Savior: The Wounded Hand | Part 1

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This week I came across a story of an 83-year-old pastor.

He was in the drive-thru at McDonald's.

I'll read his words.

You might be familiar with it.

You might have seen it.

I was in the McDonald's drive-thru this morning.

The young lady behind me leaned on her horn and mouthed some ugly things because I was taking too long to place my order.

So when I got to the first window, I paid for her order along with mine.

Cashier must have told her what I'd done because as we moved up, she leaned out her window and waved to me, mouthing, thank you, thank you.

Probably feeling embarrassed that I had repaid her rudeness with kindness.

When I got to the second window, I showed the server both receipts and took her food too.

Now she has to go back to the end of the queue and start all over again.

Don't blow your horn at old people.

We've been around a long time.

Today we're talking about forgiveness, the deep waters of forgiveness.

How do we learn to forgive in an age of retribution and retaliation?

We've all been wounded.

We've all caused wounds and we all carry deep wounds that others have inflicted.

And the truth is, is we all struggle with forgiveness.

And if you don't, just give it some time.

And then you will.

Is it even worth it?

And then the deeper question.

How do you experience forgiveness from God?

It was five days before this moment.

We call it Palm Sunday now.

It was the triumphal entry.

The city of Jerusalem's getting prepared for the great feast.

Passover, it's packed.

I mean, just slammed with people.

They've all come.

It's a pilgrimage from all over to celebrate the feast.

And Jesus, as he comes in, the people begin to crowd around.

And as he's riding in, they begin to shout together, Hosanna, Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

And they lay down palms, welcoming Jesus in as if he is the new King of Israel.

Twenty-four hours before this moment, his disciples got into a fight.

They were arguing about who is the greatest.

You can only imagine because they saw Jesus entering, he's about to be coronated, and they want to know who's going to be the greatest.

And then they sit at what they didn't know would be the Last Supper with Jesus.

Where he got up from the table and he stooped low and washed all of his disciples' feet, including Judas.

Judas, who earlier had struck a deal with the religious leaders to sell, you know, to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of gold, uh, silver, rather, and he got up from the table and left.

Disciples didn't even know why.

Thought Jesus had sent him on an errand or something.

A few hours later, Jesus is in the garden praying in agony, such agony that his sweat is mixed with blood that is pouring from his pores.

And his disciples, who he asked to pray with him, just simply fell asleep.

And then a midnight mob came.

And they come in the middle of the night with clubs and swords, and they arrest Jesus and take him.

And there's an unjust, illegal, corrupt trial where Peter's right there, by the way.

Can you only imagine this?

Peter follows all the way there, and he's in the courtyard and he denies Jesus to the point that he can actually see Jesus and Jesus can see him.

Next morning, Jesus is brought before Pilate where he is condemned.

And then think about this, the creator of the universe, Jesus, who when he first walked with humanity, it was in the cool of the day.

Now walks towards the hill called the skull, carrying a cross being pushed out by his own creation.

And the first words of Jesus' sermon from the cross.

They have no idea who they nailed to the cross.

They have no idea that their very creator is the one hanging there.

They don't understand the gravity, the weight, the significance of what just happened.

Jesus has much to teach us when it comes to forgiveness.

And I want to just draw your attention to three things when it comes to Jesus' first sermon, first saying of the cross, his first words.

Father, forgive them.

First thing I want you to notice is that forgiveness is actually a divine act.

It's supernatural.

You know what's natural.

Natural is to pay back.

Our natural human response is to get even.

That's natural.

That's easy.

Forgiveness is a divine act, is a supernatural act.

What's natural is we hurt and we hurt one another and we pay back.

What's supernatural is to forgive.

In fact, uh, Dr.

Hannah Arden, she, not a Christian by any means, or she's since passed, but she was a German Jew, escaped Paris during the Holocaust, philosopher, historian, one of the uh most influential political theorists of the 20th century, writes this.

The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.

And to her point, was just because it was written in a religious context, don't dismiss it because of its significance.

And in her book, The Human Condition, she writes about the problem of irreversibility.

And the problem of irreversibility is you can't undo what you have done.

And I can't undo what I have done, right?

The minute we do it, we can't take it back.

The minute we say it, we can't take it back.

And if there is no forgiveness, you are destined by one single deed, and you can never undo it.

Forgiveness is this divine act.

Without forgiveness, we are stuck.

Dead.

Not able to move forward relationally.

Well, what is forgiveness?

Forgiveness is simply replacing ill will towards the offender with goodwill.

It's not holding over, it's giving what they don't deserve, it's letting go of your right to pay them back.

