174- Correcting Our Thinking on Forgiveness- with Dr. Bruce Hebel

Welcome to Podcast 174. Today I’m with Dr. Bruce Hebel, author of the incredible, life altering book Forgiving Forward: Experience the Freedom of the Gospel through the Power of Forgiveness.

All close followers of Jesus Christ know that we should forgive others, but there are things about forgiveness that are about as clear as mud to us. 

In this episode of SFTP, we talked with Bruce about the common misconceptions that are out there about what forgiveness really means, and how to actually do it.

Among the misconceptions are the following ones:

-forgiveness is not a process (it’s a decision)

-to forgive someone, there’s no need to go to that person and tell him/her. 

-Forgiveness is transacted with the Father. See Mark 11:25-26

-forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation

-forgiveness is not salvific; but, forgiveness of the wounds of others determines how the Father acts toward us in this life (Matthew 6:12, 14-15)

And more...

Feedback and/or questions welcomed!

For Poimen Ministries, its staff, ministries, and focus, go to poimenministries.com. To contact Poimen Ministries, email us at strongerpastors@gmail.com. May the Lord revive His work in the midst of these years!

Transcript

174- Correcting Our Thinking on Forgiveness- with Bruce Hebel

Welcome to Strength for Today's Pastor, conversations with current senior pastors and leaders which will strengthen and help you in your pastoral ministry. And now, here's your host, Bill Holdridge of Poyman Ministries. Welcome to podcast 174 of Strength for Today's Pastor.

Today I'm with Dr. Bruce Hebel, author of the book Forgiving Forward: Experience the Freedom of the Gospel through the Power of Forgiveness. So all close followers of Jesus Christ know that we should forgive others, but there are things about forgiveness that to many of us are about as clear as mud. Today I'm going to be talking with Bruce about the common misconceptions that are out there about what forgiveness really means and how to actually do it.

So really good to have you back, Bruce. Welcome to the program. Thanks, Bill.

Glad to be back. Love you guys. Yeah, amen.

Me too, to you. So I'm going to start the ball rolling here, Bruce. In Mark chapter 11, on Tuesday of Passion Week, the apostle Peter pointed out to Jesus that the fig tree that he'd cursed the day before had withered away, dried up.

Jesus then talked to them about having faith and about believing prayer, and this is what he says to his disciples, Mark 11, 23, Have faith in God, for assuredly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, be removed and be cast into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them. And then he goes on, it's still the same subject, prayer, and he goes on to say this, Mark 11, 25, And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.

But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses. Your Father in heaven will forgive you if you, having something against someone else, forgive him, but if you do not forgive, your Father will not forgive your trespasses. These are hard sayings indeed.

They are. And you've experienced it, I've experienced it, this passage and others like it are sometimes, maybe even often, glossed over and explained away by pastors. So Bruce, you're the man that we're going to talk to about this and other difficult forgiveness related issues because I think it's so important and it's actually a freeing concept that is going to be brought forward, very, very freeing, which is the reason for the subtitle of the book.

So you and your wife, Toni, are the authors of the best thing I've ever read on the subject of forgiveness. Helped me a lot personally, Forgiving Forwards, the title of the book. You've both given your ministry lives completely to advancing what you call a forgiveness revolution.

Your ministry is taken off big time, yet there still remains much confusion about what it means to forgive others. So much to clear up. So Jesus is obviously the divine expert on forgiveness and how to do it, but I consider... Pretty much everything else.

Yeah, and everything else, yeah. But I consider you, Bruce, to be a human expert on this subject, so I thought it'd be a good idea today to briefly tackle some of the leading misconceptions about forgiveness. Yeah, so let's just start off with an easy one, right? The Mark 11 passage.

It's simple. Let's don't ease into this, are we, Bill? That's awesome. Okay, that's good.

That's good. Because the same thing is communicated in the Lord's Prayer as well. Absolutely.

And there's a big, big controversy, right? People think, does this mean you're losing your salvation, is what many people are seeing at that, which it cannot mean that. It cannot mean that. Because there's too many other passages of Scripture.

You have to interpret Scripture with Scripture, and the whole tenor of the Scriptures is that when you put your faith in God and you are redeemed, he says, I will be with you always. You will be mine forever. No one can snatch you out of the Father's hand.

And some people try this way. Well, he can, but he, the Father can do that. Well, I think no one may even include the Father, if you think about no one, right? So what is he saying here? He's not saying this is your eternal security is not at threat, at risk here.

But what I think he's talking about here is eternal forgiveness and salvific forgiveness. And then you have relational forgiveness, right? The way we deal with our wounds affects our relationship with God. So what God is saying here, you've got great, we have great power, we great authority and maybe even, or maybe access to great power through prayer.

I don't want to claim anything is mine. It's not mine. But through prayer, I get access to God answering my prayer with his power and his wisdom and his strength.

