Hard to Forgive | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin, and today on Theocast, we're going to have a conversation that is a heavy one and that will strike close to home we trust for pretty much all of us.

The title of today's episode is Hard to Forgive. The reality of life in a fallen world is that we will sin against others and we will be sinned against, sometimes in ways that are indescribably painful and hard and may go on for a really long time.

So today, John and I are going to talk about how hard it can be to forgive others when we've been sinned against in these ways.

And at the same time, the teaching of the scripture is very plain and very clear that because God in Christ has forgiven us of a debt that is incalculable, we are to forgive others when they sin against us and no longer hold their sin over them as a record of wrongs.

We aim to have this conversation in a way that is pastoral and filled with compassion, acknowledging that oftentimes the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak.

So we hope this is encouraging for you and we hope it's clarifying. Stay tuned. If you'd like to help support

Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

Christian life from a confessional, Reformed, and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today, sitting together in Knoxville, Tennessee, are

John Moffitt, who is the pastor of Grace Reformed Church over in Spring Hill, Tennessee, west of here.

And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, a couple hours east of here, where we sit today.

John, it's great to be together in the same space. We've been enjoying some time together. We've been working, but enjoying one another's company since last night.

Second podcast recording for us today, interspersed throughout the day, has been conversations about Theocast and hopes and plans, podcast content, all kinds of things that we're thinking through, and some long -term goals as well.

So it's been a good time. We're tired. It's Monday afternoon. Usually we're off on Monday.

We both woke up, but we were ambitious to wake up as early as we thought we would. We traveled yesterday, so this is maybe more information than the listener cares to know.

We're going to get to the content, but we appreciate everybody's love and support toward us. We both preached in our respective churches and had things to do following the service yesterday in Asheville and in Spring Hill.

Then we hit the road yesterday afternoon, got here last night, and we were up a little bit late just because we were enjoying seeing one another.

Got up early today to work, so here we are. Let's quick reminder, if you've not downloaded the newest podcast,

Everyday Grace, or watch it on the YouTube channel, go do that. Opportunities to be encouraged five days a week.

As we sit here today, that podcast just went live. We hope you are encouraged by Everyday Grace.

Reminders daily, Monday to Friday anyway, of the sufficiency of Christ for us and the grace of God toward us.

Give that a listen and share it with your friends and family. They're short, digestible little bits that we hope will be of benefit.

With all that by way of catching you guys up on our lives over the last 18 hours or so and talking about a new podcast release, we're going to get to the content for today.

This is a topic, John, you're going to tee it up for us. It's a difficult conversation to have.

We could be misunderstood, but we pray that that will not happen, and we pray that our tone and a pastoral heart and concern will come through.

Why don't you tell everybody what we're talking about? As you already know from the title of the podcast, we are going to be talking about how hard it is to forgive at times.

I know personally, I have harbored unforgiveness over the years towards people that I thought had not only hurt me once, but multiple times.

I've counseled so many people through bitterness and anger. It's one of these subjects that Justin and I were looking at that I don't think is talked about enough.

It's one of those acceptable sins because we can justify it. This person hurt me so much that there's no way

I could ever offer forgiveness, and so we can quickly justify it. What Justin and I want to do is we want to be compassionate because we're pastors, and we're fellow brothers, and we love our brothers and sisters.

The point of this podcast is not to hurt or malign or cause greater pain, but I want to start here because what we're about to say next can be really hard to hear.

We are trying to create freedom and liberty, right? Let the light of Christ shine in our hearts, and I think that bitterness really does cloud our hearts.

We looked this quote up because we wanted to make sure we were quoting the right person, but I think

C .S. Lewis was the first person I heard quote, Augustine, when he says, Resentment is like drinking poison, assuming it's going to kill the other person.

Exactly. That's our fear, is that we assume that unforgiveness is going to bring retribution, or it's going to bring punishment to the person that has hurt us.

Or it's going to vindicate us. Yeah, it's going to bring vindication for us and punishment towards them, so that's the setup where we're going to take pretty much everything

I've just said, and we're going to walk through it from a biblical standpoint. Everyone would agree we must forgive, right?

