Is my forgiveness conditional on me forgiving others?
Published: Fri, 04/11/25
Updated: Fri, 04/11/25
Sessions Include:The Good and Beautiful Community, Lesson #1 Why Study Books?My church recently transitioned to using books as curriculum in our Sunday School. The reason is simple. My life has been profoundly influenced by the reading of books. I don’t think my life has ever been changed by any curriculum piece I have ever read. Ever. I have actually surveyed a number of groups I have taught over the years, asking: Has your life ever been changed by any curriculum? The most common response is for people to laugh out loud. Our first study was the Bless book by Dave and Jon Ferguson. It is a great study on relational lifestyle evangelism. About half-way through the the study, we did a survey to help determine what we would study next. No one wanted to go back to the curriculum. Not. One. Person. The #1 choice for what to study next was a tie:
We will be studying these two books over the next year and a half or so. Here is what Amazon says about Ortberg’s book: The Me I Want to Be will help you discover spiritual vitality like never before as you learn to "live in the flow of the spirit." Why does spiritual growth seem so difficult? God's vision for your life is not just that you are saved by grace, but that you also learn to live by grace, flourishing with the Spirit flowing through you. And this book will show how God's perfect vision for you starts with a powerful promise: All those who trust in God "will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8). Pastor and best-selling author John Ortberg first helps gauge your spiritual health and measure the gap between where you are now and where God intends you to be. Then he provides detailed tasks and exercises to help you live in the flow of the Spirit, circumventing real-world barriers - pain and sorrow, temptations, self-doubt, sin - to flourish even in a dark and broken world. As you start living in the flow, you will feel:
God invites you to join him in crafting an abundant and joy-filled life. The Me I Want to Be shows you how to graciously accept his invitation. I have just completed a new, 22-week study of John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be that we will be using in my church. (I had previously done a 7-week study.) I have always thought that using books as a curriculum would be a good idea, and I have written a lot of book studies over the years. One of the things that actually using books as curriculum caused me to realize has to do with cost. By writing a study on every chapter of this book, instead of my previous study that had a lesson for every section, the cost drops to below what we were paying for curriculum. Better curriculum. Cheaper cost. Win. Win.
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It is easy to make a mistake here and assume that our forgiveness is conditioned on our ability to forgive, or that forgiveness is like a transaction: you forgive, then God will forgive you. Many people pray the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”) and conclude that our forgiveness is merited by our ability to forgive. This is yet another false narrative, and it is so deeply embedded in people that we need to take a moment to address it. Jesus is simply trying to show us the absurdity of accepting God’s forgiveness for our countless sins and yet refusing to forgive the one or two (or even a hundred) sins done against us. It is absurd for us to glory in the forgiveness God has given us and yet remain unwilling to forgive someone who has harmed us. A community who has been forgiven must become a community who forgives. God’s forgiveness toward us is unrestricted; how can our forgiveness for one another be restricted? That is his point. Turning the story into a transaction reveals the tendency we have toward legalism. My inability to forgive another is usually based on my own sense of justice. We think, It is unfair, unjust, to forgive the person who hurt me. Why? They have not earned our forgiveness. True. So then, is that how we want to be treated? Jesus is saying to us, “All right, if it is your just deserts you are after, then you can have them. If it is justice you seek, it is justice you shall get.” New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias states it this way: “Woe unto you if you try to stand on your rights;* God will then stand on his and see that his sentence is executed rigorously.” So which way do we want to be treated? By mercy or by justice? Dare we have the audacity to look to God and ask for our rights when it comes to those who have sinned against us, but ask for mercy when it comes to our own trespasses? We cannot play it both ways. Jesus’ words in the Lord’s Prayer are reminders that we need to hear repeatedly: You have been forgiven much; therefore you must forgive. It is not easy, but it is also not impossible. Once we stand firmly entrenched in the larger story of our own forgiveness, we can then forgive—a process that often takes time. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what Paul taught in his epistles. James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Formatio, 2010), 53–55. If you would like to explore this new study, it is available on Amazon, as well as part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking |
