When People Wound You

Alright, alright.

I hate to interrupt.

Good fellowship.

Go to lunch.

My name is Russ.

If I have not met you, it is great to have you guys with us.

I'm one of the pastors here at Church of the Grow.

So excited to be with you.

As we continue with a series called Scars, we're dealing with pain, hurt, wounds, and how to process those things.

Looking through the lens of Scripture and what God teaches, and I know Jonah said we're going to wrap it up today.

We'll wrap it up next Sunday.

One more week.

And then I promise it's going to be good.

I'm going to dive in this morning.

We're going to go at a rapid pace because there's a lot a lot to cover.

On Sunday evening of June 17th, a number of years ago, a young man by the name of Dylan Ruth walked into Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina, and he murdered nine people with a gun.

At his trial, church members and family members publicly forgave the man that took the lives of their loved ones.

That type of forgiveness blows my mind.

In October of 2006, a young man named Charles Roberts entered into an Amish school in Pennsylvania, and he killed he killed ten young girls, and the Amish community publicly forgave the young man and his family.

Even visiting with his family and attending his funeral.

And this can be a heavy, heavy topic.

Now when we talk about a subject like this, it it can it can elicit um several different responses.

And one can be dread.

You know that you're carrying unforgiveness issues.

I mean, you you you you dread it as soon as I mention the word forgiveness or unforgiveness, and and you've been avoiding the issue for a while.

You might not even have come in this morning service if you knew what the topic was going to be, because you don't you just don't want to deal with it.

We just don't want to deal with it.

A lot of times we make up our mind that we're gonna hold on to unforgiveness.

And we might even understand the gospel to a degree, but we want to hold on to it.

Another response is fear.

It's not that you're resistant to forgiveness, but you're scared.

You're thinking that if you forgive someone that you're having to pretend that it didn't happen or that you're gonna go back to being treated the same way over again.

And then thirdly, you might say, well, this doesn't apply to me.

You believe that you're you're you've done such a good job at living the Christian life that there is no unforgiveness that you have.

And maybe that's true.

I would say that for most of us it's unlikely.

Or maybe you aren't thinking about who you need to forgive, but you're thinking about how you wish someone else was here that needed to hear this message.

I call that shovel theology.

I'm gonna shovel it back to the person sitting behind me because they need to hear it more than I do.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum, wherever you fall on that spectrum, I want you to stay with me because this is such an important, important topic, important issue that we see that's part of our life as followers of Jesus.

Because everybody in this room is carrying something.

Listen, we're all carrying something.

A close friend of mine, a close friend may have lied to you.

You may have had promises broken.

You may have been neglected by a parent.

Your grown children may have neglected you.

Maybe a violent crime was committed against you.

Maybe an employer treated you unfairly.

Maybe you walked through your parents' divorce.

Maybe you were falsely accused.

Maybe your spouse had an affair.

Maybe you've been rejected, stolen from, or belittled.

Maybe you grew up with an alcoholic parent.

Or you married you're married to one.

Maybe you were publicly humiliated, maybe you were abused, and maybe the wounds that you have are so deep that you carry, they may have even come from somebody inside the church.

And I could go on, the list could go on.

And here's the part that we don't always want to talk about, we don't want to mention, but whatever was done to you happened once, or maybe multiple times, in individual circumstances, but what you're carrying keeps happening.

Unforgiveness doesn't sit still in a person, it gets into your peace, your sleep, and your marriage, and the way that you read a text message from somebody who's done nothing wrong.

It changes how you see other people and it changes how you how you see yourself.

It spreads until grace feels impossible and bitterness feels perfectly reasonable.

You think holding on to it is how you're going to protect yourself.

It isn't protecting anything, it's already moving.

There are probably a lot of us walking around this morning acting like everything is fine.

We come in with a smile on our face, and the truth is everything is not fine.

You're carrying an infection.

And maybe that infection was something that happened a long time ago.

And nobody knows about it.

All through this series, called scars, we've been talking about the wounds that we carry.

Some of them we did ourselves.

