Pardon of Prayer, Part 2

Unforgiveness will block God's miracles in your life. Dr. Tony Evans says there's an important link between being forgiven and being forgiving. If you don't do unilateral forgiveness, then you'll stay hostage to something that can never be fixed.

This is the alternative broadcast featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans. When we're angry or resentful, it's difficult to find the will to deliberately forgive someone who's wronged us. But in this classic message from Dr. Evans, we'll learn that making that effort, even when we don't feel like it, not only benefits us emotionally, but also helps us grow into the person God wants us to be.

Let's listen in. Forgiveness is the decision to relieve a person from an obligation or a debt incurred because of an infraction or a sin against you. When you decide to do that, regardless of where your emotions may be at a certain given time, you're operating on the biblical definition of forgiveness. Now, at this point, we need to clarify the kind of forgiveness we're talking about. There are two types of forgiveness when it comes to our relationship with God, because the first part of the prayer is, forgive us our debts, because you're praying to God. The first kind is legal forgiveness. The biblical word for legal forgiveness is justification. When the Bible says we are justified, God in heaven declares us legally not guilty for the infractions against Him.

Jesus on the cross paid your bill. Jesus on the cross paid my bill, which allows God the Father to credit us as not guilty, not because we're not guilty, we are guilty, but because the debt that was incurred by being guilty was picked up by the death of Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, who paid the penalty for our sin. So that's an eternal issue settled when you come to Christ for salvation.

But that's not what he's talking about here. He's now dealing with your relationship with your Father, our Father who art in heaven. He's dealing with relational forgiveness. Legal forgiveness is, have I accepted Christ? Relational forgiveness is, am I in fellowship with my Father? So God not only wants to be the Savior who takes you to heaven, but the Father who fellowships with you on earth. So forgiveness means that God cancels out the thing that's breaking up the intimacy that He wants to have with you.

Now I want to first talk to you about two categories. First is unilateral forgiveness. Forgiveness that you grant even when the person hasn't asked for it. Why would you give unilateral forgiveness? Nobody said I'm sorry, nobody's repented, and you forgive anyway. Unilateral forgiveness is given, one, because the issue is so small.

In other words, it didn't matter. They did wrong, but you don't care because it didn't hurt you that much, and it's something you can forget. So you don't even care if they say I'm sorry if they repent.

So that's unilateral because it's so small. Another reason you would do unilateral forgiveness is the person refuses to say I'm sorry, refuses to confess, refuses to repent. They say I ain't gonna repent. No, no, I'm kind of glad I hurt you.

I'm glad I did it. So they're refusing. Another one is they can't repent because they've died. They hurt you when years ago, they've since passed on, so they can't make amends even if they wanted to.

They can't because they're not here, or maybe you don't even know where they are anymore. So even though you're still hurting for it, they moved away, they've gone somewhere, so they can't repent. If you don't do unilateral forgiveness, then you'll stay hostage to something that can never be fixed, because they've died, they've gone, or they're never gonna say I'm sorry. Utilateral forgiveness is to set you free. It's to forgive what happened even when the person is not sorry about what happened because you don't want to be held hostage by what happened. So it sets you free.

Let me try to illustrate it this way. I'm driving down the street and a man, I'm in my lane, and he comes over and swipes the side of my car. Just the whole side of my car, he swipes, but he keeps going.

Exactly. He kept going, I mean, he sped off, and I'm driving the car to work every day. People are telling me, your car is messed up, your car is dented, your car is scraped, and I'm telling them, yeah, I know, I know, and I'm telling them the story. I go for weeks with a dented vehicle, basking in the pain of my dentedness, being reminded every day of the infraction and the sin that was committed to me on the road until one of my staff reminded me, you know you got insurance.

I had gotten so comfortable with my dance that I learned to live with it because I was so busy being upset about what happened to me, I didn't take advantage of the solution to heal the dent in my car. Many of us are living our lives with dent on our souls. We've been carrying that thing around for day after day, week after week, year after year, and we keep seeing this dent if he hadn't done it to me, if she hadn't done it to me, if they hadn't done it to me, if I hadn't done it to me.

If we just see the dent, we tell everybody about the dent. When Jesus Christ has provided you insurance, Stephen is being stoned to death in Acts chapter 7. They've come out to destroy him in verses 54 to 60, and and they're not repentant, they're not sorry, they're stoning them to death, and in the middle of being stoned to death, he says, Father, forgive them. Don't hold this to their account, but they are stoning you, but I'm not gonna let their stones remove God's work in my life.

I'm not gonna let their stones. And what did he see? He saw Jesus standing on the right-hand side of the Father. Many of us don't see Jesus because we keep staring at the dent. We don't see the insurance policy of God's grace at work because we won't do unilateral forgiveness. That's where you forgive when there is no apology.

They aren't sorry, but you decide I'm going to not credit this to your account, even though you're guilty. Once you unilaterally forgive, then vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay. The second kind of forgiveness when it comes to the categories is transactional forgiveness. Unilateral is where you forgive even if there is no opportunity for apologies and confession and repentance.

