TEXT: Luke 23:34

SUBJECT: Hard to Forgive

Forgiveness is hard.

I don’t need to prove this, do I? Everyone who has been offended or hurt knows how hard it is to forgive. Some find it so hard that they can’t even say the words, I forgive you. Others can, but they don’t mean what they say—not even when they say it. Others feel forgiving, but that’s all they do—feel it. The cry, the hug, they swear undying love, but when the feeling fades, so does the forgiveness. Others do forgive—kind of. You apologize to them and they say, I forgive you. For a time, it seems they have, but the next time you do something wrong, they bring up your past against you.

Forgiveness is hard.

Some things make it harder. For example, the nature of the offense. You forgot my call? That’s easy to forgive. You didn’t pay me back when you said you would? That’s not so easy to forgive. You punch me in the nose? That’s harder to forgive. You murder my best friend? That one’s really hard to forgive.

The number of offenses make it harder to forgive. You and I have been good friends for twenty years. All that time, you’ve been good to me. When I moved the piano, you were there to help me. When I couldn’t pay the water bill, you paid it for me. When someone slandered me, you defended me. You’ve always been there for me: you’re the best friend I ever had. But then one day you did me wrong, and that hurt. A couple of days later, though, you came by to apologize, and since then you’ve been your old self again. One offense in twenty years? Judas Iscariot could forgive that!

But what if the offenses were more common? What if you did the same thing over and over again? Every week, every day, every hour? Then it would be a much harder to forgive you. For one thing, you’re keeping the bruise tender—and never letting it heal. For another, what kind of friend are you if you’re hurting me 18 times a day? For years? It’s said, love covers a multitude of sins, but how many is too many? Seven every day? Seventy times seven?

The place an offense is committed makes it harder to forgive. My wife and I are eating dinner one night and she says, Criminy! How much ice cream are you going to eat? That hurts my feelings, of course, even if it’s true, kinder words could have been chosen. But what if she blurted out the same thing at the Love Feast? What if she yelled out from the back pew, Michael! Doris didn’t make the whole pot for you! This would be much harder to forgive, because it not only hurt my feelings, but it embarrassed me in public.

The tone of voice makes it harder to forgive. Uncomplimentary things are hard to take when said nicely. But when they’re dripping with sarcasm of yelled in rage, the offense is much bigger and the forgiveness much harder to give.

Because forgiveness is hard, we sometimes don’t grant it. Or, we do, eventually, but only after stewing for weeks or months or years. Or, maybe we’re quicker than that, but we put conditions on our forgiveness. Of course, I will forgive you, I’m a Christan, and all you’ve got to do is:

• Admit that you were totally in the wrong.

• Agree that I was perfectly in the right.

• Confess your sins to the pastor.

• Do whatever I say from now on.

The conditions make you smile, but the smile is an uneasy one. You’ve heard them before, haven’t you? Maybe coming out of your own mouth!

Because it’s hard to forgive, we excuse ourselves for not doing it. This is bad, very bad. But there’s something worse than excusing it, and it’s very common: we justify it.

If a Christian man commits adultery, he might excuse it. She was pretty, I was away from home, one thing led to another, and so on. Notice, he’s not saying what he did was right. He admits it was wrong. But, because she was pretty, he was away from home, and so on, it wasn’t as wrong as it seems. He’s excusing himself.

But what if he went farther than that? What if he said his infidelity was the right thing to do? He’s not excusing himself, he’s justifying himself.

I have never heard a Christian justify his adultery. Never. Maybe the woman he had an affair with is now his wife and he’s happier than he was with his first wife, but still, he knows what he did was wrong. The Lord has blessed him after his sin, but the sin is still sin—and the man knows it.

But when it comes to not forgiving, believers often justify themselves. Of course they believe in the concept of forgiveness, it’s the practice they don’t believe in. At least not enough to do anything about it.

That was the cry of Isaiah almost three thousand years ago. And it’s still ringing in the world…and in the Church.

I know why we don’t forgive: it’s hard! But how the forgiven can justify not forgiving, I don’t know!

God forgives sinners! If He didn’t, there would be no Christians because that what a Christian is—not a sinless man—but a sinner whom God has forgiven. The next time someone asks you what a Christian is, instead of telling him what we believe or what we do, tell him what we are: forgiven by God!

Looked at in one way, it must be easy for God to forgive us. After all, the punch I throw at Him misses! The blasphemies I yell at Him cannot be heard over the Heavenly choir singing His praises!

But the poke you take at me lands right on the kisser! And the wicked things you say about me hurt me personally, and hurt my reputation because others are sure to believe you.

Of course an Infinite, Eternal, and Almighty God can forgive the puny things we do against Him.

But what if this infinite, eternal, and Almighty God were a Man? And what if He were a sensitive Man? And what if people did all kinds of bad things against Him? Could He forgive them?

We don’t have to guess. The Infinite, Eternal, and Almighty God became a sensitive Man and everyone ganged up on Him. That’s where the verse finds Him.

Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do, was spoken by God Himself. He spoke the words after He became a Man. And He spoke them while hanging from the cross.

Forgiving the men who crucified Him was not easy for our Lord. In fact, it was the hardest forgiveness ever granted by man or God.

Go back over the list the sermon began with. Think of the things that make forgiving doubly hard. First, we have the nature of the sin. What were the men doing to Him when He forgave them? Were they poking fun at Him? Were they criticizing Him? Were they excluding Him? No, they were crucifying Him.

I haven’t been crucified, but I suppose it’s far worse than people saying unkind things behind your back! I imagine being nailed to a cross is more painful than being snubbed at church. This was the worst crime in the history of the world—deicide is the word for it: murdering God!

Yet the Lord forgave them for it.

