Where is the instruction manual for forgiveness?

Frank Ligons invites viewers to “go guilt-free” and consider what it means to expect something from God in exchange for faith, arguing that a God worth worshiping can withstand questions, doubts, fears, and frustrations.

He notes that people rarely invest time, money, or effort in anything without expecting a result. Wouldn't it be similarly wise to evaluate the return on our faith?

This episode questions whether a positive outcome can come from an unorthodox—or even seemingly sinful—path. 

Turning to Christian ideals like love, kindness, and forgiveness, he emphasizes that while these goals are simple in concept, they are difficult to execute, especially in extreme situations like forgiving someone who has harmed or killed a loved one. 

We are "supposed to" forgive--but HOW do we overcome our desire for "eye for an eye" revenge? As Christians, we are encouraged to release our anger but without a roadmap to achieve it. 

00:00 Dare to Expect

00:41 God Can Handle Questions

01:47 Faith Needs Results

02:21 Unorthodox Paths

02:37 Christian Values Aim

03:33 Why Forgiveness Is Hard

04:17 When Hurt Runs Deep

05:37 Anger Versus Peace

05:59 How Do We Forgive

06:34 Wrap Up and Next Time

Transcript

Welcome To Guilt Free Faith

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to today's episode of Guilt Free Faith. I am your host, Frank Ligons. I'm giving you the permission today to dare to consider what it means to expect something from God in exchange for your faith. Okay. And you're going to have to go guilt-free with me to even entertain this because even before I've really flushed out this idea, you may feel something pricking your conscience, or maybe some alarms going off, like, hey, this guy's really going off script. Is he going to say something demonic or against Jesus or something that's deplete my faith or send me to hell? Or so I don't believe any of that's the case. Okay. I believe that any God that's worth worshiping can withstand some questions, right? He could withstand some scrutiny. If he can design the whole universe, he can withstand, you know, little old me having my questions, having my doubts, having my fears, having my frustrations, right? It would be pitiful to think of me bowing down before somebody that won't even engage in a conversation with me about my own struggles, right? My own weaknesses, not how I want to be dominant or not being arrogant or not having the answers or not being able to like replace God. Quite the opposite. Actually be like, God, I really need you in all these facets of my life. And I need to have that discussion with you. And that may be a discussion that we have to continually have over every day of my life when something doesn't go my way and I feel like you've let me down, or somehow I can't depend on you, or I don't understand where you're coming from. There's no area of your life in which you're convinced to do something, believe in something, put in some type of effort, put in the hours, spend this money this way, or ask this person to marry you, or there's no aspect of your life in which you are voluntarily putting forth effort without some expectation of result. If there was no expectation of a result, it would be pointless for you to spend your time or money or energy or optimism on that. I mean, it would just be common sense. Today I want to pose to you the question is it possible to arrive at a positive result from going down an unorthodox or some might even say a sinful path? And what I mean by that is there are lots of things that the Bible encourages us to do, right? And even bigger than that, and perhaps spelled out more clearly, there are certain values and overarching goals that we're shooting for. Like we're shooting to be loving, right? We're shooting to be forgiving, we're shooting to love others like we would love ourselves, right? We're shooting to be kind to our neighbors in every way, whether that's not inflicting violence on them or not coveting their belongings or their spouse, right? There's all these things, these qualities, these character values that the Bible extols the virtues of. Some of those are like the fruits of the spirit, some of the things that you might just say, following Christ's example, or what would Jesus do in this case. But for all of those things, one of the challenges is even when you want to do those things, even when you want to be forgiving, what you find is that's actually not that easy. As with most things in life, it's simple, right? Like the idea is simple, but the execution is non-trivial. If somebody just cut you off in traffic, that may not seem like a big deal and you can let that go. Some people can't even let that go, right? I mean, we can see nowadays you might get killed for cutting someone off in traffic. Someone might pull a gun on you, someone might run you off the road. So just imagine, like if just on that small scale, if people aren't forgiven, imagine then the other extreme, those cases where someone's murdered a loved one of yours or murdered your child. And now and again, you'll see a news report where the family will come to the sentencing hearing and say, Hey, we forgive you. And if you're like me, you may be sitting there just thinking, like, I just I'm stupefied, right? Like, how could I ever even pretend to forgive somebody in that situation? You killed somebody I love. I'm gonna try to like at least pardon me in the anger, in the pain. You want to kill that person, right? You want the eye for an eye. That's a very real instinct. And indeed, I don't think that's a sinful instinct in the sense God made us in to protect ourselves and to protect our loved ones and even to protect the weak and vulnerable. We have a sense of the value of life and the value of connection. And so just to forget about people or write them off or just act as if whatever happens to them is inconsequential and we're not going to do anything about it. That's not an easy pill to swallow. And even if you wanted to, right, a lot of times you don't reach that level of forgiveness, you don't reach that level of acceptance. Some people do, and hey, that's a blessing, right? Because we all know that anger can be righteous, but it's also deleterious, right? It subtracts from our joy, it subtracts from our peace of mind. That's why people will say, hey, practice forgiveness because it's really for you, it's not for the other person. Staying mad at them is like drinking poison and expecting them to die. But it's very difficult. And if you ask somebody how to go about forgiving, you're gonna find disappointingly that there's really not a whole lot of concrete instruction around some of these Christian values that you're pursuing. Even as Christians, we can agree, hey, yeah, it's great to forgive. Yeah, Jesus He forgave us all, he died for us, that we're forgiven. He forgave the people that persecuted and killed him and turned on him. Jesus set the example, right? But how does that actually happen? We will talk more about this next time. Let me know what you're thinking in the comments.