It says in your bulletin that I'm to pray a prayer of illumination. Pray that the lights would turn on in our head, in our hearts. I could have asked the elders if we could have seatbelts, maybe helmets for this message because it's a very sober message. It's a very necessary but hard message. in that pastors and policemen know too much about human nature. If you talk to a policeman, he can tell you all the things that he has to get involved in that are against the law. Pastors know many of the same things, but there are things that are not illegal, but they're certainly unbiblical. And sometimes you want to dip in a vat of alcohol or take a hot shower after being involved in such things. As a pastor, I can remember looking out in the hearts of my people and feeling very grievous, very grieved for them because of what things they were going through. And I'm looking at a congregation and you're all going through things or just finished going through a thing or about to go through a thing. And we need the Lord's help to have a right perspective on going through these things. So let's pray that God the Holy Spirit would speak to each one of us, let's pray. Father in heaven, it is an astounding thing that you entrust to men to communicate the things of God. Our Lord said that if his followers were told to stop speaking and to be quiet, he said the rocks would have to cry out. And those of us who are called to be speakers of the gospel can confess there are times when we think that rocks would have done a better job than us in speaking the truth about you. But as we read your word, as we reflect upon passages in your word, as we look at the whole issue of the really deep hurts and what you ask about forgiveness, that you would open our minds, illuminate our minds, move our hearts, that you would help us. For we are but frail men. We are made out of the dust of the earth. Lord, come down among us. Take glory for yourself. Free us from those sins who have sinned against us. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. Please turn in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 4. Years ago, I was having a devotional reading in Ephesians, and it dawned on me as I was reading this passage that there was a lot more to these verses than I had previously given credence to. Paul, just as a quick review, that Ephesians is believed by many to have been more of a circular letter, not just to the Ephesians, but there are extant copies of this book that have the two Ephesians left out. And so you could send it to different cities. So it has more of a sense of a universal letter. And it's a great book. It's one of my favorite books. In chapter 4, verse 30 through 32, let's read what God has said. and do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God. by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." So, okay, first of all, we're not to grieve the Holy Spirit. Second, he says, let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, if you, my New King James Version has in the margin loud quarreling, a verbal argument, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. What's malice? A bad attitude. And be kind to one another. Tenderhearted. And here's the punchline. Forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you. Forgiving one another even as God or just as God in Christ forgave you. So we want to look at this issue today and we're not looking at, you know, somebody in third grade said your mother was ugly and you held on to that for years. We're not talking about childhood. small things that you've forgotten, they were so small, but the really big hurts. What does God expect you and me to do with the really big hurts? First of all, the reality of sin in our fallen world, I know I've mentioned this several times already today, but it bears repeating all the time. We live in a fallen world. This is not God's last best hope. This is not Disney World. I was once in Africa, and flying out of that particular country, I was in an airport waiting to leave, and a man sitting next to me in the waiting lounge was a doctor on his way to a conference in Sweden. And as he was slipping through his passport, I noticed he had maybe 15 or 20 different places he'd been to in the world. And I said, well, tell me. You've apparently been all over the world. What's your favorite place you've ever gone to and would love to go back to? He goes, oh, that's easy. Disney World. I was thinking Paris, London, you know, whatever people who travel the world would go see. And I said, why Disney World? He goes, well, think of it. Nobody's sick. Everybody's nice. It's clean. The food and the water are safe. It's just a nice place to go. And coming from what was effectively a third world country, I can see why he would say that. But, you know, there's no sin in Disney World, at least no outward sin. Probably you're not going to be shot at Disney World. You're probably not going to be robbed at Disney World, although times change. But we live in a fallen world. But for him, if I could just get to some place like Disney World, it's kind of like heaven, but God's not there. I think part of what he was saying. Romans 323, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Everyone, every man, woman, and child. Children are acorn sinners. Some people my age are oak tree sinners. We've been at this a long time. But we're all sinners. So life on a fallen planet is a record of our sinning and our being sinned against. I'm surprised I'm not getting any amens yet. Anyway, as I said, both policemen and pastors know too much of what goes on in people's lives. You can read about the sinning