Sips from the Fountain
Learning to drink from Jesus, the Fountain of Living Water, isn’t as hard as I thought, especially when you just start with sips, and those will change everything.
Sips from the Fountain
Deep Drink: From Judgment to Joy: Embracing an Unoffendable Heart
What if embracing forgiveness could transform your life from the inside out? Join us as we delve into the liberating power of relinquishing judgment and how it can set you free from the prison of resentment. We start by uncovering the deeper layers of forgiveness and the biblical principles from Matthew and Hebrews, demonstrating how this act is not about condoning harmful behavior but about freeing ourselves and allowing God to take over the judgment. Listen to how this journey towards unoffendability, powered by the Holy Spirit, can fill our lives with love and light.
In the next segment, we contrast self-centeredness with an others-centered approach and discuss how unhealed heart issues can impact our relationships, especially within the church. Drawing from Scriptures in Luke, Romans, and Colossians, we emphasize the necessity of heart transformation over mere behavior modification. Through an inspiring anecdote about forgiveness and a recount of Stephen's martyrdom in Acts, we illustrate the incredible power of forgiveness and the perils of holding on to judgment and rage.
Finally, we explore the poignant difference between law and grace, sharing personal stories and scriptural insights from Ephesians and Galatians. Judgment breeds bitterness, but grace fosters encouragement and self-awareness. Through embracing grace, we align our hearts with God's truth, releasing the heavy burdens of unforgiveness. This heartfelt conversation encourages us to sow grace, live freely, and enjoy the peace and divine health that come from a heart transformed by forgiveness. Join us and renew your mind to truly live in the blessings of grace and love.
Hello everyone. It's such a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I wanted to just connect with you a moment about forgiveness and review a couple of things that we talked about in forgiveness in the first recording. To begin with, forgiveness has depth. It's very much deeper than we think when we say, oh, I forgive them, I forgive them.
Speaker 1:There's more to it than that, because forgiveness also implies that I have taken up an offense against the person who has hurt me, withheld from me, used me, abused me, rejected me, not nurtured me. So forgiveness means that these people owe me a debt. They should not have treated me this way. They should have seen me as a human being, not an object. Perhaps in almost everyone, somebody in their world fell short of what we perceived, that we feel like we needed in order to be loved, accepted and in order to flourish and grow. So, having said that, in looking at forgiveness, forgiveness is when I give to Jesus the right that I felt was mine to hold a judgment against someone, and a judgment has sin behind it. A judgment says I hate you for what you did or I hope you get what you deserve. That's vengeance. Judgment also says I look down on you, I resent you for what you withheld from me or did not give to me. So forgiveness is when I give to Jesus that right to hold a judgment against someone. I release them from the prison in which I've locked them until they pay me what they owe me. This does not mean that what they have done is right and that they now get to do the very same thing again. No, what it means is what they have done is now between them and God. He's in charge of judging them. He is in charge of whatever their journey is. I no longer have to be their judge. So I resign as their judge, jury, jailer and I unlock the jail cell that I've got them locked in and I give Jesus the key and I let Jesus do whatever he wants to with them. And then I get to leave the prison, because I will be in the prison with the one that I have imprisoned in a jail cell.
Speaker 1:So when I forgive and practice forgiveness on an ongoing basis, daily, I actually become unoffendable. Whether it's a car cutting me off or someone not acting like our child is as great as we know they are, I'm unforgivable unoffendable. So, having said that, we have talked about how it's illustrated in the last half of Matthew, chapter 18, with the unforgiving servant. So that one would be a good one to review. But for today we want to think about the difference between the sin that we inherited from Adam and those sinful impulses, like we are born in sin and our impulses are to walk in sin. So we're going to use the term flesh to indicate that part of us which gives birth to sins. These sins can only be dealt with by our taking the sinful choices to the cross, where Jesus's blood redeems us from this sin pattern and washes us from the acid of sin. So it's actually sinful to judge someone because Jesus said don't judge. Matthew, chapter seven, verse one. And then he goes ahead to open it up a little bit more in verse two. But Jesus does say do not judge, because in whatever way you judge, you will be judged, so it will come back to us. So yes, I was hurt and my dad traveled and didn't protect us, but yes, I did judge him for that because I felt he owed me a debt to be home and protect me me and my siblings from an untenable home environment.
