0:0 - All right, so I'm not sure how closely people pay attention to sermon series or what's happened last week or the week before.
0:10 - But hopefully we've noticed that Pastor Brad and I have been preaching our way through Luke over the last number of weeks.
0:17 - We talked about during Lent, we did a series of the seven sayings of Jesus.
0:21 - But going back as far as Christmas, the Advent story was from Luke.
0:26 - And so whenever we have no other special Sundays going on, we usually kind of work our way through the next section of Luke.
0:32 - And so we were on Luke 5.
0:34 - And this next week would be the sermon where Jesus talks about fasting and about new wine skins and that kind of stuff.
0:41 - But I'm going to leapfrog ahead a little bit in Luke this week and go up to Luke chapter 7 instead.
0:47 - And later on this summer, we'll come back and we'll do the wine skins because that's a good message too.
0:53 - I've had a lot of conversations in the last couple of months with people about forgiveness and the idea of forgiveness and forgiving other people and what the Bible says about forgiveness.
1:3 - And a couple of times people have said like, we should maybe do a sermon about that.
1:8 - I know we hear that sometimes in the CRC.
1:10 - We could use a sermon about that one.
1:11 - But I already kind of felt like, yeah, this might be a good week to go ahead to Luke 7 and to talk a little bit about forgiveness and what we see Jesus saying about that.
1:19 - So before we open up God's word, let's pray together.
1:24 - Lord, I thank you for a beautiful day in this spring.
1:28 - I thank you for your word that we can have it with us all the time, and that you teach us so many wonderful things in there, and that no matter how many times we've read a passage, there's all kinds of new lessons and new insights we can take about your character and about your will for us.
1:46 - So Lord, as we open your word now, and as I bring the message you've laid in my heart, I pray that we'll be able to be attentive to your spirit, that you'll guide me in what I say, and that you'll fill this room with your presence.
2:0 - In Christ's name, amen.
2:5 - So from Luke chapter 7, this is Luke 36 to 50.
2:10 - This is the story of the sinful woman anointing Jesus at, of all places, the Pharisee's house.
2:17 - So verse 36, when one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table.
2:24 - A woman in that town who had lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house.
2:31 - So she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.
2:34 - As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his hair with her tears.
2:40 - Then she wiped them with her hair and kissed them and poured perfume on them.
2:45 - When the Pharisee would invite him and saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would know who's touching him and what kind of woman she is, that she's a sinner.
2:55 - And Jesus answered him, Simon, I have something to tell you.
2:59 - Tell me, teacher, he said.
3:1 - Two people owed money to a certain money lender.
3:4 - One owed him 500 denarii, the other 50.
3:7 - Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both.
3:12 - Now which of them will love him more?
3:15 - Simon replied, I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.
3:19 - You have judged correctly, Jesus said.
3:22 - And then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, do you see this woman?
3:26 - I came into your house.
3:27 - You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.
3:33 - You did not give me a kiss, but this woman from the time I entered has not stopped kissing my feet.
3:39 - You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.
3:43 - Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, as her great love has shown.
3:49 - But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.
3:53 - Then Jesus said to her, your sins are forgiven.
3:57 - The other guests began to say among themselves, who is this who even forgives sins?
4:3 - Jesus said to the woman, your faith has saved you.
4:6 - Go in peace.
4:9 - From Acts 2, this is the story of the very first Pentecost Sunday.
4:13 - I thought this would make a nice connection here too.
4:16 - So from Acts 2, 38 and 39, Peter, right at the very end of the first Christian sermon that's recorded, Peter replied, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you'll receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
4:33 - This promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call.
4:41 - This is the word of the Lord.
4:45 - After reading that, I'm kind of thinking like one of the little many messages in there is, for non people that come to my house should expect a kiss.
4:54 - Anyway, so today we want to talk about forgiving each other and what forgiveness looks like, a bit about what forgiveness doesn't look like.
5:5 - And so there's all kinds of things you can do with forgiveness.
5:7 - I was working on this message, I realized like this could turn into a six part series and maybe it will.
5:13 - So today we're going to focus on forgiving each other and what that looks like in our lives.
5:20 - I'll start with a bit of an assumption that many of us have got things in here going on in our lives or that have happened in our lives in the past that you can't really tell just from looking at somebody on Sunday.
5:32 - We like to look all cleaned up on a Sunday morning and I think that's appropriate.
5:35 - You know, we're coming to worship the Lord.
