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On our wedding day my ex was actually seeing another woman.  I found out a year and a half into the marriage that he had impregnated that woman.  I wanted to meet the mother so we could establish parenting, and he never told her about me.  She came over to our house one day, and he told me to get into the back room.  He said he didn't want her to meet me because she was violent.  She swarmed in the house and hollered, “Where have you been, what are you doing?  You are supposed to be at work but you're not!” 

I came out of the room that I was hiding in because I refused to hide in my own home.  She said, “Who are you?” 

I said, “I am his wife.”  She went crazy and started running after him with an iron candlestick.  The next day was when I said, “I can't do this.”  I was crying.  He said, “Either you get over it and move on, or you get out.”  I used to lay in bed when I was with him and plot my escape.  I thought, “If I stay here much longer, I don't know who I am going to be.”  I got on my hands and knees and said, “Lord, I will release it to you.  I am tired of being resentful, I am tired of being hateful.  I am tired of the world being a horrible place.” 

He said, “Don't worry, I am holding you.  I am going to dance with you in your life and your life is going to be a beautiful dance.”  I ended up going to “Divorce Care” and learned that even though I was divorced, I am still single, unique and whole.  It brought me through the course of so many Ginghamsburg events, and I found new friends and relationships.  I became more comfortable with myself.  I learned that ultimately, I had to forgive my ex and all the hardship that he put me through.  I had to learn to let him go, and learn to let go of that pain and bitterness, because it was killing me.  It wasn't until I had forgiven my ex that I was able to really get out from underneath his control.  I had to forgive myself.  If God had forgiven me, who was I to not forgive myself?  Had I not been able to forgive him and move on, I never would have met my present husband.  I am so in love with him.  Now I have the privilege of being one of the teachers of the “Love is a Choice” class.  Change only happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.  If you are stumbling with forgiveness, I will see you in class.”     

[Pastor Mike Slaughter]

Good morning, and Happy Mother's Day.  So far my family and I have had a great weekend.  Carolyn, myself, our son and daughter-in-law went over to Indianapolis and spent the night Friday night to run in that Indy 500 mini-marathon yesterday.  It is really good at age 58 to be able to run with your son and daughter-in-law.   

Talk about holidays like Mother's Day, there are some holidays that we don't mention here at Ginghamsburg.  People kind of snicker and sneer about Hallmark coming up with these holidays, and they really didn't.  A woman by the name of Ann Jarvis in 1864, in honor of mothers who lost sons in the Civil War, came up with Mother's Day.  I really appreciate it, because it gives us opportunities to celebrate our relationships and to come together and make excuses to be together as family.  I am still thankful that Carolyn's mother and my mother are both alive.  We will get together today and go out to lunch.  But family occasions can also be painful. One of the things about ministry that I don't enjoy as much is weddings, because today a little more than half of the young couples who get married come from divorced households. The couples are always a bit nervous about how parents are going to react when they come together.  Often I have had to referee….generally the bride's mom will sit in the front row and the dad and his new wife are supposed to sit behind.  We have to go out in the hall and discuss this because sometimes the wife says, “I will not sit in the same section.”   

The challenge of family holidays is unresolved pain and lack of forgiveness.  We are in the second week of a six-week series on Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount.  What the Sermon on the Mount is about is the Ten Commandments made flesh.  Really, the Ten Commandments are about, what Jesus says everything is about, relationships.  You can't be right in your relationship with God if you are not right in your relationship with people.  The problem is that relationships are complicated.  Relationships are messy.   

Open your Bibles to Matthew 5:23.  The section we are looking for right now is about murder.  Jesus redefines murder.  Not only is murder a physical act, Jesus says, but he redefines murder as a response of our words and attitudes.  It is more than a physical act.  This is what he says:  “Therefore if you're offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to that person, then come and offer your gift.” In other words, the health of our relationships are so important to God that making things right with people must proceed your worship of God.  This is what the scripture is saying.  It is the only place I see this.  God wants the offering of your olive branch, before he will receive your offering for God.  You notice here, it says if anyone has anything against you, if you forgot your mom's birthday and she still holds that against you, then you should take your cell phone right now and go in the hallway and call your mom.  I have done that.  I am going to try this for real.  I am calling her now.  Let's see what she has to say.  Let's see if she even knows I am supposed to be in church.   