And what's beautiful is it's this divine act of recreation.

Jesus and God, the Godhead in all of eternity beginnings created all there was.

And on the cross, it was this moment of recreation when he declared, Father, forgive them.

He was taking on the payment and the substitute standing for our sin, our shame, our brokenness.

And I want to bring recreation, new creation, bring new life out of that which is dead and gone.

In fact, Dr.

Hannah goes on to write: it is the reason for the Christian conviction that only love has the power to forgive.

It's been rightly said that forgiveness is the final form of love.

Love incarnate nailed to a cross.

It was not the nails, by the way, that kept him there, it was love.

And John, who was the only disciple that actually came to the cross, who watched his rabbi and master die, pinned these words.

This is how God showed his love among us.

He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.

This is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

I just want to highlight that word atoning.

You can also put in the word forgiving, substitute.

It means to cover.

And they would be preparing a Passover lamb.

And the lamb, and it's a very odd picture for us today.

We're not used to this.

But it was a symbol pointing towards one day, an ultimate substitutionary lamb of God, would take our place where what was needed was death.

What was required was death from us in the reality of the things that we've done have caused separation.

And they would take this lamb as a symbol, and they would kill it, and they would sprinkle its blood, the lifeblood.

Blood represents life, covering everything that's ever been done wrong.

Forgiving, atoning.

And Jesus stood as our substitute in that place, a divine act of recreation.

We all love to be forgiven.

It's an amazing thing.

And if it is, you know, not just natural, supernatural, this divine act, why don't we do more of it?

Why is it so very hard?

And the second thing we learn from Jesus on the cross is not just that forgiveness is this divine act, his love pouring forth through us.

It's costly, isn't it?

It's deeply and profoundly costly.

There is no accident that within the word forgive is the word what?

Give.

Because you have to give something in order to forgive.

In fact, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who um was significant, worked with um Nelson Mandela in South Africa to end apartheid and bring about healing and reconciliation, wrote this: forgiveness is not cheap, is not facile, it is costly.

Reconciliation is not an easy option.

It costs God the death of his son.

It's costly.

It means we sacrifice something.

And when we understand forgiveness rightly in the light of the cross and what God did for us, it was his sacrifice for us, him in substitution for us, him taking our punishment, him saying, I will take it for you.

And it cost him something significant.

He said, You're worth it.

You know, the value of something is what you'll pay for it, right?

Your value.

God said, I give you it all.

And then we come to our forgiveness.

We come to our challenge, our cost.

Dr.

Everett Worthington, he's the foremost scholar and researcher when it comes to forgiveness.

Uh, and there's some incredible resources.

We won't be able to cover it all.

I put it in the notes, but if you want to get really practical with this, because as I'm talking, I know for many, there's someone who's come to mind, whether living or not, that you need to forgive.

And he's made it so tangible, practical.

He's got a workbook completely free online for you to go through.

But he talks about the path of unforgiveness.

And we get stuck in this.

And the path of unforgiveness begins here.

It begins with the transgression, it begins with an offense.

Someone has done something against us, and then it moves from the transgression to our perception of the transgression.

Our perception of the offense.

See, because we can perceive something and be offended by it, but they may not have actually offended us or transgressed against us.

Okay, let me give you an example because you're looking at me a little confused.

This doesn't fully pertain to forgiveness, but this happened yesterday.

So I was out to lunch with my son, and somebody came up to me and was like, hey man, do you have a lighter?

I'm like, no.

And then I'm like, what does it look like?

Do I look like a smoker?

You know?

I'm like, what vibe am I giving off?

Uh and he's he's going around asking a bunch of people.

I'm like, oh man.

And then he comes back, he had found he lit birthday candles.

Because our perception doesn't always uh lead to what's actually right or real.

See, there's the transgression, something, then there's our perception of it, which then leads to emotion, a hot emotion, anger, hurt, fear.

Now it's important to know that this is not unforgiveness.

These emotions are important.

They act as a warning sign that something needs to be dealt with.

Emotion.

And then it moves to rumination.

Oh, we know about rumination, don't we?

Where you stew on it, you indulge negative feelings, you rehearse it in a way that makes, well, it makes you the self-righteous victim and them the villain.

And after rumination, it moves to unforgiveness.

It's this blend, it's the cocktail of emotions of anger, resentment, bitterness, hostility.

And what happens is unforgiveness actually resides in the body.

It's not just an emotional thing, it's not just a mental thing, it's a physiological thing.

There's been lots of research about this, that your unforgiveness, that resentment, that anger, it actually resides in your body.

