Ephesians 4:31-32 Forgiveness

Transcription

1 Ephesians 4:31-32 Forgiveness 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Eph 4:31-32 NIV) Pray Rotting in prison, planning revenge Adnon Syed is serving a life sentence in Maryland. Five million people now wonder if he is really guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae in Baltimore 15 years ago. Fifteen years this guy has been in prison. Does anyone know this story? It ended almost a month ago, but I have to admit it I was helplessly addicted to the new number one podcast in the world. It's called Serial and every week it tells one story. And then on week 12 it ended. I probably changed my mind about whether Adnon did it 25 different times in those three months. But I don t care as much about the podcast as I do about this guy rotting in a prison. I can imagine that if he didn t do this horrible act, then he has got to be about the most bitter person in the world. He probably has to fight off feelings of malice, rage, anger, slander and bitterness. It reminds me of my old French friend Edmond Dantes. He was framed and ended up spending years in prison. He kept the rising bitterness at bay as best he could, but deep down he had plans. He would get his revenge. While there he learned a million things about being a gentleman, about sword play, about sophistication and charm. And he learned the key to a treasure. And when he got out, I pleaded with him to get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice, but he ignored me. My pal Eddie got his revenge. He pretended to be a count, built a new life for himself and subsequently destroyed those who had hurt him. My guess is that none of you have spent half a lifetime in a French prison or even a Maryland Correctional Facility, but I am equally certain that most of you (And I asked quite a few of you) have been betrayed by someone, been treated harshly and unfairly, have been abandoned, have been truly hurt, maybe even crushed. How do you get rid of rage when the world revels in it? And this verse, speaks a gentle charge to you:

2 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. And you read this and you assent to it. You know that s the way it should be, but seriously, How? The fact that you haven t killed that person who hurt you should prove that you love Jesus, but the rage still comes, sometimes uncontrollably. The malice is there. The bitterness... oh the bitterness. Still, even if you weren t a Christian you would probably agree with this statement. We seldom meet anyone who thinks rage is okay or good. No one appreciates bitterness in someone else and they don t even like it in themselves. We all, Christian or non-christian, abhor brawling and slander. Well, we abhor it in the real world, but oh how we love it in literature and story telling like movies and tv. Don t you just love a good revenge movie? I remember the first time I saw Charles Bronson buy those quarters and put them in a sock and go out looking for trouble. And when he finally shoots the bad guy, and then shoots him 15 more times, I had a smile on my face. Because revenge is sweet. Mel Gibson has a movie entitled Pay back. What could be more about revenge than that? How about Wrath Of Khan, Edge of Darkness, Cape Fear, Kill Bill and the list goes on. Or Maximus as he stands with power: I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next! Perhaps some of you find those movies juvenile; you are too high brow for that you don t watch stories, you read them. Well don t forget my friend Edmond Dantes from the great Alexander Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo. What about Moby Dick? A story about a sea captain who hunts the whale who wrecked his ship and took his leg so that he can get revenge. Granted it is more an epistemological journey but on the surface it is all about revenge. And Shakespeare s line is still quoted with power: If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? And if you don t like movies or great literature, just try board games. Sorry, the game of revenge. It's a horrible game where the evil laughter of conquering quickly become sobs as you get crushed. My wife wont even play the game. Probably because of this verse.

3 Only Christians dislike rage and bitterness? But here is my point. Everyone, at least non-sociopath people, agree that rage, bitterness, revenge, malice, etc are bad. Every ethical teacher from Aristotle to Plato to Marcus Aurelius agree. Marcus Aurelius said The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury. Plato had a list of cardinal virtues: fortitude, wisdom, temperance, justice. Aristotle added his doctrine of the mean, and what he called the great souled man But I wonder how much they would like the first half of verse Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other... I think Aristotle s great souled man would be ready to bear insults without striking back. Julius Caesar, giant among pygmies as a magnanimous man, produced astonishment among his contemporaries in more than one scene of forgiveness of enemies. What s behind your forgiveness and compassion? But I fear it was not truly forgiveness. I fear the motive was not there. It wasn t traced back to real love; rather, it sprung from pride. In fact, I think pride can rival Christian morals on a regular basis. We do things so people will think well of us. So people will be amazed at us. Wow, look how tenderhearted they are. But their heart isn t tender, its arrogant and hard. wow, look at how they forgive. But they aren t forgiving. They are saying we forgive you but they harbor ill will towards you. They hold on to the bitterness. What I am calling us to is very simple its Christian kindness, Christian compassion, Christian forgiveness. The most ethical person in the world would not automatically be a Christian (sadly). You see the New Testament doesn t really talk about virtue or ethics or ideals. It talks about fruit of the spirit. There is something behind our good. Don t forget the end of verse 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. What is the motive of forgiveness?

