Forgive and Forgive: Dying by Bitterness | Part 1

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Well, I want to talk to you today about forgiveness.

I want to talk to you about what that means in this world and in your life.

To do that, I want to start with a story from 1928, like a hundred years ago.

Forgiveness, it's like something that many people know about, but they haven't really applied it into their life.

It's something that I would say often goes overlooked.

Much like some of the great discoveries in science and medicine.

Do you know, like a lot of science and medicine, cool things happen through development in labs, through planned scientific processes.

Other discoveries happen by complete accident.

That's what happened in 1928.

Alexander Fleming was studying bacteria.

This is a hundred years ago.

He's in the coast in England, and he leaves a petri dish of some of the bacteria he was studying, accidentally leaves it unopened.

And he leaves it near a window.

And he checks on it and realizes to his dismay that he's left it uncovered.

It's probably worthless.

But he notices there's these small uh mold spores on the outside of the bacteria he was studying.

He was like, this is weird.

And he noticed that this mold that was growing was actually destroying the bacteria that he had been studying.

As he extracted it, he noted that this was this mold juice, he called it, by the way.

Great name.

I'm glad we changed the name.

The name was changed to penicillin because he had extracted this, and he realized this is from the Pelicillum genus, and it had the ability to kill bacteria that was connected to diseases like pneumonia, scarlet fever, meningitis.

Things that used to not have a cure now would have a cure through what we now call antibiotics.

Most of us, many of us in this room, have taken an antibiotic at some point, something that kills growing bacteria in our body.

But you know, a hundred years ago, we hadn't found that yet.

But it what I love about this discovery, of course, first and foremost, the radical ability it has had to change medicine and practice of medicine and the benefits it's given all of us in our lives.

But secondly, what's so cool about Fleming's discovery is that it truly was a discovery.

It wasn't something that he manipulated in a lab, but something he found by accident.

He discovered a healing agent within nature that could heal nature itself.

When nature was twisting and turning into chaos, there was something within the ecosystem that could heal the ecosystem.

You know, something that we had overlooked for thousands and thousands of years that he suddenly discovered.

He actually said this himself.

Uh he said this, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine, humble brag, um, by discovering the world's first antibiotic or bacteria killer.

He's like, I didn't plan.

But I suppose that's exactly what I did.

I did not invent penicillin, nature did that.

I only discovered it by accident.

Um I think that forgiveness operates in this way.

Could there be something within the life of faith that you have overlooked?

Something so central to the way that things operate within the ecosystem of your faith that you've missed it, that all you had to do was kind of notice it in a particular environment and extract it and apply it in the right way to see its healing power.

I think forgiveness is like this, you guys.

I think most Christians talk about forgiveness and the way God has forgiven them, and they say we should forgive people, and you might even write a nice, you know, tweet about it or post on Instagram about forgiveness and how good it is, but really, kind of at the end of the day, applying this and knowing what this is is it often goes overlooked.

Many, many Christians I know, they walk not in bitterness, but something else.

Like this bacteria has grown in their life of bitterness.

And they've overlooked the healing agent that is within their bitterness, which is God's operating forgiveness.

There's something else going on.

I think it's the most untapped resource.

Forgiveness, it it's it's it's the most uncommon resource, uh, uncommonly tapped resource in the Christian faith.

What is it?

What is forgiveness?

Forgiveness, I've defined it as the God-given ability to say this.

You don't owe me anything anymore.

See, forgiveness deals with debts and it deals with hurt and with pain.

When we've been hurt and when pain has happened, what do you say?

You owe me an apology, right?

That's kind of a trite way to put it.

More dramatically, a long relationship that has been, you know, uh gone bad, or parenting that has been suffocating to us over our years.

What do we say?

You owe me years of my life, you know?

Forgiveness deals with debts.

It deals with the ability, though, from God to say, you don't owe me anything anymore.

What I want to argue over the next couple weeks, and it will be an argument with you a little bit, it's okay.

But I want to talk about that forgiveness.

Um, I don't think it's actually possible for human beings to forgive without the power of God.

I don't think that it's possible for us in our own ingenuity and emotional capabilities to look at somebody else and say, you don't owe me anything anymore.

