Herbert W Armstrong

   The problem is the inability of all of us to forgive those human beings who we perceived as having hurt us in some way and perhaps rejected us over the years or mistreated us in some ways, or deprived us of something in life that we have consistently over the years viewed as our due. We thought we should have whatever it was and somebody has deprived us of it and we have a hard time forgiving them for it. It's so hard to forgive. I don't know how many people have talked to me about the difficulty they have in forgiving certain people in their life, and I know what it's like because I have also done battle with the same problem.

   It is almost impossible to forgive. Did you know that? Common urban English, but brethren without God is help and without the working of the spirit of God actively in your life, I don't think you can forgive. It's significant that Jesus Christ found it very easy to forgive, very easy. You remember, in fact, what Jesus Christ said a few hours before he died. And at that point he had already been crucified. There was spittle running down his face, and there was blood oozing from dozens of gaping wounds in his back and in his sides. He was in terrible pain. And there was a point when his thoughts began to soar loftily above all of the agony and above the pain he was experiencing and above the abject humiliation of it all, and Jesus Christ cried out at the top of his lungs in a way that I could not even begin to attempt to imitate. He said, "Father, forgive them, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That's in Luke chapter 23, verse 34 (Luke 23:34).

   You look at that example, and it is so clear, brother, in this very poignant episode towards the end of the life of Jesus Christ that forgiveness was paramount front and center in his life. It essentially flowed out of him, and you are filled with the spirit of God, it flows out of you. It flowed out of Jesus Christ. It was not a problem. It flowed out. It's also clear that most of us are light years away from that kind of forgiving, merciful, compassionate kind of attitude. It simply does not flow out from us. You have to sort of analyze how it flowed out from him. It does not flow out from us.

   You and I, and I include myself, tend to avoid the whole concept of forgiveness like the plague. I don't know how many people over the years have come and sat in front of me as a minister in my office, and oftentimes more often than not with tears running down their cheeks, and they said to me, "Mr. Catherwood, I've tried for years to forgive," and they'll mention somebody. They mention a name sometimes I know the person and they say, "but I can't. I tried. I beg God to help me to forgive, and I've agonized over this, and I can't. I want to, but I can't." Why is it so hard? Valid question, don't you think? Why is it so hard?

   I think my greatest personal trauma centered in this area centered on a rather problematic relationship that I've always had and no longer have, but that I had for many years with my father. I need to mention that my father was not a bad man. My father was basically a rather kind man. He, uh, I had never heard my father raise his voice and reproach or reprove. I was never disciplined by my father. He was not that type of person. He was a rather mild-mannered person. The problem was that my father was not there when I was a child.

   In retrospect, I've come to the conclusion that my father was probably not mature enough to begin a home and to become a father and a husband when he did. He’d been spoiled as a child, I think spoiled children tend to be late bloomers, and my father from every indication was that he was a late bloomer. He married when he was 26, but he was still not ready to come to grips with the responsibilities and the problems and needs of having a family. He didn't pay his bills as an example and so financial problems did begin to stack up in the first couple of years of my parents' marriage, and it became rather severe.

   When I was 6 months of age, the bills became absolutely astronomical, and of course the creditors began to dog him and hound him daily. They would call, they'd write letters. So one day, when I was 6 months of age, my father simply packed his suitcase and he walked out the front door of the house and took a bus and left. He simply ran off to escape the pressures and escape the creditors. It was early 1940 and that corresponds with the beginning of World War II. Within weeks he joined the Canadian Army and he was sent to England and ultimately in 1943, 1944 to France. He was gone for 5 years.

   When the war was over, that's in 1945, as I'm sure you remember, he returned home. I was then 6 years of age. I didn't know my father. My father didn't know me, but he tried to become a father for a little while. The experiment lasted exactly 6 months. Before leaving Europe, he tried to, he began to have a persistent cough, a deep hacking cough. So when we got back to Canada, they did the usual checks to find out what the problem was. 6 weeks after he returned, he was diagnosed with communicable tuberculosis, contracted they said in the trenches in France during the last year of the war. He was hospitalized at that point of communicable tuberculosis. He was released exactly 20 years later. He was released. I was 25-26 years of age. I was an ordained minister in the World Church of God. I had been married almost 3 years.

   During the 26 years of my life, I rarely ever saw my father with the exception of those, you know, 6 months when he first came back before the diagnosis had been made. Now it is strange how children perceive that kind of long-term absence. A child does not perceive what to do as a parent in a rational way. It's a kind of an emotional reaction a child has. I somehow interpreted what had occurred as rejection of me, and I began to blame my father from that point on, beginning about age 7 or 8, for the various difficulties that were part and parcel of my life growing up in that kind of circumstance.

   We lived in poverty from that point on. I remember getting, you know, crates and things of that type, little apple crates and orange crates in the back of grocery stores and supermarkets and things of that type became cupboards and tables and chairs and closets and whatnot in the tiny rooms we used to live in in the back of the grocery store in rather slummy sections of town. My mother developed emotional difficulties very quickly because of all the stress, and that necessitated her being hospitalized on many occasions for nervous problems. She had nervous and mental and emotional problems much the rest of her life. I blame my father for that.

   As a consequence, I spent a great deal of my childhood in other people's homes, relations, aunts and uncles who in general really didn't want me there. My mother and father had not had close families themselves, and my aunts and uncles simply did not want to have an 8 or a 10 or a 12-year-old nephew living in their homes, so they put up with me, but that was about all. I also had to spend some time in foster homes in which conditions were on occasion absolutely abominable. Some foster homes, I'm sure are fine, but I never found one. I remember one in which people were somewhat kind on occasion, but I have rather traumatic and rather negative memories in most of those situations.

   Anyway, you know, I blame both of my parents for all of this, but as I moved into my teens, my resentment basically focused on my father. I blamed my mother, but I felt she was a victim like I was, so I let her off the hook to a certain point. I blame my father. At ages 13, 14, and 15, I basically analyzed life as follows: If my father had paid his bills when I was a baby, he wouldn't have had to run off to escape the creditors. That's true. If he had not run off, he wouldn't have joined the Canadian Army. If he hadn't joined the army, he wouldn't have been sent to France and if he hadn't gone to France, he wouldn't have gotten tuberculosis. Maybe he had gotten tuberculosis, you see, I wouldn't have been raised in poverty, and I wouldn't have spent all those years in foster homes under difficult circumstances, to say the least.

   That's how I viewed it. I traced it back very carefully, you see, and this is the way kids do things to the initial rejection of me as a 6-month-old baby. I mean how could you run off and leave a 6-month-old baby. I began to think that when I was 10 years old, and I really began to think that when I was 14 or 15. Then I began to get mad. You see, you go through puberty, the questions changed to anger, and the chickens come home to roost as they were puberty and the hormones began to bounce and then 13, 14, 15-year-old kids can begin to think some scary things.

   I became very angry toward him, toward my mother up to a point that I would not go all the way with her toward my father primarily, and the anger and the resentment began to grow. When I was 15, I decided that I didn't want to have anything else to do with my father, and I cut myself off from him completely, even though he attempted from time to time to call or to write, I would not return his phone calls and I would not write him letters.

   I hope you can see what I had begun to do to him. I was paying him back. The Bible calls that reaction vengeance. I will come back to that and analyze that in a couple of minutes. I was paying him back. So in my late teens, not so late, I was 17 when I was baptized, so I was in my middle teens really when I began to come into the church in 17 when I was baptized. I was called into the church and in the church of God we talk and learn a great deal about overcoming and about growth and about learning to think and act like Jesus Christ, and I wanted to think and act like Jesus Christ in some areas of my life.

   I had my limits. You do too, you see. I had my limits. I had certain areas with no trespassing signs. I didn't want God to trespass in those areas. They were off limits even to God. My relationship with my father was one of those areas. When I came to the church, I didn't view my non-relation with him as a problem because you see problems have to be resolved, don't they? A converted person is going to solve his problems, and I didn't want to touch that problem with a 10-foot pole because there was so much pain and anger and a lot of other stuff. This emotional stuff is sort of murky, bleak, ugly stuff in here, and I didn't want to get near that. And so I didn't want to get near the problem.