4 The difference between a moral non-christian and a Christian is motive. Why are you being compassionate, kind and forgiving? Why? Because in Christ, God forgave us. Here is the therefore of Christian ethics the mighty act of the cross. This one single fact, apprehended in repentance, can outweigh a hundred textbooks on virtues or ideals. It can evoke the ethics of forgiveness, of which even a Plato could not dream. It can make human hearts tender and not merely great. It can produce the miracle of Christian love. 1 I am not saying that you can t be good or even great as a non-christian. You can. I am not saying you automatically lack empathy. You don t. I am not saying that you don t have the ability to show compassion. You do. But I am persuaded that true tenderheartedness, true compassion, true kindness, true forgiveness is modeled and embodied most clearly in Jesus. And I am persuaded that people who truly understand the compassion, kindness and forgiveness of God in Christ, can embody that most clearly today. I like this line from Dallas Willard If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus good news, I can go tot eh mass murderer and say, You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits. To the pederast and the perpetrator of incest. To the worshiper of Satan. To those who rob the aged and weak. To the cheat and the liar, the bloodsucker and the vengeful: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee in the arms of the Kingdom among us. 2 Why don t Christians forgive and show compassion? So this leads to the obvious question. Why don t Christians stand out in these areas? I don t think it s fair to say, as I hear so often, that Christians are worse at this then everyone else. That is not even remotely true. That is the product of a media culture that only shows all the terrible things that people who take the name of Christian (and some actually are Christian sadly) do. But there are Christians by the thousands that are living lives of compassion, kindness and forgiveness that are unheralded because it s not a story. That caveat said, I think we all know Christians who don t stand out in these areas. Maybe we can be honest for a minute and admit that we know ourselves pretty well and there is still bitterness inside of us. There is still animosity and sometimes slander. There is still rage that we Bruce-Banner-like, try to keep at bay. We think the same things others think when the Taliban goes on a murder spree against children. What do we think? Let s get them back NOW. 1 Theodore Wedel, The interpreters Bible, Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1998), 125.

5 Same thing if you lived during Pearl Harbor, or even just watched the Ben Affleck movie about it we have to get them back now. When the towers fell,... we have to get them back now. We like to couch our words in phrases like Justice, deserved retribution, but the line is often quite thin between this and straight out revenge. Bitterness, malice. Who have you not forgiven? I asked a bunch of people in this building and others who they still haven t forgiven. I didn t even ask them whether they have someone they haven t forgiven, I just assumed they did. And most of them had a name almost immediately. A father who left A sister and brother who ignored when you went through hard times A wife who never seems to want to be intimate A husband who is never sober More than a few people here were abused by family members. I can t imagine the pain. I don t have these experiences. Perhaps mine pale in comparison. I can t even begin to fathom what that girl in high school told me about her father. She said she would never forgive him. Never! I don t know that pain, but I have been wronged. In my immediate family there are people who want nothing to do with me despite my many attempts to reach out and love them. I have to say, it s kind of hard to forgive them when they either abandon me or use me all the time. Christians here at this church, who I thought loved me and loved Jesus, have written and said things to me that I can t repeat. I have cried more than once. I forgive them. With every ounce of my being, I forgive them, but something seems to hold on. When I see them, I remember this moment. There are still tinges of bitterness. Does forgiveness make everything immediately right? I can tell you to forgive and some of you may even say you forgive, but there is still something holding on. And I get this. It's kind of like this little analogy

6 Just because someone apologizes doesn t make everything right again. Just because someone says they forgive someone doesn t mean the bitterness disappears. Things don t go immediately back to the way they were. Can forgiveness really work to get rid of bitterness? But let s also remember that this is a plate. The analogy doesn t go too far. We are people. And not just people, we are people with the Spirit empowering us. We actually can forgive. We are living in the fifth act, after the cross. We can forgive and we can live abundantly. We can conquer the bitterness and rage. Not on our own, but with the Spirit and with the Spirit empowered church. We work together to forgive. And we must. There are so many people out there destroyed by guilt. So many people that don t know the truth about their sins. Many have killed themselves, many lash out at others, many battle mental illness. Karl Menninger, the famed psychiatrist, once said that if he could convince the patients in psychiatric hospitals that their sins were forgiven, 75 percent of them could walk out the next day! 3 So many people who can t live, can t function, can t have abundance because they haven t been forgiven: There's a Spanish story of a father and son who had become estranged. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in a Madrid newspaper. The ad read: Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father. On Saturday 800 Pacos showed up, looking for forgiveness and love from their fathers. 4 3 Today in the Word, March 1989, p Bits & Pieces, October 15, 1992, pp. 13.

