Grace is greater Ch.7.

Ch.7. More Reconciling Than Your Resentment
              Reconciling Grace > Your Resentment

 Elizabeth and Frank Morris’s eighteen-year-old son, Ted, was home from college for Christmas break. He had gotten a job to make a little money. It was late, and Elizabeth was worried because he was supposed to be home from work already. That’s when the phone rang. Elizabeth answered and received the new no mother wants to hear. On Ted’s drive home a car coming the other way had crossed the median and hit him head-on.

 Tommy Pigage was driving the other car. He had been at a party where he had gotten drunk. His friends told him not to drive, but he didn’t listen. He blacked out and never even saw Tod Morris’s car coming down the other side of the road.

Ted died next morning. Tommy’s blood alcohol level was about three times the legal limit.

 The trail was about a month later. Elizabeth and her husband were there and were enraged when Tommy pleaded innocent. The trial was delayed repeatedly. Finally, almost two years later, the trial closed when Tommy reached a plea bargain that allowed him to be freed on probation.

 Tommy was now free, and Elizabeth began having revenge fantastic in which she would kill him. 1
                              footnote
   1 David MaCormick, “After Couple Forgave Son’s Killer, All Three Were    Able to Start New Life,” Los Angeles Times, Set.1, 1985,
 http://articles. latimes/1985-09-01/news/mn-25735_1_drunk-driver; 
  see also William Plummer, “In a Supreme Act of Forgiveness, a Kentucky   Couple ‘Adopts’ the Man Who Killed Their Son,” People, Aug.26, 1985,
 http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20091574,00.html.

                            Inhale, Exhale

Is grace really greater?
Is grace greater than even the pain caused by a drunk driver who kills your son?

 That is what the Bible says. That is what we’re saying. God’s unconditional love is so transformative that the grace effect we experience will lead us to forgive even the worst of our worst enemies.

 In case there is any confusion, here’s what we’re not saying. . . . We’re not saying that what happened is no big deal or that healing will be immediate or that you should make excuses for what someone did to you. We’re not saying abuse should be tolerated or that you shouldn’t press charges if a crime has been committed. We’re not saying you won’t hurt anymore or that you’ll be able to magically forget what happened. We’re also not saying you should blindly trust someone who’s hurt you.

 What we are saying – actually, what the Bible is saying – is that it is possible to get rid of our bitterness, rage, and anger. The grace that flows to us through Jesus can flow from us to others. We can be set free from the prison of unforgiveness. We read in Eph. 4:32, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” We are to forgive as God has forgiven us. The forgiveness we have received from God is the motivation, the mandate, and also the model of forgiveness we are to give. Once we have received his grace we are to let it flow freely from our lives.
              
 I have a pastor friend in Nashville named Pete Wilson. I was visiting his church recently, and he preached a sermon on how we can give the love and grace of Jesus to others. He explained it this way: “What you inhale is what you will exhale.” If you’re intentional to inhale God’s grace and forgiveness, you will also exhale it in your relationships. But if you’re breathing in anger and rage, you’re going to breathe it out in your relationships.

 When you’re taking off on an airline flight, the flight attendant gives you a demonstration with an air mask. There’s something about pulling the mask firmly toward you and covering your mouth with it. And there’s something about how even if the bag doesn’t inflate, the oxygen is still flowing. Then comes the most difficult part of the instructions, when they tell you if you’re traveling with a child to put your mask on before you help your child with their mask. As a father, if my kids can’t breathe, I want to help them before I take care of myself. That’s just a parent’s natural instinct. But I realize that even though making sure I’m breathing first wouldn’t be easy, it would be necessary. If I’m not breathing, I won’t be any help to my child.

 The same is true with breathing in the life-giving oxygen of God’s grace and forgiveness and peace and joy. That’s what you want for your kids. That’s what you want the people you care about to be breathing in. But if it’s not what you’re inhaling, you’re not going to be able to help them breathe it in either.

 We need to be intentional with this, making sure we’re breathing in God’s grace. If you’re struggling with anger and bitterness, can I encourage you to begin every day thinking about this image? As you take time to inhale the oxygen of God’s grace, you’ll be in a place to make sure the people around you are inhaling it as well.

 As you inhale God’s grace, he will teach you how he wants you to forgive others. The level of grace and forgiveness we are going to talk about in this chapter may seem impossible now, but the more his grace flows to you, the more his grace will flow from you.

