00:00
00:00
00:01
Transcript
1/0
lesson 11, a lesson on forbearance. So we'll get that up there. A
lesson on forbearance. Now forbearance, the dictionary
says, a command of temper, a restraint of passions. In other words,
it's about self-control. It also says the exercise of
patience, long-suffering, indulgence toward those who injure us, leniency,
delay of resentment, or punishment. These things are not always easy
to do. And as a matter of fact, let
me go back to that one. It says the exercise of patience. So it's something you have to
work at, right? I know I'm having surgery on
my knee coming up, and they give me exercises to do before the
surgery. So I'm trying to do those exercises,
and I don't like to do them. Most of the time, you go to therapy
and they say, this is what you need to do. It's really not what
you want to do. As a matter of fact, I was doing
some things to relieve the pain in my knee, and they said, that's
exactly what you don't need to do. because it's caused some
other problems with my knees, so I'm having to get that straightened
out. But forbearance has to be worked on. Leniency, what's the
other word there? Patience and delay of resentment. We have to forbear that. And I wrote this down. Liberty
is the power of doing or forbearing an action. So that gives you,
you have liberty to do that. But you have to choose to do
that. But we are free to do that as
Christians. We can forbear. We don't, just because somebody
does us wrong, we don't have to tell them off. And we have
the spirit of Christ in us to help us to not do that. So our
scriptures for this lesson, and you have them there, but in all
four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but we'll read
the scripture it gives us for Matthew in opening up. It says,
and while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and
with him a great multitude with swords and staves, for the chief
priests and elders, from the chief priests and elders of the
people. Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying,
Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same as he, hold him fast. And forthwith he came to Jesus
and said, Hail, master, and kissed him. And Jesus said unto him,
Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they and laid hands
on Jesus and took him. And behold, one of them which
were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and
struck a servant of the high priest and smoked off his ear. Then Jesus said unto him, put
up again thy sword into his place where all they that Take the
sword, shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot
now pray to my father, and he shall presently give me more
than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures
be fulfilled that thus it must be?" Of course, we know from
the other Gospels that this was Peter that did that. I found
interesting that only John named Peter. The others did not. And also, in the other Gospels, we know
from those that Jesus actually healed the soldier's ear, and
his name was Malchus. So now we'll go on. We're going
to read some of these other scriptures later. For our lesson goals, we need
to realize that Jesus loves all people. We don't have any problem
with that, do we? We don't, as Christians, That's
just accepted. We know that. If we've been saved
any length of time at all, we know Jesus loves all people.
Then comes the hard part, and so should we. He is the greatest
example of how we should behave. And we say, well, He's Jesus,
and He's in us, so we can too, right? We have that ability because
He is in us. Now, most Christians willingly
forgive people for small things, right? It's small, just don't
worry about it. And then, now, the more we perceive
ourselves as being wronged, the harder it is to forgive. I know
it's that way with me. I think it's that way with most
people. If you really think it was bad, it takes a little longer
to forgive somebody, right? especially when it comes to things
that cannot be made right. And if they do something to you
and they can't correct it, it's done, done deal, they can say
I'm sorry and they can truthfully mean that they're sorry, they
can apologize, but they can't make any retribution for it.
It becomes harder to forgive. Erica Kirk recently gave that
example of forgiving the man that killed her husband. And
that's the ultimate forgiveness, right? To forgive somebody that
kills somebody in your family. And that's what Jesus did. And she's following his example.
Now then, where you say, well, with knowing Charlie Kirk, I'm
sure she knew all the scriptures and she knew the Bible, so it
was easier for her than for me. No. It was still her husband. We had the same ability to forgive
that she had. Again, liberty is the power of
doing or forbearing an action. You have that liberty. You have
that ability to forgive. She didn't have to forgive. She
chose to forgive. Forgiveness is a choice. You
have to choose to forgive because your flesh will say, get back.