Transactional forgiveness is different. This is where a person repents of what they did to you. They come and they confess at first, I'm sorry for what I did. That's confession. Confession is I agree that I did you wrong. Repentance takes confession to the next step. Repentance is the decision to make it right, okay? So I confess what you said I did, I did, and it was wrong. Then repentance is I want to turn from doing it, and I want to make restitution. I want to make it right.

Whatever kind of right is possible to be made, I want to do it. The Bible calls that fruit of repentance. In other words, how do you know if a person's truly repented?

Because their words don't mean anything. They can say I'm sorry and not mean it. How do you know that the confession was real? You know the confession was real when there is visible, there are visible acts of repentance.

That is, trying to make it right at whatever level is possible to correct it. The reason for transactional forgiveness is because that opens the door for a restoration of the relationship. The relationship can now be restored because repentance has been requested and forgiveness has been granted, opening up the opportunity for reconciliation. In unilateral forgiveness, you can forgive but there is no reconciliation. With transactional forgiveness, you forgive and the goal is to try to reconcile and you heal the breach that caused the problem. When a couple is fighting and one says, well, you did this to me, and they say you're right. How do I make it right?

What visible thing can I do to show you I'm serious? The whole goal of that is to heal a broken relationship. In unilateral, they're not sorry, so you can heal that relationship.

You may not be able to stop the divorce because they're not sorry, but you can still go on with your life because you're not gonna let them dent your soul for the rest of your life. That's the forgiveness that seeks to build a bridge to relationship. When the prodigal son saw that he had left his father, Luke 15, he had left his father, he was not in a pigpen, he said, I have sinned. That's confession. But then he got up out the pigpen and he came back home and he said, make me as one of your servants. In other words, he talked a good game in the pen.

I'm sorry. But when he got up out of that pen, made his way back home, notice his father didn't go to get him. He had to come back to his father.

But when he came back to his father, his father canceled the debt and restored him to the relationship of father and son. In just a moment, we'll hear more about both sides of forgiveness when we return to this lesson from Dr. Evans' timeless series, Freedom Through Forgiveness. Through the messages presented in this collection, you'll gain an understanding of the pardon you've received from God and learn how to pass on that same kind of forgiveness to people who've hurt you and even how to forgive yourself. And right now, we'd like to send you a copy of Freedom Through Forgiveness as our gift when you make a donation to help support the work of the Urban Alternative here on the air and around the world.

This special offer will only be available for a limited time, but if we hear from you right away, we'll include an added bonus, a companion book for this series that explains why the person who benefits most from your forgiving heart is you. It's called 30 Days to Victory Through Forgiveness. Visit us today at tonyevans.org for the details or call our resource center at 1-800-800-3222.

That's 1-800-800-3222. I'll repeat that contact information for you following the second part of today's lesson. Forgiveness, canceling of debt, it's legal when you accept Christ. It's relational when you confess your sin to Jesus Christ and repent of your wrong direction and get back in fellowship with God.

Now, why does this matter? Okay, you don't want to miss this because everything I have said is contingent on or determined by what I'm getting ready to say. Let's reread the verse. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Let me read chapter 6, verses 14 and 15. For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your Heavenly Father, because you're already a Christian, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father, because you're already a Christian, will not forgive your transgressions.

Well, wait a minute. He can't be talking about heaven, because I'm already forgiven for all my transgressions when it comes to my legal relationship. But he's talking about his relationship with you on earth. So now, let's read the verse. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Let me read it in another way. Forgive us our debts to the same degree that we forgive our debtors. To put it another way, a refusal to forgive the bill that somebody owes you will cause God not to forgive the bill you owe him.

And the bill you owe him is probably bigger than the bill somebody else owes you. Maybe somebody hurt you once, twice, three times. We hurt God every single day. We hurt him with the thoughts we think, the things we do, the places we go. We hurt God. God weeps over us every day. But every time we come to him, he's canceling, canceling, canceling.

He says, now don't come to me and ask me to cancel for you what you are unwilling to cancel for somebody else. In Matthew chapter 18, a long story is told. It's told of a man who owed the king 20 million dollars.

In today's dollars, 20 million dollars. He begged the king for forgiveness. The king canceled his debt. He went out from the king celebrating a debt cancel. But then a man who owed him $20,000 came to him and said, please, please, please, please, please forgive me.

I can't pay you now. He put the man in prison because he couldn't pay the $20,000 debt when he owed the king 20 million dollars. When the king found out that the man who owed him 20 million was harsh to the man who owed him 20,000, he recanted on his decision and put the man in prison because he wanted something from the king. He was unwilling to give to somebody else. So God is saying, don't tell me you want me to expunge your record in heaven and you're not willing to offer that to somebody else on earth.

Let me ask you this question. If we pull down this screen and put all your sins on the screen and we went public, how would you feel about that? Well, when you look at the screen and you see all we've done against God, what's your complaint about that person that did something against you? In Mark chapter 11, Jesus is telling the story and he says in verse 20 to 26, he says, have faith in God. And when you have faith in God, he says, you can move mountains. A mountain in the Bible is an unovercomable situation, situation you can't fix. It's called a mountain in the Bible. He says, you can say to this mountainous situation in your life, be moved and it will be cast into the sea. Stay with me here. So you got a problem in your life you can't fix.

