This is gonna be a short one. I really mean it. It's actually gonna be a short one because we're just gonna round out some of the ideas and really, frankly, very pregnant questions that are lingering from our little sub-discussion on forgiveness that comes at the end of the passage in Matthew chapter six that has the very famous Lord's Prayer in the middle of it, where Jesus is talking about what it looks like to pray properly in light of the kingdom values. But to pray properly according to Jesus in light of the kingdom values means that you give away the stuff God has given you. And the first thing that God has given away in terms of us having a relationship with him is forgiveness. He's overlooked how vastly flawed and inferior we as imperfect beings are in comparison to him. So the whole relationship with God is predicated on his forgiveness, his grace, which means if that's what that relationship is predicated on, Jesus seems to be intoning that all relationships flowing from the person who's received that forgiveness should also be marked by such forgiveness. And that's really sounds like a beautiful principle. Something that'd be cool to write like some kind of Christian song, and we could sing it together and like really mean it and close our eyes, and there could be smoke and maybe lights and stuff, and we can repeat the chorus 72 times to show that we really, really, really mean it. But you know, when it's super hard is when someone does something hyper crappy to us, like really awful, like deeply, profoundly, life-changingly awful. Or when somebody does something that's just sort of awful, but again and again and again and again, and eventually you see it coming, you're like, you're just awful all the time. And if I trust you or I hang around you, you're just gonna do the same awful thing again. And at some point I got to quit banging my head against this wall, just I'm out. In those situations, how does forgiveness work? Can kingdom citizens actually be expected to be loving and forgiving toward people who are abjectly awful to them? I don't mean like said something mean one time in the hallway or gossiped a little bit or hurt your feelings. I mean awful stuff. What does it look like to forgive? And if you've been hanging out with me over the last couple of conversations, my guess is that you're listening to this too, and you're like, that does sound great. And I understand that I guess I have to do that. But as I understand forgiveness to be, I'm not sure I can do that. Let's break down that concept, actually, because I hear that a lot these days. The concept of I just can't forgive, or I'm not ready to forgive. And from a counseling self-actualization processing through anger and hostility perspective, uh, I get it. I think it's totally valid language. I certainly feel that impulse. And I would imagine that God, who knows all things and made us and understands hurt and pain, that he would understand that impulse. But the text holds out absolutely no off-ramp or exception to forgiveness. Nothing anywhere, ever in the teachings of Jesus or anything that comes after that, is there like uh you, if you want to be forgiven by your father in heaven, you have got to forgive other people unless what they did was like really offensive and you were really hurt or embarrassed. Like, obviously, you don't have to forgive then. I mean, that is super bad. So, there, my command unto you, my children, would be to like work on it, just like work toward forgiving. That's not Jesus' language at all. And so, to understand what he's saying in the text that we're trying to wrap our brains around, we have to understand what he's not saying. And I got to point out that he never gives some kind of exception. If anything, the implicit language of Jesus about forgiveness seems to be that forgiveness exists because of heinous things. If something is little and trifling, it's not so much a forgiveness, that's just social grace. Forgiveness is not in place to overlook trifling little things. We all do that regardless of our social system or moral system, just to get by with people and have longevity to our relationships. Clearly, if we're talking about forgiveness, we're talking about the stuff that hurts. We're talking about the worst stuff imaginable, the stuff that I will take a pass on even describing as an example for the sake of the conversation here. You just fill in the worst stuff you can think of. That's the kind of stuff that Jesus is talking about forgiving, not working on, but just doing. Let's just do a hypothetical here with me. Let's say somebody did something horrible to me, like maybe when I was a kid, or like something in my body, like something terrible that you wouldn't want them to do to anybody else ever, and they have to be stopped. And you just can't trust that person anymore because they're probably going to do stuff like that again. I mean, uh, the pushback on the text might be, well, how can I forgive somebody like that? They're just going to keep doing that. Don't I have some kind of obligation to justice or to some kind of closure with them or to prevent them from doing that to other people? And I think the response here is that it is very common for us today to conflate two things that are very different: forgiveness and reconciliation. Those are not the same thing. But a lot of times when we think about forgiveness or we hear Jesus say words like this, we think reconciliation. Ah, but the text, like you know, in the book of Romans talks about, you know, us doing our best to be reconciled and at peace with everyone as much as it's up to you. So the biblical text acknowledges that reconciliation is an ideal, but not always an option. We see that playing out in the life of Jesus. I would say he was not reconciled to Judas after Judas's betrayal, right? And Jesus didn't go chasing after him. He didn't holler out at his disciples, like, make sure you go and track down Judas and make sure he's okay and work it out. Like that looks like it was a pretty irreconcilable difference when Judas sold Jesus out to die for a few extra bucks. So look, reconciliation is what happens when we forgive and then we go through maybe some kind of process to kind of work things out with people and figure out like what went wrong here. Would it be possible for us to move forward? Is there a debt that that person owes to me, to others, to society that maybe really does need to be squared up as a teaching thing or a justice thing? You have the right to release people from a debt they might owe you or to society. But maybe some debts to society ought to be paid so that people don't further victimize. Maybe it's okay if, as much as it's up to you, a thing cannot be reconciled to put a lot of distance between yourself and somebody that's dangerous, troubling, awful, destructive, whatever. I don't know. But what I do know is that's different than forgiveness. Forgiveness appears to be, according to the teachings of Jesus, a state of mind, a state of being that is always informed by what God did for people. That is, extend forgiveness and patience. And so if you embrace that forgiveness and patience from God, even though there might be some world consequences to sort through for stuff other people do to us, maybe somebody owes us some kind of recompense. I