Forgiveness Culture

All right. Well, um, the sermon title is a bit of a spoiler. We’re going to be talking about forgiveness this morning. And, uh, you can turn in your Bibles to Ephesians 4:31 and 32. I feel like—maybe you agree with me, maybe you don’t—but I feel like forgiveness is one of, if not the hardest things that Christians are called to do. I mean, it can be very challenging, um, especially when you feel so hurt by someone, when it seems like, you know, we can often feel like when we forgive them we’re letting them get away with it. You know, where’s the justice? All of that can sort of be, uh, pent up in that.

Um, but one of the things I think—uh, why I want to go to this passage in Ephesians chapter 4—one of the things that I think this passage helps us with that makes forgiveness easier is we can often mess up forgiveness before we even get started. And how we do that is we can often treat forgiveness like it’s a special-forces mission deep behind enemy lines. And the battle rages all around us, and we get inserted in there, and we’re supposed to, in the midst of all the turmoil and all the conflict, forgive them, and then boom, we’re back out and we get extracted. It’s almost like we treat it as an isolated thing that we do, um, and it’s separate from all of the rest of the Christian life that we’re supposed to be living.

And so, too often we try to forgive people, or we know we should forgive people, when our hearts are not really in any condition to be forgiving. We have other things that we need to deal with first if we’re going to have any hope of actually being able to forgive those who have wronged us. And in other words, if we are going to forgive people, the first thing we need to do is completely recondition our hearts. We need to recondition our hearts. Um, I would put it this way: the key to forgiveness is keeping an eye on its friends. Who else is hanging out with this forgiveness that you’re trying to offer people?

Let’s look at what Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4:31 and 32. He says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” There’s a lot of associates with forgiveness in these verses, isn’t there? There’s a lot of people that forgiveness is hanging out with, or a lot of, uh, beliefs, a lot of attitudes, a lot of actions right there. And if we just, out of these two verses, just this sampling that Paul gives us, if we try and just address the forgiveness and ignore all of the rest that is found there in Ephesians 4:31 and 32, it is not going to work.

So verse 31, Paul essentially says there’s this stuff that you have to do away with. You have to get all this stuff out of your life before you even think about forgiveness. This has to be dealt with first. And it’s kind of a rough list when you look at it in verse 31: bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, malice. I mean, if you lived your life as a person that that characterized you, you probably would have very few friends. You probably would not be the kind of person that anyone was wanting to associate with.

It’s not a random list that Paul has just sort of pulled together off the top of his head and said, “Let me just think of a few things. Okay, here you go. Boom. Here’s my list.” No, there is a clear progression that he works through in this list, beginning with what’s going on inside of us in our hearts: bitterness. Bitterness is a kind of resentment, isn’t it? In the Greek word that’s used, it’s also used of the idea of like sharpness, like the point of an arrow. And bitterness can often be like that in our hearts, like this stabbing reality that we have toward someone. It’s like the tip of an arrow that’s kind of just resting right in the center of our chest. Bitterness can also, though, lie dormant for a long time. Maybe it’s something we think we’ve just forgotten about. We’ve never actually dealt with it; the circumstance has passed, and so it’s kind of out of sight and out of mind, but it’s still there below the surface. And something can happen, something can intrude into our lives, and all of a sudden that bitterness is just right back out on the surface without any warning.

I like what the writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 12:15. He says, “See to it that no root of bitterness springs up and causes you trouble.” It’s like this root that’s down in there, and without any sort of other prior indications it can all of a sudden just boom, spring up. Made me think of the alien, the chest alien in the first Alien movie, to give it sort of a gross illustration. It’s in there, and then all of a sudden it’s not in there anymore. Bitterness can sometimes be that below-the-surface, undetected thing, and then all of a sudden it surfaces. It can also be just sort of this constant current churning in your heart that you are just carrying this bitterness toward someone or toward something, and you just can’t get past it, and it dominates you. Maybe that’s the experience that you’ve had. But whatever it is, Paul says that it has to be dealt with.

And then there’s wrath and anger. These two are often almost used as synonyms—kind of a rage. One of the definitions for anger is an intense anger that does not subside, often on an epic scale. This is what Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount equates to murdering someone in our hearts, right? If we have anger toward them, it’s the same thing as murder. When you think about that, it’s not real hard to see how you can get from bitterness to wrath and anger, is it? It’s not a big leap. It isn’t. They’re not the same thing, though. But I mean, it’s just a short little step, and all of a sudden my bitterness is now wrath and anger, and it can be brewed to almost an epic scale.

