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Forgive One Another
Ephesians 4:30- 5:1
Ruby was born in
the Delta region of the Mississippi River in 1954. Also in 1954 the
Supreme Court heard a case called Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education.
After the arguments were made, the high court ruled that separate but
equal education for blacks and whites while it was separate it was in no
way equal. Segregation ended officially the year Ruby was born, but in
reality, it hung for a long time thereafter.
Six years later Ruby's mother got her ready for her first day of school.
She wore a white dress and a white bonnet on her head. She had all the
fears and hopes of any first grader, plus the weight of the State of
Louisiana on her shoulders. At only six years old Ruby was escorted to
her first day of school by seventy-five well-armed federal marshals.
When she had enrolled, all the other students withdrew, but their
parents were there to greet Ruby that first day of school. Hundreds of
people lined the sidewalk leading to the school entrance. As she passed,
they screamed hateful words, spiteful slurs, and racial slang’s. Not
only did all the other students withdraw, but the almost every teacher
resigned in protest.
But one teacher was coerced into service. She was one year away from
retirement and was forced to report to work by the threat of losing her
pension. The judge who had ordered that Ruby be allowed to attend the
school had also assigned a therapist to monitor Ruby's mental health and
that of her family.
One day the teacher called the therapist to report a deviation in Ruby's
daily routine. From the school window the teacher saw Ruby stop and
apparently talk to the angry crowd that continued to greet her each day.
She had asked Ruby about the confrontation, but Ruby said she hadn't
spoken to the crowd. The therapist agreed to visit with her that
evening.
"Your teacher tells me that she saw you stop in front of the school
today and talk to those people."
"No sir," Ruby said. "I didn't talk to them."
"Did you stop in front of them?" the therapist asked. "Yes sir, but I
didn't talk to them. I prayed for them."
"You prayed for them. Why did you pray for them, Ruby?"
She answered the question with a question. "Don't you think they need
praying for?"
"I suppose,” the therapist replied “But why were you praying for them?"
"Because I'm the one who hears what they are saying."
The therapist tried a different approach. "What did you pray?"
"I prayed, 'Dear God, please forgive them; they don't know what they are
doing.”
The therapist, who has written this story down for prosperity recalled
the incident. "Her words were strangely familiar to me," he said, "as if
I'd heard them somewhere before."
Let’s pray together.
Our first two one-another passages were pretty easy on the soul. Greet
one-another -- encourage one-another. I hope you'll make a habit of
both. By the way thank you for the cards that I received and I want you
to send another card this week. Let’s not allow encouragement to become
a one-Sunday phenomenon.
Today I want to go a little deeper, and I need you to listen very close.
I know that the dynamics of this church are very different from most,
since we are a family church. I have told you in the past how when we
first arrived I struggled when I heard the way some of you talked about
one another. Then I had a revelation when I realized that most of you
here not only go to worship together, but you are blood kin. So the
dynamic is different here because we come to worship God who provides
for our needs but we met together with cousins, uncles, and in-laws and
at the least they can be very irritating. So today I believe that we are
looking at something this church needs, today we're going to talk about
forgiving one another.
Listen with me to two very important passages of Scripture.
Ephesians 4:30- 5:1
Colossians 3:12 – 14
That's what we're called to do. But forgiving people who have hurt us
may be the hardest command in the Bible.
In his book, Forgive and Forget, Lewis Smedes identifies four stages of
forgiveness.
First, we hurt.
Someone, usually someone very close to us, wounds us. They say something
mean. They do something hateful. A friend betrays a confidence. An
employer unfairly treats us. A business partner cheats us. A colleague
undermines us. A family member abuses us verbally, sexually,
emotionally, physically.
I don't want to rush too quickly over this first stage. Some of us in
this room have been terribly wounded. The wounds may still be fresh and
bleeding. Or they may be decades old. But they still hurt. Human beings
have almost unlimited potential for inflicting pain on one another.
