Forgiveness After Hours

This is Stu Epperson from the Truth Talk Podcast, connecting current events, pop culture, and theology. And we're so grateful for you that you've chosen the Truth Podcast Network.

It's about to start in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, and please share it around with all your friends. Thanks for listening, and thanks for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours, a time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now.

Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We are glad to be back with you live, well, mostly live, in the studio. You'll be hearing us on podcasts, so it's almost live, a couple days removed. But no, we've had a couple weeks of the best of shows that we've played because we've been out of the studio for the last couple weeks, but we're back. We're glad to be with you and glad to be back as a group. Jim, you want to tell us a little bit about our topic that we were talking about in the last show, and we'll continue into the after hours? And it is live for us.

It is live for us. And we are talking about forgiveness. And the first part, a large part of that is looking at the different places forgiveness comes from and goes to. And we need forgiveness from God. Sometimes we need to forgive God. We have forgiveness between one another, which is often the toughest one and certainly the most common. And then maybe the toughest one of all is forgiving ourselves. And when you say forgiving God, we're not implying God needs our forgiveness.

We're implying that we've cast stuff on him, right, that we consider to be his fault. Well, I'll do a quick story on that. One of the most impressive times I've ever heard God's voice was after, this was six or seven years after my father died, and I was boot camp in Colorado. And I went to the closet to talk about my father wounds, and I had a wonderful father, and I've struggled with coming up with any. And about the time I stepped into the closet, literally, I heard from God and a very audible voice that's, why are you angry with us?

And I immediately knew what he meant. I was mad at God for dying three weeks before my daughter was your dad. My dad, what did I say? You said God.

Oh. God's not dead, Jim. He's surely alive. God's alive, Jim.

Don't call me Shirley. Okay, let's start that one over. Three weeks after my father on earth died, my daughter was married, and I had prayed before that, and I thought I was okay with it because I had been in a situation where I was watching people die miserably. He died suddenly, and that's what I prayed for, and this was like three weeks later. But I didn't want it to happen that soon, and God made it very clear that I was living in anger at both of them, and the weight that came off my shoulder in that closet that I then came out of was, I had to do that because I knew somebody else would.

But it was just wonderful and freeing to forgive God and my father for him checking out when he did. Yeah. Thank you, Jim. Harold, do you have a story for us? We haven't heard from you tonight, so we're just wanting to make sure you're still there. Oh, yeah. Well, I had a funny incident.

At least it was funny to me. About 13 years ago, my wife came down with pneumonia, pleurisy, and a staph infection, and so we were over at Forsyth Hospital. And so her regular doctor was off that weekend, and a substitute doctor came in, and they come in and tell me that she's got MRSA. Well, I made the mistake of getting home that evening and jumping on the internet, and if you've got MRSA and lung infection, you have a death sentence. So I get back in on Saturday morning, and I'm sitting there all day. Well, I can't tell my sweetheart that.

Sunday rolls around, you know, I'm there all day and on into the night. Monday, her regular doctor comes in, and as he comes in, he starts picking up that protective apron and stuff, and then he stops mid-stride, and he said, what's this? I said, they told us that she has MRSA. He jumped down in the chair and flipped through some paperwork and stuff. He said, she doesn't have MRSA.

So off goes the wait. Well, that evening, this tiny little sweet nurse comes in very sheepishly, and she's just all abashed because she had misinterpreted the lab report, which said it was methicillin sensitive, and she misinterpreted it. So my wife did not have MRSA. So I'm standing there, and I put on this real stern face, and I look at her, and I'm short, but she's a good bit shorter than me. And I said, well, there's something very important that I need to say to you. And she just turned another shade of white, and her eyes opened up wide, and I looked right square at her, and I said, are you willing to be forgiven?

