NBC Pastoral Letter August 2010

In the past couple of months I’ve been reading and listening to RT Kendall on forgiveness. In his book Total Forgiveness he suggests several reasons for forgiving, as well as ways of knowing that you have forgiven someone.

I think this is really important teaching for the church to take on board, so I would highly recommend buying the book and reading it for yourself, but my first sermon after the summer break will focus in on the story of Joseph and his brothers and the need for total forgiveness.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to forgive other people, whether they have hurt us deliberately or unintentionally, is that God the Father has forgiven us. God knows all the things that we have ever done, said or thought – each thing that has hurt him, and that the Bible calls sin. But in his great mercy, God does not punish us, he lets us off the hook. He gives us forgiveness because Jesus died on the cross. So God tells us to forgive others to the same measure that he has forgiven us – totally.

One of the signs that we have forgiven someone totally is that we don’t tell anyone about what the other person has done for us. It is so tempting when someone has hurt to let everybody know how much we have been hurt. But this is not God’s standard of total forgiveness. Now, it may be that we need to tell one other person, whom we know will not tell anyone else, for therapeutic reasons. it may be that the person has done something which is a crime, and we need to give evidence against them in court. Apart from that, we should keep silent. And that doesn’t mean we say “so-and-so has hurt me terribly, but I can’t tell you what they’ve done.” That’s almost worse than spilling the beans completely.

In his letter, James writes about the dangers of talking too much. “Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of one's life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” (James 3.5-6) A stark warning to us.

There is much more that RT says in his book, and I shall share a bit more of it in September. Maybe you could use any quiet moments that August provides to reflect on people that have hurt you in the past, and whether you have totally forgiven them. We cannot do this in our own strength, but only in the strength that God provides.

God bless,

Nik