FREED | Unforgiveness

Go ahead and bring it back. You can remain standing. Go ahead and bring it back. You can remain standing for the reading of God's word. Our teaching text tonight comes from Matthew chapter 18, verses 21 through 35. It says this, then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him 10,000 bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. At this, the servant fell on his knees before him. Be patient with me, he begged, and I'll pay back everything. The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him 100 silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. Pay back what you owe me, he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, be patient with me and I will pay it back, but he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in, you wicked servant, he said, I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? In anger, his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart. This is the word of the Lord. You guys can take a seat. Church City, how you guys doing? Good? Welcome to church. It's summertime, which means that it's hot at Calvary St. George. See those fans working. My name is Tim. I serve as one of the executive pastors here, and it's a real honor to be with you guys tonight. We're continuing forward in a sermon series that we're calling Freed. And it comes from this beautiful promise

that Jesus gives to each of us in Galatians chapter five, verse one, where he says, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. And week after week, we've just been naming all of the categories that Jesus died to set us free from so that we could live the abundant life in Christ. We've talked about our past, our sin, the lies that we believe, idols, anxiety, shame, rejection. And today, I wanna talk about what I believe might be the single most ignored source of bondage in the church today. It's not trendy. Nobody's posting about it. No one's wanting to write a worship song about it. There's not a conference headliner about this, but it is quietly running and ruining more Christian lives than almost anything I know. And the topic is unforgiveness. Sometimes the Bible calls it bitterness. And today, I just wanna share with you how Jesus desires to set you free from unforgiveness. I came to faith about 16 years ago, around 2010. And so most of my adult life has been spent around Christians. I spent time around leaders and congregants and mature Christians and immature Christians and new believers and old believers.

And as you spend time around Christians and you spend time in people's homes and at church and at Sunday school, and you read books and you read biographies, you just start to pick up on these patterns of behavior. And somewhere along the way, I noticed this. It's not that we're bad at forgiveness. It's that we've gotten really good at avoiding it. Not a little good, like pro-level good, like Jedi-level good, like we're very good at it. We're great at moving on. We're great at moving churches, moving community groups, moving jobs, moving relationships. Sometimes it's just like, bye, see you in heaven, we out. And we move. I watch this happen so often that I assume forgiveness really wasn't that important. I read my Bible and I knew that it was there, but I thought forgiveness was some kind of spiritual gift that God would sprinkle on a select few. The rest of us just got a free pass to hold our grudges with a clear conscience. Now, not only that, but there were some Christians I knew, in my mind, very mature Christians, longstanding Christians that were exceptionally good at holding a grudge. And you just learn pretty quickly, like don't cross that person, because if not, you'll pay. Sometimes you just knew like those two people, don't put them in a room together

or put them on different teams because they don't get along. And over time, I just began to accept this, like, ah, that's life, that's ministry, it's a broken world, we're all sinners, that's just kind of how it goes. And here's my question, and this is just what I wanna ask tonight and build this talk around is, what does Jesus have to say about this? Like if I were just to step aside tonight and just hand him the mic, Jesus, you're up, what would he say? What would God Almighty himself say? And that takes us to Matthew 6, and this is the famous Lord's Prayer. This is the prayer that even if you're in the room tonight and you wouldn't consider yourself a Christian, you probably know. Somehow we all memorize it in the King James Version, I don't know how that works, but it's, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And there's this moment in the prayer where Jesus gets to forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And then right when he finishes the whole prayer, Jesus circles back and he gives one piece of commentary as if to emphasize the most important part of the prayer, and it's not on the kingdom, it's not on daily bread, it's not on hallowed be thy name,

like surely the holiness of God is the most important part, but no, he comments on forgiveness. And this is what he says, Matthew 6. For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Now, I don't know about you, but this really messes with me because I like to consider myself, I am a good Western Protestant Bible-believing Christian, I love my unconditional free grace. And it sure seems like in this passage, Jesus is putting a qualifier on it, right? Yeah, you're reading the same passage I'm reading. And so what I start to do is all these theological gymnastics, like, well, what he really meant was this, or I write them off, it's like, well, he was speaking in hyperbole, and it's just kind of meant to entice us and make us think. And what I just don't want you guys to miss in this verse is the obvious, which is that Jesus is so serious about us forgiving that he stitched it into the Lord's prayer and he underlines it twice. Now, if that's not enough, just one more, let's go to Mark 11. This is where Jesus doubles down. Sometimes when Jesus comes in with a sharp word, we kind of feel a temptation to release it somehow.