In his autobiography, Lee Iacocca, remembered how Henry Ford III fired
him and later ignored him at a social function. The first offense
Iacocca said he could explain if not understand. Of the second, he
wrote, "For that I will never forgive him." Even if to others it seems
as small and insignificant as being snubbed at a social function, the
pain you feel is yours and it is real.”
And for some of us in this room, the hurt comes not from merely being
snubbed, but from being violated in some very painful, personal ways. We
hurt. And that pain has become not just a part of us -- it has become
our identity.
Second, Smede says we hate.
After the initial shock of the hurt we begin to respond emotionally. We
want to see the offender suffer as much as we have. We hate what they
did to us. We hate the person who did it and we want to see the same or
worse done to them. We might even ask God to hurt them -- even to hate
them for us.
We can talk all we want about loving the sinner and hating the sin, but
we're human. In this stage we are no more able to separate sin from
sinner than we are skin from muscle, though we'd like to give it try.
It is in this stage that we either get stuck, as Iacocca did, or get
started growing. If we get stuck, then the wound continues to fester. It
becomes infected with bitterness and malice and anger.
In both the passages we read a moment ago, Paul speaks of things we have
to put away if our relationships are going to be healthy. Before he ever
commands us to forgive, he says we must root out of our lives all
bitterness, rage, malice and anger. He's writing to people who are stuck
in stage two. They've been hurt. Now they hate.
Have you ever been to a chiropractor? I love them, but am still a little
confused by them. While in Nashville we had a young man in our Youth
Group whose dad was a chiropractor and he offered Trista and I free
adjustments. I had never been to one before but you know my feelings on
free thing.
I didn't understand the chiropractic healing art at first. I'd go and
tell him that my head hurt or that I was slicing the Golf Ball. But he
wouldn't do a thing to my head or my hands. He started manipulating my
back and neck. Now why would he do that? That's not where the pain was?
He explained to me that my head hurt and my golf ball sliced not because
there were problems in my head or hands, but because there were problems
in my back. That's sort of how it is with a failure to forgive.
We imagine that the pain we feel is because of the wound we received.
But after awhile, it isn't the words the offender spoke which hurt us.
It isn't the actions she took. The source of the pain is somewhere else.
It is in the bitterness and rage, the anger and malice that have taken
root in our hearts.
When we fail to forgive we think we are punishing the person who hurt
us. And we may be. But it is a particularly bitter punishment. For we
are not only killing them. We are killing ourselves.
Unforgiveness is an acid that first destroys the one who contains it. If
we begin to grow, then we move on to the third stage;
We heal.
Smedes writes: “As we forgive people, we gradually come to see the
deeper truth about them, a truth our hate blinds us to, a truth we can
see only when we separate them from what they did to us. When we heal
our memories, we are not playing games, we are not making believe. We
see the truth again. For the truth about those who hurt is that they are
weak, needy, fallible human beings. They were people before they hurt us
and they are people after they hurt us. They were needy and weak before
they hurt us and they are weak and needy after they hurt us. They needed
our help, our support, our comfort before they did us wrong; and they
need it still.”
I'm not telling you that you have to do it right now -- that you have to
feel all warm and fuzzy and forgiving this moment. Forgiveness doesn't
have much to do with warm and fuzzy. I'm telling you that when you begin
to grow, when you begin to heal, forgiveness becomes a possibility.
The last stage Smedes mentions is this; we come together again.
Forgiveness is complete when we heal. We all know that coming together
again isn't always possible. The offender may never accept our
forgiveness. The damage to other relationships may be too great. The
consequences of their actions may be too severe and permanent. God chose
to reconcile with the world, but not everyone in the world is willing to
be reconciled. So it sometimes is with our relationships.
I offer Smedes four stages as a way of helping you find out where you
are in the process. Hurting. Hating. Healing. Coming together. Let me
remind you today a few things that forgiveness isn't. Then we'll talk
about what it is and how to get there.