that goes on all the time online in the papers. If you still get a paper, you can watch it on the evening news. You can watch it on the YouTube channel. You can pray about it in the prayer meeting. Sin is happening all the time. But with the reality of sin comes the reality of hurt and pain and suffering. Some sins against one another, like I said, are relatively small. They pass from our remembrance. Somebody said something to us unkind years ago, and at the time it bothered us, we forgot about it. But there are other sins that are horrific, that are life-affecting, life-altering. I've come up with a list of half a dozen of just ones I can talk about in public, but there are all kinds I can't talk about. A lady in my church was raped by her boyfriend while his parents went for a walk, and when they came back, she was too ashamed and too intimidated to report it, and she lived with that for so many years. A babysitter invited her boyfriend to come over after the parents left, and they molested their little children. A man I knew was a bright Christian, living for the Lord, had a company that he used his life savings, invested in a company with two other men who were professing Christians, and they were going to start this business. And about six months into the company, he went on vacation. And when he'd come back, these men had basically stolen the company from him. And there went his life savings and his reputation. And he got to start over at 45. One of my professors told me, and I saw the results of it, that while he was in graduate school at Michigan State, he wrote some music and never performed it, or I think he wrote the music. Well, he's watching TV 20 years later, and during a miniseries on television, the musical score for the miniseries was his music. Someone else had stolen his music, and they were profiting from it. A man I know trained up a young man in his company, a national Fortune 500 company, trained up the man, befriended the man. The man turned on him, accused him of all kinds of sins. The company later fired my friend and gave this other man a half million dollars to keep him quiet. And my friend was out of a job from someone he had trained and befriended. A lady I knew filed for divorce without biblical grounds. She trashed her husband in the church she was attending. They had attended our church and they had had problems. And she accused this man of all kinds of heinous sins, including she said he was a homosexual. And she called up every woman in her church and told these people about her husband and solidified her position as being right. After the divorce went through, she actually admitted that she had made the whole thing up just so he would look bad. But his reputation in that church was totally trashed. I know a father who left his children and wife when the children were small, and he literally ran off to join the circus. And she never saw him again until he was in his mid to late 60s when he showed up at her doorstep with cancer and wanted her to take care of him. Now these are just a few of many stories that any pastor could share about awful things that happen to Christians. I didn't talk about childhood physical or emotional or sexual abuse. I didn't talk about marital infidelity. There's a hundred things we could have talked about. What are we to do about these awful sins and these awful hurts? I came up with a list of seven things we are not to do, seven things that we can fall into and we're not to be doing. First of all, we shouldn't pretend it never happened. It doesn't help anything, it doesn't deal with reality, just to pretend it didn't happen, being in denial. We're not to perpetually condemn and judge this other person over and over and over again and nuke them in our hearts. were not to bitterly rehearse the sin over and over again to ourselves and just become an embittered person. I once had a woman come into my office and her father, 80-something-year-old father was dying of cancer and she was in her early 60s. And she said, he can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned. And she went to a litany of all that he'd done to her as a little girl. And she said, if he thinks I'm gonna go visit him while he's dying, he's got another thing coming. And she was so bitter. But she had never dealt with what had happened in their home. We're not to become perpetual abuse victims, reliving the event, reliving our powerlessness to stop it in the first place, which led to a life of fear and defilement. We're not to become perpetual victims. We're not to have the event become the defining characteristic of our lives. I've seen too many people who viewed this event as the defining characteristic of their life. This happened to me, and I'm this thing. And viewing our whole life and our future through the lens of this sin against us. Number six, we're not to exact vengeance personally. Justice for the sin must be obtained in accordance with the law of God and the laws of the land God says in Romans 12 to the Christians in the city of Rome beloved never avenge yourselves But leave it to the wrath of God for it is written Vengeance is mine. I will repay says the Lord And the final thing we're not to do is we're not to become control freaks. What do you mean by that? I was hurt because I was not in control. That will never happen again. And it's pretty ugly when you see a person who, why is this person such a control freak? Because that's their way of simply compensating for what happened to them and the sins keeps on rolling. None of these are helpful. Some people call them strategies for being sinned against or coping mechanisms. and