Think also of the number of the offenses. The crucifixion did not just fall out of the sky. It was the climax of a long and bitter persecution of our Lord. The men who hung Him on tree first, well, let’s see: they hated Him, they slandered Him, they lied about in court, they turned the people against Him, and they tried to stone him one day and push Him off a cliff another day. They also said He did His miracles by the power of Satan, laughed at Him when He was on the cross, and after He rose from the dead, they paid off men to say His disciples stole the body, and then, later, persecuted and killed His best friends.

Who can number the sins committed against the Lord Jesus? Yet He forgave them all.

The place of their sins made them worse. The enemies of Christ did not pull Him aside privately to correct Him. No, they ridiculed Him in public! And they hung on a high cross for everyone to gape on and laugh at!

The tone of voice was not courteous and honeyed, but rude and harsh. On the morning of His crucifixion, the whole nation yelled at the top of their lungs: Crucify Him…Let His blood be upon us and upon our children…Crucify Him!

Add to the list one other thing, a thing no one can else can say: He was innocent, perfectly innocent. When families fight, there’s usually blame to go around. Maybe the man started it, but his wife did not respond well and made it worse. Or, maybe his ugly and hateful criticism had some truth in it. Maybe she really is that way. That doesn’t excuse what he said—ugly and hateful words are always wrong. But, to some extent, she brought it on herself.

But our Lord did not. He was hated without a cause. Nothing they said against Him true—not even partly true—not a grain of truth in all the charges!

Yet, even though He was hated without a cause, He forgave the ones who hated Him. And not years later, after they made up with Him, but when their hate was at its high tide!

This means it was harder for our Lord to forgive the ones who did Him wrong than it is for us to forgive those who hurt us.

This is not an obvious truth. Until you think about it. What do you have to do to forgive me? Or your wife or your kids or your worst enemy? All you’ve got to do is…swallow your pride.

But Jesus Christ had to die. He didn’t swallow pride that day, He swallowed His own blood to forgive sinners!

If He gave up His life to forgive His enemies, can’t we give up our pride to forgive our enemies? Especially if they’re not enemies at all, but friends who messed up?

How did the Lord bring Himself to forgive sinners? Much could be said here: He did it from a sense of duty—God commands men to forgive their enemies and the Lord obeys His Father. That’s one. Another is His great love: He loved sinners, whatever they did. Like a Hosea who loved a straying wife, the Lord loves His people, no matter how often they break His heart.

We need to remember these things, but they’re not at the heart of our verse. It doesn’t say, Father forgive them because I know you want me to pray this way. Or, Father forgive them because I love them. No, it says something quite different,

That’s pretty generous, isn’t it? What, Caiaphas, Annas, Pontius Pilate, Judas, and the others didn’t know they were doing wrong?

It doesn’t say that. They knew they were sinning, but they didn’t know the magnitude of their sin. Paul agrees: If the rulers of this world had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Why didn’t they know the greatness of their sin? And what put them up to it? In a word, Satan. The devil and his angels got the rulers of Israel and Rome to crucify the Son of God. They didn’t force them to—if they had, the men would have been innocent—and they weren’t.

But the demons obscured their vision, confused their thought, held down their consciences, and unleashed the worst in them. That’s why they did it.

This is important in forgiving others. When people sin against you, they are responsible! But it’s not only they who are to blame. Satan is at work in the world, fooling people, hardening them, weakening their graces, stirring up their lusts, and so on.

Thus the people who hurt you are not only sinners, but also victims—victims of the malice and cunning of hell. If you believe this, you won’t be so quick to take offense and so slow in forgiving it.

Forgiveness is not like caviar—a nice thing to have, but you can get by without it. No, it’s more like air: you live on it or you don’t live at all. You live on forgiveness—the forgiveness bought and paid for by the blood of Christ.

But if you live on it yourself, how can you deny it to others? How can you inhale forgiveness and breathe out grudges? If the words of our Lord scare, they were meant to. Except for the 23^rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer is the best known passage in the Bible. But the words that come right after it are not so well known. After praying, And forgive us our debts, the Lord says,

We all believe in forgiveness. Within reason. But the Lord tells us forgive beyond reason! Seven times a day is reasonable! Peter thought it was, at least, but the Lord says, no! It’s seventy times seven!

But can you be really sorry for your sins if you keep on committing them. If you were really sorry, you’d quit them. That’s what people say. But think about it: when you confess your sins to the Lord don’t the same ones keep popping up?

I confess my sins every day—several times a day when I’m right with the Lord. But I never confess my drunkenness. Do you know why? Because that’s not my sin. I confess my real sins—four or five of them most days. Not four or five sins committed in a day—I’m far worse than that! But the same four or five a hundred times a day, every day.

I’m not alone. We’re all bent, but we’re not bent in the same direction: some this way, some that. And the crookedness we have in our character will be there until we die or the Lord comes for us. One man will have to struggle with pride his whole life; for another it’s lust; for a third, the love of money; for another it’s laziness.

What if the Lord forgave your particular sin seven times? You’d have run out of forgiveness a long time ago! But He doesn’t forgive each sin seven times, but seventy times seven every day! All your Christian life.

Christians are forgiven. And we need to forgive.

Is there someone you need to forgive? Whether he has apologized or not, whether he’s worthy of it or not—is there someone you need to forgive?

If there is, why don’t you forgive him? And why not now? Time is short and life is uncertain. The only time you have to forgive others is now. They won’t live forever, and when they’re dead, you can’t forgive them! And you’re dying too. Will you go to God carrying a grudge? If you do, He might be holding on to one too: against you. And if He does that, you’re sunk.

Gulp down your pride and pardon the one who has done you wrong. If you can’t, or won’t, look at the cross and hear the Man on it,