don't know. Jesus said to be pretty forgiving and even generous toward our enemies, but yeah, I understand that's complicated. And acknowledging that that teaching is something that the kingdom citizen would theoretically have to wrestle through as well, still forgiveness is the absolute starting point. It's the default position of the kingdom citizen according to Jesus. In fact, if it's not the default starting point, you might not actually have ever been a kingdom citizen because the trademark of the kingdom citizen is the trademark of the king, which is forgiveness, an ability to look past and forgive the debts of those who owe a tremendous amount to him, and likewise for us to forgive the debts of those who owe a tremendous amount to us. First John is a really interesting book that tackles a lot of these same questions about how what the kingdom citizen has received from God, how that relates to what the kingdom citizen gives away to others. And John was clearly writing a little bit after the fact in this letter that he put together, and he's trying to help people sort out the difference between actual Christianity and kind of weird, screwed up mutations of Christianity. And he gives this threefold test that he develops in two cycles through the book of 1 John. And the threefold test is basically morality. Does the person do the stuff morally that Jesus put forward? And that list is not as long as a lot of people like to make it, but you know, there's stuff that these are kingdom things to do, these are not kingdom things to do. The next test is one of theology. Does the the claimant to being a kingdom citizen say the stuff that Jesus said, or are they making up their own stuff with their own little twists and turns? That has been a very popular thing to do over the last couple of thousand years, and John's warning seems very prescient and very timely even today. But then the third test, in addition to the moral test and the theological test, is the test of how you interact with your brother or your sister. And the idea here is that if the supposed kingdom citizen received grace and love and mercy from God and doesn't give grace and love and mercy to other people, then maybe that person didn't actually receive it. Maybe that person never actually signed up for the kingdom, maybe there's goofing around, or this is just what their friends did, or who knows why they're there, but that's not real. Don't trust it. Push back on that. In 1 John chapter 4, maybe the most concise turn of a phrase articulating that third test about the relationship between kingdom citizens and others says uh verse 19, we love because he first loved us, as obviously Jesus. If anyone says, I love God yet hates his brother, he's a liar. For anyone who doesn't love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And he's given us this command whoever loves God must also love his brother. That's pretty interesting at this point in the conversation, because, well, for three reasons. One, you were like, this one was going to be short. Why is it not short? Okay, got me. Two, because there are a bunch of you sitting here who are from some kind of Christian tradition or Christian background, and you're like, wow, that that is pretty convicting because I've been burned in church and I've seen really not loving things, and it's even maybe messed with my faith and been really frustrating. Maybe if you think about it a little bit longer, it might like occur to you that maybe at times you've even had some ownership in some of that stuff. So one, this is a little long. Two, there are a bunch of Christians who are probably thinking that stuff. Three, there are a bunch of people who I know are sitting in on this conversation with me, and you're not a Christian at all, and you're like, wow, if Christians actually did the thing that that said, that would be a lot more interesting to me. But a lot of the press that I see about Christianity and a lot of the tweets and a lot of the Facebooking and a lot of the other things, it seems like lots of people claim that they want to love God, but the whole part where you go on to be like the consistent thing then is to love other people. I don't know if I see that one quite as much. And to the person who might hold that opinion, who's an outsider to Christianity looking in, I would say you're about half right. I think about half of the time that you see that, you're actually observing hypocrisy on my part, and you are absolutely correct. Yep, we uh yep, there's a reason that Christians uh actually need a God and aren't perfect because we just do stupid stuff and we and we don't get this right all the time. But I would also submit that there's another half of the time where, yeah, I don't know, Christians it can be a pretty easy target. And sometimes Christians are actually doing things that are good and redemptive and getting no credit and uh maybe even getting beat up or framed in ways that aren't entirely fair historically. Both of those realities can be true at the same time, even if that makes us uncomfortable. So here's a text that kind of cuts for everybody people in the faith, people outside the faith. It gives us all a ton to think about. But what it does also is it kind of lands the plane on this concept that we've been processing for the last three days, that if you got forgiveness, you got to give away forgiveness. That forgiveness, additionally, is not reconciliation. Reconciliation is the goal, but a spiritual state of grace toward everyone is the trademark of the Christian. It's the most basic tier one technique that on the Christian skill tree chart, everybody has that one ticked at the very beginning. You gotta have that one, or the rest of the Christian skill tree is completely irrelevant. And because forgiveness is that trademark, basic skill one tier that identifies all Christians, it is a constant state of being, not an intellectual action that we do each time we're wrong. Kingdom citizens are just supposed to live in a state of constant forgiveness and grace. Is that weird? Is it antithetical to the rest of how things are? Well, hey, that's why we're looking at the Sermon on the Mount, right? Because all of this is upside-down kingdom stuff, and frankly, it's very challenging and very difficult. And it all sounds nice when we started back on the Beatitudes. It's like, oh, poor people and the poor in spirit and oh, mercy is important. We're like, oh yeah, that's great, that's beautiful. And then we actually start gaming it out. We realize, dang, this is a little bit challenging. But well, there's a reason this has had staying power, and I'm content to just let that challenge simmer on the question of forgiveness for the time being. Hey, thanks everybody who uh has my back on the whole Patreon thing. That that means such a tremendous amount. And uh a handful of additional people jumped in this week, even with little stuff. It just it it really helps. I don't know. I always feel weird talking about it. I'm not trying to beg or anything, but just you're awesome and thank you. Uh Patreon.com slash the T MbH podcast is where people do that. If you're not into that stuff, awesome. Super still glad you're here. Okay, we're landing the plane there. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we will do this again soon.