5:37 - We probably don't want to come here in a ragged look, but we look like we're all fairly well put together and it's hard for us to let other people see kind of some of the hurts that we've had in our lives.
5:48 - I'm going to assume that we probably all have some hurts back there.
5:51 - Some of them are pretty deep and profound.
5:53 - Some have gone back many, many, many years and some are relatively recent.
5:59 - And I don't know if everybody has struggled with forgiving somebody in the past, but I suspect many of us have.
6:5 - Forgiveness is not a very easy thing to do.
6:7 - I don't stand here as somebody who finds forgiveness a super easy thing to do either.
6:11 - So I hope that nothing I say comes across as me sort of saying stuff because I got this figured out and you guys need to hear it.
6:19 - Not at all, but it's something I've been wrestling with as I read through the scriptures.
6:23 - And one of the great things about being able to prepare messages like this is you get to spend weeks wrestling over these passages.
6:29 - And there's a lot of good stuff to learn there.
6:33 - So usually I have these sermons broken up into three parts, right?
6:36 - I'll warn you, part one is way longer than part two and three.
6:39 - If you're a clock watcher, you're noticing, wow, he's only just finishing part one.
6:43 - And it's already been like several minutes in here.
6:46 - Part two and three are a little bit shorter, but hopefully just as impactful.
6:50 - So what does forgiveness look like?
6:52 - What does it look like when you forgive?
6:53 - Well, we'll start with kind of a biggie.
6:56 - I don't know if you remember this one.
6:58 - There have been a sad number of mass shootings have taken place in the United States in the last number of years.
7:4 - This was a very bad one.
7:6 - In Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November 2017, a gunman killed, I think, 23 people, including several members of an extended family.
7:16 - Later on that week, it was time for the funerals, and the pastor of the local church, Pastor Frank Pomeroy, said, I want to begin this funeral service by praying for the shooter and praying for his family, because they must be going through such a hard time right now.
7:32 - And he offered up a prayer of forgiveness for the man who had done this, and also a prayer of comfort for his family.
7:40 - And you might think that a lot of people in the congregation maybe would be upset to hear something like that.
7:45 - Surely this guy doesn't deserve first place in our funeral service.
7:49 - How can we forgive somebody?
7:50 - And they may have even been thinking, well, that's easy for a pastor to say.
7:54 - Pastors have to say that kind of stuff.
7:56 - You know, if he had lost somebody, he might not have been so quick to forgive.
7:59 - I don't think anybody in the church that day was actually thinking that because his 14 year old daughter was in a box at the front of that church.
8:7 - And even though he'd lost somebody really precious to him, he was able to start off his funeral with, we need to pray for the guy who did this and we need to offer up forgiveness.
8:17 - I suspect that's not something we can do.
8:20 - So we'll come back to this later in the message.
8:22 - How are we able to forgive somebody who's done something as bad as that?
8:27 - So what is forgiveness anyway?
8:30 - I think we have a lot of ideas from popular culture, what forgiveness is supposed to mean.
8:35 - But if you think about forgiveness, forgiveness is really, it's kind of two things, right?
8:39 - It's a decision, we often don't really feel much like forgiving, it's a decision and it's a letting go.
8:45 - You're just releasing something.
8:47 - And what do you let go?
8:49 - You let go of your resentment, anger, revenge, or desire for revenge, you just let that go.
8:57 - But where do you let it go to?
8:58 - I mean, there's secular definitions of forgiveness and I think they all fall short because without seeing Jesus at the center of this, we kind of miss the whole point of forgiveness.
9:9 - And so as you let those things go, and you let God deal with them, I find it interesting, let God deal with those feelings of resentment and anger, but also let God deal with the person, the situation, whatever that has caused this hurt in your life.
9:24 - Turn the person over to God, but also turn those feelings and stuff over to God and let him deal with it.
9:29 - So this is what we're talking about.
9:31 - We talked about forgiveness in our sense here.
9:34 - But forgiveness is hard.
9:36 - Certainly don't want to pretend this is an easy thing, right?
9:39 - Sometimes it's something, it's even not like a major thing.
9:43 - Sometimes somebody said something just quick and it hurt your feelings.
9:47 - Somebody promised you something and they didn't deliver it, and you think, and it just stays there and just keeps working around in your mind, and you have a hard time letting it go.
9:56 - But sometimes forgiveness is for something really major.
9:59 - Somebody has ruined your life, caused a really major problem, caused a rupture, and it's hard to picture ever either not hanging on to that, or ever really having a fellowship with that person again.