   It was much simpler to tell people that knew me that my father and I were not close. That's what I would tell people would say, well, you know, what's your relationship with your dad or where does your dad live? And I'd say, well, we've never been close. That was, you know, a cop out because that wasn't really the way the situation was. It was far more dramatic than that.

   I learned the common flaw is the problem, as some of you have done, and you will not like some parts of the sermon today in a few cases because I will pull away your common flaw. When you take away somebody's cover, it hurts. I had dug holes, you see down here in here, in the emotions, and I swept it down in these holes, the resentment and the anger. I didn't go out and punch my father in the nose. I didn't write him nasty letters. I felt all of those feelings that I, I push it down. I buried it. And it sort of erupts every now and then I push it back down. And I got pretty good at doing that, you know, and I sort of danced around it like it really wasn't there, but I knew he was there and God knew it was there. I guess my father knew he was there too.

   I didn't recognize that the anger I felt towards him and the resentment was an indicator I had not yet forgiven him. You see, anger leads to bitterness and bitterness leads to an unforgiving spirit. When you can't forgive somebody, it is because there is bitterness and anger all locked into it. And I didn't know that those manifestations of resentment or proof I hadn't forgiven him. I didn't really know I had to forgive him. I didn't fully grasp that that was God's command and the God's requirement of me. I simply, you know, danced around it and avoided it.

   When I got married in 1963, I didn't invite my father to the wedding. I told my new wife that my father and I were not close was my excuse, and I said he wouldn't want to come, and he would be embarrassed because he couldn't come, and he really wouldn't be surprised, so I didn't send him an invitation. I informed him 3 months later down the road. I told him finally. I sent a letter. I informed him of the marriage 3 months after it was over because I didn't want my father to come. I didn't want my father to know. I didn't want my father to be aware of the fact that his only son was being married.

   I wanted, do you understand what I was doing. I wanted to pay him back. I wanted to even the score. I wanted him to know I was rejecting him just as I had perceived that he had rejected me. Now I would not have phrased it this way, and I don't think I consciously felt it this way, but this is what I was doing. I was trying to hurt him just as I felt he had hurt me. Now you said that to me when I did that, I always said, "Oh no, I'm in the church. I don't do things like that." I recognized several years down the road that I was doing things like that.

   Thankfully there was a point when some powerful scriptures jumped out at me, you know, you can read the Bible for general exhortation, you know, general stuff in the Psalms. You don't really want God to just go over the head that day, but he does anyway. You keep coming over the, you know, coming across scriptures that you wish weren't there. You ever done that and you think, oh, I, I'd have to read that today. I don't want that scripture, God. Don't, don't, don't, don't make that one jump out at me. Let's let's just do general, general studies, and this thing would keep jumping out at me.

   And slowly but surely I began to peel away the camouflage because I had no choice, and it hurts when you see it, you began to tear the camouflage away and what is buried down there, you began to look at it. It's very painful. It is not fun, but if you're a true Christian, you have to do that. You can't leave this, this volcano sort of boiling and simmering down there forever. You got to deal with it at some point in your life.

   I began to peal away the camouflage, and I was shocked by what I found. But you know, from that point on, it took me years to get rid of what I found. I found it, but I didn't know what to deal with it. I didn't know how to react to it. I knew it was there. I looked at it. I'll tell you how I got on top of it and how I got rid of it. I did get rid of it and it's a wonderful feeling when you get rid of that stuff, the anger, the pain, the resentment when it's gone, you know, when you are free at last from all of that kind of enter pain. It's it's a wonderful point in your life.

   I want to show you some basic teaching first of all about forgiveness. Matthew chapter 6 verse 9 is about as basic as you can find in this regard. Matthew 6:9. Jesus Christ is giving us teaching here on the subject of prayer, and perhaps we don't realize that one of the major points to be covered in daily prayer is the whole area of forgiveness. How many people do you forgive daily? How how much time do you spend daily talking about forgiveness of others? Probably zero in a lot of cases. You may ask God to forgive you, but you probably rarely tell God in your knees that you want to forgive somebody else, and this is one of the core areas that you should be covering on a daily basis.

   You see, this area hurts too much. So we don't, we don't mind asking God for our daily bread. So we say to God, "Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." That gets down in the nitty gritty that we don't like getting down into. So we ask for daily bread and forget about asking for forgiveness being given to us so that we can give it to others.

   Notice after this manner, verse 9, Matthew 6, pray our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. We all talk about these things on our knees. Give us this day our daily bread. In verse 12 we jump over because this is where the pain is. Forgive us our debts as it's a kind of a cycle here, trial you see, we forgive our debtors.

   Now this is an interesting verse because it allows us now to define in effect what forgiveness actually means in the biblical context because how can you forgive when you don't know what forgiveness is, you know, and you forgive somebody, do you forgive them their sins and then are the sins blotted out? God forgives us for sins when he forgives us, but can you forgive other people's sins just by saying I forgive you? Does that make any sense? You've analyze that. You forgive somebody who hurt you? Does that block their sin out? Can you replace the sacrifice of Christ by the words I forgive? Obviously there are two types of forgiveness, God's forgiveness with us and our forgiveness with others, but our forgiveness of others is something we all fully understand. We do not wash their sins out when we forgive them. That occurs when they repent to God.

   What do we do to people then when we forgive them? What's the process? Well, notice the word debt is used here. This is the clue that Christ wanted you to get. He didn't use the word sin here in many parallel contexts. The word sin is used sin and sinner, not debt or debtor. This is a synonym with a much broader meaning, and it is used purposely by Christ so that you can begin to understand what you do as you forgive another human being. What is involved. The focus is here on the concept of a debt. That which is owed to you or that which you owe somebody else, forgiveness, brethren, is the canceling of a debt.

   But I'll tell you what kind of debt it is in a minute. It's not a monetary debt. It is the act of setting somebody free from an obligation that is the result of a wrong done against you, and there is hurt involved. There is hurt involved. And when God forgives us of our sins, that is judicial forgiveness. This is different. That is judicial forgiveness. He blots it out and he frees us, however, from a debt, from the obligation of dying. That's the debt that is owed. The debt we owe God as a result of breaking his law is death but the shedding of blood. That's our debt to God the Father.

   But the wonderful truth we also understand is that Jesus Christ, through his death on the cross, paid that debt in full. Remember at Colossians 2:14 says that's nailed to the cross. The law is not nailed to the cross. Our debt is nailed to the cross. He died on the cross, and then our personal debt was nailed to the cross by Jesus Christ. It is now paid in full. When you sin, when you cry out to God the Father for forgiveness, and you mean it, as a result of the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ, our personal debt to the Father is then canceled, and it is remitted in full. Jesus Christ paid it for us. So I think we understand that.

   But what happens when you remit, when you forgive, when you cancel the debt of another human being? What does that mean? Remember, just as God the Father cancels our debt, we Christians must be actively involved on a daily basis, canceling the debts of those who have failed to fulfill certain responsibilities or certain obligations or certain commitments in our life, and as a result of that we have been hurt. It is this, you see, with pain around you.

   But the debt I'm referring to when you talk in terms of your relationship with other people is not a financial debt. Somebody owes you 20 bucks, you can send them a letter, you can [inaudible] them. You can ask them for the money back. You don't have to cancel that debt unless you choose to, but that is your, you know, your, your not an obligation. That's financial. You don't have to do that. That's not what God is talking about here. He talks about debts and debtors. This verse does not mean you have the right to forgive somebody else their sins. Please understand that when you forgive another human being, their sins are not blotted out. A debt is canceled. That is what occurs. It is primarily an emotional and or a mental debt. It may even involve a financial issue in part, something which is owed you, and I'll try to make that clear in a couple of minutes.

   But 10 years after I was baptized, I began to realize finally that I had never forgiven my father. And all the anger and the resentment I felt was weak toward him, was weakening my relationship with God because it does that and I'll tell you why as time goes on, what it does, and it weakens that relationship and blocks and impedes the work of the Holy Spirit when you have that resentment within you. So I knew I had to do something. I tried to remedy the situation. For a couple of years I did some superficial things that didn't seem to work very well. I think I was sincere, but I didn't know what to do, and I would kneel down and I would say, "Father in heaven, help me to forgive my dad."

