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Now here's today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. This is the coming year with the brand new 2024 daily devotional, From Pathway to Victory. This exquisite book bound in forest green leather and inlaid with brown and gold foil features over 530 pages of biblical inspiration from Dr. Robert Jeffress. That's a new devotional reading deeply rooted in God's word for every Monday through Friday and through every season in the new year. Get a copy for yourself and request several more for your family and friends when you go to ptv.org. This is Robert Jeffress in response to the horrific attack on Israel. I've written a brand new book called Are We Living in the End Times?
Go to ptv.org to order your copy. It's one thing to make changes and say goodbye to regrets we're responsible for. But how do you deal with those hurts in your life that are not a result of what you've done, but what others have done to you? Again, we've talked so far about self-inflicted regrets.
But how do you handle regrets caused by others? Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. You know, few topics are more personal than the issue of forgiveness.
We've all felt the sting of being wronged by another, and we've all struggled with letting go of resentment. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress refutes four common misconceptions about forgiveness that keep us from moving on. Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message.
Dr. Jeffress? Thanks, David, and welcome to this Friday edition of Pathway to Victory. We're glad to have you along today as we continue a brand new teaching series called Say Goodbye to Regret. Think back for a moment to your most cherished friendships. Can you recall a few times when you failed that relationship by making a blunder?
Maybe something you said that drove a wedge in your friendship? Today on Pathway to Victory, I'm going to show you the biblical path to overcoming your regret. You see, God doesn't want you to be stuck in the past.
He doesn't want your faux pas to become a barrier to receiving His best for you. And in our brand new teaching series and in my book that shares the same title, I'll show you how to say goodbye to regret. I would be very pleased to send a copy of my book to your home today. It comes with my sincere thanks when you remember to include a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory. In addition to relationships, my book addresses nine other topics such as saying goodbye to marital regrets, saying goodbye to spiritual regrets, and saying goodbye to financial regrets.
David and I will give you more information at the close of today's message. But right now, let's consider what the Bible has to say about cultivating healthy relationships with those you love. I titled today's message Say Goodbye to Relationship Regrets. Somebody has said that one of the greater jokes God has played on us was giving us the power to remember our past, but leaving us no power to change it.
Now, I'm not sure that's completely true. As we've seen in our series Say Goodbye to Regrets, it is true we can't erase the past, but we can make decisions right now that reverse the consequences of past mistakes and more importantly, reshape our tomorrow and our eternity. Now, in our series Say Goodbye to Regrets, up to this point, we've dealt with what I call self-inflicted regrets, regrets that are the result of what we've done or haven't done. We've talked about regrets about our marriages or regrets in parenting. We'll talk about how to say goodbye to work regrets and money regrets and other things. But today, we're going to deal with a certain category of regrets, regrets over offenses other people have committed against us. It's one thing to make changes and say goodbye to regrets we're responsible for, but how do you deal with those hurts in your life that are not a result of what you've done, but what others have done to you? For example, it's one thing to say you're going to rekindle your desire for your mate, but what do you do about a mate who has lost their desire for you and wants to end the marriage?
You may be able to get back on track in your work life by reapplying yourself, but what do you do when your employer unfairly dismisses you? It's one thing to say I'm going to start spending more time with my kids, but what do you do about a drunk driver who extinguishes the life of your child? Again, we've talked so far about self-inflicted regrets, but how do you handle regrets caused by others? The theme of today's sermon is very simple. Those who refuse to forget the hurts of others become prisoners of regret. Now, in the years I've been your pastor, I've had the privilege to be your pastor, I have preached a lot of messages on the subject of forgiveness. I've written a book on the subject of forgiveness, and people sometimes wonder, pastor, why do you talk so much about forgiveness?
Are you struggling with some hurt in your past that you just can't let go of? And the answer to that is no. I mean, honestly, I have a lot of faults, plenty of faults. If you don't believe it, just ask Amy.
She can listen for you. I have many things I struggle with. Unforgiveness isn't one of them. I learned a long time ago that not forgiving people is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.