“Hey, Mom, how are you doing?  Good!  Happy Mother's Day.  How was the race? It was good.  My right knee hurts, but it was good. I just wanted to tell you Happy Mother's Day.  You are coming to church today?  Okay, what time are you leaving? So does this make up for when I didn't call you on your birthday? Yeah, we will go out and eat.  Yeah, we will go back to my house then.  Okay, I love you and I will see you later.  Bye.” 

Making things right with people must precede our worship of God, right.  She laughed when I said that.  She is coming to church, but she didn't even know I am preaching now.  Pretty good, huh?  God can't receive anything from us as long as there are these walls of resentment and animosity.  How many of you would agree with me that forgiveness is hard?  What is amazing is that Gallup did a poll where 94% of people surveyed said they think that forgiveness is critical, but less than half, only 48%, make an honest attempt to forgive.  So I put it out there on Facebook this week and I asked people about things that were really hard to forgive, and the responses were amazing.  I had more responses this week on Facebook than I have ever had in a survey.  Here is the number one response of what is really hard to forgive….betrayal from a loved one, broken trust.  Next week we are going to go there specifically about betrayal and broken trust and the adultery passage that Jesus is talking about.  

The second most frequent response was when someone you believe in lies to you. How do you establish trust? 

The third was when anyone hurts your children.  I can relate to that one.  If anyone hurts your children, how can you forgive? 

The whole thing about not forgiving is that when you have been hurt, your sense of justice has been violated.  This means there has been a wrong done and you believe there should be recompense, that you are owed something.  The problem is that anger causes self righteous blindness. When you are angry, you are very aware of an injury that has been committed against you, but you are blind to injuries that you have caused other people. We are blind to our own offenses.  What happens is that when we are angry, we give ourselves permission to be both the judge and the executor of justice.  We do that in our spiritual blindness. Especially as it involves influencing the opinions of other people.  Like when I am ticked about something and others know it, I want other people to know that the person who did it was wrong. So what do we do? It really becomes what the Bible calls gossip, and gossip is another form of murder.  From God's perspective, and we need to look at everything from God's perspective, it is bigger than being right.  It is about being redemptive.  That's big….think about that for a moment.  It is bigger than being right, it's about being redemptive.  Until we make it right with people, we won't be right with God.  God wants the offering of your olive branch, before he will accept the offering of your tithe.   

Let's look at the consequences of not forgiving.  We will pick up at verse 25. “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court.  Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.”  Now this has several layers of meaning here.  One is that not forgiving is like a debt.  Remember we talked about debts here at Ginghamsburg? It is not your friend.  Do you see what has been happening to the stock market again, and the instability of the financial system we are in? Do not get comfortable. Do whatever you can to get out of debt in every way, including debt on homes. I never thought we would live in an environment where the price of my house would have decreased by about 30%, and that we have lost value on a house that we built in 1993.  As long as you have debt in your life, then you are constantly working.  You will go to work tomorrow to pay for the past.  As long as there is lack of  forgiveness in your life, this scripture says you are chained or a prisoner to the past. You will never be free to live in God's preferred future.  You see it with the woman who gave her testimony up here on the screen.  Until she released that unforgiving attitude, that chain was not broken.  It has very personal self consequence.  You are not hurting the other person.  You are enslaving yourself.  That chain was not broken for her to live into God's redemptive future. The other problem here is that as long as you hold on to not forgiving you are setting the standard for your own eternal judgment.  Now hear me on this. I honestly believe that if I am taking liberty with this passage I am at least teaching it in the spirit of this passage.  Could Jesus in this passage be referring to the final judgment, where God is the judge? If you do not settle matters of forgiveness and resentment with people here on earth, then you will pay the consequences in the life hereafter. 

Let's look at several of those scriptures.  

Look at the sixth chapter with me a moment, the 14^th verse. This is the same sermon, the Sermon on the Mount.  “For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.”  So you see, if we refuse to forgive while we are here on earth, when we come before the final judgment, why should the Father forgive us, when he offers us free forgiveness?  If you don't forgive others of their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.   

Look at the seventh chapter, the first verse. “Do not judge (what does anger do….it causes us in our self-righteousness to be blind to our own transgressions) or you, too, will be judged for in the same way you judge others, you will be judged. With the measure you use it will be measured to you.”  If we do not settle matters that stand between us here on earth, then those consequences will follow us to our final judgment.  When we fail to forgive, not only are we hurting ourselves in this life, we are hurting ourselves in the life to come.   

