Getting Past Your Past – Forgiving Those Who Hurt You*
Sycamore Creek Church
April 27/28, 2014
Tom Arthur
Peace friends!
We’re into week two of this series Getting Past Your Past, and I’ve heard how God is working in many people’s lives already. I am really excited about how God is going to continue to work in each of our lives to help us get past our past and move into God’s future for us.
Last week we talked about breaking the labels that bind. Next week we’re talking about getting unstuck from your past. My personal therapist is our guest speaker next week. No, he won’t be sharing about me. But he will be sharing how he sees people get stuck in their past over and over again. The following week we’re looking at apologizing. How do you really deliver an effective apology when you’ve been the one who has hurt someone else? Then we’ll look at getting past your past money mistakes. And we’ll wrap up the whole thing with forgiving the one who is hardest to forgive: ourselves.
Today we’re exploring a particularly difficult theme: getting past your past by forgiving those who have hurt you. Have you been hurt by someone? Most of us have. Sometimes it’s just a misunderstanding, but it still drives a wedge between us. Other times it’s outright betrayal. That person meant to hurt us and they did. Right now it is likely that at the front of your heart is a wound, and it’s still fresh and still hurting. We bury it and act like all is OK. Then something steps on that mine and it explodes into our consciousness again. We have a rush of negative emotion all over again.
Back when Micah was born I got an unexpected Facebook message from someone I had not thought about for many many years: my dad’s second wife. I didn’t even know she was on Facebook, but she saw a picture of Micah and sent me a brief compliment on how beautiful he was. Now, this was a woman that my dad had an affair with and that affair ended my parents’ marriage. My dad married this woman and it lasted for a year or so and then they got divorced. It all happened when I was in elementary school, and while I have wrestled with and forgiven my dad for his mistakes, I had never even thought of his second wife and her culpability in the situation until I got this Facebook message. Here’s the irony of the timing. I was in the middle of writing another message about forgiveness! As I was trying to tell other people how to forgive, this little Facebook message brought all this negative emotion up in me. It was like I was being tested by God. Would I just be speaking about forgiveness or would I forgive?
Some of you have walked into a divine appointment today. You thought you were just coming to worship, but God is going to work in you today and begin to break you free from your past hurts.
Whenever I preach on this topic of forgiveness I almost always get some pushback. It goes something like this: “You don’t know what so and so did to me.” They gossiped about me. They lied about me. I was taken advantage of. They betrayed my innocence. My spouse cheated on me. My parent abandoned me. Sometimes it’s harder to forgive someone who hurt someone you loved rather than just forgive someone who hurt you. So you’re right, I don’t know what so and so did to you. Although many of you have told me stories over the five years that I’ve been your pastor. And while I don’t know what it has been like to be you, I do know that I have been hurt too. I have had to forgive too and sometimes it seemed impossible.
God, may what is impossible with humans be possible with you today.
I want to look at two big things today: why should you forgive and how do you forgive. First, why? Why should I forgive someone who hurt me?
Unforgiveness Hurts Me
You should forgive others who have hurt you because all you’re doing with unforgiveness is continuing to hurt yourself. The author of the book of Hebrews in the Bible says this:
See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled.
Hebrews 12:15 NRSV
Unforgiveness is a bitter root that we live with. We try to learn to function with a grudge, but the grudge always pulls us down. But we’re told elsewhere in the Bible that “love keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Unforgiveness is like grabbing broken glass and squeezing it. Are you familiar with the game Angry Birds? It’s this crazy game where some pigs steal the eggs from the birds and the rest of the game is all about angry birds trying to destroy the pigs again, and again, and again, and again. It never stops. It’s worse that the Hatfields and McCoys. Anne Lamott says, “In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die” (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith). Forgive because unforgiveness only hurts you.
I Will Need Forgiveness Again
Forgive those who have hurt you because some day you will need to be forgiven again too. Jesus says:
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Matthew 6:14-15 NRSV
We all have fallen short of God’s standard for our lives. All of us have done unloving things. All of us have missed the mark of God’s will for our lives sometime intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. All of us have participated in injustice in some way or another. All of us are broken wounded people who have hurt and wounded other people. We all need forgiveness.
And yet, I tend to embrace God showing me mercy in my own life and in my own brokenness and woundedness, but we are each slow to embrace others being forgiven. We tend to come up with a rather nuanced description of our own motives and mitigating factors, and we tend to be pretty black and white when it comes to others. I deserve to be given a mulligan. He deserves to be held accountable to every detail of his mistake. I deserve to be forgiven. She deserves to rot in hell.
