Thank you, Brian. Thank the Lord for that word, and let’s just open with prayer.
Lord, thank You so much for Your goodness toward us and for the ways You work in our lives—ways that sometimes, like Brian said, we do not really want or anticipate. But, Lord, the end result is that You are creating Your character in us and bringing us closer to Yourself. We thank You for that, Lord.
Lord, we continue to pray over this time. I pray for Your help in sharing what You have given me, and bless each and every one of us who are hearing. Lord, help us to hear Your heart, grow closer to You, love You in a greater way, and love one another. Lord, we do love You. We thank You so much for who You are. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, when Joseph was doing announcements earlier and he said, “Brian and Roger,” I was like, “All right, I got out of this.” But I guess not.
I have to confess that when I was asked a couple of months ago if the Lord had something for me to share, or something He had been showing me, I had been praying about it. To be honest, I had been nervous. But that is okay, because you lean on the Lord. I know that I cannot do this without the Lord’s help.
I learned a lesson from trying to do something without the Lord, and I cannot take this lightly. I remember many years ago, when I had just become a new believer, I had the opportunity to go to the southern part of Russia shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A coworker and I met with a missionary there who had just started his work. He took us to a meeting where there were many Russian believers. There were a lot of new believers, as well as believers who had been believers for a while and had lived through the Soviet Union.
The believers asked us if we could share our testimonies afterward, and then they wanted to ask us some questions. We said, “Okay.”
When the time came for the question-and-answer period, one of the questions they asked us—which I thought was so odd—was, “How do you deal with persecution?”
I was thinking to myself, “Well, I should be asking you that question.” But I felt like I needed to say something. So, like the dummy that I am, I proceeded to say something that I had read or heard secondhand from others. It was not living. It was not something I had experienced or gone through.
At the end of the time, an older Russian sister who had been through the Soviet Union came up to me. Through the missionary, who was interpreting, she said, “Brother, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
You know what? She was right. I felt kind of bad, and I thought to myself, “Oh, my goodness, I probably said things I should not have said—things that were not beneficial to the believers.” I said, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Through the missionary, she said, “It’s okay.” Then she proceeded to say, “Please pray for us in America.” I felt restored. I felt forgiven.
That is really what is on my heart—what I felt the Lord put on my heart to share: forgiveness. It is something I have gone through, something the Lord has been teaching me about through certain things in my life. Maybe it will be an encouragement as I share it with you all today.
I know forgiveness is something many brothers have shared about over the years. Anything I say is not going to be new or profound. It is simply what the Lord has been teaching me, and perhaps it can be beneficial and encouraging to you.
Do you remember the day when you were saved and forgiven of your sins? Or even more recently, when you fell short, repented, and came to the Lord, and He forgave you? Is it not freeing? Is it not liberating to know that our sins have been covered and are as far away as the east is from the west? He does not remember our sins anymore, which is amazing when you think about that.
What the Lord has been showing me and teaching me is that, just as Christ forgave us, He also expects us to forgive each other. God wants us to forgive one another, and He enables us to do it.
If I had to give this a title, it would be: “Forgive as the Lord Forgave You.”
Turn to Colossians 3:13.
Bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, if any man have a complaint against any; even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye.
Another passage I want to focus on is Ephesians 4:31-32. As we read these verses, I have come to see that forgiveness is not optional. It is not an option.
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice:
and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you.
Some of these verses came to mind when I went through a very difficult period in my life, when I felt hurt, betrayed, and offended by what was done to me or what was taken from me.
I am not talking about minor things that most of us experience regularly, where somebody says something to you, does not acknowledge you, or whatever. I am talking about life-changing things—very painful things to deal with, things that cause deep wounds. That happened to me.
When that happened, at first I did not want to forgive, and I found it very difficult to forgive.
My notes are all mixed up.
When you go through something that is very difficult, and you have a hard time forgiving once, think about what Jesus said to Peter in Matthew 18:21-22. He said to forgive seventy times seven. You can see that it is really an impossible task outside of Christ.
How many times have we sinned and wronged the Lord? How many times has He forgiven us?
In Genesis 6:5-6—the passage says that the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.
You can see that man was not only wicked, but the Word says he was evil continually—nonstop sinning against God. Fast-forward to today: has man gotten any better? No. Is there more sin or less sin? Probably more; who knows?
But thank God, He has made a provision for our sins through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Who took our place on the cross. We can be forgiven of our sins.