Forgive as you've been forgiven. But there seems to be a caveat to the level of pain where we might walk that back a little bit.

The disciples even know this because when they ask Jesus, how many times do I forgive? One comment along the lines of what you said before we dive in to even

Matthew 18 and some other clear texts that we could refer to, we know that oftentimes the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak.

We are faced with situations where we have been hurt terribly, maybe for a long time by the same person, where the thought of forgiveness may feel impossible from our perspective, and the thought of forgiving a person who has hurt us so badly is a painful thought in and of itself.

We acknowledge all of that, and at the same time, what we're after here, we of course want to live in accord with the

Word of God. There is nothing, and by nothing we mean nothing, that trumps the Scriptures, and what we are aiming for,

John, as we are in everything that we do as pastors and even as podcast hosts, is we're aiming to herald

Christ, the forgiveness that we have received in Him, the righteousness we have received in Him, and the freedom that we have been given in Him.

Whom the Son sets free will be free indeed. That is not unrelated to this conversation when it comes to forgiveness or harboring unforgiveness.

Let's dive into what the Scripture teaches us about forgiveness. There are a lot of places that we could go, but perhaps the most obvious place is

Matthew 18, I believe 21 to 35, the parable of the unforgiving servant that Jesus tells.

It's very pointed. Sometimes it's said about the book of Galatians that it's the book in the New Testament with the sharpest elbows when it comes to the clarity of the gospel.

This is a parable that gets in the lane and throws some bows. Jesus sets the grenade on the table and pulls the pin, drops bombs, whatever cliché phrases we want to use.

But you're right, Peter has asked, because the context is

Jesus has just talked about church discipline, restoration, seeking your brother's restoration and how that might look.

Peter asks the question, how many times will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

As many as seven times. Typical teaching of rabbis in that era was that you forgive an offender three times and after that, you no longer forgive.

In Peter's mind, he's asking something that's very gracious, very generous, like seven times a lot.

Jesus responds, I say not to you seven times, but 77 times or 70 times seven times.

Whether we're talking about 77 or 490, that's not the point. The point of Christ is there is no end to your forgiving of your brother if he comes to you and says, forgive me.

That makes us all uncomfortable. We're very uncomfortable, even as Christians, with limitless forgiveness, because it's not like on the 491st time that you're no longer bound to forgive.

We completely miss the point if that's how we look at it, because bottom line, John, it's like, let's just go and defend everybody's senses of their own righteousness.

We have been forgiven by God 490 times today. We use this with our own children.

I stopped doing it because I realized how unbiblical it was to say sorry and ask for forgiveness means you're not going to do it again.

I'm like, no, that's not what that means. Luke 17,

I think verse three or so, Jesus says something very similar.

If your brother comes to you and asks you to forgive him, as many as even seven times in a day, you're going to forgive him.

That's not how we think, because we would immediately start evaluating the quality of someone's repentance. You could not be sincere in your repentance if you've done this to me seven times today.

You clearly didn't mean what you said. We're not saying throw discernment out the window, but what we are saying is that if our forgiveness is contingent upon the quality of one's repentance, then

God help us all. Forgiveness, unfortunately, is not transactional. I'll say this now, and we will unpack this way down the road.

Trust is definitely transactional, but forgiveness can't be. It cannot be, because what it means is

I am going to withhold from you something that I don't have the right to withhold.

Trust is something I do have the right to withhold. We do this with elders and deacons. We do this with our children or with our money.

We're not going to give our money away to somebody we don't trust. Let's use the example of a pastor who does something that disqualifies him from holding pastoral office, and people were hurt.

There can be forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation mean the same thing, but restoration is something else.

We would not restore that man to pastoral office immediately. Or if ever, depending on what it was.

I mean, maybe ever, but certainly not immediately. And so that can absolutely be the case where forgiveness and reconciliation are commanded of us in the

Scriptures, and then restoration of relationship, at a minimum, we can say is going to take time.

And it may be that the relationship may never look like it once did. So that's important to clarify.

But just final word on the parable of the unforgiving servant, people probably know it well.

Where there is a servant who is forgiven by the king, an unfathomable debt.