It's things that we, actions that we took ourselves, and we bear the scars of our own actions.

Some of them were things that were done to us, um, and we had no say in it.

We had no control of it.

And week after week, we've said the same thing.

Don't sweep the wound under the rug.

Bring it out of the darkness and into the light.

That is where healing can be found.

Bring it to the Lord.

Bring it to God's people who love you and allow healing to begin and to start.

And this morning we're doing something a little different.

We're not talking about the wound itself.

We're talking about what happens when a wound doesn't get treated.

And the big idea for this morning is this that unforgiveness is a deadly infection of the soul.

Unforgiveness is a deadly infection of the soul.

Most of us have had a scrape or a cut or we've had a sore that we ignored, and you know what happened?

It isn't the cut that puts the person in the hospital.

It's what gets into the cut.

And I've sat with people who were hospitalized that had an infection that seemed very simple and started as something small, but it ended up threatening their life.

Maybe I've probably done funerals with people that started with simple infections.

And this is the picture I want you to have in your mind this morning.

Unforgiveness is not a preference.

It's not a personality trait.

It is not you being a private person left untreated, it kills things.

Unforgiveness is a deadly infection of the soul.

And my prayer this morning is the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will speak to us and bring to our minds the people and the circumstances that we need to address.

Because sometimes when things are left unaddressed over a long period of time, we need the Holy Spirit to bring it back up, and we may not even know the effects because it's been so long in the past.

And I want to say at the top this morning, there's no way am I trying to convince you that what has happened to you is no big deal, or even that you just need to get over it.

That is not my heart this morning.

I'm acknowledging that your hurt is real.

And the pain that some of you have walked through, that some of you have had, you've had deep, painful, even criminal things that may have been done to you.

And I'm not diminishing the reality of the situation, but I also want you to see this.

Forgiveness costs you something.

Forgiveness costs you something.

Unforgiveness will cost you everything.

And I'm going to show you in Scripture what I mean by that.

Forgiveness does cost you something, but unforgiveness costs you so much more.

This is something that Jesus understood and taught and repeatedly to his disciples, including the one specific interaction with Peter, which is the longest parable that he gives on the subject.

Matthew chapter 18.

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

If you've got your Bibles, turn to Matthew chapter 18.

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

We're going to be in a few different passages, but we're going to start off in Matthew chapter 18, verse 21.

Matthew 18:21

I'm reading out of the Christian Standard Bible.

It says, Then Peter approached him and asked, Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?

And he says, as many as seven times.

Now, Jewish rabbis at this time taught that you should only forgive someone three times and then you just move on.

And let me say that I interpret that as, hey, three times you forgive and then you start sweeping it under the road.

You just move on and don't deal with it.

So when Peter asks this question, he thinks that he is being incredibly generous.

Seven times that we're to forgive?

He's doing more than double what the rabbis of his day are suggesting.

But listen to Jesus' unbelievable response.

Then Peter approached him, Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?

As many as seven times?

So what Jesus says.

He says, I tell you, not as many as seven, Jesus replied, but seventy times seven.

Now this is in this stage, in this setting, that would have been unimaginable, unthinkable.

To forgive someone this many times?

Let's do the math.

70 times.

Right.

Now, do you think he was being specific to 490 times and for you to keep up in your prayer journals?

And when you get to 491, I'm going to heap coals of fire on their head.

They are damned to hell.

That's not what Jesus meant.

Jesus is illustrating something bigger here.

There's a bigger point.

You just simply need to stop counting and keep forgiving.

Stop counting and keep forgiving.

For the follower of Jesus, no ledger is going to be kept.

We must forgive again and again.

This goes against every natural instinct that we have because naturally we don't want to forgive.

We want revenge, don't we?

I believe that's just our natural bent as human beings, even those of us that know Jesus.

I mean, just think of what you said or what you thought to the person in the vehicle that couldn't hear you but cut you off on the highway.

It wasn't blessed you, my brother.

It was may you lose control of your vehicle.

May you be cut off.

I mean, we we this is our natural reaction.

