Married Like Jesus -- Forgiveness

It is great to see half of all of your faces. My name is James Sutton. I'm the Associate Pastor here. Our Senior Pastor, Jeff Bradford, is away with his wife celebrating his ten years of service at our church. Whoop whoop. I was actually the chairman of the pulpit committee that called Jeff ten years ago. And looking back, it's been such a blessing to see how God has used him in our church. I just want to encourage you. This would be a great week to send him a little text or an email—an encouragement, something that you remember about his time here that has blessed you. I think that would be a real encouragement to him.

We are continuing our sermon series titled Married Like Jesus. It's a very kind of interesting title. It's a little awkward, honestly, coming to Ephesians with that kind of presumption because of course we understand that a lot of you aren't married, right? So what we mean by that, I want to talk about that just for a moment before we dive into our text.

Jeff talked about this at the beginning of the series, but it bears repeating. One of the highlights of the pandemic for me was that things had opened up enough when it was my stepmom's seventieth birthday, that we got to go and actually celebrate with her. And I was like, what do I get my stepmother who kind of has everything that she needs at this point? And I decided to go creative. I found a website where you could upload thousands of photos and also one photo, and it would take all of those photos and blend them into that one photo into a mosaic, right? So I got my sister and said, send me all of your pictures of your family, your kids. We took a ton of pictures and we all uploaded them and we gave her this beautiful picture of her built out of all of us. It was a great gift. It really landed.

The Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ

The reason I tell you about that is because this section of Ephesians begins by talking about the body of Christ. And we're moving towards a section—I'm going to spoil the end, okay? Sorry about this. Ephesians has been around for a couple thousand years, so if you don't know this, you should have. The end where we're going talks about the bride of Christ. It moves from the body of Christ to the bride of Christ.

I want to talk just for a moment about the purpose of both of those things. It's a mosaic, right? The body of Christ—the purpose of the body of Christ is to bring all these different people together under the head of our Lord and Savior Jesus. And we as the church—that's the body, right? We're the church. We represent him in the world. We are the physical manifestation of Christ in the world. We're the mosaic. And when people look at us, they're meant to see Jesus.

And then at the end, when we get to Ephesians five, what it talks about is the bride of Christ. That marriage really is a representation of this beautiful union of the church with the groom, Jesus. So all of us who are married, right—our marriage is meant to be a mosaic. It's meant to be a picture of Christ.

Now, it's easy to think of those as two very separate things, and I think they are separate analogies to point us to what we are called to be. But I want to press on you that these concepts are related and are pointing to the same spiritual reality. Here's the connection. When we do weddings, we talk about two being brought together in one flesh, right? The two become one. They become one body. So when we talk about the body of Christ, we're talking about us as the bride, right? Because we become one with the groom. Do you see the relationship?

And so when we're going through this series and we're talking about all these things that in Ephesians we're called to do—yes, they apply to our marriages, those of us who are married—but it applies to all of us because all of us are married. All of us are a part of the body.

Single people, I just want to encourage you. Some of you have mentioned that this has made you feel a little left out. I don't want you to feel left out because we are a part of the same body. We are unified. We're part of the same mosaic. And I would say to you just pastorally, this church would be far worse without you.

As a married person who knows all of the problems of being a married person and the drawbacks, there's so many blessings to being in community and relationship and being one with a group of single people. I just want to say, this series is for you and we're grateful you're here.

With all that said, let's now look at Ephesians chapter four verses 32 through five two. This is God's word to us.

Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God. — Ephesians 4:32–5:2

Let's pray. Lord God, we pray that you would enliven our hearts with your word, that you would help us to see Christ. That we would be transformed by that encounter, that we would not just encounter concepts this morning. We would encounter our risen Lord. Lord, meet with us in this time. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

I have three points for this morning and I'm about to go on sabbatical. So that means I'm tired—I'm a tired pastor. So there's no alliteration, no clever kinds of things with these three points. I'm taking them straight from the text.

