Got Baggage? | The Weight of The Past | Part 1 | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

GOT BAGGAGE? 
The Weight of The Past | Part 1 
Senior Pastor Keith Stewart
April 26, 2026

We all carry baggage—but some of it is heavier than we realize. In “The Weight of the Past,” we’ll confront how unresolved hurt quietly shapes our lives—physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. Left unaddressed, it doesn’t stay behind us—it takes control of us. But there is a way forward. Join us this Sunday as we begin the journey of identifying what we’re carrying and taking the first step toward the freedom God intends for us.

Discussion Questions

OBSERVATION (Understanding the Text/Message)
 
1. What stood out to you most from this message? Why do you think it resonated?
 
2. How does the message describe the impact of unresolved hurt across the five areas: physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, and psychological?
 
3. According to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18, why is forgiveness not about setting limits but removing them altogether?
 
INTERPRETATION (Digging Deeper)
 
4. The message suggests that “bitterness always remembers details.” Why do you think painful memories tend to replay more than positive ones?
 
5. What does it mean that resentment can “bind you” to the person who hurt you? Have you seen that dynamic play out in real life?
 
6. The distinction between “this happened to me” vs. “this moved through me” is significant. How does each perspective shape a person’s identity and future?
 
REFLECTION (Personal Application)
7. Is there a situation or person that came to mind during the message that you may need to forgive? What makes that difficult?
 
8. In what ways might holding onto a hurt be affecting your life right now (stress, relationships, outlook, spiritual life)?
 
9. Do you tend to define yourself more by your wounds or by what God has done for you? Why?
 
APPLICATION (Next Steps)
 
10. What is one practical step you can take this week toward releasing a past hurt (prayer, conversation, reframing your thinking, seeking counsel)?
 