                        Level One Forgiveness

 I want you to think of forgiveness on three different levels. Let’s call level one forgiveness getting rid of bitterness, anger, and rage. It’s cleaning out your closet and deciding that you are no longer going to live with feelings of resentment and animosity over something that was said or done to you in the past.

 It doesn’t mean all those feelings will go away. Not at all. It just means that when those feelings come, you are not going to put them on and wear them around. You are going to get rid of them.

 The problem with level one forgiveness is that you may never feel like forgiving someone. Maybe you’ve even tried to feel differently as you have read the last few chapters. You’ve said to yourself, I want to forgive. I want to let go of bitterness and hatred, but I feel bitter and hateful. When I stop feeling bitter and hateful, then I can forgive. Look, if you want to forgive until you feel like forgiving, it could be awhile. If you want to stop feeling angry and bitter until you stop feeling angry and bitter, well, good luck with that.

 Getting rid of those feelings is much more a matter of obedience than most of us realize. When one of those feelings comes boiling to the surface we must hold it up, examine it, and then decide to get rid of it. Instead of continuing to replay the offense and relive the hurt, level one forgiveness is releasing that pain to God. It’s making the decision to stop calling up what was done to us and start focusing on what was done for us.

                        Level Two Forgiveness  

 Level two forgiveness, which we’ve also talked about, isn’t so much about releasing hurt as it is releasing the person who hurt you. It’s choosing to write off the debt. You release your right to retaliate, and instead of seeking revenge against those who have hurt you, you begin to pray for them. It may mean accepting that you are going to have to live with the consequences of another person’s sin, but you are no longer going to look to the person who hurt you to make things right or somehow pay for what they have done wrong.

 There’s a speaker and author you may have seen speak on TV named Joyce Meyer. In her book Beauty for Ashes, she shares that when she was at a very young age her father started molesting her. Soon it turned to rape. Joyce says a conservative estimate is that her father raped her more than two hundred times before she turned eighteen.

 At one point she approached her mother and told her what her father was doing to her. But her mother either didn’t believe her or was too afraid to do anything about it, because nothing happened, nothing changed.

 When Joyce turned eighteen she moved out of her parents’ house as fast as she could. She then went on a journey toward forgiveness. She had given her life to Jesus when she was nine but then basically walked away from her faith for years. As she came back to it, she realized she had to forgive her father. If she didn’t, she knew what he did would continue to imprison her. At the time she had no relationship with him, but her Bible told her she had to offer him forgiveness. So, despite her feelings, she did.

 When she went to him and forgave him, he didn’t acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. But as much as his response upset her, she knew it didn’t change what God had asked her to do.

                      Level Three Forgiveness  

 We haven’t really addressed level three forgiveness yet, and some of you aren’t going to like this. For some of you, level three forgiveness will seem more than unrealistic – it will seem offensive. Here’s how we’ll define level three forgiveness: a will-ingness to be reconciled with the person who hurt you.

 Look, I realize this isn’t always possible. The offender may not want reconciliation, or may no longer be living, or may not be safe for you. I also realize that certain levels of reconciliation may not be wise in certain situations. I’m not suggesting you submit yourself to further abuse. But when it’s possible, level three forgiveness is the goal, because level three forgiveness is what we have received from God through Jesus.

 Joyce Meyer had an evil father who abused her in the ugliest of ways, but as a follower of Jesus she knew she had to forgive him. So despite not feeling like it, she made the decision, went to her father, and offered him forgiveness. Several years later she was reading in the Bible (Luke 6) where Jesus tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who have hated us. Later she was praying and felt like God was saying to her, You need to take care of your parents. You need to do good care of your parent. Her parents were aging and lived about two hundred miles away in a different city. Joyce had done some things through the years to help take care of them financially but felt like God was asking her to take it to a new level.

 She and her husband talked, looked at their finances, and realized they had enough to buy her parents a house that was for sale about eight miles from where they lived. She realized her parents could also use a newer car and newer furniture. God had told her, You need to take good care of your parents, so she bought them the house, a car, and furniture.

 Her parents thanked her, but still her dad was a bitter man, and it continued on like that for several years. Then one Thanksgiving morning, Joyce’s mom called her and said, “Your father has been crying and crying all week. Will you please come over? He needs to speak to you.” Joyce and her husband went over to her parents’ house. Her dad confessed to her the horrible things he had done to her and apologized. He then turned to her husband and thanked him for the years of undeserved kindness he had given him.

 Joyce could see there was genuine regret. She took the opportunity to explain the gospel to him again (she had done so before). She asked, “Dad, do you need to give your life to Christ?” And ten days later she baptized him in their church.

