Forgive One Another (Ephesians 4:25-32)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning into New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel center church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

Therefore, putting away lying, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another.

Be angry and do not sin.

Don't let the sun go down on your anger, and don't give the devil an opportunity.

Let the thief no longer steal.

Instead, he is to do honest work with his own hands, so that he has something to share with anyone that is in need.

No foul language should come out from your mouth, but not but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that he gives grace to those who hear.

And don't grieve God's Holy Spirit.

You were sealed by him for the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness, anger, and wrath, shouting and slander be removed from you, along with all malice.

And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Be kind to one another, compassionate or tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

Lord, as we open up your word, help us to understand it today's terms and give us the courage to apply it to our lives now and always.

Amen.

Please be seated.

As you can guess, we're continuing with the one another theme.

And today the theme is on forgiveness.

And I foolishly not took it on, I took it on honestly with uh great esteem and appreciate it, but foolishly thought it was such a simple subject to address.

Foolishly thought there was just a little bit to do, and I'd be able to give it and present it in a couple of minutes.

And this is not the case.

This is quite a vast subject, and I will try to do it justice.

I will try to bring the word to you and we'll explore it together according to his will.

And if I go a little bit over, please forgive me.

I want to tell you a story first.

A story about a man I heard a couple of years ago at GAFCON, as a matter of fact.

His name is Yasser, and Yasser was brought up in the Muslim tradition.

In North Sudan, and in their school, they were mostly Muslim, but they had one Christian friend.

Now, this boy was supposedly a friend of all the Muslims, and openly that was the case.

But that was not truly what happened.

And the story goes this way it's a little bit of the story as a young man at the school, and a little bit later on.

Because of the teaching in the mosque, Yasser and his friends wanted to get rid of this one Christian in the school.

So one day they took him aside and beat him senseless almost to death and left him there, and that was it.

And they thought at the time they would hear nothing more about it.

And sure enough, he never showed up again in school.

However, Yasser felt this sudden tug over time and was converted to Christianity.

That's not the story.

He also was ordained as an Anglican priest.

That's not part of this story, although it's a fabulous story.

Later on, after his conversion, after becoming a priest, Yasser attended, as is often the case, clerical meetings in Cairo in Egypt.

And he was standing there one day after some of the sessions, and another young man came up to him, looked him in the eye, and said, Do you remember me?

No, I don't.

Who are you?

He said, I am that boy, now the man, whom you and your friends beat senseless and left to die.

Oh dear.

That tug.

But the next thing he said brought all our hearts beating.

He said, I forgive you.

I forgive you.

What kind of forgiveness is this?

Complete and absolute that forgives the inexcusable.

That's the sort of thing we need to address today.

And I'm not sure I could do that.

I really am not.

Could you?

So, what is forgiveness all about?

I hope today, after our time together, that we'll all uh understand the same thing.

Forgiveness matters.

And forgiveness matters for three reasons.

The first is that it's all throughout Scripture.

God wants us to forgive.

The second, forgiveness matters because it's so unnatural.

I don't know about you, but for me, it's not a simple thing.

Even the littlest things, again this morning and driving.

We'll talk about that later.

It's hard to forgive.

The third thing is that forgiveness, true forgiveness, shows the real character of God.

It is the heart of Christ.

And I think we'll agree by the end, and if not now already, that we can only truly forgive with his help because of what he's done for us.

Okay, let's explore forgiveness together.

So much to do.

I use the ESV translation.

It's going to be a little bit different from what we have in our bulletin, but if you have your Bibles, turn to them.

If you have the bulletin, turn to it.

We'll go through and explore, and I again apologize.

We'll spend a bit of time on the whole passage, mostly focusing, though, on the last line, which is 32.

Therefore, having put away falsehood or lying, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.

Be angry and do not sin.

Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

Now that's a lot of verses, and there's a lot of stuff in there, and I'm just going to touch on it because it builds the story for forgiveness.

We are told here by Paul writing to the churches in Ephesus about the new self.