   I don't ever remember saying, "Father, I forgive my dad," because I knew I somehow couldn't. I just said, "Help me to forgive my dad." But I didn't, I didn't know what kind of help to ask for. I didn't know how God would do that, and then time would go by and I would wait for some kind of miracle to happen and it didn't happen. And the next day the anger and the resentment were still there, and I had to start the process all over again. It became very, very confusing for a while.

   In fact, it all got worse because I was dredging this stuff up. I was trying to deal with my feelings, processed them, if you will. It was like a volcano that had been sort of, you know, under control, and by bringing this stuff up, I was making it worse. I was getting more angry, feeling more resentment. Like a dormant volcano that begins to erupt after years of being asleep, demonstrably at the beginning of the process of forgiveness, in some cases it does get worse. It really does, and it got worse for a couple of years it got worse.

   I didn't realize, you see, that I had to release my father from the debt, the obligation to meet my emotional and financial needs as a child and as a teenager, I had to release him from that. I didn't know that. I hadn't read this verse and fully grasp what it meant. Well, I would get down on my knees and talk about forgiveness, you know what I mean we all do that, don't we? We talk about it and then it doesn't seem to happen. This rock is still in here. The anger and resentment is still there. I would do that, and yet I still wanted my dad to pay me back for all the things he hadn't done when I was a kid.

   I wanted him to pay me back for 18 years of poverty. I'm not quite sure what I wanted, you know, I look back on it now and I think maybe I wanted him to come and apologize. That would have helped, but I don't think that would have been enough. I really wanted my father to grovel, you know, and that's what some of you want. You want your ex to grovel. You want your dad to grovel. You want the boss to grovel. Think about it, really think about it and be painfully honest with your feelings. That's sort of what I wanted.

   I continued to focus obsessively on all the things he hadn't done. And I would say, "Father, help me to forgive him." And then I would focus back on the debt. That is the obligation, the unfulfilled obligation of the father to the child, and I would reactivate the anger and I would be upset again, and I would have all the old feelings would come back. It's another 3 or 4 years before I realized that I'm commanded to forgive the debtor his debt, as you find here in Chapter 6, the second part of verse 12 (Matthew 6:12). That means I finally had to set my father free from the obligation to pay me back what I felt he owed me.

   When God said, I finally did that. I released him from it. As I accepted the fact that he had not done those things. I accepted the fact that he could not do those things. I accepted the fact that he might have done them if he hadn't been ill, but how could I know? I simply accepted the fact that my father was incapable of doing anything about all of those lost years. I accepted that.

   And you know, I ultimately, not ultimately, rather quickly found myself being released from the anger and the resentment I felt towards him, and then the pain began to go, the pain began to drain away, and I think that you just asked about 98% of it is gone as long as I'm in the flesh I guess all of it will never go, but most of it is gone, and I'm free from almost all of that and it's a wonderful feeling. In some ways, very frankly, it is a little bit like getting out of jail.

   Any of you ever been in jail, don't put your hand up. But a number of us have. And I have too, by the way, nothing all that dramatic, but in our youth we sometimes do stupid things, I guess, or things other people think are stupid. I don't know. It's like getting out of jail, you see, when you refuse to forgive, you are trapped in a form of bondage. You're trapped, you really are. It's a form of emotional and mental slavery.

   An unforgiving spirit can create all kinds of physical problems. It can create high blood pressure or at least contribute to it in a very heavy way, cardiac problems, disorders of that type, ulcers, and a host of other difficulties, all of those things can be impacted by an unforgiving spirit because an unforgiving spirit, brethren, is the core, but around the core is anger and bitterness and anger and bitterness you see impacts your health, the way you think and act and the way you feel. The worst part of it though is that it creates major barriers. It doesn't cut you off, but it creates barriers between you and God, and it blocks the Holy Spirit. It doesn't stop the flow, but it makes the flow difficult. It, it impedes the flow. It impedes the flow of God's spirit. It doesn't cut us off from God totally in the early stages, but it will cut us off from God in the final stages, and it will be over the years a continual source of turmoil.

   And sort of tension, murky anxieties can lead to depression, and if you have had over the years, over much of your adult life, all of these sort of strange murky emotions there and they never go away and you're always sort of depressed and you're down and you're afraid and God's spirit simply does not seem to flow through your life as effectively as you know it should. Maybe you should analyze what is down there that is blocking it, because these are blocks and impediments make it very hard for God's spirit to work effectively.

   Notice in verse 12, I want to reread this verse because it is so dramatically central and front and center in terms of our prayers and in terms of our spiritual life. "Forgive us our debts, Father, as we forgive our debtors." Notice verse 13 (Matthew 6:13): "Lead us into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen." That's the end of the prayer. But notice, as soon as he finishes the model prayer, he comes right back now.

   The prayer is over, but he comes right back immediately to one of the points covered in the prayer and gives some added amplification, and significantly, the points he gives added focus to is forgiveness. He doesn't come back to daily bread. He doesn't come back to praying about the kingdom because we all do those things, don't we? He comes back to what we don't tend to do because it's a painful area. That's why he reinforced it by extra material, verse 14 (Matthew 6:14). "If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." Notice that, that's a that's a bone crusher. "If you forgive not men your trespasses, neither will your Father in heaven forgive you, your trespasses." Very dramatic statement.

   Now please understand, brother, doesn't mean that you have to forgive every single human being, every single debt, emotional, mental, or whatever ever owed you for God will forgive you your sins. It doesn't mean that because you don't end up with an incredible load of guilt that you can't cope with as a result of reading that particular verse. It's meant to shake you, not to destroy you.

   You see, God does not have an accounting book. And which he lists on the left side of the ledger of the ledger, the exact number of times you forgive people and counts all those out, but on the right side he lists the exact number of sins he can forgive because you forgive him here and he can forgive you here and you've forgiven this person and he can forgive you this sin, but he can't forgive these sins because you haven't forgiven these people. That's not what he's talking about. That's not the focus of scripture. God forgives you your sins when you repent, not when you forgive somebody of your sin, you see. That is not the point he's making. This is a generic statement, and the lesson to be learned, however, is of paramount importance in terms of the effectiveness of your spiritual life.

   How close to God are you? You're full of anger and resentment. You are not very close to God. How much of God's spirit is flowing through you today? This speaks the firstfruits. It commemorates the coming of the Spirit of God. If you have a lot of anger and resentment and you have not forgiven an awful lot of people and not much of God's spirit is flowing through you. A little is it may only be a trickle, it ought to be a torrent. That's what Christ is talking about.

   We refuse to forgive. Or because it's painful, we we hide from it, we squiggle out of it or when we don't know how, and that often occurs, or when we are afraid of forgiving because we're afraid you see that the volcano will explode and it is a little scary initially. Some, some of you have not thought about some of these areas of your life in 5, 10, 20, or 30 years, and you would rather not think about them today. And here I'm saying you gotta look at this and process it and that's how to do away with it. We have to do that so that God can work effectively in our life, as hard as it is, and I know how hard it is. I really do know how hard it is. You have to learn to forgive.

   Now what is the problem with life. What is it that is not being forgiven? If forgiveness is the one segment of the model of prayer that's given here to which Christ saw fit to add extra complimentary material. It should be obvious that he foresaw that forgiveness would be neglected or minimized in the church, neglected and minimized in our prayers, and it has been. So he comes back to it and places this extra focus on it. So I'm going to do the same thing this afternoon, and we'll we'll put focus on it because this is not where your focus in most cases has been.

   I know that because of human nature and Christ said that's why he said this at the end of the model prayer. We'll peel away a little camouflage. If it hurts, I would encourage you to let it hurt. That's very useful pain, by the way, and maybe we'll find some areas in which you have not yet forgiven people, areas with some pain and some resentment and perhaps some anger and maybe even some bitterness too.

   Category number one, this is the most common that I deal with, and maybe it's in terms of counseling is the most common in the church worldwide. Category number one, parents. A lot of people feel deep resentment and anger towards parents for mistakes made in the process of growing up. All of us feel a little, I mean, no parent has been perfect, but some people feel an awful lot, way too much. It is most common when parents have been too harsh or too hard or too authoritarian or too unemotional or on the other extreme too lax, too overindulgent, too easy, pushovers. It also occurs that they've been alcoholics if there's been some form of sexual molestation within the family, and then it really occurs and there's a lot of anger. If you've gone through anything like that, you've got a volcano to deal with.