Jesus presses in harder, this is what he says. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive your sins. So when you're at church and you're standing there praying, you're praying before the sermon and you're worshiping or after the sermon and you're praying or you're doing lingering prayer at the end of the sermon, and you hold anything against anyone, forgive them. And I'm like, surely, Jesus, you can't mean anything against anyone. Like surely you don't mean my landlord, right? Like the guy who hasn't fixed my radiator since the Obama administration been holding out on me. Surely you don't mean my roommate who's been eating all my food in the fridge, even though I labeled it, still ate it anyways. Surely you don't mean those people, right? But he says, forgive anything against anyone. Now, my point is this, and this is the weight of what I felt preparing this talk, is friends, we have to forgive. It's time, the hour has come, you have to forgive. You have to forgive your dad. You have to forgive your mom. You have to forgive your ex. You have to forgive your coworker. You have to forgive your brother, your sister, your daughter, your son, your roommate, your best friend, your college professor,

your boss, your old pastor, your CG leader, your neighbor, your coworker, your spouse. You have to forgive that person who hurts you so deeply that you now live in a different state, and you're in different parts of the world. You have to forgive anyone for anything. Now, if you've been coming around Church of the City for some time, you know that we love nuance. I love nuance. I love to teach with nuance. I love nuance so much that I'll start nuancing my own nuance. where you're like, I'm not even sure what he's talking about anymore. Now, I'm not gonna do that today on purpose, and here's why. Jesus isn't nuanced about this topic at all. He's so direct. He's so clear. And it doesn't mean Jesus wasn't a nuanced teacher. There was times where Jesus would teach and the disciples would go like, ah, you understand what he meant? I didn't. They were all confused. But on this topic, it is like he just comes so clearly. And so today, what I'm gonna do is just get out of the way and let the strength of Jesus's words do the work. Now, that being said, I do have one piece of nuance I need to give.

Because in a church our size, this will surely impact some of the people in the room, and I just want you to hold this. Just hold this in the back of your mind as we go through tonight's talk, and it's this. Number one, justice is good, okay? It's biblical, it's godly. Forgiveness is not divorced from justice. In fact, on the cross is where the two meet together. And so when I say forgive, I'm never saying stop caring about what is right. Okay, number two, forgiveness does not mean stay. If you've been in a situation of abuse or domestic violence or physical or sexual abuse, get help and get safe. You have to prioritize your safety and the safety of your family. Forgiveness is still on the table, but it doesn't mean stay. And number three, forgiveness does not mean don't take legal action. Forgiving someone in your heart and pursuing justice in the world are not enemies. You can do both. Something that we say often is it's not loving to continue to allow a person to sin and to hurt people. So there's the nuance. Just kind of hold that over here and just keep that in mind, and we'll keep going. So for today, three questions I just wanna ask. Why is forgiveness so hard?

And what is it costing us? What actually is forgiveness? Like, what is it? And how do we do it? So why is forgiveness so hard? What actually is forgiveness? And how do we do it? So we'll just go in order. Why is it so hard? Let's start with the one thing that I think everyone in the room could probably agree on. Forgiveness is hard, is it not? Sometimes it feels impossible. Why? Here's why, and it's probably not what you think. It's not just that our ego gets bruised. I like what Ronald Roheiser says in some of his writing about forgiveness. The difficulty of forgiveness is that a wound to the soul works the same as a wound to the body. It strips us of our strength. So I played baseball growing up in high school and played a little bit in college. It was my life. I loved it. And one day in high school towards the end of my senior year, I tore my shoulder. Like, it just popped. And it was so painful. Like, the pain was almost unbearable.

