FREEWAY Part Five: Forgiveness By F. Remy Diederich Cedarbrook Church 11.1.15 Outline: 1. The natural response to theft is a demand for justice. 2. If justice is not obtained we may retaliate, complain and distrust. 3. Forgiveness transforms our pain so we don t pass it on to others. a. Remember that God has forgiven your debts. b. Acknowledge the debt that exists. c. Absorb the debt. 4. Freedom comes from not only forgiving but from asking forgiveness from those you ve hurt. Message Welcome to our series called FREEWAY. If you are new, let me help you catch up. We are looking to help you find freedom from your hurts and your habits and the emotional pain that goes with them. I ve said that freedom doesn t come over time, all on its own, and it doesn t come with a quick fix. Freedom comes when you follow a process. And so we ve been walking you through a sixstep process over the last few weeks. The first step is AWARENESS. Our tendency is to ignore our problems. We cover them up, or run from them. So we have to become aware. Second, we looked at DISCOVERY. When you become aware you start to discover problems that you ve never seen before. Then, last week, we looked at the third step: OWNERSHIP. Ownership is when you decide to stop blaming and feeling sorry for yourself and actually do something about what you ve discovered. Now, today, I want to look at FORGIVENESS. Many of the problems we have came as a result of someone hurting us. It s a relational issue. Maybe you were abused verbally, or physically, or sexually. Or, maybe a family member betrayed you, or a friend, or a work associate. My point is: our hurts most often come from people. So any discussion of freedom has to include forgiveness. But we struggle with the idea of forgiveness, don t we? It s such a personal topic with so many layers and complicating factors. An analogy might help here. Think of what happens when you experience a theft. When you experience a theft there is a debt, or a deficit, that needs to be 1
repaid. Something inside of you wants to put things right. You want your money back! It s only natural to want justice. So, to get justice, the first thing we often do is retaliate, right? You want to get the guy who did this and make him pay for what he took from you. You want payback: not only a return of the money/items but you want to see him punished. Some of us like to avoid conflict so we go another route. We just complain about what happened to us. We tell our story of injustice hoping that people s sympathy will somehow fill our deficit and ease our pain. Or another result of theft is that you lose trust. Maybe you can t get your money back, but you can at least keep from losing more. My son s house was broken into a few months ago in Phoenix. They stole thousands of dollars worth of valuables and the first thing my son did was reinforce his doors and put in a security system. Now think about this. Isn t this exactly what happens when someone hurts us in a relationship? They steal something valuable that we want back, right? Typically they steal one of two things: your respect or your control. Think through what makes you mad and I guarantee that nine times out of ten you either felt disrespected or you lost control in some way. So what did you do? You retaliated, you complained and you lost trust not only trust in that person, but for people in general. Your walls got a little higher and you promised yourself that you wouldn t let that happen to you again. Now, play this out a little. This kind of relational theft isn t rare, right? I mean, people hurt us starting in the sandbox and it continues to the nursing home, which means it s very easy to spend your life retaliating, complaining and building bigger walls and security systems. That doesn t sound like freedom to me. It s actually bondage, isn t it? This is how one person described it: Recall the pain of being wronged, the hurt of being stung, cheated, demeaned. Doesn t the memory of it fuel the fire of fury again, make it hurt again? Suppose you never forgive, suppose you feel the hurt each time your memory lights on the people who did you wrong. And suppose you have a compulsion to think of them constantly. You have become a prisoner of your past pain; you are locked into a torture chamber of your own making. Time should have left your pain behind; but you keep it alive to let it flay you over and over. Your own memory is a replay of your hurt; a videotape within your soul that plays unending reruns of your old rendezvous with pain. You cannot switch it off. You are hooked into it like a pain junkie; you become addicted to your remembrance of past pain. You are lashed again each time your memory spins the tape. Is this fair to yourself; this wretched justice of not forgiving? You could not be more unfair to yourself. Lewis Smedes, Forgive and Forget, page 132,133 2
You see, there s nothing constructive about unforgiveness. Nothing about retaliation moves us forward. It only moves us backwards, causing us more pain, yet many of us devote our lives to getting back at our offender in one way or the other, even if it is to ignore them. But Jesus showed us a different way. A better way: the way of forgiveness. Forgiveness transforms our pain and sets us free from our torture chambers. So the question is: how do we forgive? Jesus rarely gave how-to steps. There s no chapter in the Bible on How to Forgive, but we can pick up a few tips from an interaction that Jesus had with his disciples in the book of Matthew in the New Testament. We are going to be in chapter 18. I m going to tell you the story and then make some observations. One of Jesus followers was a man by the name of Peter. Peter came to Jesus one day and wanted