Speaking the truth, not lying.

That's our, I believe, ninth commandment, if I have it correct.

And we are members of one another.

And uh Creighton, here's another one another we could add to it as well.

That is, members of the body of Christ.

Give no opportunity to the devil that is, don't let him into your mind, into your soul, into your thoughts.

That's hard to do.

But we are told to do that.

Uh, if we stop here and just reflect on the book of Ephesians, the darn thing about the Bible is it's so interconnected.

The darn thing about the Bible is the whole of the Old Testament points to Christ, and the New Testament talks about Christ, then what we need to do with it.

I say darned because it means you can't really focus on one area without looking at the other two.

So, just as a very quick thought, Ephesians, the first part we're told, and if you read it, you see the first two chapters, talk about what has God done for us.

That God has, through his grace only and his mercy, blessed us, that he has given us Christ on the cross, who through his death and resurrection has saved us, who has forgiven us.

So he's talked about what God has done for us in the second part of Ephesians, as here and on, talks about what we need to do now, having accepted Christ as our Lord and Savior.

So if you've got that sort of separated, now we're being told what to do and how to live.

This is critical, not because that will get us to heaven, not because that will justify us, we're only justified through Him.

But now that we've accepted Him, this is how we have to live.

Okay, so none of these things uh don't speak the bad language.

Um I attended cadets as a teenager, and I don't know about your experiences, but in the military or quasi-military stuff, good language is not there.

It's always the other one.

It's this and that.

And I remember going home once, and somebody else had the same experience, and you're sitting and you're asking for the butter to be passed, and it's not just the regular butter, thank you very much.

And the surprise in everyone's faces.

The rotten thing is that this stays with you the rest of your life, and you're continually fighting it.

Wouldn't it have been best if I never had that to begin with?

And so there it can come out at any time, especially when you're hammering a nail and you hit your finger.

Yeah.

But we're taught and told not to do that.

It means that if we have to be told, it's a natural thing to do the wrong thing.

I think that's something to remember.

The natural thing is always to do the wrong thing.

We have to be told by Christ and by God the right thing to do.

And Paul reiterates that here, what we need to do at this time.

So we've been accepted by Christ on the cross, we've been redeemed by Christ on the cross, we're not having this corrupting language come out of our mouths.

Christ tells us that it's not what goes in, remember, it's what comes out that defiles us.

We have to keep this in mind.

Okay.

What's the next thing he says?

Verses 30 and 31.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption, in the ESV translation.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

So this fits in with exactly what we were talking about before, the same continuation, but some more descriptive words about our feelings that we need to address.

They're going to be there, they're natural, that's the way we're built, at least that's the way now that we are sinners, that we are built.

Not the way we were designed, but coming out of Eden, we are.

We need to live what we speak, talk what we walk the talk, pardon me, and go and sin no more.

And remember, Christ commanded so many to go and sin no more.

That woman caught in adultery.

And it says nothing about the man caught in adultery, does it?

Just about the woman.

It's another discussion again.

If we don't do these proper things, we'll go back to our old ways, the natural ways, the ways that are right in there.

And that'll cause the spirit to grieve.

Let all bitterness and anger and wrath and clamor, loud noise, slander be put away from you.

Get rid of these common feelings.

The problem is that so easily said, but not so easily done.

And here's the one, the verse I want to focus on, the one that should draw us in, and also through other passages we'll see.

32.

Be kind to one another, compassionate in the one or tender-hearted in another, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

First, we've heard Paul telling us to put off our old self and take on the new one, what to do and how to do it, the types of things that will come out of our hearts and out of our mouths.

Be kind as opposed to bitter, be tender-hearted or compassionate as opposed to hard-hearted.

And remember Pharaoh, when Moses went to talk to him, he was very hard-hearted.

I think it's a great uh example of how we can become when something is happening that we don't quite like.

So, what is forgiveness after all that?

What is forgiveness?

Two definitions I'll use.