But honestly, I eventually had to have surgery. But honestly, even worse than the pain was all the conclusions that I just quickly arrived at in my head. It was like, I'll never play baseball again. I'll never work out again. I'll never even run again. My athletic career is over. I might as well just sit on the couch and read books because that's that. Now, what I want you to notice about how I was thinking is I never thought about recovery. I never thought about healing or rehab because the wound took all of my strength from me and then it started to think for me. And that's exactly what a wound to the soul does is someone hurts you and it strips you of strength and then it starts to think for you. And then the most natural sentence in the world comes out of our mouths, which is, I'll never forgive that person. I'll never forgive them. Very normal human response. And then the problem is that we just stay there and we never think heal and we never think recovery. We think, I guess I'll just move on. Now, the truth is, and I want you to hear this, is your soul can heal. Your soul can get to a place where it forgives and I really believe that it will and it must.

But here's the harder question. What if we don't forgive? Like, what if we just carry on business as usual? And here's what I want you to see. This is all the writers on forgiveness, all the writers in the New Testament. They just keep hitting this point over and over and it's this. You think the grudge is punishing them, but it's not. It's actually punishing you, okay? Carrie Fisher, she said it this way. Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. In other words, there's a connection between. and our unforgiveness and so many other things that we'd never think to attribute it to. Let me just name a few. Pain, a feeling of stuckness, not hearing God's voice, unanswered prayers, the slow draining away of joy, a kind of spiritual deadness where you're moving through life half numb. And you would be surprised how much of that traces back to one person that you haven't forgiven. This is why courses like Healthy Soul that we offer here at the church, always the first step is, do you have any unprocessed pain and do you have any unprocessed unforgiveness? Because it's kind of like the entry point into healing.

There was a book called The Secret of Lasting Forgiveness that was written by a psychologist and I like what the author says. I've helped many people move past their unforgiveness and I have never met anyone with both unforgiveness and inner peace. In fact, most of the people I've helped forgive haven't understood how the resulting unforgiveness torment can disturb so many different areas of their life. I mean, he says that you can literally see it on their faces and their bodies, like they look physically sick. Put another way, unforgiveness becomes a poison that we voluntarily choose to live with. This is what Hebrews 12 says. This is how the Bible describes it. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God. Some translations say, be very careful that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. So the Bible says that bitterness is described as a root and this is important because some of you might be here today and maybe you're like me as I was thinking through this sermon. Man, I don't know if I'm wrestling with any unforgiveness. I wouldn't describe myself as a bitter person but I'm sure glad that so-and-so is in here because they need to hear this message. I'm gonna send them the tape afterwards.

Now here's my caution is be careful. Be careful with that assumption because the way a root works, just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. It works underground out of sight and it twists together and it moves and it lingers beneath the surface. A bitter root says, yeah, I was hurt by my dad but that has nothing to do with how I relate to authority or how I interact with the opposite sex. A bitter root says, yeah, my ex treated me really bad but it hasn't influenced my ability to trust people. What happens is this root turns into anger and it passes into us and it distorts us and it makes us cynical and it hardens our hearts. And then what the text says is that when it's fully grown it causes trouble and it spreads to others and it defiles many. If you've been around churches for a while, anyone in the room ever seen a root of bitterness just blaze through a church like a prairie fire? Just consumes people. Anyone ever experienced a root of bitterness move through a workplace culture and it's just like poison? The culture starts gossiping and there's backstabbing and it just feels like a toxic place. Now, just to give you an example of this, this is a framework that comes from Pastor Dave Lomas in California, it's called the spiral of unforgiveness. And this is how unforgiveness practically plays out in our lives.