   A couple of years ago I gave a sermon on the 5th commandment. I know which one that is, don't you? That's the one that says honor your parents. I thought it was a nice sermon on the 5th commandment. I didn't mean it to be anything particularly dramatic. I could have given one on the 7th commandment or the 3rd. I picked the 5th. I talked about parents, how to honor them. You know something, I averaged a phone call a week for about 6 months from distraught members, some of them angry at me for having given the sermon. People have said to me, "Mr. Catherwood, I wish I'd never heard the sermon.

   You brought back things I didn't want to think about." One lady said, she said, "I can't even talk to my parents, much less somehow honor them," and this was a statement she made to me. She said, "I wish I'd never heard your sermon. It was much easier to bury my resentment and keep it under lock and key, but you told me I've got to take this stuff out in the open and look at it and ask God to take it away. And she said, he hasn't taken it away yet. I'm still sitting there looking at it, and she said, this is one of the most miserable experiences I've ever had. I wish I hadn't heard your sermon."

   Now, in a way she was being kind. She was, she was not nasty. It didn't hurt my feelings. She was asking for help, but it's a little hard to get a sermon on a topic that you feel is not all that dramatic and to discover that you have hit a nerve. You've got all these people calling you up, some of them in tears saying do something. You said it, now I got to deal with it, solve my problem. And it was rather I still get phone calls by the way, from people as a result of that crazy sermon. Very hard thing to do. I commiserate with those people, but I know this much, as unpleasant as it might be, you have to face the need to forgive.

   When God's spirit flows out of you, forgiveness flows out of you. If it is not flowing out of you, brethren, God's spirit is not flowing out of you, may be trickling out, but that isn't what you want and you can't grow with a trickle. You can only grow with a torrent, with the flow.

   Second area I want to talk about this is very common in Southern California, less common, I'm sure here because this is more of a traditional area, and that is ex-mates. My ex-husbands, ex-wives. You know, anger over the failure of a marriage, usually contracted before conversion, but on occasion, even after conversion, can be a potent and a corrosive emotion, and it is very easy to hate a person who's been a part of your life and then has ripped themselves out of your life. The normal reaction is to become angry and embittered and hateful, and then at that point you stop forgiving because you see you cannot forgive when anger and hate and bitterness is there. It's a very easy emotion to feel.

   Then people pass on that emotion to the children and that children are victimized, they become angry. They become angry at the father or the mother or both parents, and then you've got anger being passed on through a family system. Sometimes I've seen anger going down through families, generation after generation after generation essentially passed on, and so many people become victims.

   If you have a living ex, how do you feel about your ex? You feel anger? You think about them, what they have done or haven't done to you. What, what surfaces? If you feel anger, you have a clear indication you have not yet forgiven them. The debt is still there. You still want them to come groveling back full of apologies with tears in their eyes, with lots of money and lots of loot down on their knees. You want them to grovel. You're still angry. You know what Jesus said. You said father. Teach my people to forgive as I have forgiven, as have forgiven, and then he taught us to pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Your ex owes you a heavy debt. Are you wanting to cancel the debt? You gonna hang on to that till the day that you die? You want to get rid of that anger? You can. You gotta cancel the debt.

   Category number 3, needing forgiveness siblings, that is brothers and sisters. You'd be surprised how many people feel resentment, terrible resentment towards brothers and sisters as a result of trauma they've gone through growing up. We all know as an example that parental favoritism turned on to all of Joseph's brothers against him and their anger and their lack of forgiveness toward him and their father caused them to sell them to the Egyptians.

   Was there a favorite in your family? How do you feel about your favorite son? Are you son number 4? Was it hard? What are your feelings towards your dad? What are your feelings toward the, you know, the favorite in the family? There always is one. You know there are 6, 8, 10, 12 kids in your family and looking out at you. I rather imagine that occurred in a number of cases because a lot of you go back to the generation when that was very, very common. How do you feel about them?

   You say, well, he died last year, my brother's dead now. Can you forgive a dead man? Well, we'll talk about that today. Can you forgive a dead man? Your dad died 25 years ago and there’s a thorn and rock in here. Can you forgive a dead man? I'm gonna have to wait till he comes up in the white throne judgment and then go through all of that, you know, the necessary work to get all the anger out. Can you forgive a dead man? Now God does not forgive dead men their sins. That's judicial forgiveness. What you do is a little different. Oh, I'll give you the answer before the sermon is over.

   What do you experience when you think about your brothers and sisters? Warm feelings concern, or is it still anger shimmering beneath the surface? Do you feel anger when you just still not after the bunk into that, you know, is that how you feel? I mean, you, you want him out of your life. You don't need those people. I mean, they live down in, you know, they're down in Kentucky, they're over in Illinois and you keep as many miles between them as you can. You know what that means? You haven't forgiven. Hostility. There's anger there. There's something wrong in your life. There's an impediment to your relationship with God and an impediment to the flow of the Holy Spirit. You got to rip those things out of your life.

   How do you do that? I tell you, it isn't easy, but you have to know how thinking about it or agonizing about it on your knees does not do it. [Inaudible] that always gives us [inaudible].

   4th category rather common too, that's the boss. The boss may even be a minister, but generally I'm talking of the boss or in corporate terms. It's amazing how much turned up anger there is towards the boss, especially in the world. We've all read the things in the last 6 months, the people who walk into the office with a submachine gun or a sawed of shotgun and they blow the boss away. They fill them full of holes because the bosses deprive them of a promotion or of this or that. The bosses demean them they're angry at the boss.

   Now I follow my life to talk to people in the church. We're also angry at the boss and sometimes the boss is in the church too. I'm in Pasadena, we got 2500 employees. We've got a lot of bosses out there. We got a lot of employees. What if your boss was a church member, would everything be perfect? Yeah, not. If you can forget everything's great, you can't, it's not. I know that back in the 60s and 70s, a certain number of people in supervisory capacity in the work of God made some mistakes. I'm fully aware of that. We were going through a phase of growth as a church and there were gaps in our understanding on leadership. Some of you perhaps saw those gaps, saw things being done by the ministry, by people in leadership capacity. It should not have been done.

   I also went through those times. I also was a boss, and I've made my mistakes, let's say within the corporate side of things, and I know that as Christians, it behooves all of us to forgive the boss when the boss makes mistakes, whether the boss is a church member or whether the boss is a physical human being. Bosses do make mistakes and we got to forgive. We got to try to forget.

   What I find in this is this counseling with people in Pasadena sometimes, and that is some people carry anger and resentment towards the boss they had 25 years ago, and it is still there, still there. The vengeance is important to some people. If they want to even the score, and vengeance can even be fun up to a point. It's almost a neurotic satisfaction that comes from licking our wounds.

   You know, you know how much fun it can be. You have a wound that started healing over and you rip off the the crust, you rip off the scabs, you start to dig into it again and it gets raw again, you start to lick the wounds, and there's a certain kind of satisfaction dogs will lick their wounds. It must feel good. Sometimes we're just like dogs, you see, we like to lick our wounds. And keep them raw, and the rawer they are, the more they hurt, but the more enjoyable it can be in a neurotic way to keep on licking them.

   A few years ago I met a young man, and I will be very general about this, so you cannot identify him because I don't want to be sued by him. And nowadays if you make, if you use examples and you're too graphic or too vivid or you pinpoint the area if folks find out about it and then they want to sue you, some of them do, this one wouldn’t, I'm sure. And why don’t you stop pretending, and he looked at me and he said, "I'm bitter. I'm bitter." And I, and I said why? And he said, "I'm better." I said, who? I didn't say why. I said who. And he said "at my former boss" and he mentioned somebody who had had supervisory responsibility in the work of a number of years previously, who had also at one point been my boss. I knew this person quite well. I worked under him too.

