Forgiving Others

Pastor Ron Burcham

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

You may have heard about the man who went to Des Moines International Airport and he goes up to the counter on a Monday morning, still kind of sleepy. He looks at the gal behind the counter and he says, “I'm going to Chicago today. I'd like this bag here to go to Dallas . I'd like this bag here to go to St. Louis .” The gal says, “We can't do that.” He says, “I don't see why not. You did last week and I didn't even ask you.”

You know, whenever you go to the airport and you check your luggage, you take a chance, don't you? You're never quite sure where it's going to end up. Now I know there are some people who are great fans of just doing carry on. They don't travel any other way. If they can't fit it into a carry-on, then they just don't take it with them. I've done that a couple of times, short trips, take a carry-on. But I have to confess, if I have my choice, I want to check my bag and take my chances. I do not like dragging around my bag in the airport. It's just a hassle. You're walking down the aisle, you bump into somebody, “Oh, excuse me. I'm sorry.” You bump into somebody else. You have a layover someplace and you try to go to a restaurant, what do you do with this thing? The restaurants are like miniaturized anyway. There's no place to put it. We won't even get into going to the restroom with one of these puppies, okay? What do you do with the bag? I don't like carrying my bag around the airport. To me, it's cumbersome. It's inconvenient. It's a lot of work. I get tired of carrying it around.

That made me stop and think. What would it be like if you carried around bags everyday? You woke up in the morning and there they were, sitting there waiting for you. You took them downstairs to breakfast. They were there as you went off to work. You set them down next to your desk. You go off to lunch, you take your bags with you. You hit the gym that afternoon, the bag has to go with you. You stop at the grocery store. It's kind of clumsy, but you have to take your bags along with you. When you go out to dinner that night and, that night, when you go to bed, you put them down next to your night stand, there's your baggage. And when you get up the next morning, it's waiting there for you.

You know most of us do that. We can't see the baggage, but it's there. And we lug it around with us every day. The baggage we carry with us is the baggage of the past, and it's past hurts. There are really two different kinds of bags we carry. There is the one bag which has all the things people have ever done to us that hurt us, so inside this bag are the words of that one kid in 5 th Grade who just really humiliated you on the school playground. Those are stuffed in this bag. It's the hurts of when people lied to you. It's the hurts of when a friend betrayed you. It's the hurt of when the spouse was unfaithful. It's the hurt of the pastor who was uncaring. It's the hurt of the fellow church member who wasn't very Christ like. It's the hurt of trust being abused. It's all the hurts from your past, everything someone has done to you that has caused you pain, and we store them all in our little bag here and we carry them around with us. Sometimes, in conversation, we'll open the bag up and we'll bring out one of our hurts and we'll share it with someone else and tell them about how awful it was. And then we'll neatly fold it back up and then we'll put it back into our bag and then we'll take it with us. It's the hurts of what other people have done to us.

Now the second bag is similar but a little bit different. Inside this bag are all the hurts we've caused other people. So these are the words we've spoken to other people that weren't very nice. These are the actions we've done that weren't very kind. We don't want anyone to know about this bag. We don't share this bag with anyone. In fact, we never open it up and we hope and we pray no one ever looks inside this bag because that would embarrass us. It would humiliate us. Because, inside of here is all the things we're ashamed of, all the things we regret, that's what's inside this bag. And as much as we'd like to lose it, we carry it around with us. I don't know about you, but I'd like to get rid of the baggage.

This week, we're going to focus in on the first bag and how to get rid of it. Next week, we'll focus in on this one. Carrying around baggage is nothing new. Our friend, Moses, had his share of baggage that he carried. He had one of each variety. He certainly had this one where he had hurts over the past, things that had happened to him. You remember when he was in Egypt , he grew up in the Pharaoh's palace. You also might remember the account we talked about last week where he went out among his Hebrew people and he defended them against an Egyptian and all he got for that was abuse from his own people, rejection, ridicule from his own people. In fact, they turned him into the authorities and, because of that, he had to flee. He had to leave all of his wealth behind. And now he's living in Midian with a bunch of sheep. You think Moses doesn't have some anger, some resentment, some hurts from the past. For 40 years, he's drug it around with him. You can imagine his response, then, when God says, “Go back to Egypt .” He's probably thought of going back there in the past, maybe to see his mother and father, to see his family; but every time he thought about going back to Egypt , his blood just boiled. Go back to that traitorous lot, that ungrateful lot of people? Why would he ever go back there? I wonder how many nights he sat in the desert staring up at the sky recounting the events of that fateful day when he had to leave? I wonder how many times he replayed in his mind the conversation he had with the two Hebrews he tried to stop fighting with one another? How much time, how much energy had Moses wasted in 40 years of dragging around this baggage from the past?

