SPEAKER_00: So we've got a lot to talk about today.
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness is forgetting.
SPEAKER_00: I will remind you before we get started that every week I produce some sermon notes, and it's a little two-sided document.
SPEAKER_00: We've got some right here.
SPEAKER_00: They're at the Welcome Center every week.
SPEAKER_00: We send them out in the tidings on Friday.
SPEAKER_00: But I would really strongly encourage you, if you haven't made use of those, would encourage you to start taking a look at those.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe print them out ahead of time, grab some when you come on Sunday mornings.
SPEAKER_00: For this series, we're doing some fill-in-the-blank for those sermon outlines to kind of keep you engaged and writing some stuff down and hopefully remembering some things that you can keep with you for a really long time.
SPEAKER_00: So if you liked the Jeremiah packets, that's kind of what these sermon notes are every single week.
SPEAKER_00: So I'd encourage you to start making use of those.
SPEAKER_00: But as we have a whole bunch of blanks to fill in today, as we talk about what forgiveness means in this sense today, may God's grace and his mercy and his peace be yours from God our Father, from our Lord and our Savior Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: So welcome back to our series on popular misconceptions about forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: I hope it's been insightful and helpful for you so far.
SPEAKER_00: This is a really important, huge, uh, pretty difficult topic.
SPEAKER_00: So thank you for your willingness to navigate with me uh over these last couple weeks using the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Uh in week one, we address the myth that forgiveness starts with us.
SPEAKER_00: In reality, forgiveness starts with God.
SPEAKER_00: It originates with him and passes then from him through us to others.
SPEAKER_00: In week two, we address the myth that forgiveness is optional.
SPEAKER_00: And we took really seriously the words of Jesus that demonstrate how forgiveness really is a non-negotiable aspect of what it means to be his disciple.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we addressed the myth that forgiveness is easy, and we looked at all sorts of reasons why it is actually quite costly and incredibly hard.
SPEAKER_00: And today we address the myth that forgiveness is forgetting.
SPEAKER_00: And this is a particularly interesting one, I think, for us to consider.
SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, you might hear people say things like, I'll forgive them, but I will never forget.
SPEAKER_00: And generally speaking, I would say that that means they probably haven't really forgiven either.
SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, forgive and forget is kind of part of our vocabulary too, and maybe for a good reason, because we hear a lot about God not remembering our sins.
SPEAKER_00: And if that's how God forgives, then wouldn't forgetting be part of what forgiveness kind of entails?
SPEAKER_00: If so, why do we struggle with it so much?
SPEAKER_00: Last week we talked about why forgiveness feels impossible.
SPEAKER_00: Today we discuss why it often feels unfinished.
SPEAKER_00: So as we address this myth that forgiveness is forgetting, let's start right where that misconception can begin to take root.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't God forget our sins?
SPEAKER_00: What would you say to that?
SPEAKER_00: Does God forget our sins?
SPEAKER_00: I have framed this as a rhetorical question, which I'm assuming most of us would answer with an immediate and emphatic and enthusiastic, yes, of course he does.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, God forgets our sins and remembers them no more.
SPEAKER_00: But as we answer that rhetorical question, I do think it's important to be clear about what we mean by it and how we understand it.
SPEAKER_00: Probably the clearest statement in the Bible about God not remembering our sins comes to us from the prophet Jeremiah.
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps some of you have heard of him.
SPEAKER_00: And we spent a couple months diving through just about everything he said.
SPEAKER_00: Um, Jeremiah talks about this new covenant that is going to be fulfilled by Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of that really powerful section of Jeremiah chapter 31, God says, For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
SPEAKER_00: Well, there it is.
SPEAKER_00: What more do we need, right?
SPEAKER_00: Pretty clear statement there.
SPEAKER_00: And this is quoted directly in Hebrews chapter 8 and Hebrews chapter 10, solidifying its truth as fulfilled specifically in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: But here's a really important thing to keep in view as we look at this.
SPEAKER_00: This is covenantal, not cognitive.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I mean by that.