I mean, Jesus uses just an astronomical figure to convey this was a debt that was beyond any human being's ability to pay.

And the king forgives the debt and lets the man go free. The man, of course, had pled for forgiveness and mercy and give me time, give me time, right, to be able to pay you back.

Well, that was impossible. The king says, no, you're free. So then this man, having been forgiven a debt that we can't even calculate, it's so large, goes out and either intentionally goes to find or just runs into a fellow servant who owes him some money, not an insignificant amount of money, but nothing compared to what he had owed the king.

And he demands that this servant pay him what he's owed. And that servant pleads for mercy to the servant that's been forgiven.

This servant pleads for mercy. And the servant that had been forgiven by the king, not only does he end up saying, no, you're going to pay me everything,

I'm going to throw you in jail, he doesn't even do the modestly forgiving thing of saying, yeah, I'll give you some time. He doesn't even give him time.

He just chokes him and has him thrown in jail. And, of course, the fellow servants see it, they're concerned.

That's an indictment, by the way. When the fellow servants see it and they say, this is not okay, they go and tell the king, and the king then has the man brought and, of course, pronounces judgment upon him.

And then Jesus drops the hammer and says, so it will be with you. Like, my father in heaven will not forgive you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.

It's really strong. So I think, John, what we can say... I'll just interject in there.

Yeah, please, go, jump in. Right, because ultimately what you're saying... All right, let me change the scenario, okay?

What you're saying is you disagree with God on what he demands as holiness and as right.

Like, if I were to say, no, no, I think it's okay that someone sleeps outside of his marriage or is a homosexual.

I don't think it's an offense to God. This is an acceptable... What the point of the illustration is, it's not acceptable.

It is a sin. That's the hard thing about hearing that, is that it's not an acceptable...

This is a unique situation. No, God says there is no situation to which this is acceptable.

So what you're saying is the Scripture is clear for the believer, right?

Because of what we have been forgiven in Christ, God has forgiven us a debt that is unfathomable, that we could never pay.

Doesn't matter how much time we were given. We can't earn this back. We've been forgiven that.

And so how could we ever hold the sins of other people over their heads as a record of wrongs?

Because God doesn't do that with us. And so let me just go ahead and answer this question. Let's think about law and gospel for a second from that text and the clear command to forgive.

I think you and I are in agreement. The requirement or the command to forgive is always a thing with no exceptions, right?

So let's anticipate some questions people might ask. Is Jesus saying that we acquire the forgiveness of God by how we forgive other people?

The answer to that is certainly no. We are forgiven by God on account of Christ alone, and we receive that by faith.

We want to be crystal clear on the gospel. And we must agree with God on what He demands us to send. That's true. And right,

I agree with that 100%. But what that text is saying, law of God, command of God, forgiveness is always required.

And what we need to say here is that if you are the kind of person who walks around thinking that you deserve mercy and that you deserve forgiveness from others, but you are not willing to extend it to anyone, that's a sign of unbelief.

That's right. And it's a sign that you are living under the law and not the grace of the gospel. Yeah, or you are very confused.

At a minimum. At a minimum. Yeah, because I think at times, bitterness blinds us.

How many passages do we have even in James that talk about how bitterness can absolutely blind you and it becomes something that consumes you and destroys you?

But we would understand a person who is defiantly harboring unforgiveness, who says,

I don't think in this scenario God requires me to forgive, and I'm justified to not forgive this person.

You have just stood on the other side of God. That is unrepentant sin. You're opposing God. Yeah. So that's serious.

It's different to say I'm struggling with bitterness. A hundred percent. I need to confess this. Exactly. We're going to get to some pastoral comments in a minute because we don't want to be misunderstood here.

But let's anticipate an objection that many might offer here, and this is an objection that's not lost on you or me.

We get this. We're pastors. We are sinners too. We struggle to forgive too, and we are living life in congregations that are comprised of sinners, and so we see this.

People would say, John, Justin, I hear you. I hear what you're saying.

I see the teaching of the Scriptures, but you don't know what this person has done to me.

You don't know how long this person has done this to me. Or how painful it was.

Surely, brothers, there are some things that are so bad, so painful, so wicked, so prolonged that they're beyond the pale, and forgiveness isn't possible.