So we can pray. And as long as it's in the name of Jesus and consistent with the will of God, God will answer prayer. He talks about that in John 15.

But if we don't forgive, if there's a wound in our heart that we've not dealt with since the last time we talked to God in prayer, I think this patch is saying that God doesn't want to talk to us. Our relationship is broken. An example I'll use, one of our sons, when he was late teens, became rebellious.

We called his walkabout. He was doing a walkabout. And he was really hard at home and he was disrespectful to his mom and he tried coming at me, but it didn't work.

And so he went after mom because he knew that's how he could get me and intuitively. And he was just wrestling with the immaturity. He was wrestling with his faith, being a pastor's kid and all the wounds he had and all this.

But he became intentable for him to continue to live at home. So I did what I call remove the option of living at home from him because I had to protect his mom and the family. And I told him at the day, I said, son, I love you.

You're my son. You'll never not be my son. But you don't have the privilege of being my son for now.

You're just not getting the benefit. You're not going to get to enjoy the benefit because you've inconsistent with my heart toward my wife. And the covenant I have with your mom is more significant and sacred than the relationship I have with you through biology.

So covenant trumps biology. With Christ, with God, there's a covenant and a biology, a relationship. So the priority relationship in our family was me and Tony, husband and wife is priority relationship.

Children come out of that and eventually they move off into their own. But this remains in the Godhead. The priority relationship is the father and the son.

Not the father and us. And so when we don't forgive, we're actually dishonoring the sacrifice of Jesus that paid for our sins, that gave us the forgiveness and allowed us to be restored to relationship with God. The blood of the covenant that paid for that, that we celebrated over Easter, and the death and resurrection.

That's the core of the gospel. But it's so that, for instance, for forgiveness of sins be proclaimed in his name to all the nations. So there's a whole concept of the blood of Jesus paying for the sins of the world, 1 John 2.2. So when we don't forgive, we're dishonoring that.

And God disciplines us and it impacts the quality of our relationship. Our sonship doesn't end, but our access to the benefits of that sonship is severely hindered because we're not living in consistency with the gospel and the cross and the blood of Jesus' impact on us and on them. So what he's talking about here is God takes our forgiveness and our unforgiveness incredibly serious.

I mean, it's interesting. He's given all this power, this value of prayer, power of prayer. But he goes, but there's a GFI.

We're tripping the breaker box on the access to that power when we don't forgive. Now, the power is still coming to the but it's not going through it to the rest of you because there's a problem. There's a default that has happened.

And so God disciplines us to bring us into alignment with the way he thinks about the gospel, about the blood of Jesus, and the efficacy of that over not only our sins, but also the sins of the world, as 1 John 2.2 says. So the example that you've given with your son is such a good one. Your relationship with your son will not and has not ever changed.

But the way that that relationship is working changes if he treats your wife, Toni, in a... So like in the... The quality shifts, right? The quality shifts, yeah. Can I do a little caveat here? He did leave. He did move.

He was gone. And about 11 months later, or no, nine months later, God brought him to the end of himself, and he came back, and he got reconciled with the family, and he's walking with God. He's a worship leader.

He's married, kids, doing awesome. So again, that's another part of it. The moment we forgive, right? Then God restores that relationship.

And in the same way with Aaron, he was restored. And he gives us permission to tell the story, so we're not... I'm not doing the pastor thing and dissing on the kids like, you know, happens sometimes. I couldn't imagine you doing that.

Yeah, that's so cool, because here we have a situation where he did come back, and the discipline worked. Your discipline worked, and the divine discipline through you worked, which is what our Heavenly Father does to us when we refuse to forgive the wounds and the wounder of the wounds that we've received. Absolutely, yeah.

And it's a gracious thing to do. We think it's hard. It's not.

It's gracious, because it's never okay. It's never good for us to live inconsistent with who we are in him. And so he brings the discipline in order to line ourselves up with him, and our joy comes out of obedience.

Yeah, I go back to the Lord's prayer, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Oftentimes that's misunderstood as being a request of some type. It's not a request, it's a statement.

And it's also counterintuitive for us most of the time. It was for me for many, many, many years. Yeah, that's a good little prayer.

That's a good little thing. Yeah, God, forgive us. But in our minds, we're thinking, okay, God, use the standard I use in dealing with the people who wound me as a standard you use to relate to me, instead of the opposite.

Lord, help me use your standard to forgive others. He's going, no, use my standard in how you relate to me, which is a little unsettling, right? So when that became more clear to me through what you've written and conversations and so on, I settled into where you're at. I just settled into the idea that I really like it this way.

I really do. I want the Father to treat me commensurately with the way I treat others. I do want it in the spirit, in my spirit.

I don't want it in my flesh, but it's such a great arrangement. And the freedom that we experience when we actually do forgive is worth so much, mostly because we have this union with the Father that is so priceless, precious. Yeah, yeah.

