Got Baggage? | Letting It Go | Part 4 | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

Got Baggage? | Letting It Go | Part 4 
Senior Pastor Keith Stewart
May 24, 2026

What do you do with the pain that remains after someone has hurt you deeply?
How do you let go of bitterness when the memories still ache? This Sunday, Pastor Keith Stewart concludes the “Got Baggage?” series with a powerful message called LETTING IT GO. Through unforgettable true stories and the example of Jesus Himself, we’ll explore how forgiveness can free us from the weight of anger, resentment, and unresolved pain. You don’t have to keep carrying yesterday into tomorrow. Join us this Sunday in person or online.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 

1. What part of this message impacted you the most personally and why?
 
2. Pastor Keith said, “Forgiveness does not erase scars, but it can transform what the scars produce.” What do you think that means in real life?
 
3. Kim Phúc carried bitterness and anger for years after the trauma she experienced. Why do you think pain so easily turns into resentment if left unresolved?
 
4. The message described anger as a form of protection and control: “When you’re hurt, you feel vulnerable. When you’re angry, you feel invulnerable.” How have you seen anger mask deeper hurts, fears, or disappointments in your own life?
 
5. Which unhealthy approach to pain do you most relate to?
       • Manager
       • Firefighter
       • Stuffer
How has that coping mechanism affected your relationships or emotional health?
 
6. Discuss this statement: “There’s a difference between rehearsing your hurt and releasing your hurt.” Why do people sometimes become attached to their pain stories?
 
7. Why is it difficult to bring emotional wounds honestly before God instead of merely talking about them with other people?
 
8. The sermon emphasized that Jesus often forgave people before they ever asked for forgiveness. How does that challenge or reshape your understanding of grace?
 
9. Read Luke 23:34: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” What stands out to you most about Jesus’ response from the cross?
 
10. Pastor Keith said: “God’s forgiveness ALWAYS precedes our repentance. His compassion ALWAYS outruns our contrition.” How have you personally experienced God taking the first step toward you?
 
11. Is there someone in your life you still need to release to God? Without sharing unnecessary details, what makes forgiveness difficult in that situation?
 
12. Kim described bitterness like “black sludge” that had to be poured out “day by day and a bit at a time.” Why is forgiveness often more of a process than a single moment? What practical step could you take this week toward healing, forgiveness, or emotional honesty with God?
 
13. Close your time together by praying specifically for: healing from unresolved wounds, courage to face buried pain, freedom from bitterness, and the ability to forgive as Christ has forgiven us.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Amen. Please have a seat.

unknown 0:04

Woo!