   And he said "I'm bitter because," and he named the name. He said "this man has over the years purposely held me back. He demeaned me, he embarrassed me, he broke my self-esteem." And then came the statement that revealed the real problem, you see, the real problem. He said, "I want to," and he almost called him. He said, "Sometimes I fantasize about ways of getting even, vengeance." He said, "I dreamt once about being a top prize fighter." He said, "I had a dream and I had boxing gloves on and I was in a ring, and I was a champ. And my opponent was my, my former boss, and he got in the ring and the crowd was cheering. They were chanting my name and he said, I beat this guy to a bloody pulp." That was his former boss. "And then they raised my, you know, my gloves above my head. I had beaten him to a pulp and he said, I listened to the crowd cheer, and he said the next morning when I woke up, I still felt good. I still felt good."

   You know what that proves? You know, there is a certain temporary gratification that comes from vengeance. You get them even when you're hurting people because they hurt you and you're pushing them out of your life and you're getting back at them. It does sort of feel good, doesn't it temporarily, but I'll tell you, as you as you see that what happens within you is awful. It hurts you and in fact it can destroy you.

   Are there any former bosses you might enjoy punching out in a boxing ring? I don't think that's a very comfortable analogy, but maybe analyze it quickly. Don't focus on it too long though, you know, just let it fleetingly come into your head. Any former bosses you might like to, you know, punch out. Well, that might indicate something. It might indicate that it's not over yet. It's been 5 years or 10 or 20 or 30 and it's all gone, but the anger is still there. There's something wrong. You haven't forgiven him yet. It is, it's a wonderful time in your life. Bitterness and anger, which lead to unforgiving spirit will poison your relationship with God. It is a real form of bondage. It will prevent God from forgiving you as time goes on. It doesn't do that initially, but with time it will, it will even drive you out of the Church of God.

   In Hebrews chapter 12, there's a verse here that talks about those emotions that are related to an unforgiving spirit that lead to it. One of them is bitterness. The other is anger. They are related emotions. There are degrees of the same emotion. Anger is the beginning, rash anger, bitterness. They all flow together in the same direction and ultimately you have the inability to forgive. And there's a progression and a sequence there.

   Verse 15 in Hebrews chapter 12 (Hebrews 12:15), "Looking diligently, lets any man fail of the grace of God." Now how do you fail to the grace of God? Grace is unmerited pardon that God gives you. That you fail of the grace of God when you refuse to give pardon to others, you see, God's grace flows into your life, and God forgives you your sins, and then it flows out of your life as you forgive others their sins, and you fail the grace of God, and you do not forgive others as you should. "Lest in a root of bitterness spring up." Now once they're under the surface, you can't see them. So if you have a root of bitterness, you may not even know it's there. How do you know it's there? If you have anger, there possibly is a root of bitterness there slowly springing up, and it will take over your life at some point.

   The soil you see in which roots of bitterness grow is anger. That's the soil. Anger towards another human being, resentment towards another human being. Then you've got the soil. The roots grow in that soil. They grow slowly. They spring up slowly. It takes years. You can feel a little anger here, a little anger there, a little anger here, and you may think, yeah, I just feel a little bit of it. But you put all those little bits of anger together and you've got some soil. In that soil, bitterness begins to grow. It can be generalized bitterness.

   Notice it says the root springs up and it troubles you. It's a hazy word in the Greek. It just sort of means it bugs you. It bothers you. You're sort of bothered. Are you troubled? Is it just sort of a kind of a hazy, problematic, murky kind of a down negative feeling that you deal with daily? Maybe here's part of the reason why. And notice thereby many be defiled, many are victimized by it. That word defiled is very strong in the Greek. It means stain. It it can it can indicate destruction and that type of thing. Think about that another category and I need to get to a couple more of these before I begin to wrap things up.

   Category number 5 former friends. There's a lot of pain here too. I had a friendship in the church, very close. You really felt close to somebody and you did things together, you laughed, cried together, told things, told each other things that you never told anybody else. And then all of a sudden there was a kind of a coolness there, and they didn't sit with you quite as often. They didn't say hi at church quite as much. Then you notice your friend or friends were spending a lot more time with other people and the other people were not as part of your group and didn't invite you over, and then you found yourself sort of locked out and you felt very hurt by it. There's a lot of pain there.

   Ever felt like you've been dumped? That can happen in the church and create anger, resentment, heavy feelings if you fail in resentment in fact and begin to fill the void. Now if you catch those feelings at the very beginning, and this is important for you to realize if you forgive the person that has hurt you at the very beginning before the anger enlarges before it grows. You can then eject the anger from your life rather easily. It will then not tend to settle in. It will not internalize. It won't fade. You won't start digging holes and burying it in the holes as I did to my father. You won't have to because you'll be getting it out very quickly and you'll be OK then. No major spiritual or emotional problem is going to be there. You won't have to worry about roots of bitterness. You're not laying there will be no soil. It's not going to happen.

   But if you don't, brother, if you focus on the hurt, you feel very hurt. You don't forgive, you don't deal with it, the anger will then begin to grow, will automatically exacerbate, and as it does, you will then tend to suck it down. You, you internalize it. You'll push it down. You'll bottle it up. So you push it down, you'll bottle it up. So you're hurt by somebody in the church. You can't walk up to a church member and bust them in the nose. You know, you feel anger and hurt but you can't take it out on them, but you feel the anger anyway. What do you do? Well, you don't go out and beat them up, you just sort of push it down, you hold it in, you see, you internalize it and internalized anger is incredibly destructive. It really is. It's soil in which bitterness grows and bitterness does not allow you to forgive. And if you haven't forgiven them, you got to get, you gotta, you gotta get the soil out.

   I want to ask you today to dig down as deeply as you can over the next few days and weeks perhaps and to strip aside some of the veneer and the pretty nicely nice camouflage that we as good people tend to put over our lives and to look at what is really there. You may be shocked to find what you find I was. I want to ask you then to clear out this this seed bed of anger, the soil in which anger grows, or that anger is in a sense in which bitterness grows, and as the bitterness grows the anger will grow with it, and you won't end up getting better. You won't end up leaving the church and rejecting God's grace as you refuse to give grace to others.

   At that point, by the way, you begin to get this out of your life, you'll find it much easier to forgive. It will begin to flow and God's spirit will begin to flow and the trickle will become maybe not torrent initially, but the flow will become far more effective.

   So many other areas I wish I could deal with, but I will not for lack of time, but lack of forgiveness, bitterness, anger are many areas of our life. Race is one. I know people of this race or that race that feel automatic anger towards people of another race. A lot of my stepfather's people were Ukrainians and they felt a lot of anger towards Poles because of things that happened way, way back in the eastern Poland 100 years ago. But the Poles were not popular in my stepfather's family. They didn't like Poles. I can never quite figure out why Poles and Ukrainians all looked alike to me, you know, I built the same, talked the same, and it all taught the same broken English where I came from, but boy, you got Ukrainians and Poles together and they to us very quickly. One of my aunts married a Pole and the whole family disowned her. There was this heavy, heavy anger. Why, you know. Race can be an area in which forgiveness. Some people have to forgive the whole race. Some Ukrainians have to forgive the whole Polish people and vice versa. Hard for some people to do that.

   Children, sometimes we have a rough time, especially people over, I would say in their 60s and 70s, sometimes have a hard time forgiving children who have not measured up their high expectations and rejecting children who hadn't quite made it was fairly common 30, 40, 50 years ago. Parents had high, high, high standards and if you didn't reach those standards, you didn't come by the house for Thanksgiving any longer until you did.

   Neighbors, the dog barks, manage your neighbor, barking dog, have you dealt with that, is it still there? Some people have a hard time forgiving themselves. Because they've been, you know, they've done some dumb things in their life, they feel anger towards themselves. God has forgiven them, but they won't forgive themselves. Some struggle with anger towards God Himself because of trials in their life, and in that sense they're unwilling to forgive God. So there's anger towards God, but they can't go out and punch God in the nose either, you see, so they feel anger towards God for what God has done for a major trial, a death, whatever, and then they internalize it, and it's in here. And the matter is gone. But the anger is here hurting them. The list goes on and on.

   Turn to Matthew's chapter 18, if you would please, and I want to show you again stressing the fact that it's got to flow through our lives. Matthew 18:21. Chapter 18 verse 21. Very clear focus on what we have to be and how we how we have to be. Then Peter came unto Jesus. Matthew 18:21, I should say 21, and Peter said, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? 7 times?" The rabbis taught at that point in history that you should forgive at least 3 times. I'm sure that Peter here was congratulating himself for his own magnanimity in saying 7, and then Christ said what he said. This was confounding.