to know how often he should forgive, he suggests, like seven times? That s God s perfect number. Seven must be enough, right? I mean, it s way more than two or three. Peter probably thought Jesus would be impressed with his guess. But Jesus said, no, seventy times seven, which was Jesus way of saying you never stop forgiving. I m sure Peter s eyes got big and he stopped breathing for a minute. It seemed impossible to always forgive, so Jesus continued with a story to explain himself. He said, there was a king who decided to collect the money that he was owed. So he had his accountant call people into his office and demand the king s money. One man owed the king a million dollars but the man couldn t pay. So the accountant said, I m sorry, but to pay your debt you ll have to sell yourself, your wife and your kids into slavery. That would never happen today, of course, but this is what happened 2000 years ago. You didn t put your debt on VISA, or take out a loan. If your creditor wanted his money, you sold yourself into slavery. Jesus said: The servant fell on his knees in front of him. 'Give me time,' he begged. 'I'll pay everything back.' His master felt sorry for him. He forgave him what he owed and let him go. Matthew 18:26,27 That s a nice story. This is a picture of what God did for us, right? But the story continues. Shockingly, this same man leaves the office and goes to someone who owes him money. Pay back what you owe me! he said. The other servant fell on his knees. Give me time, he begged him. I'll pay you back. But the first servant refused. Instead, he went and had the man thrown into prison. The man would be held there until he could pay back what he owed. Matthew 18:28-30 His friends saw what he did and were troubled by his hypocrisy. They didn t catch it on video, but they did go to the king s accountant and told him what happened. Then the master called the first servant in. You evil servant, he said. I forgave all that you owed me because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on the other servant just as I had mercy on you? In anger his master turned him over to the jailers. He would be punished until he paid back everything he owed. Matthew 18:32-34 3
Jesus ended the story by ominously saying: "This is how my Father in heaven will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." Matthew 18:35 That s a harsh ending. Maybe not the words we want to hear Jesus say. But Jesus is making his point: if you want to be a follower of Jesus, and a friend of God, then forgiveness should become a way of life. In another place Jesus said that to whom much is given, much is required. So if you are forgiven much, God is looking for you to forgive much. Now, let me make a few observations that might help us to forgive. First the obvious point here is that we should always remember that God forgave us. How can we celebrate God s forgiveness, like we do in communion, and hold a grudge against someone? It makes no sense. It s pure hypocrisy. If you lived every day with the knowledge of God s forgiveness that should eventually permeate your heart and help you to forgive others. If you have trouble forgiving it may be because you don t appreciate how much God forgave you. The second lesson I see here is that it s important to acknowledge that a debt exists. In the story, the accountant called everyone in and identified their debt. You see, sometimes we like to ignore a debt because it requires too much to collect it. It takes a lot of energy. Ask any bill collector. This is a subtle point, but I think a lot of us ignore the debts we are owed. What I mean is; rather than deal with the people who hurt us, we do our best to forget about it. It makes us too uncomfortable. We have no idea how to handle it. We hate confrontation. So we just stop talking to our offender or keep the conversation ultra superficial. But deep down we don t forget and our anger turns to resentment, then bitterness, then hatred, which turns to revenge. It s not pretty. So rather than ignore our debts, we need to acknowledge them so we can resolve them. Surprisingly, one author says we need to blame our offender. Blaming means you assign responsibility to someone for causing an incident to happen and acknowledge the behavior is wrong Blaming brings confusion into focus and clarifies who an injurer really is. It lets you know whom to forgive. Beverly Flanigan, Forgiving the Unforgivable, p.197 Jesus would agree. In fact, he told us to do this just before he told his story about the king. If your brother sins against you, go to him. Tell him what he did wrong. Keep it between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won him back. Matthew 18:15 Forgiveness doesn t mean you overlook an offense, or forget about it. No, you acknowledge it, you talk about it, and bring closure to it if you can. You see, the more you can resolve, the less you have to forgive. 4