And it was like I could see behind her eyeballs, I could see the brain churning, and then she looks up and says, yes. So I reached over and gave her a hug, and I said, you're forgiven. So that's my funny story about forgiveness, but also with this COVID stuff and what we've had to go through with being isolated from one another and everything, it brings up to me that we don't need to take the easy way out and say I forgive that person, because if they don't know it, it's worthless. You've got to go, and like Danny was talking about, you've got to get nose to nose with them and let them know that you're forgiven them if it's for them, or that you're asking to be forgiven if it's your fault. So that's sort of my thoughts on forgiveness.

Yeah, I don't disagree totally. The only thing I would say is walk with God in that, because some situations may not be safe. If you have a battered wife, you wouldn't want her to go confront necessarily maybe that husband.

God may call her to forgive in a different way, but I agree with you. Whenever possible, that's definitely the way you need to do it, because it's about them. Good point.

I was thinking, don't be a coward like me and text or email a request for forgiveness, or forgive me for this in a text. That's kind of tacky. Yeah, it's better than not doing it at all, I guess. Marginally. Marginally, yeah. Danny, were you going to say something, or just pull the microphone over in case I ask you something?

Yeah, because you're like loaded over there. No, talking about forgiving God, that same daughter that was taken away from me that I got back when she turned 16, she all of a sudden didn't like our church rules. She didn't like our, well, she didn't like anything, I don't think.

So she works out the deal, she's going to live with her mother. And I am just living at this, and I'm thinking, here we go all over again. And what it revealed in the story was that I was angry at God. It wasn't just my ex. I was angry at God.

And I go out on the deck and I'm praying through this thing, and I'm kind of like Jim. It wasn't totally audible, I don't think. But what he said was, go in there and bless her. Not a southern blessing. Not a southern blessing.

Well, you southern guys, you confuse them. Bless your heart. But, so I go in there and my mindset is I'm going in there and I'm going to bless her and she's going to stay and everything's going to be wonderful. So I go in there and I bless her, we cheer her up, we hug. She finishes packing and her mom shows up and she goes with her mom anyway. So I go back out on the deck.

Okay, big guy. And I don't recommend you do this, but we're having a conversation, God and I. And what he says was, he says, you quote the scripture all the time, he who has begun a good work in me will complete it to the end. He said, you believe that in your own life, but you don't trust me with her. And it just struck everything in me.

What do you mean I don't trust you? So I had to let her go. And I also had to learn to trust him because, fast forward, her mom put her in a Christian high school, which was all kinds of funny at the time. But when she graduated, she got to say a few words. And she thanked her mom for dah, dah, dah, dah. And she turned and she looked and we were sitting on opposite sides of the auditorium. And she turns and looks at me and says, Dad, thank you for telling me the truth when no one else would.

And in that Presbyterian high school, I about cut a Pentecostal fit because I knew God had spoken. There's also the bonus of having a teenage girl with her mother and not with you. Amen. My wife and daughter, they're both wonderful people, but not when they were together during the last couple of years, from puberty till leaving home.

There's a few years there that are a little sketchy. I'll give you that one. I'm going to play another clip as I try not to cough here. God taught me a lot in this clip. He taught me, first of all, I'm very judgmental, which he continually has to teach me apparently. Because I did a search in YouTube for forgiveness, you know, to see what clips popped up. And one of them said, there's a Dolph Lundgren TED Talk on forgiveness. I'm like, really?

Dolph Lundgren, the guy that played in Rocky IV, you know, played the Russian guy. You know, obviously, he can't be very bright. You know, I mean, you just look at the guy, you know, he can't be bright.

He's just big and dumb and all these things. All these thoughts come to mind, and they picked him for a TED Talk. And then I watched it, and it was an amazing TED Talk. It was about forgiveness, and I learned his story and learned more of his story, that he actually was very, very bright and got a scholarship to MIT in engineering. He didn't end up finishing there, but he got accepted there and was bright enough to be there.