And the research would say is it doesn't matter how big or how small the offense is, if we can't forgive, inevitably we will find ourselves somehow stuck in this cycle. And so as we do go through this, maybe you've been hurt, maybe there's a person coming to your mind right now where there's been an offense committed against you. And just use this as a tool to sort of self-identify. So number one, it starts, the cycle starts with unforgiveness. And this is when you have a choice, often a quiet choice to forgive someone and you choose not to. There's an offense that happens, you choose to ignore it, to minimize it, and you just choose not to forgive and you move on. This hardens into anger, and this is when we start to believe that our emotional maturity can actually push the offense out of our minds. But you find yourself dwelling on it and you begin to nurse the grudge by recounting specific details in your mind over and over and over, and you start to have invisible arguments with the person who hurt you. And anger inevitably leads to avoidance. And this is when you're around the person who hurt you, but you're shorter with them. The relational ease and the lightness that you once experienced and felt is gone

and you start to avoid. avoid them, you start to not respond to text messages, you start to think that avoidance is actually good and healthy, and you tell yourself that we just need some space, but what you actually need to do is forgive because you're angry, and you're starting to draw all these boundaries. Number four, avoidance gives birth to bitterness, and this is when the seed grows roots and you lose your peace, you've lost trust for the other person, you're emotionally withdrawn, and the walls go up to protect yourself, and that person is no longer a safe person, and you cannot afford to have unsafe people in your life, so they are out of the circle, and bitterness eventually leaks out as slander, and at this stage, the infection has spread to the tongue, and now you begin to damage the other person's reputation, or at least you want to, and this is where gossip and slander happen and rumors start. In your heart, you're secretly glad when they suffer or fail, but you would never really admit that to anyone, and you start to warn other people about them, and you say things like, that person, and I'm just telling you this because I love you,

but you need to know what that person is really like, and so you do this out of love, or so you think, but you're actually in a spiral of unforgiveness and bitterness, and you start to gossip and slander and do all the things that when you read the New Testament says that we're supposed to cut out like cancer, but you do it anyways because you're trapped. Slander crystallizes finally into resentment, and this is a deep-seated sort of cynicism towards the person who hurt you, and this is where you wish everybody could see them for who they really are, and you're longing for them to be exposed, and this is a stage where if you know anyone else associated with that person that they actually begin to lose credibility in your mind, and you think, oh, you know that person? I can't trust you anymore, and resentment sets in, and the bitterness that started as a root has blossomed, and it has broke through the surface. Now, I know that's kind of heavy, but it's true, and this is what can happen in the human heart, and so I just wanna ask, have you found yourself in this cycle before? Is it possible that maybe even tonight

you find yourself in this cycle? And what all this leads to, and this is the point that I wanna make, what Jesus says, this is how the parable that we read at the beginning, the teaching text, ends, and Jesus is essentially saying the exact same thing. He says, in anger, his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he could pay back all he was owed, so that's how the parable ends, and then Jesus gives one sentence of commentary. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart. So, the man who won't forgive gets handed over to be tortured, and I don't know about you, but I read that, and I'm like, that's a little intense. That doesn't seem like the heart of Jesus. Like, is he talking about hell? And I don't think so. I think he's showing us something. He's showing us, Jesus is showing us that when we refuse to forgive, we are the ones handed over to suffering. We're the ones who are imprisoned, and the only way out is through the door marked forgive. So, that's the cost, and that's why it's so hard, and also why it's so urgent.

So, next question, what is it that we're being asked to do? Because some of you, and this is why I love New Yorkers, is you're action-oriented, and so you're like, all right, listen, man, I get it. I'm supposed to forgive, and so you're already rehearsing the speech in your mind, and maybe there's a person you need to forgive, and maybe it's like my friend Billy here in the front row, and it's like, hey, Billy, how you doing? Just wanna let you know that over the past six years or so, I've basically hated you, and whenever you suffer, I secretly take joy in that, and I wanted to let you know that I forgive you, and that's that. That's not forgiveness. That's not what we're talking about, okay? So, let's talk about what it actually is, and also what it's not. So, if you go back to the parable, Matthew 18, Jesus is talking about a king, and the king is settling his accounts, and one servant is brought in who owes him 10,000 bags of gold. The real translation is 10,000 talents. Talent was a form of currency in the first century. Now, I'm an engineer by training, and so I had to actually do the math here.