The Oxford Dictionary online and also in the text says to stop feeling angry or resentful towards someone for an offense or a mistake, to stop feeling angry.

Okay.

Also to cancel a debt.

So if I owe anyone any money, will you forgive me?

Webster describes it, and this is uh also important, and we need to keep all these three definitions in mind: a disposition of compassion, kindness, and sensitivity to others.

Stop feeling angry, cancel the debt, and disposition of compassion.

Forgiveness matters.

Let's address the first part then.

Forgiveness matters because it's in Scripture.

If it's in Scripture, God wants us to forgive.

Well, apparently, and I didn't count them all, but I believe the concordance, it's 120 times that forgiveness appears, or more, in the Bible and its different variations, in the Old Testament and in the New.

It's of course in our liturgy, but that would be understood because our liturgy is scripture rewritten, so it has to be there.

And Jesus himself spoke about forgiveness 30 times.

Michael, if you don't believe it by now, you should understand it's really important.

What does Jesus say about forgiveness?

Well, we read in today Luke 11, 1 to 13, about praying from the Lord.

I used actually Matthew from the Sermon on the Mount, but it refers to the same discussion on prayer.

Jesus tells us how to pray.

At the time he was teaching the people there around Galilee how to pray.

He'd gone through the what we call the Beatitudes, and now he was addressing prayer.

And we know how it begins, our Father, or whenever you say pray, Father, your name, be honored.

And then it gets to in the ESV version in Matthew, and forgive us our debts.

Remember, canceling debts?

As we also have forgiven our debtors.

Jesus tells us to ask forgiveness of God alongside forgiving others.

This is a command, not a guideline.

Did you ever see the Pirates of the Caribbean?

Do you ever remember that business about guidelines?

Well, it's not really a code, it's more like a guideline.

Guidelines are there to help you understand what to do, but they're not critical.

This is not a guideline.

But listen to the tense that he uses in the ESV in Matthew.

As we also have forgiven our debtors, as we also have forgiven.

And that's a past tense.

That doesn't mean in the future, Michael, you've got to start forgiving.

It means I already now need to have forgiven others to receive this forgiveness.

What manner of forgiveness is this?

Now remember, Jesus has just gone through to tell us that.

He's using this tense in the sermon.

He's talking to people, Sermon on the Mount.

Listen to what happens next.

It's critical because not only telling us what to pray and how to pray, and that those two conditions are in there, but Jesus now explains it a bit further.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, from the ESV, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But and a but means it can wipe out everything else beforehand.

But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Uh-oh.

There's no gray area here.

This is unequivocal.

I, that is also we, must forgive others.

This is very important because in no other area does Jesus explain the prayer that he gives.

He doesn't go into any other further demonstration of what it means.

This is really important.

Again, uh in Matthew, he talks about forgiving.

He explains it in the story of the unforgiving servant.

I won't go into the full details there.

You know them.

I believe Matt talked about that a little while ago in June before he left.

The unforgiving servant, of course, very quickly had amassed this fabulous debt to the king or master.

He couldn't repay it.

The master came, said, Okay, can't pay.

Into jail, you go.

He begged for forgiveness.

He was granted forgiveness.

All was well.

And then it came his turn, and servants who owed him money, he did not forgive, and he put them in jail.

The master or king came back, found him, and okay, you're in jail, that's it.

Until he could repay the debt.

The debt, as explained in the Bible by Christ in the parable, would have been billions of dollars in today's money.

How could he repay that?

And I think that's the story.

He could never have repaid it.

We cannot repair it.

We are given absolution and remission of our sins.

If it's not important after that in scripture, would I believe anything else?

I am a believer.

I have an inquisitive mind, but I'm also taught to look elsewhere.

And it's probably not as good a thing to do as I think it is.

However, did you know there's forgiveness in medicine too?

I went to look up just for fun, some of the uh old areas that I used to deal in in studies.

I did an online search and I could find many references, but I'll just choose two.

One is Johns Hopkins University, and the researchers have a whole page on forgiveness there.

