Night 3. Children's Camp 25. Forgive One another.

LRA: Some Forgiveness Required. Price is right showcase. Kids will bid on what they think their showcase is worth and if they get it on the money, the get both showcases. Rig it to make one kid land right on the money. When the kid wins tell him that you aren’t going to give him those things because he wasn’t supposed to win like that and have both sit down. Interview the kid who won.

How do you feel about being treated this way?

How do you feel towards me?

Do you think you could forgive me?

What if I made it right and gave you guys your prizes?

While this is a silly example of forgiveness, we’ve all been in places and situations that aren’t silly and they aren’t easy. But more than that, odds are some of you have done something bad or wrong in this room that you needed to be forgiven of.

So I want to start tonight by asking you: How does it feel to be forgiven?

When I was a kid I told you about my dad and forgiving him. I will never forget one night as long as I live. Dad had just picked us up from Mom’s house to go to grandma’s. It was almost dark and he honked the Bronco’s horn to have us come out. When we got out there we got in the car and I still remember the way he smelled. He had been drinking more than usual and before I could say anything he pulled away and we were on the road. I was about 13 and my little sister was 10. I looked at her and told her to buckled up. As we were almost outside of town, probably 5 minutes into the 1.5 hour drive dad started swerving pretty hard and dipped the tires off the road. He over-corrected and sent the truck off the road on the over side, barely missing an oncoming car. We hit the ditch so hard that my sister slammed her head into the roof of the bronco, I hit my head on the dash and dad right into the steering wheel. Dad, tried to downplay the situation and joke about it, “Hey that car came out of nowhere.”

You’d have to know my dad at this point to realize that I couldn’t comment on what had happened. If I would have said anything about how reckless that had been or how dangerous he would gone ballistic. He always got angry when he was drunk. So I had to find another way to get out of this situation. I came up with the idea of trying to make dad feel like he was a good dad and this would be a great time to teach me how to drive. To my surprise, he went with it. And so, I got my first driving lesson sitting on a pillow, at 13, at night, driving 1.5 hours to grandma’s house, barely big enough to see over the dashboard. I remember two things during that drive. Praying that God would keep us safe and that I wouldn’t kill my sister and that I couldn’t let dad know that I was crying the whole way. I had to make it seem like I was happy to be doing this.

Stories like this and far worse make up the time from 12-18 for me and I dealt with all of that chaos by becoming very angry and very funny. I was a class clown and a world class bully in school and no one knew what was happening to me at home. I was so mad all the time and I grew from thinking of dad as my hero to never wanting to be around him.

Forgiveness can be tricky. People can let us down a million different ways. People can hurt us badly too. We can do it to others as well.

Yet, if we are going to learn how to live out Jesus love for the world to see, forgiveness has got to be apart of the recipe.

When someone has done something against us, we can choose to forgive them. We can do this because we have been shown forgiveness by God. Jesus is the face of this kind of forgiveness. His entire death on the cross was so that we could be forgiven.

So tonight, as we talk about this, we are going to be in the book of 1 John chapter 4.

1 John 4:9–12 ESV

9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

We know why God sent Jesus for us: Because God Loves us.

You see, Jesus was God's son. He was sent to a no nothing backwater town named Bethlehem. He was born to nobodies from nowhere, into a family that had no name. He was given to a young girl named Mary to raise and to a Carpenter named Joseph. They had not yet been married and this became a scandal.

They had to travel a far distance because of a census and because of that they didn't even have a room whenever Jesus was to be born. So they did the best they could and they wrapped him in clothes and lied him in a food trough for animals.

An Angel appeared to a group of shepherds and told them that the savior had been born. So they came in herald in the coming of the new king.

Right after that he had to flee into Egypt, so that jealous rulers who we're scared of his power couldn't have him killed.

But as Jesus grew up, he showed love everywhere to everyone that he met. Jesus traveled around with his disciples, teaching people about God and about helping people in need.

Oftentimes he would flip people's expectations upside down. Jesus performed miracles and healed people who were sick. he would teach people that the most important thing that we could do is love God and love each other.

Near the end of Jesus's life, he shared a meal with his disciples. That was the story that we read our first night about Jesus washing his friend's feet.

after Jesus sends disciples shared that meal together Jesus led them to a garden. He brought them there to pray.

about that time soldiers came to arrest Jesus, even though he'd never done anything wrong. The religious leaders put Jesus through a fake trial, and the crowd shouted for them to put Jesus on the cross.

Mind you, Jesus had still done nothing wrong. This is the same Jesus that they we're so excited to see, who fed them, who healed them, who taught them, and he loved them.

On the cross Jesus said it is finished and he breathed his last and he died. Jesus gave us the ultimate example of love when he died on the cross for our sins scripture tells us that sin is all of the things that we have done wrong. It's actually an old tart archery term. It means to miss the mark. So if you were shooting a bow at a bullseye and you didn't hit the bullseye, the judge would say sin.