My response to that is you're absolutely right. I will never understand that. I won't.

I can't. And the moment anybody tries to understand somebody else's pain, that's impossible to do, because it's so individualized.

I'm not here to belittle that, and you're not here to belittle that. What's interesting is to think that an all -sovereign

God who understands every situation He has endured and experienced all suffering and pain says, it can be done.

Here's the thing. So I 100 % agree with you.

We are not claiming to understand, and at the same time, we're going to uphold the teaching of the Word. But Jesus, let's consider

Him for just a second. The one who in that parable is saying, you must forgive your brother from your heart, is the one who took all the sin of all of His people upon Himself and died for that.

From the cross, as He was being executed, His plea is, Father, forgive them. If Christ can forgive them.

That is right. When you ask Him, like Peter, how many times do

I need to forgive Jesus? If you ask Christ, the one who would take on the sin of His people and die for that sin and forgives because of what

He did for them, you ask Him, how far do I need to go in forgiveness? His answer is, really far.

If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest.

And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

slash primer. I don't ever want to compare us to Jesus because we're not

Jesus, but it is Jesus on the cross who says, Father, forgive them for they don't know what they do. They did beat

Him to death. And again, I don't ever want to say we'll be like Jesus because I know we can't.

But I think it's healthy for us. We should seek to imitate Him, but can we be Him? Can we?

No. But it is helpful to understand that by the power of the Holy Spirit, this is where we understand true freedom and joy.

This is the thing, Justin, I think that what happens. I've been here. I've struggled with this.

The opposite of forgiveness is bitterness and resentment. It is a prison that sucks the life out of you.

We don't believe that to be true. Well, because what do we think we're doing when we withhold forgiveness? Yeah. What do we think? We think we're actually hurting the other person.

Right. We're not. We're actually hurting us. We're imprisoning us. So, what's powerful about forgiveness is that you are free from that burden from that moment going forward.

What is hard is that people have misinterpreted this.

And I want to say this now in case I forget and we move on. People have misinterpreted forgiveness to...

and I know we touched on it, but I want to make some clarity here... to mean that one must fully enter back into the same level of relationship or circumstance that one was there before.

I've seen this where they'll demand a husband and a wife to re -engage. So, when we're talking about forgiveness, please hear us that we are talking about letting go letting go of the offense that was brought against you.

But that does not mean that you must willingly and foolishly put yourself back into a position where you may undergo not only the same pain, but greater.

That is not the same thing. Forgiveness is not the lack of wisdom. You're not throwing discernment out the window.

No, I always say this. Scripture is very clear. Love and forgiveness are demanded. There are no options. You must.

Trust is always earned. Sure. Always. It's healthy to remember that Justin and I are not saying that you offer forgiveness and trust equally at the same time.

You don't. I'm going to not push back so much, but I'm going to clarify, at least from my perspective, like you were talking about.

When we withhold forgiveness, we think we're doing something that's good for us. 100 % agree. We're doing something that's terrible for us.

So, it's bad for us to withhold forgiveness because it is a prison. And what we end up doing, we talk all the time here on this podcast.

Let me just clarify. It's a prison because you are now trapped back in sin, and you're not living in grace. Right. That's the prison.

And what you're doing is you're just continuing to relive what you've been through, and you're continuing to hold it against the person that did it to you, and you think—

It creates a lot of self -righteousness. You think, well, sure. You think that you're doing something that's good for you because you're vindicating yourself, and you're punishing the other person.

And it's like, well, in reality, you're imprisoned. You're not free. You're in bondage to this thing that you just are fixating on.

We talk all the time on Theocast about not navel -gazing and not looking within all the time, looking to Christ for freedom and rest and peace and all these things.

It's like, well, when you are harboring unforgiveness, you are not looking to Christ, I promise you. You're looking to yourself and your own pain, and you're looking through the lens of malice and hatred toward another human being, and it's not helpful.

I will say that we think that it's good for us, and it's not.

I do think harboring unforgiveness is harmful to the person you're not forgiving. It's bad for this reason.