Get back at her. Something that is also hard to
forgive is that when someone continues to do something wrong
to you and they could stop at any time, but they won't. You
bring it to attention, they keep doing it. They say, I'm not gonna
do it anymore, but they do it. What are we supposed to do? Forgive
them. Gets harder, every time they
do it, it gets harder. But that's still the example, Jesus told
Peter, seven times 70. That doesn't mean 490, that means
always. You probably got people in your
family that have went past the 490, but we're still supposed
to forgive them. Don't count to 490 though. You're
saying, well, that's enough. That's all I have to do. No,
just keep, Jesus never stopped forgiving. He never stops forgiving
us. He is the example that we are to follow. And then number
two, choose to allow the Lord to have his way in our lives,
to have his way. And of course, that's what we're
doing here in Sunday school, to learn Christ's way that we
can follow him. And the outline will be the betrayal,
the battle, and the binding of the arrest of Jesus. Now then,
here we have, of course, we're studying about Peter, so we're
focusing on his part in the scriptures, and he acted impetuously. In
other words, he acted out just out of, it was just a reaction.
Didn't really think about what he was doing. It was just in
his flesh to do that. He thought that's what he needed
to do. He didn't think whether he should or not. He just did
it and he cut off the ear of the soldier. Well, have you ever
acted impetuously? I'll answer for you, you have.
All right? Say he cut off somebody's ear.
I just said you acted impetuously. You acted, reacted quickly to
something that happened and even before you finished, you realized
that you'd done wrong, because you probably didn't think about
it enough beforehand. James 19.1, 19.20 says, Wherefore, my beloved brethren,
let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. A lot of times we have that reversed,
right? Quick to speak, quick to wrath,
slow to hear. Verse 20 says, for the wrath
of man worketh not the righteousness of God. So when we're mad, we're
almost for sure not going to do the right thing. Now, we couldn't teach this in
the teen class, because they probably don't teach this in
history anymore. But in World War II, they had
a saying, loose lips sink ships. Remember that? Learned about
that? I know Eddie Smith does, because
he might have been the one that wrote that. I don't know. But, and of course it was talking
about, you know, if you know anything at all, you don't tell
it because the enemy might find it out. And so, but Proverbs
8 and 13 says, he that answers a matter before he hears it,
it is folly and shame unto him. Well, I skipped what I was gonna
say there. So that's true today. Loose lips sink ships, relationships. You say something too quick,
the person just writes you off. Think before we speak. Again,
Proverbs 18, 13. He that answereth a matter before
he hears it, it is folly and shame unto him. That's the reason
we're to listen fast, or make sure we listen. So have we ever
failed to show patience again? Yes, we have. Now here's when
it says, A man that answers a matter before he hears it, it means
to hear something intelligently. In other words, to think about
what you hear. Not, you know, you heard the
words, but you're mad, so you're not really understanding anything.
You don't care what they say. Not just that the sound waves
vibrated against your eardrum, right? You heard it if that happened,
right? That's not what it's saying. It's saying that you took time
to try to understand what's being said. We must think about what
you hear before we speak about it. A lot of times, the first
thing that comes to our mind is what we say when we really
haven't considered what we hear. And that's what Peter's doing
here. The first thing to come to his mind is to defend. When Jesus
had already asked him to let him go, Have you ever failed to follow
the words of David in Psalm 27? It says, wait on the Lord. A
lot of times we don't. We don't wait on the Lord. It's easy to instantaneously
to react to a situation. They don't require thinking,
don't require any new knowledge, you know, whatever you have in
your past, whatever thought, you just do it. But a Christ-honoring
response, rather than a fleshly reaction, is more difficult.
We have to think about what we're doing. We have to remember what
Christ would have us to do. So this is, Lesson of Peter,
again, is about forbearance. God wants us to be long-suffering,
slow to wrath, and patient. Now, all these are combined and
woven into forbearance. That's what forbearance is, that
we have these attributes in our life. And of course our example
again is Christ. Psalm 86 and 15. But thou, O
Lord, art a God full of compassion and gracious, long-suffering,
and plenteous in mercy and truth. So we have that capability. We have that attribute in us
because Christ through the Holy Spirit is in us. So we can't
say, no, I can't do that. No, you can decide not to do
that, but if you have a desire to follow Christ, you can do
that. 2 Corinthians 6 and 4 through 6, but all things are proven
ourselves as ministers of God in much patience, in afflictions,
in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments,
in tumults, in labors, in watchings, in fastings, By pureness, by
knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost,
by love and fame. So how do we get through all
those hard things to get through? Through the pureness of the knowledge
of God. And in Proverbs 16, 32, he that
is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth
his spirit than he that taketh a city. Again, we've all done
the opposite of that. Sometimes we hear somebody say
something, or we think we knew something they did, or we think
they knew something, and we'll talk to them, you knew this,
you knew that, you shouldn't have done this, you shouldn't
have done that, and we don't even take time to think, well, maybe they
didn't know it. We want to get our point across. It says, he that ruleth his spirit,
He that rules his spirit doesn't have an automatic reaction or
circumstance. If you automatically, if you
just, then you're not, you don't rule your spirit, you don't rule
your conscience. He that rules his spirit displays
an action that he has thought about and applied forbearance.