they don't work, they don't help, and they leave you worse off than you started. What is the one thing that God does command us to do? The one thing we must do, our text. Forgiving one another just as God in Christ forgave you. How is that even possible? I mean, come on, you don't know what it was. It was awful. I can't speak to it. I've never told my wife or my husband, my parents. It's awful. Surely God is asking too much. How in the world are we to forgive other people for the awful sins that they have committed against us? And our text says, just as God in Christ forgave you. So that begs the question, how did God in Christ forgive us? Some people would say, you know, God just needs to be big about it and get over this sin thing. He just needs to be big about it. And that's not gonna happen because God is a holy God and he hates sin, all sin, every sin. God's forgiveness of guilty sinners is based solely on the finished work of Christ. God forgives sinners not because he's having a good day, not because he decided that, well, boys will be boys, I'll forgive you. It's not for a number of slushy reasons why people think forgiveness should happen. But God forgives sinners because of the work of Christ. Having obeyed God perfectly and fulfilled the requirements to be God's sacrificial lamb, Christ bore the sins of all of his people once and for all. Romans 1 says that the resurrection proved that Jesus was who he claimed to be. that he had pleased the father and he was raised from the dead as the completion of a finished work. Christ fulfilled the holy demands of the law by fulfilling the law's demands of justice for each and every law that was broken. Every law that's ever been broken in the history of humanity will have to be adjudicated, either on the head of the unrepentant sinner in hell or on the repentant sinner, the believer, on Christ. Going all the way back to the Garden of Eden, what was the only recourse of sin, the penalty for sin is death of the sinner. And I've said this before, but it's sobering to be reminded. Every sin ever committed will be punished, either on the head of the unrepentant sinner in hell, or it was punished on Christ on the cross. But no sin gets off scot-free. No sin dodges God's justice. You can't hire some cheesy lawyer to get you off for what you did because God's perfect justice is holy. No sin ever gets away with it. God sees and punishes even when men's justice falls short. No one else knew that this happened but me and the perpetrator and God. Second major point here is God's forgiveness is based on legal categories. It's forensic, which means it's legal. God's holy law, which represents his holy character, has been willfully broken and disregarded, and God's holy character is horribly offended at lawbreakers. It is cosmic rebellion. It's cosmic treason, as R.C. Sproul used to like to say. God's word teaches us that the consequence and punishment of sin is death. Romans 3.23, the wages of sin, what we earn for our sin is death. God's Word also teaches that the one and only remedy for the cosmic failure of sin is the death of the sinner or the death of a perfect substitute, a perfect and innocent substitute. The Old Testament shows us how God forgives sin by giving us a repeated storyline, if you will, almost like a billboard. What's that? The sacrificial system of the Old Testament. It's like you're driving down the interstate and there's about 40 billboards in a row all saying the same thing. Genesis 321, and the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. God obviously had to kill some animals to take their skin as a sacrifice for Adam and Eve's sin and gave them the skin of these animals to cover their nakedness. In chapter four, verses one to five, we have Cain and Abel. The big to-do there is that one man brings a sacrifice of his animals, the other man brings the fruit of his fields, and God rejects Cain's offering of the grain offering, and he accepts Abel's, and Cain kills Abel. The first murder in the Bible was over correct worship, but it was a pattern from the beginning. and the beginning of sin, that only a sacrificial substitute could deal with the person's sin properly, or the death of the sinner. By the time we get to the book of Leviticus, which for years I stayed away from because it was full of intricate and seemingly arcane and obscure details and what in the world's going on here. But I finally determined I need to buckle down and study Leviticus. It's become one of my favorite books, not because it's an easy book, not because it's immediately applicable to us today. But God tells his people, I want to dwell in your midst. But I'm absolutely holy, and I'm not going to dwell in your midst unless you understand how to come into my presence. and you need sacrifices for your sins. By the time we get to Leviticus, we see that only a sacrifice will allow people into the presence of God. These animals were sacrificed that you might go free. Hebrews, which is kind of like an inspired interpretation of the Old Testament, says this in chapter 9, verse 22. Indeed, under the law, almost everything is purified with blood and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. God hates sin that much. Someone has to die for this sin. If you took your sacrificial turtle dove, or if you're middle class, a lamb, or if you're wealthier, a bull calf, and you take it to the priest and you confess your sin, you put one hand on the animal's head and you confess your sin to the priest, then symbolically the sins that you committed or are transferred to the animal, and the priest cuts the animal's throat in front of you and catches the blood in a little pan and then takes the blood and splashes it on the altar. My father worked in the livestock business, and I went with him to farms to buy livestock. And I went in the packing plants to see what they did to the animals. Now, you cannot go and watch them slaughter animals. That's too gory. And they even have to transfer people out of that job periodically, because nobody can kill animals all day for a living for very long. Some of you farmers may have done that. And you may kill your own animals, but I bet you don't do it eight hours a day, five days a week. And it's a gory thing. A slaughterhouse has a unique psyche about it. It has a unique smell about it. The smell of blood is everywhere. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. In Leviticus 1711, it sums up this way. The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your sins. For it is blood that makes atonement for the life. Once a year, the high priest on the Day of Atonement made a sacrifice for the whole nation. John the Baptist, when he saw Jesus, identified him in public and says, behold, the Lamb of God, or as we'd say it in English, God's Lamb who takes away the sin of not a person, not a nation, but a world of sinners. Behold God's Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. I'm not teaching universalism here, I'm just teaching the Bible. Anyway, Christ is a sufficient sacrifice for a world of sinners. My final point under this is Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial system. He is the once and for all perfect and sufficient, all sufficient sacrifice. The sins of the believing sinner are put on Christ and he bore them on the cross. Matthew 26, 28. Christ's blood was shed for many for the forgiveness of sins, which is frequently used in communion. 2 Corinthians 5, 21, I read this morning. For God made him who knew no sin to become sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Colossians 2, 13 and 14. And you were dead in your trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. Hebrews 9, 26, Christ has appeared once and for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And finally, Hebrews 10, 11 to 14, every priest stands daily in the temple at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifice which can never take away sins. In the Old Testament, the sacrifice was viewed as a temporary covering, looking forward to, in time, the coming of the perfect sacrifice, the perfect sacrificial lamb. So the Old Testament sacrifices were temporary, not permanent. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting for his enemies to be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering, He has made perfect for all time those who are being made holy. That's your and my testimony. He's taken away all my sins, given me his righteousness. I'm declared perfect in his sight, and he's been working on me for 50-some years to make me holy. Us as Christians had our sins placed on Christ on the cross. We bear his perfect record of perfect obedience to the Father in all things as the garment that we now wear. So let's take all this I just shared and apply it to the question of how do we forgive these horrific things that were done to us? If the basis of God's forgiveness is forensic and legal, if God doesn't forgive us because he's having a good day, but because Christ paid for a sin, how do we review our sins? A couple of points here. First of all, the difference between justice and personal vengeance. Divine justice wants sin and wrong to be lawfully punished by God's justice and if called for by the civil law, by civil justice. Some things that are done to you are biblically sinful and sometimes, depending on what culture you live in, so there are civil laws against it and you should enact those. Personal vengeance wants to exact punishment and deal out hurt itself, personally, without recourse to God's justice or civil justice. Just thinking back about it, and you can see it too, and you may even see it in your own heart, why are revenge movies so popular? I thought of the first ones that became popular in the 60s. Charles Bronson had a couple of movies, Death Wish. You messed with my family. That was a death wish. I'm going to kill all of you. And then you can think of the action stars since the 60s who so much of what they're involved in is this personal vengeance. You messed with my family. You messed with my wife. You messed with my kids or whatever. I'm going to get you. And people like to go to those movies. They're popular. Why? Because there's a certain sense of satisfied justice, they think, in having revenge. We must view God's holy justice rightly if we're to trust God for the solution. If you don't believe God is a just God, that he operates on the basis of justice, then you're not going to trust him for the results. If the person who sinned against you and hurt you so terribly never repents, and never comes to Christ for salvation and cleansing, then they shall bear the penalty of this awful sin in hell along with all their other sins forever. They will pay the penalty in hell forever. Remember that every sin ever committed will be punished. No one gets away with it. Not this perpetrator. Not you. Not me. Nobody's sin gets away with it. God knows all things. And he knows the things that are committed in the darkness. Where men don't see, but God does see. And he will fully punish those sins in eternal misery and hell. It is the sin that was committed against you that you want punished. It's the sin inside you that was done to you, rather, which defiled you, stained you, pollutes you, ravishes your heart, and