   Jesus said unto him, "I don't say unto you those 7 times, but until 70 times 7," that's 490 times if you got a calculator. And that means into infinity. It simply means you never stop. It doesn't mean that's the 491st offense, then you can hold it against them and really, you know, stick it to him, punch them in the nose, wreak vengeance, burn their house down, shoot the dog, whatever you want to do. It means into infinity you keep on forgiving as long as you need to forgive. Forgiveness should be limitless.

   Now at this point I want to mention something lest that sound Pollyannaish. There are things that need to be done in addition to forgiveness. It doesn't mean we become total, you know, softies or lily lives or something like that. If you walk out of the house every tomorrow morning and your neighbor rushes over and for whatever reason punches you in the nose, you need to forgive him, God says that day. It might also be appropriate to call the police or the police stop him from doing it again.

   Now if he rushes up every morning for 490 days, that's a year and a half, and every morning he punches you in the nose again. I might even consider a lawsuit if he's not a church member. If he was a church member, I would not consider a lawsuit, but it would be tough not to. You might consider coming and talking to the minister about it because you have a big problem there, but a lawsuit isn't wrong with a brother with a non-member I should say with a brother it is with a non-member. To get them to stop doing what they're doing. But it can't be retaliatory, you see. You cannot retaliate. You cannot wreak vengeance in his life. You can try to stop him through whatever necessary drastic means might be at your disposal.

   Several years ago, and I'll again try to be somewhat general so you don't pinpoint the area, I had to counsel with a young woman in her early 20s, 22 to 23, who experienced the horror and the degradation of the gang rape. She was walking home from work one afternoon about 5 o'clock. The car drove up next to her on the sidewalk, and a young punk jumped out of the car and dragged her into the car, and there were 3 in the car total, and they drove the vehicle to a nearby deserted field, and they violated her one by one for over an hour. Then they let her go. They drove off. She didn't know where she was. She had never been in that part of the city before. It was in a big city. She finally made her way home. She was emotionally numbed by it all and as you would understand, emotionally devastated, one of the most incredibly awful things that I think could happen to a human being.

   It took her two days to recover and pull herself together to the point at which she was even then capable of talking to somebody about it. She didn't tell anybody. She called me 48 hours later. The only person I knew was her mother, and she was alone. She asked me to come over and she told me when I got there what had happened. And she said to me, "Mr. Catherwood, I've never felt anger like this in my entire life," she said. "After all I've gone through, the degradation I've gone through that I've experienced, do I really have to forgive them?" She said, "I don't think I can. Would God require that of me?"

   Now you know, it was hard to say yes, God would require that to be human. I wanted to say no. "No, you're, you're free to be as angry as you want to be for as long as you want to be angry. This is all these creeps deserve, be angry." I wanted to say that. That's tantamount to saying, you can harden your heart and you can let bitterness and anger take over, and you know, as the heart hardens, God's spirit cannot flow. I couldn't tell her that. I told her she'd be far more victimized by an unforgiving spirit and by the anger and the bitterness that would follow than she had been by the rape as awful as the rape was. Hard to say, by the way. It sort of sounds like you're being a Pollyanna again. You're saying that to somebody who's gone through an awful trial. I had to say that to her because that's what God said. So I said it to her. I felt in one sense a little hypocritical in even saying it. I had to say it.

   Two weeks later they caught these guys. She took legal action. You're supposed to do that, that's fine. It should never occur to happen to somebody else. She went down to the police station to identify them in the lineup, you know, where they had a number of people in the line. And before she got there, she called me on the phone and she said, "Would you pray that I have the right reaction?" She said, "I'm not sure I can deal with it the way God wants me to deal with it." I told her God would be with her and I prayed with her on the phone. We don't do that a lot. I thought I needed to on that occasion. She went down, looked at them in the lineup, and when she looked at them, the miracle had already occurred, and she said to me after it was all over that evening, she called me up and she said, "You know, when I looked at them, all I felt was compassion and concern. All I felt was compassion and concern."

   Now, is that incredible? I think you have to say, yeah, that is incredible, but you know that really is what it's all about. Jesus said, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," even as his executioners were in the process of wreaking awful violence on his body. And that's when he said what he said. And somehow he was able to do that and somehow 2 weeks later she was able to do that. I have to ask you how able are you to do things like that.

   What kind of an attitude do we have to have? And above all, how do we get from where we are to where we need to be because most of us aren't where we need to be. We're over here and God says we need to be over there. I'll give you a few concepts. If you believe that the apostle Paul, you have to start by dealing with your initial anger because that is the beginning of the process, your anger covered or buried. In many cases it is buried. Toward the persons you need to forgive. You got to deal with your anger towards them. And if you don't start there, I assure you you can say I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you because you're blue in the face and get down on your knees and you can weep and cry. You can say, "Father, please help me to to do what I have to do." And nothing will happen or very little will happen, and the next day the anger will simply reactivate the same ugly process and it will start all over again. You see, when the anger is still there, you will start all over again from scratch day by day by day. You got to go back in the process to the beginning of the process. You got to deal with that.

   Ephesians chapter 4 is an interesting chapter because it's has at the beginning of the chapter, Ephesians chapter 4, exhortations to unity in the church, and we want that, of course. And the chapter shows that unity comes as God's spirit flows through our life, and then at the end of the chapter, Paul labels anger and bitterness as the major cause of disunity, and then he isolates forgiveness as a part of the solution. So to have a unified church, we must have a church in which there is little anger, no bitterness, and we deal with it immediately and then we forgive those who trespass against us quickly, and that cements us together.

   Verse 23, notice what it says in Ephesians 4, here it talks about the Holy Spirit meat in due season, Ephesians 4:23: "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind," and renewal is not a trickle, brethren, renewal in your mind is God's spirit flowing through you effectively. "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind," renewed. You got a colored pencil underlying the word renewed dramatically important verse. "Put on the new man." That means major changes. You can do that with God's help.

   Verse 25 says, "Put away a lying." A lying blocks the spirit of God. That's why he mentions it. Then he gets to anger. Verse 26: "Be you angry." Now here there's a positive command, so you can on occasion be angry, and it is proper and acceptable. The command is be you angry. So there's a natural indignation that towards sin that Christ felt when he drove the money changers from the center. He felt a certain level of anger towards sin. So notice, brethren, that that kind of righteous anger and disgust at disobedience does not lead to resentment in inner hurt. Because it isn't directed at people, you feel resentment and it hurts when your anger is directed at people. When your anger is directed at situations or philosophies or systems or the way you get, there’s no inner hurt and the anger goes very quickly.

   But you see when you're angry at a human being, you feel that anger viscerally, you feel it internally, you know, the heart begins to pump, you know what it's like. And it tends to stay around, tends to stay around for weeks and months and years, and it begins to internalize and it begins to do a lot of things inside of you that are really, really not good at all.

   When our society it's not considered acceptable to demonstrate anger too openly. You get mad at the boss, you get mad at your brother, you get mad at the minister. You don't punch the minister out, do you? You just sort of gripe about it on the way home from church. And the kids listen and then they may get angry though you get mad at who at your brother, your father, or relation. You don't tend to punch him in the nose. Once again, you internalize it, you bottle it up, you hold it in, then it begins to destroy you from within. This is what God is talking about.

   Notice his emphasis here verse 26: "Be you angry, but don't sin." 95% of the time we do sin when we get angry. On occasion we direct it towards sins, then it can be OK. "Don't let the sun go down upon your wrath." Just make sure it dissipates and is over before the sun sets. In other words, don't hang on to it. The longer it hangs on, the greater the danger is of it coalescing deep within you. And when it does, the roots of bitterness will begin to grow. Anger must not remain a part of your life overnight. It should be a temporary thing directed at things, not at people. By the time the sun sets, it's gone. What happens if it doesn't go? That's the danger and that's what he's dealing with.

