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Jon Moffitt: Hi, this is Jon. Today on Theocast, Justin and I are going to solve the world’s problem – that is, we’re going to tell you what the greatest need everyone has in the world today. I know it’s a big topic, but we think it’s going to be helpful. In the member’s podcast, we have a discussion around who are the most difficult people to live with. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Stay tuned.

Today’s podcast is one that I think will resonate with many, or it definitely resonates with Justin and I, because we’re both sinners and we struggle as everyone that’s listening to this podcast with the current climate in the world.

Now that we’re talking, Justin, I would say it has been this way since Adam and Eve. Relationships have always taken a beat down when it comes to two sinners living with each other or multiple sinners in a family living with each other.

As the rhythms of life get thrown off and what we normally do is turn to our coping mechanisms. Whether it’s going to the gym, playing sports, attending gatherings, or going to a movie, we do these things to break up the rhythm of life and deal with the frailty of life. Then all of that is ripped away and people are now left with their own sin and their own struggle. What ends up happening is we become hyper-selfish and we go so introspective that we look only to what makes us feel good and what satisfies us.

What do you do? How do you get rid of this anger? Some attempt to get rid of it on other people. I’ve seen people put things on social media that I’ve never thought they would ever say. I don’t know if that’s been your experience. It surprised me that they put that out there.

Justin Perdue: You see a lot of stuff happening right now. Broadly societally, there’s a lot of tension and stress and strain on almost everybody, and it’s not that the tension and stress and strain creates something in people that wasn’t there to begin with.

These stresses and strains and tensions are opportunities and occasions for our sinful nature and the corruption of our flesh to just start doing terrible things. In particular, we start doing terrible things to other people, and that’s most often going to be the people that were closest to: our spouses and our kids.

This is a Christian podcast. We’re talking to people I presume who are probably members of churches, so this refers to people that you’re in church with that you see regularly and you’re trying to honestly live with. You start to wound and bludgeon each other in times like now, though we do it all the time anyway. But when we’re all struggling and hurting and reeling, and rhythms are disrupted, it’s like throwing gasoline on the fire.

Jon and I were talking before we hit record about different things you hear from all kinds of sources in the church and outside the church in terms of what we really need. What is the prescription that will cure what ails us? What will fix this issue? You get a thousand different answers.

I think I know what you’re going to say, but how would you respond to that in terms of what is it that we need and what is it that will actually bring some relief, hope, and light into these relational dynamics and into some of these struggles that we’re describing.

Jon Moffitt: Either you log in to the church, or for those who have been able to reopen, you walk back in o the outdoor-indoor church, and you hear a lot of pastors and ministries diagnosing that people are suffering, hurting, angry, and upset, depression levels are at an all-time high, and marital issues are at an all-time high. You and I were talking about how we’ve been trying to care and love for people who are struggling. I heard David Zahl say on his podcast this week that he knows of five couples and are very close to them, and all of them are going through a divorce. It’s very sad. I’m walking through a couple of families in my church with heartaches, disappointments, and frustrations. How do you care for these people?

What discourages me is the solutions being offered are not even band-aids; it’s like Tylenol that’s going to get you through the next two hours but when it’s over, it’s going to be worse because it has festered and you really didn’t deal with the problem.

Justin Perdue: I would even argue some of it is worse than treating the symptoms. Some of the stuff that’s suggested actually just, on the face of it, makes it worse.

Jon Moffitt: What we’re offered is self-help, and these aren’t bad or wrong. Exercise, thinking about ways to get out of the house and walk, a good reading plan, or a good book to read – those can all help bring relief. If you’re not a Christian, what other options do you have? If you’re not going to believe in Christ, your options are to try and make it work as best you can.

But what we’re here to do, as Theocast always does, is help peel back the layers and really, they look at the issue beneath the issue. Most relational issues, when it comes down to when two sinners find themselves in conflict, whether it’s in a work marital or familiar relationship, at the core of it all conflicts are the result of sin. Whether someone was inconsiderate, impatient, didn’t respond correctly, or has held on to being mistreated, all of that just festers and builds up. Then when you tell someone to pay attention to his or her spiritual disciplines, or the way in which they approach their prayer life or Bible reading, what it’s communicating is if I make myself better, I can make the situation better.