He just chose acting and went in a different direction. Well, when you hear some of his story, which we're going to listen to here in a second, a small version of it, what you don't hear in there is a couple of the people he ends up forgiving, which we'll talk about afterwards, but also the depth that his life went to because of some of the stuff that happened to him and his lack of being able to forgive. It led him into some situations with bad choices, with intimacy issues with his first wife and losing his family, those types of things, and seeing the pattern repeated until he got some help for it.

And so I want to go ahead and listen to that, and we'll come back and talk about it. I think I remember the first time my dad hit me. I was around three or four, I think, and I was walking in front of the TV, and he kicked me, and I flew into some bookshelves. And I remember there was blood, and my mom was screaming. You see, my dad had a lot of problems, and he took it out on me and my mom, never touched my brothers or sisters. And this started when I was about three or four and went on until I was about 11 or 12. It was a really hard part of my life because I had to go to school with a black guy or, you know, some of my hair was missing when he had been yanking my head.

I think some of you may know what I'm talking about. I understand how you're feeling. You see, when you get abused at home, you have two choices. It's like an animal, fight or flight. You can either run away, which was impossible for me because I was a little kid living at home. Or you can fight back, which I couldn't do because, you know, I was just a little kid and my dad was my size.

But I've learned later there's a third choice. You freeze. You just freeze and go dead. All your emotions are bottled up inside. I would just lay there when he was hitting me.

I wouldn't even cry. To make a long story short, I took up therapy three years ago and it totally changed my life. Suddenly, this fog that I was living in lifted.

I did the therapy where you go back in time, you relive your experiences, you cry, scream, you roll up in a little ball, you hit the couch with a baseball bat, you know, anything you've got to do to start attack this part of you, this frozen part of me that was running my life. And slowly it started to become smaller and smaller and I can sort of see my life come back to me. Like, you have to come to terms with yourself. You have to love yourself so you can appreciate those things in others. I think if you take time to look inside and find that little boy, that little girl inside yourself, then treat them well and then you're ready to look, see a little boy, a little girl next to you, don't you need some help? Because if you do that, it's just the greatest feeling in the world.

Thanks. So I watched that Ted talk and then felt about an inch tall. Felt like I almost had to, you know, try to look up his contact information, forgive him for being so judgmental, forgive, ask him for his forgiveness for me being so judgmental. But there was a lot in that. And what I didn't get in that part of the clip is where he did go back through therapy and forgive his dad. I don't think they ever had a relationship again because he talked about he forgave him at a distance kind of thing. And he forgave his mom because his mom was right there when it was happening as well and didn't protect him. And there's some things there that in his heart he needed to forgive her for.

But the biggest breakthrough that he had was the forgiveness of himself. And that often happens when you're in an abuse situation. You take on like somehow it's your fault.

Right. And, Jim, you talked about earlier sometime the hardest person to forgive is yourself. And that was my story. And it was through some counseling that I got with a great local counselor, Kim, who helped me walk back into some areas as a little boy and actually asked that little boy for forgiveness, my own self for forgiveness for how I've treated him and my outlook of him in the past, of how I viewed myself as a kid and how I held myself responsible for things that weren't my fault. But my struggle with pornography, my struggle with trust issues and relationship, none of that could ever even start to get better until this piece got out of the way. Because even though I didn't know they were connected, I didn't know I was doing it, it was a big part of I had to forgive myself. I'd already forgiven the person who had abused me. That part in retrospect was easy compared to forgiving myself for something I didn't even need to forgive myself something for. Right? And so listening to this story just reminded me of how powerful that is and how therapy is such a great asset. You know, God can lead you to a great therapist that will help you walk your way back into some of those things and move past them with true healing and forgiveness and move into a healthier place in life.

That's all I got. Well, I'll throw in a little humor and I think Robby would agree with me on this. We big guys that are brilliant are used to being prejudged as being the big dumb guy. And we're okay with that and you're forgiven because it is very nice sometimes to have people underestimate you.