The great, one of the great Southern philosophers that goes by the name of Carrie Underwood.

She says, I dug my heels, I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive.

Carved my name into his legacy.

I took a Louisville slugger to his both headlights, slashed a hole in all four tires.

Maybe next time he'll think before he cheese.

I was told not to do that.

Listen, on a topic like this, we need a little levity, don't we?

This is heavy stuff.

Jesus tells Peter and us, the scriptures tell us that we are not to seek revenge, but instead we are to forgive repeatedly over and over and over again.

Jesus is serious about this, and it's a constant theme of his ministry.

It's a constant theme that we see all through scripture, but specifically in the New Testament, throughout the Gospels, he is talking about forgiveness.

In the Sermon on the Mount, here's what Jesus says.

Matthew 5, 21 through 26, he says, You've heard that it was said to our ancestors, do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment.

But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment.

Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court.

Whoever says you fool will be subject to hellfire.

So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar.

First go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.

Reach a settlement quickly with your adversary.

While you're on the way with him to the court, or your adversary will hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer, and you will be thrown into prison.

Truly I tell you, you'll never get out of there until you've paid the last penny.

Jesus is showing how serious this issue is, how serious he truly is.

He doesn't want people to confuse righteousness with presenting offerings at the altar while their relationships are broken.

We talk about this vertical relationship we have with God.

He is provided for our forgiveness.

He's provided for our redemption.

He's provided for our reconciliation with Him, with the Heavenly Father through what He did in His life and His death and His resurrection.

But here's what He's saying: you can't expect that relationship to be okay if all of your relationships that are horizontal with one another aren't okay.

Where unforgiveness continues to be a part of our life.

And he doesn't stop there.

We go to Matthew 6.

This is the Lord's Prayer.

It's what he says in verse 12, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And then verse 14, he says, if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well.

But if you don't forgive others, your father will not forgive your offenses.

That's the end of the Lord's Prayer.

And the command is that we should forgive the same way that we have been forgiven.

Forgiveness of people around us is a central command for the follower of Jesus.

And so much so that he includes it in the model prayer as he's teaching his disciples how to pray.

He says, if you don't forgive others, your father will not forgive your offenses.

Let me say that again.

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

Let me see.

I didn't get any reaction over here.

If you don't forgive others, and I'm not, listen, I'm not, I I acknowledge, listen, you may have been mistreated beyond anything that I could understand.

I'm not making light of that.

My heart hurts for you.

My heart hurts for those of us.

But if we don't forgive others, we should not expect the Father to forgive us.

Alright, I got some reaction over here.

Pastor John Stott, he's no longer with us.

He's with the Lord.

Theologian, he says, listen, he says, once our eyes have been opened to see the enormity of our offense against God, the injuries which others have done to us appear by comparison extremely trifling.

Listen to this.

Once our eyes have been opened to the enormity of our offenses, our guilt, our sin, what has been done to us appears simply trifling.

If, on the other hand, we have an exaggerated view of the offense of others, it proves that we have minimized our own.

Forgiveness costs you something.

Unforgiveness costs you everything.

You may not want to forgive someone because you feel like you're giving them an out by forgiving them.

Think that it'll cost you too much, but unforgiveness will cost you everything.

Jesus makes this very clear as we go back to Matthew 18.

Jesus does what he does best.

He tells a story to communicate a bigger point.

Verse 23, he says, For this reason the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to settle the accounts with his servants.

When he began to settle the accounts, one who owed 10,000 talents was brought before him.

Since he did not have the money to pay it back, the master commanded that he, his wife, his children, and everything he had, everything he had be sold to pay the debt.

At this, the servant fell face down before him and said, Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.

Then the master of that servant had compassion, released him.

And listen, listen what he did.

He forgave his debt.

Forgave the loan.

That servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denere.

Now we go from 10,000 talents that he owed.

He goes and finds a friend that owes him a hundred dollars and grabs him and starts choking him and says, Pay what you owe.

At this, his fellow servant fell down and began begging him, Be patient with me and I will pay you back.

But he wasn't willing.