Each of us has been forgiven, and each of us will need to be forgiven again. Our standard of forgiveness, Jesus tells us, will be used to measure our own sinfulness. Forgive others, because you will need to be forgiven again.
How?
So I’ve convinced you. You say to yourself, “I should forgive that good for nothing flea bag of a husband/boss/co-worker/teacher/classmate of mine, but I don’t know how. I just can’t make the forgiveness thing happen. How do I do it?” Good question. Let’s look at the mechanics of forgiveness and how it works, or at least two aspects of forgiveness.
Pray
Begin forgiving by praying for those who hurt you. But what do you pray? Maybe you could pray the Psalms. There is a whole genre of psalms called the cursing psalms. Many people want to skip over those psalms and get on to the happy psalms, but I think God put those cursing psalms in there for a reason. Here’s a little sample of them:
Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave.
~Psalm 55:15
O God, break the teeth in their mouths.
~Psalm 58:6
May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous.
~Psalm 69:28
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
~Psalm 109:9
Ouch! Is that really in the Bible? Yes it is. Here’s one thing to notice about each one of these prayers. All of them put the ultimate outcome in God’s hands. If you want the person who hurt you to die, just be honest with God about it. Then let God deliver the verdict. Often times when people pray these psalms, they find that they are able to let go a little bit and move on.
Maybe a further step of prayer would be what St. Augustine, a 4th and 5th century church leader, says we should pray: “They should pray, not that their enemies may die, but that they may reform; then the enemies will be dead, since being reformed they will be enemies no longer.” Wow, that’s a rather bold thing to pray, that our enemies would reform their ways, turn from their past injustice, confess it, make restitution, and become our friends. Wow!
Or maybe we could pray as Jesus prayed when he was hanging on the cross: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That’s how Jesus taught us to pray when he said:
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Matthew 5:43-44 NRSV
But you say to me, “I don’t feel like it. It’s not a sincere prayer.” Sometimes right actions have to come first to trigger right feelings. Actions and feelings are connected. If you do what is right, you will slowly but surely begin to love what is right. So start with a simple prayer: Bless him/her. Maybe you can’t say this sincerely, but you pray it anyway. Then you pray with a little more sincerity, “Bless him/her.” And then a little more sincerity and a little more until you really mean it. Your prayers for the person who hurt you may not change that person, but they will begin to change you and that bitter root of unforgiveness will begin to be uprooted, and slowly but surely you’ll stop drinking that rat poison you’re drinking trying to kill the rat.
Forgive as You’ve Been Forgiven
Lastly, forgive the same way that you’ve been forgiven. Jesus forgave you completely and constantly. Do the same with others. Paul, the first missionary of the church and the author of many books of the Bible said it this way:
Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
Colossians 3:13 NRSV
One time Peter asked Jesus, how many times should we forgive? Three strikes and you’re out, right? Peter thought he would improve on the three times and you’re out rule and suggest to Jesus that we should forgive seven times. Compared to the three strikes and you’re out rule, seven times is pretty generous. But Jesus’ forgiveness is gratuitous. Jesus responded, “Forgive seven times seventy times!”
Now hear me out. If you are in an abusive situation, if your husband is beating on you, get out of the house and forgive from a distance. Tell someone at church. Tell me. We’ll find you a safe space to go. There are some men in our church who are barely saved, and they will do anything their pastor tells them to do. Just kidding. Sorta. This is the power of being in a community. This is the power of having a faith community that stands with you. This is why the church matters. Because sometimes it is very hard to discern alone what you should do. Together we can discern God’s will forward when it comes to tricky forgiveness situations.
The Point
Just in case you’ve missed the point of this whole message here it is: The forgiven forgive others.
After receiving that random Facebook message from my dad’s second wife, and experiencing all the rush of negative emotions it triggered within me, I decided that I need to forgive her. So I wrote her a letter. I told her how her actions and decisions had hurt me and my family. I told her that I had made mistakes too and had needed forgiveness. I told her that I had been forgiven by Jesus for my own contributions to the brokenness of this world. I expressed a hope that she would know Jesus’ forgiveness too. And I forgave her. If it were just up to me and if the situation had only involved me, I probably would have sent the letter to her. But after talking to my dad, he felt it was best not to send it to her, so I honored his wishes. But you know what, the letter still worked. Forgiveness had come, and the bitterness was gone. When you forgive others you can say, “On the day I forgave _____, God set a prisoner free, and that prisoner was me.”
God, help us to forgive others as we have been forgiven by you. In the Spirit of Jesus, amen.
* This series and this sermon are based on and inspired by a sermon series originally by Craig Groeschel
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