11. The prayer “Lord, make me willing to be willing” was suggested—how might that become a starting point for you?
 
12. How can this group support one another in moving toward forgiveness and freedom in the weeks ahead?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Make sure my pack's oh there it is. It's on. Hey, you know, it is good to see you. I had a couple of weeks uh I was working, but I I had took a couple weeks off after Easter. Pastor Jared, Pastor Jessica both spoke for us. Uh it gave me an opportunity to get focused on some other things, get some things done. Uh I do want you to pray for me uh this next week. I I've been invited to the Thrive Conference in Sacramento, California. Uh yeah, I'm I'm going, I get to do a speech, I get to do a talk on Friday morning. I I'm not one of the plenary speakers, so not one of the big speakers, but I do a breakout session for all the pastors and leaders. This is a nationwide conference. Uh, but I'll be doing a breakout session around my book, We Were Wrong, and talking about God's Heart for Mission. So I just appreciate you saying a prayer for me about that, that God would just use that as a time to build into other leaders, which is something I truly enjoy doing. I will be back next Sunday if I already got that message ready to go. Because this is a brand new series that we're starting called Got Baggage. So it's about the stuff that we carry from the past. Today is the weight of the past. Uh next week we're going to be talking about some of the lies and myths that we tell us about what forgive is and what it isn't. I think that you're going to get a lot out of this series because let's face it, who among us doesn't have some baggage? Okay. Let's get started with prayer. Father, thanks so much for this incredible time we've had to lift up your name. That God, you are your goodness does keep running after us every day of our life. And I know that right now, you are already at work in all of our hearts and minds preparing us for the things that I'm going to share. And I pray that today would be the brand new beginning for a lot of folks who can finally lay down the baggage of the past and move into their future unencumbered by the hurts and the injustices they've faced. I thank you, God, for what you're doing in this place and what you're going to do in our time together. In Jesus' name. Amen. So most all of us in this room have done this at least once. You booked an airline flight with a low-cost carrier. I mean, you saw it was a wonderful price, so much cheaper than everybody else, and you thought, man, what a deal. We can go all the way to Florida for 129 bucks. And it was wonderful until you arrived at the airport. And then you discovered why the price was so low. Not only were you going to pay a hefty charge for having a bag, but you were going to be charged for your carry-on too. I mean, then they wanted to pay, you know, unless you're taking a middle seat, you got to pay for the seat on that airline. And you realize, okay, it's cheap because they make it up with other fares. But unless you're traveling naked, you know, I mean, I just don't know how you save money on those things. You know, I need my toothbrush, I'm spending the night, I need a change of underwear. So you've got to take something with you. You're going to pay out the nose. Well, life, like certain airlines, charges you heavily for the extra baggage you carry. And baggage really is the perfect way to describe it. It's the accumulative weight of the past hurts. It's betrayals, it's abuse, it's lies that were told about you. It's people who talked about you behind your back. It's those folks who've sabotaged you at work. It's the stuff you're still holding on to. And like luggage, it's bulky. It's hard to move through life because it's constantly getting in your way. And you pay for it for sure. Stress, anxiety, depression, and really just general misery. Now, given enough time, that pain, the painful past, begins to affect and shape you. It affects your relationship, it affects your reactions, it even affects how other people interact with you, what they say, what conversations they avoid. They walk around on eggshells because they know that certain things that they might say will get you triggered and you'll just go down this path, and there's no stopping you then. What I'm saying is, if left unaddressed, your past never stays in the past. It quietly takes control of the present. So carrying unresolved hurt is like dragging a heavy suitcase through life. It's going to slow you down, it's going to weigh you down, and then never lets you fully move forward. You may lay it aside from time to time, but it's always there, maybe out of sight, but never out of mind. Now, this series is all about learning to let go of the past, to live more fully in this present, and possess the future that God has crafted for you. Today's message is about identifying those weights that you're carrying and moving you, at least taking the first steps toward freedom. Next week, we're going to talk about the lies that we tend to believe about forgiveness, the lies that keep us stuck, especially as it relates to what forgiveness is and what it isn't. The third week in the series, I'm going to talk to you about navigating relationships with difficult people. Because some of these people we're talking about forgiving are people that we have ongoing relationships with. Maybe their family. You can't really get rid of them. You're always going to see them in holidays. How do you deal with difficult people that continually re-offend? And then finally, the last week's message, we're going to talk about releasing the past once and for all so it no longer defines you or your future. So I want to begin with a series of questions. Is there someone you need to forgive? Has someone wronged you, hurt you, or cheated on you? Is there someone in your family that causes you pain, whether they meant to do it or not? Is there someone in the church that you're bad mouthing? Maybe they said something about you or something to you a couple months ago. You haven't been letting that go, and you've been telling everybody you know about what this person's really like. As I'm speaking right now, is there somebody you're thinking about? Now don't look at him. I'm