I love what R.C. Sproul says. He says, “When anger is present, look for the pain.” Right? The thing that triggers in my mind the story of Ferdinand the bull. You know the story, right? He sits on a bee and he gets stung, and so he goes charging around town. So they think he’s this raging bull, and then he goes into the bull ring and he just wants to smell the flowers, you know. Uh, but there’s that—he sat on the bee. So then all of a sudden he was this raging angry bull for five minutes.

Um, Benjamin Franklin—one of our great theologians—um, said, “Anger is seldom without reason, but seldom a good one.” Okay, there’s always a reason for the anger, but it’s rarely a good reason. Bitterness is often that reason. But with very few exceptions, there’s going to be something that happens to you or happens to someone, and anger is the response. And this helps us to get to the idea that we need to deal with not the anger itself but the root of the anger. Just because there’s a root doesn’t ever mean that the anger is justified or is excusable. That’s rarely the case. There is such a thing as righteous anger, but that’s definitely very minimal in terms of the anger that surfaces in our lives.

You look up quotes about anger, and there’s a ton of them. They always address the issue of almost a lack of control. And these quotes will describe anger as a blinding force or it’s a folly, it’s mind-numbing, it has killed our reason where the angry person doesn’t act logically. Um, some quotes describe it like riding a storm or riding a wild horse. You know, the horse is just going to go wherever it wants, you know, and those are the ways that we have often described anger. Because it can, in the moment when we are raging, feel that way. But there’s always something that is the cause of it—something that needs to be addressed beyond just the anger itself.

But Paul still says bitterness, wrath, anger—these are in this list of things that have to be dealt with. These are things that we have to get rid of, tear out of our lives, root out of our lives. And then in this progression he adds clamor. Clamor—not a word we use very often. Clamor’s like screaming, yelling, noise. And we can often see how it’s not that hard to go from bitterness to anger and anger to now I’m screaming. My rage is boiling over into other areas of my life. And then from yelling, well, then there’s slander. Now I’m not just reacting; I am acting against someone, right? I’m now speaking falsely about them in a way that I am attempting to destroy them. I want them to get what’s coming to them. Even if I have to be untruthful, even if I have to be deceptive, even if I have to spread lies about them, I don’t care because in my mind it’s justified. They deserve it because I’m angry, because I’m bitter—all of that stuff.

I love this quote from Amy Carmichael. Amy Carmichael was a missionary who served in India for almost 50 years, um, and she’s well known for this quote. This is actually a well-known quote that’s been attributed to a lot of other people, including Socrates, um, but she’s the one that came up with it. When you think about what you say: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? That can be a great way to think about our speech. And even as we think about something like slander, just addressing our speech from that perspective can eliminate pretty much all of that. It’s hard to slander somebody if, right off the bat, it’s not true, certainly isn’t going to be kind, and it’s not necessary either.

Paul’s working out, unfolding this progression. And then finally there is this sort of all-encompassing word: malice. Malice—to act maliciously is twisting things to accomplish an evil end. It’s acting with evil or wicked intent. And why I love that he puts this word malice at the end of this list is it eliminates any attempt for us to somehow justify that any of these other things might possibly be righteous—the bitterness, the anger, the wrath, the clamor, the slander. There is this maliciousness to all of it, this evilness.

One person said this about anger and malice: “Anger and malice differ only in age.” Think about malice as just sort of a nice aged anger. It’s evilness. You know, some things get better with age; anger isn’t one of those things. It’s evil actions, evil intents that are the eventual end of unrestrained anger. If you don’t deal with your bitterness, if you don’t deal with your anger, if you don’t deal with your wrath, if you don’t deal with your clamor, if you don’t deal with your slandering, you’re going to end up just being an evil person with evil intents whose goal is to destroy and to bring down.

Now, I raced through that because it’s a simple layout of a progression that most of us are familiar with. Most of us have experienced that on both sides of it. Most of us have experienced being the object of someone’s bitterness, wrath, anger, slander, clamor, malice. And most of us—you don’t have to raise your hands—have also delivered that toward other people. We understand that. But what we need to focus on is what Paul wants the Ephesian church and us to do about it.

