If you have your Bibles or electronic devices, we're going to be in the book of Colossians. This lecture will be a little shorter. The next one will be a little longer. This lecture will be a little more serious. The next lecture will be a little less serious. And we're going to look at What the Bible says about forgiveness, we'll apply it to marriage. And obviously, forgiveness, we want to forgive our spouses, but we'll also think about forgiving your brother-in-law or something like that, and maybe not forgiving him, and how that affects negatively your own marriage, things like that. Yeah, forgiveness is a wonderful concept. And we want to sort of push that concept deep into your heart. We'll see the rationale that Paul is going to use, and other Bible writers, of why you should be a forgiving person. Now, this text in Colossians, I'm a seminary professor, so as opposed to more normal pastor jobs, I don't do as many weddings as the normal pastor would do. And so each wedding that I've done, which has not been that many, I remember them well. And one of the ways I do it is I ask the person, the couple, do you have a favorite verse? first section of scripture to read, and then, depending on what it is, I'll make the little homily, the little short sermon, so to speak, at a wedding, based off the text that they give me, assuming it makes some sense to a marriage text. And one of my In fact, this woman calls me Uncle Bob. Very, very, very good family friends. And she got married and asked me to marry her. And so, Jessica, what text do you and Phil might want me to have a homily from and read at your wedding? As she said, Colossians 3, 12 through 17. Colossians 3, 12 through 17. And so, and you're gonna see this is a wonderful text. She chose it for the little love statement that you'll see in there. We are gonna spend most of our time at the end of 13. Let me read this text. So it's gonna be Colossians 3, 12 through 17. We're gonna look at the end of 13, primarily. Listen to the written word of God. Put on then, he's speaking a clothing metaphor, put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one is a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. And above all these things, put on love. And you could see the young bride liking that statement there. And above all these things, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you, richly teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thanksgivings in all your hearts to God. And whatever you do, In word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. And let us pray. Heavenly Father, have this wonderful text that we forgive others as you forgave us, seared into our hearts and minds, that we may glorify you in all that we do. I pray this in Christ's name, amen. Paul happens to be using this clothing metaphor. You're connected to Christ, you put on Christ, and aspects of the clothing metaphor are those a variety of items. that he mentioned. To use another metaphor, if you go to the previous two verses, go to 9 and 10, so chapter 3, 9 and 10, he uses another kind of metaphor. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self or old man kind of mechanical translation, you put off the old man because we were born in sin connected to Adam. Adam is the old man and his sinful implications. You come to Christ, you put off the old man, the old Adam, and you put on the second Adam, you put on Christ. So verse 10, end of 9, put off the old man or old self with its practices and you've now put on the new self or the new man. which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of its creator. So Paul is saying, you're new, you're changed, a changed person, a Christ-oriented person, a person that has the Holy Spirit specially living in them, that they should be changed. And he goes through from 12 to 17. If you happen to count them up, there's 12 pieces of clothing, or 12 items, or 12 commands that you are to be like. And 11 of the 12, they aren't actually all the normal ones he usually gives in a list, because all of them relate to interrelations. And in context, it's interrelations in the church. And we're going to apply it to primarily marriage. But interrelations. So 11 of the 12 are all about attributes that relate to each other, like one of them is humility. You can be humble in and of your own self and what you think about yourself, but he's thinking of how does humility aid unity or connections in the church, and you could see the logic to that. The more humble you are, the better the church gets along, something to that effect. The only of the 12, the 11 are explicitly connecting. The only one that's not is the final one in verse 17, about whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. And it's sort of an overarching statement about everything. So let us quickly work through the passage in just a few minutes, and then we'll come back to the verse 13. So let's look at 12 through 14. I'll reread these. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord is forgiving you, so you also must forgive. And above all these things, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And of course, these are wonderful words there. Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another, forgiving one another, and then above everything, put on love. And you could see that if you have those character traits, you're going to interact well with others. And it's just stating the obvious there. And again, we'll come back to the forgiveness comment a little later. Quickly, let's run on to 15 and 16. And let the peace of Christ, the peace that comes from Christ, rule in your hearts. to which indeed you were called in one body." And he's again connecting. See, let Christ rule in your one body. And he's using how in the church we would all interact together. And then he says, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. So the Bible and words of Christ. Teaching and admonishing one another. One reason to know the Bible. One of the main reasons is to affect you. But another reason to know the Bible is to interact with others and talk to them about the Bible. So let the word of Christ dwell richly in you, teaching and embonishing one another in all wisdom. We'll talk about wisdom in the next lecture. And here, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, which we just did. And they were based on the Bible. So this was a good thing to do. With, again, thankfulness. He says, thankfulness several times in your hearts to God. And then, verse 17, whatever you do, in word and deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks, thanks again, to God the Father. him. And of course this number 17 is this big gigantic overarching statement of which the other 11 items would be a subset of. And in the Reformed and Presbyterian traditions we're good at talking about verse 17 as the Westminster Shorter Catechism question 1. What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. So this big overarching, whatever you do, Do it for God and everything else is a subset of that. Okay, so there's the passage 12 things to do if you're a Christian Because Christ has changed you you're different in 12 ways 11 of them inner happen to be things that you interact with each other and now let's look at verse 13 the second half of 13 and we'll spend some time on that and in the second half of 13, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. This is actually, of all these pieces of clothing, it's the only one that he gives a logic of why you should do it. The other ones he just says, ah, you're connected to Christ, you should have patience, meekness, love. This one he gives a logic, a theological logic. Why should you be forgiving? because the Lord forgave you. And the fact that he gives a logic makes your mind come more to these verses about forgiveness. And that kind of comment, forgive because the Lord has forgiven you, is a whole bunch of places in the Bible, amazing number of them. And maybe the most famous is the Lord's Prayer. Forgive us our debts. And in context, he doesn't mean money debts, sin debts, so hence trespasses, some people say, but forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Because of our connection to Christ and what he has done for us, that's a motivation for us to forgive others and what they've done to us. So this phrase, this concept all over the Bible, that we're to forgive as the Lord has forgiven us. And Paul's kind of pressing on here, as the Lord has forgiven us, the amazement of what Christ did for us on the cross, and other things he did, results in our forgiveness. And that should be so close to our hearts and minds, you'd think Christians, and they reasonably are, would be a forgiving people. If someone just asks you, what's Christianity about, or what's Jesus, and sometimes they'll say, well, Jesus died for my sins. That's a very good answer, often in the Bible. Okay, that's forgiveness. So a lot of people, even those that are not sophisticated about what Christianity is about, they know this line, Jesus, what did he do? He died for my sins. That's very, very important. That is one of the center aspects of Christianity. Now, if one of the center aspects of Christianity that even non-Christians know, should that not be an attribute that we would have often. If the center of Christianity, and there are several things in the center, it's hard to get an exact dot, but toward the center, part of the center of Christianity, as Christ died for us, how silly if a Christian is not forgiving. If one of the things that you love about God is He forgave you, He's a forgiving God, Wouldn't you want to pattern your life to be forgiving to others? Or say it another way, if you love that Christ forgave you and you're not forgiving to others, you are very unthankful to God and what He has done, because God has asked you to do this. Of course, it's due to sin that we are not forgiving to others. I think we all logically understand that. And Jesus had a parable, if you want to turn over there, over to Matthew 18, sometimes called the unforgiving servant. And it's going to make the... And I'm at chapter 18, 21. I'll start at 21 and read this parable. Some parables, most parables at the surface level, Everyone sort of understands what's going on at the surface level, but sometimes the deep level, what was the point, sometimes is a little tricky. This one's not tricky. At the surface level, the deep level, it's pretty straightforward. So 18, I'll start at 21. Here's the introduction to the parable. Peter came up to him, Jesus, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times, Jesus said to him, I do not say seven times, but 70 times seven. And now he's going to tell a parable, Jesus. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents, and that's an amazing amount of money. And since he could not pay, a master ordered him to be sold with his wife and his children, all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees imploring him, saying to the king, don't do that, don't do that. Here's what he says, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything. Out of the pity for him the master of that servant released him and forgave his debts So the so they've got the king and the king is going to be the God character the servant says the king says you've You owe me money pay up have patience with me have mercy on me. Okay, he has mercy on him and lets him go Now verse 28 But when that same servant went out, okay, now the servant's away from the king and he's interacting with his subservants. When that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him 100 denarii, much less money. And seizing him, he began to choke him saying, pay what you owe. So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, exact same words, have patience with me and I will pay you. He refused. went out and put him in prison until he should pay the debt." In other words, so his family would pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed. They went out and reported to their master all that had taken place. So the king forgave servant number one. Servant number one goes out, interacts with servant number two, doesn't forgive servant number two. The rest of the servants see this, they run back to the king and When his fellow servants saw that what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, they went and reported to their master all had been taken place. Then the master summoned him and said to him, you wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you? In an anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt. And now Jesus comes out of the parable and speaks directly, verse 35. So also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. Because the logic's not difficult. Christ forgave us, we should forgive each other. something in theology called communicable attributes. Attributes are characters and aspects of God. Certain ones, communicable, it's an old complicated word, but means if God was like X, he wants us, communicate, he wants us to be like X. Now we can't be like X in the exact same way that God is. God is loving, we're supposed to be loving. God worked six days, rested one, worked to work six days, rest one. God was forgiving, He asks us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to pattern ourselves after him and to be forgiving. Therefore, although hard to do, but logically obvious, Christians should have a willing to forgive and quick to forgive attitude about ourselves. Willing to forgive, quick to forgive. We want to pattern ourselves after God. Well, the main thing God did was forgive us our sins. Should we not want to? have a willing-to-forgive, quick-to-forgive kind of attitude. Again, back to our text in Colossians, again, at the end of 13. If one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. Okay, so we talked about God related to us, now thinking about forgiving each other. Again, in context, it's talking about inner church relation, and we'll make some obvious applications to Christian marriage, and by implication to others outside of our marriage, like a brother-in-law, so forth, so on. Now, by the logic of the verse, openly denying that you're not going to forgive someone is virtually denying that the Lord forgave you. If you're just gonna say, I am not forgiving that person, that's a dangerous thing to say. Due to sin, we do these things. But I hope you're not there. You need to openly say, I'm gonna forgive them. We'll have some complications here in a minute. Now, of course, there are situations where what the person has done is so heinous, we have a concept we call, even if you forgive them, assuming they repent, some are so heinous. They need some kind of formal repentance and what we call temporal consequences. Even if they're forgiven, there still can be temporal consequences, temporal meaning in this life, as opposed to eternal consequences. And this is a standard in all types of theology, Roman Catholic, so forth, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, temporal consequences to certain sins. And let me give an example. Assume you're the treasurer of either Grace Prez or First Prez, and I assume, hope that there's a treasurer here. No, okay, good. And assume the treasurer steals money. They're caught or were not caught, but at some point, even if they're caught, they repent. They truly repent. Okay? In your heart, you forgive them. At many levels you forgive, the church forgives them, individuals forgive them, but they may have some temporal consequences. Like, you're not going to be treasurer for the next 10 years at least. You know, there's going to be some temporal, they're truly forgiven, but you can have temporal consequences. And I'm speaking of very serious kind of situations. Or think of your child punishment. You know, Johnny walks up to Sally and just punches her in the face. You know, you're two kids. Well, Johnny say you're sorry to Sally, okay, and maybe the kid seems truly repentant, but you still may have some temporal consequences. you know, no Xbox for the next several days. So the concept of temporal consequences can match with forgiveness. But again, these are in pretty serious situations, you know, which don't come up that often in life. Now, I don't know, maybe among a husband and wife and say the husband has a gambling problem you know maybe he will take upon himself a temporal consequence I will never go to