How often has God forgiven us? More than we will ever know. But when we are really put to the test, we discover that truly forgiving others is practically impossible outside of the Lord. Yet God calls us to forgive each other because He is a loving, forgiving God, and He wants us to be like Him.
For me, I was really put to that test in 2016. I do not know if some of you remember what happened to me that year. It was a very painful period in my life.
Almost exactly four years before this day, my mom was hit and run over by a young man in a pickup truck in New York. It would be this coming Tuesday, four years ago.
At first, I thought it was an accident. But at my mom’s funeral visitation, a couple we did not know came to me and said, “We were there. We saw it happen.” They explained to me what happened and how my mom died, and they said it was not an accident.
As I learned what really happened to my mom and the driving history of this young man, I became very angry. We all agreed that he did not run over my mom on purpose, but he was careless and had a reckless disregard for life.
This young man had about eleven driving violations within, I think, a three-year period. That included everything from reckless driving, speeding, drinking and driving, and running through red lights. You name it.
A year after my mom’s death, he was caught speeding in a stolen Jeep. He had stolen a Jeep down in Maryland, and they finally put him in jail. But I felt like justice was never really served.
During this time, anger and bitterness were really welling up in my heart. The Lord began to deal with my heart.
As I mentioned earlier, I did not want to forgive, nor could I. The Lord kept probing me about it, so I finally took it to Him and began to pray. I said, “Lord, I can’t. I just can’t. I do not even want to forgive this, because it caused so much pain. My mom died the way she did, knowing how this guy had been living and all the things he had been doing prior to that.”
But I was already taking another matter before the Lord, and that had happened a couple of months earlier. When the world does something to you, you can kind of say, “Okay, that’s the world. What do you expect?” Sometimes that is easier to deal with than when a brother or sister offends you.
When a brother or sister—a believer—wrongs you, it can be very painful. You can feel betrayed. That is how I felt about a matter that took place in early 2016 with a couple of believers I knew.
None of you will know these believers. All I can say is that these believers gave us their word about a matter but never really intended to keep it. They were believers in high positions of ministry who misled us. I could not understand why, and I felt so betrayed. It affected everything in my life at that time.
In my anger and confusion, I felt the Lord probing me to forgive them and this young man who took my mother’s life. At some point, with much tears and dealings with the Lord, I was finally willing to forgive.
But I said, “Lord, I’ll forgive, but on my terms. If they come asking for forgiveness, I’ll forgive them.”
Well, I discovered that is not the Lord’s way. The Lord helped me realize that my heart was not in the right place. He wanted to set me free from anger and bitterness and conform me to Christ.
For the first time in my life, I really saw how the Lord forgives those who do not even seek His forgiveness. If they never repent of their sins and do not accept His forgiveness, they bring upon themselves the consequences of their decision and forfeit the Lord’s saving grace. But the Lord desires to save all men.
Even while He hung on the cross, He forgave those who put Him there. Turn to Luke 23:33-34.
And when they came unto the place which is called The skull, there they crucified Him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
And Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
After all they had done to Him, even at that very moment, among wicked and unrepentant men, Jesus forgave them. In a sense, He was forgiving us.
In the same way, Stephen prayed in Acts 7:59-60 as they were stoning him:
Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.
In a sense, he was forgiving them. The Lord showed me that I must forgive the way He forgives. He forgave me before I repented. In other words, forgiveness is not based on others’ actions but on the attitude of our hearts.
For us as believers, if forgiveness has not already taken place within our hearts, then forgiving someone when they actually come seeking forgiveness will be difficult, because we are still bound by what was done to us—if that makes sense.
When should we forgive? If you look at the examples of Jesus on the cross and Stephen being stoned, it seems pretty immediate.
At the very least, God tells us in Ephesians 4:26-27:
Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:
neither give place to the devil.
It seems to me from this verse that we should not let the day end with anger in our hearts. At the very least, the Lord wants us to deal with it immediately and quickly by taking it back to Him.
Otherwise, bitterness will take root and give Satan a foothold to work his schemes in and among us. Then we may end up even more unwilling to forgive later on. That was what was happening to me.
But thank the Lord, like Brian said earlier, for His faithfulness to keep after us. He keeps after me—after all of us—when we are not in line with His heart.
As I was asking the Lord to change my heart and help me forgive, He began to change my heart. I found myself praying for these believers and for this young man, especially for this young man.
Actually, the Lord caused me to have compassion for him. I felt bad for him, and I began to pray for his salvation. I prayed that out of my mom’s death, something good could come out—life—for this young man who was so lost.