Speaker 1:So forgiveness this is key is not behavior modification, it is sin eradication. Transformation indicates change from the inside out. I'm not trying to modify my behavior so that I am unoffendable and nonjudgmental. No, my sinful responses are confessed, repented of, taken to the cross and proclaimed dead. And I allow Father God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to transform me from the inside out so that out of me flows love and life, not based on the recipient but based on who I am. I'm full of love, full of light, full of life, because the Lord Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, has taken up residence within me. So in Hebrews 3.12, an illustration of this in the scripture it says Take care, brethren, lest there should be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart in falling away from the living God, in falling away from the living God, take care, brethren, lest there should be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart in falling away from the living God. So we are led to believe something different, and that is that life determines who we are and we're conditioned by the events in life that happen to us. So the effect of this philosophy is that it minimizes our own guilt.
Speaker 1:This approach eliminates the sin of Adam, the fleshly sin that colors everything that happens to us and how we respond to those situations. And it can be literally bizarre. For example, there was a girl who her mom said we're all to clean, all of us are going to clean our rooms, and so every child who cleans their room gets a popsicle. This girl did not clean her room. All the other children got a popsicle and she did not. But she judged her mother for not giving her a popsicle like everybody else got. You know the whole. Everybody gets a trophy thing.
Speaker 1:So she, the rest of her life, had a view of life that she would not get what everybody else got and that she would be left out. And because the sin had come up in her heart. And do you remember the scripture in Hebrews 12 that says beware unless any root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many be defiled. So a bitter root has an expectation on it. So her expectation was that she would be left out, not included, not a part of standing on the outside watching everybody else eat their popsicle. So her life was filtered through that expectation and she literally would draw it out of her environment. She would process all of her environment that way, whereas, if you ask somebody else when this happened to her, would you say that she was being left out and they would probably be like no, but she wore dark glasses and the dark glasses said I will be left out, and she literally projected it to other people.
Speaker 1:Another example is of a sick child who couldn't go out and play and watch his friends from a window and this he watched them and this set him up to process life from a standpoint of always being left out of various relationships. He actually later, when he was going through prayer, saw himself in an empty room alone, crouched in a back corner and through prayers of repentance actually even it got down to repenting for judging God for him being sick while everybody else got to play. So through prayers of repentance he was able to allow Jesus to come into that room and lead him out. So there are many philosophies of how to overcome some of these false beliefs about life, and the goal in some of these philosophies is to get people to a functioning level. Christians actually follow a much different road. Their road is one of forgiving, bringing their own sinful response to a difficult situation soul to maturity.
Speaker 1:We, basically, we are created in God's image. He is Father, son and Holy Spirit. We are body, soul and spirit spirit. So our personal spirit is the part of us that is filled with the Holy Spirit. When we are born again. We have to be born again because we are dead and we have to be brought to life. So when we we are born again, holy Spirit fills up our spirit and we have everything that we need pertaining to life and godliness within us. But why do we get clouded? Why do we think I'm not? I didn't get a popsicle in my whole life. That popsicle stick says what my life is like, or like me. Just take me, for example.
Speaker 1:My mother said that when I was born she said, susan, I felt like I was just going to be overwhelmed with this wonderful mother love. And she said I actually felt nothing for you when I saw you and you were the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. So what did Susan grow up believing that she was the ugliest thing anybody had ever seen. I remember standing in the mirror waiting on the school bus as a teenager and evaluating everything about me head to toe and agreeing Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. Who always was looking down at the ground, didn't have anything to say, just trying to hide and kind of melt into the wall in a room. That was me, because I thought I'm so ugly and I can't believe.