That's why I said it is a God-given ability.

You see, in kind of self-help talk and in books around that kind of emotional awareness stuff, where there's some value out there, they often talk about forgiveness being a decision we make.

But scripture talks about it as a command we receive, a gift given to us by our creator, the ability to say, looking at someone and say, You used to owe me, but you don't owe me.

The ability to cancel the debt, the ability to not hold something against somebody else.

If human beings could find this, human beings would have a future.

That's what Desmond Tutu argued.

Do you know who he was?

He was the archbishop in South Africa, the leader of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission outside of the apartheid in the 90s, right?

Um, he knows a thing or two about forgiveness, is my point, more than you and I.

In his book, which he provocatively titled No Future Without Forgiveness, because he really believes humankind has no future without learning this ability, without learning how to look at somebody and say, you don't owe me anything anymore, especially after a national catastrophe like what happened in South Africa or other parts of the continent.

He says this forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim.

I want to talk about the loss that liberates next week.

But this week I want to talk about what actually forgiveness is, and I also want to talk to you about what happens when we do not practice it.

Because the stakes are as high as Desmond Tutu says.

You might not believe it, man, but I'm here to tell you forgiveness and the lack of forgiveness is the difference between a future and no future.

It's the difference between life and death.

It's the difference between bitterness and freedom.

And I want to talk to you exactly about that today.

What's being asked of us in forgiveness?

Well, you know, Jesus talked a lot about forgiveness.

Jesus Christ defines forgiveness and tells us forgiveness in the form of a command.

I want you to look at four scriptures I just grabbed from the Gospels.

When I studied this, there's really nine of these that I'm kind of looking at, but I picked four of like things just Jesus.

I'm not talking Old Testament, I'm not talking New Testament writings, I'm just talking Jesus on earth.

What was it reported that he said?

And he commanded these things.

Look at Matthew 6, verse 14.

Matthew 6:14

For if you forgive, if you say you don't owe me anything anymore, to others their own trespasses, you know how to trespass it's when someone steps in your territory.

You know, when someone hurts you, it's a sin, a grievance.

So if you tell somebody you don't owe me anything anymore, your heavenly father will also do the same to you, will also forgive you.

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

That's Matthew 6, Mark 11, 25.

And whenever you stand praying, forgive.

If you have anything against anyone, so that your father who is also uh also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.

Luke 6, 37, judge not.

You've probably heard this one before, really famous Jesus teaching.

Judge not and you will not be judged, condemn not and you will not be condemned, forgive and you will be forgiven.

Now, all of these, by the way, are taken in four different instances.

I did not lift these in like four different Gospels repeating the same event.

These are different events of Jesus' teaching.

He just repeated this teaching a lot.

It apparently was a cornerstone of his commands.

It was very, very important.

Okay, at the end of his life, he dies, he raises from the dead in three days, he's with his disciples, his closest twelve people.

He looks at all of them and he says this in John 20, 22, receive the Holy Spirit.

He imparts the empowering presence of God into his followers and then says this.

These are strong statements that cannot go unreckoned with.

You and I have to look at these statements, and if we're a Christian, we have to really take these seriously.

And I would say, even if you're not a Christian, but you find yourself wrestling with God, this is God incarnate coming to you, and he's not suggesting that we forgive.

He's not offering it as a nice bit of advice.

He's commanding it with incredibly great stakes.

I don't think Desmond 2-2 is wrong, man.

I think he had something right there.

That actually, if we don't learn this thing, forgiveness, there is no future for us.

Or our future is destined towards bitterness.

You see, friends, your relationship with God, it is inextricably linked to your relationships with other people.

The New Testament teaches this.

Jesus put it in the quickest way when he was asked, like, what the greatest commandment was.

Do you know what he said?

He said, love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

And if I was in the crowd, I'd go, wait, I asked you for one.

Is it love God or is it love neighbor?

And do you know what I think he would say?

Yes.

It's because the way that you treat other people is the way you know God.

And the way that you know God is how you treat other people.

They are inextricably linked.