And there are some important clues in the original language that we don’t get as clearly in the English, but I want you to let this sink in. The first one is “be put away.” Okay? In verse 31: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away.” This is passive. And what this is telling us is that your bitterness, your anger, your wrath, your clamor, your slander, your malice is not just going to go away on its own. It’s not just going to pack its bags, pull up out of your heart, and just move on. These debilitating sinful acts will not just fix themselves. You have to be the one who works to proactively pull this stuff out of your heart and get it out of your life. You have to be the one to put it away.

If you see it, if you’re aware of it, if you know that this is a struggle for you—these attitudes and actions that you have toward others that are sinful—you cannot just wait and hope that it will vanish, hope that your attitudes toward others are just going to magically change. You can’t just sit and regret their presence in your life. You can’t just say, “Boy, I wish this was different.” You also cannot simply be content to wish that you didn’t struggle with them. Boy, I wish I didn’t have to wrestle with this anger. Boy, I wish I didn’t have such bitterness in my heart. Boy, I wish I didn’t struggle with slandering people that I don’t like.

I love how the NLT and the NIV put it. They make it a lot more direct. They say, “Get rid of it.” All right, that’s a little bit more direct. You have this stuff in your life—get rid of it. Don’t let it just be there. Don’t dismiss it as just who I am. Get rid of it.

I also love that Paul says “from you.” You—this is another struggle with English. English is kind of a clunky language. “You” here is plural. That’s “you all,” you the church. In other words, the Ephesian church and this church and any church is not going to be healthy; it’s going to be dysfunctional if only a few select ones of us decide we’re going to deal with this. We all have to collectively commit to addressing these sins of bitterness and anger and wrath and clamor and slander and malice in our lives. But we all individually and collectively have to be working to rid ourselves of this. The church is not going to be healthy if we’re all full of these spiritual cancers. This is an imperative that each and every one of us has to take seriously.

And then finally, look at verse 31 again where he says, “Let what? Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor, along with all malice.” You have to get rid of all of it. We cannot be content to just get rid of the easy stuff or get rid of the stuff that, you know what, but I really like hating that person over there. So I really want to be angry at them. I really want to slander them. I really want to do evil things toward them. You’ve got to get rid of all of it.

If you’re a gardener, you understand why you have to work so hard to weed your garden, right? It’s not mainly cosmetic, right? It’s because you have a limited amount of nutrients in the soil. If you have all these weeds in your garden, they are going to starve the plants you want to grow of the nutrients you need. And so you weed again and again. And when weeds crop up again, you weed them out. You continue to do that because you know they’re stealing the nutrients from the plants you want to thrive. And so you work at it and you work at it and you work at it.

This is sort of the same idea with these sins in our lives, in our spiritual garden, so to speak. We have to continue to weed them out. Get rid of all of them. They are stealing our spiritual nutrients. If you don’t do this, you will not be able to forgive people. You can’t be bitter toward someone and forgive them. You can’t be angry, wrathful toward someone and forgive them. You can’t be slandering them and forgive them. You can’t be malicious toward them and forgive them. It’s impossible.

So you can just, from this verse alone, see why if we don’t address these issues and yet we try to approach someone in a spirit of forgiveness, it’s a failed mission right from the start. It’s not going to happen. You have to think about what is associated all around forgiveness in our lives. Forgiving others is an act that, if you have been able to successfully do it, you know this—it results in an unexplainable peace. But to understand that and to know that kind of peace, you have to first take an axe to the root of these malicious thoughts and deeds.

If you would rather say, “I want to stand on my right to be angry. I want to stand on my right to get revenge. I want to stand on my right to simply nourish my bitterness toward this person,” you’re never going to be able to forgive them. And consequently, you’re never going to be able to experience the peace of forgiveness. If you’re an angry person, you don’t experience peace in your life. You have to be able to deal with these problems.

Paul takes us then to the positive side. This is all the stuff we’ve got to put away from us, get rid of, throw it away. But there are some things that we want to encourage and invite and foster in our lives. We have to have an anchor point for our forgiveness. And just as Paul lays out this sort of well-defined path from bitterness to maliciousness, there’s a path that leads us to forgiving others.

Verse 32: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Kindness. I said this when I addressed this issue with the youth group a couple weeks ago—I think a lot of us have a hard time forgiving because we’re just not kind people. We can just be kind of mean, kind of negative, always seeing the worst, always believing the worst about people. Kindness is things like the Golden Rule, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Kindness is like the call for Christians to be humble, not prideful, or the call to consider others as more important than yourself, the call to show no partiality toward others. This is the kind of attitude that we want to be fostering and living out in other people’s lives.