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Happy Memorial Day weekend to you. I hope that I hope that you don't treat this as just a three-day weekend. You know, this is a this is an important time in our country. We set aside this day to remember those who went to war and never came home. And Jesus himself said, Greater love has no man than this, that man would lay down his life for his friends. And that's what we're looking at. We're looking at soldiers who literally laid down their lives on behalf of their comrades in arms as well as our country. And it's a fitting time if you have a chance this weekend to actually go by local cemetery. Brendan and I like Mills Cemetery. It's over there off Centerville. It's an old cemetery. It's always decorated on Memorial Day. It's just a great time to go by and just pause and just be grateful for the sacrifice of others to make this great nation. This service, I really wondered if it was going to come off. We arrived this morning, probably around 7:30, 8 o'clock, and we had no power. And we had volunteers scrambling everywhere trying to figure out what went wrong and come to find out an actual pyro line disconnected out here right in front of the building. And so we were getting nothing. There was nothing inside the building. It was all external. But GPL showed up like soldiers and took care of it like that, so we have power. Yeah, it's great. And I have I picked up a bug while I was on vacation and I didn't know if I was going to make it today. So I think this message must be pretty darn important. There have been so many obstacles to get to this moment. So whether you're here with us right now or joining us online, we're just so glad you're here. And I do believe this is the message for the hour. So I pray that uh God will just meet with us in a special way. Would you join me in that prayer right now? Father, we are looking to you to do what you do so well, and that is to meet us where we are with exactly what we're needing. I believe, God, with all my heart, this is the message that perfectly culminates this series. And it challenges us in unique ways of what it means to forgive, to let go of painful feelings, but also what it means to forgive like Jesus. So I pray, God, that you're just going to have complete freedom in our hearts and minds to do the work that you do so well. In Jesus' name. Amen. So her picture was one of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War. A nine-year-old girl running naked down a road, screaming in agony, after napalm had burned the clothes off her body as well as much of the skin off her back. It was the aftermath of an attack on her village on June 8, 1972. That same attack killed both of her brothers. To most people, she was simply known as the Napalm girl. The photo was taken by associated press photographer Nick Utt, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it, largely because that one photo did more to communicate the horrors of the Vietnam War than any other photo taken during the war. But it also left that little girl, Kim Fuch, full of bitterness and hatred. Immediately after the photo, Utt laid aside his camera, rushed the nine-year-old along with the other children to a local hospital in Saigon. Doctors determined that Kim's burns were so severe that she probably wouldn't survive. After 14 months in the hospital and 17 separate surgeries, including skin transplants, Kim was finally released to go home. But it took a full 10 years after being released before she gained full use of her body again. Here's a photo of Kim as an adult. This photo shows you just how extensive the scarring is that covers Kim's back. Because of constant pain, Kim nearly ended her own life in 1982. I want to share with you an interview that was done with NPR. Her English is somewhat broken because English is not her first language, but I want to share with you the way she shared with the magazine. She said this. And then she added this it built me up with hatred, bitterness, and anger. I was just living with the question why me, why that happened to me? And I imagine everyone here can understand how enduring something so horrific might fill one's heart with anger, bitterness, and hate. And why these feelings that she wrestled with could not have been easy for anyone, let alone a nine-year-old girl. Is forgiveness even possible in a case like that? Could you ever let go of the negative emotions that you carried, knowing that every single day for the rest of your life, you'd be reminded through your physical pain of what you had endured that day? Now you and I will likely never wrestle with something on the same magnitude as what Kim Fuck had to face. But every one of us can relate to the pain that remains even long after the initial hurt. When we're hurt, when we're mistreated, done wrong, abused, maligned, we're left with feelings of angriness, bitterness, and hate. Those feelings become our baggage. That's what weighs us down. Though sometimes those feelings are out of sight, they're never very far out of mind. These are the things in life that constantly remind us of the hurts, of how we were treated by other people. So even when we agree that forgiveness is important and maybe even necessary, even if I can find it within myself to let that person off the hook, to let them go for how they hurt me, how do I deal with the feelings that remain? That's what today's message is all about. How do we deal with that lingering sense of hurt and bitterness and hate? You see, it's not just about letting go of what happened, it is about letting go of the residual. So I want to begin just with that, with dealing with feelings. The Bible reminds us of this: Jesus won't walk over anyone's feelings, won't push you into a corner. The mere sound of his name will signal hope. Now, pain is a part of life. As a human being, we're going to experience physical pain, we're going to feel emotional pain. But emotional hurts are tough. In fact, in some ways, emotional hurts are more resilient than physical ones. Because you know, you can be cut, you can be burned, you can have a lot of things happen