How much time and how much energy have you wasted dragging around this baggage from the past? Sure, whatever happened to you hurt. Stung you deeply. But how many nights have you sat up awake sort of reliving the experience again? How many times have you replayed the conversation, only to get angrier and angrier each time you replay it? How many friendships have been lost? How many relationships have been ruined? How many family get-togethers have you missed because you know so and so is going to be there and you can't stand to be in the same room with them, not after what they did to you? What has it cost you? In time, in energy, in relationships for dragging around the baggage of past hurts?

What has it cost you in your relationship to God? You might think this has nothing to do with my relationship to God. “This is between me and that other person.” But it does affect your relationship with God, because there's a contradiction going on in your life. If on the one hand, you accept God's unconditional forgiveness and you acknowledge that He has freed you from the past but, on the other hand, you refuse to forgive someone else, you refuse to let go of the past, there's an incongruity going on in your life. There's a disconnect that's happening there. The price of carrying around the baggage of the past is great.

And there's only one way to get rid of it. There's only one way to drop off this bag for good. There's only one way to heal from the hurts of the past, and that's through forgiveness. When we forgive those who have sinned against us, that frees us from the past and enables us to live in the present and move into the future. You see, forgiveness is about freedom. It's about freedom from the past. Right now, I want you to think about something somebody has done to you in the past. It probably won't take you that long. Think about something. Something somebody said, something they did. Now ask yourself how much time have you wasted on that? How many times do you need to relive it? I'm not saying they didn't hurt you in the past. I'm certain they did. In fact, I'm certain that some things have cut you down to your very being of what people have done to you and what they did was absolutely positively wrong and it was very painful for you whatever that incident or that conversation might be. But my point is how long are you going to live in the past? How long are you going to allow them not only to hurt you in the past but to continue to hurt you even in the present? Because each time you relive the event, each time you replay the conversation, all of the emotions come up and all of the hurts resurface all over again. They hurt you in the past and, because you keep hanging on, they're hurting you even today.

Forgiveness offers freedom from that, freedom from the past, freedom to let go of the past and to stop the hurting. Forgiveness offers us freedom to grow in our relationship with God. We grow in our relationship with God because, when we forgive someone else in the same way God has forgiven us, when we get a small inkling, at least a small idea of what it is God has done for us, we gain a new appreciation, a new understanding when God says we are forgiven, what exactly that cost Him, what exactly that means. When we forgive someone else, we have a new understanding of our own forgiveness. Forgiveness is about freedom, freedom of the past and freedom to grow in our relationship with God.

If you're interested in that freedom, if you're ready to let go of the past, if you're interested in forgiving those who have hurt you in the past, then there are some important things you need to know. The first one is this: Forgiveness is hard work. Forgiveness is hard work. It's tough to do. It's tough to do because it doesn't come naturally to us. What comes naturally to us is, if somebody hurts us, we're going to hurt them. They say something nasty to us, we're going to send a zinger right back at them. They do something to us, we're going to do something to them. We want to make sure they pay for what they've done to us. We want revenge. How often, when you have replayed conversations, arguments with someone, do all of a sudden you think of something you wish you'd have said. You're sitting there replaying the conversation, “Oh, I wish I'd have said that. That would have really got ‘em. Yeah. That would have been a good zinger.” And then you replay an edited version in your mind with you really zinging them a good one and you kind of relish in that, how good it would have felt. That's what comes naturally to us. We want to get them back.

Forgiveness says you let that go. Forgiveness says there is no revenge. Forgiveness says you can't get your pound of flesh. Forgiveness says it's gone. That's hard work. That's tough. Some of you are thinking, “But you don't know what's been happening in my life. You don't know the hurts people have inflicted upon me. You don't know what a certain person did to me.” And you're right, I don't know. But I do know the freedom God offers. And I do know the freedom is to stop living in the pain and to let it go.

There's an example of a family who had to deal with a past hurt. There's an interview with the father of the first girl who was shot at Columbine. Let's watch to see how this family dealt with that kind of hurt: “My daughter, Rachel, was the first one to be shot and killed in the tragedy at Columbine High School April 20, 1999. One of the things we discovered after Rachel died, I was in her bedroom with my daughter, Bethany, and we were looking at some of Rachel's things. We were talking about her. And I happened to see two pieces of paper caught on the mattress springs under Rachel's bed and I pulled them out. And it was an essay she had written for her 5 th period class a month before she died and it was called My Ethics and My Codes of Life . And in that essay, Rachel challenged her reader to start a chain reaction with kindness and compassion, and she repeated that several times. But she defined compassion. She gave Webster's definition of compassion and then she improved on his. She said, ‘Here's my definition.' And she listed five things that, to her, meant compassion. And the first thing she listed was forgiveness. And that really struck our family that Rachel put such a high emphasis on forgiveness. And I remember Maria Shriver doing an interview. Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife did an interview with us. And she said to me, ‘How do you feel about the boys who did this and their parents?' And I said, ‘Well, our family talked about all this and we made a choice to forgive and to move on and celebrate Rachel's life.' And I saw her head just jerk back. And I've said then and I say now that I would not have pardoned Eric and Dylan but I forgave them. My daughter would not have wanted Eric and Dylan to ruin our lives because of unforgiveness. In fact, she was the one who told us to forgive. This is, to me, so important because you need to acknowledge that you can't forgive within your own strength. That's the first step of forgiveness. And I had to say that, ‘God, I cannot forgive Eric and Dylan and I confess that weakness. But out of my weakness, your strength is made perfect.' And when we choose to be weak, God is strong. But there's so much that opened up as a result of forgiveness.”