What do we end up doing? We become self-focused. When circumstances don’t work out, like your kids come in and they bug you while you’re in the midst of your Jesus time, or your wife or husband doesn’t want to get on board with your spiritual path and you’re trying to drag them along, people feel the frustration wanting the relationship to be better. They want the pressure to go away. They want result and yet there isn’t any.

We’re going to come in and point to something that is not rocket science. It is actually going to be so basic. It’s going to be hard to believe that the one thing every relationship in the world needs is this one thing. What does Scripture tell us is the number one thing we need in our relationship with God and in our relationship with other people?

Justin Perdue: The answer to that is forgiveness. We are going to talk about forgiveness and our need for absolution to have our guilt removed. Forgiveness and absolution come from God to us in a vertical sense. That has everything that works itself out horizontally in our relationships with other people.

To kick off this conversation about forgiveness, I think it’s obvious to anybody who is observant, as we look around broadly in the church and outside of the church, that there is a demand for atonement and reconciliation. There is a demand for all kinds of things in various kinds of relationships all over the place, yet we live in a culture where forgiveness and absolution are nowhere to be found.

This is a very Law kind of economy. Our listeners are familiar with us talking about Law and gospel, grace, and others like this in a Law economy. There is this constant loop of being given the Law, only for you to transgress it, then being given judgment and needing to make this right; you need to atone for it and make reparation, etc.

In that sort of an economy where there is no forgiveness and there is no absolution, it is not only a miserable place to be, but there is no way to move forward in a relationship. It can’t be done. What we aim to do today is talk a little bit about the vertical piece of the forgiveness that we need from God, but then really spend our time talking about forgiveness and absolution as we extend it to other people, how vital that is for every relationship that we have, and how the lack of both makes relating to one another miserable and impossible in a fallen world.

Jon Moffitt: This is what makes the gospel preposterous; it’s what makes it a stumbling block to the self-righteous: God says that to be forgiven, all you must do is ask. That’s the requirement. All you must do is ask to be forgiven and the Father would take all of your sins and remove them as far as the East is from the West. As Isaiah says, He throws it behind his back, and He sees them no more. It’s in the depths of the sea. That’s the requirement.

What ends up happening in a relationship is one will not offer forgiveness if one feels as if they have the upper hand. “I’m not going to offer it even if someone asks for it. Why would I ever forgive you? Because of what you have done to me, you don’t deserve forgiveness. You deserve to feel my wrath and my anger. You deserve to sit and think about all that you have done. You need to feel just how much you’ve violated and hurt me. You cannot repay. If you give me enough money, if you give me enough fame or wealth or whatever you want to give me, you cannot restore the time, emotion, and how you violated me. You do not deserve forgiveness therefore I will not give it to you.” This is how we treat people.

Then you think about the God of the universe. One of the thoughts that helped me think about my relationship with God is that God is the King of the earth; He’s the Creator, the Founder, and the Sustainer, therefore He is King. He decides how you relate to him in this King relationship, and the King relationship is you love and serve and worship Him, yet no one has ever loved and worshiped and served Him ever. They maybe tip their hat to Him but that’s not what He said; He said you are to love, worship, and obey Him. If we think about the constant way our life violates God, God has every right.

Justin Perdue: Our sins against an infinite, eternal, and holy God are so much greater in scope and scale than our sins against one another could ever be. My sin against you, Jon, is not an assault on your holiness because you don’t have any holiness. You didn’t create me, so you don’t have any claim on me the way that God does, in that He made me, He made the world, and it’s all His. He is completely good and upright and true. He is the Father of lights; there is no shadow of turning within Him at all. He is the one against whom we have sinned.

I’m looking at five verses from Psalm 32 that beautifully illustrate our posture before God and this whole forgiveness piece. David writes these words: “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven; whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,” not that there isn’t any, but that God doesn’t count it against him, “and in whose spirit there is no deceit.” He’s going to explain what he means about having no deceit, meaning you confess, and you acknowledge your sin. Verse three of Psalm 32, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; and my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” I wasn’t confessing my sin. Then he says, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my inequity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Beautiful. Blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven, whose sins are covered, and against him, the Lord does not count any iniquity. This is our great need before God, and this has everything to do with our relationship with other people.