Three things that we, as dearly loved children, are called to model our behavior after—we're modeling it after our Father and our older brother. We're called to do three things: We're going to talk about being kind and compassionate or tender hearted. We're going to talk about the call to forgive. And we're going to talk about walking in love. Straight from the text. Very lazy on my part, but we like God's word.

Kindness Versus Niceness

Notice that we are not called to be kind and compassionate or tender hearted because we know how to do that. We're called to do that following God's example of how he forgave us in Christ. I want to distinguish for us kindness versus niceness. We always do this in this church, and it's always important because we are in the context of the South, and oftentimes we confuse the two.

There's nothing wrong with being nice. Being nice isn't bad. But we're not called to being nice. We're called to be much more. There's a distinction between kindness and niceness. Niceness is just being pleasant. You can have all kinds of reasons for being pleasant. In fact, it's kind of a neutral statement to say something is nice morally. Which is why you can apply that term to things like, that is a nice shirt, or these are nice chairs. You can apply that to things, but you can't say these are kind chairs or kind shirts without feeling awkward because there's no moral directive with regard to niceness. You can be pleasant for all sorts of reasons and be called nice.

But being kind takes into consideration the other person. There's a direct benevolent concern towards being kind. Tenderheartedness or compassion, similarly, is different than just being nice. If you are compassionate or tender hearted, it means you actually care.

In the South, we do a lot of blessing of hearts, don't we? We like to feign that we care. I'll be honest with you, and I hesitate to even say this because oftentimes I'm in conversations with members in this church and you're going to start to wonder now because I'm about to confess sin to you. You're going to wonder if I'm sinning when I'm talking to you because in the South it's often very hard to tell if somebody is actually compassionate or if they're just faking it. And as a pastor, I often feel like I have to fake it. There are sometimes when I'm in conversations and people are talking and I really don't care. Am I allowed to say that? I hope so, because the reality is that's true of all of us. Have you ever been in a conversation like that? Have you ever feigned compassion? Well, that's not what we're called to do. We're called to actually care. And the example of that we're given is Christ Jesus.

He's the one that teaches us compassion, tenderheartedness, and kindness, and he teaches us in three dimensions. I want to highlight these three dimensions for us because I think we tend to focus on two of them but not the third one.

First of all, he teaches us, right? Jesus came and had a lot to say about kindness and compassion and how we should do that. He talks about that as he talks about his kindness and compassion for us. So he talks about the Father's care. When he's talking to Nicodemus, he doesn't say God wanted to pretend like he loved the world. He says:

For God so loved the world... — John 3:16

He so loved. There's a clear message from Christ that God actually cares about you. This example that we're called to follow—it's not just that God pretended or God was nice or God thought, "I want to present well to the universe." He actually cares. Over and over again, that's Jesus' message. He taught us that. It was in his lessons over and over again.

But he went further. There's another dimension to how he displayed this to us. It's also displayed in his work. For God so loved the world that what? He gave his only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Paul puts it this way:

If he gave up his only Son for us, how will he not also give us all things? — Romans 8:32

We look at the work of Christ and we see the depth of how much God actually cares. It wasn't just lip service. Jesus didn't just show up and say, "Yeah, God loves you." He showed us.

Do you see that? He showed us, and some of us need to spend some more time thinking about that. We need to think about the teachings of Christ. We need to think about how he showed us that. But my sense in this church is we think a lot about that. We do. If you haven't, you need to spend some more time thinking about that. You need to spend some time meditating on the gospel, the work of Christ done for you, and what that displays about how much God loves you and what kindness and compassion truly is.

Some of you are so disconnected from that reality, that teaching, and that display of affection that you have in your mind a God who is not kind and not compassionate. And that's gonna make it really difficult to emulate the kind and compassionate God of Scripture. So it's important to spend some time meditating on the teachings of Christ. It's important to spend some time meditating on the work of Christ.

