Colossians 3:12-13 | Rebuilding From the Ashes

It's good news.

Amen, church.

So we go to the Lord in prayer.

Let me come out of Psalm 34.

Why don't you bow your heads with me as we pray?

We seek his face for our time together in his word.

Father, we love you.

And we say with David, I will bless you, Lord, at all times.

Your praise shall continually be in my mouth.

And how could it not be in our mouths after watching something like that?

That is just one of the many stories of redemption and restoration that you are establishing, Lord, that you are causing to take place in our church and amongst the marriages represented in our church.

And so our souls make their boast in you, Lord.

And we desire to come together as your people, to magnify your name, to exalt your name together.

And what a privilege it is, Lord, because of the shed blood of Jesus to know that as we seek you, you answer and you deliver from all of our fears.

Lord, when we are at the depths, we are in the worst place that seems we can't come back from, that's irreconcilable.

You are the God who does the impossible.

You are the God who can build what is broken.

And we must see that, Lord.

And that's the desire that we would taste and see that you are good and that you are at work.

And blessed indeed is the man who takes refuge in him.

And so, Father, I take great comfort, and I pray that the same comfort would extend to those today who need to hear this.

That you are near to the brokenhearted and you save the crushed in spirit.

Father, would you be imminently near to the brokenhearted and the crushed in spirit today on a particularly sensitive subject?

A hopeful one, but a sensitive one.

Lord, many are the afflictions of the righteous, but here's the good news out of Psalm 34, you, Lord, deliver out of them all.

Thank you, God.

You keep olive's bones, not one of them is broken.

Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.

But the Lord redeems, you redeem, Lord, the life of your servants, and none of those who take refuge in you will be condemned.

Father, as we get to your word and continue in it, would you bless the proclamation of your truth in a disproportionate way to the glory of your name and for the good of your people?

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

And all God's people said.

Amen.

A little bit different today, church, but if you can and you're able, would you stand for the reading of God's word?

And we're going to come out of Colossians chapter 3.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

Colossians chapter 3, beginning in verse 12, reading down to verse 13.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

We're going to actually be in many verses today, but we're going to finish in Colossians chapter 3, beginning in verse 12.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

What a privilege it is to read God's Word to you today.

If you don't have a copy of God's word, by the way, there's ledges with Bibles.

Those are our gift to you.

We'd be happy to have you take one, and you can follow along on the screens.

Here's what it says.

Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another.

And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Love ones, this is the word of the living God for our time today.

I pray the Lord to write these eternal truths on your hearts.

And with that, you can be seated.

Church, good morning.

Hope you're doing well.

My name is Scott, I'm the lead pastor here.

It's a great joy to be in the house of the Lord together and with you as we continue in our series called The Grammar of Marriage, God's Framework for His Gift of Grace.

And I mentioned to you maybe a few weeks back that we would eventually get to a sermon that talked about how do you rebuild a marriage when it has absolutely hit the depths of despair.

And today is that message.

And so even if you could say a prayer for your pastor today, and maybe not just for your singular pastor, but your pastors for the work that will come and likely the tears that will be shed and the work that needs to be done to see this kind of by God's grace redemption story take place in many other places that it needs to within our church.

And so we trust that the Lord will be with us as we do look at a bunch of different scriptures today.

So you can have your finger in Colossians 3, but we're going to move around quite a bit to try to grab, I think, the essence of what it looks like to title the message, Rebuild from the Ashes.

Rebuilding from the Ashes.

Now I remember as a kid growing up, my family, we would go to Tahoe, and uh most of the time we would go to South Shore, and if you've ever driven Highway 50 up to South Tahoe, uh you uh are amazed by the view you get.

Uh the trees and the hillsides and the mountains, and it's just beautiful, and you're kind of in awe of all God's creation.

But I remember as a kid quite frequently going up and seeing at times entire hillsides decimated, blackened, charred.

And I remember as a kid, like my jaw felt like it hit the floor.

I couldn't believe something so beautiful, beautiful could be so devastated.

What shocked me even more than the devastation and the charring was remember hearing that fire could actually bring good.