Instead, he went and threw him into prison until he could pay what he owed.

And when all the other servants saw that what had taken place, they were deeply distressed and went and reported to their master everything that had happened.

Then after he had summoned him, his master said to him, You wicked servant, I forgave you all the debt because you begged me.

Shouldn't you also have had mercy on your fellow servant as I have had mercy on you?

And his master was angry and handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he could pay everything that was owed.

So also my heavenly Father will do to you unless every one of you forgives his brother or sister from your hearts.

Now I'm telling you, this that hits home for me.

That hits home for me.

10,000 talents.

It would take a working man 20 years to earn a single talent.

Do the math.

This man could work for the rest of his life, and the life of his children never never touch that debt.

It's a debt that cannot be paid.

And everybody listening to Jesus would have known this.

And the king forgives it, all of it, just like that.

The grace given to this man.

And the man walks out of the room where he receives grace, and the first thing he does is find a guy who owes him a hundred denarias, a hundred dollars, a real debt, but a pay.

One and he grabs him by the throat.

I love what C.S.

Lewis says.

He says, everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.

He received grace and he went out demanding justice.

He was released from prison and immediately he started building one for somebody else.

And look at what the king calls him.

He calls him wicked, not petty, not immature, wicked.

And so when you refuse to forgive somebody, you are acting contrary to the very character and nature of God.

And notice where the man ends up.

His unforgiveness puts him right back into the bondage that he had just been released from.

Look at what the king he calls him wicked.

And then notice how the story ends.

Jesus doesn't say that the man got sick, he says that he got handed over to the jailers.

Jesus is telling us that what unforgiveness does to a person, and I'd say the point is the same either way, whatever you refuse to release, you end up carrying.

He called it a prison in your body and in your soul.

It works like an infection.

It gets in, it spreads, and it does all of its damage from the inside.

This leads to this, this idea, this unforgiveness starts as a local infection and quickly spreads everywhere.

Unforgiveness is the deadly infection of the soul.

Infection left untreated will never stay in one place.

It's going to spread throughout the entire body.

It's going to wreak havoc on your bodies.

There's a word for what happens when an infection starts to spread.

And please forgive me if you're in the medical field, if I don't explain this correctly, but the word is sepsis.

Sepsis is your body's response to infection turning on your body.

The CDC calls it the body's extreme response to an infection.

The immune system, the very thing designed to protect you, overreacts and starts damaging healthy tissue by mistake.

And this is the same as unforgiveness.

The unforgiveness infection gets in.

You didn't ask for it.

Maybe you didn't deserve it.

And your response to it, the thing you've been telling yourself is protecting you.

It's the thing spreading the damage.

Please hear me say this again.

I'm not saying your wound was your fault, but your response to the wound is your responsibility.

I'm saying the infection isn't coming from the other person.

They might not have thought about you in 10 years, but it's your response that's been running unchecked through your own body.

In an article titled Forgiveness, Your Health Depends on It from John Hopkins Medicine says to quote Karen Schwartz, MD, health benefits of forgiveness, lower heart attack risk, improved cholesterol, better sleep, reduced pain perception, lower blood pressure, decreased anxiety and depressive stress, chronic anger triggers fight or flight, raising risk for depression, heart disease, and diabetes.

In another article titled, How to Let Go of Grudges and Why It Can Be Good for Your Health was posted in the Washington Post by Richard Cowden, and he says this unforgiveness can become a physical state associated with anxiety, depression, and sustained stress responses, including elevated cortisol.

Now, I don't need to give you all this data and quotes for you to know that these things are true.

Most of us probably know this, at least to a degree.

We've probably met people who are bitter angry people who are miserable because of something that they have never let go of since childhood.

My dad was a he was just a mean person.

But when you know the whole story, his dad had left his mother for another woman.

While he was in his young teenage years, and at the age of 15, his mother died from cancer.

Any dad worth his salt would have either done one of two things, because his dad lived in Florida.

He would have either invited the son, please come live with me, or I'm gonna relocate back to where you are because it's the right thing to do.