I think maybe the most important thing we can say about what forgiveness
is not has to do with memory.
Forgiveness is not forgetting
Eventually, maybe, we'll forget the hurt. But there is no magic button
that we can push to delete this from our mind. I'm afraid that for the
most part we come with un-erasable memory.
Even if it is not in the forefront of our thoughts, it is waiting
somewhere in a deep, unreachable crevice of the brain. The words which
were spoken, the actions which accompanied them, even the vocal tones
and facial expressions which accentuated them are still there. We hear a
song. We catch a whiff of some scent. We see an image. We suffer through
a sermon on forgiveness and those memories breech the surface of our
consciousness like a killer whale exploding out of the depths onto what
was the peaceful waters of our lives.
I don't know of a passage that commands us to forget. God is not in the
habit of ordering the impossible. In fact, if we could forget,
forgiveness would not be the act of love it is intended to be. It would
be a mechanical function.
So what is forgiveness intended to be?
It is a decision of the will to respond in love rather than hate to
someone who hurt you.
To give what they need, rather than what they deserve. It is the
decision that we will not allow ourselves or our future to be controlled
by the past. We don't have to feel warm and tender to forgive.
Forgiveness is what we do despite what we feel. It is action, not
emotion.
So how do we do the act of forgiveness?
If we can't erase that from the movie in our mind we can at least stop
watching it all the time. Our tendency, when someone hurts us, is to
replay that mental video over and over, memorizing every word, every
inflection, and every gesture. It becomes not just one chapter in the
story of our lives, but the story itself. We allow it to define who we
are and who the offender is. It becomes the script of our lives.
So the first thing I would council you to do is to stop replaying that
moment in your mind.
Every time you run it, you're just opening up old wounds. You may need
to get some council from someone who knows these matters better than I
do to figure out how to do that, but one way or another; you've got to
stop reliving it.
Second, I would suggest you follow Ruby's lead. Pray for them.
Remember what she said when the therapist asked, "Why did you pray for
them?" "Because I'm the one who hears what they say." It is hard thing
to do, to pray for those who despitefully use you. I think it's hard
because we don't feel like praying for them. We feel like hurting them.
But who appointed our emotions the sentry at the gate of our actions?
Do we have to feel like doing something before we do it? There are some
things that ought to be done whether we feel like it or not. Our
emotions can be a terrible task master.
In fact, that's what wounded you to begin with. Someone felt like
hurting you. They let their emotions over-rule their judgment and they
said or did something despicable. If you and I continue to give in to
our feelings, we fuel a bitter cycle of runaway emotion.
It's hard to hate people you pray for. It's hard to envy their success
or wish for their failure. The more we mention them in prayer, the more
human they seem, and the less monstrous. Prayer is the key that opens
the door to forgiveness. And that door must be opened. Because despite
what we feel, it isn't the offender that has been locked in the dungeon.
It is you.
One last suggestion for learning how to forgive. And it isn't really a
suggestion at all. In both the passages we noticed earlier, Paul
reminded these folks stuck in stage three, to forgive, just as in
Christ, God forgave you.
This is where memory can be a useful tool in the process of forgiving.
But it isn't our pain we remember. It is His. We use the tool of memory
to conjure an image of the cross. And when we see the cross, we see are
forced to recall our own sin. And the forgiveness God has given to us.
But there is one important difference between the forgiveness we receive
from God and the forgiveness we give to others. We are to forgive
because God forgave us. But it is not within our power to forgive in the
way God does.
Hebrews 8:12 explains why. "I will forgive their wickedness and will
remember their sin no more."
Somehow, God is able to do what we can't. He can forget. Forever. That's
the best news I'll ever tell you.
Today you need to ask yourselves two questions
1. Who do I need to forgive?
2. Who do I need to ask for forgiveness?
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