We're not exacting the punishment upon them that we think we are, but we are hurting them because if a person comes to you—

Like, let's say, John, let's say I sinned against you, and I know I've sinned against you, and I come to you and I say, brother,

I have wronged you, and I am sorry. Please forgive me. It's very clear that in my own mind and heart, my conscience, that before God, I am burdened, and I'm coming to you saying, forgive me, and I'm going to use that word.

I mean, we might talk about this in a minute. I'm not going to just be like, hey, bro, I'm sorry, and then you, if you do forgive me, you're not going to be like, oh, that's okay.

That's a terrible way to handle this. I should say, please forgive me, and then if you do, you should say, brother,

I forgive you because when we forgive the other person, we are actually setting their conscience free and saying, you don't need to be burdened by this anymore.

What you did to me is real. If it wasn't real, forgiveness wouldn't be needed, and I think that needs to be stated because I think sometimes people think that to forgive somebody's transgression means it just dissipates.

It's still a thing, but it's just that I don't hold it against you any longer in terms of a record of wrongs.

You don't use that as a lens. Right, because it is a clouded lens that goes, I cannot think of you in a positive, loving manner because this cloud of wrong is over you.

Sometimes people actually don't understand what forgiveness is. It's not just saying, I forgive you. It's not having a conversation with somebody where they say some words, and you say some words back.

What you're saying is, I will not look at you as if you have wronged me. I'm not going to look at you. That's hard to say.

Our relationship is not going to be defined by what you did to me. I'm telling you that you're free of it.

I've been forgiven in Christ, and I'm forgiving you, and just like I no longer have to be burdened by the guilt and the shame of what

I've done before the Lord, you don't need to live with me like that either. Right, I'll throw this on. This is a little bit of a counseling side, but I've had to help couples understand this.

You know, Justin, if I came by and I hit you really, really hard in the arm, and then

I did that about every hour, every day, eventually your arm's going to get bruised. You're going to start flinching me like, dude, that.

And then eventually we come to the realization, this is not healthy. Don't do this anymore. That doesn't mean when you walk by, there might not be a flinch.

Just because there's a level of, I'm not sure. And so when we're talking about forgiveness, there are times where it's hard to describe where one can forgive, right?

But that level of, trust is such a tricky word here, and I don't want to,

I want to just keep using trust, but there's a familiarity that was lost, and there was a closeness that was lost, and what

I'm trying to say. And a safety. Right. And what I'm saying is this, is that the person who did the offense, what

I want them to understand is that your actions have consequences. You will be forgiven.

And you can have a restoration in relationship, but that trust, and it's healthy for us to, even for those of us who understand that when we violate someone, we need to feel that.

Like, there's a level of sincerity and sensitivity here. So I'm trying to be sensitive to the person who has been violated very hard.

Understanding that Justin and I think that according to 2 Peter 1 .9, that you can live in an ineffective and unfruitful life.

We're not antinomians, y 'all. We think there are consequences for our sins. I don't think eternally, but we can lessen the effects of the glory of the kingdom of God and the proclamation of God's love.

And so just don't hear us saying that we're all just going to run around throwing forgiveness out there. There are consequences for our actions.

But at the same time, there's also equal consequences for not forgiving. It's true.

They're both equal. It's true. We're already making some pastoral comments, but let's continue making some,

John. I'll go and say this. We said it already. Just want to double down on this and be really clear because we don't want to be misunderstood.

Forgiveness in a fallen world when we have been wronged in unspeakable ways, perhaps for a long time, forgiveness in this life will often be very hard in a way that we would grasp at the leash of language to describe.

And we don't presume to be able to climb into the mind and heart of anybody that's been wronged and know exactly what they feel.

What we are saying here in the clear command of Scripture, the clear words of our Savior that because of how we've been forgiven, we are forgiven, we acknowledge that the flesh and the ability to carry that out, there will be weakness.

As a pastor, if we're in a situation where a person has been wronged by a brother or sister or a spouse, whatever it may be, and it's bad, in saying that forgiveness is required, we are not saying that you need to be able to just say, yep, today right here in this moment,

I've forgiven and I'm good. Let's move forward. That's not what we mean. What we're asking— So it's like saying, well,

I struggled with lust today. I've asked God for forgiveness, and I'm never going to struggle with it again. Right. That's not at all what we mean.

