Sermon: I Love you, But How Do I Forgive You?

Forgiveness stands as one of the most difficult yet essential aspects of Christian faith. When someone has deeply wounded us, the question becomes how to love while still forgiving. Jesus established forgiveness as foundational, telling Peter to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven, demonstrating unlimited grace. Even while suffering on the cross, Jesus prayed for his torturers' forgiveness and offered salvation to the thief beside him.

The importance of forgiveness becomes clear through Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant, where a man forgiven an enormous debt refused to forgive a much smaller one. This story reveals that unforgiveness creates its own prison, keeping us bound by resentment and preventing us from living freely. Many resist forgiveness due to misconceptions, believing it means accepting harmful behavior, freeing others from consequences, or maintaining dangerous relationships. In reality, forgiveness is primarily heart work that involves releasing resentment, letting go of ill will, and recognizing our shared need for grace.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu developed a practical four-step process that helped heal an entire nation: tell your story honestly to trusted people, name the specific emotions and hurts you're carrying, grant forgiveness as a daily choice rather than waiting for feelings to change, and decide whether to renew the relationship with boundaries or release it entirely. Even when apologies never come, forgiveness remains both possible and necessary for our own freedom from the burden of carrying resentment.

Learn how to forgive when it feels impossible with this biblical guide to letting go of resentment and finding freedom. Discover what Jesus taught about unlimited forgiveness and why it's essential for spiritual growth and emotional healing. This comprehensive guide explores common misconceptions about forgiveness, explaining what it does and doesn't mean for relationships and personal boundaries.

Explore the powerful parable of the unforgiving servant and understand how unforgiveness becomes its own prison, keeping you bound by anger and resentment. Learn practical steps for forgiveness using Archbishop Desmond Tutu's proven four-step process that helped heal South Africa after apartheid: telling your story, naming your hurt, granting forgiveness as a choice, and deciding how to move forward with relationships.

This biblical approach to forgiveness addresses difficult situations including abuse, betrayal, loss, and unresolved conflicts. Discover how to forgive even when apologies never come and how to set healthy boundaries while still choosing grace. Whether you're struggling to forgive others or yourself, this guide provides scriptural wisdom and practical tools for emotional healing and spiritual freedom.

Topics covered include Jesus' teachings on forgiveness, the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, protecting yourself while choosing grace, dealing with unrepentant people, and finding peace after deep wounds. Perfect for anyone seeking biblical guidance on one of faith's most challenging commands.