It doesn't work that way. You only hurt yourself. So I'm not preaching out of any personal struggle, but here's what I've seen over 40 years, after 40 years in ministry. Forgiveness is the number one struggle that most people have in their spiritual life. Either receiving God's forgiveness or extending that forgiveness to other people. And that's why I preach about it so often. Today we're going to talk about forgiveness versus revenge when it comes to the regrets caused by others in your life.
For example, C.S. Lewis once said, forgiveness is a beautiful word until we have somebody to forgive. I mean, we extol the virtues of forgiveness in general, but when it comes to specifically forgiving, we have a hard time with it, don't we? I mean, for example, how does forgiveness apply to a woman whose husband continually, physically abuses her in the presence of their children? How does it apply to a retiree who loses his retirement savings because of the fraud of a fellow Christian? How does forgiveness apply to a pastor who's unfairly dismissed from his church because of a jealous associate? How does forgiveness apply to a father whose teenage child is killed in a brutal gang attack? By the way, all four of those instances are not theoretical.
They are actual incidents that I've dealt with in counseling with other people. We're not talking about a hypothetical forgiveness, we're talking about real forgiveness. Well, God tells us that there's a better way than revenge. We know that forgiveness is the preferred option. We know that turning the other cheek is preferable to breaking your opponent's nose. We know that intellectually, but we have a hard time actually applying it when it comes to us.
Why is that? Some people would say one reason people have a hard time forgiving is they're not Christians. They can't give away what they haven't received. And the Bible gives some legitimacy to that explanation. It's really impossible, honestly, to forgive somebody until you experience God's forgiveness in your life. As children, we learn the verse Ephesians 4-32, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ has forgiven you.
We've seen the relationship between receiving God's forgiveness and forgiving others in a parable we've looked at before in Matthew 18. Remember the story of the slave who owed the king 10,000 talents? A talent was 70 pounds of gold, so do the math with 10,000 talents, how much gold that is.
Calculated in today's term, that would be $16 billion. The slave owed the king $16 billion, and one day the king said, I want my money back. He had every right to have it back. It was a debt that he was owed, but obviously the slave had no way to repay a $16 billion debt.
So what did he do? He fell down before the king and begged for mercy. The king felt compassion for him and forgave him, literally released him of that debt.
That's what the word forgive means, to release somebody of a debt. Now here's a slave who's been forgiven $16 billion. He goes out and finds a fellow slave who owed him 100 denarii.
A denarius was 16 cents, 100 denarii would be $16. He owed him a measly $16, but he didn't have it to repay the first slave, and so he begged for mercy. Please have mercy on me and I'll repay you everything. But unlike the grace the first slave had been extended, he was unwilling to extend that grace to the fellow slave. He said, no, I'm not going to forgive the debt, and I'm going to have you thrown into prison until you repay everything. Remember when the king heard what had happened? He called that first slave in, and he said, how is it that you who have been forgiven so much would refuse to forgive so little?
And he threw that first slave into prison until he repaid everything. And then, remember how Jesus ended the story in verse 35 of Matthew 18? So shall my heavenly Father do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart. There's a link between receiving forgiveness and extending forgiveness. Jesus isn't saying that you haven't been wrong, you haven't been hurt, you deserve to be repaid for what's happening to you.
He's not denying any of that, but he's saying this, keep your hurt in perspective. Remember, the difference between how much somebody has wronged you and how much you have wronged God is the difference between $16 and $16 billion. Forgiveness is the obligation of those who have truly been forgiven. Jesus said, if you forgive others, God will forgive you.
If you do not forgive others, neither will the heavenly Father forgive you. Was Jesus saying you can lose your salvation? No. Was he saying you earn your salvation?
No. But he is saying this, if you find it impossible to forgive that person who has wronged you, if the cry of your heart is, I will not forgive, I will not forgive, I will not forgive. It's not that you've lost your salvation.
It's probably you never had it to begin with. Because when you understand the real debt that God has forgiven you as a Christian, you can't help but want to extend that same forgiveness to others. One reason people don't forgive is they truly haven't been forgiven.
But I've come to understand that's not the only reason. There's a second reason that people don't forgive and that is they don't really understand what forgiveness is. More than 25 years ago, I decided to write a book on forgiveness.