just saying, are you thinking about him right now? Or is there someone you need to seek out to ask forgiveness for for something you did? So today we're gonna talk about holding grudges and clinging to resentment and how bitterness, once it takes root in your spirit, can be incredibly damaging. It's my prayer today that we're all gonna wake up and realize that life itself aligns against the person who holds grudges, that it's a prison, a prison of our own making, and the sooner we can forgive, the sooner we can be free. Now it's interesting, this word for resentment, it comes from the Latin language, and it means to feel over and over again. And one of the tip-offs that we're bitter is the number of details we can remember about the event. Remember this, I've said it many times. Bitterness always remembers details. So think about this. In your lifetime, you've had thousands upon thousands of conversations, most of which you have forgotten. But there's this one conversation that took place months ago, years ago, one conversation that you can remember every single word. You remember their tone, you remember the anger in their voice, you remember the look on their face, you remember the exact things they said to you. In fact, you remember practically everything about that moment. That, my friends, is a sign of bitterness. You say, no, no, I just have a good memory. Well, you might have a good memory, I'll give you that. But the reason most of us remember things so well is because we've reviewed it over and over again in our mind. That's how memories are reinforced. Review, review, and more review. So you just gotta know that most of us don't rehearse the wonderful things that happen again and again in our mind. We rehearse the bad things because we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to figure out what happened, how did it happen, could I have done something different, all of those things. So the hurts that we meditate on are the ones we've rehearsed many times. And each time we rehearse a hurt, it gets etched deeper and deeper into our souls. Because you're bitter, you have made an account with this person's name on it. And that account is called Horrible Rotten Things This Person Has Done to Me. And it's a really big account, and you keep adding to it. In fact, everything about that person bothers you. They can't even breathe right in your mind. Every conversation, every word, anything that sounds misaligned, it gets stuffed into the file. So nuances of character, communication, all get put into file with all the rest of the hurts. All those things are indicative of a person who's clinging to a grudge. The Bible tells us that if we want to grow and become all that God meant for us to be, we need to stop storing up hurts. In fact, it says this in 1 Corinthians 13 love keeps no record of wrongs. So mature and loving people refuse to do it because they know the price tag is too steep for holding on to hurts in the soul, which is what my first point is all about. Maintaining an ugly place within will only get uglier. Someone has said, bitterness is self-induced misery. I think that's why the Bible says this. You're only hurting yourself with your anger. So if you maintain an ugly place inside, it's only going to get uglier with the passage of time. On its own, it's never going to get better. The passage of time is not going to cause it to heal or make it go away. So hanging on to hurts has huge implications for us personally. I want to talk to you about five things that hanging on to hurts will always do to you. Number one, physically, that our bodies keep score. You may recognize the name Dr. Redford Williams. He's with Duke University Medical Center. He reminds us of this people who harbor hostility and anger are five times more likely to die of heart disease and six times more likely to die prematurely from other causes. Isn't that amazing? That if you want to drive yourself to an early grave, just keep hanging on to grudges. He goes on to explain this. He said, anger kills. There's a direct correlation between hostility and death rates. The angrier people are, and the more cynical they are, the shorter their lifespan. To put it in another way, grudge holders are gravediggers. Now, at the opposite end of the spectrum, it's really interesting. Now, studies have confirmed for sure, physically, when we hang on to hurt, when we hang on to bitterness, when we nurse grudges, it has a detrimental effect. But when we practice forgiveness, when we refuse to hang on to hurts, when we let those things go emotionally in our spirit, people who forgive, here are the benefits. They benefit from better immune functioning and lower blood pressure. They have better mental health than people who do not forgive. They feel better physically. They have lower amounts of anger and fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, and they maintain more satisfying and long-lasting relationships. So you can see hanging on to hurt can lead to a very detrimental negative effect, and letting it go can lead to a very positive effect physically on our bodies. But that's not the only way grudges affect us. They also affect us emotionally. You become bound to the person you hurt. Now, I don't know if you remember this name, Dr. Gerald Jumpalski. He was really popular in the 90s, was a huge on the speaking circuit. He did a lot of talks on seminars on love and on healing. But in his audiences, he would often ask this question when he would start a teaching session on healing. He'd ask the question, how many of you have not totally forgiven your parents for their mistakes? And he said, typically, 75% of the hands in the room would raise. Three-quarters of the people, I've never fully forgiven my parents for the things they've done to me. He said he also did this talk among divorced people and asked them a similar question. How many of you have not fully forgiven your ex? And he said, same number. About 75%, three-quarters of the people in the room would raise their hands and say, I've not fully forgiven my former spouse. Then Japalski would tell the group this ironically, anger ties you to your ex-spouse even if you marry someone else. And as long as you blame your parents for your problems, you never fully take charge of your own life. Wow, do