I want to make this clear too because I think we are a little bit confused about kindness. We sometimes mistake or we equate kindness with being polite. Those are not the same thing. You can be polite and not be a kind person. And kindness doesn’t always necessarily come across as politeness. Sometimes kindness is shown in a state of urgency or is coming to somebody and doing something they need you to do but maybe they don’t want you to do because what they’re doing right now is harmful but it has taken hold of them—maybe it’s an addiction, maybe it’s something, a blind spot that they have, and you’re showing a kindness to them by helping them to see and then to deal with it.

Kindness is also not to be confused with just being nice to people. You can be nice to somebody and not be kind as well. You can be nice—I’m not saying don’t be nice—but don’t just think because I’ve been nice to somebody that I’m a kind person. You ever heard somebody say, “Bless your heart”? Oh, bless your heart. That sounds very nice, right? It’s not a compliment. It’s not a nice thing they’re saying. Don’t confuse those things.

Tenderhearted. Tenderheartedness—this is compassion. This is having an affection for someone. And once again, this gets down to, if you kind of extrapolate from the Greek, it’s like in your guts, in your bowels, in the center of who you are—we care for someone right down into our guts. And once again, if Paul’s leading us to being forgiving, this is the path that he is putting us on. We can see how we have to move away from bitterness and wrath and anger and all of that. We can also see how kindness and compassion are going to help us be forgiving, right? You can see how if you have a compassionate heart toward somebody, you are going to be much more eager, willing, and able to forgive them. And we’re going to get to why these are necessary in just a second. It’s hard to be motivated to forgive someone if you don’t care for them, if you don’t care about them, if you have no compassion toward them. You need to be kind. We need to be compassionate.

And Paul says we need to forgive. This is not the usual word for forgiveness. This is an unusual word. Every English translation—I did not look up every single one, okay? I looked up like ten, the most popular ones: ESV, King James, New King James, New American Standard, NIV, New Living Translation, Christian Standard Bible, Revised Standard Version—so that’s like eight right there—they all use this word “forgiving.” “Forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”

Don’t be scared, but I’m going to say a Greek word, okay? The Greek word here is charizomai. The root word for that is charis, which is—if you know anybody named Carissa or you’ve heard of “charismatic”—it comes from this word for grace. Paul is saying we need to show grace to people. We have to be gracious toward them. This is the connection to forgiving, okay? You only forgive someone if they’ve done something wrong to you. If they’ve wronged you in some way—intentionally, unintentionally—that’s when you forgive them, right? Because they have done something wrong to you. Forgiveness is only needed when there is real sin, when there is real offense, when there is real hurt, when you say, “You don’t deserve my forgiveness.” You might be right because they have done something horrible to you. They have hurt you in deep and real ways. That’s also when you show people grace. Grace is giving someone something they do not deserve. It’s giving someone something they have not earned. It’s giving them something free.

Do you remember 2015? July 17th was when Dylann Roof went into the Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot ten people, killing nine of them. And it made national headlines. To read the description from the people who survived of what happened at that Bible study—it’s horrific. I mean, it’s terrible, not just the idea that he went in there and shot those people, but just the cold-bloodedness and the very casualness with which he did it.

And what, in all of that after the arrest and then the trial, what was so surprising—one of the things that came out of that that was so surprising—was how many of the survivors or the relatives of people whom he killed offered their forgiveness to him in the courtroom, expressed the fact that they were hurt by what he did, that they were shocked, that what he did transformed their lives forever, and yet they forgave him. I mean, that’s real sin. That’s real wrong. That’s real hurt. And for those people to be able to say, “We forgive you.” Well, most of us will say, “Well, he doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t.” Right? We would all say that, and we would be right. And in fact, the response from so many of the vocal community leaders was essentially like, “Well, forgiveness is nice, but we want justice. We need justice.” And you can have both of those things. You can have both of those things.