The Third Dimension

But there's a third dimension. My son recently has a friend who has an Oculus. Do you know what that is? It's a 3D headset that goes over your eyes and essentially inputs you into a whole another world. We were real hesitant to get him this as good parents because all good parents should be hesitant about anything that's a screen. But he begged us, he begged us, he begged us. It was his birthday. He saved up money. He paid for half of it. He got one. And I put that thing on and I'll tell you what, it's amazing. You get so lost in it. You have to, when you set it up, it invites you to kind of see the room and you kind of trace an outline of where things are so that it'll warn you because when you're in the other world, you just get lost and you'll start bumping into things.

This third dimension—I want to tell you—is like putting on that headset. It's not just the teachings of Christ, not just the work of Christ, but the person of Christ. A year ago, before the world ended, Paul Deschamps and I traveled to Pennsylvania where we went to a conference, and we got to spend some nighttime with a guy named Paul Miller who has a ministry called See Jesus. It's kind of a Bible study really. It's called the person of Jesus, where it goes through the Gospels and just invites you to look at who Jesus is. It's not real insightful, honestly. It's not the kind of thing that Presbyterians like because we like to get into the deep theological ground of Scripture. We want some new idea that just blows our mind. All this is is walking through the Gospels and making observations about who Jesus is.

And the point isn't that you be able to articulate who Jesus is. The point is you develop a relationship with him. Over time, you start to see the kindness and compassion of our Savior through the numerous times that he interacts with people. During our time in Pennsylvania, Paul's son came up and shared about using the See Jesus Ministry in their youth group. He talked about how he'd been through it, as his dad's son who wrote the curriculum. He'd been through it like something like 13 times. You'd think he'd be bored with that.

Some of us, that's how we feel about our faith. We're kind of bored with it. I've read the gospels. I've read Mark. I've read Matthew. I've read all of this. But that's not the point. He mentioned that his thirteenth time going through it, he got to a moment with some kids in his youth group, and they were going through the passion week of Christ. And he just broke down into tears because suddenly, he felt like instead of just a story, a Bible story that he was meant to memorize, he was hearing the story about how his friend was killed.

Some of us need to spend some time with Jesus, especially this year, especially this year because it's been so hard. And often times, I feel like we've been so busy and the last thing that we have done is run to our savior and spend time with him, gazing upon his eyes, learning about his compassion and kindness because it's there. It's there. And when you read it, it starts to become a part of your landscape. That relationship becomes real. You need a guardian. It's almost like you're living in another world. You're living in a world where there's a God of the universe who loves you so much and created the universe out of a great expression of love and invites you into it.

There's a lot of people in this church who are like, what the heck is he talking about? I would love to invite you to learn more about that. And I would say this: a lot of times we talk about as Presbyterians the difficulty of moving things from our head or our hands to our hearts. I'm convinced that spending time with the person of Jesus, whether through prayer or through scripture, is a part of how we do that.

So I encourage you, just as a point of application, if we're going to be kind and compassionate, we need to gaze upon the one who defines what that is for us. If you're going to do that in your marriage, we need to do that. If we're going to do that in the body of Christ, we need to do that. It's orienting our stories and all of our narratives into that mosaic of who Christ is.

Forgiveness

Second point: forgiveness. I want to spend some time just defining forgiveness. So we're supposed to be kind and tenderhearted, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you.

Forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you. — Ephesians 4:32

Forgiveness, similar to kindness and tenderheartedness, bears a little defining. I'll tell you how I often think about forgiveness: I confuse forgiveness and forbearance. The Bible calls us to forbearance, but forbearance is not forgiveness. They're different concepts.

Forbearance is where somebody does something wrong and it's minor enough, and you're just kind of like, I'm going to be patient with it, I'm going to leave that there, and we'll—I'm not going to hold that against them, but I'm not going to engage them. That's forbearance, and we're called to do that. That's important. But forgiveness is much more involved. Forgiveness is the concept of going and canceling a debt. That's what you're giving in forgiveness. You're giving the cancellation of a debt.

And the reason that that's important is that anytime there is sin, there is always cost. Think about a car accident. Let's say I ran into your car. Whether accidentally or on purpose, it doesn't matter. I run into your car, there's damage, right? There's a financial cost. And we say, okay, well that's okay. I have insurance, I'll pay you for that. There's no need for you to forgive me because I'm paying you. Except there's certain parts of a car accident and the cost of that that I could never repay you for. Anybody that's been in a car accident knows that.