It, you see, we we talk about it like I've got my relationship with God, and then we talk about, I got this relationship that's really bothering me, you know?

But the New Testament is like they are actually one in the same.

I see, friends, I'll put it this way: our experience of God's forgiveness is contingent upon our ability to issue forgiveness to others by God's power.

Now, notice what I said here for some of you watching carefully.

I did not say that God's forgiveness is contingent upon our ability.

I said our experience of it, our ability to know it, our ability to even comprehend who God is and what he is.

It's contingent upon our ability to issue the power of forgiveness, but by whose power?

By God.

God is involved in all of this because God is so passionate about saving your life.

That's why he's commanding you and me to forgive things.

We forget this all the time.

Like the commands in scripture, they are not given to us to be nice little religious people, man.

They're given to you because a bacteria is growing in your life and a penicillin is necessary to kill the bacteria of bitterness and resentment.

God is trying to save your life.

That's all he's trying to do.

When he commands you to do something, he's commanding you in a way that would save your life.

Forgiveness, my friends, it is absolutely necessary so long as we withhold it from giving it to other people, we will just not understand God's grace.

When was the last time you took stock of forgiveness?

I often find that we we don't take stock of like who owes us what and what do we feel like we've been hurt by?

And because we don't take stock of it, it's like it leaks out in really weird random comments or small gossipy moments or a fiery post on social media, not realizing that we've just been hurt and we have resentment building, and that's what's leaking out.

But we haven't really dealt with some of the fundamental questions around forgiveness.

Do you want to know what some of them are?

Here's four questions I think that kind of circle forgiveness.

What have we done that we are ashamed of?

What has been done to us?

People have hurt us in some of us in this room have been hurt in unimaginable ways.

Ways that if you told your neighbors sitting next to you, it would shock them.

What has been what have we done?

What have has been done to us?

What have we failed to do?

And then who has failed us?

These questions are at the heart of forgiveness, but are they not the questions we spend most of our lives trying to ignore?

Oh, just me?

Okay, cool.

Um I once heard somebody say, you know what being a pastor is?

It's getting on a stage and saying, you've been ignoring this all week, and I kind of feel that way right now.

Like, like, this is stuff I ignore all the time, right?

But like these are the questions that actually define your whole life, right?

Like, you and I don't really know each other unless we know the answers to these questions about one another, right?

Like, you might know that I love the Portland Trailblazers and that, you know, I like certain kinds of music, but you won't ever really know me unless you know these things.

That's the level of vulnerability that connects a real true relationship, right?

It's like the events in our life that have caused us harm, and then what we did about it and what we didn't do about it.

Like these questions are kind of circling around the essential nature of what forgiveness is.

And the truth is they often go completely unnoticed.

And what happens is a bacteria starts to grow in our life where we look at these questions, and anytime someone brings it up, like a pastor on a Sunday in a gym at Del Mar High School, we start to get kind of angry and agitated because something's growing in us that's disgusting.

Because to be a human being is to experience these four questions.

It just like is a part of the nature of living on this earth.

And so when we encounter forgiveness, though, and we try to practice it, we're really clumsy with it, mostly because forgiveness is not only the most untapped resource in all of Christian living, I believe forgiveness is the most misunderstood concept in Christian living.

Here's five, just five lies I hear about forgiveness all the time as a pastor.

First one is I hear people talk tell about forgive and forget.

Hey, just like water under the bridge, man, like that happened, forget about it, and when you forgive, it should allow you to forget the pain.

And it is not that at all.

Forgiveness, if forgiveness is the God-given ability for you and me to say you don't owe me anymore, we gotta know what they owe.

We gotta know the pain.

We have to know the thing that has grieved us, right?

Forgiveness is not about forgetting.

That's why we've called this series forgive and forgive.

Because it's not so much, and we're gonna talk way more about this next week, it is not so much about forgiving and then forgetting and then like it's over.

It's actually about living in forgiveness towards other people for your whole life, waking up every day and choosing forgiveness.

It is a process.

Which leads me to number two.

I always hear people talk about forgiveness as an event.

Do you hear this?

I hear it all the time.

Someone comes to me and says, Chris, I need to forgive this person.

