Forgiveness | 1 Samuel 16:6-7 | Rainey Segars

Our teaching text for this morning is 1 Samuel 16.

When they arrived, Samuel saw Eliad and thought, Surely the Lord's anointed stands here before the Lord.

But the Lord said to Samuel, do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him.

The Lord does not look at the things that people look at.

People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.

This is the word of the Lord.

Well, good morning, you guys.

It's such a joy for me to be in this wonderful church family with all of you.

I hope it's a joy for you as well.

This is my first time here.

It's bigger.

I'm thankful.

Happy to be here.

It's almost summer.

I don't know what impact summer has on your life.

Um, but if you work in a school or if you have children who are in school, summer's a huge deal.

Summer, summer upends everything, and I'm very ready.

Um, I'm so excited for all of it, but I am particularly excited for our family's annual beach trip.

The three of us go with my parents for the 4th of July week every year to the same beach, same hotel.

It's the one we went where I was growing up, and it's just wonderful.

It's just really great.

Um, I love the whole thing, but my very favorite thing to do while we're at the beach is to get in the ocean and jump the waves.

I grew up jumping waves all day with my family.

And now I really want Teddy to jump waves with me.

And he does, but very reluctantly because he's incredibly concerned about the jellyfish.

He's been stung badly before, and he really doesn't love, love, love to get in the ocean with me because he's so worried about it.

Um and so last summer we got there that first day and he checked those beach flags, you know, and they had that purple flag up that means marine life in the water.

So he points at the flag and he's like, I knew it.

And I'm like, the ocean's really big.

Marine life can mean anything.

That's just for the insurance.

I'm sure it's fine.

And I go in, and he's on the beach going, absolutely not, no way, purple flag, but I'm already in the waves having fun, going, come on, it's fine, it's fun, you're not gonna get stung.

And he doesn't want to miss all the fun, and so he finally goes, You're not getting stung.

And I go, no.

And he goes, Okay, and in he comes.

And he was not in the water 60 seconds, and a jellyfish, a big one, wrapped around his neck and the bottom of his jaw, and he rockets up out of the water, shrieking, silences the beach, and we have to go do the meat tender riser and the really hot shower and the whole jellyfish thing, and it was terrible.

So the next day we go back down, purple flag is still there.

And very wisely he's like, I'm not doing that.

And I say, fair enough, that is fine.

But the third day we go down, no purple flag, purple flag is gone.

So I'm jazzed.

I'm like, Ted, no flag, no marine life, waves all day, let's go.

And God bless him.

I have to give it to him because the flag was gone, he was willing to try again.

Now he did send Colton and me in first to see if we got stung, but still, he did not say, I'm never going in the ocean again.

He acknowledged that the situation had changed and he was willing to try to have a different experience.

And I tell you this silly story this morning because I think that the humility to admit that I don't know the whole of any situation, and the hope that something could change, and the willingness to maintain a warm posture even when we've been hurt, those are things to which I think as believers we are called.

However, something might have been in the past, we are called to be humble and open enough to look again.

I learned this recently about the word respect.

In Latin, spect means to look, like spectacles or a spectator.

And re, of course, means to do something again, like revisit or repeat.

Re means again.

So fundamentally, in its etymology, to show someone respect is to be willing to look at them again, to allow someone to change, to see someone's dignity and their value in a way that maybe you didn't in the past.

The opposite of respect would be to go, uh, women, white men, teenagers.

This person is just difficult.

I do not need to hear your story.

I already know everything there is to know.

I may have all sorts of assumptions, but to show you respect is to be willing to extend to you the hope and the chance that maybe I was wrong before.

And maybe I didn't understand your whole perspective, and maybe something is possible that I had not considered.

Show proper respect to everyone, to liberals, to conservatives, to Muslims, to atheists, to your in-laws, and to lunatics in the comment section of Facebook posts.

We are under orders to show respect no matter how right we think we are.

God thinks you have value, then by golly, so do I.

God's kingdom has no category called those people.

We do not get to call ridiculous someone that Jesus has called beloved.

We are called to have the humility to look at each other again and again with renewed dignity.

Unsurprisingly, Jesus was the master of this.

Although he did not have he didn't have to correct any mistaken impressions because he had not made any mistakes in the first place.