All the money is great. The rental car is great. The kind insurance agent who's trying to prevent you from suing them, also great. But it doesn't make up for all the time at the mechanic, the potential medical issues that you might have if you're in a car accident, the doctors that you have to see, perhaps the emotional wear and tear of all of this ordeal. There's no paying that back.

At St. David's, when we would illustrate this for little kids, we'd get big tubes of toothpaste and then a bowl and we'd invite little kids down. We'd say, "Hey, come on down. Guess what you get to do? You get to squeeze all the toothpaste out into this bowl." And the kids love that. My kids really love that. They do it for no reason in their bathroom. I go in there and it's just plastered everywhere. But then we say, "Okay, now put the toothpaste back in." And they can't do it. That's the reality of sin—that it causes a cost that you can't repay.

And so we need to forgive, just as Christ needed to. God needed to forgive us. He couldn't just ignore our sin because he's a just God. He couldn't just wipe it away without actually paying the cost. That's why the cross was necessary. So there's always a cost.

We need to get into the three-dimensional reality of the forgiveness that we have in Christ. So we need to do the same thing that we did with kindness and tenderheartedness, but we also need to do that with forgiveness. We need to spend time thinking about the teaching of Christ, the work of Christ, and the person of Christ with regard to our forgiveness.

Three Key Aspects of Forgiveness

Forgiveness involves repentance. There is a very real sense in which repentance is important for forgiveness because if somebody doesn't recognize that they're owed a debt, it's really hard to forgive them.

In preparing for this sermon series, I listened to a resource that I really highly recommend to you. Doctor John Cox has a podcast called Good Enough Living. There's a section on forgiveness within his marriage talk, and one of the things he says is a conversation he had with one of his seminary professors, R.C. Sproul. He said, "I was talking to R.C. Sproul and I said, 'Hey, is forgiveness dependent upon repentance?' And R.C. Sproul apparently said to him, 'I don't know, but all I can say is even God doesn't forgive the unrepentant sinner.'"

We often think we can just forgive without engaging on the topic of repentance. But that makes things really difficult. It's our southern way of avoiding conflict—avoiding actually having to go to a person and say, "Hey, you've wronged me," acknowledging the reality of the cost.

Forgiveness leads to a declaration. We dumb down language like nobody else. Americans, we dumb it down. I was thinking about this with greetings. It used to be when people would greet each other, there would be this long, flowing introduction, or at least a very simple blessing like "peace be with you." We take an English phrase, "hello," which is just like "there you are," and that's too long for us. We've shortened it down to two letters: "hi."

We don't use our language to the extent that we could. Wouldn't it be great if we actually started blessing each other when we greet or when we leave, as we used to do? And wouldn't it be great if when we're exchanging in this act of forgiveness, we would start to use some of that language?

What we do is we say, "I'm sorry," and then we say, "No problem," which denies the reality of the cost. I'll tell you—this is the painful truth—in the Sutton household, other than those times when I'm faking compassion, we tell our kids to use that language. But Katie and I, we do "I'm sorry, no worries." There's something beautiful about actually engaging in the declaration because it acknowledges the cost. It points us to the forgiveness that we have in Christ and the storehouse that we have there.

We need to start using the language. Forgiveness is a declaration. Listen to this from our assurance of pardon. Here's God's way of saying "I forgive you." He doesn't just say "no worries." He doesn't deny the cost of it.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him. As far as the East is from the West, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

You understand—these are not my words. These are God's words to you this morning. He doesn't just say "no worries, no problem." He uses beautiful language to describe how far he goes to pay the cost and issue your forgiveness.

We need to start using that language if we're going to represent him in this world, either through our marriages or through being the body of Christ. We need to stop pretending like there are no offenses. We need to go to our brother or our sister, as Matthew 18 says, and we need to say, "Hey, there's a problem here. There's a cost. This is painful." We need to call them out on that and then we need to go through the process of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a process. Oftentimes we think of that declaration and we think, "Okay, I'm supposed to forgive," which we dumb down to just mean "I'm supposed to say no worries or ignore the problem," which is not what it's called to do. But forgiveness is a process. It's a very long process. Forbearance is shorter.