It was such a prevalent problem. And amazingly, after 25 years, it's still in print when forgiveness doesn't make sense. Not because I'm a wonderful writer, but because it's a topic that everybody wrestles with. And as I prepared to write this book, I partnered with the Barna Research Group and we did a national survey on the subject of forgiveness among American Christians. And in our survey, we found that most Christians have an unbiblical understanding of forgiveness.
They don't understand what it is. And there are four fallacies that keep many Christians as prisoners of regrets over the hurts of others. Let me mention those four myths about forgiveness, four fallacies about forgiveness that may truly be keeping you from forgiving that person in your life who needs to be forgiven.
Fallacy number one, forgiveness must be earned. You just can't let that offender off the hook, we think. Why, that's not right. You can't let him go unpunished. It's not right for you. It's really not right for him. He has to earn forgiveness.
But here's the problem. There are really two problems with that idea of thinking your offender can earn your forgiveness. First of all, earning forgiveness is really impossible when you think about it.
Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. You've heard it say, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, don't resist the one who does evil, and so forth. You know, we think of that as a barbaric rule. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
But really, it was a law, we call it lex talionis, the law of retribution, that was given to keep order in society. In other words, the punishment should not be any greater than a crime. It shouldn't be a life for an eye, it's an eye for an eye. It's not a tooth for a toenail, it's a tooth for a tooth.
In other words, you measure the punishment. But here's the problem. Gandhi pointed out the problem with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is that eventually everybody turns out blind and toothless.
There's got to be a better way. And in the end, when you've lost your tooth, you've still lost your tooth. You lose your eye, you've lost your eye. It's really impossible to earn forgiveness. For example, what could somebody pay back to you to make up for a child killed by a drunk driver? How could anybody repay you for a marriage that is torn apart by adultery? How do you repay for a reputation that has been lost through slander? Once it's lost, it's lost.
What do you do about that? It's impossible to earn forgiveness. Secondly, and this is key, earning forgiveness really binds you to your offender.
It makes you a partner with your offender when you're waiting on them to do something before you free yourself from the prison of regrets. I remember reading about a man named Kevin Tennell in 1982. He was convicted of drunk driving that resulted in the death of an 18-year-old girl. The family wanted $1.5 million to be paid for restitution. They didn't get that. Instead, they got $936. But this is what the court ordered. They ordered that Kevin Tennell would pay that debt $1 at a time. Every week on Friday, the day of the girl's death, he was required to send the family a check for $1. And he had to do that for 936 weeks. The punishment was obvious. The court wanted Kevin to remember every week what he had done to extinguish the life of this girl. But here's the problem. He mailed the check, but the family was forced every week to open the mailbox and remember what had happened to their daughter.
And after 936 weeks, after the payment was made, they still didn't have their daughter back. You see, when you require your offender to do something, you are making yourself a prisoner to them. You remember, maybe you've been to those old-fashioned picnics before, and remember for the games, they sometimes have the three-legged races. And you would have your leg bound to a partner, and you all would hobble down to the finish line together. You'd try to go as fast as you could, but you couldn't do it. And if you ever had a thought like I did, I would think, how can I get loose from this jerk so I can get further and faster? But you see, three-legged races don't allow for solo contenders.
You have to have a partner. You can travel no farther or faster than he's able to. It's the same way when you require that your offender ask for forgiveness or earn your forgiveness, you are making yourself emotionally bound to that other person.
You can travel no farther or faster in life than they're willing to go. But forgiveness is the process by which we separate ourselves from our offender. We say what you did was wrong. If we don't say it out loud, we say it in our hearts, you did wrong, you deserve to suffer for what you did, but I'm going to let God deal with you.
I'm going to be free of you so I can get on with my life. That's what forgiveness does. Earning forgiveness binds you to your offender. There's a second mistake that many people have about their thinking of forgiveness. They think that forgiveness is a one-time act.
We think that we can forgive a person once for all and never have to deal with it again. But did you know that outside of becoming a Christian, there really are no one-time decisions about anything that's important in life. I mean, somebody decides they're going to quit smoking. But if you've ever had that experience, you know, you can make that decision. You may be successful in it, but that decision doesn't quench your desire for nicotine.
It's something you battle with for weeks, for months, perhaps for the rest of your life. Or you can make a decision in your marriage. When you are married to somebody, you make a vow that you shall be faithful to them and to them alone till death shall part you, and you're sincere about it. But at some point in your marriage, you'll be tempted to break that marriage vow and you have to remake that commitment.