Still, he changed his whole, he's changed people's whole lives because of his willingness to see beyond what people typically saw.

People looked at Zacchaeus and they saw nothing but a greedy, cheating traitor to Israel.

But Jesus saw a friend worth joining for dinner.

And the same with the woman at the well.

This gal was publicly hated.

Everybody knew about her six boyfriends.

And when Jesus meets her, this girl is getting her water in the heat of the day.

That means nobody wants to walk with you.

It's been so mean and so uncomfortable for her when the other women go in the cool of the morning that it's just better to do it at high noon in the desert.

That is how ugly the other women have been.

And Jesus does nothing but sit down and ask her for a drink of water, which means he was willing to drink from a cup that she had touched, which is much more dignifying and striking than we might realize.

When everyone else saw an embarrassment, he saw a conversation partner.

And actually turns out a pretty sharp one.

And his willingness to look past bias and reputation and see what other people didn't, it changes her whole life.

And she runs back into town and goes, I think I just met the savior of the world.

And what's so interesting is why did she think that?

He didn't do a miracle, he didn't do anything.

He just showed her respect.

And in her story, the respect was the miracle.

For her, the miracle was not water into wine, but contempt into compassion.

And for Zacchaeus and for the woman at the well, the text reports huge and immediate life change.

And Jesus does not do a miracle for either one.

No healings, no resurrections, not even any preaching.

He just stops and talks and looks and eats and treats them both like more than their reputation and their past.

And it's enough to renovate their lives.

Like everything else, he is perfect at this, and we are called to be like him.

But unlike him, our assumptions about each other really might be off.

In fact, they often are.

We are often a lot more like Samuel, checking out all of Jesse's sons when Israel needs a new king.

Samuel knows he's there to anoint somebody, but he doesn't know which one, and he sees Jesse's oldest son and goes, Oh, yeah.

That has got to be my guy.

Tall, stacked, already trained for war, that's the one.

Surely the Lord's anointed stands here before the Lord.

And the Lord says to Samuel, No, no, no, no, no.

Do not consider his appearance or his height.

The Lord does not look the way that people look.

We often see so wrongly.

So, as we seek to follow Jesus, to whom do we need to show respect?

At whom do we need to look again and remember their dignity and their value?

Because I am a person under authority and my king says you have value.

Now we typically do not want to do this.

Peter says to Jesus, how many times am I supposed to forgive somebody?

How many chances am I supposed to give?

Seven.

And Jesus says, No.

You're right.

That's crazy.

Not seven.

Seventy times seven.

Infinity.

Because you're supposed to love like I do.

And I love you.

Infinity.

Peter, aren't you counting on the fact that I forgive you?

Infinity?

Aren't you glad that the number of chances I give you, the amount of time I am willing to wait on a relationship with you, is infinity?

So how much hope for reconciliation?

How much dogged belief in the dignity of others?

No, Peter.

Not seven.

Seventy sevens.

Real people have been known for being like this.

Um, Fred Rogers, Mr.

Rogers from the show, his UPS man, he had this consistent delivery man, and his UPS guy said later, Fred always stopped what he was doing, looked him in the eye, and made him feel like the most important person in the world.

Fred Rogers knew that no one is just the UPS guy.

No one is just the waitress or the pastor or the problem.

No one is just anything.

Respect means really trying to see someone with complexity and mercy and hope a tiny step closer to the way that God sees them, and thank God, the way that God sees me.

Now, I don't know what the very hardest part of following Jesus is for you.

I don't know if it's your finances or your sexual life or materialism or gossip or honesty.

Following Jesus is very demanding.

But I think for a lot of us, perhaps the most demanding way we are called to be like Jesus is in forgiveness.

In my experience in ministry, this is one of the hardest things, maybe the hardest thing to convince people is healthy and required.

When we think about being a Christian, like the very basics, what is the very most basic thing about being a Christian?

What we probably think of is John 3.16.

God loves you, he sent his son to die for you, believe in Jesus, go to heaven.

That is what we think of as Christianity's thesis, if not Christianity in total.

That is our most famous verse.

It's likely the verse, if I ask people to quote a verse, it's likely the verse in here most people would know.

But that was not the main verse of the early church.