If you’re going to be forgiven by God, what’s the requirement? It’s that you ask for it. I agree, and I might even phrase it a different way: it’s to see and feel your need of forgiveness which then would prompt you to ask for forgiveness from God. In a verse from the hymn, Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy, it goes this way, “Let not conscience make you linger, nor of fitness fondly dream,” fitness before God, “all the fitness He requires is to feel your need of Him.” The only thing I need to do in order to be fit before God and to come to Him is to feel my need of Christ and to know that Christ is the only one in whom I can find forgiveness and absolution. That’s our posture before God. We are really guilty, as the day is long, we have blown it, and God is gracious and offers forgiveness and absolution through His Son.

Jon Moffitt: The woman washing the feet of Jesus is being criticized by all of the Pharisees who Jesus is having dinner with. What does he say at the end of his story? At the end of the illustration, he says, “Those who have been forgiven much love much.” He looks at the woman and she gets it.  She understands that her posture before God is that she has nothing to offer, and she’s washing the feet of Jesus; she doesn’t care what anyone else thinks because this man was offering her something which no one else can, and that’s forgiveness – to forgive what I am in the eyes of God.

One other story I think is fascinating is in Luke 5 where they bring the paralytic man before Jesus through the roof. The man is now before Jesus and everyone’s watching him. In the beginning, Luke records that Jesus has the power to heal. What does Jesus say to the man? “Your sins are forgiven.” The whole room erupts: “Who gives you the authority to do that?” Jesus says, “If I have the power to heal, it means I also have the power to forgive sins.” The point of it was what this man needed was not healing; what this man needed was forgiveness. Every single Pharisee sitting in that room needed forgiveness; they needed it, but they couldn’t see that Jesus is the one who could offer it.

In most relationships, it’s easy to hold something over the other person when you feel as if they are beneath you because of what they have either done to someone else or what they have done to you. What the Law does is it absolutely flattens everyone. It comes down, takes everybody’s spiritual hierarchy, and crushes it flat.

Justin Perdue: Nobody has the high ground that’s right.

Jon Moffitt: When you’re standing next to another sinner and you say, “Look, my head is above you,” and then you walk over to the Lord and realize His holiness and righteousness, and the way in which you have violated your fellow sinner is a speck of dust compared to the mountain that you have a violated God.

This is where we must begin. Most people struggle with bitterness, anger, and an unwillingness to forgive because they don’t understand the forgiveness that was needed between the only relationship that matters in the universe, which is between you and a holy God.

Justin Perdue: The question could be asked: what is it that fuels, drives, and motivates our forgiveness of one another? The fact that I’m called to forgive my brothers and sisters. That’s fine that I’m commanded to do it, but what is it that will drive me, fuel me, and motivate me in that? Forgiving people who have really sinned against me, forgiving people who have wounded me and hurt me; it’s been painful and hard, but I’m going to forgive them – what’s going to help and drive me to do that? It is the forgiveness of God in Christ Jesus. How gracious, how merciful, how patient has Christ been with me? That helps me be merciful, gracious, and patient, and it helps me forgive my brother or sister, my friend, my coworker, my spouse, or whoever it is when he or she sins against me. That’s just a great reminder to us in the church that in dealing with one another and in bearing with one another, we remember how God in Christ has forgiven us, and how merciful and patient Jesus has been with us.

Then we also remember other things that we talk about on the regular about how we all have struggles and battles that we didn’t sign up for. That’s as true for other people as it is for us. In thinking about forgiving others, we are so prone to withhold forgiveness. Like you were talking about that a minute ago, Jon, how we have all these criteria that we impose upon other people and we have this list of demands that are in our minds and hearts: if you do these things, if you jump through these hoops, if you demonstrate an adequate amount of this, or if you do enough of that, then okay, maybe I’ll forgive you. That is not a godly posture. That is not a humble posture. That is not what we are called to in Christ Jesus.