His dad did neither, did not reach out to him.

And so as I've gotten older, I've learned more about the stories that led to my dad's anger and bitterness and hard-heartedness.

But it doesn't change the fact that unforgiveness is a deadly infection of the soul.

I watched it in the life of my dad.

And by God's grace, now I know this sounds, this doesn't sound right, but by God's grace, after my brother, I have two two older brothers, my middle brother passed away tragically suddenly in May of 1992.

That very single event led to my dad's salvation.

It broke him.

So I can look back and see how God works all things together for the good.

Because my brother's in glory.

I mean, he knew the Lord.

He's way better off than any of us.

And he would have given his life, I believe, for if he knew that it would impact the salvation of everyone in our family.

So it's not just for our physical, mental, and emotional health, it's also for our spiritual health.

Unforgiveness doesn't just spread.

It's an invitation to the enemy.

If you're a note taker, take note of this.

Unforgiveness doesn't just spread, it is an open door for the enemy, for Satan, Lucifer, for the adversary to come into our life and to plant his flag and take ownership of your heart, your emotions, your mental well-being.

He doesn't want you to know the joy of forgiveness.

He wants you to stay in prison.

Ephesians 4, 26 and 27, the apostle Paul says, be angry and do not sin.

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

And Paul doesn't say that we should never get angry.

The word he uses for opportunity here in the Greek is the word topos, which means location, geography, place, territory.

So some of your translations will say foothold.

Don't give the devil a foothold.

That's the picture that Paul's painting here.

When you hold on to unforgiveness, you hand the enemy ground in your life that he did not possess before.

Do not give the enemy a foothold.

Do not give the enemy an opportunity.

Do not give the enemy your heart, who you are.

When you hold on to unforgiveness, you're handing him territory.

You're handing him a foothold.

Understand that if you are a believer in Jesus this morning, Satan has no authority over you.

He has no authority over you.

You are free.

Christ has set you free.

The enemy doesn't control you.

But here's what we do.

Here's what happens when we hold on.

When we hold on to unforgiveness, it's almost as if we give a pass to Satan to hold a little bit of power in our life.

Maybe he can't keep your soul from eternal life, but he can make your life as miserable as possible before you get to that next stage of life.

But here's the good news about the infection: it's treatable.

Nobody gets treated for something they keep insisting isn't there.

So what does that treatment actually look like?

Colossians, the apostle Paul says in Colossians 3, 12 through 14, he said, therefore, as God's chosen ones, those of us who've put our faith in Jesus, we've been covered by the blood.

We are redeemed, we're saved, we're forgiven.

He says, therefore, as God's chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.

If anyone has a grievance against another, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive.

Also, he says, above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.

So notice where Paul starts.

He doesn't start out with what to do.

He starts out with who you are.

You're chosen, you're redeemed, you're adopted by the king, you're a child of our heavenly Father.

You listen, you're part of the family of God.

He starts with who you are, you're dearly loved.

And he says, listen, out of that identity is what will change how you live.

And forgiveness, finally, this forgiveness is not a feeling.

Forgiveness is a choice.

It's not a feeling, it's a choice.

There's times where I've had to just humble my heart and say, God, I don't, I don't feel lovey-dovey, I don't feel warm, I don't feel hunky dory.

I mean, these are all Greek and Hebrew words.

I I don't, I want to hold, you know, I can even say, I kind of want to hold on to this, but but I know that I need to forgive.

I need to forgive.

Corey Chin Boom, you know, survived being in a in a in a concentration camp.

And she says that after the war, she could not, she could not forgive one particular person.

Two sleepless weeks.

She finally confessed it to a pastor, and he pointed out the window at the church tower and said, he said, You see that bell?

That bell is rung by pulling a rope.

When the sexton who rings the bell lets go, the bell keeps swinging, ding, dong, ding, dong, slower and slower until it stops.

And here's what he said: he said, forgiveness is the same.

When you forgive, you take your hand off the rope.

And if you've been tugging on a grievance for years, don't be shocked when the angry thoughts keep coming for a while.