10:11 - Either way, forgiveness can be a hard thing to do.
10:14 - You don't want to minimize that at all.
10:17 - We're going to look at a couple of passages here, what Jesus has to say about forgiveness, and I think we're going to find, we thought forgiveness is hard, Jesus ratchets it up a notch even further.
10:26 - So this is from Matthew 18.
10:29 - This is Peter, you think about forgiveness as maybe one of the passages you think of.
10:32 - Peter, of course, being somewhat impetuous, comes up and says, hey Jesus, I'm ready to forgive somebody seven times.
10:38 - Aren't I awesome?
10:39 - Because seven times is way above and beyond, right?
10:42 - And Jesus, depending on how you view the Greek, could be either like no, 77 times, or possibly even 70 times seven, for those doing your math, that's 490 times.
10:54 - It's like Pat, Pat, Peter, yes, seven, that's great.
10:57 - How about 490?
10:58 - In other words, you keep forgiving people infinitely.
11:2 - And then he proceeds to tell a parable.
11:4 - So I didn't really realize that these two passages happened right next to each other.
11:9 - Jesus tells the parable about a guy who wanted to sell up accounts and everything.
11:13 - And then there's the guy who went out and owed somebody 50 denarii and somebody owed him a whole bunch of money.
11:18 - And he takes the guy and like starts to strangle him.
11:20 - And then the other servants come and report on the guy.
11:23 - And at the end of the parable, the king in the parable says, take that guy who was unwilling to forgive his fellow servant, take that guy and send him off to be tortured until he can pay the money back.
11:35 - Which I always found kind of interesting in the ancient world, like we're just gonna torture you till the money drops out of the sky.
11:40 - How does that work?
11:41 - Anyway, I mean, I know how it works, but we don't need to do that.
11:44 - So, verse 34 talks about send that guy out and have him tortured because he would not forgive his fellow servants.
11:52 - And then this is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
11:59 - Man, if you were thinking forgiveness was hard already, this just raises the stakes.
12:4 - If you don't forgive, my father will not watch.
12:8 - You should look at this next passage, Matthew 6 14.
12:11 - This is the Sermon on the Mount.
12:12 - This is right after the Lord's Prayer.
12:14 - The Lord's Prayer finishes with Matthew 6 13.
12:17 - And remember one of the parts in the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
12:24 - And as soon as the Lord's Prayer is done, Jesus is because if you forgive other people, then your heavenly father will also forgive you.
12:30 - But if you don't forgive others, your father will not forgive your sins.
12:35 - Well, it seems like kind of a contradiction, right?
12:39 - Didn't Jesus die for our sins?
12:41 - Don't we hear all the time through the New Testament how this is a message of grace, we don't do anything to deserve this, we can't merit our forgiveness, we can't merit eternal life.
12:50 - But then Jesus himself, in the early part of his ministry, he's saying, by the way, if you don't forgive other people, God's not gonna forgive you.
12:55 - He's like, so is there a condition?
12:58 - Is this like a works righteousness thing?
13:0 - It's like, no, you can't do anything, but you do have to forgive people.
13:3 - It's a tough passage, and I don't know if this is 100% right.
13:8 - It seems to make a lot of sense to me.
13:10 - The best explanation for this passage that I've read is from a theologian named NT.
13:15 - Wright, and he talks about a door and how forgiveness is kind of like a door.
13:22 - You can open the door wide or you can open the door buried a little bit.
13:27 - And if you open the door wide and let forgiveness flow freely from you towards other people, there's a lot of room with that open door for God's forgiveness to flow into your own life.
13:41 - But if you keep that door closed really tight and barely open at a crack and hardly any forgiveness flows out, it's really hard to accept and understand God's forgiveness coming in that way as well, because there's just not much room in the door.
13:56 - So I think this is a call from Jesus to say, you know what, it goes both ways.
14:0 - You open that door and forgiveness flows out.
14:3 - It gives a lot of room for God's forgiveness to flow in.
14:8 - What else do we see in scripture?
14:10 - So this is Jesus on the cross, and we talked about this back during Lent.
14:16 - They came to the place called the skull, and they crucified him there along with the criminals, one on his right, the other on his left.
14:21 - And Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
14:25 - And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.
14:31 - Jesus is offering forgiveness to the guys who are putting nails through his wrists, killing him for something he has not done, nailing him to the cross, and he's asking forgiveness for these guys.
14:43 - Not only that, I think what's a significant point of this, these guys have not apologized.