You were talking about Luke 5, and Luke 17 is also helpful when it comes to some of these things that we’re discussing. The first few verses of Luke 17 goes, “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Temptations to sins are sure to come but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.” But then these words in verses three and four of Luke 17, “Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

It’s astonishing words. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him – full stop. If he sins against you seven times – and seven is the number of completion and perfection, Jesus doesn’t literally mean seven times – if he sins against you a bunch of times in the day, and each time he turns saying, “I repent,” you must forgive him. This is controversial. That’s like the grenade is on the table, Jesus pulls the pin, walks out of the room, and it blows up.

In thinking about forgiveness, we talk about what we need to evaluate. We evaluate the sincerity of somebody’s repentance: is there enough fruit of repentance here for us to really forgive the transgression? Have they done enough? But Christ blows that up. If your brother or sister looks to you and says, “I’m repenting, forgive me,” you must forgive each other. We would do so well to remember this in our marriages. We would do so well to remember this in our parenting. We would do so well to remember this in the church. If your brother or sister sins against you and asks to be forgiven, you forgive him or her. It’s the only way to move forward.

Jon Moffitt: There’s a really strong statement that often can be hard to digest. When Jesus says in Matthew 6, right under the prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses.

It should knock you back a moment to think, “God doesn’t take this lightly.” This is a weighty situation, and it is so because of the comparison. He’s saying, “How dare you not offer forgiveness after being forgiven so much?” No human in the history of the world will ever offer the level of forgiveness that a sinner has received from God. It cannot happen because you cannot be violated in the way in which God has been violated. I know it’s really hard for a simple mind to wrap our heads around that because there have been people who have been hurt and violated in ways that are almost unspeakable. I can’t even mention them on the podcast because it would be potentially offensive to children or families that are listening to this. I understand that. I have counseled people who said, “But Jon, you don’t understand the years and years of suffering that I’ve gone through,” and I don’t disagree. I don’t disagree with them at all that it’s horrendous and it’s horrible and it should never happen.

It creates anger in me. There are times that I have physically wanted to hurt the person who violated them, that I have wanted to show retribution and justice upon those people. I feel all of that, yet you have to understand that God has felt that so much so that He created a place called hell. God has felt that so much so about you, that it said He crushed His Son. Instead of taking His anger out on you, He took it out on His Son as your substitute, and God says, “If I have forgiven you and the violation that you have caused Me, you too can forgive.” The thing is, sometimes we hear this and it comes to us in an angry voice. I don’t think this is the case. I think it’s as a Father who has this child on His knee and He’s loving them and gently whispering into their ear and saying, “I love you. I have given you so much. I have set you free from the bondage that is called bitterness and an unwillingness to forgive. I’ve set you free from that. In turn, you can be set free from the bondage you have of what this person has done to you. You can be set free from it.”

Justin Perdue: If you were to ask the average person in a church in our American context what the key distinguishing marks of a Christian are, the distinguishing marks about a Christian is that he or she doesn’t do A, B or C or X, Y, or Z. Maybe in certain circles you might get certain other marks of faithfulness in terms of things that people are doing. But oftentimes missing from that list is I think the number one thing according to our Savior, and that is our love for one another.

I think you could also add in there, to make a strong argument for a distinguishing mark of a Christian, is that he or she is ready and eager to extend forgiveness to people who have wronged them. It’s our love for each other and our eagerness and willingness to forgive. This is like the language of Paul: we pray and we work for the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. We’re eager to seek reconciliation. One of the things that we tell people all the time in our membership classes at our church is that if they decide to come to CBC and become a member, one thing we can promise you is that you will be offended by somebody, somebody will wrong you, somebody will say something, and somebody will do something that will offend you in the end. That’s not a question. How do we deal with those things you were talking about in Matthew 6 and Matthew 18?

Jesus tells another parable that definitely has a little bit of sauce on it: the parable of the unforgiving servant. Many will be familiar with that parable where there’s a servant who has a large debt to his master. He pleads with the master to forgive the debt that he owes and the master does; the master forgives his debt.