You got an addiction you can't get over, you're living in fear, maybe you're afraid person all the time, maybe you're controlled by anger, maybe you're living as a defeated single. Whatever the mountain is, you try to get rid of it, you went to counseling to get rid of it, it's a mountain. And God says you can speak to the mountain and it'll go into the sea if you have faith in God.

But what a lot of people don't do is read the whole passage. Cuz after he says you can remove mountains, the only way God will help you move a mountain, he says, is if I see you forgiving. If you don't forgive, you won't be able to get rid of your mountain, get rid of that addiction, heal that relationship, solve that emotional problem, because you're living in unforgiveness. Unforgiveness will block God's miracles in your life. So if you need a miracle in your life, forgiveness is a condition of that miracle. Proverbs chapter 19 verse 11 says, it is to a man's glory to overlook a fault.

That when a man overlooks a fault, God is able to shine his glory on that man. You say, but I can't feel it, I can't get my emotions up to forgive. Remember, forgiveness is not your emotions, it's your decisions. What happens is, we let our emotions cancel our decision. The decision is, I have decided to forgive.

How do I know I've decided? Cuz I'm not gonna throw it up in your face. I'm not gonna bring it up again.

I'm not gonna use it as a battering ram. I may not control how I feel, but I control what I do or say. Joseph forgave his brothers to save a nation. He said, God brought me here. He used your mess to save a whole nation. Nelson Mandela imprisoned for over 27 years because of the evil of apartheid in Africa. Imprisoned for 27 years? It's not fair.

It's not fair. Apartheid was a crime. Apartheid is the evil. But he got out of prison and decided to forgive the people who imprisoned him.

He used a soccer game to bring black and whites together, and all of a sudden, he becomes president, apartheid collapses, there's now one vote for every person, all because a man decided, rather than retaliate, I choose to forgive. There will be no healing unless there is sincere repentance coupled by authentic forgiveness. If you keep going back to slavery to make your point, if you keep going back to Jim Crow to make your point, I'm not talking about if it's happening today, but if you keep reaching back there, back there is real and back there painful and what our grandparents and great-grandparents went through was horrific, but as long as you go back there, there'll be no restoration here. Yes, there must be repentance on this side, but there must be forgiveness over here, or there will be no reconciliation even in the Church of Jesus Christ.

I'm just using that to bring history to make a point now. No, as long as you do that, you just block God from doing his supernatural work, not because it's not real, and if it's present currently, it should be addressed currently, but because God wants to heal and he will not heal if there's unforgiveness because he went to the cross. Some of the forgiveness we need is not toward another person, it's toward ourselves. If I hadn't done that, if I hadn't gone there, if I hadn't been with them, if I hadn't, if I hadn't, and you know because you live a life of regret. If I hadn't, if I hadn't, if I hadn't. Look, Jesus says in Matthew 22, he says, what I want you to do is I want you to love your neighbor like you love yourself.

Okay, that's what he said. When it comes to forgiveness, the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 13 5, love keeps no record. Love doesn't keep a record. So if you want to love your neighbor, that means you don't keep a record when you forgive them, like you love yourself, which God doesn't even want you keeping a record on you.

Learn from what you did, but he does not want you continue going back there in your mind, in your thoughts, and in your in your lifestyle. Oh, if I hadn't, if I hadn't. Okay, you did. You did.

That's a reality. Now you must decide, yes, I'm not gonna go back there anymore. God, I've repented for you. You've canceled it. So how can I be bigger than God holding on to something he canceled? He says, if you repented, I canceled it. Then you must let it go by a decision. And every time the devil brings it up to your mind, you must inform him that that has already been dealt with on the cross. I've learned from it, but I'm not going back there. The question on the floor is, how long are you gonna let the past hold you hostage?

How long are you gonna let the devil hold you hostage? You are to be set free, but in a righteous way, by acknowledging to God, forgive me my debts on a regular basis to the degree that I let others off the hook, either unilaterally or transactionally, Lord, I'm going to move forward with my life because I'm tired of blocking your grace and your mercy from me through my unforgiveness, even if it's my unforgiveness of myself. It also means you need to get some things right with some folks who you need to repent to, or you need to tell people who've hurt you that either may not know that they've hurt you or know how bad they hurt you. That's why James 5 16 says, confess your faults to one another.

Why? That you might be healed. Dr. Tony Evans on the important role forgiveness plays in our lives, part of his timeless series from the archives called Freedom Through Forgiveness. As I mentioned earlier, this audio collection, as well as a copy of the companion book for the series, 30 Days to Victory Through Forgiveness, is yours with our thanks when you make a donation to this broadcast ministry. Just visit us online at tonyevans.org to get all the details. Again, that's tonyevans.org, or call our 24-hour Resource Center at 1-800-800-3222 and let one of our team members help you. That's 1-800-800-3222. It's easy to talk about forgiveness when someone cuts you off on the highway or does something else to annoy you, but when you're the victim of a hateful tragedy like the ones reported so often in the news, that's a different story. Be sure to tune in tomorrow as we explore what's involved in the biblical call to forgive one another.