Speaker 1:People have to look at me and my pictures aren't ugly. In fact, my husband has taken childhood pictures of me and put them all in one of the hallways in our home. It's just lined with my little girl pictures. And I was a cutie, a real cutie. I was not ugly. So why? Um? So basically, what happens is that soul clouds the truth about who we are, because the soul believes you're ugly. The soul believes you're going to be left out. You'll never get a popsicle. The soul believes everybody else gets to play, but I have to be sick and I have to stay here and I'm just pitiful and sick and I'm just a victim. I'm a victim and all of it is victimization actually.
Speaker 1:So what God wants to do is bring us to maturity, and simply telling somebody about these things doesn't do anything, doesn't do a thing. Just to tell somebody about forgiveness, repenting and walking in truth Transforms us. I repent, I confess the sin, I repent of the sin, I pray and take it to the cross, I release it, I let it go, I let the people go and then I begin to walk into the truth and that truth transforms us. So the fact is, when I thought I was so ugly, I was incredibly self-focused. I thought about myself and what people were thinking and what they were saying and what they were seeing. But as God healed me and I forgave my mom, I forgave all over the place lots of things then at that point I didn't think about me anymore.
Speaker 1:There are two ways to walk into a room. One is to walk into that room and go here I am, everybody's looking at me, here I am. The other way is to walk in a room is there you are, there you are. I'm so happy to see you. You're here and there you are and there you are. I've got to talk to that person and that person. When you're healed up, you walk into the room and you fulfill the scripture where the Lord says that he calls us to love the Lord, our God, with all of our heart and with all of our soul and with all of our mind. He says that is the great and foremost commandment. And second is, like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And on those two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets. Isn't that incredible? So when you walk into the room, a healed individual, what you will find is you are loved, you are loved and everything's not all about you.
Speaker 1:So why do we as a church often continue in weakness and ineffectiveness, despite the fact that we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit? And in my opinion, it's related to the fact that the heart is not dealt with. An example is church hurt. I hear church hurt all the time. This church hurt me, that church hurt me when I had this need, nobody even reached out in the church. Well, do you know what I found over these decades? We expect the church to fill the void in family that we never had, but because we have an expectation of family based on hurt, that expectation is a filter and a draw for the church to treat us like family did. It can be positive or negative.
Speaker 1:So consider the scripture that says they have healed the brokenness of my people, superficially saying peace, peace, but there is no peace. Behavior modification is a superficial healing of brokenness. We get to the heart and that root of bitterness toward family springs up, causes trouble and defiles the environment of our new church family. We have expectations that they won't be there for me or they don't see me or they objectify me, or they don't see me or they objectify me, or all the different things that we form, the judgments that we form. So there are a number of scriptures that deal with this issue.
Speaker 1:One is a marvelous scripture in Luke, which says the spirit of the Lord is upon me Now. This was a prophecy in the Old Testament. Jesus is declaring it about himself in Luke, chapter four, verses 18 and 19. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to the, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed and to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. That's what Jesus looks like in me too and you.
Speaker 1:Then, in Romans 12, 2, the scripture says and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable. Also, the scripture says therefore, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil, desire and greed, which amounts to idolatry. Don't lie to one another, since you stripped off the old self with its evil practices. That's Colossians, chapter 3, verses 5 through 9. And also Colossians 3 and verse 12 says so as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
Speaker 1:So what I want to point out very quickly is another piece, and that is that an example of when my brother taught about forgiveness. He had a man that came up to him after the message and he had not spoken to his mother in 25 years. He saw it, his unforgiveness, his 50% of the fight, and he said to my brother I'm going to call my mother this afternoon. So it's all about what do I do with what is in my heart? And one of my favorite favorite examples is Stephen in the book of Acts, and Stephen basically well, this is what it says he just has given this stunning sermon. Like it's pages long in the book of Acts, acts 7. And so Stephen preaches it.
