The Key to Maintaining Family Unity

What is it, most importantly, that causes relationships to be sustained over the long haul? In a word, it is forgiveness. It is forgiveness.

Why do I say that? Well, first of all, because no matter who you're married to, they're going to fail you. Despite the attacks that threaten to destroy it, the family still remains a cultural adhesive. It stirs feelings of loyalty. It ties people together. But that doesn't mean all families today are truly close, as they should be.

That may even be true in your home, your Christian home. So how do you knit your family together and experience true unity? And what's the benefit of that sort of togetherness?

How difficult is it to pull your family together? What are your responsibilities? Those are vital issues, and John MacArthur considers them today on Grace to You as he shows you the key to maintaining family unity. That's the title of today's lesson.

And now here's John. What is it, most importantly, that causes relationships to be sustained over the long haul? In a word, it is forgiveness.

It is forgiveness. Why do I say that? Well, first of all, because no matter who you're married to, they're going to fail you. They're going to offend you. They're going to misunderstand you. They're going to misinterpret what you mean by what you do. You are going to offend them. You are going to sin against them.

You are going to disappoint them. This is true in any kind of relationship, because we are sinful creatures. We are fallen creatures. And what essentially keeps that from destroying relationships is forgiveness. Forgiveness. In fact, in Proverbs chapter 19 and verse 11, it says that it is a man's glory to overlook a transgression.

Never is a man more lofty or more noble than when he forgives. And frankly, we live in a society that would not accept this, would not acknowledge it, and consequently relationships are flying apart all over the place. We live in a sad, pathetic society on the road to really total self-destruction. And one of the main contributors to that self-destruction is a disdain for forgiveness. People are filled with bitterness, filled with anger, filled with hate, filled with vengeance toward others. They believe that retaliation somehow is a virtue, that getting back is somehow right and healthy. Such attitudes are approved in our culture, approved on every front.

They are approved by counselors and psychologists who tell us we need to vent, we need to tell people what they need to hear. We need to make sure that we don't keep our anger in, that we explode when necessary so we don't carry it around. Such attitudes are exalted in the heroes of our culture who have an in-your-face kind of mentality. There are those in our society who go around killing people because they feel they have been somehow mistreated or abused by cultural inequities, and so they get their pound of flesh by random execution. The worst case, of course, is those kinds of vengeance which take lives. Coming along behind that are the lawsuits, about 300,000 lawsuits a year in America for every piece of flesh that people can get. Any way and every way that people can seek vengeance, they will seek it.

We have 70 percent of the world's lawyers just to keep up with the number of lawsuits. Even the people helpers, the counselors and psychologists will tell us it is not healthy to forgive. In her popular book called Toxic Parents, one that I'm sure you haven't read, but it's quite an interesting book, Susan Forward wrote the book, and she presents what is really the prevailing attitude toward forgiveness in our culture.

She has a chapter in the book entitled, You Don't Have to Forgive. She says we should place the blame for our present problems on our parents because that's where it belongs. They poisoned us.

We all had toxic parents. And the new cry is, I am a victim. It's not my fault and I'm not responsible. Guilt for anything and everything is pushed off on others and left there until vengeance exhausts itself. And there's really no place for forgiveness. In fact, it's often suggested that forgiveness is unhealthy.

It's sort of wimpy. It's sort of cowardly. We've all been oppressed, abused, victimized, and we aren't about to forgive anybody. But the price of vengeance is extremely high. The price of unforgiveness is really severe. Let me tell you some of the things that unforgiveness does. Unforgiveness imprisons people in the past.

So what do you mean by that? Well, as long as you are unwilling to forgive offenders and their offenses, you are shackled to them both. As long as you are unwilling to forgive the offender and the offense, you keep it alive. The pain is there.

You're picking at an open sore, keeping it from healing. When you won't forgive, you are sentencing yourself to go through life feeling as bad now as you did in the past when the offense was committed with no end in sight. You choose to love hate and cultivate it through your life. Unforgiveness imprisons you in the pain of your past. Secondly, unforgiveness inevitably produces deep bitterness, an infectious cancer in the heart. Such bitterness is malignant.

