t there a few steps between my complaint and my forgiveness? Maybe something the other person needs to do there? How is it I just go from my complaint to my forgiveness? Aren’t there some more steps? Well, biblically, there are actually some more steps.

[00:30:18] Jesus said in Matthew 7 to get the log out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly to get the speck out of your brother’s eye. So, the first step is introspection and repentance, and then going to the other person and helping the other person see where they’ve gone wrong. In Matthew 18, Jesus outlines a whole process for addressing someone who has sinned, including getting other people involved, if necessary, to come and to address the sin going on in that other person’s life, calling them to repent. But Paul here doesn’t mention any of that, does he? He doesn’t mention any of that here in Colossians. That doesn’t mean that Paul sees that as unnecessary. He’s just skipping right to the end. He’s skipping right to the end. He’s telling us, look, church, the goal when someone sins against you is forgiveness. That’s where we’re headed. We’re heading toward forgiveness. If you have a complaint against your spouse, the goal is forgiveness. That’s where it’s got to end for a Christian. Nothing short of forgiveness will do for a person who follows Jesus. It’ll take time, depending on the severity of the sin, it may take a very long time, but there is no goal for a Christian short of full forgiveness. Don’t miss the must here. Do you see it? Do you see the word must? Don’t miss that must. That’s a translation of three words.

[00:31:53] So also you. So also you. This is not choose your own adventure. There are not multiple endings to this story for a Christian. If you are following Jesus, your complaint ends in forgiveness and a forgiveness that is of the quality of the forgiveness that we’ve been given in the Lord Jesus Christ. That kind of forgiveness, a fully gracious gift that bears our sins and sets the other person free. Christian forgiveness doesn’t carry bitterness, and it doesn’t carry vengeance. There’s so many marriages across our community, including right here in our own church, that are struggling under the weight of accumulated sin that has not been released through gospel shaped forgiveness. You’ve been patient. You’ve been bearing with your spouse, but you have not moved to forgiveness. Paul Tripp describes one couple that he was counseling one time with a very vivid picture. He said they both held on to the record of the other’s wrongs, as if it was a valuable family heirloom. Mm. And that’s the case. Isn’t that the truth? You’ve kept meticulous records of all the ways your spouse has been the one at fault. Things he said, things she did. You’ve got your spouse’s sin with yours conveniently edited out, stored in an album in your mind. And you can pull it out and you can see all the things that are there, and you say, hey, as soon as he starts addressing all of these faults and starts working on himself.

[00:33:40] That’s the phrase I’ve heard so many times. As soon as you start working on yourself, then, then we can get to forgiveness. Just for a moment, church, I’d like you to ask yourself, Did God forgive you because of the work you did to make yourself worthy of his forgiveness? Did you work on yourself enough to get to the place where God said, all right, I think you’ve paid enough? No, of course not. That wouldn’t be gracious forgiveness at all. You know what that would be? That would be earning. So let’s just be honest for a moment. What we really mean when we say we’re willing to forgive our spouse often is that we’re willing to receive payment for the debt that they owe us. We’re open to receiving payment. Henri Nouwen, in his book The Road to Daybreak, wrote this: by not forgiving, I chained myself to a desire to get even, thereby losing my freedom. A forgiven person forgives. This is what we proclaim when we pray and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. This lifelong struggle lies at the heart of the Christian life. Church, I am not saying this is simple. It’s not. There’s a process here. We do need to get to repentance. There needs to be acknowledgment of sin. We can’t just turn a blind eye and say we forgive and go on without addressing the problems.

[00:35:11] But all of that is part of a healthy marriage. It’s all part of what we need to be doing to maintain and grow and develop a healthy marriage. But here’s the thing you won’t be able to do that if you don’t create the space for that work through patience and tolerance. Or if your goal is just to be right, or if your goal is to receive payback instead of graciously forgiving. We gave questions to the couples that came to our date night event. There’s another one coming up here in October. I invite you to come to that. But we gave questions to to our couples as they went out that they could discuss over their date. I want to give you a question to consider as you leave today. On what issue in my marriage am I unwilling to forgive my spouse the way Christ is forgiven me? Which one is it? And don’t immediately go to all the other places where you’ve already forgiven and say, look how good I’m doing. Go to the one where you haven’t. Go to the one you’ve been hanging on to. What issue is that that you’re unwilling to forgive? If you will honestly assess your heart and call out that issue, whatever it is, you will move your marriage closer to Jesus. And your marriage will move closer to being the demonstration of the gospel of forgiveness that it is designed to be. Let’s pray.