Speaker 1:Now the Pharisees and all those folks are listening. The scripture says in verse 54, when they heard these things, they were overtaken with violent rage filling their souls and they gnashed their teeth at him. So what we see right here instead of them walking with forgiving, clean, wholesome hearts, they held it against Stephen when he said something they didn't agree with. So they gnashed their teeth and they were going after Stephen. See their judgmental hearts. But Stephen, overtaken with great faith, was full of the Holy Spirit. He fixed his gaze into the heavenly realm and saw the glory and splendor of God and Jesus, who stood up at the right hand of God. Look, stephen, said I can see the heavens opening and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God to welcome me home.
Speaker 1:His accusers covered their ears with their hands and screamed at the top of their lungs to drown out his voice. Have you ever done that in an argument? Have you ever done that in an argument? Talked really loudly so the other person couldn't get be heard, and then the other person gets louder and then you get louder. That's the heart of a pharisee. Then they pounced on Stephen and threw him outside the city walls to stone him.
Speaker 1:His accusers, one by one, placed to their outer garments at the feet of a young man named Saul of Tarsus. As they hurled stone after stone at him, stephen prayed Our Lord, jesus, accept my spirit into your presence. He crumpled to his knees and shouted in a loud voice Get them. God? No, he didn't, he did not shout that. Stephen said our Lord, don't hold this sin against them. And he died. Do you know that, saul of Tarsus? Stephen forgave him along with the others. He let him go. He said what they're doing to me? God is between you and them. And God said, oh okay, All right, I'll be in charge. And them. And God said, oh okay, all right, I'll be in charge of them.
Speaker 1:So Saul of Tarsus was the chief persecutor of the church and he was on his way on the road to Damascus to persecute the Christians and on the way a blinding light shone upon him and it literally blinded his eyes. And Jesus asked him why are you persecuting me? He appeared to Saul. Well, I'm telling you what Saul believed after that. And God changed his name Saul to Paul, and Paul is the one who wrote all those letters in the New Testament. He became the mouthpiece of what we have, of a lot of the New Testament.
Speaker 1:I don't know what to say about that. Stephen, let him go. He didn't hold it against him. And God said okay, I'll take him. And God saved him.
Speaker 1:Have you ever thought of the difference in my heart? Me wanting? Let's say, I don't like some government official. Let's say it's the President of the United States. I don't like him and I don't like what he's doing in the White House and how he's flaunting evil and sin. Let's say that we've decided that. Well, we have two paths we can take. We can say he needs to get what he deserves, or we can say I forgive him and how he is being. The authority in our country is between him and God. I let him go. My other option is to say that I forgive him and, lord God, would you bring salvation, sanctification and transformation to him? Which one do you think would change our country the most? A forgiving heart or a demanding my rights heart? See the difference. Jesus actually said Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.
Speaker 1:In Mark 11, jesus replied let the faith of God be in you. Listen to the truth. I speak to you. If someone says to this mountain, with great faith and having no doubt mountain be lifted up and thrown into the midst of the sea, and believes that what he says will happen, it will be done. This is the reason I urge you to boldly believe for whatever you ask in prayer. Believe that you have received it and it will be yours. And when you ever you stand praying.
Speaker 1:If you find that there is sin in your you or offense against another person, you go to them and you make it right. Or you confess your own sin and you deal with it and make it right. Isn't that interesting, very, very interesting. So I think one of the things that I really also wanted to mention to you is that difference in love and grace. If I drop that page, this is from a man named Jack Frost and he just gave us this little handout, which is wonderful. It's based on Luke, chapter six, and he shows the difference in law and grace. And these are some of the differences.
Speaker 1:Law is all about what is right and fair. That is not right that they did that to me. I'm church. That's not fair what they did to me. They all got popsicles and I didn't get one. That's law. Grace is an undeserved gift. God says to me I forgive you, susan, you're forgiven. And I say to the person that didn't do me right I'm giving you an undeserved gift of forgiveness. You don't deserve to be forgiven. But I don't traffic in what's right and fair. I traffic in giving you the undeserved gift that I received. I received it and I freely give it to you.
Speaker 1:Satan traffics in law. Satan traffics in law. God traffics in grace. Satan is the prosecutor. Jesus is our advocate. So picture this. We know Satan has access to talk to God if he wants to and God allows it.