And I think that's what people hear, John. The reason it's important to clarify is when we say you need to forgive, people assume that what we're saying is you need to be able to forgive, and it's just done.

Forgive and forget, yeah. Yeah, forgive and forget. It's good, yeah. Absolutely, happy to forgive. Not hard. Not what we mean.

We would, as pastors, patiently bear with a person who looks at us and says, brothers,

I know that I'm to forgive my brother or sister or my husband or my wife, but I know

I'm supposed to. And in my inner man, I want to, and I am just struggling so hard to forgive.

But I know I need to please—I'm praying for grace. I'm praying for mercy. Please pray for me.

Help me. You know, just encourage me in the Lord that I might forgive him or that I might forgive her, because I know my heart is hard, and I know that I'm harboring unforgiveness, and I know it's wrong.

If a person says that, it's like, brother, sister, we're here. Yeah, and here's the gospel.

We're here all day. Let's feed on it. Here's the good news. Yeah, and the gospel and walking together, it's what we do.

That's different, though, than sitting and looking at me or you or at your pastor or your brother or sister in the faith and saying, yeah,

I'm harboring unforgiveness, and it's entirely fine, because what I've been through, I'm justified.

I'm justified to not forgive, because this is different. The Bible can't speak into this.

The Lord himself can't speak into this, because I have determined that this is beyond the pale, and I am justified to not forgive her or not forgive him.

That is a very different posture to which we would say, brother, sister, we're concerned for you, because you're demonstrating a hard heart, and you are in potentially unrepentant sin against the clear commands of the

Lord. That's right. We as the church are designed,

Galatians 6 .1, Romans 15 .1, where we are told to go and help relieve that person from being slaved, because that is slavery.

It is. You can't have joy and harbors sin knowingly.

It is going to rob you of that joy. There are so many circumstances, even in my own church that I'm thinking through right now.

It's complicated. We were trying to be very careful on even using the word abuse.

Sometimes I don't have words for some of the pain you've seen and experienced.

The one hope I want to give to somebody, if you wake up every day and you begin your day with bitterness, and then you run to the throne room of grace and you ask for mercy, you need to do that daily so that you aren't hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Sin wants...there's nothing more than Satan wants to do and send within your heart than to turn your heart hard to justify yourself in your bitterness.

It will destroy not only you, but everyone around you. It will not restore what was lost.

As we've already stated, you think, if I've lost, someone else is going to lose as well.

They're going to lose as well. It's impossible to do that. May I say, vengeance is mine, says the

Lord. I will repay. I will repay. You need to hand that over to God, and God will say,

I will dish out what is right and just. You are not the judge.

Right. You are not the judge. We so often act as though we are. We live in this cycle, this loop of law, transgression, and judgment.

Here's my law. You've transgressed. Now there's judgment. We think it's up to us to be the judge, to which we know the

Lord is the judge of all the universe. He always does right. As you said, Deuteronomy is cited in Romans 12.

Vengeance is mine, declares the Lord. I will repay. This isn't judgment. This is us standing outside the dungeon going, trust me, you don't want to be in here.

It's going to kill you being in here. You do not want to be in here. If you continue to live from this transactional, quid pro quo perspective, that's not gospel.

That's not grace. If we want that kind of transactional, quid pro quo life, we need to be careful what we ask for.

Certainly before the Lord, but we can't relate to each other in these ways. What we have to trust,

John, in particular in the church, when we forgive a brother or sister in the faith, whether that's a spouse, a child, or a friend, whatever it may be in the church, it's like, okay,

I'm extending forgiveness because I trust that Christ has already handled and satisfied the justice of God against my brother, against my sister.

I'm just pronouncing over them what Christ has already accomplished in their behalf. That's important.

Even when it comes to people maybe outside the church, unbelievers in our lives, and we don't know whether they're ever going to come to faith, we still can forgive them because the

Lord will handle it. Christ will either have atoned for this sin, their wrongdoing, and what he accomplished on the cross, and his suffering, and his life, and all the rest, or they will.

