John Bradshaw - Biblical Forgiveness
This is "It Is Written". I'm John Bradshaw. Thanks for joining me. There are not too many times in the Bible that God says, "If you do this, you will not be saved". Now, there's a place right at the very end of the Bible, in fact, the seventh-last verse of the Bible, where God says, "But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practice a lie". That's Revelation 22:15. Now, there's a passage in 2 Timothy 3 that says that "perilous times shall come" in earth's last days when "men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy", and so on. Ultimately, that's a catalog of 18 or 19 sins.
Of course, people caught in that may repent, but when Paul writes, "From such turn away," you know it's clear that these people are headed in the wrong direction. But you're not surprised by that. Sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and liars and blasphemers and lovers of money, these people have told you by their actions that they are not especially interested in God's will for their life. But here's something that might surprise you. It's Matthew 6, starting in verse 14: "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses". That's clear. If you don't forgive, God will not forgive you. And that's not saying we are forgiven because we forgive, but we're forgiven as we forgive.
So let's look at that again. We'd hate to misread that. "If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses". That's soberingly clear. And I say "soberingly" because so many people have issues with forgiveness. And yet here's God saying if you won't forgive others, you can expect that God will not forgive you. And that stands to reason. Forgiveness is an attribute of the divine, an expression of divine love and grace. When you welcome Jesus into your life, forgiveness must become a feature of your life because Jesus is now the anchor of your existence. Then someone who has deep issues they're dealing with thinks, "How is that possible"? You know, hurt can go deep. People can do terrible things. Certain things can be very difficult to forgive.
Let me share with you a story of forgiveness. The man in question was born south of Buffalo, New York, and raised in Long Beach, California. As a child, he learned to fight so he could handle the bullies who gave him a hard time for being Italian. In high school he developed into an outstanding runner. He competed in the Olympic Games trials in 1936 in New York City in temperatures of up to 100 degrees, or 38 Celsius. The stars of those trials included Jesse Owens; Mack Robinson, the older brother of baseball's Jackie Robinson; and this man, Louis Zamperini, who finished in a dead heat for first in the final of the 5,000 meters, becoming at just 19 years of age the youngest American to ever qualify for the Olympic Games in the 5,000 meters, which is a distinction he still holds. He finished fifth in his heat at the Berlin Olympics and eighth in the final.
At those Olympics, Zamperini met Adolf Hitler after catching Hitler's eye by running the fastest single lap ever run in the 5,000. "You're the boy with the fast finish," Hitler said to him. It wouldn't be long and Louis Zamperini and Adolf Hitler would be looking at each other very differently. Five years after the Olympics in 1941, the year the United States joined World War II, Louis Zamperini joined the U.S. Air Force. He was posted to Tuvalu, or the Ellice Islands, as they were then known, in the South Pacific. And he narrowly escaped with his life when his B-24 bomber was attacked by Japanese Zeros during a raid on Nauru, which at the time was held by Japan. Just weeks later his plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean 1,300 kilometers, that's about 800 miles, south of Hawaii. And he drifted in a life raft for almost 50 days.
Sharks ominously followed the raft while its occupants survived on rainwater and the few fish and birds they were able to catch. The raft was strafed repeatedly by a Japanese aircraft. But in spite of being filled with holes, it never sank. Of the 11 people on board the plane when it crashed, only three survived. One of those men died, leaving only Zamperini and one other as the only survivors. They were taken prisoner by Japan when they came ashore on the Marshall Islands. And it was then that Zamperini's life descended into the stuff of nightmares. His biography, "Unbroken," written by Laura Hillenbrand, discusses the cruelty and torture he endured at the hands of his Japanese captors. The book spent more than four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including more than three months at number one. It was made into a movie, also titled "Unbroken," directed by Angelina Jolie.
In the movie, the brutality of Zamperini's captors, in particular one certain prison guard, was portrayed in excruciating detail. On one occasion he forced Zamperini to hold a two-meter-long beam of wood above his head for 37 minutes in an attempt to break the American. The psychological cruelty was also extreme during the two and a half years Zamperini spent in three separate Japanese POW camps. After the war, he was plagued by memories of what he endured as a prisoner of war. Of course, by now his running career was over.