you get what he's saying? Bitterness is a form of bonding because resentment is glue. It binds you to the other person. It's a form of attachment. Negative attachment for sure, but attachment nonetheless. Your life becomes inextricably bound to the person who hurts you the most. My question for you is is that what you want? You see, if not, the only way that bond is broken is through forgiveness. Now, one of my favorite writers on forgiveness is a guy named Dr. Lewis Speeds. He died some years back. But the books that he wrote, he wrote probably back in the 90s, early 90s, on forgiveness. They're still some of the best books I've ever read on forgiveness. The two I'll mention is The Art of Forgiving and Forgive and Forget. If you're at half-price books, I love half-price books, I love to get a deal on books, you can get this book at half price, it's be there in abundance because it was a bestseller back in the day. But he said something similar. Listen to what Dr. Smead said. Unless we forgive, we give another person the power to hurt us again and again for the rest of our lives. You see, when you don't forgive, you are empowering the person who hurt you to perpetuate that hurt even now. So they continue to hurt you. The one way we release it is through the power of forgiveness. So that moves the question from why forgive, to the question of when do I want this to end? A third real consequence of holding on to grudges is invariably it will affect us relationally. The hurt spreads through your relationship networks. Here's how the Bible says it. These are not meant to be nice words because these are not nice consequences. They produce nothing of value. The point is, if I let bitterness take root in my heart, I'll not be the only one who's polluted by an unforgiving spirit. Now, whether you can see this in yourself or not, others will. No matter what you tell yourself, when you find yourself being a bitter person, other people will see that in you. And how many of you have ever been around somebody who is bitter? I mean, it just oozes, it oozes out of every pore, doesn't it? You feel like you kind of enter a dark cloud when you're in conversation with them because that stuff is just cling, it's it's heavy in the atmosphere of their life. Resentful, angry people are no fun to be around. So what I'm saying is, I can never contain bitterness just to myself. I can never just keep it all contained inside of me. It's always going to seep out. So people around me are going to be affected and often hurt by the bitterness and the hurts that I'm hanging on to. So look at the progression in this verse. And many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Offense leads to betrayal, betrayal leads to hatred. When I'm offended, my attitude quickly degenerates. What I say to myself is I was mistreated and misjudged, therefore I'm justified in any response I make to this. This is probably one of the worst things we ever do. Justified self-centeredness. Because I'm hurt, that it's my right to do back to them whatever I want to do, and that's okay. That feeling that I have this right to talk, behave, retaliate, malign anybody who's offended me because of what they've done to me, friends, just because you were mistreated doesn't give you the right to retaliate or hold on to hurt. Two wrongs never make a right. One of the sayings of the Bible that I hear quoted often, judge not lest you be judged. Now you could probably count on one hand how many Christians have actually read that verse in context, as opposed to just reading that statement isolated. Maybe one in a thousand Christians have read the rest of the verses. I just want to give you the next verse, okay? Here's what it says Jesus said, Do not judge, or you'll be judged. That's the part we know real well. But he said he adds, but in the same way you judge others, you'll be judged. And with the measure you use, it'll be measured to you. Now, what Jesus is saying here is judgmental attitudes are like boomerangs. It's always going to come back to you. So when I was a kid, I got a boomerang. My parents bought me a boomerang. I don't know why they did this. These things are dangerous, right? But I but I had this, and I was in elementary school, and I had this boomerang, and at home I would throw it and it'd be like two houses down, and I'd retrieve it. I could not make that thing come back to me at all. And one day I took it to school. In those days, you could carry weapons into school. Did you know that? And I carried my boomerang to school. And I can remember being out on our, it was a big open field, and a lot of kids were playing ball and stuff like that. And I had my boomerang. And I threw it like this, and it arced up into the sky. And I lost it in the sun. And so I'm looking for it, can't see it anywhere. Next thing I know, it comes back and hits me square in the middle of my forehead. Blood is going all down my face. The first time I make it work, it happens at school, and I end up in the nurse's office through a self-injury. But you see, this is what judgmental attitudes are like. When you throw it, the person who ends up getting hurt is yourself. So let me explain. We often judge others ourselves by our intent, and we judge others by their actions. So when we do something wrong, what we say to ourselves is, but I didn't mean to do that. That was the furthest thing from my intentions. We let ourselves off the hook by telling ourselves we meant nothing by it. But when I look at what other people have done to me, I don't judge them by their intents, I judge them by their actions. So when they say, hey, I didn't mean anything by that, I never meant to hurt you, that's not good enough. We hold them to the strictest level accounting for what they said or what they did. But Jesus reminds us of this in those verses I just read you. The way you give it is the way you're going to get it. So if you judge other people by their actions, be prepared to be judged for your own actions. If you're merciless in the way you judge other people, their behaviors, it will come back to you just as mercilessly. There's a fourth real consequence of holding on to grudges, and it's spiritual. Spiritually, I invite damaging spiritual influences into my life. The Bible tells us this be angry, yet