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May the grace of God, the love that He has shown us in Christ, His mercy, that we have the privilege of sharing with one another, and the peace that we have, because we are reconciled to God through Christ, and the peace with one another, because of that reconciliation, may that be yours, our Heavenly Father, from our Lord and our Savior Jesus. Amen. All right, you got to listen a little more closely today. That's maybe not such a bad thing, right? Um, when I was a kid, there were just certain things that I dreaded. Do you have that? Like as you look back on your childhood, maybe you're there right now, were there just certain things that scared you, things that kind of made you uncomfortable, places you didn't want to go, things like that. Do you know what I'm talking about? Can you hear me out there? Okay. Um, so one of the things I really dreaded was getting a sliver. Some people call it a splinter. Yeah. Is that weird that that was such a big deal to me? I dreaded it when I was a kid because I knew that it was probably going to be painful to get it out. I don't know if any of the rest of you had this experience, but I remember getting them in my feet a lot when I would run around without shoes in the summertime. And uh my parents would, you know, see that I had this, and I was like, well, it's it's fine, just leave it alone. And they would say no, and they would get a needle sometimes, sometimes they'd heat it up. That was terrifying, right? They'd try to get out this little piece of wood that had made its way into my skin that wasn't supposed to be there. And and somehow, I don't know how they were this skilled, but somehow they would manage with the tiny little pair of tweezers. Great word, right? Tweezers. They would manage with one tiny set of tweezers to stab every single nerve ending in my body at once. It felt that way anyway. It felt kind of cruel. But we know what it actually was was love. They were trying to pull it out because they knew that it wasn't good for the splinter to stay with me and they loved me. But man, did it hurt. And now that at least I'd like to consider myself a grown man, they they don't bother me nearly as much. In fact, sometimes the excavation can even be a little fun. Can some of you relate to that? Maybe not. But they do still bother me sometimes. You know what it's like, right? You get one and you can't quite get it out, and it's just there for a while. Every time you bump it or touch something, you forget about it, and then it's like there and it just stings, and you know that it needs to come out. But for some reason, you just kind of keep living with it for a while. Well, I think forgiveness is kind of like that. Today we get to continue our series on five popular myths about forgiveness. Uh, two weeks ago, we challenged the idea that forgiveness starts with us, uh, locating forgiveness, not in ourselves, but instead in the steadfast love and mercy of God. Lastly, we confronted the idea that forgiveness is optional. Now, we were heeding Jesus' words last week that leave us no choice but to forgive as we've been forgiven. And today we're challenging the myth that forgiveness is easy. Now you might be thinking to yourself, that's not really much of a myth, because anybody who's ever tried to forgive knows that it is the furthest thing from easy. Uh, true enough. And yet, how often do we beat ourselves up when we try to forgive and seem to encounter nothing but failure over and over again? How often do we lose heart when we know that Jesus has commanded us to forgive, and we can't understand why we struggle so much to do so? Well, we know the truth, right? Forgiveness is hard. I would say it's one of the hardest things about life in this fallen world. Something enters our life that shouldn't be there, kind of like a sliver. And we we know that it hurts us, and yet we hold on to it. We struggle to extract it, to extricate ourselves from the pain. But when we try to tweeze it out, it feels like each attempt is a stab into every nerve ending of our soul. It hurts, it's hard. And so today I'd like to explore a few reasons why it's so hard and what the Word of God leads us to do about that. The first reason that forgiveness is hard is because sometimes we mistakenly think that it takes sin lightly. When someone sins against us, it hurts. Sin truly wounds. The loss that it inflicts on us is real, and the hurt that we experience as a result is not to be glossed over. Forgiveness is hard because hurt is real. And we can fall into the trap of conflating forgiveness with excusing sin. How many times have you heard someone say, I'm sorry, and the other person says, that's okay. We can tend to think that forgiveness means pretending that what happened is okay or didn't matter. We long for wrongs to be made right, and we can see forgiveness as a miscarriage of justice. We might resist forgiving someone because it kind of feels like letting them off the hook unfairly. Doesn't seem right that those who do wrong go unpunished. If you've ever wrestled with that, you're not alone. In our Bible study last week, you might remember that we looked at the prophet Jonah. Now, many people think that Jonah ran away from God because he was scared, or maybe because he was lazy or something