The John 3.16 of the early church was Matthew 5.44.

Can anyone quote Matthew 5.44?

No, I can't either.

It's not our go-to anymore.

We don't know it anymore.

Matthew 5.44 is love your enemies.

We've had a really big, really important shift away from the Christianity of our early mothers and fathers.

The history is more complex than this, I admit, but in part, during World War II, Hitler was blitzing Europe.

The Germans were dropping bombs from planes overhead all the time.

And so you heard bombs hitting homes and exploding in your city all night long while you slept.

So you really lived under the threat of possibly dying at any time.

And in response to that situation, the church dialed way up this language that if you were to die tonight, do you know for sure you'd go to heaven?

It's very urgent, it's very death-focused, because these people really were living every day thinking that they might die in their beds, or that their children might not come home from school.

It wasn't a bad pivot to address the urgency of the church's crisis.

But the trouble is, once the blitzes and the world wars were ended, we didn't let go of the language.

We have stayed unnecessarily deep in this mindset that presents our face, our faith's only real essential as when you die, will you go to heaven?

Are you sure?

The trouble is that isn't our faith's only real essential.

That was a temporary crisis response.

The central thesis of our faith has never been only that you are saved from hell, but that you are saved to participate in an undoing of the fall in the garden and to be trans, excuse me, transformed into people of weird, hard to explain, uncommon mercy and forgiveness and joy.

The early church emphasized nonviolence and enemy love and the Sermon on the Mount far more centrally than we do now.

We are not called to get saved.

In fact, if you want to read through, the Bible never uses the phrase get saved.

That phrase, you won't find that phrase in there.

We are called to make Jesus our King, to be filled with his spirit, and to be transformed into kingdom citizens, which is a process that will last for all of eternity because in God's economy things happen at an infinite scale.

Therefore, you will be transformed infinitely, more and more and more and more and more and more and more deeply into the image of Christ forever.

That's the journey we're called to say yes to.

Our Christianity now sometimes reduces the gospel to your personal afterlife.

Whereas Jesus' preaching is actually about transformed living and participation in God's restoration of his created world.

And I think one of the very hardest parts of that transformation to which we are called is forgiveness and enemy love.

So I want to spend the rest of our time this morning together talking about forgiveness.

Um, and I want to look at it through a few falsehoods that we might believe about it.

So, okay, falsehood number one: unforgiveness is a healthy boundary.

I'm a chaplain at a school, and in talking to the girls at school, I have been surprised to discover that they do not even think forgiveness is healthy.

They at least acknowledge that they should stop lying.

They shouldn't use AI for their schoolwork.

They shouldn't exclude lonely people.

They might still do those things, but they at least acknowledge that they shouldn't.

That honesty and inclusion are the right thing to do.

But with forgiveness, they often don't even think that it's a should.

They see it as weak, they see it as bad boundaries and allowing someone to continue to abuse you.

Now, don't get me wrong, I adore the girls at school.

There's a couple of them there.

I love the girls at school.

And one of the many, many things I love about them is that they've got this cool new young person slang.

They have a whole language.

It's called brain rot.

I cannot speak it, but I think their new words are so great.

Here's a few.

I have learned some things.

I've learned that to flame or to slime someone both mean to give that person a hard time.

I've learned that to mog someone means to look better than they do.

If you're mogging her, then you look prettier.

And if you are frame moging, then you're in better shape.

I've learned that eating and cooking both mean success, but it's very tricky because cooked as a verb is good.

If you cooked, that's good.

But cooked as an adjective is bad.

If I'm cooked, no good.

That's bad.

It means doomed.

It all moves much too fast for me.

I'm very behind.

I can't understand them.

And in fact, they have a term for old ladies like me.

They call us millennial cringe, lethal, brittle.

I tried to tell the girls that they are mistaken, that I am their fellow cool young person.

But unfortunately, when you refer to teenagers as my fellow young people, the the jig is up.

The teenagers have all of this wonderful new language.

But one of the terms they have that, in my opinion, is not so wonderful, is this protect your peace.

You gotta protect your peace, they say.

You need to do what you need to do to make sure nothing is upsetting you.

Stressed by your quiz, gotta protect your peace.

And to some degree that's true.

