Worship - August 2021
All Scripture is God breathed and profitable, but you've got to love passages where God gets right down to business and tells us what we need to do and why. And when it comes to knowing what God wants me to do and why, I can always count on the Apostle Paul to tell it like it is. The book of Ephesians is full of practical instruction for the individual believer and for the church, but today I want to look briefly at the end of chapter 4 and beginning of chapter 5.
Paul instructs the church in Ephesus, "Let ALL bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with ALL malice." (Eph. 4:31, emphasis added). Sadly, in too many churches these words go unheeded, but that is not what I want to focus on today. These sins of bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander and malice are a fast growing and aggressive cancer to both the soul and the body of Christ. These sins have no place in the family of God. Instead, Paul charges us, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." (Eph. 4:32). Instead of taking offense, we are to be kind and tender hearted. And rather than allowing the root of bitterness to grow within our hearts we are to freely offer forgiveness, especially with the body of Christ.
Now, I know you may be thinking, "I can't forgive that person, you don't know what they have put me through". And you are probably right. It may very well be that I do not understand and cannot empathize with the pain that you have experienced at the hands of another person. The fact of the matter is, only on occasion have I ever truly been hurt by someone, and even then, it has rarely been that person's intention to cause me harm. Rarer still has that person been someone who was close to me, whom I loved and trusted. I don't pretend to understand the agony that you have felt, and I would not dare hold myself up as an example and say, "If I can forgive then so can you."
But I am not the standard by which you are to forgive, Christ is. And while I may not be able to empathize with your suffering, Christ can. And what we need to understand is that God has already forgiven us of infinitely greater trespasses than we could ever suffer and then be called upon to forgive. That is why Paul holds up the Thrice Holy God as our standard of forgiveness when he says, "as God in Christ forgave you." And he drives the point home in the next verses when he says, "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 sacrifice to God.” (Eph 5:1-2, emphasis added).
I do not appeal to you today as someone who has forgiven much, but as someone who has been forgiven much. I do not know what it means to forgive someone who has committed an unspeakable sin against me. I do know (in part) what it means to have been forgiven by an infinitely holy God, although I will not fully understand until I see His face. And the fact of the matter is that the one who has forgiven us has commanded us to forgive as we have been forgiven. I like to think of it this way. To be forgiven is to breathe in the life giving air of the gospel, and to forgive is to breathe the gospel back out again.