There's no way that when you looked at it, you thought, yeah, that's not gonna end in any good way.

It's already devastated, and the truth is that actually fire can bring a lot of hope.

For one, it acts as a natural cleanup tool.

It ends up clearing dead wood and dead brush and ends up um dispelling pests that have been in the, you know, amongst the trees and doing damage that hasn't been addressed.

Fires get rid of those issues.

Fires actually end up feeding nutrients for future growth back into the soil.

Minerals that help certain seeds sprout.

And you even find about certain tree cones like pine cones and things like that, right?

Only at certain heats do they end up dropping their seeds, and so it requires a certain heat for that to happen in order for more things to grow, and fires obviously cause that to take place.

But when you look at the hillside, that's not what it looks like to the senses.

You're not looking at it and going, oh, I'm hopeful for the future.

All you're seeing is devastation.

And today we're gonna talk about that very thing that some of you have an experience in your life, have a situation in your life with your marriage where it looks like it is burned to the ground.

You have charred it to a crisp, there looks like there's no hope, whether from unfaithfulness or irreconcilable differences that you can't seem to deal with appropriately, or just a bunch of things that you've let go on for way too long, and they've created these huge rifts, and so now you're in this place where your marriage is D-O-A.

It's gutted.

You take the pulse and there isn't one.

Where do we go from here?

I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, I'm so encouraged to say this to you that there is absolutely hope for restoration.

Because our God is a God of restoration.

The truth is, is you can't get the years back, right?

My solution today is not, hey, God invited or invented a time machine, and we'll just get into it together and we'll go back in time.

You can't do that.

You can't get the years back, you can't get the words back, you can't get the actions back, but there is a way back.

And our God, of course, is the God who brings life out of death, and so just remember this as you go, and remember this in your darkest moments.

If you haven't faced them yet, maybe you face them in the future.

Listen, if he can save your souls, which were in a far worse predicament, he can save your marriage.

And he's gonna save your marriage the same way he saved your soul, and that is by the grace of God.

And so we're gonna write this down as our big idea today.

God is able, by his grace, to do what he does in the gospel.

Turn destruction into resurrection.

God is able by his grace to turn marriage destruction into marriage resurrection.

This is what God loves to do.

This is what God is so good at doing.

Not that God's not good at everything that he does, but he really loves bringing life out of death.

And what a hope for you if you are a Christian.

God is able by his grace to turn marriage destruction into marriage resurrection.

But you say, what is the pathway of that grace?

What does that grace look like?

And how ought it, where do we even begin when we look at each other in the eyes and recognize how devastated things have become?

Where do we even start?

Why don't you start here?

Number one, start with the grace of lament.

Don't deny the devastation.

Lament over it.

If we're gonna capitalize on God's grace, we've got to start with the grace of lament.

Don't deny the devastation.

Lament over it.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verse 4, there's a time for certain things.

Ecclesiastes 3:4

Verse 4 says there is a time to weep.

I don't think we take this as far as we need to in our culture.

Grieving is not only an appropriate part of living in a fallen world, grieving is an expected part of living in a fallen world.

And I can't tell you how many times as a pastor I've heard people say, well, I have to be strong for my kids.

So I'm not gonna grieve.

But someone has to make the money, and so I just have to go back to work, and I can't really think about this right now.

Or I'm I'm they're too guarded about their pain.

They don't want to share it.

And here's the issue with that you cannot restore what you haven't lamented.

Lament is this amazing gift.

It's one of the things that I think is just a beautiful, clear, obvious reality in Scripture that many people don't understand the gift that it is.

It is God's way of helping us process our pain.

It is the way that God has invited us to deal with the dissonance between life in a fallen world and a faithful God.

How do those things come together?

Lament is the way for us to deal with severe, heavy grieving and making sense of that when we hear about the goodness of God.

God has created this path, lament as a path to bring your pain to the Lord.

And maybe one of the best singular sentences that could describe the full picture of lament given by a pastor, Pastor John Piper, he says it like this.

Occasionally, weep deeply over the life that you hoped it would be.

Grieve over the losses, and then wash your face, trust God, and embrace the life you have.