Last May, a year ago, I was invited by our State Department to be part of the peace talks between the Palestinians and the Jews.  I took one picture of a rabbi in Hebron.  Hebron is where Abraham, the patriarch, is buried.  I was at an elementary school, and this rabbi is the principal of the school.  Do you see what he has strapped to his hip? Here we are in an elementary assembly, and he has a pistol strapped to his hip because he is teaching the young elementary students that the Palestinians are their enemies.  Right outside in the school yard, is a street where the Palestinian children walk to school. What they had to do was erect a fence over that street, because the Jewish people throw things down and urinate on the Palestinian kids.  What I was hearing was that the Palestinians and Jews would argue grievances that were committed 1800-1900 years ago, back when the Jews would come into a synagogue and kill Arabs.  They are still arguing over things that happened centuries ago.   

I love what Mahatma Gandhi said.   He said if the world lives by an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the whole world would soon be blind and toothless.  That is the old covenant. We are people that are not demonstrating an eye for an eye and the tooth for a tooth.  For God, it is not about who is wrong or who is right.  For God, everything is about being redemptive.  As the people of Jesus we are here to be proactive in giving grace and forgiveness.  It is not who is right or wrong, it's being God's agents of reconciliation.  That is why we are dead, buried and out of the way.  You see, we are here to be God's agents of reconciliation in the lives of other people. 

Romans 5:8 says this: “But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”  Did Jesus die for you before you made it right? Yes, he did.  You still have never made it right.  Not only is God the judge in this parable that you make it right and settle matters, God is the one who has been offended. Our sins are an offense to God.  God is the judge and the one who has been offended, so who are we not to forgive those who have done wrong against us. 

I told you we were going to deal with this word, “settle.”  The word in the Greek is aphiemi. It means to let go, to send away, to pardon or forgive. What is the Jewish holiday every September around the day of atonement? Yom Kippur. In the Old Testament there was what they called a scapegoat.  Have you heard that expression before? I am not going to be the scapegoat.  The priest would take the scapegoat and he would lay his hand on it the day of atonement, and it would symbolize that all of the wrongdoings of the people against each other and against God were laid on the scapegoat. The scapegoat would then be let go, sent away into the wilderness.  It wasn't about who made it right or wrong.  All of the junk went on the scapegoat and the scapegoat just took it all away, out to the wilderness.  Who is the scapegoat?  Jesus.  You see, it is not who made it right or wrong, or that any of us can ever make up the grievances or wrongs that we have committed against each other or God.  Jesus Christ is our scapegoat.   

In Matthew 5:9 it says, “Who are we to be then in the world? Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God.”  Who are the children of God?  Those who are being agents of forgiveness and reconciliation in the world.   

What is comes down to, and this is what is so freeing in my own life. God always has to remind me of this: Forgiveness is an act of obedience, it is not a feeling.  Martin Luther said this, “We are in the Christian church where there is nothing but continuous, uninterrupted forgiveness of sin.  Both in that God forgives us and in that we forgive, bear with and help each other.”  Boy, isn't that an incredible model of a church?  I come to this place, a screw-up, and what do I experience in return?  Unconditional forgiveness.   

God says, “I desire obedience rather than sacrifice.”  Why did I call my mom?  God desires that we offer the olive branch before he will receive the offering of our tithe.   

We are going to have a time of prayer.  I want you to bow your head, and I am going to guide you through this prayer.  Is there is person in your life right now that you are really struggling to forgive?  We will talk about this more next week.  Forgiveness is not forgetting, nor does it mean that you immediately trust that person again.  It is the letting go; it is an act of obedience; it is a choice.  Is there a person which you are struggling to forgive, struggling to release that grievance to God?  Judgment belongs to me, says the Lord.  Right now, just as an act of release, placing that person, that grievance in the hand of God, just open your hand and give it to Jesus, who is our scapegoat, who is our peace. 

Father God, I am the physical expression of your mercy and grace.  I just pray through your strength, not my will, but yours, that you will make me an instrument of your peace. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

Next week we will deal with betrayal and broken trust, so God bless you and I will see you next week. Happy Mother's Day!!