It's said that unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping
that it affects the other person.
I want to turn quickly and read from Matthew 18.
I know I've talked about forgiveness in the past and I
want to talk a little bit this morning about the fruit of our
forgiveness. And that's what Ben and Receiva
are walking in is the fruit of their forgiveness.
And it's, it's a beautiful thing when those relationships are
reconciled and and we get to walk in that unconditional love.
So Matthew 18 verse, I'm going to start in verse 21.
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times
shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?
Up to seven times. Jesus answered, I tell you not 7
times, but 77 times. Therefore the Kingdom of heaven
is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his
servants. As he began the settlement, a
man who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him.
Since he was not able to pay the master order that he and his
wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the
debt. Now that amount that he owed was
not something he could ever repay in his lifetime.
And it's also interesting how our our debts affect there's a
ripple effect to his wife and children.
Continuing verse 26, the servant fell on his knees before him.
Be patient with me, he begged, and I will pay back everything.
The servants master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let
him go. But when the servant went out,
he found one of his fellow servants who owed him 100
denarii, which is not very much. He grabbed him and began to
choke him. Pay back what you owe me, he
demanded. His fellow servant fell to his
knees and begged him, Be patient with me, and I will pay you
back. But he refused, and said he went
off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the
debt. When the other servants saw what
had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told
their master everything that had happened.
Then the master called the servant in.
You, wicked servant, he said. I cancelled all that debt of
yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have mercy on your
fellow servant just as I had on you?
In anger, his master turned him over to the jailers to be
tortured until he should pay back all he owed.
This is how my Heavenly Father will treat each of you unless
you forgive your brother. From your heart.
Wow, from your heart. Sometimes forgiveness is just
words, but how do we get it from our heart?
I think it requires Holy Spirit. So just a couple of points I
want to make on on forgiveness though, is to remember that the
one that gets the most out of forgiveness is the one doing the
forgiving. We might think and withholding
forgiveness from another that we are punishing them, but the one
suffering the most is ourselves. It's said that unforgiveness is
like drinking poison and hoping that it affects the other
person. Even our secular psychology
talks about the harm that unforgiveness can do to our
physical bodies. It can cause depression.
It can cause anxiety, high blood pressure, depression, all of
those things. But when we choose to forgive,
it frees our hearts as well, and it restores the standard of
holiness that's in US and through us.
So I would say that one thing that's the fruit of forgiveness
is peace. Peace in our hearts, peace in
our minds, peace in our relationships.
We heard a testimony of a married couple.
You know, forgiveness in a marriage is critical.
You're doing life together every day.
And we aren't perfect. Sometimes we mess up, but
responding in forgiveness. It's a must in a marriage
relationship, but it's also a must in the in the family in the
body of Christ. A little earlier in the chapter
18 of Matthew, chapter 18, Jesus lays that kind of a three-step
pattern for approaching someone that's sinned against us or
offended us. You know, go to them, take
someone with you or take it before the church.
And how many times is it just easier to go tell somebody and
say, come with me or to tell everybody versus just going to
them one-on-one? And what a beautiful thing.
If we can go to our brothers and sisters in Christ and reconcile
with them at a heart level. That's what that's that's what
God always has wanted. And that brings peace in the
body. It brings unity in the body.
Those are all fruits of forgiveness.
I want to read a story. If I can find where it went to,
here it is. For time's sake, I'm going to
read it. And it's not my story.
It's actually a Heidi Baker's story.
And As for those of you that don't know where, she's been a
missionary in Mozambique for many years.
And so she writes, I found Louise on the streets.
He was sick and full of anger because he had been burned in
his house, which was a cardboard box, by people who had
previously been his friends. They had poured gasoline on it,
tied him to the cardboard, and lit it on fire, leaving him to
die. He was terribly burned and has
spent many months in a dilapidated local hospital.
He was unhappy and bitter about being treated so horribly.
His misery brought him to a place of great brokenness, so
Heidi writes. When I met Louise, I held him in
my arms and told him about Jesus's passionate love.
I invited him to come home and live with us.
At the time, Louise was not very merciful or forgiving.
He made his living by hitting, stealing and knifing people.
But I kept telling Louis about this man named Jesus who had
given up his home and riches and walked the streets, the one who
left heaven and came to earth to find him.
Eventually, Louis said I must know this man.
One day Louise came to me and said that he wanted to go to the
streets with me so he could tell the guys who tried to kill him
that he forgave them. I watched Louise pour out
extravagant mercy on many in the streets of Maputo, and I watched
the favor of God increase in his broken little life favor,
another fruit of forgiveness. One of our churches at the time
was an unconventional congregation.