If I were to put lament into a sentence that speaks of it well.

Weep deeply, grieve the losses, then wash your face, trust God, and embrace the life you have.

Listen, I don't know if this applies to you right now.

Some of you are like, I this doesn't apply.

Write it down anyway.

Because here's the thing if you don't go through it, someone close to you will go through it, right?

And one of the things that's so devastating about listening to a sermon is that you listen solely for yourself.

You should not be listening to a sermon solely for yourself.

There's also a bad way to listen for others, like, hey, this applies to you, whack whack, right?

That's not the way either.

But maybe, just maybe, you could be a help, right?

So if this isn't resonating with you, you're like, we have a great time, and already you sound depressing, Scott.

I'm like already not enjoying this sermon.

Uh so be a help to others by leaning in, right?

So here's where it starts.

You need to have the funeral if you have this brokenness in your marriage.

If you have this kind of devastation, you have to have the funeral.

You have to be able to unload the reality that what was supposed to be your greatest comfort in your life, your marriage, has become the greatest cross in your life.

And that is a heavy weight to process.

You've got to process it.

You've got to bring your sorrow to the Lord.

You've got to learn how to do it.

You say, I have no idea.

I was never taught how to grieve.

I have no idea how to do it.

Here's the good news.

If you need an example of how to do it, that's what the book of Psalms is all about.

In fact, the largest category of the type of psalms in the Psalms are laments.

Literally, one in three.

Just rush and roulette it.

You'll find one, all right?

Open them up, bam, one in three, you're gonna get there.

And it's going to give you an example of how to lament, how to not stay silent in your pain, how to not stay, this is what we do often, stewing in your pain, where you just think about it a lot and think you've prayed about it.

The greatest privilege of lament is God invites you to bring everything to him with all of your feels and share it with him.

In lament, you get to join the disciples in the boat in Mark 438 when they say, Don't you care, Jesus, that we're perishing?

You get to be that honest with the Lord.

In lament, you get to join David in Psalm 13 when he says, How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

You ever feel that?

How long must I take counsel in my own soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?

Lament is an invitation to bring the fullness of your feels to the God who knows, and the God who sees, and the God who loves, and the God who restores.

And so here's the thing: God's inviting you.

Bring it all, bring all your feels.

You, some of you are like, I didn't even know it was appropriate to talk to God that way.

Read the Psalms, it's there.

Bring it, but as you grieve, Christian, we do not grieve as those who have no hope.

Remember 1 Thessalonians 4 13, but we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.

In other words, where the process of lament is yes, bring everything to the Lord, process it, have that funeral, get the sorrow out, don't stew on it merely in your own head, but then eventually you must resolve to redirect your thoughts off of your circumstances and on to your loving Lord.

You have to have that moment that the psalmists have.

I call it your yet moment.

You have to have the yet moment when you lament.

Amidst the sorrows, amidst the feels, amidst the tears, amidst the difficulty, you get to a place where you say, Yet I will trust in the Lord.

Yet I will trust in your unfailing love.

My heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord, for he has dealt bountifully with me.

You have to have that yet moment.

You have to get off of yourself onto the Lord.

I don't know what it is, but what you're choosing to do is saying, I choose to trust my God when my circumstances don't look like the truths I see in Scripture.

And so I don't know what it is for you, but maybe you would join Job with a yet I will worship refrain.

The Lord gives, then the Lord takes away.

But blessed be the name of the Lord.

You hear that yet there?

But blessed be the name of the Lord.

It looks terrible right now.

There is no possible way I can even wrap my mind around a verse like God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

That is so terrible to hear right now.

But, but you will trust him.

And you'll do a little work in that passage.

And one of the things you find in that passage is that word work together is like a it's like for medicine.

And it's the idea of like creating a serum.

And the Lord has this ability where you can throw poisonous things in, and he's actually able to turn it into a serum that makes it profitable to you.

That's what working all things together for good is.

You throw poison in there, and God somehow makes it profitable to you.

And yet you're gonna trust him for that.

You're gonna believe that.

Maybe this is what you need to say.

I I need to trust what we just prayed in Psalm 34, 18.