do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity. Now, opportunity in the original Greek could easily be translated a place or a foothold. Now, if you've ever been rock climbing or seen it done, I mean these people amaze me, going up sheer sides of cliffs. All they need is the tiniest place in that rock to get a foothold or a handhold, and they can climb up something sheer that I think that's impossible. But they just need the tiniest bit of margin to be able to do that. What the Bible is telling us, what Paul's telling us in Ephesians chapter 4, is that the devil, this is all he needs. He just needs a place to grab onto in your soul. When we stay angry and we refuse to let it go, we provide that foothold to the enemy. We practically invite negative spiritual influences into our life. In other words, if I'm a grudge holder, I lay out the welcome mat to the enemy. Grudges and unresolved anger are open doors to Satan. So if your relationship with God is not everything you thought it should be, you might need to ask yourself, am I holding on to a grudge against somebody? That might be part of the problem. Listen to this again from Lewis Meads. He wrote, When forgiveness is necessary, don't wait too long. We must begin to forgive because without forgiving, we choke off our own joy, we kill our own soul. People carrying hate and resentment can invest themselves so deeply in that resentment that they gradually define themselves in terms of it. And that leads to this next thing, the way that holding on to grudges damages the soul, and that is psychologically. It changes the way you see yourself. Rabbi Harold Kushner is somebody you probably recognize his name. He's written several best-selling books. He said, forgiveness happens inside us and represents letting go the role of the victim. So two weeks ago, I got the, well, actually it was probably two months ago, I got the card from Dallas County saying you're required to be at jury duty on such and such a time and day. And we all just love that, don't we? You know, I'm gonna get my six bucks, you know, I don't know where I'm gonna spend it, but but my my money for jury duty. So I I I go down to the county courthouse, and of course, you're first in this jury duty room with several hundred people, and you just pray, God, be merciful, don't let me be picked, right? And and and so you're sitting there, and and when I have you bet if you ever get called for jury duty, take something to read, okay? You're gonna have all kinds of time in that room with nothing to do, and that's what I do. When I have downtime, I read. I don't watch television, don't watch sports, I don't do anything, I read. And I came across this article, and I and it's really one of the best things I've read in some time. I came across it on a site called Reddit, and it was fascinating because the opening paragraph posed the question: why do some people become gentler with age and other people become bitter? Especially when both groups may have had the same experience in life. And they postulated that everything comes down to a single interpretive fork. Did this happen to me or did this pass through me? Now I'm gonna let the author explain it. This is a little bit longer quote, but it is too good. I cannot rephrase it the way this guy says it. He said, When suffering is something that was done to you, it becomes evidence of a hostile world. Every loss confirms a pattern. You were cheated. Singled out. The narrative calcifies into an identity. That's a powerful way of saying that. This, what we're telling ourselves about, what happened, it calcifies into my identity. I'm the person who was wrong. And identities, once formed, resist correction. They seek confirmation. A person who's organized their entire autobiography around being harmed will, without intending to, find harm everywhere they look. And I read that and it was like, wow, I have seen this in a thousand people in my lifetime. You know, all kinds of people who got hurt, define their life by it, see all of life through that lens, and then only seek confirmation that they're the victim, they're hurt, they're targeted, it's always something bad happening to them. So invariably, if I hang on to hurt, it leads to seeing life through that lens. I'm the person always mistreated, and pretty soon I see it everywhere I look. But Justin Brown said there's another way of looking at the same hurt and wounding. So listen to what he says next. When suffering is something that moved through you, temporarily reshaping you, stripping certain things away, depositing others, the experience gets metabolized differently. The pain still registers as real, the loss still matters, but it doesn't become the defining feature of the self. And this analogy is really great. He says it becomes weather. Severe weather, sometimes catastrophic weather, but weather nonetheless. And weather passes through a landscape without becoming the landscape. And that's powerful. Therapists are always trying to get their clients to see their life through a different interpretive lens. That their worst moment might, there may be another way of seeing it. Not a better version, not a version that erases the pain, just a version where that pain doesn't define who you are. You see, once you understand this, then life doesn't get reduced to you to your worst chapter. The facts don't change. No one's asking you to pretend like the wound wasn't real, but the relationship between you and that wound, it shifts. You go from being the person it happened to to being the person it moved through. And that perspective makes all the difference. Now I think we can all agree that everyone has some level of baggage from time to time in our life. And that baggage, when we cling to it, we've all seen. I mean, I don't think these issues are rocket science. I think these are the kind of issues that when you look at them honestly, you say, yeah, of course, that's always the consequence, emotionally, relationally, physically, spiritually, psychologically. Nothing good comes from hanging on to hertz. So if that's what holding on does, then the question that's left is this is there a limit to forgiveness? Matthew 18 contains Jesus' most extensive teaching on forgiveness. And his forgiveness is prompted by a question that Peter asked him. So I'm going to begin the story where the Bible does, that you see Peter's question, and then talk about what Jesus has to say. Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times, or some of your translations say seventy times seven. Now Peter wants to know what a lot of us want to know too. Are there limits to how many times I have to forgive somebody? So Peter is verbalizing what maybe we're afraid to say, even in this context. Being merciful is admirable, Jesus, but isn't there limits to this? How much do I have to put up with before I say, okay, enough's enough? You finally crossed the line. I don't got anything else to give. It's all on you now. So Peter, he thinks he's being generous, saying, seven times is the limit. You know why I think that? Because in Jesus' day, what the rabbis taught is three times was plenty. In fact, if you don't believe that, there's a book that was compiled about the same time as the New Testament called the Talmud. And the Talmud are the collective teachings of the rabbi of Jesus' day. And here's what it says in the Talmud. If a man commits an offense once, they forgive him. He commits an offense a second time, they forgive him. If he commits a third time, they forgive him. The fourth time, they do not forgive him. So in Judaism, in Jesus' day, what the rabbis taught, three times is plenty. Fourth time, you've gone over your limit. I don't have to forgive you anymore. So when Rabbi Jesus responds to Peter, he says, Peter, not seven times, but seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven. The reason for that difference is trying to understand what it means to be times in the original language. So it could be translated 77, it could be translated 70 times 7. But whether he said 77 or 70 times 7, the point is the same. There's no limit to forgiveness. Jesus is not saying, hey, when you reach 491, end of the game, right? At the 491th time, you don't have to forgive this person anymore. That's not what Jesus is saying. He said, if you're keeping track of the number of times you forgive, you haven't truly forgiven. So in order to illustrate this truth to Peter, he's going to tell him a story. This story, man, it's a gut punch. I want you to hear it. He said, a king discovered that one of his servants owed him 10,000 talents. A talent was a lot of money. It's actually a weight. To accumulate one talent, to earn that much in your lifetime, took the average person 15 years to earn one. So you might earn three or four in your entire lifetime. But to owe 10,000 is like saying this guy owed a zillion dollars. Okay, that's what the scripture's saying. He owes more than you could ever calculate. He owes so much, there's no way he could possibly ever repay it. The note is due. He knows he's going to prison for the rest of his life. But knowing this, the servant falls to his knees before the king and begs for mercy, saying he'd repay it if he just has a little more time. This is comedy in Jesus' story, right? Because even with all the time in the world, he can't make a dent in this debt. The king knows that that's a ridiculous and a desperate kind of promise. It's not even possible. So the king does the unthinkable. He completely and totally forgave the debt and set the man free. By the way, in case you don't realize it, this is a picture of what God has done for each and every one of us. You owed God more than you could ever possibly repay. You owe God such a great debt that even with a thousand lifetimes, you could not possibly repay it. So God does the unthinkable. He pays the debt for you and sets you free. He pays the unpayable debt through what Christ did on the cross. Amen? So now hear what I'm about to say. It may be the most important thing I say about this teaching. For Jesus, this is where any discussion of forgiveness begins. Not with how merciful you have to be with those who hurt you, but with how merciful God has been to you. So then the parable continues. One deneri, a deneri, is worth like 19 cents. So a hundred of them is less than 20 bucks. He finds a guy who owes him 20 bucks, grabs the guy by the throat, demands that he pay him back the $20. The poor man does exactly what this guy had done, fell on his knees, begs for mercy, asks for a little more time, and this guy says, No way, and throws him into debtor's prison over a $20 debt. That word gets back to the king. When the king hears that, he is so furious. He threw the ungrateful servant into prison. Then Jesus looks at Peter and the other disciples and he said, So my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart. Wow. You know, don't hold back, Jesus. I mean, just say it like it is. His point is if after you've been forgiven, the greatest debt you could possibly ever owe, that you still think there's limits to forgiveness, that you have a right to withhold forgiveness from others, the only thing that could possibly mean is that you've never truly experienced the forgiveness of God. That you don't know what it means to be forgiven from the gracious, merciful heart of God to forgive this unpayable debt. Jesus wants to know: is there any evidence that you've been the recipient of God's mercy? You see, when Jesus hears Peter's question, it lands differently. When Peter says, is there a limit to forgiveness? He knows the things Peter has done and he knows the things Peter will do. He knows how deep Peter's debt actually is to God. So it's inconceivable to Jesus that Peter would wonder how many times he has to forgive other people, especially when you consider how many times God has had to forgive Peter. You see, Peter's not living in reality about his own life, about how often he screws up, about how deeply he depends on being forgiven every day. Not seven times, but seventy times seven times. He needs the forgiveness of God. But still, we persist in asking Peter's question. Aren't there limits to forgiveness? Is that because we define our lives by our hurts? And if we forgave other people and we gave up our hurts, without the hurt, we wouldn't even know who we are anymore? Are we, aren't you tired of living a life that's defined by hurt? Or is it because we don't know what it means to be forgiven? We've never experienced the grace of God. We've never fallen on our knees and said, God be merciful to me, a sinner, and