Sermon Tone Analysis

The Freedom of Forgiveness

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Today we wrapping up the River Valley Church study about purpose in the freedom that God gives us.

Just as a quick recap, we kicked this series off by looking at the source of our freedom.

Without God freedom wouldn’t even exist!

By the power of His word, He created us for freedom.

With freedom comes responsibility.

Freedom in and of itself implies the ability to choose not to be free.

Our enemy wants does not want us to be free.

The enemy wants us to be captive to sin.

The enemy constantly lies to us and tries to separate us from the source of freedom.

The following weeks we talked about ways to seek after God, gain freedom over the enemy, and create a pattern of connecting to the source.

We studied our kingdom citizenship.

Jesus said that God’s kingdom is here.

We don’t have to keep waiting for God to bring His kingdom, He sent Jesus to transfer you from Darkness to Light.

Jesus told us to seek God’s kingdom above everything else and present the king’s invitation to other’s.

Then we talked about surrender.

True freedom starts when we surrender our wants and desires to God and trust Him to be in control of our lives.

Next we talked about God’s Word.

God’s Word has the power of life.

Jesus is God’s Word.

He came down from heaven, just like the manna that the Israelites would eat in the wilderness.

In the same way, we are to partake of every word of God.

Even Jesus.

We take God’s Word and meditate on it, just like cows eat.

We chew on it, swallow it and let it sink deep within us, then we call it back up, chew on it again, and repeat the process.

After that we looked at our identity.

We like to change who we are and decide what our identity is going to be, but we learned that God is the one who created us and He defines identity and He alone get’s to determine our value.

He created us to be something unique and decided that we were worth the life of His only Son.

Then we talked about the fact that we are spiritually minded.

We know that because we look in the mirror.

In the same way that we look into a mirror to see what we physically look like, the bible is our spiritual mirror and it tells us what our spirit looks like.

We must renew our minds to what the Bible says is true about us.

Last week we talked about God’s voice.

God is always speaking to us, we just need to learn how to tune it and hear Him.

We looked at some practical advice for tuning in to God’s voice.

If I want to get better at hearing God when He speaks to me, I need to spend more time with Him.

Like a cell phone, the only way to get better at using it is to use it more.

Then I should recognize and avoid the things that get in the way of hearing Him.

Avoid areas that block signal or cause static on the line.

Next I should get better at following the lead of the Holy Spirit.

Pay attention to the prompting of the Spirit throughout the day.

It’s also vitally important to pray.

Jesus prayed regularly.

He would often go to a quiet place where He could be close to God and He would spend lots of time in prayer.

Finally, I should recognize God’s consistency.

He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

He doesn’t change His mind like I might.

I can trust what He says and verify what He is telling me by looking into His word and getting more familiar with who He is and what He might ask me to do.

As we wrap this series up, let me start by asking you a question to ponder.

What was the last thing that someone did that hurt you?

Maybe you were offended, hurt, aggravated, disappointed, or something else all together.

Maybe it wasn’t the last time that bothered you, but someone did something several years ago that you can’t even think about without getting upset.

You’ve probably all seen a story in the news about someone who lost a family member to a murderer or some other tragic event, but surprisingly the family member stands up in front of the murderer and says, “I forgive you.”

Why?

How could someone who would never see their loved one again because of that person offer them forgiveness?

I remember being hurt in a big way by someone one time and a friend of mine told me about someone they knew that went through the same thing.

He said that everything turned around for that person after he forgave the person who hurt him.

The key was that instead of just being forgiving, he told the person that hurt him that he forgave them in Jesus’ name.

It is such a simple little thing, but to me forgiving someone in Jesus’ name greatly amplifies the effect.

It forces you to think a little bit more about forgiveness.

What is forgiveness?

How does Jesus forgive?

How can I forgive like Jesus?

To understand what true forgiveness is, we must first understand the amazing gift of forgiveness that Jesus provided for us.

We know that sin is what separates us from God (Isaiah 59:2).

And that everyone has sinned and fallen short of God’s glorious standard (Romans 3:23).

But God loves us so much that He sent Jesus to pay the debt we owed to rescue us from sin so that we could be forgiven and brought back into His presence (Romans 5:8).

All we have to do is believe.

Give our lives to Him.

Confess our weakness and failure to Him and He forgives us and makes us clean (1 John 1:9).

He gives this forgiveness to us freely.

It is a priceless gift from God that Jesus paid with His life.

Forgiveness is a means by which our relationship with God is restored.

The easiest way to forgive someone else is to think about the way the Father forgave me when I didn’t deserve it.

To think about all of the ways I failed, yet He still freely restored my relationship with Him at no cost to me.

To forgive in Jesus’ name.

It is important to forgive with a heart of true forgiveness.

Sometimes we tend to think we are being forgiving when we are actually just avoiding the situation, letting ourselves be taken advantage of, or possibly even demanding something in return or expecting “conditional forgiveness.”

Let’s quickly talk about some things that forgiveness is NOT.

FORGIVENESS IS NOT...

RECONCILIATION

Forgiving someone does not mean that we have reconciled with that person.

In order to reconcile the relationship, additional things must happen between the two people.

These additional steps are:

Repentance, Restitution, & Rebuilding Trust.

That is to turn away from the wrong actions, to make things right, and then to prove it with consistent words and actions.

Reconciliation requires two people, but forgiveness only requires one.

The trap is that someone may say, “I will forgive them after they apologize.”

If you seek reconciliation you will become a hostage to the person who has wronged you.

Instead of living in the God’s freedom of forgiveness you are leaving your freedom in the hands of another person.

That is why Paul said…

FORGIVENESS IS NOT...

JUSTICE

The important thing to remember is that God’s sense of justice is better than ours.

If we live by the mantra, “It’s not fair!

If I forgive, they will just get away with it.”

we are failing to understand God’s forgiveness towards us.

Forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right, it sets us free and places justice in the hands of God.

Forgiveness is not reconciliation, it’s not justice, it’s also not...