Yet I believe you are near, that you are near to the brokenhearted and that you saved the crushing spirit.

And Lord, I don't feel you near right now.

In fact, I feel you're so far away, but I have to believe you at your word.

Or maybe you need to say with the psalmist, yet I will trust you to heal, Lord, because Psalm 147, 3 says, You will heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds.

Or maybe your yet moment is yet, I will trust in his timing.

I will wait on the Lord.

My the joy will come.

It will come with the morning.

Maybe not this morning, but some morning.

We get our thoughts off our circumstances, we get them onto the Lord.

We have our yet moment.

Yet, Lord, here's what's true.

We got our eyes off ourselves, we get them on to the Lord.

Even more, we get them on to the gospel.

Where all of our pain must finally come.

Here's an interesting way to look at your life.

Every trial that you face is a mini death.

Every affliction that you face is a mini death.

Those things are here because we live in a fallen world.

But our framework doesn't end with death.

Our framework ends with resurrection, right?

So every single sorrow, every single trial, every single affliction that you face is a mini death, and we are the expectant ones that expect out of death resurrection to come.

This is how God's designed the work, the world to work.

And as we anticipate resurrection, so if our marriage looks like it's dead, we don't look at it and say that's the end of the story.

Our God's the God who raised from the dead.

Our God's the God who's ascended to the right hand, and so every trial that I face, I'm expecting a resurrection.

That's the hope that we have as Christians.

We are not the people of the God of the dead, we are the people of the God of the living.

And while we wait for the God of the living to bring about resurrection, we go back to the gospel.

Why?

Because the gospel proves that God loves you.

Right in the middle of the worst parts of your life.

The gospel proves that God is for you, not against you.

The gospel deals with your feels when you sense that his love maybe has been separated from you, but then you go to Romans 8 and you wait, wait, because I'm in Jesus Christ, there's nothing that can separate me from the love of God.

Right?

Not death, not life, not famine, not sword.

Nothing's in heaven or on earth.

Nothing can separate me from the love of God.

So whatever it is that I'm facing, I am not separated from the love of God.

Jesus Christ has made that sure for me.

Not only that, because of the shed blood of Jesus on that cross, he has bought the right to make everything right.

And so I go with that kind of confidence into my future.

I weep, but then I wash my face.

I trust the Lord with my yet moment, and I embrace the life that is staring me in the face today with hope of resurrection.

It starts with the grace of lament.

It's maybe one of the most important areas that we can grow in as believers.

But then it moves to this the grace of repentance.

How important is this?

The grace of repentance.

Don't excuse your sin, repent of it.

I cannot tell you how important this point is.

I'll just say it like this.

Point number two is where the real work gets done.

It is where the work of restoration either stalls or succeeds, and it depends on what happens with the quality of your repentance.

And by the way, you can't stir up the quality of your repentance.

It is a gift from God.

The ones that truly restore their relationships do so because they're not coaxed into repentance.

The Spirit of God is prompting and pushing and urging repentance in such a way that it's almost feeling natural to the one who needs to do it.

Guided, yes.

But you're not questioning it, going, are they just doing that because someone told them to do it?

Piece by piece, step by step, day by day, year by year, repentance is the way to restoration.

So just like you can't restore what you don't grieve, you cannot rebuild apart from repentance.

And by the way, if you're like, oh, this doesn't apply to me, but repentance is your life.

So take good notes.

You're like, I'm single.

Yep, and you're a sinner.

That's another word that starts with S.

So um get some good notes in, okay?

What stalls rebuilding is a couple things.

When you're caught in sin rather than being sorry, when you're caught in sin and then you say sorry, do you know how bad that messes up the restoration process?

I can't trust you're sorry when you're caught.

Are you tracking with me?

If you get caught in your sin, like if you're in a situation right now and you're thinking, I'm gonna be okay, I'm just gonna hide it, as the worst plan in the possible world.

And it seems so right that you just hold on to it because if you shared it, this is the dumb stuff we think.

If you share it, it will make things worse.

Ha! Yeah, it will for a second.

But then God, by God's grace, it's the way to make things better.

And actually, between you and the Lord, it's far better when you start to share it.