Sometimes you truly do need to remove yourself from a harmful situation.

Absolutely.

But I have found with the girls that protect your peace is actually a sly code for unforgiveness.

You're saying you're just drawing boundaries when what you actually are is bitter and angry with no plans at all to reconcile and forgive.

You hurt me, you are done, I hate you, and I'm not being unforgiving, I just protected my peace.

It's not disobedience, it's mental health.

The trouble with this is biblically, we are not asked to protect our peace.

We are called to be like Jesus, who absolutely did not protect his peace.

Thank goodness Jesus didn't protect his peace.

Because he could have stayed in the throne room with his father and had a very peaceful time.

But alas, Jesus protecting his peace would have meant doom for the rest of us.

He gave up his peace.

He made himself incredibly uncomfortable.

In Mark 6, Jesus feeds the 5,000.

But what happens right before he feeds the 5,000 is that King Herod beheads his cousin John the Baptist.

So Herod beheads John the Baptist, and in the next line it says, Oh my goodness, so many people were coming and going.

They didn't even have a chance to eat.

So Jesus says to his disciples, Oh golly, come away with me to a quiet place.

Let's get some rest.

So they go away by themselves.

But oh no, many saw them leaving and ran on foot and got there ahead of them.

And when Jesus landed, he saw a large crowd and he had compassion on them and began to teach them.

Jesus is leaving.

He needed to rest, he needed downtime, he went to grieve.

His cousin was just murdered, and he goes away, he runs away to eat and sleep and rest and mourn.

And when he gets there, huge crowd.

You know what he does?

Feels compassion and teaches them and then feeds the 5,000.

Jesus did not protect his peace in heaven or on earth.

He remains warm and open even when he shouldn't have to.

Don't misunderstand me.

I am not saying that we should run ourselves ragged with unboundried work.

And I am not Saying we should let people continue to abuse us.

We should not do either one of those things.

But I am saying that we are called to be similar to our king who looks at people and does not ever see a problem or a lost cause.

He does not withhold tenderness or mercy because the other person is difficult.

He runs toward us over and over and over again, bearing patiently with irritations and inconvenience and slowness and sins, waiting and praying and walking beside us.

Love is very inconvenient.

So in his name, at whom do you need to turn again and respect?

Look again in hope and in love, even though they do not deserve it.

Because Jesus looks in hope and in love at us, even though we do not deserve it.

We are not told to protect our peace.

We are told to do the very uncomfortable, very sacrificial work of looking again in hope at our difficult people and reminding ourselves of their dignity and of the fact that this is an image bearer for whom Christ died, and to take every thought captive and to pray and to repent until I can genuinely hope for that person's flourishing.

Okay, falsehood number two.

Forgiveness means I stay in abuse.

No one is saying that you should allow yourself to be abused.

You should not.

Look at Jesus' instructions about our problem people.

In Matthew 18, he says, listen, if your brother or sister sins, go point it out, go talk to them, just the two of you.

And if they listen, great.

If they won't listen, take one or two other folks along.

And if they still won't listen, tell it to the church, bring it to the church family.

So look, if someone is harming you, try to work it out privately.

That's plan A.

But if they aren't repentant, look, Jesus never asks you to be alone with them again.

The kingdom of God does not endorse the abuse of victims.

Lost my place.

Forgiveness is not about staying in abuse.

But for the most dreadful person in our lives, we absolutely are called to hope for their healing.

We absolutely are called to maintain a desire to be in a peaceful, reconciled relationship with a healed, healthy version of that person, if that ever were to happen.

We absolutely are called not to dwell on how awful they've been, and to say no to resentment when we feel it pop up, and to try to be courteous to them when we're around them and to wish for their long-term good.

We are called to look again and again and again to see if there could be any peace or any reconciliation at all, and to stay open to it if there could be.

And for how long?

How many stinking times?

Well, we already know.

70 times seven.

Okay, falsehood number three.

Um, forgiveness is God's thing.

It's not my thing.

When I was younger, my mother had a friend who was a missionary in Brazil.

And my mother and I used to go to Brazil to serve in this lady's orphanage.

And while we were there, the people kept looking at my mother and then looking at me and repeating the same phrase.

And we do not speak Portuguese, but it was very clear they were pointing at us and repeating the same phrase over and over.