 The grace Joyce showed her father may seem crazy, but how much crazier is the grace that the God of the universe has shown us? The Bible says we are to forgive as God forgave us. When God forgave us, he didn’t say, “I forgive you, but we can’t have a relationship. I mean, I won’t hold your sins against you, but we’re not going to have anything to do with each other. You go your way, I’ll go mine.” No, God’s forgiveness of us leads to him reconciling with us despite our sin.

In Colossians, Paul describes how God forgives us, this level three forgiveness, like this:

  For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself.

He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth. (Col.1:19-20 NLT)

How did he do that ? How did he pay for that debt to have peace?

 He made peace . . . by means of Christ’s blood on the cross. This includes you who were once far away from God.

You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. (vv.20-21 NLT)

 So we had made ourselves God’s enemies and were separated from him because of our sin against him. But then comes God’s level three forgiveness:

 

Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought

you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. (v.22 NLT)

God “gets rid of” your sin, reconciles you to himself, and invites you into his presence.

That’s the model for how we’re to offer forgiveness.

                              Level 2.5

 About twelve years ago, an out-of-state relative of mine got into some financial trouble and reached out to me for help. It was a pretty urgent situation, and he asked us to loan him five thousand dollars.

 We were in our twenties and didn’t have five thousand dollars lying around the house to loan him. But we decided to do it anyway. We pulled money out of our savings and loaned it to him. He promised to have it paid back within a year. We counted on that promise because we couldn’t afford not to be paid back. We needed that money to pay some bills, our kids’ school tuition, and our taxes.

 The year came and went, and he did not pay it back. In fact, he never brought it up. We saw him over the holidays, and he went out of his way to avoid us. I tried to call him, but he never answered. I left messages telling him we could wo가 out a gradual payment plan, but he wouldn’t return my calls.

We ended up having to sell a vehicle and replace it with an older minivan so we could use the difference to pay our bills.

 Several years went by, and I grew increasingly resentful. Having to drive an old minivan does something to a man’s spirit. Every time we would see him at a family gathering and he would do his best to avoid us, I would become a little more bitter.

 Eventually my wife said, “You know, I think you really need to have a relationship of some kind with him, but as long as he feels like he owes us money and as long as you are frustrated that he won’t acknowledge it or pay it back, that relationship is just not going to happen.” I didn’t like where he was going. She continued, “I think we should forgive the debt and tell him he doesn’t owe us.” I disagreed. I told her, “No, we can’t do that. Even if we wanted to we couldn’t do it. We need that money,” and “We would just be enabling him,” and “There’s no way I’m going to forgive that debt.”

 But we decided to forgive the debt. I remember telling him that we wanted to forgive the debt and forgot about what he owed us. We were spending time with family for the holidays again, and I asked if I could talk to him in another room. I told him he didn’t need to pay back what he owed us; we were going to make it a gift, and that the debt was forgiven.

 To be honest, I wanted him to be incredibly grateful. I had played the whole scene out in my mind. He would be extremely apologetic and profusely grateful. But that’s not what happened. He acted like it wasn’t a big deal. Af first he pretended he wasn’t even sure what I was talking about. He thanked me, kind of, but didn’t apologize.

 Over the years I’ve been tempted to hold it against him. Sometimes I’ll think about how much money that would be now if I had invested it - $ 15,765.27, in case you’re wondering. When I’m tempted to think that way, I have to remind myself, Wait, I forgave that.

 A few years ago he bought a new vehicle and posted a picture of it on social media. I started to leave the comment, “Hey, that looks nice. Reminds me of this minivan I used to own . . . but completely different.” I had to remind myself, Wait, I forgave that. I released it. I don’t replay that episode in my mind anymore.

 It’s hard. People say you “forgive and forget.”  That’s not true. You forgive and remember, and when you remember, you have to remind yourself, I forgave that.

 I reconciled my relationship with my relative – kind of. True reconciliation would also require him to acknowledge that he did something wrong. Complete reconciliation is dependent on both parties. We could say it this way: total reconciliation requires both forgiveness from the offended and repentance from the offender.

 Isn’t that true in our relationship with God? He offers us forgiveness. He even made the payment required for us to be forgiven. But to be reconciled to him, we need to repent.

 The person who hurt you may not repent to the degree you think he or she should. He may not realize how grievous his sin was, how much damage it caused you. She may say she’s sorry, but it may seem that her level of repentance doesn’t match the level of the offense. But . . . our level of repentance doesn’t match the level of our offense against God.