But this is what we think.

When you're caught in sin, instead of saying sorry, repentance is slower, the validity of it is slower to affirm.

You can't affirm it easily.

What stalls repentance is when you lie about it, you provide selective information.

This is what happens, right?

You have some catastrophic issue that happens, right?

Something you have to admit in your marriage, and you kind of admit something about it, and then a little bit more comes out, and then a little bit more comes out, and then they find out a little bit more.

Not helpful.

Not helpful.

Not helpful when you're trying to be honest when you haven't been honest.

Or like I said, when it seems like in order for them to quote, exercise repentance, they have to jump through all the hoops that the pastor or the counselor is making them do, and then you're wondering, man, are they just doing that because so-and-so told them to do that?

Or is this prompted by a heart that's broken before the Lord and hungry to in sackcloth and ashes repent of their sin and return to right relationship with God and spouse?

The good news is that if you are in Jesus Christ, and this is so key, repentance is a gift from God.

And repentance is yours because you are free to repent, because in Jesus Christ, you already know He's secured your acceptance.

Your acceptance isn't based on your performance, and so you can gladly come clean with everything that's taken place in your life.

And so here's that process.

When we talk about repentance, what does it mean to repent?

We're gonna jot down about, I think, seven things or so, this process of what it looks like to repent.

And the first thing is really simple: take the log out of your own eye first.

Right?

Start with yourself.

We've talked about this so many times.

First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you can deal with your brother's log or your spouse's.

Start with you, not your spouse.

And as you take the log out of your own eye, number two, take a good look.

Because here's what you'll find in a repentant person.

A repentant person is appalled by their sin.

No one has to make them appalled.

They are horrified over what they've done.

They they borrow the heart of Isaiah when confronted by the Lord.

Woe is me, for I am ruined.

I am a man of unclean lips, dwelling amongst a people of unclean lips.

Take a good hard look.

And listen, no one better make you do that.

You do it because you're so broken over your sin.

Number three, catch the damage it caused.

This is so important.

Take a good hard look at not just at the sin itself, but at the damage that the sin has caused.

I'll tell you what will inhibit your restoration when you downplay your sin, and they see it a lot more significant than you.

You can't rebuild what you refuse to acknowledge is broken, and what you refuse to acknowledge is broken to the depths that it's broken.

This is on the one who needs to exercise repentance.

This is be specific.

Tell your spouse, sweetheart, I loved my sin, and this is the sin.

Here it is by name.

Usually it's several.

Let's just pluralize it, sins.

I loved these sins more than I loved you for the years of our marriage.

And I'm way less focused on myself and more focused on my concern for you.

You catch the damage caused.

Number four, you take responsibility.

Grasping the accuracy of the offense is critical, but then you take responsibility.

There's no hemming and hawing.

It's I and I alone have committed this sin.

And it doesn't matter if there's explanations for why, there's no excuses for why.

No blame shifting.

And frankly, let me just say this too, because I should have said it earlier.

Before your sin breaks your heart over your spouse, it must break your heart over your savior and the relationship that has been fractured because of your sin.

It should start there first.

In fact, the best repentance we will see is when your heart is first and foremost broken with a sense of what your sin has done against the Lord.

The very Savior who died to deliver you from sin, now you are sinning against the one who hates sin, who died for sin.

And as crushed as you are over your spouse, you're more crushed over the jeopardy done to your relationship with the Savior that you are like sackcloth and ashes, kind of weeping before him.

And then you make amends, number five.

You make amends.

You can't get the past back, but where humanly possible, you work to restore what your sin has squandered, what your sin has stolen.

You borrow the heart of God in Joel 2.25, where he tells his people, I will restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten.

You grab hold of Zacchaeus' heart when he's met by the Lord Jesus in Luke 19, and he goes, Whatever I've taken, I'm gonna restore.

And here's the thing: he didn't have to be told by a counselor, uh, how much do you think I should restore?

Let me just give you a heads up.

If you're in this place, don't ask that question.

Multiply it by many and go with that.

He goes four times back.

I'm just gonna give you four times what's been taken.