So we finally asked the missionary lady, What are they saying?

And she sort of smiled and said, Yeah, it's a phrase we don't have in English.

They're saying the child of a fish is also a fish.

In English, we would say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

It's an expression that mean that means you look like your mother.

The child of a fish is also a fish.

You resemble your parents, and children do.

You can usually see the likeness of a parent and a kid.

And our father is asking us for exactly the same thing.

We are not saved because of our behavior, praise the Lord.

But there is no salvation in our Bible in which we just take the salvation and don't resemble the Savior.

There is no biblical salvation in which we go to heaven but we don't resemble Jesus.

The child of a fish is also a fish.

And on no issue is this true more than the issue of forgiveness.

In Matthew 18, Jesus tells a story we wish he had not told.

We wish he would keep talking about being sweet to the children.

We wish he hadn't talked about this.

Jesus tells a story about an unmerciful servant, and the king forgives the servant this massive, unpayable debt.

And the servant goes, Oh, thank you.

And then he goes out and finds his buddy, who does indeed owe him, but a lot less.

And the first guy, no mercy.

He shakes his friend down for the last penny.

And the king finds out.

And he is hot mad.

And in fact, in this story, the king takes back the original servant's forgiveness, throws his bones in prison, and goes, Oh, you love justice?

We can do justice.

I got you justice right here, buddy.

Our scripture leaves us absolutely no room at all to receive and enjoy God's sacrificial forgiveness, and then not extend that same forgiveness to the people who wrong us.

We'll hear it in the Lord's Prayer in a couple of weeks from Colton soon.

Forgive us as we forgive.

Colossians 3, the Master forgave you, you forgive others.

Ephesians 4, forgive each other just like God forgave you.

And Matthew 6, also something we wish he had not said.

If you don't forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins.

Yikes! This is not about earning our salvation.

We do not earn our salvation by forgiving people.

But we want to live in the kingdom of forgiveness, or we don't.

In God's kingdom, forgiveness is how you are treated, and forgiveness is the expected behavior of the citizens.

Do we want to live here or not?

All right, falsehood number four.

I'm not perfect, but I'm better than you.

I really hope you don't hear me blowing off your suffering this morning.

Forgiveness is incredibly hard, and it automatically has to do with our pain.

When we're talking about forgiveness, we're automatically talking to people about their hurt, which is so tender and personal.

So please don't hear me minimizing your suffering like forgiveness is easy.

It's not.

I have someone in mind as I speak who I struggle not to hate because he's terrible.

And he does premeditated damage and he causes suffering to the people I love.

So I don't like him.

So please don't hear me blowing off your suffering like it wasn't a big deal.

And yet, your suffering is a big deal, and we're commanded to forgive.

But as always, our Father is calling us to something healthy, and he says, I'll start.

He says, first, meditate on how forgiven you are.

Obey second, meditate first.

When Jesus washes his disciples' feet in John 13, it says, Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God, so he got up and washed their feet.

In God's kingdom we know things and feel things, and therefore we do things.

Because Troy, because John, because Boyd knew how God loved him and received him and forgave him and where his true home was now.

Because he knew that his father adores him and doesn't dwell on his sins, and he can drop the ball two thousand times and he'll be welcomed home 2,001.

Because he knew so he could forgive his enemy and hand the justice to his father who had never done him wrong.

When we won't forgive, the problem isn't just bitterness.

The problem is that we've forgotten the gospel.

We've been meditating on the wrong thing.

In Galatians, Peter acts racist towards these Gentile Christians, and Paul comes and rebukes him, confronts him.

But Paul doesn't just say, you're breaking the racism rule.

He says, You've forgotten the gospel.

The gospel is supposed to infect our whole mindset.

It's not just unforgiveness is a sin.

It's that I can forgive you, I can be happy if you heal, I can be happy if we could reconcile, because that's how I've been treated.

And that's the culture of the place where I live.

And that's the type of person the Spirit is transforming me into.

And so I will take my thoughts captive and meditate on Jesus' beauty instead of your ugliness, because I know that my Father has only ever done me right.

And if he's asking me to try to do this, then it must be true and right and good.