Unless the person keeps doing it and then you're forbearing for a long period of time. But forgiveness is a very slow and deliberate process. Think about your forgiveness in Christ. Why didn't God just snap His fingers after the garden and say, "All right, it's done"? You realize that the process of forgiveness in many ways is the narrative of all of Scripture. And it took a long time.

Some of us get into our marriages and then there's some sort of problem, or in the body of Christ there's some sort of problem, and we're like, "Well, that person's problem is they just need to forgive me and get over it. That needs to be done with." Would you say that to God? When Jesus shows up to the disciples and he shows them his wounds, would you go to Jesus and say, "Hey Jesus, come on, heal those suckers. Let's move on. It's over"? No.

The process of actually revealing the pain reveals also the beauty of his love, and that process of forgiveness is slow and deliberate and important. We need to stop acting like it's easy and quick and that it doesn't matter to us because we're so super spiritual or something like that. If we're going to forgive as God forgave us in Christ, we need to allow that to be a deliberate process.

The Five-Step Process for Debriefing an Argument

On that point, in this series we're giving lots of different resources to point out ways in which you can apply these principles in your marriage and in your relationships within the body. There's a great resource from the Gottman Institute on the process for debriefing an argument. It's kind of a five-step process, and I want to walk through it with you. I'd say this bears some kind of thinking through. So if you find this helpful at all, I'd be glad to run off copies of how they actually go through this for you after the service or email them to you if you email me.

Before you begin the process though, Jeff talked last week about time outs, about getting your head right before you start talking about things that are painful in your relationships. That's really important here because oftentimes we get heated and we can lean towards bitterness. We're angry, and so we come to this process of kind of coming to grips with our sin against each other and sorting that out, and we're bitter. I've got my side and I'm going to push that, and that's all I'm going to push. So you need that time out. You need that time, that headspace before you come to this process. You need to fight against bitterness.

Recently, my wife and I had an argument and we had a cooling-off period. I came downstairs and I was fearful that she would be down just stewing, ready to go and pounce on me. And I got down there and you know what she did? She had her Bible open. It was incredibly reassuring to me because I was like, "Oh, she's been talking to my Savior. I know he's not pushing for bitterness." That's a great thing to do when you're calming down.

But then once you've done that, you come to this process where you start working through it. And here's practically how you do that.

Step one: You share how you felt in the argument. It's very important because there was a cost, right? There was an emotional cost to you in that argument. That's what we're getting at. You want to actually share, "Hey, here's what it felt like to be me. Here was the cost." And you need to let the other person do that too. So you take turns. You share how you felt, but here's the trick—you don't say why. Not yet. We'll get to that. You don't say why because if you jump to the why, really it becomes all about them and telling them what this is, and then you can kind of spin back into the argument. So you just talk about you for now. Step one: this is how I felt. This was the cost of this for me.

Step two: You start getting into subjective reality and validation. You take turns describing what you saw and how that impacted what you felt. The goal is understanding the other person's perspective. Because here's the thing—in arguments, anytime we're emotionally compromised, there are voices. There are voices that tell us things that are not true. We have a subjective reality where we see things, perhaps, and it's skewed. It's not necessarily the right perspective. And so this is an opportunity to kind of sort that out. To say, "Hey, here's what I saw and here's how it made me feel. Is that right?"

And if you're listening, your job is to validate what you hear that is correct. You're validating what you hear that is correct. You're trying not so much to correct things as much as to understand where the other person is coming from. Do you see how that's kind and compassionate in the wake of an argument? It's tenderhearted.

Now, why is being kind and compassionate really important before you get to forgiveness?