It is devastating. It brings those malignant thoughts, those harassing memories that distort how you see life. Anger rages out of control. Things become unbridled and unchecked and you entertain desperate ideas for revenge.

Every conversation becomes a forum for slandering the person you hate for defamation and even for lies. No, unforgiveness is a very, very severe thing. It will shackle you to the pain of your past and it will provide for you a deep bitterness. On the other hand, forgiveness brings complete freedom from the past and from bitterness in the present. When you study the Bible, there's a lot in it about forgiveness. In fact, there are seventy-five word pictures for forgiveness in the Bible.

Let me give you just a few of them. To forgive is to turn the key, open the cell door and let the prisoner walk free. That's one metaphor. To forgive is to write in large letters across a debt, nothing owed. The Bible says that to forgive is to pound the gavel in a courtroom and declare not guilty. To forgive is to shoot an arrow so high and so far it can never be found again. To forgive is to take out the garbage and dispose of it once and for all, leaving the house fresh and clean. To forgive is to loose the anchor and set the ship free to sail. To forgive is to grant a full pardon to a condemned and sentenced criminal. To forgive is to loosen a stranglehold on a wrestling opponent. To forgive is to sandblast a wall of graffiti, leaving it looking brand new. To forgive is to smash a clay pot into a thousand pieces so it could never be put back together again.

Those are just some of the word pictures in the Bible about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a marvelous, virtuous, liberating, loving attitude and act. It makes sense to forgive. It is healthy. It is wholesome. It is liberating.

It is sensible. It relieves tension. It brings peace.

It solicits love. And again I say, it is man at his noblest. It is his glory to overlook a transgression. And I'll tell you something, no relationship can survive the absence of forgiveness. If you don't forgive continually, you will accumulate bitterness that will destroy any and every relationship. Now there are some compelling biblical, theological and spiritual reasons why we are to forgive and I want to talk to you about them. Beyond the sheer virtue of it, beyond the sheer nobility of it, let me show you a few of the compelling motives for forgiveness. Number one, forgiveness is the most God-like act a person can do. Forgiveness is the most God-like act a person can do. No act is more like God than forgiveness.

Never are you more like Him than when you forgive someone who has offended you. Forgiveness is a verbally declared personally granted promise. It is a statement of undeserved, unearned love that affirms to an offender that there is no anger, no hatred, no desire for vengeance, no retaliation because guilt has been removed, blame has been removed. There is no self-pity and there is no bitterness and that is precisely the attitude of God toward sinners. God grants to us in Scripture a verbally declared personally given promise of undeserved and unearned love that affirms that He is no longer angry, no longer carries hatred or a desire for vengeance, that there will be no retaliation, no condemnation because guilt and blame and shame have been removed. That's the attitude of God toward those who have put their faith in Him. Listen to this character of God extolled in Scripture, Exodus 34 verse 6, then the Lord passed by in front of him, that is Moses, and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth who keeps loving kindness for thousands who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin.

That is characteristic of God. And so we say never are we more like God than when we forgive. Psalm 32, how blessed is He whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity. Psalm 85 says essentially the same, Psalm 130, all throughout Scripture we read of God's forgiveness. He remembers our sins no more. He buries them in the depths of the sea.

He removes them as far as the east is from the west. But if you want the epitome of testimony to the forgiveness of God, you need only to read the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. That son was not unlike many sons, greedy, anxious to get his hands on wealth he had not earned, humanly foolish in the way he spent it. He disdained his father, really hated his father, went out living with those who exploited him and left him in the misery of his own sin when the money ran out.

Slowly he came to his senses while feeding the pigs and his experience in a pigsty was kind of a mirror of his life. He awakened one day and said, my father's servants live better than I, and he said I will go to my father. He didn't expect forgiveness really. He just wanted to say what a bum he'd been and ask if he could be a slave.

He didn't want to ask to be a son. He figured he'd forfeited that. All he wanted was a roof over his head and a little better food than the pigs were getting. So he started on the road back. And you remember the story. Jesus uses that story to teach us how to forgive.

You don't wait even for the sinner to arrive. When you see him far off, you run to meet him. And when he starts to say he's sorry, you silence him with an embrace and a kiss. And you embrace him and love him and put him into the best garment and put the best ring on his finger and get the best meat out of the freezer and cook up the best meal you've got.