7 Christians, our motive for forgiveness is Jesus. If he forgave us, if he took the consequence of sin on himself, if he cast away bitterness and rage and brawling when we put him on a cross, how much more should we be able to forgive. Forgiveness isn t much more than saying I love you. A couple married for 15 years began having more than usual disagreements. They wanted to make their marriage work and agreed on an idea the wife had. For one month they planned to drop a slip in a "Fault" box. The boxes would provide a place to let the other know about daily irritations. The wife was diligent in her efforts and approach: "leaving the jelly top off the jar," "wet towels on the shower floor," "dirty socks not in hamper," on and on until the end of the month. After dinner, at the end of the month, they exchanged boxes. The husband reflected on what he had done wrong. Then the wife opened her box and began reading. They were all the same, the message on each slip was, "I love you!" Love casts out all fear. Love kills monsters by making them friends "The man I ate dinner with tonight killed my brother." The words, spoken by a stylish woman at a PF banquet in Seattle, amazed me. She told how John H. had murdered her brother during a robbery, served 18 years at Walla Walla, then settled into life on a dairy farm, where she had met him in 1983, 20 years after his crime. Compelled by Christ's command to forgive, Ruth Youngsman had gone to her enemy and pronounced forgiveness. Then she had taken him to her father's deathbed, prompting reconciliation. Johns not a Christian yet, but he sees something in them that I see as well. No that long ago, at a PF banquet, his voice cracked as he said, "Christians are the only people I know that you can kill their son, and they'll make you a part of their family. I don't know the Man Upstairs, but He sure is hounding me. Lewis Smedes writes in Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don t Deserve, "If we say that monsters (people who do terrible evil) are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word." Don t let the monsters get the last word. The Scottish soldiers, forced by their Japanese captors to labor on a jungle railroad, had degenerated to barbarous behavior, but one afternoon something happened. A shovel was missing. The officer in charge became enraged. He demanded that the missing shovel be produced, or else. When nobody in the squadron budged, the officer got his gun and threatened to kill them all on the spot... It was obvious the officer meant what he had said. Then, finally, one man stepped forward. The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel, and beat the man to death. When it was over, the survivors picked up the bloody corpse and carried it with them to the second tool check. This time, no shovel was

8 missing. Indeed, there had been a miscount at the first check point. The word spread like wildfire through the whole camp. An innocent man had been willing to die to save the others!... The incident had a profound effect... The men began to treat each other like brothers. When the victorious Allies swept in, the survivors, human skeletons, lined up in front of their captors (and instead of attacking their captors) insisted: "No more hatred. No more killing. Now what we need is forgiveness.". 5 The death of one man had a profound effect. Brotherhood. And forgiveness. There is someone here who needs forgiveness. Someone in your life still needs it... and you still need it. That is you still need to forgive someone so you can be freed from the bitterness and rage that takes over from time to time. You need it because this is what it means to live an abundant life. You can t hold on any longer. It's time to forgive. Lords Supper Right now I want you to spend a few minutes with God. Who would he have you forgive? And who do you need to ask forgiveness from? Perhaps you are the problem? We are about to take the Lords supper and you can t come before this table without having been forgiven and forgiving others. Video: Signs of forgiveness It's very much a table of forgiveness. It's a reminder of what Jesus did on our behalf. We say that communion is a means to grace. We see grace rise as we partake here this morning. Grace comes to those undeserving and no one can come to this table based on their own merits. We are all undeserving, which means when we take this it is pure grace. When God fills us, it is nothing but grace. Christian, you must forgive. There is a verse that says that if we don t forgive he won t forgive us. I don t know if that is an ultimatum or a charge but whatever it is it s a way of making this VERY serious. Forgive Christian. And bask in the forgiveness of Jesus. 5 Don Ratzlaff, "The Christian Leader".