There’s that kind of absolution like your debt or your guilt is taken away and you’re forgiven. But then that servant who has had this massive debt forgiven goes out into the streets and encounters someone who owes him, by comparison, a very small amount of money. The servant’s debtor says, “Could you please forgive me my debt?” and the unforgiving servant does not. He demands every penny and threatens to throw the debtor into prison – and that’s what ends up happening. The master hears about it and then chastises that unforgiving servant and says to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?” And then the master ends up throwing this unforgiving servant in jail. Jesus says, “So also when my heavenly Father will deal with every one of you if you don’t forgive your brother.”

We will talk a lot in the church about faithfulness and obedience. There are a lot of sermons preached with a real, exacting, threatening tone, but oftentimes the things that are talked about most seriously do not love for one another and they’re not forgiveness, but yet Jesus talks in very strong terms about these things. We need to take seriously this call to love and forgiveness, and to mercy. We should be merciful with one another. Not only is that just a critical thing with respect to our understanding of God’s forgiveness toward us, but also it matters in every conceivable way in our relationships. At a pragmatic level, if we want our relationships to be able to function in a fallen world, there has to be mercy and forgiveness because we’re all sinners and we wrong each other.

We were talking a lot about marriage before we hit record, and I’m thinking about my own marriage. The things that have been most helpful to my wife and me are the tones of grace, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness that God is working in building in our home. Without it, I can’t conceive of how this would work.

Jon Moffitt: With my personality, my wife’s personality, and how much we clash, if it wasn’t for the forgiveness of God towards me and softened my heart, I’m not sure what our marriage would look like.

Justin Perdue: I completely echo what you’re saying.

Jon Moffitt: All three of us hosts have talked about the struggle of marriage. Sometimes people think that a pastor’s home is like sterile white.

Justin Perdue: That we’re somehow exempt from this,

Jon Moffitt: Right. That we don’t have disagreements and arguments, or that we don’t disappoint our wives and our wives don’t disappoint us. I live in constant disappointment and my wife lives in constant disappointment, but what gets us through the day? What gets us through the day is that we understand we’re both sinners in need of God’s grace, and we must extend grace. This is Ephesians 4:32. It says, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.” As we look at the forgiveness we’ve received from God, it should cause us to be kind, tender, and patient because God has been kind. It literally says that the kindness of God is meant – and this is Romans 3 – to lead to repentance. When we see how kind God has been, he says in turn, you need to do the same.

I do want to say a couple of things because I know that there are many who will be listening to this who are struggling with forgiveness. I need to clarify that in Scripture, the Bible does not collapse trust and restoration with forgiveness. Don’t confuse those. To forgive someone means that you will no longer hold over his or her head how they have violated you, and you’re going to set them free there from their guilt.

However, let’s say a pastor goes against his calling and violates it in any way, shape or form – like dishonesty, or stealing, the church can offer him forgiveness and should and not hold him guilty for that sin but that does not mean that they should trust him still. Restore him to a level of ministry again.

I would say this is true in a relationship. Unfortunately because of sin, some marital relationships have been abusive verbally or physically. In order for the one who had been abused to get past that, they need to offer forgiveness and not hold that guilt over them. But that does not mean that they need to restore that relationship because it may not be the safest to do that. Forgiveness never means trust. I’ve had to say this in relationships before with people.  I have said, “I have forgiven you, but I do not trust you. For the sake of my family, we’re going to need to keep a distance until there the level of trust can possibly be restored.”

Justin Perdue: Not only does forgiveness not mean that trust is completely restored, forgiveness does not mean that everything will look the way it looked before the sin was committed. That just has to be clarified. You can forgive someone and decide that the best thing for both of us in a fallen world, before the resurrection, is that our relationship looks different than it used to. That’s an important clarification to make and I’m glad that you brought that up, Jon. That is something that we deal with all the time in counseling and in pastoring people. At the same time, circling back to our major theme of the day, there is hardly ever a time, in particular when there’s relational conflict and most often in the church, most pointedly occurs within marriages. There is never a situation in which I’ve been counseling a couple when I don’t walk out of the room thinking a couple of things: this would be so much better, one, if they were each more mindful of their own sin than they were the sin of their spouse, and two, if there was a genuine, sincere ability to extend forgiveness to one another. If we want to talk about it from a functional, pragmatic perspective, if there is no forgiveness extended then you cannot move forward. You will forever be stuck in a quagmire of bitterness, resentment, animosity, and vitriol – this will be your life if you are unable to forgive.