Start the family, get the friends there and the family and proudly invite him to be indeed your returned son. That's how God forgives lavishly, grandiosely. The Lord also warns us that acting this way will be greatly misunderstood and it will be greatly unappreciated, even by one's own family.

You remember the son who didn't run away, the one who stayed home, pouted. And he called his father a fool for forgiving his stupid, wasteful brother who ought to be sent back to the pigsty of his own foolish making and not forgiven. But the forgiving father can only say that he loves and will always love the son.

Even though the son has committed gross offenses against him, he will forgive him fully and completely for the sheer joy of reconciliation, for the sheer exhilaration of restoration. Jesus being executed on the cross says, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. Stephen, so godlike, being crushed beneath the bloody stones that pummeled his body, said, Father, lay not this sin to their charge.

Sir Thomas More was the Lord Chancellor of England after having been tried at Westminster and condemned to death with no just cause, said this to his judges as he stood before them, and I quote, As the apostle Paul held the clothes of those who stoned Stephen to death, and as they are both now saints in heaven and shall continue their friends forever, so I verily trust shall therefore most heartily pray that though your lordships have now here on earth been judges to my condemnation, we may nevertheless hereafter cheerfully meet in heaven in everlasting salvation, end quote. That's godlike, to have such a forgiving spirit toward your executioners. God has been overtly, blatantly, unjustly offended, blasphemed and dishonored, and yet longingly, eagerly forgives just for the sheer joy and glory of reconciliation. That is, by the way, Paul's salient point in Ephesians chapter 4 verse 32, Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you, chapter 5 verse 1, therefore be imitators of God. You imitate God when you forgive.

This is a call to godlikeness. Be a forgiving person. It's hard to destroy a relationship if you continually forgive every offense. Colossians 3, 13, Paul says, bearing with one another and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. It is godlike to forgive. Beloved, in your marriage, you are headed for major disaster if you continually accumulate hostility because of offenses. If you continue to allow those bitternesses to develop. But whenever there's an offense and immediate forgiveness, it's disappearing.

It's gone. That's the key to any relationship. Children, the same toward your parents. Parents, the same toward your children.

Brother and sister, brother and brother, sister and sister, it's the same situation. Forgiveness, forgiveness, because that is like God. Practice the godlike virtue. Second, in thinking about motives for forgiveness, it is not murder only which is forbidden by the sixth commandment. It is not murder only which is forbidden by the sixth commandment. The sixth commandment, thou shalt not kill, involves much more than just the idea of murder.

You say, well, how do you know that? Because Jesus made that very clear. Matthew chapter 5, listen to verses 21 and 22. You have heard that the ancients were told, you will not commit murder. You shall not commit murder.

That was the command. And whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court. In other words, if you commit murder, you've committed a crime, and you're liable to the court's verdict against you. But, Jesus said, I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court.

In other words, the point is not only that God says don't kill, but implied in that is the motive or the attitude that results in that, namely hatred. Jesus says, I'm telling you, don't even be angry with your brother. Don't even say raka to your brother. Don't say you fool, raka was some kind of an epithet. We have a number of those kinds of curses that we put on people when people are angry.

Raka was one from ancient times. You fool another one. Jesus said, when I refer to the commandment, you shall not kill, I'm including all of that, all of that. Anger, wrath, malice, lack of forgiveness, desire for revenge, vengeance, it's all included in the sixth commandment. And I say it again, it is not murder only which is forbidden by the sixth commandment. All anger, all wrath, all malice, all evil and intent, all bitterness, all of that. Jesus, you see, when He said, if you even are angry, if you even say a curse word toward someone or call someone a fool, you are a murderer at heart. When He said that, He swept away all self-righteousness.

He unmasked the heart. Raka was a slanderous thing to say, a common epithet with no modern equivalent except that it seems as though those kinds of epithets always like to use hard consonants, a term of abuse and derision and arrogant contempt and hate. You fool was to call someone godless, to curse them, to say you're guilty enough to go to hell. If you are angry with someone, confess it as an iniquity. If you seek vengeance toward someone, confess it as a sin. Recognize that your lack of forgiveness is sinful, it is selfish, that you must put your selfishness aside because it is exactly that undeserved affection for yourself that makes you aggravate the faults of others who offend you.