Listen to what they say.

It is an active process, so it's not just a one-time thing, in which you make a conscious decision to let go of negative feelings, whether the other person deserves it or not.

That's the hardest part I have with forgiveness.

Whether they deserve it.

In my opinion, the person who wronged me doesn't deserve it.

But that's my opinion.

What do you think God thinks of me?

In my opinion, Michael.

Yeah.

Also, uh, the Journal of Religious Health states, 2022, forgivers experience greater psychological health, that is, lower anxiety and depression, and greater self-esteem indirectly through reduced anger and improved hope for the future.

They go on to say this leads to greater health and a restoration of freedom.

Isn't that what Christ has been telling us all this time about it?

Huh.

It sounds like medicine is finally catching up to scripture.

How interesting is that.

The Stratford Festival is putting on a plate, runs through till September 27th.

It's called Forgiveness.

It's an emotional map across time.

The story of love in a family, which is a testament to the power of choosing forgiveness over anger.

It's the story of what happens when the children of the Japanese internment camp survivors and Canadian wartime Japanese POW survivors get together.

And they choose forgiveness over anger.

No matter where you look, forgiveness is spoken about.

Just ask Creighton about Star Wars and the forgiveness theme there.

Okay, if forgiveness matters.

And scripture tells us it's important.

We see it also then in medicine.

What about this uh not natural business?

Let's see if I can condense this.

You know the story of Jonah.

Jonah told to go to Nineveh to tell the people, they're sinners, they need to repent.

Jonah didn't want to go.

I won't bore you with the details, but you know them.

Jonah, ship, big storm, throw them overboard.

Big fish swallowed three days, comes out nice and fresh, right?

And then he's got to go to Nineveh and do what God told him to do before.

And he didn't want to.

Why didn't he want to?

It says there that Jonah knew what was going to happen.

They'd repent.

Anyway, he went, told them, took three days to get across, and everyone in the city repented from greatest to least.

But the part of the story here that is critical is that Jonah went afterwards to the east to see what the Lord would do.

Because the Lord's going to take care of them because they're evil people.

Everybody knew that.

And he sat up there, he built a booth.

And remember the story had this plant come and shade him for a day, and then what happened?

A worm destroyed it and fell over.

And listen to the words.

Jonah was angry for the plant.

And God asked him, Do you well?

Do you be well to be angry for the plant?

Jonah's reply to God was, Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.

God pointed out to Jonah his pity for the plant, comparing it to God's pity for the people of Nineveh.

For more than 120,000 people, and this struck me, who don't know their right hand from their left.

That's symbolic.

That means they really don't know very much about anything.

They're so concerned about themselves, aren't they?

But that's a natural thing.

And Jonah didn't want that.

He was so furious.

Am I like that?

Do I not forgive others when I know they're dreadfully wrong, when they're dreadfully evil?

Look at also the younger, sorry, the older son in the prodigal son story.

The story, and I won't bore you with those details, but you know how it goes.

Young son says, Give me my inheritance.

Father says, geez, okay, there you go.

And it takes a lot of money away.

Off he goes, squatters it, gone, then realizes it's it's all wasted.

He has nothing left.

He's treated so poorly out there.

He says, I'll come back and be a hired hand for my father.

Comes close, father sees him a bit of a distance and spreads this feast, welcomes him, loves him, throws kisses on him, gives him finest robes and jewelry, and the feast is there for him.

But what about the older son?

How did he feel about that?

The older son says, I'm not happy about this.

The older son was angry and refused to go in, refused to take part in the feast.

The son told his father, how he'd been so obedient and been there with him all the time.

But there was no celebration, no feast, no appreciation.

Am I like that older son who, when I see someone else being forgiven, do I get jealous?

Do I want something for myself?

It's so easy, isn't it?

It's so easy to fall back into those things and be unforgiving.

Which comes to the next point, then.

If it's so easy to be unforgiving, it's so difficult to be forgiving.