You’re sitting there and you’re thinking, “I’m hurting. I’m been wounded. I’m indignant. What happened to me was wrong.” We say, we hear you and we understand that. What’s the motivation? Why would you ever forgive? Consider Christ and his mercy to you and how much he has forgiven you. That is what will be the driver and the motivator for you to forgive other people who have really wronged you.

Jon Moffitt: Holding onto the bitterness… I’m trying to think who said this phrase, but I’ll think of it in a moment: “Drinking poison and hoping that it will affect the person that you hate is insane.” That’s what bitterness is -it’s to think that if I drink this, it’s going to hurt them. We think holding on to something is going to hurt them. We think, “That person has hurt me so I’m going to be angry, bitter, and mean towards them. That’s all I’m going to repay them.” But it can never cause the damage that they’ve caused to you unless you end up doing the exact same thing to them that they did to you. That is an absolutely horrible way to live because you’re in constant bondage. How many movies are out there about someone wanting to take revenge and then once they have it, they’re empty? Now there’s a double weight of guilt. They feel guilty for holding onto the bitterness, they feel guilty for acting out in retribution, and they still don’t feel any sense of right. It’s still all wrong.

The only way to have that sense of right is to be set free from the burden of holding that over someone. This is Scripture. This is why there’s so much that’s commanded as far as forgiveness because it’s the only way to be set free from that bondage that you have.

And it is bondage. I’ve seen people who live in immense depression, and the way that they cope with this is like an addiction; they’re addicted and they’re holding onto this bitterness. The moment you can be set free from that, because of the forgiveness you have received, you actually can move on. If you’ve gone through years and years of holding on to this, realize that you’ve already tried this and it doesn’t work. The one solution that God does give you, which is to forgive, actually does work and you will have full restoration when you get into the new heavens and the new earth with a new body. But until then we have to only receive that which we have now, which is forgiveness.

Justin Perdue: Amen. I want to frontload what I’m about to read. I don’t want to be misunderstood. To pursue justice is a good thing, and so we should avail ourselves of the means that we have in the world, whether that’s societally speaking or something else to pursue justice. That’s true. But when it comes to how we relate to one another, we have to be honest and just aware enough to realize that there are going to be a million little, and sometimes more significant, ways that we will be wronged, and that there is no systematic way to pursue justice with respect to them.

To your point, if we live our entire lives thinking that I am going to avenge myself against all these people who have hurt me, first of all, it’s slavery and bondage and second, it will produce nothing good. God tells us to do something altogether different. In Romans 12:18-19, Paul exhorts us, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'” It is. We have to trust God in so many of these things. To be content to say, “I’ve been wronged here. There really is not a lot of recourse that I have. And even if I were to pursue it, what good is going to come of it? I’m going to forgive this person and I’m going to trust God. I’m going to trust Him. I’m going to cast my burdens and anxieties upon Him. I’m going to pray to Him and talk to Him about how I’ve been wounded. I’m going to trust Him in His character that He will make this right and that justice will roll from heaven. That either Christ will have atoned for this or this person will bear this inequity forever. I will let God sort this out and in as much as it depends upon me, I will forgive and I will live peaceably with others.” That’s what we’re called to as Christians.

Jon Moffitt: We’re going to move over to the members’ podcast. In there, one of the things that’s going to come up is that we don’t want you to be confused and thinking that once you forgive someone, then all is well, all is set free, there are no scars, and you’ll be happy. It doesn’t work like that. Forgiving someone once… you may say to that person verbally, “I forgive you,” but you may need to learn how to forgive him or her every single day. What does that look like? How do we do that? We’ll talk about that in the members’ podcast.

For those of you that are new, first of all, thank you for listening. We hope this was encouraging to you.

The way in which we support our ministry and to continue to produce resources is through our support membership. We have people who support us monthly, and we like to try and give them some extra material for supporting us. So you can go over to our website, theocast.org and look at our membership. There are different ways in which you can support us, and that helps continue to spread the gospel of rest around the world. Thank you for your support. Members, we’ll see you over there. See you all next week.

Members Transcript
Members Podcast