SPEAKER_00: God is not suffering from amnesia, and he is just not able to remember anything.
SPEAKER_00: He is choosing not to remember.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that God does not say that he cannot remember our sins.
SPEAKER_00: He says that he will not.
SPEAKER_00: This is an act of his holy will.
SPEAKER_00: This is a deliberate act of grace on God's part, grounded in the finished work of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: He makes a conscientious, covenantal decision not to hold on to our sins or to call them to mind.
SPEAKER_00: God choosing not to remember our sins is a settled decision not to reckon or recall or resurrect any of our sins at all for judgment.
SPEAKER_00: We started our series a few weeks ago with Psalm 103, and there David proclaimed of God, He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
SPEAKER_00: They are removed from the equation, as far as the east is from the west, he goes on to say.
SPEAKER_00: And that was kind of our prayer this morning, wasn't it, with David, along with him in Psalm 25, that God would remember his steadfast love instead of our sins, that he would deal with us according to his mercy rather than judgment.
SPEAKER_00: And so he does.
SPEAKER_00: God doesn't count our sins against us.
SPEAKER_00: God not remembering our sins means that he doesn't keep track of them.
SPEAKER_00: They count for nothing, because he doesn't count them.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we were reminded that love keeps no record of wrongs, and God, who is love himself, doesn't.
SPEAKER_00: What God is saying when he tells us that he remembers our sins no more is that they're removed from the ledger.
SPEAKER_00: We are blessed because the Lord counts no iniquity against us.
SPEAKER_00: Our liabilities are not calculated.
SPEAKER_00: They're canceled, they're wiped out.
SPEAKER_00: If Yahweh were to be audited by the IRS, they would find no trace of the debt that we owe him, because it is not counted against us.
SPEAKER_00: But don't let this fool you into thinking that God is cooking the books.
SPEAKER_00: There's no money money laundering or tax evasion here.
SPEAKER_00: Our justification is not a legal fiction.
SPEAKER_00: God is not pretending that we are without sin.
SPEAKER_00: He has put our sins away.
SPEAKER_00: God has truly caused us to be without sin.
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah says that God has cast our sins behind his back, where he doesn't see them, doesn't look at them, doesn't dwell on them.
SPEAKER_00: Micah closes his book by saying that God will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea, not just really far away and buried down deep, but in a place where they can never come back again, can never be retrieved or accessed or recovered.
SPEAKER_00: They're gone.
SPEAKER_00: And they're gone because of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: God doesn't forget our sins in the sense of an inability to remember.
SPEAKER_00: He forgives them.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't remember our sins now because he remembered them at the cross and dealt with them there.
SPEAKER_00: And so our forgiveness is final.
SPEAKER_00: It is finished, one could say.
SPEAKER_00: And he did.
SPEAKER_00: So maybe that gives us a bit of help with our second question that we asked not rhetorically, but quite sincerely.
SPEAKER_00: Why can't we forget?
SPEAKER_00: If God doesn't remember our sins, why can't we forget them?
SPEAKER_00: How do they linger and ache and throb and refuse to go away?
SPEAKER_00: Why do they stand in the way of our ability to forgive as God does?
SPEAKER_00: A few reasons, I think.
SPEAKER_00: The first is that memory is involuntary, at least most of the time it is.
SPEAKER_00: I think painful memories that we have are a lot like grief.
SPEAKER_00: I suppose you could say they are a form of grief, actually.
SPEAKER_00: We don't usually elect to call them to mind.
SPEAKER_00: They just kind of show up like waves lapping against the shore.
SPEAKER_00: We don't choose it, but we can't help but remember.
SPEAKER_00: For one thing, we remember our own sins and struggle to live in the forgiveness that we've been given.
SPEAKER_00: Remember week one?
SPEAKER_00: We talked about how forgiving ourselves isn't really a thing, that forgiveness comes from God, not from ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: But we can struggle to remember that the record is canceled.
SPEAKER_00: But then there are the sins of others against us.
SPEAKER_00: We remember them.
SPEAKER_00: They come back a lot.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they hurt a lot.