God's kingdom unavoidably requires us to respect others, to force ourselves to remember their dignity, and to extend to them the hope that by Jesus' power and in his name, maybe things between us one day could heal.

But the mercy God is asking from you is always based first in how much mercy you've received.

And if we don't think that we've received all that much mercy, because we're really not as bad as our ex or our mom or our old friend group, then we need to repent not just of unforgiveness, but incredible blindness and pride.

At whom do we need to look again and remember that we are not superior?

They believe some absurd, self-centered things, and so do I.

Their sins are so hurtful and so obvious, and so are mine.

We require so much mercy.

There is no biblical way to receive the forgiveness of God and not extend that forgiveness to others.

In our scripture, forgiven people, forgive people.

We want to live in the kingdom of forgiveness, or we don't, but the but forgiveness is the culture here.

The child of a fish is also a fish.

Jesus says that the Holy Spirit doesn't draw attention to itself, but it elevates Jesus and helps people to follow him.

That's one of its jobs.

So we can ask the Spirit, make me like Jesus in this way.

If he's merciful, I want to be merciful.

My precious girls at school think that forgiveness is optional, even unhealthy, and that unforgiveness is self-love.

But as brilliant as they are, they are wrong.

Unforgiveness promises us protection, but it actually is poison and it's disobedience.

And if I want justice and I want everybody to get exactly what they deserve, then I need to be really sure I want to swim in the pond where everybody gets exactly what they deserve.

And I don't.

Look at this story, it's one of my favorites of all time.

In the 90s, true story, in the 90s, a group of terrorists was burning their way across Algeria during the Algerian Civil War, and they kidnapped seven monks from a monastery and they held them hostage for two months before they slit their throats.

Now the monks knew that these men were probably coming.

And so, in case they wrote these final letters to be opened if they were killed.

And one of the monks, Father Christian, wrote this.

He said, if it should happen one day, and it could be today, that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass Algeria, I would like my community to accept that the one master of all life was not a stranger to brutal departure.

I have lived long enough to know that I share in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world.

I should like, when the time comes, to forgive with all my heart the one who will strike me down.

And then he speaks to the murderer.

Friend of my final moment, who will not be aware of what you are doing, I commend you to the God whose face I see in yours.

May we find each other, happy good thieves in paradise.

I always cry about Father Christian Drat.

If it pleases God, the father of us both.

Father Christian is able to do this because he remembers he has also been a part of the world's evil.

And God is welcoming him and his murderer both into the kingdom like the thief on the cross.

Guilty, undeserving, but included.

Happy thieves.

That is what we all are.

All right, falsehood number five.

I really shouldn't do it if I don't truly feel it.

We have a pop quiz.

Here's a quiz.

Is this a Bible verse?

Next.

No, that is from Hamlet.

Okay, is this a Bible verse?

Next.

No.

That's AI slop.

That's made up.

No.

Okay, next.

Is this a Bible verse?

No.

Well done, you all gotta know.

Our culture contains an incredible message that what is healthy and right for you is what you feel is healthy and right for you.

The trouble is that's not real.

We, in fact, need to follow Jesus like a child learning to drive.

You do not tell your 15-year-old to get in your car and do what feels right for them.

You say, you do what I say no matter how it feels.

We need to mimic Jesus, even if our version is clunky and confusing and inorganic.

In Acts 9, God sends Ananias to heal Saul after Saul's blindness and to welcome him into the church.

And Ananias says, absolutely not.

Hard pass, no.

He is kidnapped and imprisoned and starved, my friends.

I do not feel safe.

This is not what is right for me.

This guy is objectively terrible.

We do not want him in our church.

Congratulations on the new leaf, but it's a no from Ananias.

And God says, Ananias, do as you're told.

And the next thing we see Ananias say is, Brother Saul.

No, we already know.

We just read.

That is not how Ananias feels.

He is doing what he's told.

And from this inauthentic but obedient interaction, kingdom work flows out from which every single one of us today is still benefiting.

So where this morning do you need to do as you're told?

It's possible in your heart and in mind that we are called to deal in a kingdom way with someone who authentically we hate.

And maybe God is saying to us this morning what he said to Ananias, do as you are told.

Feelings are real and valid, but they're a bad king.

Sometimes Christian maturity is doing the loving thing before you feel loving.