Somebody says something to you, against you, they're totally
wrong, okay, it was mean, So what we want to do, we want to
say something that is about that much meaner than what they said
to us, right? We don't want to say the worst,
right? Because we might need that later. Just as long as it's
worse. That's the way arguments are.
I mean, you don't go for the throat most of the time, you
know. You just make sure you talk what they say. But forbearance would be to think
about it and then accept accept the wrong that's been done. That's what Jesus did. Was anything
right about that day after Judas kissed him? Nothing was right. But he accepted it because it
was God's will. So number one, we have the betrayal. I'm going to read Matthew 26,
23, 25, because Jesus had already foretold what was going to happen.
So, I know that it was, I forgot to put that in there for you,
but I've already said that. Relationships. So, the betrayal. So, he had already told him in
Matthew 26, 23, 25, and I'm not going to read those verses. But it say, verse 24, the Son
of man goeth as is written of him, but woe unto that man by
whom the Son of man is betrayed. It had been good for that man
if he had not been born. Then Judas, which betrayed him,
answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou
hast said. The Judas knew it was. At this
point, he had already made the deal, right? Nobody else knew
it, but Jesus knew it, and he knew it. The betrayal of Jesus
is one of the darkest hours in the history of the world. Because
the Savior, the perfect man, was betrayed. When we hear that,
I think the only person that we
would compare Judas to, the only name, would be Hitler. Right? When you hear the word Judas,
there's nothing good comes to your mind. When you hear the
word Hitler, there's nothing good comes to your mind. Even
Adolf, probably, unless you're putting seasoning on your steak,
right? But it causes us really to just
almost to get mad just to hear the name because we know what
the name Judas, we know what Judas did. But then we have to
realize that it was God's plan. Did Judas have to? No. He didn't
have to, but he did. The fact that Jesus knew What
Judas was going to do did not cause Judas to do it. The fact
that Jesus knew you were going to be saved did not cause you
to be saved. You got two ends of the spectrum
there. Christ knew what was going to
happen. He willingly went to the cross. The scriptures had
to be fulfilled. In John 13, 27 it says that Satan
himself entered into Judas. So Satan himself entered into
Judas and so he was Satan's pawn. Just like if you're playing chess
or checkers and you move that piece, that pawn Knight, bishop,
whatever your playing chess, that checker piece has no control
over where you move it. Once Satan had entered into Judas,
he had no control, but he had already made his choice. I'm
going to skip some here that I have. So he had made his choice,
and now we're going to talk about the kiss of Judas is A, the kiss
of Judas. Now that word kiss connotes love,
tenderness, and affection. I know in some countries, that's
the way they welcome the kiss on the cheek. We don't normally
do that, unless we're real close to somebody, I hope. But Tim,
don't shake my hand. I don't need a kiss on the cheek,
right? But a hug, you know, sometimes,
but still it's someone close. We don't meet somebody the first
time and hug them or kiss them on the cheek. I know in some
countries they do, but we don't do that. But it denotes an affection,
or at least in other countries when they do it, it at least
affects, you are somebody that I feel comfortable around, right? So when that kiss is given, it's
a great devalue of what somebody, of the betrayal. I mean, they
basically, they're giving you, they're showing you, telling
you, telling everybody else around that everything is okay between
those two people. But when it's used to betray,
then it's a little more devaluing. So while the Passover meal was
still going on, Judas had stolen away and actually urged by Jesus
to do so quickly. He said, go ahead and do it.