like that. That is not the case at all. At the end of the book, Jonah tells us exactly why he ran away from his call to preach to the Ninevites. He says to God, O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish. For I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Jonah is devastatingly angry that God has forgiven the wicked Ninevites. It's not fair. The prophet is scandalized by God's grace. And so the prodigal son's brother is David read for us just a few minutes ago. The father welcomes back his wayward son. He gives him this great homecoming, and the older brother is scandalized by the father's grace. When this son of yours came, he says, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him. It is a travesty. It's a miscarriage of justice. It's not fair. Well, it's not. It's free. It's grace. It's mercy. It's all undeserved. The prodigal son did not deserve his father's welcome. Nineveh did not deserve to be spared. And you and I do not deserve the father's forgiveness. But we have it. One of the things I love about the parable of the prodigal son is how it ends. The father gets the last word. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive. He was lost and is found. And that's us. Jonah didn't want God to have the last word in Nineveh. He wanted it for himself. But God gets the last word in Jonah's book, too. So today I'm going to ask you: will you let God have the last word when someone sins against you? To use the oft-quoted cliche. Will you let go and let God? That is, after all, what forgiveness means. Remember our definition these past couple weeks. Would you read it with me again? Forgiveness is God's gracious release of sin, won by Christ, given to us freely and entrusted to us to extend to others. Forgiveness releases sin. Let it go. Forgiveness isn't fair, it's free. And it's freeing. And it's all undeserved. But don't let that fool you into thinking that God doesn't deal with sin. For one thing, Paul talks about letting God have the last word in Romans chapter 12, where he says, Brothers, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. For it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. All will be made right in the end. But far more than looking to God for vengeance, Paul directs us to look to the cross. You see, God doesn't overlook sin, he deals with it at the cross. Sin is serious enough that it necessitates the death of the Son of God. When Jesus comes to forgive sins, he doesn't deny our suffering. He enters into it. He takes it upon himself. I always come back to that verse from the great hymn on crucifixion, on the crucifixion of Jesus. You who think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great, here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate. Forgiveness doesn't take sin lightly. It doesn't minimize it or ignore it. It releases it by the blood of Jesus. At the cross, God gets the last word. He wins the battle forever. But it is a battle. And that brings us to reason number two that forgiveness is so hard. Forgiveness is hard because so much battles against it. So much, both within us and without, fights tooth and nail against forgiveness. First of all, our own sinful nature resists it. We are curved in on ourselves. Pride and anger and self-justification all fight against forgiveness. Last week we heard Paul tell us to put away all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander and malice. And that is far easier said than done. When we are hurt by someone, it usually lingers. We tend to sit with it. We call it to mind. We play it and rehearse it and we retain the offense. In other words, we keep a record of sins, oftentimes quite unintentionally. Our memory remains, and there's not a whole lot that we can do about that. But it's not that we can do nothing. Next week we'll talk a lot more about that. But love keeps no record of wrongs. We heard today. Psalm 130 reminds us that if God kept a record of sins, none of us could stand before him. But with him there is forgiveness. And so with us, there should be forgiveness. And we can't do it ourselves. We need his help. We need his heart. And that's hard when our own hearts battle against it. And then the battle is joined by the world around us. How often have we been taught we are right not to forgive? In our society, unforgiveness is actually often held up as moral clarity. Cancel culture seeks to silence anyone who has made a serious mistake. The internet provides ample evidence of the anger and the rage that so often controls the narrative. Those who uphold justice by refusing to release sins are sometimes seen as heroes. I was reminded this past week of Simon Wiesenthal. Have you heard of him? It's the Nazi hunter after World War II. He very famously and openly spoke about his refusal to forgive the Nazis for their horrific atrocities. And many people agree with his stance. One author commented on his approach by writing this forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim. You can kind of understand where she's coming from. This is how many in our world view forgiveness. And they encourage us to do the same. But it is not the way of Christ. The grace of Jesus is scandalous to the world. It's countercultural to the fullest possible extent. But the grace of Jesus calls