And that's where our joy comes from. It's hard for many people to correct. It was hard for me to get my head around that when it finally dawned on me.

But it really, we want what God wants. And it also puts a standard pretty high up there. It's like, okay, whatever I do to them, he's going to do to me.

Okay, I'm going to treat them really well now. Yeah, years ago when my son, who's now a pastor, and so he's repented. So same story as your son Aaron, but he's doing great.

Pastor's kids have it rough. Yeah, he's doing great. But when he was in junior high, we were playing basketball in the front yard, and I'm dribbling the ball, getting ready to drive the hoop.

And he started being snarky like a junior high kid can be. And I got angry. And so I'm still dribbling the ball.

I haven't started my drive yet, and I'm plotting his demise. What am I going to do to get back at him for this? And I'm still dribbling, and the Lord speaks to me. He says to me, Bill, do you want me to treat you right now the way you're thinking about treating your son? And I said, no, Father, I want you to be merciful and gracious to me.

And I got the message. I mean, I got the memo real clear that the way I was going to treat him was going to have a direct effect on the way the Father would treat me in that particular situation. So I thought of the beatitude, blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

It's the same thing. It's the same family of truth. And that was great, but that was before I heard the fuller forgiveness message.

But I'm just guessing you didn't let him score. I'm just thinking, you may have still... I don't know what happened. I mean, he was shorter than I was then.

Now he's about 6'4", so there's no chance of beating him now. Yeah, I got that. You know, C.S. Lewis had a classic line that said, everyone thinks forgiveness is a grand idea until they have something to forgive.

And it's a bit of a different story. But there's power in it, and we're seeing it built every day and all over the world. We just see the breakthroughs in people's lives when they choose to forgive.

Yeah, that load that's been on them and the prison they've been delivered to is gone. Okay, so let's tackle another one of these. So here we go.

To forgive someone, there's no need to go to that person and tell him or her that about which you're forgiving them. We don't forgive them personally, horizontally. It's transacted with the Father, as in Mark 11.

It's done in prayer. Yeah, and I think the way you were stating it is, these are the paradigm shifts we need to make. The misconception is, you got to go make it right with them.

You got to go talk to them. You got to go tell them that you have forgiven them. Which, I mean, there's so many train wreck relationships because of someone doing that.

Forgiveness is not about me and them. It's about me and the Father. It's about me aligning myself up with what Jesus did for me on the cross.

Clearly, forgiveness doesn't say what they did was okay. It says it was wrong, but Jesus paid for it. The reason we say don't go to them unless God specifically tells you to, and sometimes He does, but most of the time, that's in a really tight, close relationship, like a marriage relationship or a familial relationship that's close, but there's some parameters around that even.

God has to make that clear, but unless He does, don't go tell them because forgiveness and reconciliation aren't the same thing. I think that's what's driving that. People think, if I forgive, I have to reconcile, so I forgive, and then I have to go do something to bring them in line with my forgiveness, which that's kind of outside my job description.

Reconciliation takes place when the wounded party forgives and the wounding party repents. In other words, repentance means to change your mind, not your behavior. I can't force them to repent, and if they've not repented and I forgive them and I go say, I forgive you, they'll reject my forgiveness, and it's another wound I'm going to have to deal with.

One way that helps me understand it is that in God's relationship with us, before the foundation of the world, Ephesians 1 tells us, God chose to forgive us, and for us, 2,000 years before we were born, God forgave us and paid for our debt on the cross. So 1 John 2 says, He is the satisfaction, full payment for our sins, but not for ours only, but also the sins of the world. So that forgiveness was established.

When someone repents, God doesn't say, let me go think about it. I've been waiting for you to repent. Now I've got to go decide if I'm going to forgive.

No, the decision's already been made. It's predetermined. So if I come to the table and I forgive and I sit there, that's kind of what God has done with us in the gospel.

Now the question I want to ask, I don't know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone. Now maybe somebody out there knows someone who came to God, who came to Christ, came to faith without someone telling them about Jesus. Now there are examples out in Africa and remote parts when God gives a revelation and Paul knocked off a horse, all that.

But most of the time, with a holy God who is totally holy and motivated and has already provided for the forgiveness, for reconciliation to take place, God uses a mediator to bring that person to repentance, to understand their need for repentance and bring them into reconciliation. Well, if that's true of the holy God, then what chance do we have of doing it on our own? So our counsel is you forgive what they did was wrong. Jesus paid for it.

You sit at the table and you let God decide when to send the Holy Spirit to draw them to repentance. Can't tell you how many people we've coached to forgive that within days, sometimes within hours. Sometimes you calculate the timeline and all that stuff.

It's like right at the time of forgiveness, God brings repentance and the person reaches out and gives. Now, one last thing before we move to the next one. There's some people who will argue, say, well, Jesus said, if you come to the altar and you realize someone has something against you, go and make it right.

Leave your offering, go make it right. Well, that's for the person in repentance side. If you come to the altar and you realize that you have something against someone, leave it and go make it right.