Transcript

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I love you, but how do I forgive you? That's the question. How do we forgive? Well, Desmond Tutu was a famed peacemaking pastor in South Africa. And he said that if you want to walk on the journey of forgiveness, you first need to find a stone smooth and small enough to fit in your hand. And he said, Hold that stone in your non-dominant hand for six hours, doing everything you're supposed to do while never putting that stone down. Well, I took him up on this challenge this week, though I will admit I did not make it a whole six hours. I got four, which I thought was pretty good. Do you know how hard it is to type on a keyboard with a stone in your hand or open a banana? As soon as I've got it open, it was all mush. Like it didn't work very well. So if you have not yet picked up your stone, or if you put it down, now's the time to pick it back up, put it in your hand. And as you do so, think about a grudge that you're holding. Think about a person that you are having trouble forgiving. I love you, but how do I forgive you? Think about that as we go now to our next scripture reading from Luke chapter 23. Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with Jesus. When they came to the place that is called the skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right hand and one on his left. Then Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. And they cast lots to divide his clothing, and the people stood by watching, but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, He saved others, let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one. The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying, If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself. There was also an inscription over him, This is the King of the Jews. One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us. But the other rebuked him, saying, Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong. Then he said to Jesus, Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus replied, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, we ask that you would pour out your Holy Spirit on us as we read and ponder these words of yours in the Gospels. Speak to us, open our hearts, our minds, and ears to hear you, that we might be convicted, challenged, and encouraged as your faithful disciples. Amen. Six years ago this month, I was awoken by my phone in the early morning hours. You never want an early morning phone call. It was news that one of my best friends had died of a rare heart event. He was 35 years old. We had been friends since our preteen days. We'd done so many church youth events together. We were inseparable in college. We went to seminary together. He introduced Kevin and me. We'd been through a lot together. Family struggles, mental health struggles, his divorce. And as with any friendship, we didn't always get along. We hurt one another from time to time. And over the years, those hurts piled up, and many of them went unresolved. I guess we always assumed we'd have plenty of time to sort them out. After the shock of his death wore off, grief came, and with it, regret. I never apologized to him for the ways that I'd let him down, and I never confronted him for the ways that he had hurt me. I never received the apology that I needed, an apology I didn't even realize I needed until after he was gone. It's like I had been holding a stone of resentment in my hand for years and hadn't noticed how heavy it had become, how much it had gotten in the way of our friendship. And once he was gone, I didn't know how to let it go. Sometimes people hurt us and there is no way they can apologize. Sometimes people hurt us and there's no way they will apologize. Perhaps they don't believe that there's something worth apologizing for, or perhaps they don't know how to apologize, but whatever the reason, the apology that we need will never come and it's heavy. The resentment, the anger, the hurt, it's heavy and it's painful. I love you, but how do I forgive you? And what's more, sometimes people hurt us and they do apologize, but we still hurt. We hurt so much we don't know how to forgive them. We don't know if we even want to forgive them. I love you, but how do I forgive you? Jesus had a lot to say about forgiveness. In fact, forgiveness was a foundational virtue for him. Notice what Jesus told Peter when Peter asked how many times to forgive another. Seven times? Peter asked, thinking he was extraordinarily generous, to which Jesus said, not seven times, but seventy times. In other words, there is no limit to how many times you are to forgive another. In fact, counting how many times you forgive another means you probably aren't forgiving them in the first place. And then Jesus told a parable, and it begins with the story of a king who made an extraordinary loan to one of his servants. 10,000 talents. Now, a talent was the greatest currency denomination in the empire, and 10,000 was the highest number in the Greek language at the time. So when Jesus said the debt was 10,000 talents, he picked the highest sum of money imaginable and said, that is how much the servant owed the king. Enough money, one might argue, to topple a kingdom's entire economy. So the king went to collect the debt, the servant could not pay, and the king responded, according to the bankruptcy custom of the day, the servant and his family were to be sold as repayment. But the servant fell to his knees and begged for mercy. He promised to pay back every last bit if he just had more time. And the king did something surprising. He had mercy on the man. And he didn't just send him away and say, okay, I'll give you 90 days to collect it and bring it back to me. No. The king forgave the debt. The man was no longer liable for paying the king back for this extraordinary amount of money. He was set free. And in doing so, the king lost all of that money. It was never coming back to him. He took on the debt into himself. Now remember that in this parable, the king is akin to God. And the king's act of mercy is akin to God's mercy toward us. Our wrongdoings cause a whole heap of trouble in our relationships, in the world around us, and in our relationship with God. We cause harm all of the time. And we are responsible for the trouble that we cause. But when we confess our sins and ask for mercy, God promises us, God will forgive us and set us free. We will no longer be measured by our wrongdoings in God's eyes. We are freed. Furthermore, like the king in the parable who absorbed the servant's debt, so Jesus on the cross took all of our wrongdoing upon his shoulders and absorbed it into his own body on our behalf. This healed the rift between us and God, making us possible to live as free people in God's eternal kingdom. This is the enormity of God's grace toward us. We don't earn this, we don't deserve this any more than the debt-riddled servant earned the king's enormous forgiveness. It is all a pure gift. And when we receive it as the enormous gift that it is, recognizing that we would be lost without it, it changes who we are. And so the forgiven yet unforgiving servant was thrown into prison. And Jesus ended the parable with these powerful yet haunting words. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart. Now it's not that we have to forgive others in order to be forgiven. Rather, this parable teaches us that because we have been forgiven so extraordinarily, we ought to be people who forgive as freely as we've been forgiven. Once we grasp how deep and wide and costly is God's forgiveness of us, that transforms us into people who are willing to do the deep, wide, and sometimes costly work of forgiving others. Another way to put it is this if we are not willing to try to forgive others from our hearts, have we actually received the forgiveness of God? Tim Keller, in his book Forgive, he put it this way: if you believe the gospel that you are saved by sheer grace and free forgiveness of God, and you still hold a grudge, at the very least it shows you are blocking the actual effects of the gospel in your life. Or you're kidding yourself, and perhaps you don't believe the gospel at all. Either way, spiritually speaking, to not forgive somebody is to put yourself in a kind of jail. It's no coincidence that the unforgiving servant was thrown into prison at the end of the parable, for unforgiveness is its own kind of jail, one in which we have the key to our own cell. When we don't forgive someone who has harmed us, we are imprisoned by our animosity toward them. We are not free from the harm they've caused us, rather, we are bound by it. Take, for instance, a man who is living with unforgiveness toward his father. The man will inevitably refuse to do something that is good for himself if he thinks his father will approve of it. Likewise, he will choose behaviors that are harmful to himself if he believes that it's going to anger or hurt his father. This man is living in a prison of his own making, unable to make his own choices controlled by his resentment toward his father. This is why Jesus commands us to forgive. Unforgiveness is detrimental to our souls, to our bodies, to our minds, and to our relationships. Forgiveness is key to finding life. Consider Jesus on the cross. He is literally dying at the hands of people who have tortured and humiliated him. And what does he do? He prays for them. He says, Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing. And then when the thief beside him asks to be received into his eternal kingdom, Jesus offers forgiveness. The last thing Jesus did in his life was extend forgiveness to people who didn't deserve it. This is how seriously Jesus takes forgiveness. This is how seriously Jesus wants us to take forgiveness. No one is beyond forgiveness, and no one has been harmed beyond the ability to forgive. Forgiveness is the way to life. But as we've already named, forgiveness is easier said than done. Especially if someone has wronged you immensely through abuse or assault or betrayal or any number of traumas. Forgiveness in these instances can feel like we're letting the person who harmed us off the hook. It can feel like we're giving up on justice. It can feel like we're saying what they did doesn't matter. Sometimes we fear forgiveness means that we have to endure a harmful relationship. And so I want you to hear me clearly. When Jesus commands us to forgive, he is not insisting on any of these things. Forgiving another does not mean we are okay with what they've done. Forgiving another does not free them from the consequences of their actions. Forgiving another does not even mean we have to maintain a relationship with them. Rather, forgiveness is primarily work done in and for our own hearts. Let me explain by telling you more about Desmond Tutu, who I mentioned earlier in the sermon. He was an archbishop in South Africa who became well known when apartheid ended and the nation had to heal after the brutality white and black South Africans inflicted upon one another. Because over several decades, tens of thousands of South Africans were murdered by one another and political racialized violence. And when the system of apartheid ended and the violence was quelled, Tutu was appointed by Nelson Mandela in 1995 to chair what was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Tutu had the conviction that without intervention, the grievances South Africans held toward one another would fester into more violence. He called this the cycle of revenge. And the only answer Tutu knew was to lead the nation in a movement of forgiveness. Now many were skeptical for all the reasons that we just named of why we're skeptical of forgiveness. They were skeptical, but Tutu succeeded. He led his nation through a process of forgiving one another for the most heinous of crimes. He taught them that there is no future without forgiveness. He summed up his work in a book called The Book of Forgiving. And in this book, he talks about the why of forgiveness, but he specifically talks about the how. How did he help his nation forgive one another for the worst crimes that you can imagine? How? He laid out a fourfold path of forgiveness. He said the first step on this path of forgiveness is to tell your story. So much of our unforgiveness and resentment is tied to our unwillingness to talk about who and what has harmed us. We have to get it out. Sometimes we need to tell the person who has harmed us exactly how they have done so. We need to be specific and honest. Sometimes that is not possible or advisable. And so we need to tell a trusted friend, a counselor, a pastor. Or we could write a letter to the person who has harmed us and never send it. Either way, telling the story is the first step in unlocking our prison cell of resentment. And the second part of the journey toward forgiveness is to name the hurt. It's not just enough to explain what happens. We have to grapple with the feelings that the harm left within us. The anger, the helplessness, the fear, the betrayal, the hopelessness, all the hard feelings that are wrapped up in our resentment have to be brought to the