know that what Christ did on the cross was applied to my life and my sins are completely forgiven. I can't give grace to others if I've never experienced grace. I mean, I know there's all kinds of awful atrocities happening in our world, even at this moment, all around the globe, you name it, it's everywhere. But you know, the things that's keeping us up at night is not because some gunman came in and slaughtered our entire family. It's not because we've experienced something like the Holocaust, where an entire race of people was systematically tried to be destroyed during World War II. It's not for those reasons. You know, the thing that keeps us up at night is we fantasize about getting our hands around the throat of the person who owes us 20 bucks. That's what Jesus is saying in Matthew 18. That you and I will never really forgive unless and until we first see ourselves right. Unless you understand what a big debt that you've been forgiven for, unless you understand what it means to be forgiven, an unpayable debt, you'll never have the capacity to extend that to other people who are broken like you are. You know, uh Beth Moore, a really well-known Bible teacher and preacher, she wrote a great book called Living Beyond Yourself, Exploring the Fruit of the Spirit. She tells a story that illustrates this perfectly. She said she'll never forget she was watching TV one night and she saw this feature story about parents and the killer of a young college student. The killer was a student's best friend. The weapon was alcohol in a speeding automobile. What made this particular feature primetime viewing is the parents had forgiven the young driver. The young driver killed their son. Killed their son. And this under under the influence, driving the kids in the pastor's seat, their son is killed. And if that wasn't enough, they'd taken him in as their own. He slept in the son's bedroom. He worked with the victim's father teaching seminars on safety. He spoke about the one he'd killed in ways that only someone who knew him intimately as a friend could. And Beth Moore asked, How could these parents do such a thing? And they said, Because it gave them peace. The interviewer was amazed. Beth Moore was amazed. She kept trying to put herself in the shoes of those parents, but she says, I couldn't. Then as the tears began to stream down her cheeks, she heard the Spirit of God whisper to her heart and say, No wonder you cannot relate. You put yourself in the wrong position. You, my child, are the driver. You see, God was the parent that not only forgave us, but invited us to sit at the table in the space provided to us by the Savior. He forgave us and he treats me like his own son or daughter. He's forgiven me. So as we begin this journey of examining what's in our baggage, would you be willing to pray with me, God, show me the truth about me? I want to be free of the garbage that's accumulated in my soul. I've carried it for so long it's become a part of me. Some of us are filtering all of life through it, through the things that have happened to you, the hurts you've experienced from others, and even good things gets tainted by all this junk. What I'm saying is, don't surrender the joys of tomorrow to the unfair pains of yesterday. Even if it takes 79 times to do it. And if you get a place where you say, I just can't forgive, Pastor Keith, there's one thing you can do. It's a prayer that was taught to me a long time ago by my spiritual director. A prayer we pray when we know there's something we really need to do, but just can't find the willingness in our own heart. We pray, Lord, make me willing to be willing. Would you pray that way? There's something in your heart and you feel stuck, and you know that right now I just can't honestly say I'll forgive that. But you say, Lord, make me willing to be willing. I'll let that go. Confess to God that you have no power to change your thoughts or feelings about this person. But you're willing to be made willing. Because you see, freedom doesn't begin when you feel ready, it begins when you take the first step. So let me wrap up with this. Y'all know 40 years ago I moved to Garland, Texas. I've lived here most of my life now in Garland. When I first moved here, I was an associate pastor, a youth pastor, at a small Baptist church on Kingsley Road between Shiloh and Garland Road. So it's a tiny little two-story church building there. I was a youth pastor, and the pastor I was serving under was the guy who was my spiritual mentor, my father in the ministry. I announced my calling to preach under this guy. And I served with him for a year, and after a year, he was from Ohio, same place I was from, and he really liked rural ministry, not city ministry. Hated Dallas with a passion, wanted out of here with everything within him. So he resigned the church. He said, I want to go back to Ohio. The church then voted unanimously for beat me to be their new pastor. And I would then pastor there for the next three and a half years. But something happened in that time, and I won't go into all the details, but my pastor, my mentor, my father in the faith, he turned against me. And he began to try to poison the church against me and poison my influence in the church and began to talk to leading families in the church and saying I was doing it all wrong. And this was really hard. It was really tough on me because, you know, I'm a young minister, he's my spiritual father, and he's actively working against me and hurting me in the ministry. But if you know anything about the Baptist church, the deacons really lead the church. Sorry to say that, but they do. And the deacons were seeing all this and they were standing with me, which was amazing. I was maybe 23, 22, 23 at the time, and they were standing with me and saying, the pastor's out of order. This shouldn't be happening. While all this is going on, one day I'm in the office. So this was his old office and his old desk. And I noticed that every single drawer pushes all the way to the cabinet, but one. The top left drawer, you'd push it, and it still stuck out about a half to a to a whole inch. That would not close all the way. I thought, there's something wrong with this desk. And as I pushed really hard, I could hear paper crumpling. So I reached in and I pulled out