That's a family that knows the freedom of forgiveness. Was it easy for them to forgive? Not in the least. The whole interview goes on to talk about how their son had an incredibly tough time, not only with the events of Columbine but also this whole issue of forgiveness and they dealt with it for over a year. And the father says, “Sometimes you just have to forgive again and again and again until it finally sticks.” Forgiveness doesn't come easy. But forgiveness brings freedom. He said, “Rachel wouldn't want us to be burdened for the rest of our life because of unforgiveness.” But they were free to celebrate her life and to celebrate her eternal life. Forgiveness is tough work, but it brings forgiveness.

Forgiveness also is not excusing. And that's something I want to be clear about because I don't want you to think that, somehow, when you forgive somebody, you're thinking, “Well, that means whatever they did is unimportant. It's okay. It really doesn't matter. Let's just forget about it.” That's not forgiveness. Forgiveness is not excusing. In fact, forgiveness is the opposite. Forgiveness is saying, “This is serious stuff we're dealing with here.” Rachel's father said if Eric and Dylan would have gone to court, if he had the power, he would not have pardoned them. He wouldn't have pardoned them for the justice that needed to be served. But he would forgive them. He wasn't saying that what they did was unimportant or excusing them. Heavens, no. Forgiveness is not excusing. Forgiveness is identifying and acknowledging that you have been sinned against, acknowledging you have been hurt, and acknowledging that whatever has happened is serious. It's so serious that the only way to get over it, the only way to heal is through forgiveness. Forgiveness is not excusing.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgetting is a passive activity. Forgiveness is not a matter of, after a length of time, somehow the memory fades away and then you don't remember it anymore. No. Forgiveness is active, not passive. I've heard it say, “I can forgive, but I can never forget.” I think that's absolutely true. I don't think we ever do forget. When somebody does something, sure we can push it to the back of our mind. We can try to not think about it and then, bang, something happens and it's right there in our face and we're reliving the pain all over again. Forgiveness is not forgetting because that's passive. Forgiveness is something we do.

Jeremiah 31 and 34 put it this way, “God says ‘I will remember their sins no more.'” It's my favorite passage about God's forgiveness for me. Because it means that God doesn't just casually forget about what I've done. It doesn't just, after time, fade away. Gods says, “I make a choice, and my choice is I will remember your sins no more.” When we forgive another person, that means we're going to make a choice. We're going to choose not to remember what they've done. What that means is, when the memory comes up, we're not going to think about it. We're going to make a conscious choice and a conscious decision to think about something else. We're going to occupy our mind on something else because we refuse to think about this anymore. We refuse to be held captive by it. We refuse to relive the hurt. It is forgiven. It is gone. I will remember it no more. It means when you're in a conversation and somebody starts telling you something similar and you say, “You know what? Somebody did that exact same thing to me.” And then you start unfolding the story and reliving the hurt. No, you don't tell the story. You change the topic. You change the subject. I'm not going to remember it anymore. That's what forgiveness is.

The most important thing is this: The only way we can forgive is through the power of God. The only way we can forgive another person for something they've said or done to us is by the power of God in our lives because we can't do it on our own. We can't do it by ourselves. Jesus said to His disciples, “If somebody sins against you seven times in a day, seven times they say I repent, forgive them seven times.” The only response the disciples can come up with for that is, “Lord, increase our faith.” Because they're blown away. “You mean if somebody does the exact same thing seven times to me, I'm to forgive them seven times in one day? God, we need more faith if we're going to do that.” Rachel's father said the same thing. He said he had to confess to God that “I could not forgive Eric and Dylan.” He could not forgive them. He says, but in his weakness, when he confessed that to God, then God's strength was made perfect. If we're going to forgive somebody from the past, that means we're going to have to confess to God, “God, I can't forgive them on my own.” And in our weakness, God's strength will be made perfect. For God will empower us and God will enable us to forgive that other person because God will remind us of our own forgiveness. God will say, “Remember how I forgave you.” God says, “I didn't excuse your sin. I treated your sin so seriously it cost me the life of my Son. But now I choose not to remember your sins.” And as you experience God's forgiveness, as God releases you from the past, then He empowers you to forgive others so you can be released from the past.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of lugging this thing around. The hurts inside of here are very real, but it's time for them to stop hurting me and it's time for them to stop hurting you. The only cure for getting over past hurts is forgiveness, not excusing, forgiving, choosing not to remember. The only way we can do that is through God's power in our life. So as God has forgiven you and released you from the past, it's time for us to forgive others and to be released from the past. Amen.