makes you miserable. And God is going to punish each and every sin. This awful sin will not go unpunished. It won't. Can you believe that God will in no way let this sin go free? That he will in no way let the guilty go free? The Old Testament, one of the worst things that can happen in a civilization, he says, is that when you have unjust judges. Genesis makes the point, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? It's unimaginable, it's unthinkable that God would not do the right thing, the just thing. By forgiving the other person, regardless of whether or not they repent, You are releasing them from accountability to you and turning them over to God in His perfect justice. Let me explain briefly how this works. Sin against you, personally, has a two-fold aspect. A person sins against you, but in sinning against you, they're sinning against God who made you. Every person's made in his image. You're to love your neighbor as yourself, and a person treats you in a sinful way. They're sinning against you, yes, and they're sinning against God. So there's double accountability. You can hold on to say, nope, I'm going to adjudicate this. I'm going to be the one to exact justice. or I'm going to be the person to just cower in the corner and just live with it the rest of my life. Or you can say, yes, this person did sin against me, and I would name the sin for what it is. I wouldn't sugarcoat it. I would name it for what it is, because sin does not like to be called out for what it really is. Name the sin that was done against you. Choose to forgive that person and turn them over to God for him to adjudicate the other half of that. This way you're not a perpetual victim. The sin's not always in your face. The defilement, the evil, the stain, the pollution that's carried with the sin goes down the drain of God's White House justice. He will deal with this person. By forgiving the other person this awful sin or sins, you're telling God that you believe what he says in Romans. Vengeance is mine. I pay back. No sin gets off free. I will deal with this. Now sin no longer has the ability to define you, to control you, to victimize you. You can watch in holy justice as God punishes this sin and it gets what it deserves, damnation. In Revelation chapter 6, about the time I was reading and studying Ephesians 4, I saw something I had not seen before. In Revelation 6, you have Christian martyrs crying out to God for justice and asking for God to vindicate their martyrdom. Now, they're in heaven. They're under the throne. They're not sinners because they're no longer in their fleshly sinful bodies. But they're crying out for justice. Justice is something that God wants. Listen to what the martyrs say. When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete. who were to be killed as they themselves had been. The New Testament seems to indicate that God has a finite number of people that will be killed in the building up of the kingdom. In the meantime, we're to sit tight. These martyrs are in heaven. They're now perfected. They have no sin. So their cries for justice are not personal vengeance cries. They're cries for righteous justice. It is a righteous thing to want God's justice, and these martyrs clearly are crying out and shouting for it. Their martyrdom demands justice. They killed God's people, and they cry for God's justice upon their killers. God did not tell him, shh, now be quiet, don't be so upset, get over it, make lemonade out of your lemons. God is gonna punish those who hurt and kill you. The martyrs were given the white robes symbolic of the righteousness of Christ given to them on earth and told to wait a little longer until the full complement of martyrs is complete. The suffering of the saints must go on a little bit longer before final justice comes to earth. But see how it comes by the end of this chapter 6 of Revelation. It talks about God's coming justice. Revelation 6, 15 and 16 says, Then the kings of the earth, and the great ones, and the generals, and the rich, and the powerful. You go, well, it pretty much sums up people who are the movers and shakers. and everyone, slaves and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and to the rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb, for the great day of the wrath has come and who can stand? C.S. Lewis said in the weight of glory, a sermon he delivered I believe at Oxford during World War II, if you could see a person after they'd been in hell a brief time, you'd be tempted to run away from them as you would from some terrible thing and a nightmare. He said, if you could see a person after they've been in heaven, you'd be tempted to fall on your face and worship them like they were an angel or a demigod. He said, every day in every way, we're helping people to one or the other destination. But the point is, people in hell are not having a vacation. They're being judged by the wrath of God. Let me give you a final word about what to do as you forgive them. As you think about what I've said, you look at these scriptures, you pray about it, pray about it some more, think about it. First of all, forgiving others does not mean you're to become best friends with them. My forgiveness plus their repentance equals a certain kind of reconciliation. But my forgiveness without their repentance means no reconciliation. But I'm free of their sins. They're not accountable to me anymore. I've turned the order to the Lord. This person has sinned against the Lord, too, and he will adjudicate them perfectly. I'm not going to spend my time and energy trying to do payback or trying to just always be dealing