When he competed at the age of 19 in Berlin, he believed that the 1940 Tokyo Olympics would be the real opportunity he would have to win an Olympic gold medal. Those games were never held, although ironically it was the time he spent in Japan that would largely define the rest of his life. How do you come back from what Zamperini went through? It was dehumanizing, soul destroying. He endured brutal cruelty. He suffered what today we call PTSD. After returning home he had nightmares in which he dreamed of being bludgeoned by his captors. He often thought of murdering the man who stalked and tormented him every day while he was a prisoner of war. And he actually made plans to return to Japan and kill that man.
Struggling with alcoholism and with his marriage in tatters, at the urging of his wife, he went to hear the famous preacher Billy Graham speak at a revival meeting in Los Angeles. The second night he attended, his heart was touched by Graham's message, and he gave his life to Jesus that very night. And in an absolute miracle of God, the hatred he felt for the man who had cruelly abused him while he was a POW just melted away. He forgave him. He even wrote to the man expressing his forgiveness and sharing with him his faith in Jesus. There are many people living their lives chained to another person. I'll tell you more about that in just a moment.
Thanks for joining me on "It Is Written". Author Laura Hillenbrand described Louis Zamperini as an incorrigible delinquent as a child. She spent seven years getting to know him, researching, and writing her book, "Unbroken". Here's what Hillenbrand wrote in a "Guideposts" article: "To live in bitterness is to be chained to the person who wounded you, your emotions and actions arising not independently, but in reaction to your abuser. Louie became so obsessed with vengeance that his life was consumed by the quest for it. In bitterness, he was as much a captive as he'd been when barbed wire had surrounded him. This is why forgiveness is so liberating. But how is it found? For Louie, it lay in resurrecting his dignity, seeing himself not as the wretched creature that the Bird had striven to make of him, but as the object of God's infinite love".
It was forgiveness that changed Louis Zamperini's life and set him free to live with peace in his heart. In 1950 he visited a prison in Tokyo, where several of his former prison guards were being kept. And he told them he forgave them. Prior to the Nagano Winter Olympics almost 50 years later, he carried the Olympic torch for about half a mile between rows of Japanese soldiers near one of the prison camps in which he'd been held. He tried to meet with the man who persecuted him so terribly during his imprisonment in Japan. But the man refused to meet him. Forgiveness.
I spoke with a woman once whose parents were senselessly murdered by a man who had escaped from a halfway house, where he'd been serving a sentence for manslaughter. The murderer made off with an old vehicle and $61. During his trial, the woman, Sue, visited the man and told him that she didn't hate him. "My grandmother always taught me not to use the word hate," she told him. "She taught me that we are here to love one another. If you are guilty, I forgive you". She later said, "I didn't think of him as a killer, I thought of him as a human being". Not everyone was happy that Sue chose not to hate. To begin with, even the killer was confused by Sue's words and actions. She said, "There is no way to heal and get over the trauma without forgiveness. You must forgive and forget and get on with your life. That is what Jesus would do".
While Sue never felt the murderer should be released from prison, she became friends with him. Through her example and friendship, the man became a devout Christian believer. Now, that can seem like a bridge too far for many people who struggle with the idea of forgiveness. But forgiveness does much more for you than it does the person you forgive. When an It Is Written team visited Rwanda not long after the 1994 genocide, It Is Written team members met a woman whose family had been killed in the tragedy. When she came face to face with the killer, she explained to him that seeing as she no longer had any sons, he would have to be her son. She took him into her home and treated him as she would have treated one of her own children.
That's radical forgiveness. But whether or not that feels to you like something you could ever do, it does tell you what's possible. And if someone can forgive the person who brutalized him in POW camp, if a woman can forgive the man who murdered her parents, if a woman can forgive the man who killed her family, then maybe you can forgive whatever it is you're facing or dealing with. Life has taught me that almost everyone has forgiveness issues of one kind or another. It might be an ex, an old teacher, a parent, a boss or former boss, a colleague or former colleague. And often people carry around with them baggage from years, sometimes years and years ago. You might have heard it said that choosing not to forgive is like taking a poison pill and hoping the other guy will die.
