Amazing Grace: Forgiveness

The blast buried Gordon Wilson and his 20-year-old daughter, Marie. It was 1987. The bomb had been planted by the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, in a small town just west of Belfast in Northern Ireland. Eleven Protestants were killed, 63 were seriously wounded. Buried beneath the brick and concrete were Gordon Wilson and his 20-year-old daughter Marie.

As they lay under the brick and concrete, Marie could just barely reach out and grasp her father's hand. And as she held his hand there, her last words were, Daddy, I love you. She died a few hours later in the hospital. But Gordon Wilson, her father, survived. The world press wanted to know what would this Protestant father have to say about this terrorist act.

Some Protestant militant groups were already calling for retaliation against Catholics in the Irish Republican Army. But when Gordon Wilson was interviewed in the hospital by the world press, this is what he said. And he is a devout Christian of Methodist background, but a devout Christian. And he said this, I have lost my daughter, but I bear no grudge. Bitter talk is not going to bring Marie Wilson back to life.

I shall pray tonight and every night that God will forgive them.

And with his gracious forgiving act, a new surge toward reconciliation began in Northern Ireland. and Gordon Wilson was at the center of some of the reconciliation efforts that went on in that country. Not the only one, but he was a key figure in some of that. Mark Twain said this about forgiveness. Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

Do you hear that? forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. And Frederick William Robertson said, we conquer by forgiveness. As we look at Lessons for Life, the radical, liberating, demanding, transforming power of God's amazing grace, Today we're going to take a look at the reality that where there is grace, there is forgiveness. Where there is grace, there is forgiveness.

And as we begin, let's pray. Lord, this day I pray that our hearts and our minds will be captured by your grace. but that we, having known your grace, will become agents of grace ourselves. For it is in Christ's name we pray. Amen.

This whole issue of grace and forgiveness is rooted in God's forgiveness of us. In the book of Nehemiah, when the children of Israel have returned to the promised land from captivity, they have a great gathering and they have a great prayer meeting where the leaders begin to pray to God and to recount the sins of the people. And in part they say, speaking of their ancestors, the leaders prayed. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery.

a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. The idea of forgiveness and grace from our Lord being two ideas captured in that prayer. Ephesians 1-7, the Apostle Paul writing says, in him, that is in Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace. An aspect of grace is forgiveness, and it is seen most perfectly in Jesus Christ. There are two images for us to remember when we try to understand what the New Testament means when it talks about forgiveness.

The Greek word in the text there has two pictures. The first picture is the picture of liberation. It's the picture of someone who has been in captivity or in prison who has now been set free. When our Lord forgives us, He sets us free. He liberates us from the guilt and the penalty of sin.

The great picture in the Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's great book of Christian, when he gets to the cross? What happens at the cross when Christian gets there?

Anybody remember the scene?

The burden falls away. Christian in the story, and there's an interesting aspect of this story, Christian had a name before he was known by Christian in the book Pilgrim's Progress. Do you know what his name was before he became known by the name Christian? His name was Graceless. His name was Graceless.

But when he got to the cross wearing that heavy pack, which symbolized the burden of his sin, he fell at the cross and the pack fell off. The burden was lifted. He was liberated. He was set free from the guilt, the burden, and the penalty of sin. None of us have been enslaved before.

And most of us don't know the experience of being imprisoned. But can you imagine being a slave and one day being set free? No longer bound to your past. or being imprisoned and the cell is opened and you're told you can leave and never have to return. That's the picture of God's forgiveness of us for our sin against Him.

The other picture is the picture of pardon. It's a commercial term. The idea is that sin is sometimes viewed in the Scriptures as if it were a debt. We owe a debt, and that debt has been paid or canceled or pardoned. That's what God does when He forgives us.

He pardons the debt. He cancels the debt that we have toward Him or owe toward Him. The result of God's givenness is that we are redeemed. We are set free. We are liberated, and we are pardoned from the sin.

And the Scriptures give us two great pictures. It tells us that when God forgives us, He removes our sin as far as the east is from the west. That passage of Scripture is found in Psalm 103, 12. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. He doesn't say He's removed it as far as the north is from the south.

He says as the east is from the west. And I think there's a reason for that. On our earth, if you head north, at some point you will have to head back south. Right? Or if you head south, you will eventually turn around and be headed back north.

But you can go east forever. Keep circling the globe going east. And east never meets west if you just keep going east. So the picture is He removes our sins as far away as possible. The other picture is that we are told in Isaiah 43, 25, I even I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and remembers your sins no more.

God remembers our sins no more. Now let me explain that briefly. God is omniscient. He knows all things that have happened, will happen, have happened. knows the sins we have committed, but the context is that when it comes to our relationship with Him, when He is determining what kind of relationship we will have with Him, will we be His children, or will we be separated from Him because of our offenses against Him, in the calculation of our relationship, it's as if the sin is no longer on His mind.