You understand that? The reason you're so mad about what someone did to you is because you have an elevated opinion of yourself. If you really want to know what you deserve, it's hell.

Anything else is just benefit. Be humble enough so that no offense against you is worthy of hate. No offense against you is worthy of forgiveness because you see yourself as nothing. It's the opposite of self-esteem. All the self-esteem cult does is feed this monster by giving people permission to have an elevated view of themselves so that anything against them in any way, shape, or form, however trivial or minimal, is cause for great aggravation and justifiable offense. Kill your selfishness. I say it again, it is exactly that undeserved affection for yourself that makes you aggravate the faults of others who offend you.

Be aware of the fact that God has commanded not only that you not kill, but that you not have a murderous attitude. Thirdly, and this is a very important point when you talk about forgiveness. You must remember, thirdly, that whoever has offended you has offended God greater.

Whoever has offended you has offended God greater. Sometimes I hear somebody say, I'm getting out of this marriage. I have had it. I am up to my ears in this. I'm not going to take this another day.

I'm not living with this. And they think that that's the ultimate offense against them when the reality of it is that if there has been sin in the life of that person who has offended you, it has offended God far greater than it has offended you. And listen, if God who is the most holy has forgiven him the greater offense, can't you the least holy forgive him the lesser? Whatever it is that that sinful spouse has done against you, he or she has done against God. And God forgives fully, totally, freely, completely. And if God who is the most holy and the most offended can forgive, can you the least holy and the least offended not forgive? Now, God is the one most severely sinned against in any situation. Any sin is most severely against him. We, frankly, are somewhat incidental. So what if it offended me?

That's really incidental to the main issue. And God who is so severely offended forgives so readily, how can we so minimally offended not forgive? This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. John is Chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary. He's also been Grace to You's featured speaker for 53 years now. And in all those years of ministry, few messages have been requested more than the one you heard today.

It's titled, The Key to Maintaining Family Unity. Now, you know, John, it's possible that you've brought some listeners face to face with their past today. And maybe it's a family situation where they should have offered forgiveness, but they didn't. Is it ever too late to undo damage that's done by a lack of forgiveness? It's never too late to be forgiving.

It's never too late. First of all, it frees your own soul. You know, I wrote the book, The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness.

And when I chose that title, it kind of surprised some people. Why would you give so much credit to forgiveness that it produces freedom and power? Because that's exactly what it does. It frees a person from bitterness, from hostility, from thoughts of vengeance, retaliation, which just eats people alive.

And it has the power to restore a relationship, maybe even to a higher level than it was before the offense. So I just would love every believer to understand the freedom and power of forgiveness. You all have issues in your life where you have conflict with some people. We all do.

I do. And I wish that people would come and be restored. I wish that people didn't feel the way they do about me or somebody in my family. And we all deal with that. And that can be very destructive in your life and in the lives of others. So the pathway to meaningful relationships always goes through forgiveness, because we're always going to offend.

We're sinful. And what destroys relationships in the end is not some offense, but the lack of forgiveness. If you want a full, rich life and you want to be restored in relationships, you need to be forgiving. And this book will help you with that. You can order a copy of The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness from Grace to You.

That's right. And this is a great book, The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness. It takes a practical look at all aspects of forgiveness, showing you how to forgive others and how to understand God's forgiveness of you.

And it's really an important book. Order your copy today. Call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org. The title again, The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness.

And it's also available in Spanish, like many of John's books. You can purchase yours when you call toll-free 800-55-GRACE or visit gty.org. And let me remind you that you'll find a number of sermons on forgiveness available for free at our website. Log on to gty.org and search our sermon archive. It has 3,500 total messages, and they cover every verse in the New Testament and much of the Old. You'll find also daily devotionals, the Grace to You television program, and much more.

All of it free at gty.org. And to keep up to date with what's ahead on our radio broadcast, follow us on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and check out our YouTube channel. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace to You television this weekend with your family. Check your local listings for Channel and Times and be back tomorrow for more practical tips on how you can make your home a place of harmony and peace. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.