I'm working up the courage for this conversation.

I'm gonna have this conversation with them and say, You did this to me, I don't owe you anymore.

I forgive you, then it's gonna be over.

And anyone who has worked through forgiveness in their life will tell you, it doesn't work that way.

It is not an event, it is a process.

It requires remembering the pain and continually saying, you don't owe me anything anymore by God's grace.

It's not about forgetting, it's not an event.

And the third lie is I often hear people talk about it in equating it with reconciliation.

They'll use it in the same exact phrase, the same exact, it's like a synonym.

But these are two different words for a reason because they have two entirely different dictionary meanings.

It's different.

Forgiveness, Jesus says you can forgive someone from your heart.

He says this in Matthew 18.

He says, forgive your brother and sister from your heart.

Now, what does that mean?

It means that you actually don't need to go talk to that toxic person again.

Actually, that forgiveness allows you to forgive somebody without having the conversation.

There's people in your life you need to forgive, but you cannot reconcile with because they're dangerous, they're crazy, they're toxic.

Never go to see them again.

Because you are drawing that good boundary, isn't it amazing that God gives us the gift of forgiveness and commands that?

Because you'll notice in all those commands I read you off, he didn't say, I command you to be reconciled with one another, and if you're reconciled with one another, you'll be reconciled to God.

No, he can't do that.

Because forgiveness is a one-way road.

Reconciliation is a two-way road.

Reconciliation requires the other party to receive the forgiveness and humbly repent and come back.

So long as that doesn't happen, forgiveness is the only option.

But forgiveness is the true path forward because there's so many people in our life that aren't going to receive our forgiveness, right?

And there's so many people in our life that we can't see again because of what they've done.

And God gives us this great gift in the one-way road of forgiveness to say, I can issue forgiveness and say, you don't owe me anymore anything anymore, and I don't even need to tell you that.

I don't need to call you on the phone, I don't need to write you a letter.

I can actually, in prayer and Christian community, look across the horizon of my life and truly say, I'm not gonna hold any debts against you.

Fourth, people often think that forgiveness removes the consequences of behavior.

No, it doesn't.

You I put up there, you can forgive somebody in prison.

I mean, consequences exist, and some people do things to us that need to be punished under the law.

Forgiveness does not mean you are uh washing away those consequences.

I'll give you this example, Pope John Paul II, an assassination attempt was made on his life.

Have you seen this photo?

It's a famous historical photo.

He met with his assassin.

This is Pope John Paul with Mehmet Agja, who shot him weeks before.

After John Paul recovered, because he survived a gunshot wound, obviously, he met with him in prison and he said to this man, You don't owe me anything anymore by God's grace, and I love you.

This man died in an Italian prison, Agja.

He suffered the consequences of his behavior, but John Paul was able to issue forgiveness.

You see, forgiveness does not mean that people don't sleep in the bed that they've made, it just means that you don't hold it against them.

It's your choice through God's power.

The fifth lie is simple.

Many people think forgiveness is free.

It is not.

It is costly, but it is freeing.

But it ain't free.

No, forgiveness is not free because forgiveness, when you when somebody owes you something, somebody's gotta pay the debt.

Somebody has to pay.

And in forgiveness, you're just saying they don't have to pay anymore.

They don't owe you anything anymore.

You see, forgiveness is costly.

Forgiveness is not, and married couples, you gotta hear hear me on this especially.

Forgiveness is not I'm sorry.

I'm sorry is is is is free.

That's a free thing.

Will you forgive me is a costly question that puts the power in the other person's hands.

And that person can say, Yes, I don't, you don't.

Owe me anything anymore.

You see, forgiveness acknowledges the debt that is owed to us, it takes account for what has been done, it stares hurt in the face, and it just decides emphatically, by God's power, not to hold that hurt and that debt against another person.

And when that decision is made, someone has to bear the cost.

This is why the new the Bible teaches atonement.

This is a theological term that we have lost in our whole culture.

And if we recovered it, it would help us out a ton.

Do you know what atonement is?

It's the removal of sin and guilt off of a party.

We have in this country no formal process to atone for sins.

We have punishment and we have vengeance.