 Still, it is true that for real reconciliation to happen there must be forgiveness from the offended and repentance from the offender.
 There’s a story in the Bible that illustrates this. Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, had a brother named Esau. A twin brother, actually. Esau was the oldest by a matter of minutes, and as the oldest he would receive his father’s blessing and the birthright. Jacob cheated Esau out of these things and then ran and hid from his brother. Jacob knew he was guilty, and he knew Esau would get revenge, so he ran away. He avoided Esau for several decades. The two brothers never talked or had anything to do with each other.

 Finally, there comes a point where Jacob can’t avoid Esau any longer. They are going to meet, and Jacob is afraid. He receives word that Esau is coming at him with an army of four hundred men. In a desperate attempt to cut his losses, Jacob divides his family and all of his possessions into two groups in hopes that if Esau attacks one group, the other group will be spared.

 Finally, the moment arrives for these two brothers to see each other again. We read, “Then Jacob went on ahead. As he approached his brother, he bowed to the ground seven times before him” (Gen. 33:3 NLT). Jacob humbles himself and shows contrition by bowing to Esau. Then, “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him, threw his arms around his neck, and kissed him. And they both wept” (v.4 NLT).

 That’s level three stuff right there. That is reconciliation. Reconciliation requires forgiveness from the offended and repentance by the offender. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s a beautiful thing when it does.

 On the day Jacob and Esau are reunited, one of Jacob’s sons is toward the back of the caravan – just a little boy watching all of this unfold. He had probably heard of his Uncle Esau. I don’t know how much he would have known about the conflict between the two brothers, but he can tell his dad is scared to meet his uncle. He knows something is about to happen. He watches his father bow down humbly, something he is not accustomed to seeing. He watches his uncle run up to embrace his dad.

 This little boy, his name was Joseph, and he watched and took it all in.

 Several years later Joseph had some trouble with his own brothers. They sold him into slavery. But you may remember that God worked in Joseph’s life so he became the second most powerful man in Egypt. A couple decades pass, and then Joseph’s brothers show up to ask him for food. There is a famine and they are desperate. They don’t recognize him, but he recognizes them. If he wants it, this is his chance to get revenge.

 Instead, Joseph comes up with a test to see if they really are sorry for what they’ve done. He wants to find out if they are repentant, and when he realizes that his brothers are sorry for what they did, this is what happened next:

 Joseph could stand it no longer. There were many people in the room, and he said to his attendants, “Out, all of you!”    So he was alone with his brothers when he told them who he was. Then he broke down and wept. He wept so loudly      the Egyptians could hear him, and word of it quickly carried to Pharaoh’s palace. (45:1-2 NLT)

 His brothers are upset and afraid, but Joseph encourages them not to be, telling them that God had taken what they meant for evil and used it to bring about good.

 I feel confident that Joseph had already reached level two forgiveness, but now he’s able to move to level three, and he weeps. That doesn’t surprise me – when we set other people free, we end up feeling free ourselves.

 And God is calling us beyond releasing our right to retaliate, beyond getting rid of our feelings of bitterness and hatred, to a willingness to be reconciled with the person who hurt us.

                    Grace Leads to Reconciliation

 Remember Elizabeth and Frank Morris? Tommy Pigage, who was driving drunk, had killed their son, Ted. At his trial, Tommy got off on probation and Elizabeth wanted revenge.

 But Elizabeth had a problem. She was the recipient of grace. A Christian, Elizabeth took her pain to God, and as she prayed she realized that her heavenly Father had also had his innocent son murdered. She knew she had to forgive Tommy as God had forgiven her.

 Elizabeth went and met with Tommy. She told him she wanted to help him. Tommy came from a broken home and struggled with alcoholism. He needed help.

 Not much later, Tommy got drunk and violated his parole agreement. Tommy was sentenced to three months in prison, and Elizabeth visited him regularly. When he got out, Elizabeth and Frank began building a relationship with Tommy and talking to him about Jesus. One night the Morris and Tommy drove to their church, where Frank Morris baptized his son’s killer.

 The Morrises now view Tommy as their son. He attends church with them every Sunday, and then they go out for lunch. They often get together to go roller-skating or bowling. Tommy calls them every single day.

 It’s an amazing story that really happened. The question I have, though, is: Will it happen? Is there a reconciliation story that needs to unfold in your life?

 Is there an enemy you need to forgive, to pray for, to do good to, to be reconciled with? Who is it? What do you need to do?

You can do this. Grace is greater than your hurt. Just let it flow.