14:49 - They haven't asked Jesus to forgive them.
14:52 - They don't even think what they're doing is wrong.
14:54 - They think they're doing the exact right thing by crucifying this guy that they see as a criminal.
14:59 - They don't even acknowledge that what they've done is wrong.
15:2 - And Jesus still shows you can forgive people that don't even think they did anything wrong, let alone forgive people that haven't apologized, let alone forgive people that still think that you're an enemy.
15:15 - It's heavy.
15:17 - Well, we talked about this.
15:18 - They don't apologize.
15:20 - Even the story we just read in Luke 7, the sinful woman doesn't even ask for forgiveness.
15:26 - She just comes in and throws herself literally at Jesus' feet and doesn't even ask for forgiveness.
15:31 - And Jesus says, your sins are forgiven.
15:34 - So you might be thinking to yourself, yeah, okay, Rob, that's easy for you to say that, but you don't know what I've been through.
15:43 - You don't know what I'd have to forgive.
15:44 - Like it's easy for someone to stand up here and say, see, Jesus says you gotta forgive even if someone won't apologize.
15:50 - That's right.
15:50 - I don't know.
15:52 - And you don't know what I've been through.
15:54 - It's not like you have to have a moral authority, like the pastor we talked about at the first, his daughter had died.
16:1 - It seems to mean something to us that he's able to forgive like that.
16:5 - But this isn't me or even that pastor saying this.
16:9 - This is Jesus saying, you need to forgive.
16:11 - I need to forgive even if someone's not apologizing.
16:14 - And if you're not a forgiving type of person, it's really hard for you to experience God's forgiveness when you don't even know what forgiveness looks like.
16:23 - But we can't do that.
16:24 - I can't do that.
16:26 - You can't forgive this kind of like serious hurt.
16:30 - Sometimes you find it hard to forgive.
16:31 - Even that sometimes the small hurts are the ones that stick the worst.
16:36 - I don't think this pastor up here could forgive with his daughter being one of the victims of this.
16:41 - Can't just kind of forgive.
16:42 - This only comes from Jesus.
16:45 - And even Jesus himself on the cross says, Father, forgive them.
16:49 - Like we can't do this on our own.
16:51 - This is where we need to tap in to God's forgiveness.
16:54 - And having Jesus move through us and just, we talked about forgiveness being a letting go.
16:58 - It's a letting go, but it's also letting Jesus work in us.
17:2 - Letting Jesus work in us to sort of just free us from whatever anger and resentment we've been holding on to, but it's definitely not something we can do on our own.
17:15 - So, if this is what Jesus says forgiveness looks like, what does forgiveness not look like?
17:19 - Because sometimes in popular culture, we get all kinds of wrong ideas about what forgiveness might mean.
17:25 - And none of these ideas here are biblical.
17:28 - So, first thing, forgiveness is not.
17:31 - Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting.
17:33 - You'll look through the whole Bible.
17:34 - Forgive and forget is not anywhere in the Bible.
17:37 - You're not gonna find that.
17:38 - It's not even in the Apocrypha.
17:40 - It's not any one of the lost letters.
17:41 - This is just something that's going on in society.
17:44 - We're called to forgive.
17:45 - It can be hard to forget.
17:48 - We're not told we have to forget.
17:50 - I think in time, God can work through us to make these things less painful, less hurtful than they are.
17:56 - But you don't have to really forget something just because you're able to say, I can forgive somebody for something.
18:2 - Forgiving isn't a feeling.
18:4 - Sometimes we might feel like forgiving somebody, but not necessarily.
18:11 - It's not a feeling, it's a decision.
18:13 - Even if the last thing you feel like doing is releasing somebody, even if you still feel a lot of anger against somebody that said something to you or done something or whatever, you don't feel like it, that's okay.
18:24 - Forgiveness isn't just for when you kind of feel like it.
18:27 - It's a decision we can make.
18:29 - Forgiveness is not conditional.
18:32 - I heard this one a bunch of times in the last couple of months.
18:35 - Well, you know, if that person apologizes, then we'll see.
18:39 - And if they're going to apologize, they better make sure they apologize for like the right things.
18:44 - And I want to hear that they really feel bad for what they've done, then we'll talk forgiveness.
18:50 - Again, Jesus doesn't say that.
18:53 - The Bible doesn't say that.
18:54 - You can forgive somebody even when they don't even recognize they've done anything wrong, let alone think about apologizing.
19:1 - It's heavy.
19:2 - This is what we're seeing.