And that is what John was talking about in the next part of his letter in verse 10.

1 John 4:9–12 ESV

10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Propitiation is a fancy word that we don’t use very often but it has big implications for us. You see, if you committed a crime you’d have to do whatever the judge said so that you could pay that debt. That would be called justice. If the judge gave you a lesser sentence we would call that mercy. But propitiation is a different thing entirely. It would be like if you committed the crime, you were caught and guilty and the judge was getting ready to give you the sentence, but instead a man from the crowd said, “I will take his punishment in his place.” Instead of you getting what you deserve, He would be getting what you deserve so you didn’t have too.

So what this passage is telling us, is that you and I can know what love is because when we didn’t really get it, Jesus showed us what real love was. He came to pay our debt for our sins before we even knew His name. He came while we were still his enemies. He came to save us when we didn’t even want to be saved. He took our place on the cross because he knew that without him, we could never be free.

You see, Jesus life and death were only the first part of the story. Jesus didn’t stay dead. Yes he died to pay the way for our sins but 3 days later he rose form the grave. Saturday night, dead man, filled grave, Sunday morning, live man, empty grave. That morning his disciples were still morning but some of the women came to the tomb to anoint Jesus body with spices. when they showed up the huge stone they had pushed over the grave, which was so big it needed a team of guys to just budge it, was rolled to the side.

She looked on not understanding what happened, thinking probably that someone had stollen Jesus body. But when she turned around there was a man standing there. Her first thought was that it was a gardener but nope. The man looked at her and called her by name and she new it then, It was Jesus!

Jesus then appeared to all of His friends over the next weeks so they would see that he’d been resurrected.

By doing this Jesus showed that not only did he have the power and authority to die for the sins of man but that by raising from the dead he showed that He had beaten death and had authority over it.

You see, Jesus died on the cross because all of us had sinned. He hadn’t, we had. All of us have done things and still do them that hurt us and others. We know what we ought to do and we mess it up. Whats more, sometimes we know what we ought to do and we intentially do the opposite. We can be so messed up and its not even that hard.

We can’t do anything to make up for it either. Even the good we try to do often gets messed up. its like trying to get the mud off of your shirt when you’re in the middle of a mud pit.

But the good news is that Jesus death on the cross made a way for all of our sins, once and for all to be paid for and paid off.

Put simply: Jesus died so that we could be forgiven.

He gave his life for you so that you would know how much he loves you.

That is called the gospel or the good news and it is the best news the world has ever had.

The Bible tells us that if we will put our full faith and trust in Jesus, we can have a relationship with God that lasts forever. Because of what Jesus did for us, we can be forever forgiven.

Think about the passage we talked about last night from Paul to the Ephesians.

Ephesians 4:32 ESV

32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

It taught us that kindness means that we have a soft heart towards the needs of others. But it takes it further. It reminds us that true loving-kindness, the kind that Jesus has for us, is a kindness that seeks to forgive others. It is the way that Jesus loves us, forgiving us of our sins. It is the way that Jesus wants us to love each other too. That we will forgive those who sin against us.

To put this simply for us tonight: If we are going to live out the Love of Jesus we are going to have to learn how to forgive others as Jesus forgives us.

Verses 11 and 12 help us see what that looks like too.

1 John 4:9–12 ESV

11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

If we will learn how to forgive like this, the people will see the love of God in us. They will see that we are different. They will see that something has changed in us.

Before we close I want to say another piece to this. He didn’t say it would be easy. Many people in this room have been hurt deeply by those that you trusted. Maybe you’ve even been the one who did the hurting. It can be hard to forgive when people have been cruel and ugly to us. I want to close tonight however by allowing you all to hear the story of a lady named Corrie. Corrie was a Christian who tried to save Jewish people during world war 2 when German’s were trying to exterminate them. She was caught and put into a prison and then a concentration camp. Concentration camps were evil and horrible places where they abused people, killed them, fed them almost nothing, and made them work so hard that they usually died from exhaustion. Corrie lost her best friend in the world in that camp, her sister Betsy. By the grace of God Corrie survived that camp and for years afterward she spoke about what she had seen there and what God had taught her about His love even in the darkest of places. But one night, at one of her speeches, she was in Germany, and at the back of the room she saw a familiar face.

I think I will let her tell you the rest of the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz9xgsDyB88&t=7s

Forgiveness is hard but it is also one of the greatest ways in which we can experience the greatness of God’s love for us and show it to those around us.

Small group Questions

What does it feel like to be forgiven?

Why do you feel like people have such a hard time with forgiveness?

Hearing Corrie Ten Boom’s story of forgiving the man who hurt her sister, what are your thoughts? Could you have forgiven the man? Why or why not?

Why do you think its such a big thing for God that His people learn to handle forgivness?

Jesus came and died on the cross to offer forgivness for our sins. How do you think this influences us as we forgive others?

Are there people in your life right now that you’ve been unable to forgive? What do you think it takes for us to forgive people like Jesus shows us?