Scripture says God's kindness leads us to repentance. That's what you're doing here—laying the foundation for repentance. You're showing that I'm positively disposed to you as my Savior has been positively disposed to me. Once you get there, you get into the triggers of the argument. This is step three: triggers. Share what escalated things for you. Explain why it was a trigger. Help them understand what was the pain and how that connected to who you are. And then validate anything that makes sense.

Step four is where we get to forgiveness. Having listened to the other person, you now take responsibility for what you can own that was wrong. You're trying to identify things that happened that you did that was wrong, and you're going to come to them and you're not going to say, "I'm sorry, class." What are we going to say? "Please forgive me. I've sinned against you. I was wrong."

At that point, the other person has the opportunity to extend that forgiveness and say, "I forgive you"—in whatever flowery language they want to use. And I encourage flowery language.

Finally, step five: you begin talking about constructive plans. What is one thing the other person can do to make things better? How do we change going forward in order to prevent hurt again?

This is a great five-step process, but I want to tell you—five-step processes are always oversimplifications of biblical truth. This stuff is hard and it's more difficult than getting a spreadsheet and kind of going through the motions.

Walking in Love

Which brings me to our last point, and I'm concluding with this: we're called to walk in love. We're called to walk in love as dearly loved children. We've experienced God's love, and we're called to walk in it. There's an identity component to this and there's also an active component. We understand who we are as dearly loved children. We see His example and we follow it. We walk in love.

Every time I do a wedding, somehow I always figure out a way to sneak this in. I always want to talk about the definition of love because often at weddings we are swept up in the romantic ideals of our culture—the beautiful wedding, this grand emotion that will last forever. That's what presses in on us at weddings. I always want to make a point of saying: at a Christian wedding, we define love biblically.

How do we define love? The Bible defines it for us in Christ:

This is how we know what love is: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. — Romans 5:8

It's undeserved sacrifice. Love isn't this feeling. You're not called to skip through the world like you're skipping through a prairie full of flowers with this bubbly aspect. That's not what Paul's saying here. He's saying you should be looking to sacrifice for those who don't deserve it. That's what forgiveness is, by the way.

But here's the problem: we hate doing that. When we think about our relationships—whether in marriage or in the body of Christ—we have this question that presses in from the world. And this is what I always say at weddings: when the world presses in on you and asks, "What am I getting out of this marriage?" you scream back into the void, "I get to love my spouse." Because that's the call of the married couple—sacrificial love. It's not what I'm getting, but that I get to pour out love. I get to show the love of Christ to someone else. And the same thing in the body: "What am I getting out of this church?" No. You get to love those in the church.

Our problem often is we want to make it all about us. I should issue this disclaimer—I'm talking about normatively. Obviously there are times when you need to ask those questions about your relationships. I'm thinking about extreme cases of abuse. Those things are important. I can't talk about those this morning, but those are real and those are a thing. But normatively, when our posture towards other people is as Christ's posture is towards us—this sense of "I'm walking in a way that it's a privilege to get to love others the way Christ has loved me"—then the end of this passage where it talks about Jesus being a fragrant offering, a beautiful aroma to the Lord, that's what we become. As we're woven together in this mosaic, there's a fourth dimension. A fourth dimension. I'm not just talking about the sense of smell, although that's an interesting thing to think about—like, smell like Christ when we start walking in love.

When we go beyond the five step process and actually feel the things that we are called to feel, our hearts are transformed and we become the body of Christ. We become his pride. And that's what that fourth dimension is—Christ doesn't only teach us by being affectionately kind and tender hearted and forgiving us, but he starts issuing that kindness and compassion and forgiveness through us. We're in the game.

So, CTK, that's my prayer: that this morning you would be so lost in the love of our God through our Savior Jesus Christ that it would become your reality. That you would become truly part of the body of Christ, witnessing him to a lost world.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, we confess that in various ways we are prone to becoming disconnected from who you are and what you have displayed to us in terms of your love and kindness to us. Lord, reconnect us as we head to the Lord's supper. Lord, help us not to be an exercise of checking boxes of five step programs, but Lord, may we actually see you as our friend, as someone who is here with us, relating to us. Lord, meet with us and transform us. Lord, use us to display your wonder to a watching world. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.