with what they did. My forgiveness of them and their lack of repentance, we're not going to be reconciled, but I'm free of them. Their repentance without my forgiveness means no reconciliation, and I still nurse their sinful acts and my bitter resentment. That's not good. My forgiveness and their repentance can equal reconciliation, but rebuilding of trust may take a long time. It may never come. If you hire a babysitter to take care of your kids and they molest your kids, it's going to be a frosty day in August before you have anything to do with them in your home. But that doesn't mean you can't forgive them and turn them over to God's justice. Think of Joseph in the Bible. This morning I mentioned that he was 14 when he was sold into slavery by his brothers. They wanted to kill him, but they said, no, we can get rid of him and make money. It's a double blessing. It's a twofer. So they sell him to some Amalekite traders who are going to Egypt, and he's sold on the slave market in Egypt like he's just a piece of chattel. And we know the rest of the story of what happens with Potiphar's wife and going to prison and people in the prison not being gracious to him. Seventeen years this goes on until he's 31. And his brothers show up. And there's a really good, I think, Life of Joseph on TBS that I've watched the movie several times. And it's very poignant. You read the passage in Genesis and he finally reveals himself to his brothers and it's really heart-wrenching. Now, what did Joseph do? He wasn't naive. These men had wanted to kill him, but they found selling him into slavery was a better deal. Have they changed? Are they still ugly men wanting to do him in? He had to test them, and so we see Joseph testing his brothers to see what they're made of. Does he say, surprise, guess who, long time no see, and just turn himself over to his brothers? He tests them to see if they're worthy of having reconciliation and entrusting himself to them anymore. But he did forgive them. He said, what you meant for evil, and you did mean it for evil, God meant it for good. I'm not God to you, and I'm not caught up in bitterness because of what you did. Forgiving others releases the guilty person from you to God and leaves them there. And God is going to deal with them. Now, such sins against you must be battled in your mind until the evil one stops bringing it back to you and finds some other way to try to attack you. If something horrific has happened to you, You're not going to go in your bedroom and say, OK, I prayed about it for five minutes. It's cool. I'm over this, and I'm moving on in life. The devil's not stupid. He's going to keep bringing it back to you, and you're going to have to keep having a Bible study with him about what does God do with other people's sins against us? What are we to be doing with other people? Forgiveness must be rehearsed over and over and over again until it's settled in our mind and the devil stops using it as a way of attack. If you've ever played sports, like a game like football, and the opponent team knows, if we run here, every time we can do something. You think he's just saying, well, I'm tired of running over them, I think I'll just move on. He's just gonna keep doing it until you stop him. And if the devil wants to bring back this sin and throw it against you and throw it in your face, and look what a terrible, It happened to me, and I didn't deserve it. Well, until I forgive that person and turn it over to the Lord, and realize this sin is not going to get off free. It'll either be damned on this person, or it was damned on Christ. In 2012 and 13, I had to pray the Lord's Prayer every day, especially the verse, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Every day, I had to forgive certain people who were sinning against me. Every day. I would go for a walk every day to try to maintain my sanity. And I can remember one day, it was a really great day because I hadn't thought about it And I went around a corner on this path around a lake, and there was a big oak tree. And out from behind the oak tree jumped the whole thing. It had accosted me in the path, and I had to deal with it all over again. But I had to deal with it every day before so I knew what I had to do. So it didn't take up my whole day. It didn't take up an hour. It didn't take up 10 minutes. But I had to deal with it. The evil one is the accuser and the slanderer and he will keep bringing it up again and again and again about the sins committed against me so that I can convict the other person in my heart and I can be drawn into the rehearsal of their sins and how what they did deserves my wrath. Now, forgiving non-Christians is hard and forgiving Christians is sometimes harder because fellow Christians do mean, ugly, Terrible things. Back in the 70s, a person became famous who had not been well-known before that. Her name was Corrie Tenboom. She was a Dutch woman who lived in the suburbs of Amsterdam, Holland. And her father owned a watchmaker shop. And she was a 51-year-old woman minding her business working for her dad in the watchmaker shop when her life caved in. The Nazis had taken over Holland and they were hiding Jews in a space in their house that wasn't visible from the architectural plans or from the street. And this went on for, I don't think, a couple of years until finally they were discovered. And she and her father and mother and brother and sister were all arrested and all sent to concentration camps. And her father died there. Her mother died there. Her brother died there. Her sister, Betsy, who's really the hero of the book, because if you read the book