No, if you get there and someone believes you've wounded them, you go make it right. So the initiation of the reconciliation is primarily in scripture given to the one who's done the wounding, not the one who's been wounded. But the initiation of the forgiveness, he calls us to forgive first before he calls them to repent.

That's great clarification right there. So in my own experience, my father was an alcoholic. He finally got sober after 40 years of drinking, lived the last 27 years of his life as a sober Christian man.

He was a completely different person. But while he was still drinking, he was doing some things that I as the second oldest in the family, but basically the father figure in a single parent home, in a sense, I didn't like how he was handling my younger brother who I was trying to disciple as a believer, a new believer. And so I went over to him and really what I wanted was a better relationship with him, with my dad.

But I was angry. So I asked him if I could speak with him. And so I, we went onto the back patio and what I started to do was tell him about how I had forgiven him for this and that and this and that.

And he got angry himself, his face turned red, the veins in his neck were starting to pop out. And it wasn't, it wasn't a good situation. And I didn't know what was going to happen next, but the Holy Spirit, he must've put a brake on my heart completely because it just turned around in an instant.

I said, dad, what I really want to say is I love you. You're my father and I want to have a good relationship with you. And that was it.

And he calmed down, the facial expression changed, the veins receded and all of these things took place. And later when he finally got sober, he told me that he always had felt loved and supported by me as, as one of his sons. So that was great, but it was a train wreck almost.

I mean, it could have really destroyed the relationship. Yeah. Because if they've not repented, then they're going to defensive.

And defensive people get aggressive. And they create new, they lash back out. So you're actually almost asking for trouble when you do that.

So the other thing that I've, oftentimes, another reason you shouldn't do it is oftentimes I'm going to go tell them, in fact, I wrote a letter to a pastor years ago, who I thought, and God had confronted me in, it's part of our forgiveness story. When I learned this, I thought I'd forgiven a guy, I wrote him a letter and told him all that I forgave him for. But in the letter, I really was shaming him in the letter.

And I was literally calling him to repentance. So there was massive manipulation in what I was doing. Even though I didn't know it at the time.

And part of it's because my torment was there. Part of it is because I just misunderstood forgiveness like so many people do. And it did not, he did not respond well at all.

In fact, after God confronted me about that, I actually wrote him a second letter, apologizing for the tone of the other letter and just saying that, I just want you to know that I want God to bring blessing over you. And I'm sorry for the hurt in my relationship. And I owned it and I left it.

And his response was somewhat less than gracious. But I was okay with that at the time. Because that now, it's no, that wasn't between me and him, it was between him and God.

He's got to deal with his own stuff on that part. And so either his, the things he needs to repent of, the things he needs to forgive me for. So yeah, it gets a mess when you try that.

So the faith thing is coming to sitting at the table and letting the Holy Spirit deal with it. And one last thing I'll say before we shift to the next subject is if they, if the Holy Spirit goes to bring them to repentance and they reject him, they won't come to him because not all, God is not willing he should perish, but all should come to repentance, but not all come to repentance. So if they'll reject the Holy Spirit, it's a small thing to reject you.

So send the big gun of, don't go and then send the big gun, send the big gun, let him handle it. He's better at it. That's good.

Okay. So we've been talking about the misconception that there has to be a horizontal forgiveness statement made to the person who wounded me. This is done in prayer primarily, and we leave it to the Lord to initiate the reconciliation process.

So let's go back to the reconciliation subject. So there's another misconception is that if I forgive, and you mentioned it already, if I forgive, that means I mandatorily must go right back into the middle of that relationship. So talk about that because this, this one is huge.

People will not initiate with the father forgiveness because they fear that. They fear going back into that very traumatic, very caustic, even dangerous relationship at times. Well, if you can forgive, but if they don't repent, you're not reconciled.

Right. Right. Reconciliation is two alienated parties coming into agreement, and we're not in agreement.

And so some people say, if someone's not repented, you can't trust them. Well, I say, of course you can trust them. You can trust them to do the wrong thing because they're thinking wrongly.

Yeah. Yeah. By definition, in John 2, 42-ish, I don't remember exactly the address, but in John 2, Jesus, it says, Jesus did not entrust himself to men because he knew what was in their heart.

In other words, he knew what he was doing. He knew what their intentions were. He knew all that, so he could read it.

And he didn't give them access to who he was. He didn't give them access to his heart. But if you read the gospels, the rest of John, consistently throughout the rest of the epistle of the gospel, he considered, he, Jesus invested himself into those in which he did not entrust himself.

So he wasn't reconciled, but he was still blessing. While we're still enemies, he blesses with the greatest blessing of all, the death of his son. So, but we don't get that blessed, we don't get the relationship until we repent.