the drawer completely. And when I pulled it out, there was a wadded piece of uh legal-sized paper that was wadded up in the back of the drawer, keeping the drawer from closing. And I opened the piece of paper, and there in my spiritual father's handwriting was a list of all the families in the church and the hurts that they had done to him. So he's not only hanging on to hurts, he's he's documenting, he's he's keeping a physical record of the pain and injuries of others. And the moment I thought saw that, I thought, oh man, I got him now. You know, all this talking about me, all this trying to ruin my life, I show this to these families, he's gone. He's ruined. And I no sooner had that thought than I heard God say, and if you do that, you're just like him. So I tore it up, I threw it away, and none of those families ever knew what that pastor wrote about him. And I never told the pastor that I had that stuff on him. About a month ago, I got a text from Ohio, and his pastor's in the hospital, and they thought he was dying. And a friend of mine thought I might want to know. And I realized when I heard about now years ago, I'll tell you, I I he'd written me and I'd written him, and we worked out our stuff. And I I even said, you know, I know I was young and I was immature, and in whatever way, in any way, that I said things incorrectly. Please forgive me. So I I owned whatever part mine was in that and sincerely asked his forgiveness. And he did the same for me. But now that he's about ready to go to into eternity, I'm thinking, you know, God, I've got I've got no ill will toward this man whatsoever. I've got nothing but love in my heart for him. And my hope and my prayer is that when he stands before God, he gets to experience all the healing that God meant for him to have. You know, sometimes I think when we we have loved ones who are really sick, maybe cancer, some kind of physical uh illness, we know that when they go to heaven, that all, you know, these broken bodies are a thing of the past. That's that's healing. But you know, there's more to it than that. The Bible says when we see him, we'll be like him, for we'll see him as he is. There's coming a time too that some of the deepest healing that needs to happen needs to happen in here, right? Needs to happen within us, not in our necessarily our DNA, but our spiritual DNA. And I think about some of you, you know, you had you had people in your life who hurt you a great deal, and you wish you could talk to them, you wish you could work it out, wish you could write them a letter, but you say they're dead and gone now. I can't do anything about that. Don't believe that. Number one, you don't need them to forgive them, okay? You don't need acknowledgement from them. You they they don't have to understand it, they don't have to apologize to you. You can let that go. Forgiveness only takes one person to do. Reconciliation two, forgiveness one. So you can let that go. But here's the thing I love about heaven. Do you know the Bible talks about that the gates of the city, the entrance to heaven, are gates of what? A pearl, right? Gates of pearl. You know what a pearl is, don't you? A pearl is a sign of a healed wound. Because a clam, if something irritant gets within that clam, it secretes that pearly substance to encapsulate that wound and turns it into something beautiful. When we go to heaven, whether those gates are literal or not, I don't know, but I do know this. When we pass into heaven, we pass through gates of healing. And those people who maybe have hurt you in ways that they never acknowledged and never understood, one day they'll really see and understand. And I think, I sincerely think, that when we go to heaven one day, we're gonna meet some people that we had issues with. And maybe the first conversation they have is can I tell you just how sorry I am that I ever did those things to you? I think it's gonna be healing on a level that our soul craves. These bodies, they're fixed a whole lot easier than some of these pains we carry in our heart, aren't they? And God wants you to be free. And he wants you to begin that journey now, and he wants you to take that step, not because you feel like it, but you just are willing to be willing to let it go and to start that journey toward leaving that baggage in the past where it belongs and moving into the future unencumbered by your hurts. Let's pray. Father, thanks so much that we have this time. Thanks for your truth, thanks for God, this healing, this wonderful teaching that Jesus gives us on forgiveness, about what it really means, that we need to understand first and foremost what it means to be forgiven by you. That God, we've been forgiven for a debt we could not possibly ever repay. So, what could anybody do to me that even compares to the sin debt that was canceled because of the cross? I thank you, God, that you put these things in perspective. I also thank you, God, that as we look at your word and we see your truth, we see that there's a cost to hanging on to things that we're unwilling to let go of, and most of all, that it begins to calcify into an identity. It becomes a lens through which I see all of life. It becomes the way of interpreting all the good and the bad things happening to us. And God, you don't mean for us to be shackled to our past. You long for us to be free from it. So today that journey can begin. By some people saying, God, show me the truth about me. If there's anything offensive in me, if there's anything that I'm clinging to that I need to let go of, bring it to the surface of my life. And for those who are very acutely aware of pain that they're going through right now, that happened to them weeks, months, years ago, that God, they would say, I can't get there today, but Lord, I am willing to pray. Lord, make me willing to be willing. Make me willing to be willing. Put the want-to in my heart where I don't have it right now, because I long to be free. I long to be forgiven, and I long to forgive others. God, I pray that in the coming weeks that you're going to continue to visit with us in every service and show us those things that you long to heal in our life. We just thank you for being such a gracious God and providing us what we need when we need it. In Jesus' name. Amen. God bless y'all.