But we don't have atonement.

Atonement, biblically, it used to look like they would take the sins of a person or a nation or a country or a city or a tribe, they'd put it on an animal, they'd kill the animal, and they'd say, you are free of the sin because we've put it on the animal and the animal's now dead.

So someone did pay the cost, because the cost had to be paid.

Somebody had to look at the blood in the sacrifice and go, someone paid for this sin, which is why, remarkably, in the New Testament, Jesus comes and he's proclaiming himself as the sacrificial lamb of atonement.

Because in Jesus Christ, 1 Peter 2.24 says, in his uh he bore for himself our sins in his body on the cross.

The sins of the world were put on Jesus Christ, and Jesus did not just have a really tough physical death where he bled.

He had a spiritual demise on the cross.

And on that cross is what we sing about and share about all the time.

That's what I'm saying.

It's overlooked.

My point is if you're a Christian, the sin has been paid for.

The bacteria has been absorbed.

All we need is to just extract the penicillin to be able to issue it to other people.

You see, the absolute disgust and vile nature of sin is the stuff that hurts us and harms us, but Christ bore that on the cross.

He has atoned for sin.

Don't mistake, there is a cost to offer forgiveness.

But I want to ask you this: is there a cost to withholding it as well?

I get it, there's a cost to look across at your family member, to look across at the person who broke your heart, to look at your up across at your wayward child, or to look at your own parent and say, you don't know me anymore.

It costs something, but I just I have to ask you this question, right?

Could it cost more to not forgive?

I think it does.

I I was first confronted with this question when I was 19 years old, and I really got gravely hurt for the first time.

I was living in Portland, and my parents were still living there.

My brother was in Boston, my sister was in Michigan.

We were having a family dinner with just the three of us, supposed to come over for what I thought was a birthday dinner.

It was the day before my birthday.

And I walk in the house, and my mom is on the couch uncontrollably crying.

I'm like, what's happening?

And it was through that night that my father left.

He left with very little of an explanation and under vague circumstances.

And over the course of the next five years, repeatedly and consistently hurt our family in various ways.

And that night, back when I was 19 years old, 15 plus years ago, man, I look and see something was happening around this question, forcing me to reckon with the cost to potentially forgive and the cost to not.

I'd almost describe it in three metaphors.

If you've ever been hurt, maybe you've seen this before in your own life.

Like three things were going on.

First thing was that a debt started to be accrued that day between me and my dad.

Other things were going on in my life of like not inconsequential pain.

I had a friend that was really battling addiction that within the next two, three years would die because of his addiction.

And a friend of mine earlier that year had passed away from cancer.

Pain was in my life, and then my father leaves in the midst of all of this.

And I started to look at him and calculate everything he ever owed me and everything he was gonna owe me.

He owed me an explanation, he owed me an apology, he owed me a future because I had this whole plan of like, I don't know, getting married and having like my parents as the grandparents to my kids, and like he owed me, I started to stack a debt against him in my mind, right?

That's the first the second metaphor is that that of the bacteria, like something disgusting started to grow inside of who I was.

My character started to become malformed because of the pain that was in my life.

Something disgusting and nasty in me.

Like I used to look at my dad and have loving thoughts and exciting thoughts and um positive thoughts, and I started to look at him with vengeance.

And I started to look at him in hatred.

And some of the ways that that fostered was in a kind of resentment that leaked out in sometimes some shocking and terrible ways, where I said things to him that I regret to this day.

And I said them because I was deeply hurt and some bacteria was growing in me and it was spreading.

And the third metaphor I'd use is that I felt like not only was there a debt accruing and a bacteria was growing, but I also feel like a road really diverged that day he left.

A road diverged in my mind between this question of do I forgive or do I not?

And I could almost see into my future of what it would look like.

And I don't know if God gave me this or if this is just something I thought, but like I could see my life in 20 years if I just kept growing in resentment and bitterness.

And it looked disgusting.

When I tell you that Jesus has come to give us life and to tell us to forgive so that we might have life, I know what I'm talking about in this way.

It's like, dude, I felt like my very life was at stake.

Like, would I be that 45-year-old dude who's just mad at his dad?