Speaker 1:And Satan will say Susan did you see what she did? She held it against the church, that she had that church hurt from back in the 1980s. Do you see that she's got unforgiveness in her heart? Susan does in her heart. Susan does and Jesus goes. I died for Susan's sin and my blood covers her. I forgive her. That's what he says. And then Father God goes. Oh, I don't even see that sin. So Satan's the prosecutor. Jesus is our advocate.
Speaker 1:Satan is negative. God is positive. Satan is negative. He gives us negative thoughts. Those can be negative thoughts that we speak over other people, and one of those things to me is reading between the lines, assigning people motives for how they treated me. Assigning people that, oh, I know what they're doing, that's what they actually. That's not discernment. Picking out somebody else's faults and deciding that they have evil motives and impure character and mean character Wow, I would say, get out of their garage, honey, and go where you got your car parked in your own garage and look at your own stuff. So negative thoughts. The accuser of the brethren, satan, is negative. So when I'm accusing people and I'm saying, well, look how they're acting, look how they're treating, wow, have fun with that. And then the accuser accuses. And you can look at these things in Ephesians 4, verses 26 and 27, and Galatians 5, 19 to 21. Now, god is positive, Positive thoughts.
Speaker 1:I am a daughter of the master of the universe. The Lord flows through me. I know love, I understand love and I do love. I am the head, not the tail. I have within me all that I need pertaining to life and godliness. God did not put me in this place in my life to harm me. He holds all things for me. He withholds nothing from me. He's holding all things for me. The Holy Spirit is the comforter. The comforter comforts. He has not called me to be a trash inspector. He has called me to be a treasure seeker. And those things that I am speaking about, that other person am I seeing the treasure in them? That's Holy Spirit. You can look at scriptures in Ephesians 4, 29 through 32, and Galatians 5, 22 and 23,. And Galatians 6, 22 and 23 and Galatians 6, verses 7 and 8.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to talk about what happens when we sow judgment. In Galatians, chapter 6, the scripture says don't be deceived, god is not mocked. Whatever you sow, that you're going to reap. So if you sow judgment, accusatory thoughts and words, criticism, fault finding, blaming others, demanding rights, demanding justice, rehearsing wounds that's sowing judgment. And I've seen people, decades later, still going down the list of their victimization and martyrdom and how they were hurt and going down the list and trying to find the next person to say their list to. That is not attractive. Unforgiveness and bitterness rejects and devalues others. Now, if you sow grace, this is what it looks like you have edifying thoughts and words. Edifying means lifting up Encouragement, seeing your own faults first.
Speaker 1:You sow grace, you yield rights, pronounce innocence, release wounds we talked about that. You take them to the cross Forgiveness, take it to the cross and it's replaced with love and accepts and values others. When you sow grace, you reap the law and release a self-imposed curse. This is Psalm 109, 17 to 19 and verse 29. If you reap the law and you release a self-imposed curse of resentment and bitterness, hardness and anger, walls and a heart of stone unforgiving relationships, pride, bondage, anxiety, stress-related disease, a wounded, shattered life. There is no love in law Romans 7.5.
Speaker 1:You reap grace and release God's blessing, which is 1 Peter 3, 9 to 13. Innocence is restored, gentleness and meekness, transparency, openness, forgiving relationships, humility, liberty, rest, peace, divine health, healing and wholeness. Mercy triumphs over judgment James 2, 13. So once again, let's pray, lord. We just thank you today that you have taken forgiveness out of our hands. All we do is choose to forgive and then you empower it in our lives and you set us free from the acid and pain of unforgiveness and sin in our own life, which is like drinking an acid. So, lord, today we see that we have been out of touch with our own hearts in so many ways. We do want to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We no longer want to live in bondage to lies we believed about us or others that do not line up with your truth. We put our yes on the table for you to open our hearts, to know you with our hearts and not our minds. Thank you for being here. I bless you with stunning revelation in Jesus name.