to you, and your body will heal over time, and you may not ever give that physical pain another thought. But emotional wounds, that kind of hurt, can linger. And that pain is not easily forgotten, and it's not merely made better through the passage of time. The Bible constantly encourages us, even commands us to forgive. But here's the puzzling thing. Nowhere in all of Scripture does it define forgiveness for us. So it gives us examples, but no definition. If you were to turn to Webster's dictionary, you would find three things associated with forgiveness, all related to the idea of pardon, remission of guilt, or cancellation of debt. Now, those concepts are fairly easy to understand, even though they may be hard to do. Basically, the dictionary tells us that once we've forgiven somebody, we've really released them from the offense that had occurred. That's the fact of forgiveness. But once you cancel a debt that's been owed to you, something else remains. Forgiveness is more than just deciding not to hold that against that person any longer. The other side of forgiveness is the feelings. What do I do with the feelings? Now, Webster's dictionary adds that to forgive means to cease to feel resentment against. And that's the rub. It's one thing to let go of a debt because what you realize you're holding an uncollectible debt anyway. But how do we scrub out the feelings? How do we release the resentment? How do we let go of the pain? So one side of forgiveness is a decision. It says, you hurt me, but I'm not going to let you keep on hurting me for the rest of my life. I'm going to untether my life from you. I pardon you. I release you. And in the process, I set myself free. That's one aspect of forgiveness. But the other aspect of forgiveness is releasing the hurt, pent-up feelings. It's about processing the emotions in such a way that they don't keep circling back on you. And isn't that the problem? Because I may say the words of forgiveness, but a week later, two weeks later, something happens, I'm reminded, and I'm immediately immersed in those feelings all over again. How do we release the feelings so that they too go into the past? Now, believe it or not, I don't think that feelings or dealing with feelings is a strong suit for most Americans and even for Christians for that matter. There's some assumptions, some lies that we believe as a culture that keep us stuck in negative emotions. I want to share with you three of them. One of them is that time heals all wounds. In other words, we think if I just let enough time pass, let the painful event kind of go into the past, enough time will, given enough time, I'll just forget about it over time. David Siemens wrote a great book called Healing of Memories. And he said this: Time by itself does not and cannot heal those memories which are so painful that the experiences are as alive and painful 10 to 20 years later as they were 10 to 20 minutes after they were pushed out of consciousness. It's true that it takes time to heal, but time in and of itself doesn't heal anything. We used to think this about toxic waste. We thought, you know, if we just put the toxic waste in barrels and we bury it underground, everything would be fine. But what we learned was toxic waste leaks. And once it starts to leak, it damages crops, it damages animals, it enters the food chain, and it harms us. So you can't just bury it and forget about it. It's always going to leak. Same thing happens with toxic emotions. You can try to bury them, you can try to push them down, you can try not to deal with them, but they will leak. And they will begin to affect and infect everything about your relationships and your emotional life. Here's another way of thinking that's super common in society, but simply doesn't work. Bury your feelings and replace your losses. Now I want you to think about this because this is the kind of stuff we've heard from the time we were little. We lose our first pet, a family dog, a family cat, a goldfish, whatever. And our parents say, Don't feel bad, we can get another dog. Or, you know, your first real adventure with love, whether that's middle school, high school, and your girlfriend dumps you, and dad says, quit your moping around, there's other fish in the sea, right? The message comes through loud and clear. Bury your feelings, don't feel bad, stop your moping, replace your losses. There's other pets, there's other girlfriends. This is why a lot of people stay in relationship nightmares their entire life. Because what they do is as soon as a relationship goes bad, they just jump into another relationship. They're not taking the time to figure out or process their feelings or their hurts. Instead, they bury their feelings, replace their losses, which pretty much guarantees you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Here's another common way that we refuse to deal with pain in our life, and that is we say, what's past is past, what's done is done. These are people who just try to forget altogether what that experience was like and the feelings associated with it, and move on. Now, there are three different approaches that people take when it comes to burying pain. We become managers, firefighters, or stuffers. Let me explain. First, the manager. When it comes to certain negative or emotional experiences or feelings that we have, we try to keep those feelings out of our awareness by doing two things: living a very well-ordered life and controlling other people. That's a manager. They're trying to orchestrate their life in such a way that those feelings don't keep surfacing. Another type, we call them the firefighter. This is whenever those painful feelings flare up, we take quick action to extinguish those feelings, and we might use things like alcohol, drugs, sex, TV, gaming, online shopping binges, you you can name it. I mean, whatever it is that distracts me from that, I try to put out the feelings. And then there's another way of dealing with unwanted feelings and painful memories, and that's what to do what I did in the past, and that's become a stuffer. So when negative feelings would manifest, I