Would I parent that way?

Would I raise kids out of a way of negativity and this is what I'm not gonna be?

Or and the other path was so less clear.

I was like, is there just another way to live?

You know, like the road has diverged here.

And this is the choice set before us.

This is why Hebrews 12 says this.

It says, strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God.

Look at this, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.

And by it many become defiled.

See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God.

It is possible to fail to obtain the grace of God.

Obtain, what does that mean?

To possess, to hold it near.

Is it possible to not be able to hold God's grace near to your life?

The scripture would tell me that it is.

And honestly, experience would tell me, being a pastor for 15 years, look like walking with people through much hurt and bitterness and resentment, like I said, is an often undiagnosed spiritual condition, bitterness.

Because, like it says, by it many become defiled.

The weird thing about bitterness is it harms you more than it harms the other person.

It's a bacteria that is festering in you that only sheds to other people.

But it's really destroying your life and not theirs.

Why root of bitterness?

Well, you know how roots work, right?

Like roots, if you have the right nutrients beneath the roots, great things can happen, right?

But if you have nasty nutrients, it can destroy the whole tree.

And that quote comes from Deuteronomy 29, where God's telling his people back in Deuteronomy, like, look, if you guys have just a shred of pride, it's gonna spring up.

See, a root of bitterness harms the whole tree.

What happens if we withhold forgiveness?

What happens when we withhold forgiveness?

Bitterness happens.

And like I said, bitterness is the, in my experience, one of the most common undiagnosed spiritual conditions on the planet.

A festering.

What is burn uh what is bitterness?

It is a fermentation and protection of angry, resentful feelings after having been treated unfairly.

The fermentation and protection of angry, resentful feelings after having been treated unfairly.

Bitterness, friends, it will block you from experiencing the goodness of God until you give it to God.

And I know firsthand because I saw bitterness grow in my life for the first couple years after my dad left.

Because, like I said, it wasn't just my dad, it was like all these other things that were going on in my life.

Friend wrestling with addiction hurt me and harmed me in particular ways, grief of losing a friend to cancer and stuff, so much pain.

You guys, bitterness just started to like leak out a little bit in weird ways.

You know you're bitter.

Really, you're the last person to know, actually.

Other people know it.

And the longer you are bitter, the more you learn to live with it.

Kind of like a bacterial infection that you never treat.

Just constantly learning how to adjust your life and present yourself as a presentable, kind person when inside something's eating you alive.

It's pain, it's hurt, it's a debt that has not been forgiven.

And this was this was my life, living in a kind of, you know, despair.

Like I remember, and I feel like these are a few things to watch out for, right?

Like, I remember being surprised at my own anger over seemingly trite things.

I just got angry quickly, and I didn't know why.

Losing sleep over a negative event.

I definitely lost sleep over this negative event.

Maybe a loss will occur and you'll grieve it for a little bit, but you won't grieve it for a while.

Ungrieved loss, lack of lament in your life.

There became a time about a year in after my dad left and that my family was just kind of breaking apart where I realized I wasn't sad anymore.

And looking back, that should have terrified me, but I felt empowered by my own anger.

And what I realized is that anger had just replaced my sadness.

And I was kind of walking as a shell of a dude around 20 or 21.

Just convincing other people that I could be a good Christian.

I was on the track to be in ministry, I wanted to impress people.

And these warning signs were flying, and I'm telling you, I realized bitterness was growing, and I was frustrated by the fact that my dad wasn't the problem anymore.

Suddenly I was.

Suddenly I couldn't blame the pain on anything or anyone anymore.

But my lack of joy and peace and communion with God was not a result of my dad.

It was a result of me.

You see, I think a lot of times we know the pain that has been done to us.

We don't know what the pain is doing to us.

Like, we could go around this room, it would be exhausting, and talk about all the pain we've been through.

Because you know it.

A little bit of reflection will take you time to go, man, I know who has hurt me and who has failed me and how I failed others.

But like we often don't understand what that pain is then doing to us.

We know the pain done, we don't know what the pain is doing.

The only way I ever knew what the pain was doing was God's grace in my life through two really surprising communities.