So, one talent was about 20 years of a day laborer's wages in the first century. So, you translate that to modern times. We assume $60,000 a year, and what this servant owed the king was $12 billion. Massive, enormous debt, and not only is it a big number, but what you have to understand is that in that. At age, in the Roman Empire, the king's money was the kingdom's money. So when Jesus says, hey, look at the coin, whose face is on it, Caesar, and give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's, he actually meant that. The king's money was used to build roads and pay the army. It was what held the whole kingdom together. So why that matters is that a debt this size doesn't just embarrass the king, it puts his entire kingdom in jeopardy. So the king orders that he and his family and all that he owned be sold to repay the debt, which was very normal for those days. And so what does the servant do? He does what I think any one of us in this room would do, which is that he falls on his knees and he begs for mercy and he says, please have pity on me, be patient with me, and I promise I'll pay it all back. Now you and I both know that's not true.

It's an impossibly large debt. He couldn't pay that back if he had 1,000 lifetimes. Now sermon for another time, but that's what formal religion does to us, right? We think that we can somehow earn our way and pay our way back to what God has done for us, and it's just a fruitless cause. Matthew 18, 27, this is what happens next. The king does something that nobody expects. I think that these are some of the most beautiful words in scripture. It says that the servant's master, the king, took pity on him. He took pity on him and he canceled the debt and he let him go. Now I gotta camp on the word pity for a moment because the English just doesn't quite do it justice. In the English, it's a small word, but in the Greek, it is a big, beautiful, deep word. It literally means to be so overwhelmed with compassion, to be moved so deeply, to be churned in the deepest part of your soul that you are moved towards reckless, loving action. Now here's the thing that you need to know is that this is not just any word. This word is exclusively Jesus's word. This is the word that is used to describe the emotional life of Christ more than any other word in the gospels. This is the word that's used in Matthew 9

when it says that Jesus had compassion on the people because they were harassed and helpless like sheeps without a shepherd. It is the signature of Jesus. And so Jesus, in telling this parable, he drops his own word into the mouth of the king as if to signify and to hint towards who this king really is. So what is forgiveness? Now I just want you guys to watch what the king does because he takes three distinct steps and this is how we can begin to conceptualize how to forgive. So number one, he absorbs the debt. It says that he canceled the debt in the text. And this is the premise under the whole parable. So when somebody wrongs you, it creates a debt, okay? Not a financial debt, but an emotional debt of pain and you feel it when you've been wrong because there's something in you that says, that person owes me. And the debt doesn't just go away, like it has to be paid. And there's two ways to pay it. The first way is you make them pay. And there's 100 ways to do this. You can ignore them, you can say a cutting word, you can cut them out of your life, you can withdraw, all the ways that we just talked about. But the other way, I would say the harder way, is that you pay the debt yourself. You absorb it into yourself. Now, if you're like, what does that even mean?

Here's what it actually feels like day to day. Every time you wanna bring up the offense again, and you don't, it hurts. Every time you see that person thriving on social media and you choose to be glad in your heart, it hurts. Every time you wanna be cold and you choose to be warm, it hurts. Every time someone comes up to you and says, hey, so what really happened between the two of you and you honor them with your mouth, it hurts, it's painful. And that's the repayment, that's you absorbing the debt instead of charging it to them. And the reason why this is so important is because when you make them pay, it feels better. Like it actually works, the pain goes away, but the end result is that you become distorted. But when you pay down the debt yourself, they're released and you walk away free. And this whole sermon series is about freedom. And I think this is Jesus', what he's teaching us of how to actually be free. So number one, he absorbs the debt. Number two, he humanizes the offender. It says that the servant's master took pity on him. Something strange about our current moment. I don't know if you guys have picked up on this, but we're obsessed with villains, right? We love the backstory of villains and how they became the villain. It's kind of like making of a murderer.