   Verse 27 says, "Don't give place to the devil." The devil will use anger, coalesced internalized anger that you repress and that you hold in. Then take the spirit of God, destroy your relationship with God, hurt you, hurt your relationship with your husband. The wives in the hall today, and I can say this as though I don't know you, that are bitter at their husbands, and the husband sitting next to them, you have anger. You just feel angry at them. You feel anger for 10 years and it's simply been there. The husbands feel their way toward their wives. Kids sitting in the hall would feel their way the parents sitting right next to them. 14-year-olds that feel anger. Maybe they don't, and maybe they do. It's there, it stays. That's giving place to the devil, he uses it.

   Notice verse 30 says, "Don't grieve the Holy Spirit." Now this is the day to talk about that. Don't block it or impede it. Anger blocks it. Anger impedes it. Lying does, but we don't lie a lot in the church of God. "Lie not one to another." That's serious. But anger, a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, some of it not towards people in the church, however, but nonetheless, it does the same thing. Don't grieve the spirit. Don't block it.

   How do we do that? Verse 31 tells us how we can cease doing that. "Let all bitterness, wrath, and anger," these are all related. You see, all a part of the same process leading to non-forgiveness. "Let that be under verse 31 be put away from you." He doesn't say bottle it up or hold it in or repress it. He says put it away. Let us get rid of it. Now obviously in the meantime while we're getting rid of it, we need to control it, but controlling is not ideally what God wants. That is what we do temporarily. We cannot ventilate anger. We don't yell and screaming teeth or punch them in the nose. We must control it temporarily while it is going, but you see, the end result, God's ideal plan is not that you simply control what you have in here while it, you know, bounces around and wrecks you. The idea is to get rid of it. So ultimately God wants to take it out of your life, and that's step number one, by the way, in the process of forgiveness which I want you to think about.

   Step number one ask God to begin to remove all of this internalized anger. You want to forgive some people, you want the bitterness and the resentment out of your life. Ask God to begin to help you not just to help you to begin to remove all of this internalized anger. It has come into your life, it can be removed from your life. Ask him to take it out. He says he will. It may take a month. It may take a year. Keep asking until that kind of inner healing occurs. There is inner healing, you see. There's physical healing, but there's also a form of inner healing, and this is one God says he will do it, otherwise he wouldn't say put it away from your life, he would simply say control it, dominate it. If he doesn't say that, he says, "Put it away." Believe what he says and ask him to do it.

   Step number 2, ask God through His Spirit to grant you all of the necessary spiritual help. That is the specific words and fruits of the Holy Spirit that will prepare your mind for forgiveness and give you the ability to forgive. What is verse 32 in that regard? Verse 32, "Be you kind one to another." There's a key here in a sequence. Be kind. Notice word kind? But how can we be kind, tenderhearted? That means compassionate or sympathetic, tenderhearted, and then notice "forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake, has forgiven you."

   Notice the verb forgiving is a participle, which indicates it is either a consequence or a manifestation of the first part of this particular verse. An angry person cannot forgive. A kind, tenderhearted person can. You seek to forgive, you've got to become become kind and tenderhearted. What does that mean? I want to focus on that word kind very, very quickly. The word in Greek is krestos, K-R-E-S-T-O-S in English transliteration krestos, and krestos means, besides meaning kind, it means gracious. Any commentators say that and gracious, you see means given to extending grace.

   Now God extends grace to us. Grace, according to Mr. Armstrong, is free and unmerited pardon. You can also become gracious. The Bible says you have to become krestos, given to extending grace to others. Now it's significant, but krestos in its noun form that's chrestote is also listed as one of the fruits of the spirit in Galatians 5:22 that ought to open up your ears because that's very important. Now in Galatians 5:22 it is translated rather badly. You'll find gentleness, not a good translation. Many, many commentators feel the translation is much too weak and inaccurate. Modern translators such as Moffett simply use kindness, kindness, one uses clemence or clemency, the ability to forgive, and I'll quote from that particular commentator briefly so you get a drift of exactly what that word means.

   Kindness, as used in Galatians 5:22, is an attitude that calls for clemency. Clemency is a judicial term that means forgiveness, wiping out of the penalty. It is the opposite of an angry, vengeful spirit. That's exactly why the apostle Paul told this in Ephesians 4:32, "Be you kind and tender hearted, faithful." He knew that forgiveness flows out from us when the fruit of forgiveness or the fruit of kindness, chrestote flows into us through God's spirit, asks for chrestote daily. You have a hard time forgiving, there's the fruit of the spirit that gives you the ability to forgive. The fruits of the spirit are very real living fruits. You must ask for all of them daily, but you got to know what they are. Ask for that.

   I'd like to go through Colossians 3 verses 8 to 13 (Colossians 3:8-13). I'll just mention that to you. It's a parallel with that, you see the same sequence there, anger and then bitterness, and then kindness is listed as the work of the Spirit of God and then culminating with forgiveness because that is the process.

   Step number 3 very quickly now, once anger is in the process of being removed at step one, you've asked for the appropriate spiritual help. Step 2, it is time to make an official statement or declaration of forgiveness before God. It is a biblical example, you see, to verbalize it to God, to tell God that you forgive your father. You don't say to God, "Father in heaven, help me to forgive my father." You say, "Father in heaven, I forgive my dad." You make a statement, you see, an official statement, a declaration of forgiveness, and then you release him or her from the debt. You tell God what the debt is. What does your dad owe you? What does your ex owe you? What do your grown children owe you? What does your wife owe you that she hasn't given you in 30 years of marriage and you're fed up and tired of it and you want it now? Can you forget a mate a debt? If you're a Christian, you can, you must, you must, you have to. And then as you do that, God will begin to do some things in your life. You'll find God working with you far more effectively, at least some of that.

   Step number 4 very quickly, and this in a sense isn't totally a step. It is what you do after you take the 1st 3 steps. In a sense, once the barrier of non-forgiveness is removed, to complete the cycle and to reinforce the fact that the debt is canceled, you need to demonstrate if possible your new attitude of compassion and forgiveness in a visible way, perhaps by sending a gift to the person you've forgiven, maybe a little letter, maybe an invitation to lunch. I wouldn't do that with your ex. I wouldn't invite them to lunch, but you know, as they may not like that, and they're probably remarried, but maybe something to signal the fact that you have changed and that you want to have a kind of a restoration in the relationship.

   Romans chapter 12 verse 18 makes this part of the process clear. Romans 12: notice verse 18 (Romans 12:18). "If at all possible, and God knows it is not always totally possible, but we try as much as lies within you, live peaceably with all men, dearly beloved in verse 19, don't avenge yourselves. Don't try to even the score. Who are you paying back? I've tried that. It doesn't make you happy. Don't do that. Do not avenge yourselves, but rather get placed under anger that it began to go away from the anger that you feel." "It is written vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Eternal." If repayment is necessary, God will do that, but you mustn't do that. Some of you are still doing that, and we've got to stop.

   "Therefore, if your enemy hunger, you ought to feed them." First you forgive and then you feed them, you know. Begin to do these things, you see that that show up, show your goodness and your change. "If he thirst, give him to drink for in so doing, you heap coals of fire on his head." That is you melt them down with your warmth or if there's no reciprocity, you keep on trying at least from time to time.

   At this point, before I close, two questions I've got to answer that need to be addressed. The first one is the following, and they're always asked. Should I tell the person whom I've forgiven what I've done? The answer is that it depends. In some cases it might do more damage than good. There are people that don't know that you bear resentment towards them, and they would be traumatized if they did know. By adding trauma to their life, why inject that into their life and it's not necessary. Sometimes I would not do that.

   I'll give you an example, a personal example that crept up on me while I was preparing the sermon. I was preparing all of these categories of people that you have to forgive. I found one where I have some problems. People have often told me about the difficulty they've had as kids forgiving teachers, and teachers can often find really create trauma in our lives when we're little kids and we're sort of easily influenced, and you know we can carry that with us all of our lives, and I was thinking of mentioning teachers grade or high school or college, and I did a little test on myself. And I analyzed all of my teachers from first grade on up. I forgot what the first grade teacher looked like, but I remembered her name, but I had positive reactions. I wanted to see if I would have any sort of, you know, the volcano would push up any anger and if I might discover someone I hadn't yet forgiven has ever done this before, and I found tow, one at Ambassador College and I won't mention who that is because they're not out of the church, but they did something that hurt me. But it was minor, but I'll tell you, my 3rd grade teacher back in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, when I began to think about her talk about inner anger suddenly surfacing, but I had not known it was there.