just stuff them down and refuse to feel them. The problem with stuffers is they're not addressing their hurts, they're repressing them. Those hurts are driven deep within, not to go away, but to come out in unpredictable ways. You know, years ago, when I was in therapist, my therapist told me that the center of my life was this huge reservoir that was full of all kinds of hurts and pains that I was refusing to face and refusing to feel. And what would happen is throughout my life, anytime somebody'd add new pain, I'd just dump it into the reservoir. Well, the dam that kept all the feelings in check was called anger. Anger is the spillway. And so whenever Brenda or anybody else would do something remotely like what was done to me in the past, I'd open the spillway and I'd let them have it. And see, what would happen is, is my reactions were always bigger than the moment called for, which is a sure sign you're not dealing with the junk from your past because you're combining the present moment with the injuries of the past, and they're getting it all. And they don't deserve that because they're not responsible for the injuries of your past. You need to be able to deal with this present moment and what's going on here. So I was a stuffer. I would push it down and push it down. But what managers and firefighters and stuffers all have in common is you can't do it forever without paying a terrible price because repressed feelings have a high rate of resurrection. So if none of those things work, what do I do? Well, let me offer you a better way of dealing with negative emotions. The first thing we have to address is the anger. You gotta let go of the need to get even. Part of the reason that we don't want to forgive is because when we feel angry, we feel powerful. When I'm hurt, I feel vulnerable. When I'm angry, I feel invulnerable. In other words, anger is my protective outer shell. It's like the MM. It's the outer coating to the ooey gooey inside, right? Anger is my protective outer shell. It helps to keep the pain out. If I'm angry enough, I can keep you at arm's length and never get you let you be close enough to me to hurt me again. The problem is that tough outer coating also keeps out love and perspective and healing. But you see, resentment doesn't work. Saturday morning cartoons taught me this. Wiley coyote, right? He can vouch for it. Sometimes the anvil we want to drop on other people drops on us. When we're wrong, we want to get back at the person who wronged us to make them feel as much pain as we felt. Few thoughts are more tempting than the desire to avenge a wrong, to get even, to give someone a taste of their own medicine. Dr. Lewis Meads, again, he wrote this. We want our enemy to suffer, yes, but we also want him to know that he is suffering only because of what he did to us. We want the satisfaction of watching him burn with hellish leisure on the rotisserie of his remorse. I think he thought about this statement for a while before he wrote it. What I know is this if you preserve vengeance, you never get closure. You know why? Because the pain you cause me always feels worse than the pain I cause you. It's the problem with thinking an eye for an eye. You say, well, what's wrong with that? The Bible says an eye for an eye. Well, yes and no. That principle is in the Bible, but you realize it comes in a list of principles that apply to courtrooms. And what the Bible is saying when it says an eye for an eye, it's to limit compensation of losing an eye to the value of an eye. In other words, it's something God put in place to help victims in courtroom to understand you don't get to kill somebody over this. If you lost an eye, your compensation should be commensurate with the value of an eye. But what ended up happening is we as broken people began to take this law that was to limit compensation and began to apply it in personal relationships. That if you poke my eye, I will poke yours too. And Jesus questioned that completely. Read Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus does not support that kind of thinking. The problem with applying an eye for an eye in personal relationship is no one's ever satisfied with just an eye. Because victim and victimizer never weighed justice on the same scale. One is always ahead and one is always behind. Revenge never evens the score. All it does is it takes the injured and the injurer and puts them on a never-ending escalator of pain. So in order to break the cycle of unfairness, somebody has to create a new fairness. And that's where forgiveness comes in. Anger and the desire to get even are the least productive ways of dealing with pain. Anger is only masking the hurt, the fear, the frustration. Those things need to be addressed, but the anger is not going to get you there. And that's what the next point is all about. Revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing. Doctors Les and Leslie Parroth, a great couple, wrote a lot of great books about relationship success. And this is what they said. Repressed feelings, especially painful ones, have a high rate of resurrection. Be aware, however, that healing your hurts is a process of painful self-exploration. Now, how many of you in this room have ever heard the story, the Greek myth of Pandora's box? Usually when we use that story, we're saying, hey, don't open Pandora's box, so all this bad stuff's gonna come out, right? Well, Pandora's box, hidden inside that box, were all the painful parts of Pandora that she was trying to avoid, the parts that she was trying to bury. When she first opened the box, all this bad stuff comes storming out first. That's the part of the story everybody knows. But you know there's more to the story than that. Because after those painful parts are exposed to the light, she begins to explore the hidden pieces. She begins to work her way to the bottom of the box. And you know what she found at the bottom of the box? Hope. She found hope at the bottom of the box. Opening Pandora's box was discovering a lot of bad things, but in the process, she found the key to her wholeness. Same is true for you. A lot of us are