or watch the movie, Cory's this bitter, nuke them all. You can send them all to hell for all I care. She was an angry, bitter woman. And Betsy had a spiritual mind about these things. Betsy died of pneumonia, I believe. For example, The place all these women were stuffed into was filled with lice. Their dormitory, as it was, was filled with lice. But Betsy observed the only place in the entire concentration camp where they were free to be by themselves was in their dorm because the lice were God's lice and kept the guards out. Because no self-respecting Nazi would get a lice on his uniform. So they could do what they wanted. They could have Bible study and pray and sing hymns in their lice-infested dorm. So that shows you a little bit about Betsy's attitude. Well, Betsy dies. But before she died, she and her sister Corrie had promised No matter, if God gets us out of here, no matter where we go, we have to tell people, no matter how deep a hell hole you're in, Christ is deeper still. He can be with you in Ravensbrück concentration camp. He can be with you in the midst of your misery. The next day, after Betsy died, one of the clerks in the main office is typing out the numbers of the ladies who were to be executed the next day. And through a typist error, Corey was released. They came and got her, gave her her stuff, and she walked free. And that next day, all the women her age were gassed and killed. But she remembered what God had given to her and Betsy, and so after the war was over, she started speaking about what it means to forgive. What does that look like? You're speaking in a Lutheran church in Sunday school about your experience in the war, and one of the guards from your concentration camp is sitting in this congregation. He's having to deal with his sins. And then the pastor invites people to come up and shake Corey's hand after the service. And she saw that the guard was in line to shake her hand. She said, I just knew I couldn't do it. I just couldn't shake this man's hand. I knew the barbaric things he had done. And as he got closer and closer, she's praying and trying to be nice to people, but she's praying like crazy. And she had no feelings, no ooshy-gooshy, oh, I just love former guards. She had no ooey-gooey feelings, but she willed to forgive him. And when he came up and stuck out his hand, and she said it looked like it was five minutes there by itself, but it wasn't, but it seemed like it. I reached out my hand, and I shook his hand. And he didn't know it, but I forgave him. But that wasn't the hardest thing after the war. A couple of years later, she was in her apartment in Amsterdam, and her editor was with her, and her book began to circulate. And they were talking about what some Christians had done to her, to hurt her, and she got really worked up. And she said, I can prove that they were wrong and I was right, and she went over to a filing cabinet and pulled it open, went to a file, pulled out. She said, this file proves that they were wrong and I was right. And when she turned around, her editor grabbed her hand and said, Corey, look at yourself. You go and tell people no matter what awful things are done to you, God's put your sins as far away as the east is from the west, but you're keeping a file on these people so you can convict them any time you want to and prove that you were right and they were wrong. Is that right? She rushed over to her fireplace and threw the file in the fireplace. in the ashes of God's justice and her forgetfulness. You and I can forgive the awful, awful things that are done to us. We have to do it biblically. We have to do it by seeing God's justice in the midst of it. We have to release them from their accountability to us, which is only part of their sin. But the greater part of their sin is their accountability to God, and He will deal with them. He will either punish them forever in hell if they never repent and turn to Christ, Or should they repent and turn to Christ? Christ went to the cross for that sin. And it's the sin you want punished. It's the sin that did the damage. It's probably not a coincidence in God's timing that it's a communion service that I'm giving this message. May the Lord give us grace to forgive the horrible things that were done to us. You know, I was reading an article by a journalist as to why journalists can pick on Christians and make all kinds of snide remarks about Christianity and mock Christians, mock Christ. But they never mock Muslims. And he said, we're scared of the Muslims. They'll come after us. They'll kill us. Christians will turn the other cheek. Well, that may be a shorthand of Wayne saying Christians will forgive us. The Muslims won't. And if if Christ is insulted, if we're attacked, may God give us grace to be people who learned that God's justice will take care of us and we can forgive others. Let's pray. Father, I have not argued for cheap grace this evening. I have not argued for get over it and get big about it this evening. I've argued that looking sin full in the face for the awfulness of what it is, that only the work of Christ as the sacrificial substitute can atone for the sins committed against us. We do not have to hold people accountable to us. We can release them and leave them entirely to your accountability, to your justice, believing that shall not the judge of all the earth do right. God, give us grace to be people who forgive others as Christ forgave us so that we will not be captivated and captured, slimed, defiled, polluted by others' sins, but it can end. We can get over it. We can move on. I pray that you'd help us to do that. In Jesus' name, amen.