So I say this way, just because I forgive you for hitting me in the face, doesn't mean next time you swing your fist, I'm not moving my head. Right? You don't, my forgiveness of you does not give you permission to continue to wound me. That's where people are stuck because they don't realize that I can forgive someone without having been reconciled.

That's another matter. That's the thing that needs to be overcome. One lady came to Tony early on, relatively early on, when I say early on about forgiving forward, as we're developing it and practicing it.

And she had been molested by her uncle when she was a child. And she forgave her uncle, a great breakthrough. Then at the end, she says, but I have a question, how do I relate to him? My daughter is the same age I was when he did what he did to me.

I said, and Tony brought me into the room so we could have this conversation and still wrestling with how to all the nuances of these things. And I said, under no circumstances, do you let your daughter in the same room with him alone? Now that doesn't mean you don't let her in the same room with him. You just don't let it happen alone.

You don't give him access to that for two reasons. One, it's not healthy for your daughter, but it's not good for him. It's not good for him to do those things.

So, you know, the scripture says, let him who steals, steal no more. Why? Because it's not good for someone to steal. It's not good for the person who steals to steal.

So you don't facilitate someone's sin, sinful behavior, or the wounding that he do. You don't let them continue. So there's certain people in my life that we have forgiven, but I don't have a relationship with them because they've not repented.

Now I'll bless them. I'll help them any way that we can, but they're not getting access to who I am. They're not getting access to my heart.

We're not buddy-buddy. We're not vacationing together because it's not a safe place for us. But my heart is always going to be for reconciliation because that's its heart.

But God has to initiate that and facilitate that and actually actuate that for it to happen. I can't do that. So I can forgive, and I can walk in freedom, and they're still in torment.

They're still struggling. They're still in their unrepentant state. And most of the time, here's another aspect, most of the time the people who wound us are suffering with the same wounds from someone else.

Wounded people wound people often in the way in which they have been wounded. So the more we forgive, the more we may not be reconciled, but our heart shifts toward them. In fact, Bill, when we're coaching someone, and they ask this question about, how do I relate to that person? I always say, it's a great question.

But let's deal with this after you forgive. So if I forget to bring it up, remind me. People forgive, and they bless because blessing is a part of forgiveness.

If you can't bless, you haven't forgiven. They never ask the question again. Because when you're in torment, and you have not dealt with the wound, there's a fear, and there's a self-protection that takes place.

In fact, we say if you create a boundary, and boundaries are healthy. I'm not saying boundaries aren't good. Sometimes it's appropriate to set a boundary.

But if you set the boundary before you forgive, it'll be self-protective, and it'll be punitive. There you go. But if you set the boundary after you forgive, it will be redemptive and for their benefit.

Yeah, great way to put it. Love that. So I'm never supposed to protect me.

That's somebody else's. That's God's job. But my job is to be an instrument of His grace in protecting others.

Particularly the ones who wounded me, right? Bless those who bless you. Bless and curse not. Do good to those who despitefully use you.

If your enemy's hungry, feed him. Give him something to drink. Okay, so that's great.

What a wonderful way to respond to that whole idea. Forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. So let's go to another misconception of the forgiveness issue, and the way we practice forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not a process. It's a decision. This is something that you teach, and you said in your book.

So talk about that. Absolutely. People think it's a process.

It's going to take me a long time to forgive this person. It may take me years to overcome this pain in my heart because of what they did. So it's going to be painful, and it's going to be enduring, and it's going to take a long time.

But it's not a process. It's a decision. Go ahead.

That drives me crazy when I hear that. It's like, really? We have gone secular mode in that. I think the flesh thinks it's going to take a while.

In fact, if you really go to all secular models of forgiveness and you deal with a lot of Christian models, what are called Christian models of forgiveness, there really is no hope. You're really not going to get over this. There are certain things, you're never going to get over it.

You just do all you can to work toward forgiving and learn how to cope, and eventually it will just not hurt as much. You'll learn to walk with that limp and not even notice it. But that's not the gospel.

Is salvation a process or is it a decision? Is it a transaction, rather? It's a transaction. There is a specific moment in space and time when someone who puts their faith in Jesus, believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, and proclaims the Lord Jesus Christ, and believes in their heart that Jesus rose from the dead, Romans 10. There's a specific point in time when they move from darkness to light, from death to life.

That's the gospel. It's not a quasi, we're sort of life, we're sort of death, we're in this zombie apocalypse kind of a mode that it's almost like some people talk about. You're literally shifting from being in Adam to in Christ, from being dead to being alive.

It's been said by multiple people that Jesus didn't come to make good men better, to make dead men live. There is a transactional aspect to salvation. The blood of Jesus is applied and the deed to our life shifts from us and Satan and us to God.

The same thing happens with forgiveness. It's a transaction because forgiveness, by definition, is applying the blood of Jesus as payment in full for every wound I ever have or will suffer. It is a transaction.

It is a choice. I choose to forgive. In fact, when we're coaching people and if someone says, Lord, I want to forgive, I stop them.