My guess is that a lot of us here need to have a conversation with someone that has hurt us. Instead of shutting down and ignoring this person you need to get together and explain why their behavior hurt you. Most of us won t do this because we are afraid of confrontation. We are afraid of making matters worse. But Jesus couldn t be any clearer: if a brother sins against you, go to him. The next lesson I learn from this story is to absorb the debt. That s what the king s accountant did. Absorbing the debt is the opposite of payback. We spend a lot of energy on payback. We retaliate in obvious and subtle ways. We attack people verbally, we slander them among mutual friends, but we also do less obvious things like give people the silent treatment, or even sabotage them in subtle ways. But forgiveness refuses to do any of this. Forgiveness absorbs the debt. Let me go back to my financial analogy. Imagine someone stole money from you, but then they spent it. You can go to them and insist they repay the money, but they don t have it. So you yell at them and make their life miserable, thinking that will help. But they can t pay. So you complain to all of your friends thinking that will shame them, but they still can t pay. Nothing you do is going to get your money back. So, you have a choice, you can continue to retaliate and demand payback or you can move on with your life, trusting that God will somehow make it up to you over time. That s what it means to absorb a debt. You stop expecting someone else to fix what they broke and turn to God instead. It s okay to ask it of them, but once you determine that it s not going to happen, then you let it go and trust God to meet your need. You let God repay your debt. This gets back to what I said about respect and control. When someone takes either respect or control from you, it s tempting to demand them back. But this is where your faith comes in. If someone disrespects you that s when you turn to God and say: God, I don t need anyone s respect but yours. It doesn t matter what other people think about me, or say about me. What matters is that you love me and value me. So, I forgive them. Do see that? God is the one repaying the debt. Not the offender. And the same is true when people take away your control. Again, turn to God and say, God, I m letting go of my control in that area. You have ultimate control and if you want me to have it back I trust you ll give it to me. But I m not going to get ugly about this and fight for it. I recently read a good example of this in the life of Mike Singletary, the former linebacker for the Chicago Bears. Let me read some of the article to you: Mike Singletary said, "I had everything. And it was right after the Super Bowl that I realized that I was really, really empty. I had done all this stuff. I had made the Pro Bowl. I just signed a great contract. I was the MVP that year. I had just won the Super Bowl. 5
But I was the emptiest and the most frustrated." Although he was raised in a Christian home, the lifestyle of sports superstardom had overshadowed his faith, and he had come to a crossroads. He said, "I just remember, one day, breaking down. I remember saying, 'Lord, I m supposed to be Your son, and You don't talk to me or use me. You don't do anything. I don't understand this.' In my spirit, I heard two things. One was 'I want to use you, but there are some things that you gotta clean up first.' The second thing that I had to do was forgive my father." His father had divorced his mother and walked out on the family when he was 12 years old. You see, the day his dad walked out, Mike lost control. He couldn t control his dad. He couldn t control his parents marriage and it made him mad. It put him in bondage. But once he chose to forgive his father, he said, Day by day, God began to take away some of the bad habits that I had. Gospel Light, 2/17/2013 Forgiveness transformed his pain. He gave up his need for control. Forgiveness helped him to find freedom and it will help you do the same. My final point is: remember that forgiving others is only half of the forgiveness equation. Freedom comes from not only forgiving others but from asking forgiveness from those you ve hurt. That s another sermon I don t have time for right now. You know, there are many facets to forgiveness. It requires a book to explain it all and answer all your questions. So I want to give you a free book. It s called STUCK. I wrote it after teaching about forgiveness for fifteen years at the treatment center. I talk in depth about anger and how to forgive. Plus I talk about how to be forgiven and how to forgive yourself. I also give a step by step approach to confronting your offender. I can t afford to give you the paperback version, but you can download the Kindle or pdf version to it by going to this link readingremy.com/stuck-offer. Feel free to give it to your friends as well. I hope 500 people download it! Prayer: Jesus, you came to forgive us. And now you send us out today to do the same. Help us to accept your courage and your power to do what only you can do: forgive others through. Amen. Going Deeper: use the following questions for personal reflection and/or to discuss with your family, friends and Cedarbrook circle. 1. Have you ever had anything stolen from you? How did you respond? 2. What is it about theft that is so hurtful beyond the loss of the item stolen? 3. Is there a person or event from your past that still impacts you today? Has this event caused you to retaliate, complain, distrust, or all of the above? 6
4. Read Luke 1:76,77 and Matthew 26:28. At the beginning of Jesus ministry and at the end it is clearly stated that Jesus came to forgive. Why is it so hard for us to forgive others when Jesus went to such great lengths to forgive us? 5. Read Matthew 18:15-20. What are the first steps we need to take when we ve been offended? The more we can resolve, the less we have to forgive. 6. Some people assume that great losses can t be absorbed and therefore they can never recover from their loss. Read Ephesians 2:14-21 and talk about how Paul s prayer relates to our ability to forgive the greatest offenses. 7. How does unforgiveness make you a prisoner? In other words, what is the down side to not forgiving? 8. Do you have trouble forgiving yourself? Why is that? How do the principles for forgiving others apply to forgiving yourself? 9. Freedom comes from forgiving, but it also comes from being forgiven. Do you need to ask forgiveness for your actions before you move on with your life? 7