   I got this picture in my head. I couldn't quite remember her name, but it came back, but I, the picture came into my, into my mind, you know, I sort of pictured her, and the first thought I came funny out was that old bat. I wonder how many other kids she's messed up, you know, after she mess me up and as little kids we used to call teachers old bats, but I, you know, I just out it came. And it sort of startled me what, you know, why, why am I saying this or feeling this and then I remember what happened in the 3rd grade. That was the year we learned fractions, 1 quarter plus 2/3, those terrible things. And now they were out in about the 5th grade or the 6th I think that I learned it in 3rd, and I struggled with that as an 8-year-old. I really struggled with it. I had a hard time and the teacher, for whatever reason, didn't take time to get me through it. She was in her late 50s. She was very officious, never smiled, and obviously hated children to this day, I don't know why in my generation, so many teachers were invariably in their late 50s officious and hated kids. Yeah, and never married and didn't like what they were doing at all. But that was par for the course, and because I was slow in getting fractions and she was very impatient with me.

   I remember one day she had this big long, this big yard ruler, and she came by angry at me and whacked me across the knuckles, and then you sat out in the corridor for about 3 hours because I was simply not getting the fractions and she was upset and, you know, lost her temper with me. I was traumatized by that. And the end result is I got a mental block towards math in general and fractions in particular, and I carried that with me through grade school, high school, and into Ambassador College. I always got low grades in math. I was always behind. It's a monkey on my back to this day in my household. I don't do my budget. My wife does the budget because I don't like figures. I look at them and something is connected with her.

   And that lady and I have a hard time. Now, you know, in '57 I went to AC my freshman year and I had to take bonehead math to give you a test at Ambassador College and one is for bonehead English and the other is for bonehead math. I got good grades in English and lousy grades in math, and then my class of 35 kids in 1957, I was one of the 4th and I had to take bonehead math. And I sat in that class fuming because I knew she was the problem. I knew she had caused it, you see, and then I forgot about it. The years have gone by, and I'm sitting preparing a sermon on anger and bitterness and unforgiving spirits, and tell me this lady pops into my head, and I discovered I would like to put on boxing gloves and give that lady an opportunity, you see, to have at it with me in the ring. That's about 3 weeks to go. I'm, I'm dealing with it. I'm, I'm dealing with it. I'm still sort of mad at her, by the way. It's not deep, very frankly, this is not a deep trauma. But my wife does the budget, so you know there have been side effects. It's going and maybe when it goes, maybe my mental block for math will go and the monkey will get off my back and maybe my wife will find me getting reinvolved in, you know, adding up how much it costs to pay the house cleaning and things of that type.

   What I want to say is this though, there's no way to tell that lady what I've done and what I'm doing. She wouldn't remember me from a hole in my head. She if she were even alive, it would be over 100. She probably is alive because ladies like that. You know, they never die. They just go on and on and on, paralyzing children as they go. Well, he's probably still there. There's probably on, I think on 5th Street in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I don't know.

   There are cases when you should tell people though, when you should say something and you need to verbalize it. I'll tell you basically the parameters when you need to tell somebody. One is this when the other person is repenting. When they have already indicated their sorrow and you've held on to non-forgiving, but you know that they have repented of what they've done, they need to know that you've forgiven them, that they've already repented, that they're aware of the offense, their sorrow, and especially if they are a church member. The Bible says in Luke 17:3, go to them and if they have verbalized their repentance to you, you should then verbalize your forgiveness to them.

   However, Christ also showed a forgiving attitude to his executioners who had not yet repented. Please understand that were not yet ready for restoration. They were not in the church and Christ, even under those circumstances, said, "Father, I forgive them for what they're doing to me." You forgive others as well who haven't necessarily come to you yet with a repentant spirit, but you must have a forgiving attitude towards them. It's wrong to say you only forgive those who repent. You forgive those who verbalize repentance to you verbally, of course. Then Jesus forgave people who were not yet repentant for what they were doing to him, and we should follow that example.

   Second question, and I'll close in a minute. How do you know that you've forgiven somebody when you've done these things? How do you know the process is complete and it's over and you are free, really free from it, free at last? Two indicators very quickly. The pain begins to diminish. You can think about it, and the pain isn't there any longer. You can bring back the events. You can bring back what has occurred, and the pain simply isn't there. There is a scar, but there's not an open wound. The scar will never go away. I got scars. You want to see my scars? No, they're there. So you see the non-open wounds. The scar is there. I can't forget things that have happened to me in my life, but the pain isn't there because the scar is, the wound is closed. You see, the pain is gone. One way of knowing.

   Second way is the memories begin to fade. Now they will never totally disappear and God forgives us, He forgives and he totally forgets by active will. When you forgive, you cannot totally forget thy active will because you don't have that ability. So you don't forget, you don't forget. But what happens is the memories do begin to fade and slowly you begin to forget and sometimes, you know, you don't even think about some of those hurtful situations for years until you bring them back and the pain is unfair and the memories simply begin to fade. When they began to fade, when it's not raw, it isn't like sushi. It isn't there, it doesn't hurt. It's now fading, you know, the forgiveness has had its perfect word. That's a wonderful time.

   I can talk about my father as I've done today. It doesn't hurt me. I can bring back the memories of things he didn't do that I wanted him to do so badly when I was a kid. I could have eaten it. I mean, I wanted so badly for him to do certain things, and he wouldn't do it or he couldn't do it. I can think about the now I'm not hurt. You know, I have a scar. I can describe it. I can use it maybe to help you, but the pain is basically 95% gone and frankly now the memories have begun to fade, and I'm accept that they go back and dredge these things up. They only come up when I counsel with people. When people say I've gone through this and I can say, well, I had to, and this is how I dealt with it. I don't hurt. There's not a lot of pain.

   There's a very real deliverance brethren, you know, there's a Negro spiritual that says "free at last." Of course Blacks want to tie back to slavery, and there is a physical slavery, which is an awful thing, and I'll tell you when you can't forgive and you won't forgive there's emotional and a mental slavery. And when you can say "free at last. At some of these awful things that are in here, free at last." Thank God Almighty I’m free at last. When you come to that point, some wonderful things can begin to happen. It can open up new spiritual lists that I want to say this. I look forward to the time when my father rises in the white throne judgment. He's the first person I want to see. I've got my list. You have yours on the sheet. We got a list of people that you want to see, and I got, you know, I got it arranged in order. He's number one big letters on my. I want to go to my father. I want to embrace my father. I want to apologize to him, you see, for what I did to him. It's immaterial to me now whether he apologizes to me because you see, I released him from the debt. He doesn't have to do that. I have to do what I have to do though, you see. I want his release. I want his release from my debt. I want to apologize to him. That's terribly important.

   What about you? You see, can you forgive a dead man? I didn't come to the point where I released my father from the debt until 3 years after my father died. I kept working through. He was already dead when the release was given. And it was given and I was free just the same. And you can forgive a dead person. I'm not talking about judicial forgiveness. That's what God does with sin. I'm talking about attitude and the releasing of a debt that you can do.

   Forgiveness gives you a sense of deliverance. You are released from emotional slavery and these impediments you see in our life that have blocked the spirit of God are yanked away. They they're removed. It doesn't happen overnight. It can take weeks and months. My case it took a couple of years. When the anger is gone, God's spirits can begin to flow, at least from time to time somewhat effectively. There is a sense of happiness and peace of mind and tranquility we will never experience from my point of view in the same way otherwise.

   So please think about forgiveness. Please think about the spirit of God. This is the day in which the spirit of God is in that sense to be exhausted. God's power flowing through our lives, but the receptacle you see must be prepared for the work of the spirit of God, we've got to remove the anger and the bitterness, and then finally forgive and as we do that, so many things can happen that are marvelous and wonderful and that will change your life in a very dramatic way. I hope that will begin to happen to you if it needs to happen to you. Been a very fine audience. I know it's been hot. Thank you for overriding the heat and being as attentive as you have been.