We met in a brothel to reach prostitutes we worship.
Jesus prayed and simply loved the resident prostitute girls.
However, we weren't seeing a lot of breakthrough in the girls
escaping the cycle of their destructive lifestyles.
Some of these girls were as young as 1011 and 12 years old,
and they were selling their bodies on the street for a
bottle of Coke. I was desperate for Jesus to set
them free while I was on a 40 day fast.
I cried out to God to change the situation.
Shortly after this, the girls fell on their knees during
worship and started screaming. We cannot sell ourselves
anymore. I started weeping for joy and
asked Jesus what I should do next.
I knew that I could not move the girls into the same center as
the boys and I need to find a church where the pastor would
not fall into temptation. I needed a pastor whose
heartbeat matched Jesus in holiness and purity and who was
free from judgment. After crying out to God, I
looked up and saw Luis praying and worshipping God
wholeheartedly in the dirt. He hadn't finished the pastor's
Bible school because he could not read or write, but he was a
man full of mercy and compassion.
Lewis was worshipping with his hands lifted up, adoring the
Lord. I asked him if he would care, if
he would like to care for these girls as a pastor.
He fell apart sobbing, asking if God could give him the privilege
and the honor of such a beautiful task.
Kneeling down, he looked up at me and asked, Could God have
such great love to use a man like me?
He had great humility and great love, and he moved to a small
base and began to pastor the girls.
His life was one of love, mercy, and radical forgiveness, and he
chose to walk in ultimate justice, where forgiving and
releasing is the standard of righteousness rather than
bitterness and revenge. Sometimes it takes more strength
and courage to forgive than it does to remain bitter and
revengeful. But what a beautiful thing that
this man chose to forgive. And the result of that, the Lord
began to open doors for him because the Lord saw his.
He forgave from the heart and the Lord saw his heart.
Sometimes we wonder, Lord, why aren't you opening the next
door? Where?
What's the next thing for me? You know, I'm not hearing your
voice. And sometimes we need to go
back. And what's the last thing he
told us to do? And sometimes it's we need to
forgive. And as Louise forgave, the Lord
used him mightily to minister to these broken little girls.
What an honor. What a beautiful thing.
I also want to share another story and this one, it's pretty
crazy, but you can actually there's a book in the library
bookstore called Breaking the Veil of Silence.
And this there's it's 15 short stories of different people and
this gal's story is in there. So in 2013, I went to Cuba and I
was asked to speak at a conference call, Breaking the
Veil of Silence. And most of you know my story.
I have a beautiful testimony of how God brought me out of just a
place of brokenness as a result of an abortion decision when I
was a teenager. And so I was there sharing my my
testimony as how the Lord broke me free from the shame of
sharing it all the anger, the unforgiveness, the unresolved
grief, all those things. And so I shared it.
And Leanne Goth, it was she hadn't was the one that invited
me in for the conference. She goes, I'd like you to pray
with this gal. And her name is Daime.
I'm not breaking confidentiality.
It's in the book. Anyway, so Daime, she brought
her up to me and I put out my hands to grab her hands to pray
for her. And she pulled back and shook
her head and walked away. And Leanne was like, what
happened? And I said I have no idea.
So the next day she came up to me with a translator to tell me
she was sorry but she did not want me to pray with her.
And we really, none of us really knew her story.
And that was in March of 2013. I went back the end of the year
over the New Year's, so December, January, and I did a 2
morning session on teaching the women of Cuba how to minister to
women that had an abortion in Cuba.
Abortion is like their preferred form of birth control and
they've almost all had, well I can't say all but a large
majority has had an abortion and most of them have had multiple.
It was part of the Russian culture that had come into Cuba.
So I do the first morning and at the end of the the morning Daime
comes up to my translator which I was shocked she was there too.
She came up to my translator and said, I want to share a
testimony tomorrow morning. And I thought.
We all were like, and I went back and talked to Leanne about
it. We're like.
Well, what's this going to be? We had no clue.
Oh, my goodness. So she got up and she shared
that next morning how when she was a little girl, her mother
would speak of abortions like they were her heroic acts.
And so at age 18, Daime found herself pregnant.
And her boyfriend didn't want her to abort it because they
were going to get married. And and her mother at that point
also told her that maybe she should have the baby, but she
chose to have an an abortion. And four months later, they got
married. And about six months later,
she's discovered she's pregnant. And she doesn't, she doesn't
want to have a baby yet. In her mind, it's like the
economy is bad in Cuba. This wouldn't be a good thing to
do. And so she was trying to keep it
a secret that her husband obviously knew that at about 16
weeks, she began to beat her stomach and throw herself
against the counter and against the wall.