I want a Mercedes, I chose a Toyota, and so I drive a Toyota. Wanting and choosing are not the same thing. Lord, help me.

No, he's already promised to help you. Stop asking him to do what he promised he'd already do. This is you choosing.

Lord, from my heart, I choose to forgive this person for these things, and you list the wounds. I think one thing that confuses the process versus decision-making is that we're trying to forgive people, but we don't forgive people. We forgive wounds.

Now, the wounds are associated with a person. Jesus said, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.

The person inflicted the wound, but it's the wound we're forgiving. I forgive this person for these things, and they're transactional. I declare they are no longer my debt.

I transfer the debt to the cross. We're transferring whatever the wound is to the cross of Jesus, where it's now between them and God, not between us and them. It really is an important distinction that it is a choice.

It's a transaction. I wonder how much of that hesitancy or that concept that forgiveness is a process stems from the fear that if I forgive, and if it's a transaction and a decision, where's the justice in the wound? But what you just said is we're transferring the guilt for that offense or that wound to where it belongs, the cross of Christ. So justice is satisfied.

We're cleared from that obstacle that would keep us from forgiving. We can move forward. Yeah, because only in a model of gospel-centric forgiveness, which is what we teach, we teach it's gospel-centric forgiveness.

Only through the gospel is the who pays question settled. See, in most models, they feel it's a process because I'm going to forgive it, but it's going to take a while for me to absorb it and get my bank account back up. They owe me $100,000.

I'm going to forgive them $100,000. But man, it's going to take me 10 years to recoup that money. So in most models, my forgiveness, me forgiving, you say, Bill, you wounded me.

I'm going to forgive you, but that means you're getting off scot-free and I'm absorbing the cost because somebody has to absorb the cost. And if I'm absorbing the cost, two things will well up in me. Pride.

Look how good I am. I am so generous. I am so spiritual that I've absorbed your debt and I've covered it and you get to walk free.

Now, I used to teach that. Let them off the hook. But who's covering the debt? The second thing that will well up in me is resentment.

I just think that resentment will be there because, okay, you know, that just ain't fair. Not fair. Well, in gospel-centric forgiveness, the payment is settled by Jesus on the cross.

An example, last year I was driving, pulled up a stop sign, pulled through the Lady Cross there. We got there about the same time and I pulled through and I'm almost through the intersection and she turns and hits me. It's her fault.

I mean, clearly she's in my lane, my intersection, you know, all that. And she's livid. I mean, she's literally losing her mind.

And so I don't talk. I have no conversation with her ever. The police come, take her information, take my information.

And when I talk to the police, I'm assured by, I'm told and given the information by the police officer that he had taken the information down all about her insurance card. And once I knew she had an insurance card and it was legitimate coverage, I never had to worry about talking to her again because she wasn't going to pay for the damage to my car. But a greater entity, the insurance company with greater pockets was legally obligated to fix my car.

And now my car is fixed and I'm driving it fine. And I never had a conversation with the lady. So that's kind of the best illustration I know of this is that the debt was there.

The damage to my car was there, but it has been settled. It is guaranteed to be fixed. It's even more instantaneous with that.

This has already been paid 2000 years ago. Jesus has already settled it. So I'm transferring the debt to the cross.

And if there's any outstanding issues, I've sold that note, right? It's like you have a mortgage and somebody buys the note, right? You're selling a note to somebody else. It's no longer between the original mortgage holder. It's the new guy.

All right. That's where the relationship is. I'm that first mortgage holder.

I'm out of this. I sold the note. I'm out of it.

There you go. He paid. Yeah.

And so we're free. We're free to forgive that way. Yeah.

That's why really through the gospel is the only way we actually have forgiveness. All the secular models of forgiveness, they can't deal with this and they don't work. And I think God doesn't let them work because He wants to draw everyone to the cross.

Yeah. You know, in teaching this myself, as I've tried to share some of these concepts with congregations, you know, I find that when I explain that transferring the debt to the cross for where, you know, where Jesus paid for the sins of the whole world, this past, present, future, they're all paid for. That doesn't mean they're all forgiven.

People have to receive their forgiveness by grace through faith, but all of them are paid for. Yeah. You know, this is what it does.

Let me clarify what you just said. I would say, I think they have been forgiven. They're just not reconciled and we're not getting the benefit of the forgiveness in the same way my son didn't get the benefit of the relationship.

That decision was made, but it's not transacted until we repent. Yeah. Well, there you go.

Yeah. So the forgiveness isn't actualized, basically, in experience in real time. Yeah.

Well, the restoration. Yeah. The reconciliation.

The reconciliation. Yeah. Yeah.

The Romans. It's not resolved. Right.

Yeah. That's what Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5, be reconciled to God. You know, we are ministers of reconciliation, drawing forgiven people who've been forgiven into repentance so they can have access to their forgiveness bank account.

Well, thanks for that. That's what I meant. You said it better.