Of course you've been wronged. You've been harmed and, and hurt or maybe abused, mistreated as a child, abandoned by your father, raised by parents who were violent. Let's not minimize any of that. If you've been through some trauma or if you've had hurt or pain or humiliation dumped on you, that's terrible. But choosing not to forgive doesn't make it better. In fact, it makes it a whole lot worse. Forgiveness enables you to navigate pain successfully. Imagine you were mistreated and your marriage went south. Let's assume you were 100 percent in the right and that he or she was 100 percent in the wrong. That's definitely not outside the realm of possibility. You were married for, let's say, 15 years, and it's been, what, 10 years now, and you've never forgiven the other person for what they did.
So what that means is that someone who hasn't been in your life for a decade still causes you to feel angry or bitter. You're not married to them, you haven't been for a decade, but you're still taking them with you everywhere you go. How much sense does that make? An old school teacher that you didn't like, and who didn't like you, made your life a misery, was unfair, maybe even cost you something. It's probably been decades since you saw that teacher, and here you are allowing them to have a massive influence on your life all these years later. If you forgive that person, they're no longer going to be that kind of influence in your life. Not forgiving causes you to carry a burden with you everywhere you go. So, what do you do? What you do is... you choose to forgive.
Now, I know that opens up a can of worms, but let's be sure we understand what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness isn't making what that person did okay. By forgiving your sister-in-law saying horrible things about you, you're not making what she did right or acceptable. Forgiveness doesn't let someone off the hook. And it doesn't mean that you have to go back to being best friends. Sometimes it might be best not to allow a relationship to go back to what it was before whatever happened happened. The thing with not forgiving is it feels like you get some sort of satisfaction. You can feel powerless after someone mistreats you. And choosing not to forgive might feel like you have some power, as though you're punishing that person.
Listen. Your dead grandfather or your brother who moved to Costa Rica 20 years ago or that cranky basketball referee who called fouls on you in the championship game when you were in high school, none of those people are worse off because you won't forgive them. They've forgotten all about the very thing you won't let go of. No, you want to be bigger than that. Remember what Jesus said about forgiveness. "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses". If you refuse to forgive someone for what they've done to you, God won't forgive you your sins. That's how serious this is. And that's because every last person alive has sinned and is in need of forgiveness from God.
If you're willing to be forgiven by God, it's inappropriate to not extend forgiveness to someone else. Jesus taught a parable in which He spoke about a man who owed his employer a gargantuan sum of money. The boss demanded the man repay the money. There was no way he could. When the man begged for mercy, his employer just forgave the debt, the whole thing, just forgave him. Well, then our man came across someone who owed him a comparatively small sum. When that man said he couldn't pay the debt right away and begged for a reprieve, this man wouldn't have any of it and lowered the boom on him and had him punished, which obviously was grossly inappropriate and made the point that Jesus was making. But what about when you've been through something so bad that you can't possibly forgive? We'll look at that in just a moment.
You talk about forgiveness and the importance of forgiveness, and someone is thinking, "But you don't know what I've been through. How could I possibly forgive what was done to me"? Right. It might have been something very difficult. It's not so hard to forgive the person who left a little dent in your car or who borrowed something and then lost it, small stuff. But while not everything is small, everything is forgivable and should be forgiven. It's better for you that way. And it'll result in the blessing of God in your life. You'll grow through that experience, and you'll understand more of what God has done for you. Remember, Jesus died for the sins of the world. He died so you could be forgiven for the things you've done that have brought pain to the heart of God. The divine Son of God died for you.
The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 3, "Christ died for our sins". And every person alive has sinned, everyone. There's no one pure. The only pure one was Jesus, and He died for your sins. Now, there are at least two aspects to forgiveness. One is forgiving others. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love". When asked by one of His disciples how often a person should forgive, Jesus said, not seven times, as had been suggested by Peter, Jesus said, "Seventy times seven". And that's not suggesting a limit of 490 times. This was Jesus saying, "Forgive". And there's the aspect of being forgiven by God. You might struggle with this because of the way we are wired as humans.
We carry this idea with us that people deserve certain things, and it's really hard to get out from under that idea if you haven't done well or if you've done wrong or if you have a bad track record, and you feel, then, that you don't "deserve" to be forgiven. That is a self-destructive idea. God doesn't forgive you because you deserve to be forgiven. He forgives you because He is merciful and gracious and wants to free you from the burden of guilt and shame and negative feelings. God forgives those who genuinely want to be forgiven. That's what God does. The book of Psalms calls God "good, and ready to forgive". Here's the assurance you have: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness".