The continent of Africa and the recovery community.

Alcoholics Anonymous, celebrate recovery.

I wasn't struggling with any particular addiction, but I went to celebrate recovery and received surprising insights.

Let me talk about Africa really fast first.

One of the things you do when you're in pain is you justify your bitterness and lack of forgiveness by doing the suffering Olympics.

You ever do this?

Well, my pain sucks, but it's not as bad as, right?

And then also, my pain is bad, and these people have it so much easier, right?

It's kind of works both ways, where it's like we kind of play this competition of our pain, and it excuses us to live a life of unforgiveness and just kind of sit in our pain.

When I met people doing Christian ministry and theology in Africa, across the whole continent, but particularly in the Great Lakes regions, like Rwanda, Uganda, uh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, beautiful part of the world, beautiful Christian hope coming from there.

You know, by the way, this one's for free.

You know there's more Christians in Africa than here, right?

Like tons more.

Okay.

We are not the leaders uh in America, okay?

Africa's leading the way, they have led the way for many years.

Um when I got to know people over there doing Christian ministry, okay, their pain, particularly getting to know Fred Kotagua, who was a Bible teacher at Africa New Life Bible Church in Rwanda, and also the work of Emmanuel Cantagale, he's now teaching at um Notre Dame, and then um Desmond Tutu, who's from South Africa, so not the Great Lakes region, but um, you know, these these countries have gone through national reckoning that I can't comp I actually cannot comprehend it.

And I've read some of it and I've heard the stories of child soldiers in parts of Africa, and people who survived the genocide in Rwanda, and people who uh recounted the civil war in Uganda, these incredible, incredible, terrible, I mean, the the pinnacle of human evil.

And what's so interesting is in the disgusting evil that happens there, in that petri dish, so to speak, a penicillin has been discovered, I think, in Africa.

And it has a word to us here in America, which is this the theologians over there, they noticed that in the generations that were coming out, this particularly in Rwanda, this is what Fred Kotagua used to say.

He's like, coming out of the bitter or the um the experience of the genocide, there were all these young people who had no brothers and sisters and no parents.

And he's like, you know what?

The number one thing I notice in these kids is bitterness and resentment.

And a type of despair that has no future.

You can't foresee your future when you have killed each other.

And the hope of the gospel that Fred Kotagua or Emmanuel Cantagale, some of these people, or Desmond Tutu in South Africa, what they have said is that forgiveness is the only path out.

They realized within their own country, where there was bitterness growing, there was also a penicillin.

There was a healing agent growing in the country that if they could point it out and go, man, God is at work here and God is doing something.

And if we just extract the grace of God from this bitterness, it'll take the sting.

It won't completely repair.

Again, we're not forgetting the past, we're not just not letting anybody suffer consequences, but we're able to say to each other, as a country, as a nation, as people, you don't owe me anything anymore by God's grace.

And I remember hearing that and just going, What am I doing holding on to my pain when my brothers and sisters aren't holding on to theirs?

Emmanuel Contagole, he put it this way bitterness, because he noticed the same thing in uh Uganda.

He's a Catholic priest from Uganda.

Bitterness is like a cancer that enters into the soul.

It does more harm to those who hold it than those who it is held against.

But the forgiveness is right there and it opens the road to healing.

Forgiveness is right there.

He's like, forgiveness is sitting next to the bitterness.

And if we end up seeing God's grace in our life and his ability to offer us something, we can offer the world a brand new gift of forgiveness.

What does God offer us then?

What is this forgiveness?

Look back at Hebrews 12, 15.

See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up, and by it many become defiled.

It makes me think if we obtain the grace of God, the people around us will not be defiled.

So, what does it mean to receive and take in God's grace in our lives?

That's what I learned through Celebrate Recovery, which is kind of the alcoholics synonymous for Christians.

Kind of throw great theology into Celebrate Recovery.

Some of you have been through it.

I went through it again.

I didn't have any particular addiction in my life, but I was just in so much pain.

And it was these guys, you know, I met with these guys 12 rounds through the 12 steps, and then I led two groups through it.

And like in the uh in the process, man, it is punishing in a good way.

They do not let you get away from anything.