He doesn't remember it so we can have a close and personal relationship with Him. Our forgiveness of others is rooted in God's forgiveness of us. And this is where I want to focus for just a moment. Why should we forgive others? That's part B on your outline.

Well, here are the reasons. The first reason is because the Lord commands it. And we're going to look at some passages of Scripture in a moment where the Lord says, forgive others. is because God has forgiven us. We're going to see that God ties His forgiveness of us with our responsibility to forgive others.

Thirdly, the Scriptures give us an incentive to wish to forgive others because the Scriptures say that God's forgiveness of us is related in some way to how we forgive other people. So here's some text, and I'm just going to pull a few texts here for us. Colossians 3.13. Paul is talking to the church. We in the church need to hear these messages of forgiveness and compassion and kindness toward one another, don't we?

Why is it in church that relationships are often so strained? Huh? Why is that? Because we forget we are to bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances. He didn't say some grievances.

He said whatever grievances you may have against one another, forgive as the Lord forgave you.

Be kind and compassionate to one another. forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you.

Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And Jesus goes on to say in this passage for if you forgive men when they sin against you your heavenly Father will also forgive you but if you do not forgive men their sins Father will not forgive your sins. And Jesus illustrates this principle in the story of the unmerciful servant. It's a parable where the master forgives a servant who owes the master about three months' worth of wages as a debt. But then that servant who has been forgiven by the master servant who owes, I said that backwards. Let me back up. The master forgives a servant a debt that is owed. If you do the calculation, the debt that the servant owed to the master equals over 164,000 years of a laborer's daily wage. Did you hear that? In the calculations, the master forgives a debt of over 164,000 years worth of wages.

Then that servant goes and refuses to forgive the debt of a servant that equals three months worth of wages that is owed to him. The master forgave an unbelievable sum. This unmerciful servant will not forgive another servant a small sum. And at the end of the parable, Jesus says this, after the master has banished the unmerciful servant to jail to be tortured. That's the sentence the master gives the unmerciful servant once he learns how unforgiving that unmerciful servant is.

And the last verse of this parable is, this is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.

It's got to be a real thing, an internal reality that is expressed outwardly. I find these verses terribly frightening.

How about you?

The reality is that we are saved by God's grace through faith in Christ. But I think what Christ is pressing us to understand is that if we have truly understood and received God's grace toward us and understood the magnitude of His forgiveness toward us, we will be forgiving toward others. And if we are not forgiving toward others, in the main, we all have our moments when we don't do what we should, there is a reality that we have not really truly experienced the grace of our Lord.

God also says because we love you can tell I was doing this after getting only a few hours sleep and it's 6 in the morning this morning because we love one another and wish to live in harmony this is another reason we are to forgive because we love one another we're brothers and sisters and brothers and sisters treat one another kindly and with love And we want to have harmonious relationships with one another. The scriptures are not naive. They realize that even among Christian brothers and sisters, there will be conflicts. There will be disputes. We will have times that we get upset with one another.

And that's why the scriptures repeatedly urge that we must be forgiving. We are going to have to reach out to one another to forgive one another. A new command I give you, love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know you're my disciples if you love one another.

Live in harmony with one another. When people look at Greer first, do they say, man, that is a place of forgiveness. Those people love one another. They are living in harmony. when one wrongs another, they're right there working it out, making sure things are the way they should be.

When people come into our midst who are not part of the family and come seeking God's grace and forgiveness, some who have committed heinous sins against the Lord, do we receive them with hugs and welcomes and say, come join the family, we have a Father who forgives, and we forgive you too. or do we want them to bear the weight of their sin at least for a while? That's our responsibility, isn't it? To make people feel the weight of their guilt.

To be sure, we need to point out to people the reality that there is a thing like sin. But I think the overwhelming message of the Christian faith is a message of grace and forgiveness. doesn't pervade everything we do. We have missed the core of the faith. It's why Jesus came.

It's why He died. Our Lord prayed from the cross, Father forgive them. He expects us to do the same.

Before I do that one, let me tell you a few other stories. I've been reading a great book. I commend it highly by Phil Yancey. What's so amazing about grace is the title of the book. He tells a number of stories in the book, and I want to share a few of them with you.

It was 10 years after World War II. Polish Christians were approached by two Germans to see if the Polish Christians would agree to meet with a group of German Christians to try to begin to work out some reconciliation between the country of Germany and the country of Poland given all that had happened during World War II. When the request was made, there was one Polish Christian who immediately shouted, Impossible! Each stone of Warsaw is soaked in Polish blood. They did it.