It's like, what was all the childhood stuff that was going on that made this person who they were? And we basically reached a point in our society where every villain, murderer, and extortionist gets their own origin story and Netflix documentary. And you see it in Hollywood with movies like Joker and Maleficent and the whole Wicked series. And here's what we do. We sit behind a screen and we go, oh, that's why she's the way that she is, the wicked witch. She had green skin as a kid and the munchkin kids were really mean to her. And that was how she was formed. That makes so much sense. And so what we do is we show her empathy and we show her compassion. But the irony is that we'll hand two hours of compassion to a green witch and a serial killer, but we won't give 30 seconds to our own dad. And we do this because the moment someone wrongs us, we do the opposite of creating a backstory, right? We reduce them. I mean, they lied, so now they're a liar and they cheated and so now they're a cheater and they become one dimensional in our minds and their entire character is reduced to the offense. But I just want to ask you guys this question. What about your worst moment? Like, what about when you've been the offender? Well, if you're anything like me,

there's a whole backstory. It's complicated. I'm a nuanced person. See, there were circumstances and it was a long week at work and I was really tired. I got a newborn baby at home and yeah, there's some childhood stuff, which honestly, given everything, I think I've handled pretty well. And so can't you just cut me some slack? Show me some grace. The Bible says to Billy, stop crying til you see your wife's fulfilled prayer is not of pain and suffering, but of a mistaken narcissistic desire to know if I really want to do it. But what if we would just allow ourselves to go expanding even at the poorest. And the reason why we do this is because deep inside of the human heart, there is this need to justify ourselves. Deep inside the human heart, forgiveness says I'm flawed and so are you. Forgiveness says I'm weak and so are you. Forgiveness says I am in desperate need of grace and so are you. And so I forgive you and I release you. So number one, the king absorbs the debt. Number two, he humanizes the offender. And number three, he releases him.

He lets him go. So the man owes this king an enormous debt, $12 billion and just like that, in one sentence, the king speaks a new verdict over this servant's life and he says, the verdict is forgiven. It's like a legal term, like he brings the gavel down on the court and he says, no, no, no, forgiven. That is your new position. That is your new standing. I had a friend years ago who walked me through a forgiveness exercise because it was a time when I was really wrestling with some bitterness and some unforgiveness with another person. And it was so simple and he just said, Tim, I just want you to imagine in your mind that there's like a little sign just sitting over that person's head and the sign just says forgiven. And every time you see them in a meeting or you see them at work or you see them on the streets, you just see a little sign that says forgiven. I know it's like simple and it kind of sounds like labeling a person, but it's amazing how it works. And so now, I'm in the city and there's an impatient barista and I just see a little sign over their head, forgiven. And I go to Chipotle

and when the guy robs me on the chicken, forgiven. Get on the subway, just see over a guy's head, forgiven. He didn't even do anything wrong to me, but he gets forgiven too. I'm just handing out forgiveness to everybody. And the reason why I say this is because every time I hung that sign, I was reversing the verdict from you owe me to not guilty. I was flipping it in the same way that Jesus does for us. So I just want to ask this question again. What would it look like for you? You might've come in tonight and the thought or the possibility of forgiving that person or that offense just seems so out of this world. But what would it mean if you took a step forward of absorbing the debt, of humanizing the offender and releasing them? Now, this is the point where I need to say what forgiveness is not because I think that we can start to get stuck here. And I'm gonna go through these kind of quickly, but I just want to clarify this. Forgiveness does not mean minimizing the sin. This is huge. You don't say no worries, all good, because it wasn't all good. That's not true. That's not reality. You have to acknowledge the pain and not pretend that it was all fine in order to forgive it.