You know, they're like, today we're gonna talk about how resentment is the root of all of our problems.

And I say, I don't feel resentful, and they say, try again.

I'm like, I don't know, I'm not really struggling with anything in particular.

Try again.

And I met with these dudes every week and they prayed over me and they convinced me that I was not the person I was pretending to be, man.

That really beneath the facade of Chris Nye that was presenting himself was a broken, resentful, angry young man.

And that if I allowed that young man to become an old man, I would defile many people's lives.

Including my own.

You know, celebrate recovery, they have 12 steps.

Here's the first three.

And this is what I mean of what God's offering us.

He actually offers us the ability to admit that we are powerless.

And I love it, that our lives have become unmanageable.

I think it was when I was like 20 and yelling at my dad on the phone uncontrollably that I realized things were not manageable.

Yeah.

That actually I'm powerless to change myself.

And I have no atonement to offer.

I can't take on my dad's sin.

So it's either I hold it against him or I put it on to the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, where it belongs in the first place and where it has always been, anyways.

Secondly, we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves is the only one that could restore us to sanity.

Yeah.

And three, we make a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God.

Yeah, and then there's nine more steps.

Um you can see I got beat up for a couple years of just like, dude, what is God's grace mean?

And you know what I realized, man?

I realized that that's why I thought of the penicillin analogy.

It's like as the bitterness was growing in me, something else was in the dish.

Something was in the bacteria that was fighting the bacteria and conquering the bacteria.

Who could possibly do that?

No other human being.

It makes me think of Jesus at the end of his life.

He's sitting around a table with his friends, and this is our gift to close on, our gift of communion.

This is why we're going to take communion right now.

It's because we have to bring our bitterness to him.

Matthew 26.

Now, as they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessing it, he broke it and he gave it to disciples, and he said, This, take, eat.

This is my body.

And he took the cup, he'd given thanks.

He gave it to them, saying, Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant.

Look at This, which is poured out for many for what?

The forgiveness of sins.

How do I know that we can entrust God with our bitterness and bring God's grace into our life?

Here's why.

You and I, we hold on to our bitterness.

You and I, we possess our pain.

God looks at us and he doesn't hold our bitterness against us.

He looks at you and says, You don't owe me anything.

And actually, we come to the table not owing Jesus a thing, because Jesus has paid it all, because Jesus has offered it all on the cross.

And when he said these words, do you know he was around a table with 12 people who would abandon him at his hour of greatest need?

Sitting at that table was a bacteria of bitterness growing itself.

Judas would betray him in a matter of one hour.

Peter would deny him in a matter of a few hours, and the rest of his disciples would fall asleep right when he was about to be arrested, and at the moment that he needed the most prayer and support, he was abandoned.

And Jesus Christ chose to treat that abandonment not by holding it against the people at the table, but by absolving them of it.

By telling them, I am about to die and pour out for you the payment and the forgiveness and the atonement and the remission of all sin.

And I am the only one who is strong enough to take everything in this room, Jesus says.

And so we come to the table today with one takeaway from this message: to eat and drink of the forgiveness of God, because I cannot teach you next week about forgiving other people unless we today bring our bitterness before the Lord and believe on his name that he will not hold it against us.

And that we have to realize a bacteria is forming in our life, of which the only answer is the penicillin of God's grace through Jesus.

To extract that, to apply that into our lives, to have community.

It might mean going to counseling for many of you.

It's going to mean committing to Christian community.

It's going to mean prayer.

It's going to mean committing to church.

It's going to mean a life.

But right now, what it means is a surrender.

And so let's do that together.

Would you pray with me?

Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, you are the only one who can take on sin.

You are the only one who can hold the pain of the world.

You are the only one who can eliminate the bacteria in our lives that's growing.

I have a sense that there's many here today that do not know much of what's eating away at them.

My prayer is that your Holy Spirit would illuminate that to them and also good community, good people in their life would show up the way that you showed up in my life through friends across the world and friends close by.

And Lord, I pray as an act of great significance, communion and worship today would be healing.

But um, I cannot do that.

And so we're asking you, Holy Spirit, to take it from here.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

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