How can we forgive such atrocities that these Germans committed against us?

reconciliation at that meeting. So they decided before they left the meeting they would at least pray the Lord's Prayer. And as they began to pray they said, Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And what does it say? Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we in silence fell across the room. As they began to say They just stopped praying when it got to the portion that said, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. There was a real tension in the room at the moment. Finally, the Polish Christian who had started out impossible turned to the group and said this, I must say yes to you.

No longer call myself a Christian if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it. But God will give us His strength. Eighteen months later, a group of German Christians and Polish Christians, approximately 11 1⁄2 years after the end of World War II, met in Vienna and began the process of healing and reconciliation between those two countries. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Poland.

Thousands of Poles came to the outdoor event that he led. There was a huge stadium where the crowds met. As the crowds came to the stadium, they had to cross the Poniatowski Bridge leading to the stadium. Just before that bridge, on the left, was the Communist Party's central headquarters. And as thousands of Christians passed that headquarters, a headquarters that had been the center of planning of so many evil acts against the people of Poland, the Christians began to chant as they walked past the Communist Central Party headquarters.

And you know what they began to chant? We forgive you. We forgive you. We forgive you. forgive you, the chant was taken up by the Poles. Thousands of them marching to the stadium began to chant, we forgive you. It was the beginning of a process that was going to be a long process of the fall of the communist government. But it began with the chant of we forgive you. Just a few years later a 35 year old Polish priest named Jerry Popiojuszko whose sermons had electrified Poland was found murdered most believed by communist agents in the country. He was found floating in the Vistula River. His eyes had been gouged out. The fingernails had been ripped off of his fingers.

Thousands of Poles poured into the murder of this popular Polish priest. But not in violence. They went to the streets carrying banners that again said, we forgive you. We forgive you. We forgive you. Wow.

And then it was really on. The communists came tumbling down. We conquer by forgiveness. Pope John Paul II electrified the world when after the assassination attempt on his life by Mehmet Ali Agka, the pope went to a little bare prison cell, met with his would-be assassin, and there said, I forgive you. Bill Yancey tells the story of his own church deep in the south, which in 1961 received a request from a Carver Bible Institute student for membership in the church.

The Carver Bible Institute student was an African American. Yancey's church the year earlier had adopted a policy that they would turn any African Americans approaching the church away from the church that would not admit them to membership. The Carver Bible Institute student who in 1961 sought admission to the membership was a pastor, today a pastor, named Tony Evans. Years later, that church invited Tony Evans and other black leaders and publicly admitted their sin and apologized to Tony Evans and the other black leaders. Today it's a black congregation that worships in that church.

The white church died ultimately. Praise the Lord.

Because of its lack of grace and forgiveness. But another church, a thriving church, worships there now.

Powerful stories, huh?

The last reason we should forgive is because we want to truly worship God free of any hindrances. There's a powerful passage of Scripture that says, if you're offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift. The reality I think that Jesus is trying to make us understand here is that before we can truly worship the Father in a vertical relationship, we need to deal with any problems in the horizontal relationships. And where there is unforgiveness or ungrace or a lack of reconciliation with brothers and sisters in Christ, it is going to hinder our worship of God.

we've had a lot of discussion about worship in this church

we've gone to two different types of services now to try to appeal to different tastes people go to worship wanting to really sense God's presence you know what, you know when we'll really begin to embrace and enjoy our worship it's not going to be when the music is just right though I think having variety is great the worship is only going to be what it should be when we as God's people are reconciled to one another.

Who has most offended you in the church? Against whom do you bear the deepest grudge? It may be a family member, a physical blood family member who wronged you years ago in some fashion.

Maybe you need to forgive that family man. Maybe it's a brother or sister in Christ. The worship will not be what it should be. Our fellowship will never be what it should be until we seek reconciliation. Dorothy Day said this, I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

Did you hear that? I really only love God as much as I really love the person I love the least. So you need to think of that person who you really don't like. And what she's saying is that the measure of our love of God is measured by the person we really like the least. Because if we really love God, we're going to love even those who are our enemies.

And we will pray for them in a good way. Not praying, God, strike them dead, they deserve it. Praying for them. Praying for reconciliation. Praying for healing.

Praying for help. I'm going to tell you folks, I talked to a group of Harvard students Friday night in Boston. Harvard Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, this message of grace and forgiveness will conquer the world. If we as believers will live it,

it will conquer the world. But before we conquer the world, we need to conquer our own hearts and surrender.

I'll ask you to pray with me.

Lord, I...

It's a message we all need, Lord. I pray that by Your Spirit, where there are hearts that are unforgiving or callous or not willing to be reconciled, that by Your Spirit's power, our hearts will be changed. May we go to the cross of Jesus Christ and again experience the refreshing flow of grace that we have received. And may that flow of grace flow through our lives to other people. May the Christ Seekers Sunday School class, may each of us individually agents of your amazing grace.

For it is in Christ's name we pray. Amen.