Now, you hear people say all the time that they have a hard time forgiving themselves for what they've done. "If only I could forgive myself," someone says. Well, no. Let me tell you this. From a biblical perspective, there's absolutely nothing that says you need to forgive yourself for something that you've done or for the life that you've lived. In fact, forgiving yourself is not possible. Who made you God? Instead of forgiving yourself, you accept God's forgiveness for what you have done. The reality is that people who talk about forgiving themselves are really talking about something else altogether. I'll give you an example. You back out of your driveway and run over your neighbor's little dog. Your neighbor loved that dog and will be heartbroken and lonely. You were in a hurry. You didn't look behind the car.
You, you just backed out, and there was little Fido, who's now dead. Mrs. Jones next door tells you it's all okay, she knows it was an accident, Fido shouldn't have been off his leash anyway, and she insists you should not worry. You hear that, you understand that, but as the days go by you still feel terrible about the whole thing, and you think that what you're wrestling with is that you can't figure out how to forgive yourself for what you've done. But that's not accurate. You're not trying to forgive yourself for what you've done; you're trying to work out how to live with the knowledge that you did this unfortunate thing and that now poor Mrs. Jones is without her little friend. You say something horrible to someone. You've been friends for years.
Again, you're trying to work out how to live with that awful thing that you've done. You cheat on your spouse; your marriage falls apart. A ton of lives are turned upside down because of your poor judgment. And what you're trying to do is work out how to live with what you've done. You can't possibly forgive yourself, so there's no point even trying to do so. What you do is accept the forgiveness God offers you. Even after being forgiven, you'll feel terrible about what you've done, and you probably should. But you trust that God has forgiven you, and you accept that forgiveness. That terrible feeling will get better with time. Any forgiveness you could offer yourself wouldn't be worth anything anyway.
Forget all about trying to forgive yourself. Trust in the forgiveness that God gives you. And forgiveness often isn't easy. The truth is if someone has harmed you or harmed someone in your family, might be that you have to forgive again and again. You might wrestle with feelings of anger and bitterness, and, and that wouldn't be at all surprising. But you continue to surrender those feelings to God, and you know that in time God will change your heart completely. In Louis Zamperini's case it happened almost instantaneously. In the lives of many others, it works differently.
In 2010 a teenage driver's moment of carelessness behind the wheel resulted in the death of a 4-year-old boy. News outlets reported that when the local community reacted angrily toward the driver, the little boy's parents chose compassion over anger and forgave the young man. The father of the young child whose life was taken said that the decisions he and his wife made were also about helping their own recovery. He asked this question: "How do you move forward if you are consumed by hatred and anger"? Regarding the anger that the community expressed, the father said, "What did that anger serve"? Peter denied Jesus, and Jesus forgave him. As Jesus was being crucified, He prayed to His Father, and He said, "Father, forgive them". If you'll open your heart up to Jesus, He'll give you the ability to forgive. And as you do, you'll develop the character of Jesus. You'll bless your own life, and you'll bless the lives of others.
Now, to help you in this journey, I've put together a resource, wrote it myself, with you in mind. I want you to have it. It's called "Forgiveness". You read this little resource, you will learn how to forgive, and you'll learn how to experience the blessing of forgiveness in your life. Here's what you do to get it. Call right now: 800-253-3000. Now, if the line is busy, call back later. Call any time: 800-253-3000. Or you can go online; visit us at iiwoffer.com. Let me pray with you now.
Our Father in heaven, we thank You that You've given us the blessing of forgiveness. You forgive us for our sins, those sins that fastened Your Son Jesus to an old rugged cross. And we are grateful for that forgiveness. We don't deserve it. Now, there are people who have wronged us, and maybe we feel like they don't deserve forgiveness, but I'm praying that You will give us grace and empower each one right now to be forgiving, to practice forgiveness. And even if it doesn't feel like forgiveness has taken place, give that person the ability to make a conscious decision to forgive and know that forgiveness has happened.
Friend, can you forgive? Are you thinking of somebody right now that you should forgive? Maybe you've felt like you cannot. Now you know you can, and you must. Can you make that decision now?
Lord, take our hearts, make them Yours, we pray, and we thank You, in Jesus' name. Amen.