19:4 - Forgiveness, I hear this a lot too.
19:5 - Okay, if I forgive them, then they just got away with it.
19:9 - And everything, they just go along with their life and everything is okay.
19:12 - So forgiveness, there's a couple levels on this.
19:14 - It doesn't mean somebody got away with something.
19:18 - If there's something legal that has happened, of course, your forgiveness doesn't set someone free from their legal responsibilities to pay penalties.
19:25 - If someone's committed crimes, they need to pay for those crimes.
19:29 - Forgiveness doesn't let somebody off the hook that way.
19:33 - But on the other hand, getting away with something, I think you have to sort of stop and think about this, like, because I think this too sometimes, and let me just get away with it.
19:40 - Like, is the only punishment they're experiencing, your frown every time you run into them?
19:46 - Like, is that the only thing that's keeping them getting away from something, is the fact that you kind of scowl when you see them?
19:51 - I don't think that's really stopping someone from quote unquote getting away.
19:55 - You forgive someone to turn it over to God, so God will deal with the situation.
20:1 - And not so that, yeah, God will get them, that's good.
20:4 - God loves the other person as much as he loves you, and God's working something in their life too.
20:10 - And I don't know quite how this works, so I'm very hesitant to say this, like if this is a message from God.
20:16 - But it seems like there's some sort of block that happens.
20:19 - If you're holding on to anger against somebody, it seems like somehow God chooses not to work fully in that person's life until that bond has been released.
20:33 - And by holding on to that, it seems like there's something sort of delaying the next steps that God would like to take.
20:39 - I'm not suggesting God's limited anyway, and I can't really point to a verse on this, but this just, it feels like there's something extra sort of going on there, some sort of hold that we've got that needs to be broken.
20:51 - So let's try not to think about somebody getting away with something.
20:54 - Again, if it's legal, they have to pay for those anyway.
20:57 - Forgiveness doesn't stop that.
20:59 - And forgiveness doesn't mean staying in a bad situation.
21:3 - Some of us are in a place we need to forgive somebody who's been hurting us on an ongoing basis.
21:9 - Somebody in our lives has been causing problems, and it's not like you're called to forgive the person and then stay in a bad situation and keep being hurt and keep asking for forgiveness.
21:19 - Whether it's a family member, a co-worker, a neighbor, or whatever else, it doesn't mean you have to stay in that.
21:24 - Distance can be really helpful towards healing and stuff, and so forgiveness doesn't mean you just have to stick there and put up with it.
21:31 - And forgiveness is also pretty much never a one-time thing.
21:35 - I don't know if you had this experience like I have.
21:37 - You decide you have to forgive somebody, and then a couple of days later, it just kind of comes back again.
21:43 - It's like, yeah, that really stank what happened there.
21:46 - And you have to forgive them again.
21:48 - And then a couple of days later, you're still like, you kind of forget the forgiveness and like, oh yeah.
21:52 - And sometimes it takes many times of saying it before we really kind of feel like, you know what, God is actually taking this from me.
21:59 - Sometimes you got to say this a lot of times.
22:3 - I think each of us would have probably one or maybe several stories of forgiveness.
22:10 - I mean, I've got some stories of forgiveness just in the last few years of my life too.
22:15 - And I think as I was preparing this sermon about somebody that caused me a lot of trouble at school a number of years ago.
22:20 - And this guy, he was a good colleague and I really trusted him.
22:24 - And he repeated some stuff that turns out to be not even true based on a lie.
22:28 - And it caused about two years worth of trouble.
22:31 - And I hadn't realized how angry I was about that until we were working through a book talking about forgiveness and unresolved anger.
22:40 - And it was talking about like looking through and thinking like who do you need to forgive, who you're holding on to anger to.
22:45 - I realized, yeah, I guess there's still that person.
22:48 - The anger I was holding on to was causing them no trouble whatsoever.
22:52 - They had no idea, they don't even realize that I was hurt by something they've done.
22:56 - So how was I somehow punishing them by staying angry at them?
23:0 - We didn't even run into that school, it's a big school.
23:2 - I didn't even run into them all that often.
23:4 - Anyway, I think we all have a story of forgiveness and probably, hopefully God is calling this to mind now.
23:11 - Like what's a situation I need to pray into?
23:14 - Maybe you've tried to forgive in the past and it hasn't worked and turning over Jesus is going to be just that kind of last thing you need.
23:21 - I think we can pray for each other for forgiveness as well.
23:24 - I'm more about that in a bit.