All right, falsehood number six.

Forgiveness means saying what happened to me doesn't matter.

Thankfully, Jesus is not only the God of Ananias, he's also the God of Hagar.

When Jesus tells us to forgive, we might think he's being unfair, that he doesn't understand, he didn't see our trauma.

But actually, after her incredible abuse, Hagar speaks with God and she leaves the conversation calling him El Roy, the God who saw everything.

He's telling us to forgive because he knows.

Your ex, your boss, your mother brought death to you.

I know.

I saw.

And victim of injustice to victim of injustice, I have to tell you, unforgiveness will only pay you in more death.

Do as you're told.

All right, last one, number seven, falsehood number seven.

I'm not gonna forgive, but I'll obey other stuff.

I'll do something else.

It is very possible that there are things in your life you long to see God do.

Things that we want him to heal or to show us or to teach us, and he might.

He is infinitely generous.

But in Luke 24, Jesus is walking down the road after his resurrection, and he's walking with his two disciples, and he keeps them from recognizing him while he explains to them the story of salvation.

He keeps them from recognizing him because he knew they would be so emotional and so overwhelmed that they wouldn't be able to learn.

Certain things God wants to teach us have to happen in a certain order, or we can't receive them.

If there is something more that we want God to teach us or tell us or give us, are we doing the things he's already told us?

Because it's very possible that thing that you want, he wants that for you too.

But he can't give it to you until you start to obey the stuff he's already shown you.

There are things he wants to do for us that have to happen in a certain order, or we can't receive it well.

In this story, Jesus is going to show himself to these disciples.

He does do it.

But he needs them to hear first how everything in the Old Testament is about himself.

He needs them to go and teach that.

We have to do that first.

If he went ahead and showed himself to them, they would have been too excited and they couldn't have listened.

For you to receive it well, some things have to happen in a certain order.

So are we obeying the things we already have?

If not, it's not crazy, he can't yet give us more.

He's been so incredibly clear with us about how he wants us to treat our enemies, and we just do not want to do that.

But we want him to tell us new stuff.

So, how this morning do we need to do as we're told?

We are not just called to get saved.

We are called to transfer our citizenship from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.

Jesus does not just want to get us into heaven, he wants to get heaven into us.

We are unavoidably expected to appropriate kingdom culture, and forgiveness is participation in the life of heaven.

So where do we want to live?

Do you want to live in the land of justice and brutal honesty and dwelling on grievances?

I know I don't.

I think it's worth considering this morning.

If we seek to follow Jesus and be like him, to whom do you now need to show respect, renewed value, and hope?

At whom or at what do we need to look again?

Unfortunately, people don't have flags like oceans do.

The ocean has a flag to say that the riptides have cleared up or the jellyfish pod has floated away.

But people don't have a flag to let you know when things have changed.

To find out what's possible with people, we have to check again and again and again.

70 times seven times.

In fact.

So as the people who are seeking to follow the man who sat and ate and gave his affectionate attention to sinners, my hope for us is that we would show incredible respect, the humility to believe again that the best is still possible.

Because if Jesus is the Lord of the resurrection, then in his most capable hands, even what seems barren may by his grace still bear fruit.

Jesus is always calling us into newness of life, which means he also hopes for newness of life, for your dreadful neighbor, and your hurtful parent, and your rebellious child, which means we have to hope it too.

May C3 indeed be a place of hope and respect.

Perhaps even this week more than ever.

Like our friend the woman at the well, maybe for someone, your respect might be a miracle.

And until then, let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we come to you now as people who need far more mercy than we realize.

We thank you that you welcome us home again and again.

Father, we confess that we often want forgiveness for ourselves and justice for everyone else.

We thank you that you have seen every selfish thought, every hidden bitterness, every proud attitude, and you still have not turned away.

So, Holy Spirit, make us resemble our Father.

Teach us to bless where we would rather curse.

We remember before you this morning the people in our church family carrying real wounds.

Give them comfort and wisdom.

Keep our hearts from becoming places of contempt.

Make this church a place where mercy is normal.

Lord Jesus, you are the friend of sinners, the Lamb who forgave his executioners, the risen Lord who makes all things new.

Make us new as well.

In your name we pray these and all things.

Amen.