It's so naturally difficult to be unforgiving.

That's wrong.

There's too many negatives.

It's hard.

What about repeated times?

What about when somebody keeps on doing you wrong again and again and again?

That's not as easy to forgive as a one-time thing.

But what does Jesus say about that?

Of course, he talks about that.

Peter asks him, do I just forgive once or twice?

And Jesus says, in one translation, it's 77 times, in another, it's 70 times seven.

It just means it's so many times you can't remember if you've forgiven them before or not.

So we have to forgive forever and ever.

That's hard to do.

So we know Jonah, we know the prodigal son and brother, we know ourselves, we know the number of times it's not easy.

If it's not easy, then how can we forgive?

And if forgiveness, true forgiveness, then comes from Christ, we need to look to Christ to see how it is.

And how is it?

Jesus has forgiven many.

In the Bible, a few examples.

I mentioned the adulteress and writing in the sand, whatever he wrote, and everyone disappeared.

And he said, He forgives her, go and sin no more.

The Samaritan woman at the well, the tax collector, the paralyzed man, Peter, after denying Christ three times, but perhaps the most striking is Christ on the cross nailed there, the agony of taking on the sins of the whole world throughout all time.

And what did he say?

What were his words on the cross?

Forgive them, for they don't know what they do.

What kind of forgiveness is this?

How could I ever do that?

So perhaps, as uh Reverend Creighton said earlier on in another discussion, we need to take little steps.

The same applies here.

C.S.

Lewis talking about it says, do it in little steps.

It's much like learning mathematics.

And I learned after reading about it that he was not good at mathematics.

He said, it's like learning mathematics.

Don't begin with calculus, go with basic addition to begin with.

That makes sense.

We need to take the little steps and forgive those around us before we try to forgive our enemies.

Try forgiving the driver who cuts you off, Michael.

It happens every day.

Try forgiving the neighbor who doesn't cut his grass and expect you to do it.

Try forgiving your brother or your sister who's done a wrong.

How many years ago did they do that?

Or maybe they're doing something this week.

Try forgiving your spouse who said something wrong that you took the wrong way.

Try that.

As something else, if you need it, there's a Christian counseling outfit in Los Angeles, and they've got an eight-step process.

It's really quite fabulous.

I'm just going to read off, not describe it, but read off uh four or five of their steps.

There are eight.

One says to remember God's forgiveness.

That's number three, actually.

Another says reflect on the biblical commandment.

Another says, let go of the hurt.

Continue to forgive.

And the final one is pray for the person who hurt you.

So perhaps the final word in it should be Christ's word again.

And we talked about this back in February, John chapter 20, on the resurrection day, actually the evening when Christ appears to the disciples in the locked room in the upper room, appears through the door.

John 20 · chapter mention

The first time says, Peace be unto you.

And remember, they were fearful, and their fear disappeared, and they were glad.

The second time he says, Peace be unto you.

Let me read it properly so I have it for you.

And he told them he was sending them as the Father sent him, the Great Commission.

Then he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit.

He breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

And then if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.

If you withhold forgiveness, any is withheld.

I would suggest to you that it's only with Jesus, our risen Lord, who died for us on the cross, was resurrected, and now is with us through the Spirit.

Only with Jesus can we truly forgive others.

Only through his empowering Holy Spirit, taken in, can we take on the fruits of the Spirit, the first of which is love.

Because as God forgives us, he is love and he loves us.

Forgiveness matters.

Scripture tells us so.

Forgiveness isn't natural.

It's so easy to go the wrong way.

But true forgiveness comes from Jesus by way of the Holy Spirit.

Lord, the next time I'm driving, I'll have to be ready to forgive others who don't know their right from their left.

I need to forgive them completely.

I will need to forgive others in the course of the day and remember that I will be forgiven too.

I need to remember that although it will be difficult, I won't have to do it alone.

I can take little steps, and with your help, through the empowering Holy Spirit, I can forgive.

Lord, I pray this for all of us.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's Word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

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Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.