Las Vegas you know ever even if it's a business meeting or something but in any event okay even in these serious consequences say it's a serious consequence Say something like your brother-in-law did. And I don't have a brother-in-law, so I keep using ones that I don't have. I have a sister. Oh, I do have a brother-in-law, excuse me. My sister-in-law, I don't have a sister-in-law. Maybe she's done something pretty bad and she needs to repent. Okay, she hasn't repented, but you still should have a willing to forgive and quick to forgive attitude when she does repent. If it's, again, a very, very serious kind of situation. And yes, there are difficult family tensions in life. Think of not, say, your own marriage, but just outside, like your brother-in-law, sister-in-law, parents, things at work. Again, say your sister-in-law has done something fairly heinous. you know, your lack of forgiveness or willing to forgive attitude, you know, slowly is gonna eat away at you. And then, as we talked about yesterday, these outward circumstances can, at some level, start affecting your marriage, makes you less happy, hence your spouse is less happy, hence your house is less happy. The Lord forgave you, Even if your sister-in-law hasn't repented yet, you've got to have a willing to forgive, quick to forgive kind of attitude, again, in these super serious situations. OK, what about the non-super serious? OK, we're out of the super serious ones now. Of course, most situations in our church and our families do not deserve temporal consequences or formal repentance. Hence, there should be just complete forgiveness. of the other person. I mean, that's the vast majority of cases. Complete forgiveness of the other person. Even there's petty instances where you may feel slighted or you're annoyed at what the person did or did not do. No formal repentance is required by the other person. They may not even be aware of what they did. Maybe you should repent of being annoyed by this petty thing. But still, Christ forgave you. It's part of the center of Christianity that we want to be like our God as appropriate to how he wants us to be like him. Forgive the person. Forgive the person. Again, I told yesterday my 20 years of forgetting to take out the garbage. You know, my wife just needed to forgive me. Did you forgive me, hon? She gave kind of this answer. I've been better the last 14 years, or whatever the cutoff point exactly was. Or you're at church, and Elder Smith, for the 15th time, has forgotten your name, and you're annoyed by this. Maybe the guy should know your name, but just forgive him. Don't let it bother you. I'm going to talk in the next lecture a bunch about proverbs. It'll be lighter, a little more fun proverbs discussion. There's two proverbs that have really affected me. And of course, it depends on where your starting point is, which proverbs affect you. And I'll talk about the one that affected me the most in the next one. But the second most proverb that comes to my mind in sort of my lifetime, and here it is, Proverbs 1911. It is good sense, good sense makes one slow to anger or patient, but the second half. It is to his glory, it's to the wise person's glory to overlook an offense. is it is to the wise person's glory to overlook an offense. Of course, there's certain situations you got to deal with, you know, you got to discipline. Okay, yeah, there's those, there's a serious situation. Okay, just talking 95% of the stuff in life. That's annoying to you. It is to the wise person's glory to overlook an offense. Cause that's in the situations where they're doing it to you or they don't even know they're doing it, but you know, they should have better social graces and remember your name. Okay. You know, there's like, you know, 72,000 of these little things in marriage, right? The toothpaste, uh, and all the kinds of standard, uh, um, doesn't shut the cup cupboards. Um, My wife takes my scissors and doesn't put them back in the proper location. I'm Mr. File and my desk has got everything perfectly. Can't you buy your own scissors and lose them? Why do you take the ones I need when I'm in my office? I have a home office and an away office. I forgive you, hon. Christ has forgiven you. It's to the wise person's glory. to overlook an offense. You should be quick to forgive, willing to forgive. Proceed as if the slight, you were slighted. It just didn't happen. Love Elder Smith, even though he's gonna forget your name for the next five years. So what? It's your glory to overlook an offense. Yes, the toothpaste cap may never be properly put on that toothpaste for your whole marriage, Just get over it, because Christ forgave you. Imitate Christ and forgive others. We talked about joy yesterday. In some situations, there's a joy in forgiving others, where you're the forgiving person. And sometimes they may not know about it, but some One thing that sticks out in my mind at the seminary, we rarely, rarely have a student caught cheating. This rarely happens. And the few times that it has happened, it was like this quasi gray area kind of cheating. And so several years ago, I get this phone call from one of our best students in that kind of graduating class. And he's like, Dr. Cara, he lived about three or four states away from North Carolina. I'd like to drive to Charlotte and meet with you on Saturday afternoon. It's like the middle of the week. I'm like, I need to talk to you for about an hour. Can't we do it on the phone? No. Of