us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us, to pray for those who abuse us. We have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But Jesus says to us that there's a better way, his way. Some of you have read her book, The Hiding Place, and in that book, she tells of the time that she encountered a guard that was at the Ravensbrook concentration camp where she had been and where her sister had died. And it two years after the war that she saw this guy, and she was in Holland claiming actually the importance of forgiveness. And this guard comes up to her and he tells her that he's become a Christian like her, that he's come to know the forgiveness of Jesus and how it's covered over his horrible acts. But he wanted to hear it from her. And so he put out his hand and asked for her pardon. And she writes, I stood there. I whose sins had every day to be forgiven, and could not. Betsy had died in that place. Could he erase her slow, terrible death simply for the asking? But then the love of Christ compelled her. She prayed, Help me, Jesus, for the strength that she herself did not have. And by his power and not her own, she says. She lifted her hand and said, I forgive you, brother. With all my heart. She says, For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then. Ananias did something similar for a man named Saul. When God told him that the great persecutor of the church was in need of his help, Ananias understandably had a few questions for God first, but he he recounted how Saul had done these horrible evil things to the church and how he was actually in town to arrest Christians like Ananias himself. But God urged him on, and Ananias went and met Saul and restored his sight. You know, people like Cory Tenboom and people like Ananias and people like you and me, we are soldiers in the battle to forgive. And it is Jesus, our commander-in-chief, who won the war by his death and his resurrection. Which brings us back to the cross, which serves for us as the literal crux of the whole matter. Forgiveness is hard because forgiveness is costly. This is the center of gravity for the entire conversation. Forgiveness isn't just hard because we are weak or prideful or petty. It's hard because it always involves absorbing real debt. Today we've addressed the misconception that forgiveness takes sin lightly, but we know it doesn't. When we forgive, we feel the weight, the cost. We feel the cost of releasing sin. Last week in the parable of the unforgiving servant, the king forgave him 10,000 talents worth of debt, just a million lifetimes of debt, which meant, of course, that the king was 10,000 talents poorer than he should have been. In a very real way, that debt did not go unpaid. It was just paid for by the mercy of the king. When we forgive others their trespasses against us, when we forgive our debtors, we are absorbing what they owe us and asking for nothing back. This is hard. Really, really hard. It does cut against our sense of justice. So much within us and without battles against it, it is costly. Sometimes it takes everything that we've got. Sometimes we forgive through clenched teeth. Sometimes we speak forgiveness with a trembling lip and through tears. Forgiving means being willing to hurt for the sake of the one who has hurt you, being willing to absorb their debt, to bear the weight and the cost. And this is exactly what Jesus has done for you. On the cross, he bore the full weight, the full cost of your sin. Peter says that he bore our sins and his body on the tree. Jesus knew better than anyone in human history that forgiveness is not easy. For him, it was literally excruciating. And it was in the very midst of intense physical and emotional pain that Jesus said, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. Forgiveness always means that someone absorbs the cost. And at the cross, that someone is Christ. And by his death, God conquered our death, forgave our trespasses, and canceled the record of debt, as we heard last week. To forgive like Jesus is, to enter into something incredibly hard, but something that has already been accomplished for you. Forgiveness is to bear with one another, to bear the cost for one another, and to forgive each other as Christ has forgiven us. Not giving in to bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and scander, but rather to put on compassionate hearts and kindness and humility and meekness and patience. Forgiveness is God's gracious release of sin, won by Christ, given to us freely and entrusted to us to extend to others. Forgiveness isn't easy, but Jesus is taking care of it all. And he gently and graciously empowers us to share his gift with each other. And when we do, it's like getting that sliver out of us. Healing starts to take over. So may we give ourselves over to the mercy of Jesus and seek his help to share that mercy every day. In his name. Amen. Next week, we're going to take the next step in this conversation and confront the myth that forgiveness is the same thing as forgetting. We're going to see how forgiveness takes time and patience and prayers as we work through our memories. And we're going to see the mercy of Jesus in ever sharper focus. Until then, may the peace of God, which transcends our understanding, guard your hearts and minds. Jesus, our Savior, now and forever. Amen.