Because the heart that's broken gladly looks to wherever possible restore what your decisions, what your behavior has squandered and stolen.

Take the log out, take a good look, catch the damage caused, Lord help us.

Take responsibility, make amends.

Number six, accept the consequences.

You don't avoid the consequences, you embrace them for what they are.

You don't spend your time criticizing the disciplinary process you're in.

Really, under the Lord's guidance, but you accept it willingly.

You don't get stressed out about I've been changing, how come she's not?

How come he's not doing it faster?

Uh-uh.

My repentance has been really good.

Yeah, I know.

It's wild.

No, you you you humbly understand it may take years to rebuild.

More than that, you don't deserve anything.

You deserve for this never to be rebuilt.

But God.

But God by his grace.

I am just throwing myself on the hope that God is a gracious God who restores.

I don't deserve, I'm not entitled to anything.

You take your time, sweetheart, and I will be focused exclusively on my own sin.

You give them time to feel fully comfortable.

You give them time to trust you.

You broke that trust.

You give them time for intimacy to grow in the relationship.

You're not demanding, you're understanding, and you're willing to wait.

And by the way, you're not distracted either.

Is your reputation gonna be damaged and people around you and your friend circle gonna be affected when something of this devastation in your marriage goes down?

Yes.

Don't let it be a distraction to you.

Don't be so proud, you're like, I gotta fix my reputation.

Don't worry about your reputation, and trust your reputation to the Lord.

Keep working on your repentance.

Go back to these points.

Get on your knees and weep before the Lord.

That's what you should do.

Don't worry about your reputation.

Don't worry about your respect, man.

Man, your parents don't respect me anymore.

Don't worry about your parents.

Don't worry about anybody's parents.

Don't get distracted.

All that is to be entrusted to the Lord.

What you're focused on is number seven, you're charting a new path forward.

Because here's the thing, like we talked about, it's never like one big thing, right?

Yes, one big thing is the culminating thing, but the reality is you had some well-worn paths that you would tread down over and over and over until it blew up in your face.

And it is really hard to get yourself out of well-worn paths.

This is how sin takes place.

We just have these well-worn paths.

You're gonna need to bulldoze the paths you used to go down.

You're gonna have to start some new paths.

You're gonna have to chart a new path with plentiful check-ins.

It's like going to the gym for the first time in years.

Little by little by little, you have accumulated some stuff that's gonna make the gym miserable.

You tracking with that?

And you're gonna wanna quit.

You're gonna even want to tell, like sometimes you're like, yeah, I went to the gym.

And what that means is you really just drove in, you sat in like parking lot 45 minutes, read X, and came home, right?

Yeah, I went to the gym.

No, no, no, no.

Grace training requires lots of eyes.

Just like the video talked about, a kind of accountability, a kind of transparency, a kind of honesty that is required.

You are growing in grace training.

And what do I mean by grace training?

Listen to Titus 2.12.

He says, grace trains us to renounce ungodliness.

It's actually grace that helps us to grow in sanctification, renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled.

It is possible by the grace of God to live a self-controlled, upright, and godly life in the present age, waiting for the blessed hope, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This grace training, all the way till you get to glory.

You're like, how often, right?

You've seen those people that kind of do the diet thing and then they they stop and then it all goes back to the way it was, and then they're like, oh, I'm gonna die it again, and then they die it again, and then they stop, it goes back the way it is.

No, no, no.

Grace training is like, hey, even if your marriage gets better and we hope that it does, you just you're still on the grace training pathway.

Are we getting that?

Like, that's all the way until we see the Lord Jesus Christ face to face.

And so if you are growing in grace training, one of the things I would encourage about your marriage is go back to the beginning of this series and work through how do I flush every one of these messages out.

Don't worry about how do we build the old marriage back.

Consider starting a new marriage, in a sense.

You're working on marriage 2.0, and it's fresh, and it's gonna be built from the ground up from God's word.

You're gonna get after the design, you're gonna go after holiness by the grace of God, thought, word, deed, motive, you're gonna bear fruit in keeping with repentance, and you're gonna be walking alongside people as you stumble your way forward, because that's the only way we go forward.