All of us who are Christians drift in our relationship with God, and one day we decide to rededicate our lives to Christ. That's important. Those decisions are important. But we know it's not a once-for-all decision.
The tendency is to drift again. And so it is with forgiveness. There's no one-time act of forgiveness. It's something you will struggle with with that same person for that same offense many times later. That doesn't mean you haven't forgiven them.
It just means you have to keep on forgiving them. Do you remember the late Corrie Ten Boom who wrote the book The Hiding Place? She writes about having difficulty continuing to remember what a Nazi soldier had done to her in the concentration camp at Ravensbruck, how he had mistreated Corrie and her sister Betsy. And for several weeks she struggled because she couldn't forget this, and she was afraid that it meant she had not forgiven the soldier.
She writes, God's help came to me in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks. He said, up in that church tower, and he pointed to the church tower, is a bell which is rung by a sexton pulling on the rope. The bell keeps on ringing even after the sexton has let go of the rope.
First ding, then dong, slower and slower until there is a final dong and it finally stops. I believe the same things are true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we've been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we shouldn't be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while.
They're just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down. And so Corrie said it proved to be true. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but they came less and less often, and at last they stopped altogether. And so I discovered another secret of forgiveness. We can trust God not only above our emotions but also above our thoughts.
Isn't that great? Maybe those ding-dongs will stop in your life. Maybe they will never stop, but don't miss the point. Forgiveness is a continual decision. That's why when Peter said, Lord, how many times shall we forgive, seven times?
Jesus said, no, 70 times seven. Forgiveness is not a one-time act. A third mistake people make in their thinking about forgiveness is that forgiveness is synonymous with forgetting. It is synonymous with forgetting. We talk about forgive and forget as if they're the same thing. People think if I haven't forgotten, then I haven't forgiven.
But the two are not the same. Remember this. Forgetting is a biological function. The reason we forget more and more things, where we put the keys and so forth, is our brain grows older and older and things don't fire on all the cylinders like they ought to. Forgetting is a biological function. Forgiveness is a spiritual function.
I have a lot more I want to say about overcoming your relationship regrets. But if you're the kind of person that likes to hear sermons from start to finish without interruption, I've asked David to explain how you can receive the audio CDs and video DVDs of this brand-new teaching series. He'll do that in just a moment. This complete series, all 10 sermons, is available in both forms. And they include the complete, unedited version of this series, Say Goodbye to Regret. Plus, I've also written a book that coincides with this brand-new teaching series. My book is called Say Goodbye to Regret.
The subtitle is Living Beyond the Would-Haves, Could-Haves, and Should-Haves. The book is more than 200 pages in length, and it's one of the most practical and personal books I've ever written. To receive your copy of Say Goodbye to Regret, just include a much-needed gift to support the Ministry of Pathway to Victory. And then be sure to specifically mention that you would like to receive my book called Say Goodbye to Regret. As a listener-supported ministry, we rely entirely on the voluntary gifts from friends like you. And no one makes a greater impact on our future than those people we call our Pathway Partners. A Pathway Partner is someone who signs up to give a generous gift every month. You can do that right now.
In this relationship, you're entitled to exclusive benefits. In fact, with your first gift today, I'll make sure you receive a copy of my book, Say Goodbye to Regret. David will repeat this information right now, and I look forward to hearing from you today.
David? Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. When you give a generous gift to support Pathway to Victory, or when you sign up to become a Pathway Partner, we'll say thanks by sending you the best-selling book by Dr. Jeffress, Say Goodbye to Regret. It's easy to automate your monthly giving when you go online to ptv.org.
And when your investment is $75 or more, we'll also send you the complete, unabridged collection of audio and video discs for the Say Goodbye to Regret teaching series. Now, this would be a great resource for a small group Bible study or Sunday school class. Here's the number to call, 866-999-2965. Again, 866-999-2965.
Or go to ptv.org. You could also write to us, here's that mailing address, P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222.
Again, that's P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins, wishing you a great weekend. Then join us next week when the series, Say Goodbye to Regrets, continues. That's right here on Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. You made it to the end of today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory.
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