SPEAKER_00: Last week I shared the story of Corey Tenboom, who forgave the former guard at the Ravensbrook concentration camp where she had been and where her sister had died.
SPEAKER_00: Well, in that same book, she shares about a pastor who compared forgiveness to the bells in a church tower.
SPEAKER_00: Long after you let go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging and ringing, the dings and the dongs continuing on for a while, slower and slower until they finally stop.
SPEAKER_00: And she says, Don't be surprised when old angry thoughts keep coming for a while after you forgive.
SPEAKER_00: She says they're just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, we also struggle to forget because more often than not, the consequences remain.
SPEAKER_00: I'm reminded of that scene from Lord of the Rings in the Fellowship of the Ring, where Frodo is recovering from being stabbed on weather top by the ring wraith.
SPEAKER_00: And so he's in Ribendell and he's recovering, and Gandalf looks at him and says, That wound will never fully heal.
SPEAKER_00: He will carry it the rest of his life.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the wounds that are inflicted on us by others never fully go away.
SPEAKER_00: Forgiving someone does not mean that the pain they inflicted on you disappears.
SPEAKER_00: In preparation for this series, I came across this wonderful book from Concordia Publishing House called Unforgivable.
SPEAKER_00: I highly recommend it.
SPEAKER_00: It's just, it's really, really well done.
SPEAKER_00: And in this book, the authors give us a very um extreme, to say the least, picture of what this type of thing is like.
SPEAKER_00: They say, and I'm not, I'm not making this up.
SPEAKER_00: It's in the book.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine someone cut off your arm with a chainsaw.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever imagined that before?
SPEAKER_00: I hope not.
SPEAKER_00: And then later on, after this horrible act of violence happened, the person who did it, who perpetrated it, is incredibly sincerely repentant and remorseful.
SPEAKER_00: And the book talks about how you could forgive that person, you could do that, but you still wouldn't have an arm.
SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing that they could do or that you could do to change that.
SPEAKER_00: And if a stranger asked you one day, what happened to your arm, you would not say to that person, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: I I can't remember.
SPEAKER_00: You would remember.
SPEAKER_00: And that's okay.
SPEAKER_00: Now, hopefully none of us ends up losing an arm in such a way, but but the hurt that each one of us faces, it's just as real.
SPEAKER_00: And and maybe you, in fact, I'm I'm gonna say, let's take the maybe out of it.
SPEAKER_00: You have lost things that you can't get back.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we saw that forgiveness never minimizes sin.
SPEAKER_00: And so forgiveness takes time.
SPEAKER_00: With God, forgiveness is instantaneous.
SPEAKER_00: For us, usually, not so much.
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness is hard because it has to be lived out day by day in the midst of pain and memories and all of that stuff.
SPEAKER_00: It is a conscious and conscientious repeated decision.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a one-hit wonder, it's not a one-and-done situation.
SPEAKER_00: It is a 70 times seven endeavor.
SPEAKER_00: It's a process.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we prayed from Psalm 13, how long, O Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes our efforts to forgive seem interminable.
SPEAKER_00: Going back to Cory 10 boom, you might think that after forgiving that concentration camp guard, it was all downhill from there.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what she says.
SPEAKER_00: Having thus learned to forgive in this hardest of situations, I never again had difficulty in forgiving.
SPEAKER_00: I wish I could say it.
SPEAKER_00: I wish I could say that merciful and charitable thoughts just naturally flowed from me from then on.
SPEAKER_00: But they didn't.
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, that makes me feel a whole lot better myself.
SPEAKER_00: It's a process that takes a whole lot of patience and prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Last week in Bible study, Joseph showed us that sometimes forgiveness unfolds over years.
SPEAKER_00: And today we heard the story of Paul and Mark in the book of Acts that even apostles and evangelists, guys who literally wrote the Bible, have to navigate the challenge of forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: Irreconcilable differences drove them apart.
SPEAKER_00: But God used it for his glory to spread the gospel throughout the world.