You stay in a state of fight or flight.

Raises your high, your blood pressure, lowers your immune system, increased risk of heart disease and diabetes and all other sorts of things.

Like, this is the cost of unforgiveness that we carry in our bodies.

Well, the path of unforgiveness is actually more costly to us than it is to them.

Well, what's the process then of forgiveness?

And notice I said process because forgiveness is not an event.

This is not a trite, you know, hey, just forgive and forget.

Woo-hoo! We're done, we're over, we're besties.

Yeah, anyways.

There's two parts to forgiveness.

There's decisional forgiveness, there's emotional forgiveness.

I want to help us understand it with the tenses of the word forgive.

I forgive, I'm forgiving, you're forgiven.

Uh, I forgive, it's decisional forgiveness.

Uh, Dr.

Everett writes this decisional forgiveness is making a decision about how you want to treat the person in the future.

A complete decision to forgive is when you decide not to pay back a hurt for a hurt, but you plan to treat the person as someone you appreciate or value.

I made a decision.

This is how I'm going to treat you.

In fact, Dr.

Everett, he uh has an acronym, it's called REACH.

It'll take you through a two-hour process.

It's powerful.

I highly encourage you to do it.

The acronym stands R stands for recall the hurt.

Now we're good at recalling the hurt.

This isn't recall the hurt the way you've been doing it.

It's recall the hurt in a way like um with the facts as best you can that the other person would agree with the story that you're telling, almost as if you're um a journalist.

The E stands for empathy.

That you give empathy to the offender.

You begin to look at it from their eyes and their vantage point.

The A, uh the A stands for uh altruism.

That you give the gift of altruism, of forgiveness to them, knowing that it is a free gift that you give to them.

Uh the C is commit.

You make a commitment.

This is the decision point.

You make this commitment.

I've committed to forgive.

And in fact, it's powerful just to write it down.

Not that even you may not be able to have this relationship, or it might even be someone you might not even be able to communicate with because they're no longer around.

Where you write it down, I forgive.

And the H is to hold on to forgiveness.

And that's the I forgive, I make a decision, I'm forgiving.

It's this emotional, this emotional process that the deeper the wound, the longer the process it is for us to forgive.

And so we move from decisional, I forgive, to emotional, I am forgiving.

Emotional forgiveness is the emotional replacement of negative emotions, unforgiving emotions, resentment, hostility, anger, and fear by positive, other-oriented emotions, empathy, sympathy, compassion, and love.

What's powerful, Dr.

Everett's been a uh the leading researcher on this for decades, and um he had been researching this for um uh over a couple decades, and he was coming out with a new book on forgiveness, and right before it was published, um his mother was uh murdered by in a home invasion.

And here the research, you know, the leading researcher on forgiveness, a Christian, is wrestling and battling.

He writes so honestly and talks so frankly about the challenge of like, I wish I could kill him, and wrestling with those feelings, and then the power and the freedom found and forgiven.

I forgive, decisional, I'm forgiving.

You're in this process, and then you know you've forgiven, you're forgiven when you're able to wish them well.

When you're able to wish them well.

You have no ill will towards them.

When your heart rate doesn't rise when you think about them.

When you you can see them and you don't want to just go the other direction.

They may not be safe to be around, but you just you don't have to feel this sense of like, ah, I just wish them not well.

Lewis Meads, uh, he wrote a few books on forgiveness, uh great scholar.

He says, it takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to reunite it.

Forgiveness is not forgetting, forgiveness is not reconciliation, forgiveness is not removing the consequences.

Forgiveness is going about the process of moving from my ill will towards you.

Think about that when Jesus said, Father, forgive them.

They know not what they do.

The ones that nailed me to the cross, I have good will towards them.

I wish them well.

In fact, that's the reason here.

Forgiveness, it's a divine act.

Forgiveness.

It's costly.

And forgiveness, it's for everyone.

It's not just for some people.

Isn't it easy to forgive certain people and not other people?

You're like, oh well, you know.

Because the minute we started to talk about forgiveness, for some, maybe most, or I don't think all yet, and I say yet, that there's someone in your life, they've done something inexcusable.

They don't deserve forgiveness, and you're right.

Forgiveness is for everyone.

Think about this.

There is no one beyond the forgiveness of God, including you.

How often do we feel like we're so beyond the forgiveness of God?

How many times have I walked away?

How many times have I gone down that same path or I said this?

How many times?

You what did I do last night?

God could never forgive me.

And he says, No, precisely.

I forgive you.