Forgiveness, number two. Forgiveness is not primarily a feeling. Oftentimes forgiveness is granted long before it's ever felt. And if you're waiting for the feeling, it may never come. And so it's a conscious choice to forgive anyways. Forgiveness does not require their apology first. If you're waiting for sorry, some of you might wait the rest of your life. And this last one, forgiveness is not the same as trusting them again or being best friends or pretending that nothing happened. Those may not be on the table right now, and that's okay. Because the truth is, is that there's actually three dimensions to this conversation. And what happens in my mind is I start to kind of mash them together. So let me just separate these. So number one, there's forgiveness. That's the mandate. That's the work that Jesus is asking each of us to do with God's help. Then there's reconciliation, and that's always the hope. And it takes two people, and it definitely takes more time. Now, will reconciliation always be possible? No. But is it always the hope? Yes, always the hope. And then there's restoration.

And this is the ultimate end destination. This is the 2.0 of the relationship where trust is rebuilt. And this one is rarer, but man, is it a gift when it happens. And that's Christian forgiveness. Christian forgiveness always moves towards restoration and reconciliation. Okay. So I just want to close with this. How do we actually do this? Because it could be one thing to say, all right, you guys got it now, go out and forgive. But what does the process really look like? And so I'm going to take you guys through a forgiveness exercise that we've been using here at Church of the City for a while. To be honest, I go through this exercise on a weekly basis. I just, I have to do it just to keep my heart alive. I mean, living in New York City, you're just going to get offended. It's going to happen. So here's how we do it. Number one, you have to open your heart and commit. So before anything else, you've got to decide that you're in. You got to choose to forgive and override the feelings that argue against it. This is where prayer is introduced in the process. Jesus, I need your help.

And as you have forgiven me, help me to forgive this person. I want to become more like you and I want to forgive others. And so I'm committed to this. Number two, write it out. This is where you get specific and this is where you write down exactly what you did and you're honest and you tell the truth and you speak it to God and you acknowledge the pain. This is something that you can do alone or with a prayer counselor right here after the service or a trusted friend. But the one rule here is only do this if you're truly committed to forgiving. Because if you start to write out the indictment and you're not prepared to forgive, it's going to stir up pain, it's going to reopen that wound for you. And so you got to be prepared to forgive. Number three, and I think this is the most important one, is remember the forgiveness that you have received in Jesus. Forgiveness is free for the recipient, but it is so costly for the giver. And guys, we have to understand that Jesus on the cross, he paid and he took on the full weight of the debt that we owed to God because of our sin, because of our falling short of God's glory. And what he went through and what he endured,

I mean, the physical suffering that Jesus endured on the cross was a flea bite compared to the spiritual suffering that he received from taking on the sins of the world and receiving full separation from the perfect communion of the Trinity. What Jesus went through on our behalf, and so we have to preach the gospel to ourselves and we have to remember our sin and remember how greatly we've been forgiven and then we can have the strength and the power to forgive others because he first forgave us. Number four, you forgive them. And this is where you speak the verdict over the life and you say it clearly, for this, fill in the blank, I forgive you, I release you. And you might have to do that seven times or as the parable says, 70 times, or as Jesus clarifies, seven times 70 times, which is completion times completion. So he's saying infinite number of times. It has to be a daily practice for some of you and you just release them over and over, forgiven, forgiven, forgiven. And then finally, number five, you re-story how you see them. And this is where you set this story of the offense and you set their story inside of the bigger story, the bigger reality of the kingdom of God,

the bigger reality of what it is that Jesus is doing to redeem all humanity and to use us as ministers of reconciliation to bring the world back to Jesus and to be the light of the world and to be his witnesses. and his ambassadors. So that's the forgiveness exercise. For some of you, you might put that into practice tonight. There might be opportunities that Jesus is inviting you towards. Just in closing, I wanna share a story of what this looks like in real life. So years ago, before I was a pastor, I was working as an engineer and I had a boss. And this boss was, to this day, probably the smartest person that I've ever worked with. He just had a unique mind, a gifted mind that worked in special ways. He was the smartest person in every room that he walked into and he knew it. And it was so difficult to work for him. I mean, he would just steamroll people. He was angry. He was cutting in meetings. He was dismissive, sometimes manipulative. And this was the kind of guy who would make you dread showing up to work on a Monday. And in this season, man, I wrestled and I wrestled hard. And I had this sense that God had me there for a purpose.