Do what you gotta do. Of course, again, the others, they didn't
know what he was going to do. So, but the thing about Judas
was, now you're gonna have to listen to all of it. Judas was
not demon possessed. He was Satan possessed. There's demons and then there's
Satan. The Bible doesn't say that he
was full of demons or he had a demon. He was possessed by
Satan. He no longer had control of what
he did, none whatsoever. He couldn't choose but he'd already
made his choice not to follow Jesus. And that's the choice
everybody makes, not to follow. If you don't follow Jesus, you're
not going to heaven. And Judas chose not to follow
Jesus. And probably everybody in here
is familiar with the story. There comes a point, I believe,
that Satan leaves him. He leaves him alone. And what
happens? He really can't believe what
he's done. And he hangs himself. He cannot live with what he has
done. Proverbs 27, 6, Faithful are
the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. And then we'll go to B is the
kindness of Jesus. Now, we talked about how that
we don't go against somebody just because they went against
us, because they spoke against us, we don't have to speak bad
against them, or they've done something to us, we don't have
to get back at them. So now we're gonna take it actually a little
bit further. Jesus even takes that further. Jesus knew exactly why Judas
was there and he still referred to him as friend. It's really just the amazing
grace of Jesus. And although he knew one of the
most despicable, he knew what Judas was going to do, and he
still called him friend. And how could he do that? Because
how Jesus felt about Judas did not depend on how Judas felt
about Jesus. You see, when we knowingly sin,
We're really saying that we know better than Christ, or this is
okay. So Jesus still loves us just
as much when we do wrong. And the reason he can do it,
because how much he loves us does not depend on how we treat
him. Okay, I said that. Jesus loves
all sinners. They even accused him of being
a friend of sinners, and he was a friend of sinners, not in the
way that they meant it, but if he wasn't a friend of sinners,
we wouldn't be saved. Christ was love and kindness
incarnate, and we are to seek to be like him. Ephesians 1, Ephesians 4, 1 through
3. Therefore the prisoner of the
Lord beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation wherewith
you're called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering,
forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity
of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Now we're in verse three
there, endeavoring. So like forbearance, to show
forbearance, we have to endeavor. Endeavor means it's not just
a, okay, I'm going to give them a little bit of leeway. No, you're
working at it. You're digging at it. If you
knew that, I mean, if you really believed that there was a treasure
with $100,000 buried somewhere, and somebody told you where it
was, maybe they even showed you a video of them putting the money
in there, and they buried it, and you had every proof there
was that it was there. and it was right there where
they told you to dig. You would not go out there and
scrape the leaves back. I don't think it's here. No,
it's not here. You would dig. If you really believed it, you
would dig until you found that money. Well, when Christ says
that we are to give forbearance, then we have to continually,
continually show forbearance towards somebody. Colossians 3, 12 through 14,
put on therefore as the elect of God, holy and beloved, vows
of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering,
forbearing one another and forgiving one another, if any man have
a quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so also do
ye. And of all these things put on
charity, which is the bond perfectness. Christ shows us his mercy because
he loves us. So if we will love somebody else
the way that we're supposed to, then we can show them mercy. Think about how that Joseph,
when his brothers betrayed him, even his father got was not pleased
with him when he told him of the dream, one of his dreams,
and how that he was sold into slavery, then he was put into
prison, he was lied on, he was forgotten about, and then finally
he comes out of prison, he's put up second in command in Egypt,
and really he saved Egypt and most of that area from famine.
But not once did we see where Joseph got back at anybody. When
his brothers come down for Food. He didn't say, no, you remember
what you did to me? Forget you. No, he took care
of them. And that's the way we're to do. How do we, how do you treat those
that mistreat you? See, right now, we need to have
at least a thought in our mind, if I'm mistreated, I'm going
to try not to get back at somebody. I've talked to people about that
subject. And I say, I'll trade them the
way I trade them and that's it. That's me. It's not supposed
to be you. It's supposed to be Jesus. And we'll pick up there next
week with number two, the battle. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you
for this day that you've given us. We thank you for many blessings.
Lord, we thank you, Lord, for salvation. And Lord, we thank
you for your love, your forbearance of our wrongdoing, our sin, our
misgivings. Lord, help us to have that forbearance
for others. And Lord, that even before we
are done wrong, that we have in our hearts the desire to forbear. In Jesus' name we pray.
A Lesson On Forbearance
Series Life Of Peter
| Sermon ID | 928251325516998 |
| Duration | 29:09 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday School |
| Language | English |
Add a Comment
Comments
No Comments
© Copyright
2026 SermonAudio.