23:27 - So I don't know what your story of forgiveness is.
23:29 - Again, was it someone who's gossiped about you?
23:32 - Was it hurtful words?
23:34 - Was it actual physical violence?
23:37 - Was it someone who told lies about you?
23:39 - Was it a job opportunity that you ended up missing out on?
23:44 - Somebody who dented your car and didn't even leave a note.
23:46 - I mean, we don't want to try to rank these things because they're all hurtful.
23:49 - And some of us were hurt when we were quite young.
23:52 - And it can take up a lot of energy in your whole life.
23:55 - And it's certainly not easy to forgive, but Jesus wants to take that away from us.
23:59 - So whatever your story is, I pray for you and I encourage you to give that away.
24:3 - And if you don't have a story right now, you know the way life goes.
24:8 - There'll be one come along soon.
24:11 - So part three, our forgiveness.
24:14 - Because we have also been forgiven.
24:18 - Verse 42, Jesus tells Simon the Pharisee, he forgave the debts of them both, which of them will love him more?
24:24 - This is the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.
24:27 - Well, I think we've all had really big debts forgiven, but I think we go through most of our lives not really understanding just how big those debts are.
24:34 - Do you have any idea how much you've been forgiven?
24:38 - I really struggled to understand how much I've been forgiven.
24:41 - I think the more that we are able to see what God forgave us, the more we're able to find it easier to open that door wider and let our forgiveness flow out.
24:51 - Do you have any idea what you have done?
24:56 - God made you special, knit you together in your mother's womb for one purpose only, to be in relationship with him.
25:7 - And what do we do?
25:9 - We walk away, we do our own thing, we rebel against him.
25:13 - I know, like most of us in here, we love Jesus, we're Christians, but we still walk away on a daily basis.
25:22 - We do our own thing, we think about our own stuff, we pray in the morning, we forget Jesus after that, we sin, we deal with temptation, we give in anyway, we've all lived sinful lives.
25:34 - And yes, we are forgiven.
25:36 - That doesn't change the fact that we have all fallen short of God so amazingly far.
25:43 - We have no idea how much hurt we have caused to our loving Father every time we sin, every time we turn away, every time we do our own thing.
25:54 - We have been forgiven so much.
25:56 - And I find it hard to forgive somebody who said something mean to me.
26:0 - I mean, you don't want to minimize your own hurts, but those guys were nailing Jesus' wrist to the cross.
26:6 - He's able to pray for forgiveness.
26:8 - Jesus can also pray for your forgiveness and work in your forgiveness as well.
26:14 - So I don't leave in something too heavy.
26:17 - At the very end of the passage, as the woman's leaving, Jesus says, go in peace.
26:21 - I think that's really significant.
26:23 - Because with forgiveness comes peace.
26:26 - We've been talking a lot about how it's kind of a hard thing to do and how we need Jesus to work through us.
26:30 - But, and I think many of us have experienced this in the past, too, when you're finally able to let go, when Jesus takes that away from you, the feeling of peace you've got, you realize after a few days, like, oh yeah, I'm not stressed about that anymore.
26:43 - I just didn't realize how much that was kind of bothering me.
26:46 - The peace that we feel.
26:48 - And so I pray for the peace that we're able to experience as we forgive each other.
26:53 - May the peace of God dwell in your hearts richly.
26:56 - May we feel that and use that peace to encourage us to continue to forgive.
27:3 - Amen.
27:5 - Let's pray.
27:12 - Father, your forgiveness is such an amazing thing.
27:17 - We will never understand how much you love us, how much you love us each individually, personally and specifically, how much you could sit with us for hours and tell us all about ourselves, things that we don't even know, but that you've noticed, the way you made us specially, just to be like we are, just to love you.
27:40 - And Lord, we have no idea how much it cost, it cost your son to come and live a mortal life and suffer for our sins and die.
27:49 - Lord, I pray that you'll increase our awareness of that and also increase our awareness to open that door of forgiveness.
27:58 - Lord, help us.
28:1 - Even when we want to forgive, it's such a hard thing to do sometimes.
28:5 - Just feels like we've been wronged and we want justice and want righteousness.
28:12 - Lord, let us trust.
28:13 - We can't do this ourselves.
28:14 - Let us trust in your righteousness and your justice.
28:17 - Lord, let us pray for each other.
28:21 - Lord, pray for us.
28:22 - Give us the strength and the wisdom to be open-handed with our forgiveness.
28:28 - In Christ's name, amen.