afraid. I mean, this is part of the reason we stuffed it down in the first place. We didn't want to face it. But we're afraid of opening Pandora's box because all the bad stuff's gonna come storming out all at once. But I'm telling you, unless you open that box, unless you peer into the past, unless you see what's driving this pain in your life, you never get to hope. You never find the secret, you never find real release. Now I'm not just talking about rummaging through your past to develop a deeper relationship with your pain. Not at all. This time it's different. You go through the garbage to get rid of it once and for all. David Seaman said it so well, he said, there will be no healing until it's acknowledged, confronted, and resolved. So the purpose of going through the garbage of the past is to pick up a piece and say, that's not me. And neither is this. And I didn't put this in here, and I didn't deserve this. And I may have a part in this, but I'm willing to own it and I want to let it go. One of the biggest mistakes when it comes to our past hurts is we reveal our feelings to everybody but God. When we're hurt and full of resentment, we go to this person and that person over there and anybody who will listen. And what are we really doing when we do that? We're embedding the hurt. The repetition of our pain lodges the resentment deeper and deeper into our soul. Why do we tell others about our pain? Because we want sympathy. Sympathy is not healing. There's a difference between rehearsing your hurt and releasing your hurt. If you're a sympathy seeker, understand you're not releasing hurt when you go seeking sympathy. You're forming a more solid relationship with your pain than you ever had before. My point is this: to tell other people about your hurts just for the sake of telling them is never going to heal your life. But if you go to other people because you want to see what you cannot see, you want a bigger perspective, you want to know the direction you need for healing, then it could be very healing. But what's most important of all is to bring our pain to God. To ask my maker to apply his healing touch to the deepest aches of my soul. It's funny, when someone is sick, you know, somebody, a friend is in the hospital, and maybe they have a broken bone, maybe they have a fever, an illness, maybe they have cancer, whatever, we will pray for their healing. But how often do we pray for the healing of the wounds that don't show up on a CT scan? Those resilient emotional woundings in our soul. How often do we pray for healing for one another? You see, God can heal any of that stuff if we get into that box and we bring it out into the light. If we're willing to do that, God can heal it. If we're going to keep stuffing it down, there's nothing he can do about it. So then the third thing is we rely on God's strength to accomplish it. Now, early in this series, I told you about the family of Corey Ten Boom. The Ten Booms decided to hide Jews during the Holocaust in their home. And they were found out by the Nazis. And when the Nazis found them, they sent him to one of the death camps called Ravensbrook. And even though Corey survived the camp, the concentration camp, her sister did not. On one occasion, Corey was asked to come back to Munich, Germany, and to do a talk. This would be the first time she'd been back in Germany since the war. She went, and it was there that she saw him. The Nazi guard who'd been stationed at the shower room door at the processing center at Ravensbrook. Suddenly, all that pain and humiliation came flooding back into her soul. The room full of leering, mocking men, the heaping piles of clothing, the muffled sounds of the women weeping because they thought this might be their death. As the church was emptying at the close of the service, the man came up to Corey, thanked her for her words of encouragement, and then reached out his hand to shake hers. Corey said, angry, vengeful thoughts boiled up within her. Then, realizing the sinfulness of what she was thinking, she said to herself, Christ died to save him too. She tried to smile and offer him her hand, but she said, My hand was frozen at my side. She couldn't move it. She felt nothing, not even the slightest spark of charity toward this former guard. So she prayed, Jesus, I can't forgive him, but you can. Please give me your forgiveness. And as she reached out her hand to this former Nazi guard, the most incredible thing happened. Listen to her describe it. From my shoulder, along my arm, and through my hand passed a current from me to him. And in that moment, I discovered that it is not our forgiveness any more than our goodness that the world's healing depends. The world's healing depends upon God. When our Lord tells us to love our enemies, he gives us, along with the command to do it, the love itself. Friends, you can't make yourself love someone you don't love. You can't make yourself forgive someone you don't want to forgive. But you can make the connection between God's love for you and God's love for them. And God's forgiveness for you and God's forgiveness for them. And you can pray, Lord, let your forgiveness flow in me and through me. What I need is you. And what this person who hurt me needs is you. Now, you see, when God asks us to do this, he's not asking us something to do something that feels natural. He's asking us to do something supernatural. And if we're going to do something supernatural, you're not going to do that in your own power and strength. You're going to do that because you're dependent on God to do in, through, and for you what you cannot do for yourself, to empower you to love that person and to forgive that person the way they need to be forgiven. And that leads us to this really important point to forgive like Jesus. Listen to how the Bible says it. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Then in Ephesians 4, forgive each other just as in Christ God forgave you. Be imitators of God. Now we're constantly told in Scripture to forgive like Jesus, but have you ever wondered what it means to forgive like Jesus? So you ready for something that might just blow your mind? We're talking about forgiveness. And this happens to be the strangest, most bizarre thing about forgiveness in all the Gospels. Nowhere in the Gospels, not in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, do we read of anyone coming to Jesus to ask him for forgiveness. What the what? I mean, nobody in the Gospels comes and asks Jesus for forgiveness. Now, Jesus had a lot to say about forgiveness. I mean, we just spent four weeks talking about it. And yet not one time, not even one of his disciples came to him and said, Lord, please forgive me for this, or forgive me for that, or sorry, Lord, I messed up. Would you please forgive me? And let's be honest, it wasn't like they didn't need it, right? They're a bunch of screw-ups. But it never seemed to occur to any of them to come to their master, their rabbi, their leader, their Lord for forgiveness. But that didn't stop Jesus from forgiving them. In fact, he forgave friends and foes alike. He was constantly forgiving people even when they didn't ask for it. He forgave them even when they didn't realize that's what they needed most. Now there's something truly extraordinary and without parallel about Christ's forgiveness. He forgave unilaterally. You know what that word means? It means without reciprocity. In other words, without expecting something in return, regardless of whether or not you ask for it. In no way dependent on how you respond to it. He does it of his own accord. He does it because it was what was needed. One day Jesus was teaching, and you probably remember this story. Some men were bringing to him a friend, a paraplegic, on a stretcher. And when they get to where Jesus is teaching, they realize the crowd is so great, even in the house, they can't get before Jesus. So what do they do? They climb up on the roof of the house, they remove some ceiling tiles, they lower their friend down on this, you know, long uh bed that he's on, and right in front of Jesus. That's what happens. So all of a sudden, this man is there. The first thing out of Jesus' mouth, the first thing he says to the man, friend, your sins are forgiven. Jesus knew best what this disabled man needed. And yet the paraplegic doesn't ask to be forgiven. Certainly that wasn't the reason his friends brought him to Jesus. Still, Jesus forgave without being asked. That's unilateral forgiveness. On another occasion, Jesus is the honored guest at the home of a religious leader named Simon. A lot of prominent religious people in the room. They're all eating at a low table. They're all kind of semi-reclined, and they're eating. And all of a sudden, a woman comes in, unannounced, uninvited, a woman of the evening, a prostitute. She bows at Jesus' feet. She's overcome by deep emotion, so much so she begins to weep, and those tears begin to form little rivers of dirt on Jesus' feet. She takes down her hair and she wipes Jesus' feet with her hair, and then she begins to kiss his feet and anoint them with perfume. In the eyes of the religious leaders in the room, this was absolutely outrageous. Simon is thinking if this man were really a prophet, he would know what kind of woman's touching him right now. He wouldn't accept this at all. But Jesus defends her against all the condemnation. He looks at her and he says this. Jesus said to her, Your sins are forgiven. He forgave her sins, even though she never says a word or asks Jesus for anything. Without a doubt, one of the most gripping demonstrations of Jesus' unilateral forgiveness comes as he's hanging on the cross. He's slowly suffocating, still in one of only seven statements Jesus makes from the cross. His very first statement, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. This may be the single greatest miracle Jesus ever performed, to speak those words of forgiveness over his executioners. He forgave them. He forgave Caiaphas, the high priest, who was violating every single protocol of the Sanhedrin, just to have Jesus brought up on charges before the Romans so they would end his life. He forgave Pilate, the gutless politician, who sent an innocent man to his death. He forgave Herod, who mocked him, and put a crown of thorns on his head and said, Here's the king of the Jews. He forgave Judas the betrayer and Peter the turncoat. He forgave the soldiers, the hecklers, and all the crowds for whom he'd given everything, yet they demanded Jesus be crucified. What makes Christ's words from the cross even more amazing is this forgiveness is offered, no strings attached. It's unilateral, it's unconditional. I'd better understand it had Jesus said, Father, forgive them as long as they take me down right now and bandage me up. Or Father, forgive them as long as they admit they're wrong and truly broken over what they've done. We can understand that because that's the way we forgive. But not Jesus. Jesus forgives without condition. God is the one who always takes the first step. He always makes the first move. He forgives us in advance. We never do this. In fact, when we've been wrong, we feel practically righteous in our demand that the other party make the first move, right? I mean, we say, why should I do anything? It wasn't my fault. So we dig in our heels and feel perfectly justified in hanging on to our hate and unforgiveness. But God never acts in that way. And unlike us, he would be perfectly justified in saying, they're the ones being stubborn. They're the ones who haven't done right by me, but instead, God makes the first move. God's forgiveness always precedes our repentance. His compassion always outruns our contrition. His faithfulness always outweighs our faithfulness to him. Jesus really tried to help us see this in the Prodigal Son. You remember the story? We've already talked about it once in this series. The story in a nutshell is this the younger of the two sons wants his inheritance right away. He wants to be out from under dad's authority and do life the way he wants. The father agrees, gives the boy his inheritance. He makes every bad decision he could possibly make. When the money runs out, his friends abandon him, he's left at rock