Those are just the ding-dongs of the old bell swinging.

But forgiveness is on its way.

So here, here, sum this up.

We forgive because it's a command.

And if Jesus is our Lord, he's calling us to forgive.

If Jesus is Lord, he has the authority to call the shots.

Doesn't he?

All right, let me come back.

You got another chance.

If Jesus is Lord and God is sovereign, if God the Creator is the one who calls the shots, we should listen and we should obey.

Amen?

So, so we forgive because it's what's best for us.

We forgive because we don't want to give the enemy a foothold.

We forgive because we want to experience healing.

We forgive because we've been forgiven of so much.

Now, what I want to do is I want to walk you through just four steps.

And this is not, you know, these four steps don't line, they're not listed in Scripture.

This is application, okay?

So this is application that comes from myself and our leadership team that works on these sermons together.

This is application.

These are steps that we might take.

And so normally I would say, hey, we're gonna come, we're gonna have the band play behind us because our our emotions for some reason are stirred when when there is a a guitar or a keyboard playing behind us softly.

It stirs us, right?

It stirs us up.

It makes the the invitation more um, I don't know, it makes it more spiritual.

You know what we're gonna do?

We're gonna sit in silence.

And I'm gonna ask you to bow your heads.

And I'm gonna walk you through these four steps of forgiveness.

So would you bow your head?

And the first step is to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal the people you need to forgive.

Can we just sit in that for a second?

I mean, just write down.

That's not a note for you to take.

This is an action.

Ask the Holy Spirit, God, Holy Spirit, God, would you reveal?

Bring to my mind the people that I need to forgive.

Some names will come instantly.

Because it's it may be fresh, it may be so the pain the pain may be so real.

Some names may come later this week as the Holy Spirit prompts.

Who is it?

Second step.

Ask the Holy Spirit to remind you how much you have been forgiven.

Not just forgive me, but to to call me to give me an opportunity to open up his word and to share it is overwhelming.

I think of what it cost him.

Every bit of the suffering.

Every time he is whipped, every drop of blood, every nail has been provided for my forgiveness.

Thirdly.

Don't say it out loud.

Can you write it down?

Don't say it out loud if they're sitting near you.

Because of the forgiven forgiveness given to me through Jesus, I forgive.

I think of that church in Charleston.

I think of those Amish families.

I think of the picture, and I've seen it many other times.

The testimony of Corey Timboom.

I think of the power of God.

This is not something we can conjure up by ourselves, by the way.

It is through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit that we are able to forgive.

Which leads us to the final step.

Ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom about whether and how the relationship can be reconciled.

And it's just a quick sub-note.

Forgiveness does not always mean there will be reconciliation.

As a matter of fact, there are times that there should not and cannot be reconciliation.

I'm not going to encourage somebody to walk back into a relationship of abuse where they are going to continually be hurt.

But I can counsel somebody that you can forgive.

You can forgive, and that's the command of the Lord, and it is what is right and righteous, and it is in our best interest for our personal journey with Jesus.

Matthew Spanler Davidson says that we have no scars that Jesus cannot see, and we have no wounds that he cannot heal.

And we're going to sing together in a moment a song thanking Jesus for the blood.

And I want to encourage you, sometimes we don't push a big come forward invitation, but I'm going to tell you this that sometimes your physical response, your posture needs to change and reflect what God is leading you to do.

And sometimes you need to come and bring it down to the altar and in a sense say, you know what, I'm going to lay this at the feet of Jesus.

And I'm not trying to coerce you, I'm just telling you that I know from personal experience and what I believe Scripture teaches us is sometimes there has to be a physical response to the inner spiritual work of Jesus.

Father, would you work in us as we consider these steps that would lead to forgiveness and freedom?

God, set us free from unforgiveness.

God, don't allow us to continue to build a prison for our own abiding.

God, allow us to break free from the prison of unforgiveness.

First of all, because it's obedient.

We have been forgiven greatly.

And so as a result, we can forgive others greatly.

God, use this time to draw us to a place of obedience and response.

It's in Christ's name we pray.

Amen.