And I can't tell you how important those seven steps are.

I can't tell you how important those seven steps are.

Number two is the pivot, it's the hinge on which everything in your restoration hopes hang.

Take your time.

Don't go fast.

Ask the Lord to surface the things that you may not even be seeing right now.

Because listen, sin is so deceptive.

Coinciding with these new patterns, committed to this charting a new path, you ask for forgiveness for what has happened.

You ask for forgiveness.

Which leads to number three, the grace of forgiveness.

Don't hold on to hurt, forgive.

Assuming a deep, thorough, consistent pursuit of repentance is in place from the offending party and forgiveness is sought, the offended party's job is to forgive.

Again, one of those things that, again, Christians know that we're supposed to forgive.

But not when it hurts like that.

Not when it does damage, not when you hit when it affects my kids or something I love like that, then it becomes so much harder.

If I were to give you a definition on forgiveness, I would say it's you acknowledging the debt created by your spouse when they sinned against you.

And you from the heart choosing to release them from the punishment, no longer holding that debt over them.

It's acknowledging the debt created by your spouse's sin and choosing from the heart, God help us, because it's not gonna be perfect, and if it's devastating, which it would be in this case, because we're talking about rebuilding from the ashes, you are going to have to look at your forgiveness all of the time.

It's not a one decision kind of thing.

You will find, like, man, certain days you're like, forgiveness thing's amazing.

I'm killing it, it's so much grace.

And the next day you're like, I forgive nothing.

I take back that I even said it the first time, and you're like, this, right?

I mean, this is how it goes in devastating acts where forgiveness is required.

I'm saying it in a light way, but we understand the heaviness of that, right?

And the way I'm getting at this definition of choosing to release them from the punishment, no longer holding that against them, that debt against them, is that it comes from two words in the Greek in particular.

The one where we see it in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 12, and 1 John 1, if we confess our sins, the Lord is faithful to forgive us our sins, is the word to release or to remit.

And then the word in Colossians, as we read today, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other is another word, which literally means forgive out of grace.

What it means is you don't forgive paying it out of your own pocket, you forgive grabbing some of the grace that God has massively poured out on your life and extending that to the sin of your spouse.

It's a word that means to forgive out of grace.

And the framework is pretty simple.

Sin creates a debt, a debt against God and a debt against your spouse, and the offended party, this is it's so simple and yet so hard.

You know those things?

It's like it's not complicated.

Sometimes we can get really confused with forgiveness.

Like, well, what about this and what about that?

It's not complicated, it's just incredibly difficult to do when the hurt is that bad.

It's the offended party releasing the debt to God.

The debt created when they sinned against you.

You're entrusting that to God to do as He sees fit.

Now, let me just be really clear what forgiveness isn't.

Because I think it's just as important as what forgiveness is.

It isn't minimizing what has taken place.

If you forgive, it's not you enabling or minimizing.

Again, if the offending party minimizes what they've done, it fractures the attempt at rebuilding.

There's no doubt about it.

This assumes the accuracy of the offense.

You're not minimizing it.

You're not erasing the consequences, you're not unwriting history, this happened, and there is consequences, and you don't need to apologize for the consequences.

There are consequences embedded into the things that we do when we violate God's law.

And that's part of honestly, it's a great teaching tool.

Forgiveness is not ignoring wisdom, all right?

It's not the same as having no boundaries.

Oh, just receive them back in exactly the way it was before, because that's forgiveness.

No, no, no, no.

Forgiveness is not that.

It's not the same as trust.

It's choosing not to hold that debt over them.

Forgiveness is not even forgetting what happened.

You're like, but the Lord forgets.

He just like somehow blanks it out of his mind.

And it's a choosing.

It's a choosing not to define your spouse by what they did when you see or think about them.

Amen.

That's why we need daily grace to walk in that.

What you are saying when you're forgiving is this I will not make myself the judge and executioner.

That's basically what you're saying.

You are releasing the punishment to be collected by someone else.

You will not be a debt collector, you are choosing to be a debt payer out of the abundance of God's grace lavished onto your plate in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You are not going to pay, you are not going to receive payment, you are not going to be the punisher.