course. I'm simply thinking, did I offend this guy? What did I do? You know, it's all about me. Like, well, OK. So I go to the office in the middle of Saturday afternoon, and this fantastic student, who's now a pastor in ministry, doing a great job, shows up. He's with his wife. She sits in the foyer, and he comes into my office, shuts the door. and then just bursts out crying. He kind of quasi cheated on one of my Greek exams. You know, this, he's been out of the seminary five, you know, this is like seven, eight years ago. It has been eating away at him this whole time. And he feels like his degree is not valid. You know, I'm like, oh, okay, it's not about me. I did think that, which was sin. Oh, it's just about him. Good. OK, I've repented of that. Now, I had guessed there was some that might be this. In my mind, we had run through a variety of options. Knowing this guy with no way, I think he would have done something like that. Again, it's not the worst thing in the world. You know, I read a verse or two, a scripture to him, and there was a joy in just telling him, it's a dumb Greek exam. He has certainly repented. And I said, we don't need to tell anybody. Your degree stands. And he even said, well, don't I need some punishment? I said, you mean like taking another Greek exam? He said, no, I couldn't pass that. Could he do a paper on lying just to give it to me personally? I said, OK, if you want to do that. He felt super good at my having forgiven him. He probably felt better than I did, but I felt really good. There's a joy in forgiveness. There's a lot of difficulties, and they don't all work out as nicely as that, of course, but there's a joy in forgiving others. Develop that joy. You know, I don't want to say chuckle to yourself, but again, when Elder Smith, next Sunday, again forgets your name, you know, a joy in, ah, he's a great guy, okay, so what? You know, may the Lord give you grace to be forgiving, and even more grace to actually enjoy forgiving others, enjoy forgiving others. Of course, the flip side is when you've done the problem, you've created the problem, and someone forgives you, whether you know it or not, or a little more formal, there's a joy in receiving forgiveness. You know, how wonderful to be forgiven by your spouse by something when it was clear you did something wrong. And she's not sort of saying, I forgive you as a way of yelling at you. You know, I saw you do X and I forgive you for doing X. A little mixed message there, but you know, you both know you did it. You both know you shouldn't have done it. And she honestly forgives you at the core of it because Christ forgave her. or him, and secondarily because of the positive aspects of your marriage, because of your marriage vows. Another secondary reason to forgive your spouse. If one of the main aspects of the Christian faith is that God forgave us our sins, should we not be quick to forgive others? willing to forgive others. Should not Christ's forgiveness motivate us so much about forgiving our spouses, our sister-in-laws, Elder Smith at the church, your children, For many, that comes pretty easily, as annoying as your children can be sometimes. Why are we not more forgiving? And we are, Christians are pretty forgiving in the big picture, but we could always be more forgiving. It actually was on ESPN. Okay, I watch ESPN too much. explaining the situation, they're interviewing some person, he's talking about this other situation, and the person said about the other person, he said on ESPN, I'm a Christian, and I believe in second chances. Okay, that's not the best way to put it, but you'll hear that a lot. Americans believe in second chances, My mind always wonders, is that somehow related to the second chance? Again, it's not exactly right theology there, but that Christians believe we're sinners and Christ forgave us. And once that happens to us, should we not give people, so to speak, second chances? Now again, there's gotta be temporal consequences, always kind of complications to everything, but I always wonder if that's a part of I don't know enough, is that more of a part of Western cultures? I don't know. Does Russian culture have the concept of second chances? Yeah, we're getting a... But wherever it came from, there's some angle there to Christianity. Okay, if this guy on TV, who I'm assuming doesn't know that much about Christianity, can have the idea, second chances, that's what a Christian's about. Should not our marriages be marked by, you know, not seven times, but as Jesus, with hyperbole, 70 times seven, you forgive your spouse, which is a way of saying you always forgive your spouse. Christian marriages are made happier by forgiveness. Your spouse is made happier by forgiveness. And if you have a happy spouse, you will have a happy house. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the plan of salvation, realizing that in Adam we've all sinned, we all are dead in our trespasses, we all have offended a holy God. But Christ, Father and Holy Spirit put together, effected this great plan of forgiveness as we put our faith in Christ. And once given, we're forgiven. We have the Holy Spirit for us to do good works. And one of the good works, help us to do, is to match an aspect of what you've done on the cross and we should forgive others. Heavenly Father, may these two churches be marked by marriages with forgiveness and even forgiveness outside the marriage. I pray this in the name of Christ who forgave us. Amen.