SPEAKER_00: And we find out much later at the end of Paul's life in 2 Timothy that God brought them back together again.
SPEAKER_00: Pretty awesome stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness takes time.
SPEAKER_00: It's really hard.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a single moment, but it's a repeated act, fully reliant on the mercies of God.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not this vague or therapeutic thing.
SPEAKER_00: It's not an eventually you'll feel better or time heals all wounds sort of situation.
SPEAKER_00: Time does not heal all wounds.
SPEAKER_00: It is Jesus who heals all wounds by his wounds.
SPEAKER_00: So what can we do when we just can't forget sins?
SPEAKER_00: I want to leave you with two things today.
SPEAKER_00: First, we relinquish the right to vengeance.
SPEAKER_00: When you can't forget the wrongs that you've suffered, when they weigh on you and come to mind for you again and again, you can consciously and conscientiously choose to give them over to God.
SPEAKER_00: Let's revisit that definition of forgiveness we've been sharing these past few weeks.
SPEAKER_00: Now, would you read that with me again today?
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness is God's gracious release of sin, won by Christ, given to us freely, and entrusted to us to extend to others.
SPEAKER_00: God has graciously released our sins.
SPEAKER_00: When we forgive others, we are extending the same gift to other people and graciously releasing their sins against us.
SPEAKER_00: And graciously releasing sin means that we are giving up our right for repayment or revenge or reprisal.
SPEAKER_00: It means that we're losing something, truly, but also willingly, willfully.
SPEAKER_00: It means that we are willing to suffer and sustain loss for the sake of somebody else, somebody who's hurt us.
SPEAKER_00: We will not use the offense as a weapon against them anymore.
SPEAKER_00: We will not hold on to the offense.
SPEAKER_00: We will not count their sin against them.
SPEAKER_00: And when we do this, when we graciously release the sin of others, what we find is that we receive release as well.
SPEAKER_00: When we refuse to grab someone by the throat and demand that they pay back what they owe us, we experience the fullness of the mercy of the king who refused to do that to us.
SPEAKER_00: Because he is the one who alone has the right to any of this.
SPEAKER_00: Relinquishing our right to vengeance is ultimately a confession that we have no such right, that vengeance belongs to the Lord and not to us.
SPEAKER_00: Releasing the wrongs done to us is an act of trust that He will make all things right.
SPEAKER_00: And he has.
SPEAKER_00: Which is why the very best thing we can do by far when we struggle to forget, hands down, is look to the cross, where the hands of Jesus were nailed up for us.
SPEAKER_00: That's where our sins were graciously released by God.
SPEAKER_00: That's where they were dealt with and done away with.
SPEAKER_00: That place is ground zero of this world-shaking explosion of forgiveness that will in the end graciously engulf all of creation.
SPEAKER_00: And so when you remember someone's sin against you, remember how Christ has forgiven you.
SPEAKER_00: When you remember someone's sin against you, remember how Christ has forgiven you.
SPEAKER_00: And let that little twinge of pain that you've sustained remind you of the pain that Jesus underwent for you on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Let every hurtful memory call to mind for you that Christ has hurt for you.
SPEAKER_00: The cross of Jesus is where the covenantal love of God blot out your transgressions, where he willfully chose not to remember your sins.
SPEAKER_00: There your iniquities were forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: There your sins were put away once and for all, cast behind God's back, never to be seen again, cast into the depths of the sea.
SPEAKER_00: There the record of debt that stood against you was erased forever.
SPEAKER_00: There, God reconciled you to himself, not counting your trespasses against you.
SPEAKER_00: The God who gives his son to die for the sins of his people is the God who does not deal with us according to our sins, but according to the perfection of Jesus, who remembers his mercy and his steadfast love from of old.
SPEAKER_00: So take heart.
SPEAKER_00: And when you do, run to the cross and find release, and grant that release to everyone else.
SPEAKER_00: Share his mercy as you share in his mercy.
SPEAKER_00: And rest in the assurance that one day the bell will be silenced, every wound will be fully healed, and all we will know is the peace and the joy of our God.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.