We can say, inasmuch as it concerns us, we have been forgiven by our King a debt we could never pay, and we've been given righteousness that we could never earn.

We are not going to hold the sins of fellow men and women, image bearers of God, over their heads as a record of wrongs because that would be inappropriate.

Justin Perdue I do want to say something that we have to get ready to go into SR soon. We didn't really talk about this, so I'm throwing you a little bit of a curveball.

One of the things that Justin and I know has dealt with, and I've dealt with in my own context over many years, is that sometimes people aren't struggling with necessarily forgiving as much as it is that, unfortunately, in Christian culture...

I'm trying to be careful here. This is relating to the podcast we recorded last time, one before this.

In the purity culture, people who are offended and hurt, they don't receive justice.

In other words, it's not recognized or acknowledged that they were actually hurt and violated.

We're so embarrassed by it, we just tell them, you need to let it go and get over it. But there was never this moment of, no, this person was wrong, and they need to be confronted that they were wrong.

It's really hard to forgive someone who isn't acknowledging what they have done is wrong. We need to be sensitive to those people.

You just need to get over it. It's hard to forgive someone who is not willing to acknowledge the violation, or if other people...

We're still required to forgive, but I understand when someone struggles when no one is acknowledging the violation that has happened.

I'm here to be sensitive to those things. I know you are too. I've seen churches where they basically tell a young man or a young woman to be quiet and just get over it.

I understand why someone would suffer with the sense of injustice there. Get over it is a terrible response to look and say, we are sorry, and this is terrible.

What you've been through is awful. The power of the acknowledgement, yes, that was wrong.

It's wrong. Then we want to reassure the person who's been sinned against, brother, sister, should you forgive the offender?

You are in no way saying that what occurred was not wrong. Sometimes that's where we get jacked up in our brains.

If I forgive, then I am just letting this go. I'm giving it a pass. It's almost like it was not bad.

It was not horrible. It was not evil. It's like, no, you forgiving is actually the stamp.

It's actually you saying, no, it was wrong. I'm acknowledging it was wrong. It was so much wrong.

It required forgiveness. I am forgiving you of wrong. It's just like we talk about with grace.

People think that grace is a way of calling wrong right. That's stupid.

No, grace is a way of dealing with real wrong. The same is true of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not saying that something that was bad and wrong is now okay or that it's right. That's why we shouldn't say, oh, it's okay.

Actually, no, it isn't okay what you did to me. What I'm telling you is it was wrong and I forgive you.

It's very different. We do this with our children. It's important to be clear. For instance, when my kids were little and they would get into these arguments, they would run to the person who they knew would dish out justice rightly.

They would both plead their case and then I would determine who was guilty. You could see it in the child's face of, like, my father has this.

He's going to make it right. In many ways, that's what you're saying is that when I offer forgiveness, I'm going, you know what?

Whether God's going to pay himself for that sin or he will dish it out, no matter what, God will make this right and I will let him do that.

That is a safe place to be. No matter what you do to me, you can run to the Father's presence and say,

God, I know you have this. I'm going to let it go. Justin Perdue That's a good way to look at it. We are going to the Father on account of what the

Son has done. We're going to say, Lord, I trust that you have this, and I'm going to do what you've told me because you have forgiven me.

It's a good way over to the Semper Reformanda podcast. We call it SR for short, forgive us for that, if that is offensive to you.

What that is is a second podcast that we record each week. SR is a second podcast that we record each week for our members.

Semper Reformanda is actually the name of our membership. Those are people who have partnered with Theocast in a number of ways.

And so we provide this extra content for those individuals. If you're interested in becoming a supporter of Theocast, becoming an

SR member, you'll get access to more than just a podcast. You'll become a part of a community of people who like you are wrestling with and processing through some theological shifts, are learning and growing just like you are.

We've got an app and all kinds of good things to offer to people who are members and partner with our ministry.

We leave that to you. You can find information about Semper Reformanda over on our website, theocast .org.

And you know how to use a website, so we're not going to say anything else about that. We're going to go record this additional content.

We'll talk with many of you over there, and we'll talk with the rest of you in the regular format next week. Grace and peace.