But where you and I need to be able to accept the challenge of forgiveness is that when we do this, we are extending grace toward someone. We’re not saying, “If you jump through these hoops, then, and you earn my forgiveness, then you can have it.” We’re not saying, “Well, if you decide to be really nice to me, well, maybe I’ll think about forgiving you for what you did to me.” That’s not what Paul is calling the Ephesians to do. That’s not what he’s calling us to do. That’s not what Christ is calling us to do. He’s calling us to forgive someone even if they haven’t sufficiently proven that they have earned it or that they have repented or that they have changed their ways or that they have come and pleaded with you.

If you are waiting for someone to sufficiently prove they deserve your forgiveness, you aren’t forgiving anyone. You’re simply engaging in some sort of emotional contract negotiations, and we can both agree to sign on the bottom line if we agree to this contract. No. And this is really hard for us to wrap our heads around. I mean, it’s one thing to stand up here and talk about it, and I understand it’s a whole different thing to sit in a room with somebody or meet somebody at Starbucks and have this actual conversation and say that I forgive you. What you did to me was wrong, but I forgive you.

It’s hard to wrap our heads around giving someone something they don’t deserve because it’s giving up our right to demand retribution. It’s giving up our right to demand some sort of punitive consequences. And the proof of that is in the very last phrase of verse 32, right? This is the motivation. This is the anchor for our forgiveness: “as God in Christ forgave you”—as, in the same way. In other words, if you understand the forgiveness that God offers to us through Christ Jesus, that it is a grace, that it is undeserved, then that is the anchor point, that is the motivation for us to be able to show this kind of grace to others.

So let’s look at what we learn about God’s grace in Ephesians. Look at Ephesians chapter 1, flip over a couple pages, Ephesians chapter 1:7–9: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to all the good things that we do.” Right? Is that what it says? No. “The forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ.” This forgiveness for our trespasses is according to the grace of God.

Look at Ephesians chapter 2. I mean, if you know anything about the book of Ephesians, you probably know about the beginning of Ephesians chapter 2. Look at verse 1: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

The gospel, the good news of salvation, is a message of forgiveness. It is a message of the grace of God shown to us. Paul is explicit in Ephesians chapter 2: it’s not based on your works. It’s not based on you earning it. It’s not based on you getting to the point where you deserve it. He did this while you were dead in your sins. God hasn’t forgiven us because we’ve met some sort of standard. He has forgiven us because Christ has taken on himself the penalty and payment for our sins. And in exchange we are offered salvation. We are offered a new life. We are offered a transformed heart and mind, and it is all a gift of the grace of God.

When you hear the word “forgiveness,” I want you to instinctively think about that word “grace.” Forgiveness is an act of grace. And showing grace is hard. Do you see why it would be impossible for you to forgive if you’re holding on to bitterness, if you’re holding on to anger, if you’re holding on to all these other attendant sins? You’re not going to want to be gracious. If you’re angry, you’re not going to want to be gracious. If you are bitter—notice in verse 32 the expression “one another.” It gets repeated in verse 32. It’s important because it lets us know that Paul’s concern for the Ephesians and for us is that the local church is a place where kindness, compassion, and forgiveness rule. It’s not that he’s unconcerned with our treatment of the wider world, but I do believe there’s a sense in which if we can’t get it right here, we really don’t have any hope of going outside the church and being gracious and tenderhearted and putting away our bitterness. We have no hope of showing those to people whose priorities and values are so very different from our own.

This is also a repeated theme of Paul’s. You don’t have to turn there, but let me read from Colossians. Colossians chapter 3:12–13: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved”—you’re going to be surprised by this—“compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”

What I love about this gospel connection is that it means that what God the Father has done for us through God the Son by the power of God the Spirit is that we not only have motivation to be forgiving, we also have motivation to put away all the stuff in verse 31 and to live out all the good stuff of verse 32. Christ is the motivation. What God has done for us, bringing us salvation, is the motivation for our righteous living.

Let’s pray. Dear Lord, I thank you so much for this message that Paul has left the Ephesian church and has left us as well. We thank you for the clarity that it brings to the idea of forgiving, that it helps us to recognize the futility of trying to forgive independent of dealing with other issues in our lives. And it also makes so clear that forgiveness is going to be hard because it is an act of grace. But the more that we understand how much we have been forgiven through the work of your Son Jesus Christ, the more motivation we have to be forgiving. May you help us to do that even when it’s hard, even when it’s painful, even when so much in us perhaps wants to see revenge, wants to see our version of justice, wants to hold on to bitterness. May you help us to let go of those things and to embrace the peace that comes with being forgiving. We ask all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.