That was a change the Lord did in me. It was not anything I did. It was all the Lord.
I also discovered that, in the process, as I went to the Lord, the focus became Him instead of me. As long as there was unforgiveness in my heart, I constantly thought about my feelings, my emotions, and my pain.
But when I went to Him seeking His help and asking Him to change my heart, my focus was on Him. It took me away from the other things that would hinder me and make me ineffective for the Lord.
With all that in mind, the Lord wants us to come to Him with our hurts, disappointments, anger, whatever it is, and give it to Him. Praise the Lord, He is able to do what man cannot do.
When we come to Him, sometimes we discover that something else is going on that makes forgiving difficult—things having to do with wanting something else, pride, or some other fruit of the flesh that is demanding an apology because of who we think we are. I was falling into that trap.
You would think I had learned my lesson by then, but the Lord knew I needed to learn some more. That same year, I had three car accidents. Kathy said to me, “You had another one. You had four.” I cannot remember exactly when that happened that year, and that was kind of a minor one.
The first one I want to talk about happened while I was driving on I-95. I was behind a truck when suddenly a metal object came flying out and hit the passenger-side door frame, putting a huge dent in it. Another few feet to the left, and it would have hit me.
Obviously, I took it to the repair shop, paid my five-hundred-dollar deductible, and had it repaired.
A few weeks or months after that, I was driving on Providence Road when a huge dog bolted out in front of me. I could not avoid him. There was nothing I could do. Somehow, that dog survived. I hit him, and he hit the ground and took off running. But I stopped and looked at the front end of my car. It was all smashed in.
These cheap little bumpers they build, you know? So, I paid another five-hundred-dollar deductible and had it repaired.
Then, shortly after that, I was driving on the downtown expressway near the toll booth when suddenly a young lady in her car—I guess she did not have an E-ZPass—cut right in front of me. There was nothing I could do about it. Once again, the front end of my car was smashed in.
I was not offended by what happened in those accidents, but the accident with the lady made me think about my mom. You can see none of these were literally my fault; they just happened. I know this is all sounding kind of comical, and I think Kathy was probably wondering what was wrong with my driving abilities.
I ended up going to court for that last accident, and she did not show up. I learned that she also had various driving violations. I had to pay another five-hundred-dollar deductible to get the car repaired.
Because she did not show up and all of this was happening, I began to think, “Okay, Lord, I’ve had about enough of this. I want to be compensated.” The judge ruled in my favor, but my insurance company and her insurance company could not locate her.
Then a collection agency called, and I said, “Yes, let’s try to find her and get compensated.” I do not know how long it was, but I was determined to find her and recoup my expenses.
At some point, the Lord said, “Stop it. Let it go.”
The verse He brought to my mind was one we had read maybe at our last Friday-night meeting or a couple of weeks before: 1 Corinthians 6:7.
Nay, already it is altogether a defect in you, that ye have lawsuits one with another. Why not rather take wrong? why not rather be defrauded?
I also thought about the parable of the unmerciful servant that Jesus taught in Matthew’s Gospel. The Lord reminded me how merciful He had been to me in these events, and He wanted me to be merciful to her. I said, “Okay, Lord, I’m sorry.” He changed my heart again, and I was able to forgive because of His work, move on, and get past it.
But I still struggled from time to time with what happened to my mom and with those believers who had misled me. When I thought about it and dwelt on it, I would get stirred up and angry again.
Then the Lord reminded me of 2 Corinthians 10:5:
Bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
When I would do that and turn to Him, His perspective and His love would take over instead of my emotion, anger, and bitterness. Still, I could not help but think about it at times. There would be triggers, reminders, and things like that which brought back the memories of what happened to my mom and the interactions I had with those believers.
I do not think you ever completely forget those painful moments in your life. Wounds eventually heal, but they leave scars. Jesus will always have His nail-scarred hands, and yet He loves us like no other.
Only He, because He is such a loving God Who can forgive and not hold anything against us, can change our hearts and heal them, even in these sorts of things.
I remember reading about Corrie ten Boom. I do not know whether any of you are familiar with her, but she was a dear sister who, during the Nazi occupation of Holland in World War II, helped Jewish people with her family.
Eventually, she and her family were caught, and she and her sister were sent to a concentration camp, where her sister died. She also struggled with forgiveness until the Lord did His miraculous work in her.
Even after that, she talked about how she struggled and wrestled with the memories and thoughts of what the Nazis did—not only what the Nazis did, but also how some Christians let her down.