bottom. He wakes up, remembers how good his dad is, decides to go home. Then we're told, while the son is still a long way off. Remember this part of the story? His father sees him, and the old man runs to him as fast as his varicose lanes can carry him. And the Bible starts, the Bible, the boy, he starts to blurt out his rehearsed speech, but the father's not hearing it. He isn't really listening. He's too busy getting the party started. The old man is filled with sheer joy. My boy is back. He was lost, he was found, he was given up for dead. Now he's alive, and the party kicks off in full swing. And Jesus is telling us this is what God is like. He's ecstatic over the return of his lost sons and daughters. He runs to meet them. Now that doesn't make repentance unnecessary, it makes repentance possible. Listen to Henry Nowen. He said, God is not the patriarch who stays home, doesn't move, and expects his children to come to him, apologize for their aberrant behavior, beg for forgiveness, and promise to do better. To the contrary, he leaves the house, ignoring his dignity by running toward them, pays no heed to apologies and promises of change, and brings them to the table richly prepared for them. In Romans 5.8, Paul says something very similar. Listen to this. The definitive proof of God's extravagant and compassionate love for us is that in Christ, he gave his very life for us while we still had our backs turned on him. That's what God is like. That's what grace is all about. God longed for us before we longed for him. He reached out to us before we reached out to him. The cross is not an afterthought with God. God's forgiving love is prior to everything that ever went wrong in your life and mine. This is why he tells us freely you received. Freely give. This love, this forgiveness, it's your birthright as a believer. You received it freely from Jesus Christ. He knew it was the only way to reach your heart, and it's the only way to reach me, to prove his unmistakable love for each and every one of us. And if you know that grace and you know what God had to do to reach you, he says, now give this radical love and forgiveness away to others as undeserving as you were. So what if God's church, his people, really believed in leading with love, leading with grace, and forgiving the way Jesus did. Jesus calls us to be instruments of his love to a world that desperately needs it. We're the body of Christ. We're the hands of feet in Jesus in a broken world. Christ is living in me and he's living in you and he's walking the earth today. We're called to be miracle workers, being walking, breathing definitions of God's advanced love and forgiveness. Now I started this story with the true story, started this message with the true story of Kim Fuch. And as we wrap up, I'd like to tell you the rest of her story. For years, Kim truly lived with hatred, bitterness, and anger. It consumed her. Besides living with constant pain in her body, she was wrapped with pain in her soul. Then one day, in a library in Saigon, she found a New Testament from which she learned about the love of Jesus Christ. And she decided she wanted to live for him and love him for the rest of her life. So Kim surrendered her life to Jesus Christ as her Savior. But she still struggled to forgive those who'd hurt her so deeply. Her story is told in a book called Fire Road. In that book, she compared the bitterness in her heart to an overflowing cup of black sludge. One day she said she heard the Lord say to her, Kim, you must pour out the black sludge, day by day, a bit at a time, until there's no more darkness there. Whenever that command seemed impossible, she just went back to God's instructions, day by day and a bit at a time. She admitted it wasn't easy. She said sometimes she, in moments of weakness, she would befriend her bitterness again, and she'd feel the black sludge rising in her soul. Eventually she noticed that the muck in the mire was receding. She could sense that God was filling her up with something really good, clear, perfectly pure water. She was becoming more like Jesus and how she loved and forgave others. Twour years after Kim's famous photograph, Americans saw another picture of the same girl, now a young woman posed by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was Veterans Day. As a child, it was a photo of Kim who brought home to Americans and the world the horrors of the Vietnam War. Today, Kim teaches a different lesson, a lesson about the healing power of forgiveness. She laid a wreath on the wall that day, and she told the crowd of warbred veterans this. As you know, I'm the little girl who was running to escape the napalm fire. I have suffered a lot from both physical and emotional pain. Sometimes I thought I could not live, but God saved my life and gave me faith and hope. Kim shared this message of healing and forgiveness with thousands of toughened war soldiers. Veterans Day. She publicly forgave the unknown pilot, whose load had scarred her skin and killed her two brothers. And at that moment, a lot of those tough warriors began to weep. But one veteran in particular was more deeply impacted than the others. His name was John Palmer. That's because Kim Fook was Palmer's worst nightmare. Palmer was 24 years old in 1972 in June, a gung ho helicopter pilot and operations officer in the waning months of the Vietnam War. His main job was to order Allied bombing strikes. The June 8th attack on Trang Bang was one of the strikes that Palmer had planned. South Vietnamese bombers smoothly dropped heavy explosives and napalm canisters over this village about 25 miles west of Saigon. But at breakfast the next morning, Plummer opens his military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and there on the front page is the photo I showed you at the beginning of the message, the children screaming in anguish as they walk away from the village of Trangbang. First, Plummer noticed the anguish expression on the boy because that boy was about his own son's age. Then behind the boy, he saw Kim Fuck. The jelly gasoline had burned off her clothes, her eyes were screwed shut, her