And so I just, I went through every single stage of that unforgiveness spiral, the anger and the avoidance and the arguments in my head. And I was so frustrated that I literally memorized Romans chapter 12, where Paul says, bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse. And then he says, do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath. And then he says, for it is written, it's mine to avenge, says God, I will repay. And then he says, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If your enemy is thirsty, give him something to drink. And in doing this, you'll heat burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by the evil that was done to you, but overcome the evil with good. And day after day, as I walked into that office, I just started restoring this guy in my head and I'm praying for him and I'm blessing him and I'm forgiving him. And some mornings I just had to do the cycle all over again as I walked into the office. And slowly, day after day, the fire of anger that was in my heart started to subside and me and this guy actually built a decent relationship. So eventually the company sells and me and him, we go our separate ways. And that was that, that was kind of the end of the relationship. Now, years later, fast forward,

my phone rings one day and I see his name on the screen. And the second I see his name pop up, all the emotions and all the pain of that season just starts to come back to me like a flood. And I felt the Holy Spirit say, just pick it up, like just answer the phone call. And so I pick it up and he just goes on to start telling me everything in his life is beginning to fall apart. His marriage is in crisis, his career was in crisis. It just felt like the pieces of his life were just scattered on the ground in front of him. And he said, Tim, you are the only person I could think of to call. And so he asked me if we can meet up and we meet for lunch. And as he's sitting across the table from me, tears start running down his face as he's describing all the pain he's going through in his life. And here's what I noticed, is when we met in that restaurant, there was two things that could have been waiting in my heart to receive him. The first, and this was the temptation is, you finally got what was coming for you, man. You finally got what you deserved. All that stuff that you did, it caught up to you. And so you deserve it. But the second thing was to meet him with compassion. And the only reason why I was able to meet him with compassion was that I had been paying down that debt

for years and years and years. And so in that restaurant, I got to share the gospel with him right there. And this man who was not a Christian became a Christian in that restaurant and received Jesus. Few months pass, he starts coming to my church by himself. And he starts to bring his wife and he starts to bring his kids. And fast forward a few months after that, and there's actually a picture of this, but I got to baptize him. And this was him getting baptized. And actually I got a picture of him just a couple of months ago of his wife getting baptized as well. The point that I want to make guys is what testimonies are we missing out on because of the grudges that we hold? You know, Jesus says that the kingdom of God has come near. And so when we serve as ambassadors of Jesus, we are literally bringing the reality of what will happen in eternity. And we are bringing the reality of what will happen in the days to come where everything is renewed and everything is restored and everything is reconciled to bear in our lives and our realities today. And the way that we can do this So friends, I wanna invite you to forgive. is because we know how greatly we've been forgiven. I wanna invite you to take that step of faith

and to trust Jesus and to see what he does in your life. Let's pray. Well, Father, I just wanna come before you and I just wanna say thank you, God. Thank you for the gospel. Thank you, Jesus, that I am no different than that servant who owed the king $12 billion. Thank you, Jesus, God, that you have given us this great mercy. And not only have you given us the gift of eternity, but you've also given us redemption and life and healing and freedom and meaning and purpose and community and identity, God. We have so much to be grateful for. So Father, I'm just praying right now that the reality of the kingdom of God would just come to bear in this room. I just pray, Father, that the strength and the resources of heaven and through the Holy Spirit would fall, God, and would give us the ability to actually let go of the grievance, to actually process the pain and to not run from it. And I pray, Jesus, that literally stories of reconciliation and healing would just begin to flow through our congregation like water, like rivers of living water. And so, Lord, we can only do this through you and with your power. And so we love you and we honor you.

It's in Christ's name we pray, amen. Amen.