Okay. So anyway, that's a good thing. I'm sorry if I'm being picky.

I don't mean to be picky, but sometimes with words you have to be picky. I understand. Well, you have to use words to express thoughts.

And if words don't do the job, then you got to change your words. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So forgiveness. Here's another one.

The last one we'll dive into today, Bruce, for time's sake. Another misconception. Forgiveness doesn't mean that we no longer remember the offense or the wound.

If I forgive somebody, I will still be able to remember it. But something has to happen when I do. Go ahead.

Yeah. And the misconception out there is, oh, just forgive and forget. Yeah.

Whoever said that needs to be locked up somewhere. No, no. That's nuts.

You can't forget something on purpose. You know that, right? To forget something on purpose, you'd have to focus on the thing you're forgetting. And you'll never forget the thing you're focusing on.

And forgiveness doesn't say it didn't happen. I mean, I remember the lady hit my car. I'm just not bothered by it anymore.

Yeah. Right. Because when we forgive, our memory of the event changes.

It doesn't go away. Now, God can remember no more, but we don't have that. And God can remove the memory from us if he chooses.

But for me, I'm looking back and see all the things that happened to me, and I don't share the details of it to protect the forgiven. But me remembering those things are the things I can use to validate the message I'm sharing with others, and they become trophies of God's grace in my life. And now I'm actually able to look back and see how God took the evil people did to us and use it for his glory and our good.

And if I forgot the event, I'd forget the grace of God out of the event that brought me to where we are. You know, you can't have the glory without the pain, right? You can't have a positive without a negative, right? We're old enough to remember a film, you know, photographs, right? You would take all these pictures, and everywhere you went, you had this camera, and you had to put this film in it, and you would take the film out. You'd take it to the photo processing place, and they would bring you the pictures, but they would give you the negatives, the film.

But if you look at the negative, it looks terrible, right? If you look at your wedding picture of your wife in a negative, I mean, the white dress is dark, and she's got weird-looking, you know, you're seeing things on her face that you didn't know were there. That is terrible. But it's a positive out of the negative.

So you take the negative into a dark room, and you do it, and then you use acid to actually solidify it. So it's the darkness, and the acid, and the pain, and the suffering that brings out the beauty of the positive. So if I forgot the negative, I wouldn't be able to recognize the positive.

So I wouldn't see the grace and the glory of God in my life through those dark moments. So the moment I forgive, the memories turn from tragedy to triumph. They turn from pain to God's favor and God's grace, and I stop worrying about what other people have done, and I start celebrating what God did through it.

And that's a much more valuable focus for us. But you only get there through recognizing by faith that I can forgive, and God will take what He doesn't plan and use it for His glory and our good. In the forgiveness protocols that are part of Forgiving Forward, it talks specifically about, I think it might be protocol six or something? It says, uh, commit to not remember the offense or the wound, but if you remember, this is what you do.

And that was helpful. You know, you say to the Lord, Lord, I distinctly remember having forgiven that. And it kind of takes us.

So here's what I've discovered, Bruce. Because sometimes I have, you know, there are these lingering things, and they're like horror movies that are like instant replay, and the devil's involved with some of this. Some of it's spiritual warfare.

So when I go ahead and do that protocol, I distinctly remember having forgiven that and transferring that wound to the cross where it belongs. Jesus paid for it. Well, what's happening is the devil is being resisted in kind of a third-person way.

And he doesn't like to be resisted. In fact, when he is resisted, he flees. And I find that he can't handle much more than a week or two of that type of thing before he just leaves the scenario.

And it's a lot easier to not ever think about that again, because the spiritual warfare part of it is being dealt with. Yeah. And I think you're right.

And so when what I was referring to earlier is about how you can view the memories as positive, but the memories of the pain, when they come up, you're not bringing them up. God's not bringing up, as you said, the enemies bring it up, because he wants to draw you back into unforgiveness. That's where protocol is number six.

I specifically remember forgiving that. That's great. And God, thank you for the freedom that I got when I chose to forgive, right? Because whenever you forgive and the tormentors are commanded to leave, there's transformation in your heart.

I mean, it shifts, right? So thank you for that. God, thank you for what you did when I forgave. And thank you how you used that whole life.

And God, would you bless that person again, because they must need a blessing today. And as you were saying, every time the enemy brings a memory to you, you turn it into praise and blessing. It's counterproductive, and he'll eventually leave you alone.

He will. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like it.

There's one other thing he'll try. There's one other thing. He'll say, you didn't forgive this, Bill.

It'll remind you of something you didn't forgive. At which time you say, thank you very much. I'd forgotten all about that.

From my heart, I choose to forgive this person for this thing. I transfer the debt to the cross. God, would you bless them really good.

And I'll say, anything else you want to remind me of, he'll say, no, we're good. Yeah, right. That's good.