mouth spread wide open in terror and incomprehensible pain, her arms flapping awkwardly, trying to deal with the excruciating burning on her arms and back. Before the strike on Kim's village, Plumber had been told twice there were no civilians in the village, only soldiers. Listen to him explain it. So this is when he sees this picture. It just knocked me to my knees. And that was when I knew I could never talk about this. I mean, how could I ever explain to people that I did everything I could to make sure there were no civilians? So after Vietnam, after the war ended, Plummer was tormented by that image. That picture haunted him when he was awake and when he was asleep. For decades, Plummer struggled with his conscience. He drank way too much trying to bury the pain. He burned through three marriages. He was desperately searching for God. And Plummer happened to be standing in the crowd that day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Kim spoke those words of forgiveness to the helicopter pilots and the soldiers who did this to her and her family. Plummer, upon hearing that, he scribbled a note and handed it to a police officer that said, Kim, I am that man. When the note reached Kim at the conclusion of the ceremony, she turned and saw Plummer. Listen to him describe it. She just opened her arms to me. I fell into her arms sobbing. All I could say was, I'm so sorry. I'm just so sorry. Kim patted Plummer's back and said to him, It's alright. I forgive. I forgive. Now there was no news photographer there that day to take that photo. The soldier now 49 years old, the child now 33, embracing and experiencing forgiveness. Plummer and Kim talked that day and prayed together for the next two hours. They became friends and stayed in constant communication. What's the moral of the story? Well, simply this there is no limit to the restoring love of God. On that bleak day when Kim lost her family and herself was engulfed in flames, she couldn't have predicted in a million years the unlikely outcome of her ordeal. That through a series of what appeared to be chance circumstances, she would come to know and experience the healing power of God's love and in turn become a conduit to share that love and forgiveness with thousands of others. And that ministry continues to this day. Listen to her challenge. She gave this in an interview to NPR. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful. Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days, but my heart is cleansed. If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself, can you? Forgiveness doesn't erase scars, but it can transform what the scars produce. Maybe it's time for you to invite God into your painful memories. God doesn't want you going through life ignoring it, stuffing it down. He wants you to discover the cause and find relief. He wants you to speak healing to the deepest parts of your life. So don't surrender your tomorrows to the unfair pains of yesterday. Begin the process today to pour out all that black sludge day by day, a bit at a time. Let's pray. Father, I just want to thank you for this day, for how you've led my heart all week. I can't help but thank God that there are people in this room who desperately needed to hear this. God, it's challenging to think about forgiving like Jesus because Jesus forgives in ways that we never do. We feel so entitled to our pain, so entitled to our anger, so self-righteous in demanding that other people do what we expect them to do. But Jesus, you preemptively forgave. You knew that that was the deepest need in the human heart to be loved and to be forgiven. And so you did that. And God, I realized that to do that, that's not something that naturally exists in me. That's something that's going to happen through supernatural means. It's going to be because you get such a grip on my life, and that my life becomes a reflection of your heart. So, God, the forgiveness that my friends, my enemies, that people need is not my forgiveness, it's your forgiveness. So the great forgiveness that you poured into my life, may it be so overwhelming and so overflowing that, God, it just flows through me to others. God, help me to take to heart this story of a young girl who had every reason to hate, who had every reason to sink into despair and bitterness and revenge. But God met the love of Jesus Christ and gave away forgiveness and love to people who were desperate to hear it. God, thank you for her example. And thank you, God, that that example continues to this day. That she continues to preach the message of forgiveness. That God, what you did in her heart, in a little girl who suffered so much pain, that God, if you can do that in her, you can do that in me too. There's nothing I've ever been through that's anything like that. But God, you can do that work in me. And God, for anybody who's here, who for some reason doesn't know you in a personal relationship, help them to realize that God, the forgiveness that they need to give to others is first something they need to receive from you. That they can just come to you and just say, God, I want you in my life. I realize, God, you've been taking the initiative all the time. You've been drawing me to yourself. You've been showing me your love and your forgiveness. And God, I just want to receive that now. I come to you confessing that I've lived life in a self-styled way. That God, I know I'm a sinner and I need to be forgiven. And so, God, do in me what I can't do for myself. Cleanse me from the inside out, make me a new person. Help me, God, to live for you and love you for the rest of my life. And God, as they do that, then help them to do business with their past, to be able to release those hurts that they cannot, those debts that they cannot reclaim, and to let go of the feelings that have ruled over their life and over their heart for many years. We just thank you, God, for being such a great God and for giving us away so that the past doesn't rule our future. That, God, we step into a future that's as bright as your promises. We thank you for all that in Jesus' name. Amen. God bless you all.