In one of her devotionals, many years ago, she shared how the Lord helped her through those difficult periods in her life. That has also been helpful to me. I want to read a small portion of what she wrote about how the Lord helped her with those bad memories and thoughts.
She wrote:
His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks. “Up in that church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong; slower and slower, until there is a final ding and it stops.”
“I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive someone, we take our hand off the rope. But if we have been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we must not be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They are just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.”
And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in conversation. But the force—which was my willingness in the matter—had gone out of them. They came less and less often, and at last stopped altogether.
“And so I discovered another secret of forgiveness: that we can trust God, not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”
I thought that was really encouraging to me as I struggled with some of that. It is neat how the Lord meets us where we are and changes us, taking us from a defeated condition to victory when we exercise our faith and go to Him.
When I think of somebody who lived in victory despite all that was done to him, I think of Joseph. I think Joseph exemplified the biblical principle of forgiveness.
You all know the story of Joseph: how his brothers were jealous of him, put him in a well, wanted to kill him, and then decided to sell him to slave traders. Those traders took Joseph down to Egypt, where he became a slave in Potiphar’s house. He was wrongly accused of attempted rape and ended up in prison for at least two or three years. I do not know exactly how many years.
Think about what that must have been like for Joseph. Could you imagine if your family did something like that to you? Sometimes we hear this story, but Joseph was just like us.
It was probably very painful to Joseph because he loved his family so much. But somehow, through the Lord’s work in him, he rose above his anger and pain to forgive his brothers for all they had done to him.
As you know, Joseph rose to the second-highest rank in all of Egypt. Eventually, he saw his brothers again when they came down to buy food.
When Joseph finally revealed himself to them, it says that he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him. I think he wept so much because he was full of love, and the Lord had done such a work in him. I think Joseph was so glad that the forgiveness he had in his heart for his brothers could now be openly displayed.
It would be so neat if I could meet that young man, see him turn to the Lord, be able to hug him, and say, “I forgive you.”
I think Joseph is a picture of the Lord Jesus Himself—of how He loves us so much and how He has forgiven us and restored us to Himself.
Brothers and sisters, there is so much about forgiveness that is beyond what I know or understand, beyond what I could possibly share or talk about. I think all I have done today is scratch the surface of what forgiveness is.
It is like trying to see how deep and wide God’s love is for us. It is measureless. I was thinking about that song this morning before we even sang that song, Glenn. You cannot fully explain it. I believe forgiveness is like that in a way.
Forgiveness and love go hand in hand. Forgiveness rests on love.
As I was preparing for this time, I was asking the Lord, “Why do You want me to talk about forgiveness? It is so big and vast. I cannot really explain it all.” We could talk for another hour. You could all share for an hour.
But the only answer I felt the Lord gave me was from Matthew 24:12:
And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold.
When love grows cold, it disappears. When it is gone, you will not find forgiveness there either.
As it states in 2 Timothy 3:1-3:
But know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come.
For men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, railers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
without natural affection, implacable.
Notice those words: without love, unforgiving. I think as the days get darker, there will be more resentment and less forgiveness.
I feel like what the Lord wants me to know, and wants us to know, is that we need to guard our hearts. We need to stay in love with the Lord, go to Him, and keep loving each other, so that when we sin or when someone sins against us, we can forgive by His mercy and grace.
Then healing and restoration can be the end result. Sometimes I wonder how many times I must have offended a brother or sister, and how many times they must have forgiven me. I would think that they have a very similar testimony to give.
Think about those Russian believers I talked about earlier, who were persecuted during the days of the Soviet Union. I think they faced things that I have absolutely no idea how to comprehend. But many of them forgave their persecutors. They forgave their persecutors.
As a result, not only did it bring glory to the Lord, but it brought many unsaved Russians into His kingdom because they saw the testimony of Jesus. They saw something no man could do—something only God can do in men and women given to the Lord.
I hope what I shared today is an encouragement to you concerning what God can do in and through us in the area of forgiveness, if we come to Him. He can enable us to forgive. We cannot, but He can. When we give it to Him and ask Him for His help, He can do it.
Let’s pray.
Lord, I just come to You and commit everything I have shared. I pray that what was of You, You would help us to chew on, remember, and learn from what You are saying. Lord, help us to know Your heart and mind in a greater, deeper way, that we might become more like You.
Lord, thank You so much for forgiving us of our sins. Help us to love one another and forgive each other when we falter and fail. Lord, thank You that You can do that in us. We worship You in Jesus’ name. Amen.