light. They cannot heal if they are not tended. They cannot contribute to growth if they remain buried. Again, sometimes you can name the hurt to the person who harms you. Other times that's not an option. And so you can name the hurt to another trusted person. Which leads us to the third part of the journey. And this is when you get to the place where you can grant forgiveness. And there are a couple of important things to remember when we talk about granting forgiveness. Forgiveness is when we choose to release the resentment that we harbor toward the person who has harmed us. Forgiveness is when we no longer wish for their harm. Forgiveness is when we no longer maintain ill will toward them. And forgiveness is wrapped up in our ability to see that all of us are flawed. All of us are in need of grace. All of us can be forgiven, including the person who has harmed you. But you also must remember that forgiveness is a choice. It's not a feeling. It's like a muscle that we have to develop. We have to try it and keep trying it until it becomes manageable. It's like weightlifting. Repetition is key. When someone has harmed you deeply, it's unlikely that you will be able to forgive them immediately on the first try. The key is to keep trying, to keep choosing to try to forgive, to let go of the resentment, let go of the ill will little by little, and eventually the feelings of peace, of resolution will follow. But note that in extending forgiveness to another, you're not necessarily excusing them from the consequences of their actions. If someone has committed a violent crime, forgiving them does not mean they should be released from prison. Forgiveness is not about their circumstances changing, it's about your attitude toward them changing. It means you no longer wish them harm, but their consequences remain. In fact, forgiveness and justice go hand in hand because usually folks who are being forgiven need to endure the consequences for themselves so that they can feel free to start anew. Which leads us to the fourth part of the Journey of forgiveness, and that is to deal with the relationship of the person who has harmed you. And you have two choices: you can renew the relationship or you can release it. I've known several couples whose marriages were rocked by infidelity. And as the couples walked through the forgiving process, some of them have chosen to renew their vows and work on their marriage, while others have chosen to release the relationship and go their separate ways in peace. Both are possible outcomes of the forgiving process. And the same is true for all of the relationships in our life. So let's talk about renewing a relationship first, whether it's a marriage or a friendship or a different kind of family relationship. In renewing the friendship, the key is to be clear about what you need from the person who has harmed you. What kind of boundaries do you need to start again? What kind of restitution is required to earn your trust again? Will the person you are forgiving agree to your needs? These are all the questions at stake in renewing a relationship. Sometimes renewal is not possible or advisable, and relationships need to be released. This is especially true when a relationship has a history of abuse. Sometimes there is no potential for a healthy relationship. And in this case, forgiveness means you release your resentment and let them go. You let them go from your heart, from your mind, from your life. So that is the fourfold path of forgiveness that Tutu lays out for us that he worked through in South Africa to tell your story, name your hurt, grant forgiveness, and renew or release the relationship. This is how we find forgiveness. Now I worked through these paths of forgiveness in the first couple of years after my friend passed away. He wasn't there to hear me, but I apologized aloud to him, nevertheless, for the ways that I harmed him over the years of our friendship. And I told him about the ways that he harmed me. I talked about the feelings that I felt with my friends, with close people in my life to just get it off my chest. And piece by piece, day by day, over time, I granted forgiveness to myself, to him. And now I can say that though he has passed on to the next life, I renewed my relationship with his memory. It is no longer tinged with the regret I carried in the first weeks after his death. Now I miss him dearly and I look back fondly on our years of friendship, messiness included. Now you have been holding on to a rock in your hand for all this time, and it represents that grudge or that person that you have not forgiven. And as you hold on to this rock, I invite you to consider where you are in that fourfold path of forgiveness. Have you told your story? Have you worked through the feelings of the harm done to you? Have you tried to grant forgiveness, or maybe you are actively working on those forgiveness muscles? Perhaps you're at the place where you must choose to release or renew the relationship. Think about where you are on that journey as you hold on to your rock. What I found in my four hours of holding on to the rock was that at first I liked it. It was kind of like a fidget in my hand. It was a comfort, something I could mess with. It was smooth and soft in my hands, but eventually my forearms got really tired. My fingers began to cramp, and it got in the way of eating lunch and trying to get my work done, and it just became a burden. And then my aha moment came when I was holding something essential in my right hand, and Kevin was trying to hand me something else that I needed, but I couldn't grab a hold of it because my left hand was occupied by the grudge that I just couldn't let go. Your resentments and your unforgiveness are like the rock in your hand. They may feel familiar or comfortable or even right at times, but eventually they will strain your soul. They will make it difficult for you to live your life. In the end, they will make it difficult for you to open your hands and your heart to receive the forgiveness that God wants to give you. Now you are invited to do whatever you'd like to do with your rock today. Maybe you leave it on the pew, maybe you bring it forward at communion and leave it around the altar to give it to God. Maybe you take it home with you and keep it in your hand as you work through the forgiveness that you are called to offer. Maybe you put it in nature, you put it in your home as that constant reminder that forgiveness, hard as it may be, is the call of Christ and it's the way of life. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.