Father, forgive them.

Well, who's the them?

Let's think about that.

The disciples who abandoned him, Peter, who denied them?

Father, forgive them.

Judas, who betrayed him?

Father, forgive them.

The religious leaders who were threatened, tried to keep their power.

Father, forgive them.

Pilate, who condemned him, the soldiers who executed him, Father, forgive them.

Now there's something incredibly powerful for us to recognize and understand.

For us to be able to forgive others well, we first must understand the depth that we have been forgiven.

That's why the Apostle Paul would say it this way: be kind and compassionate to one another.

Forgiving one another, how?

How?

It's behind me.

Forgiving each other just as God forgave you.

I think some of us we struggle with forgiveness because we don't think we've really been forgiven that much.

Until we understand the weight and the gravity of our own sin, we will never fully appreciate the greatness of the sacrifice of Jesus and the grace and the forgiveness He has extended to us.

That it was my sin, it was my lust, it was my anger, it was my selfishness.

I'm just talking about my sins right now.

You can get to your sins in a little bit.

It was me.

Is that it took him to the cross?

I wasn't there.

I don't know where my hammer went.

There again.

I wasn't there.

But it was my sin.

One of the reasons he was there.

My sin.

And the beautiful reality is it wasn't the nail, we said it earlier, it wasn't the nail that kept them there, it was love.

It was love that kept them on the cross.

It was his love for you.

Love is in its final form, it is the forgiving God pouring forth and gushing over you, saying, You are forgiven, you are atoned, you are cleaned.

Come home.

You know it's been said that uh hurting people hurt people.

That's true.

Forgiven people forgive people.

And we know the depth and the breadth of just how much we've been forgiven.

We forgive.

In fact, C.S.

Lewis, he said it this way.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in me.

The wounded hand extends his hand of forgiveness to those who nailed his hands to the very cross.

This summer I went away to this um leadership week-long thing.

And it was called Ultimate Leadership, it was with Dr.

Henry Cloud and Dr.

John Townsend, and really powerful.

The mornings were these teaching sessions, and then the afternoons were these process groups.

You would be in a group with, you know, six or eight people, and they had a therapist there, and you would sit and process, and part of it is realizing if we're gonna lead others well, we have to lead ourselves well.

And we have to deal with the things inside of us.

And honestly, I would never say that I would never thought that I was like not a very forgiving person.

I didn't think I was great at it, let's be honest.

But I don't have a I don't have a lot to forgive.

And then we sat in the circle with our therapist, the six or I think there's six other people, and and she said, I have a little exercise.

Would you be willing to do it?

Is after something I'd shared, just struggling with for forgiving a person.

I said, sure.

And so I stood up in the middle of the circle, and if you guys wouldn't mind helping me out.

And she said, Okay, well, why don't you identify some people that you need to forgive?

It was crazy how quick the names just came, you know?

And if you've been, you know, married for any time along, you know, I'll make you my spouse, all right?

Uh, you know, you gotta marry.

Oh, I could have made you, oh, that's what I mean.

We all carry father wounds or mother wounds, and so I had some of that.

I had a sibling wound, I had a friend wound, and all these different things.

It just came up.

And I'm standing in the middle of this room, and I was telling Robbie after his first service, I'm like, I wasn't even like over dramatic on this.

Um, like it felt so hot and like sweating and tense, and you just began to feel the weight of their hands.

Like it's just this is weighty.

It was just bearing down.

And she said, I want you to take, you know, the easiest one first.

And say, you know, this is my wife, by the way.

Um and so I'd talk to that person as if they were that person, and then they would talk back their perspective and their heart, and then I'd say, I forgive you.

And then she would take the hand away.

And it's just this really powerful moment.

I mean, I'm just bawling, and and then go around, I I forgive you.

And really intimate when you look into somebody's eyes and you like just say, I forgive you.

And had this like moment of talking back and forth and hearing, I forgive you.

I forgive you.

But there was one person I couldn't forgive.

Better yet, one person I didn't want to forgive.

And our therapist, she's like, Well, Ryan, that person is gonna be here.

And so wherever you're going, they're going with you until you learn to forgive them.

Thank you.

And I just wonder how many of us are weighed down with unforgiveness and we walk around as if it's a normal common thing because it's just all we know.

And Jesus' forgiveness broke the cycle over you.

You are forgiven, and now be a forgiver.

Who do you need to forgive?

Who do you have that is on you that is bearing down?

Honestly, just start with the easiest one first.

I forgive you.

Be kind, compassionate.

Forgiving one another.

Just as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Let's worship.

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