That's great. Well, we've talked about a lot, Bruce, and it's time to wrap this up. But we don't want to forget that the book has much more.

And I want to encourage pastors to get the book, Forgiving Forward, and watch some of the videos that are online. Go to the Forgiving Forward website, because there's the explanation, the exposition of Matthew 18, the parable of the unforgiving servant, all by itself is worth the price of the book, in my opinion. But it's only a part of the message of Forgiving Forward.

But it's essential to understanding it. So anyway, we could have talked about that. I don't want to do it right now.

Yeah, we don't. But if I could jump in and say a couple of things. Pastor, if you want to watch that core message about why we forgive, how our forgiveness is connected with the gospel, if you go to forgivingforward.com, scroll down, you'll see me on a stage.

You can hear the core message of that. It's about 40 minutes long. And you can get the book on the website.

I will ask your listeners to get the book through our website, if you don't mind, because you can get it through Amazon, but Jeff Bezos has enough money. And all the proceeds that go through our website comes to Forgiving Forward. So that would be great.

There's also a video curriculum. We do a full seminar, but that seminar is now also in a video course. It's on our website.

You have access. But if you have Right Now Media, it's actually on Right Now Media as well. So those are some ways that you can learn.

And some churches, Bill, where we met was in Lindale, Texas, and Life Source Church is using it as one of their core values. And they're requiring everyone who joins the church to go through the video course and be coached before they can actually be considered members of the church. Partners, yeah.

I think they call them partners. And it's making a big difference. I know John's a good friend of yours as well.

I think you had him on a podcast recently. Well, that's excellent. So you've done a lot of the what do I do now and where do I go with this kind of a thing.

But you didn't mention that you can come, you and Tony, and actually do a Forgiving Forward seminar. We'd love to do that. Yeah.

We love, love, love that. So you're actually training people not only to forgive, but they're learning in some ways aspects of coaching somebody else to forgiveness. Yeah.

Like at Life Source, we've trained all... I think they have 10 people trained to coach people to forgive. There's certain protocols or certain strategy God has granted to us. And we have a 95% breakthrough rate in one conversation with couples or individuals, couples in crisis, breakthrough, literally addictions ending, marriages restored, crazy stuff we see.

And it's a simple protocols God has given us. And we love to train you how to do that. You go through the video course, there's a second level of training.

And yeah, we think the only people who don't need to forgive are the ones who've never been wounded. And there's only one guy who walked perfectly on the planet and we killed him. And Tony and I can't coach everybody.

So we need everybody to be trained. And we'd love to help you and train you. Our passion is to help the body of Christ worldwide experience the freedom of the gospel through the power of forgiveness.

And our mission is to train pastors and leaders around the world, how to forgive and how to help their people forgive and how to help other people forgive. So that's our heart. Then that's the very reason I wanted you to come onto this podcast, Bruce, because this podcast is for pastors and leaders of churches.

And boy, what's going to happen in a church that embraces this forgiveness message, gospel-centered forgiveness? What's going to happen? What do you predict? Well, I think just look at what God's doing on Lindale, the Life Source Church there. God is just blowing it up. The impact on the community is huge.

And the health of the church is amazing. And the leadership has a lot to do with it. The other six values have a lot to do with it.

But the health of the church comes when forgiven people, those who've received the forgiveness of God, extend that forgiveness outward. And that's the best polemic. That's the best advertisement for the gospel, is forgiving people, forgiving others.

That's how God has called us to do. And our impact will change. And again, pray for us.

We're all over the world. We were in Korea last year, Switzerland last year. We're heading to Tanzania this July.

We're just passionate about helping the body of Christ experience the freedom of the gospel through the power of forgiveness. That's what God wants us. That's the heart of the gospel.

Amen. Thanks for joining us, Bruce. Thanks for being part of this.

Looking forward to having you here in the Las Vegas area in the fall. Yeah, it's going to be great. And a couple of seminars in two different churches, and a number of pulpit opportunities, and then two seminars.

So it's going to be great. Looking forward to it. It really is.

Appreciate your friendship, Bill. Yeah, thank you, Bruce. I value this friendship very much.

And I thank you for joining us. So that's a wrap for today. You've been listening to Strength for Today's Pastor.

We've been with Dr. Bruce Hebel, author of Forgiving Forward, along with his wife, Toni. And of course, the resources that he referred to are available to you. May the Lord bless you as you serve Him, and may the gospel of Jesus Christ be the power of God unto salvation, not only for you, but for all of those in your congregations that can walk in the freedom of forgiveness. In Jesus' name. 

Strength for Today's Pastor is sponsored by Poimen Ministries. You can find us at Poimenministries.com. That's spelled P-O-I-M-E-N-Ministries.com. If something in today's program prompts a question or comment, or if you have a topic idea for a future episode, just shoot us an email at StrongerPastors@gmail.com. That's StrongerPastors@gmail.com. 

May the Lord bless you as you serve Him, His pastors, and His church.