What it really is, forgiveness, is really avoiding sin, your own sin, in response to your spouse's sin.

That's what it really is.

You're saying, I'm choosing to avoid sin in response to my spouse's sin.

Because in the end of the day, if you choose unforgiveness, the greatest sin committed against you won't be the ones committed against you, it'll be the ones committed by you.

It'll be that unforgiveness, that bitter heart, that harboring of a grudge, that holding of the unforgiveness.

It affects your past, your present, and your future.

You harbor that hurt, it will lock you in the past.

You will be obsessed and it will live rent-free in your head.

You will have a present, miserable existence, and it will stunt your future growth and maturity if you choose to remain unforgiving.

At its core is this Colossians 3.

The idea is forgiving people, forgiven people, forgive.

Forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you.

Forgiven people, forgive.

Unforgiving people are evidencing that they are unforgiven people.

I'm not saying it's a guarantee you're not forgiven, but I'm saying you're evidencing by your actions that you have not been forgiven yourself.

Furthermore, Colossians 3.13 says, forgiving each other as the Lord, how are we to do this?

As the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive.

Do you know the forgiveness of Jesus Christ?

Do you know the forgiveness of Jesus Christ?

Because when you do, you can with confidence, although with immense need of strength from the Lord.

I can forgive because Christ has forgiven me.

The biggest swallow down of forgiveness is when you elevate your spouse's sin against you as being greater than your sin against God.

Show me someone who struggles with forgiveness, and I will show you someone who believes the offense against them is greater than their own offense against a holy God.

Listen, I know someone.

Some of you are as sweet as can be.

But if the only remedy for your sin was the shed blood of the second person of the Trinity, your sin is despicably wicked.

And nothing that anyone will ever do to you will compare to the debt of sin against a holy God who in love sent his son to take care of the issue, not just to forgive you, but in love, to override, give you a new heart, put his spirit in you, the spirit of sanctification, justifying you by faith in Jesus Christ, based on his perfect work, credited to your account by faith, his death on a cross, the substitutionary payment deserving sinners.

Rising from the dead, conquering sin and death for those who place their faith in Jesus Christ.

Be so filled with your awareness of your forgiveness in Jesus Christ, and it will make the way for you to forgive others.

And I know what I just said is fighting words when you're feet experiencing something so intense horizontally.

Let that be a gauge for like times a lot more for your offense vertically.

And can we just know this as well?

There's no lasting relationship without forgiveness.

You'll never get anywhere without forgiveness.

Even in a good marriage, you have to forgive all the time.

Any good marriages in here?

You forgive a little bit?

No?

Sweet.

Once lament, repentance, and forgiveness have begun, the movement towards restoration can begin.

Hear me close.

Restoring the relationship doesn't necessarily mean to what it was.

Certainly not right away, maybe not ever.

Just because you go through this doesn't mean that it will auto-fix things, but this is the way forward.

The grace of lament, the grace of repentance, and the grace of forgiveness.

It doesn't mean that you don't establish boundaries through this.

In fact, some people go, I can't believe you're establishing boundaries.

I thought you were forgiving me.

I thought I I've repented of all this stuff.

Listen, boundaries are an invitation back in again, just with appropriate separation, because I don't trust you the same way anymore.

Boundaries are a really good thing and a really appropriate thing.

We're not gonna freak out that there's boundaries established.

And you're gonna put no timeline on the new normal.

Instead, what you're gonna do is put your head down and brick by brick, by God's grace, pursue that marriage 2.0.

And you're gonna expect setbacks along the way because we're broken even at our best attempts to be holy.

And we're gonna hold on to this hope because our God is a God who makes living things come out of dead things.

God can redeem, God will redeem, and according to Psalm 84, if it is for your good that your marriage is mended, it will be for no good does God withhold from those who walk uprightly.

Father, we need your help.

We recognize that there is so much here that gives us a framework for how to grow in the midst of horrible situations, but it has to be applied.

And it has to be applied effectively by your Spirit.

Lord, help our people apply this in their lives and walk by grace on the long, but we pray, fruitful road of restoration.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.