And, and she, she hurt herself to the point where she collapsed
on the floor and passed out. And she woke up there.
And three days later, she lost the baby.
But she did not tell anyone what she had done.
And so everybody was blaming her husband and, and her mother, and
she just didn't say anything about what had really happened.
Well, six months later, she's pregnant again.
She has a little girl and the little girl isn't gaining weight
and she starts to beat herself up.
This is all my fault. You know, I, I'm a bad mom.
It's because I had these abortions and there's a curse
over me. And, and those are, I mean,
that's what she was saying. Well, two years later, they have
a little boy and I think around a year they discovered that his,
his cranium hadn't closed properly and needed surgery.
So once again, she falls into this thing of, oh, I'm a bad mom
and this is all my fault and everything.
And over the next three years, she has three more abortions.
That's five. And after those, she gets
gloriously saved. She meets Jesus and her family
is doing well and she finds herself pregnant again.
And she feels like this is this is God, though.
This is God saying that he he sees me and so they had the
baby. No health problems with this
one. And she says, OK, three
children's enough. I'm going to make sure I don't
have any more. And in the process of that, she
discovers she's pregnant again. And she talks to her husband
that that she's not sure she can go through another pregnancy.
And between them and her doctor, they have a 6th abortion.
And this one was hard because she knew how it was a sin
against God. She she was saved and six months
later she's pregnant again. And she has a little boy.
She said she began to hate her fertility.
She's going to hate herself. So they have this fourth child,
the little boy, and at three months old he won't eat.
She has to force feed him. And by the time he's about 15
months old, it's clear that he's not developing.
Normally he he doesn't talk at all.
He's completely silent. He sits on the floor and rocks
and if they don't play music, he beats his head against the wall.
And this is the point where I came to Cuba and I'm sharing
about what God's done in my life and, and healing me.
And she's pretty honest that she was mad at me.
But she said about she came and heard me.
And then when she went back home, she said three months,
next three months was, she said, just awful.
She said she couldn't eat. She didn't take care of herself.
She didn't do her nails, which in Cuba, it's kind of a big deal
to do your nails. Her marriage was continuing to
fall apart. They would just argue.
And her husband got to the point where he only came home to
change his clothes and sleep. And she said one night, she
cried out to God. And she said, God, I need help.
And she said all of a sudden, he started bringing back to her
some things I had shared about forgiveness.
And she thought I've got to go in and forgive my husband.
So she went in two in the morning and woke him up and
began to just tell him how sorry she was and asked for his
forgiveness. She said they talked about each
of the abortions. She confessed to him how she had
caused the one and he began to share his heart of how he had
been hurt and felt about each one.
And she said, I didn't even think he cared.
And so as they began to just share and forgive each other and
reconcile, she said it was she said, I she goes the I've been
telling myself my husband was a bad person, but my husband's a
good person. So that next morning they're in
the kitchen and in walks this little boy that they were
concerned he was autistic and had because he hadn't spoke.
And he walks in and he goes Mama, Dada.
And throughout that day he spoke the names of all the rest of his
siblings, she said. She said that day, she said he's
a normal child in every way except he's a little cross eyed.
Forgiveness changed the atmosphere of that home, and it
unlocked healing in that little boy.
I also have to think about how she was so silent about this the
the truth for so long and how it also her little boy was so
silent he was locked up as well. In Psalm 32 it says when I kept
silent my bones wasted away. She was wasting away.
But forgiveness broke things open in their home and in their
life. Have one more quick story and
then we'll move into some ministry time and most of you
have probably heard this before. This is a story Pastor Dave
shared before. But there was a gal here for
prayer in the altars one night and she was blind in one eye.
She had been, her husband had beat her and in one of time he
hit her and she lost the sight in her eye.
And Pastor Dave tells the story much more dramatically than I
can. You know, he says she he blessed
it and he cursed it and all these things and nothing
happened. So he sent her over to be prayed
for by somebody else. And they, they said, well, they
asked her what happened. And they said, well, have you
forgiven him? And she said, oh, yeah, I did
that years ago. You know, he got saved and he's
with the Lord today. And the person prayed with her,
said let's forgive him again. And as they prayed and she
released him again, her eye began to see.
We just don't know. We just don't know.
And one of the things I want to challenge you with this week is
sometimes we've taken an offence with someone and we just move on
with life. But maybe just ask the Lord, is
there anybody I need to forgive? Is there anybody?
And I, like I've said in the past when I've shared on this,
that doesn't mean you have to go to them and have a long
conversation. They might have forgotten as
well, or maybe they they don't even know they hurt you.
But we can forgive from our hearts without ever going to
them. Hey, thanks for watching.
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