Yeah, that's a good point. I won't say anything or I'll have to ask for your forgiveness later. Well, you're a pretty big guy and a pretty bright guy too.

Not tall, just big. Rodney, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the first part of that, the forgiveness from God to us. Yeah.

Right? So how does that play in? Forgiveness is something that is not a Christian or a non-Christian thing. Forgiveness is a choice.

There are good therapists that aren't necessarily Christian therapists that can lead people to some healing. But to have experienced forgiveness in your life puts you in a much different place, doesn't it? Yes, and that's what we were talking about before the show was it does fall under some common grace that we get. We get the world and the beauty of the world.

We get love. We get so many other wonderful things from God that we all share in secular world are Christian. And that's one of the things that you guys were just saying about counseling. Some of the people that are the hardest to get to counseling are Christians. Because it's like we're admitting something that God can't do something, I've got to go to somebody. Well, God works through us, right?

Through others. And He will bring people into your life that can help you. And it's not a shameful thing to go get help. So God working through and bringing in healing into your life is about a lot giving and getting forgiveness. And what we should be doing is looking for those areas in our lives.

I love what Danny was talking about with Steps 4 and 5 and making a list of, okay, this is exactly who they are. And then Harold reiterated, yes, get in the face and talk to people if you can when it's appropriate. And again, your take on making sure that we're praying through that. Where should we be going now? What word should we be using?

How are we to approach different people because each person has their own different areas and you're going to be in a different place two years ago to where you are today and where you're going to be in another two years. It's constantly changing and you definitely need to be walking with God. Getting help from a therapist and trying to get help away from God is one place you can go get some help. But the lasting love and the intimacy with Jesus is something that goes, for some people, beyond description. Because there's so many ways we describe it and we just keep saying it over and over.

There's evidence in our lives and things of this nature. But when you feel the warmth and the love and the forgiveness of Christ and you know what He did for you on that cross, that brings another level of joy to your life. And your forgiveness, to me, becomes even deeper and more meaningful because you can't just cheapen it by just saying, oh, I forgive you, going on, and never meaning it at all. That's one of the things you really start to climb in bed with Jesus and get in His lap. You're there in a relationship.

You're close. You're not at a distance anymore. And it's always about becoming closer and closer.

And we're the ones that always want to shove away. When you're talking about that forgiveness that you're given from God that you feel, it humbles you. And it takes away that pride. For me, a lot of times, asking for forgiveness, if I really get down to it, it's probably an issue of pride. One, I'm afraid of the reaction, as, Dana, you kind of talked about.

They're going to have a 357 or whatever, maybe. But then there's also some level of pride, I think, that has to be humbled for you to go and be able to approach the people. There is for me. Every time I turn around and really pray and I look at that, you can see the pride. He'll show it to you. It's like, how could I have ever missed it? It's so obvious.

Yes. Well, the very presence of it is that He has made stakes in forgiveness. And there are times when I don't feel forgiven. There are times when I don't feel saved. But it's not about the feeling.

It's about what has been done on the cross, what has been done, and whether or not a person forgives you. I think you talked about it earlier, Sam. It's really irrelevant in the process most of the time. It does work out lots of times. But there are times when it doesn't. But the reality is that, like in the clip, I was able to let go of his throat. And being able to let go of your anger toward God or toward anything because it ultimately ends up with whether or not. And he tells Mac pretty plainly, it isn't that you're not able to, it's that you won't. And it's about our won't.

Yeah, and it erodes everything inside you. I was talking earlier about my sister when God would wake me up and ask me to forgive her. I kind of played that short a little bit because God would ask me to forgive her. And I'm like, God, you know what she's done to me. Why would I want to forgive her? Why would I want to pray for her?

I'm sorry, I didn't say that right. He was calling me to pray for her. I'm like, you know what she's done to me. Why would I pray for her?

Why would I do it? He said, I want you to pray for her. And then I would go back to sleep and wake up a couple hours later. And this went on for a couple nights until I finally gave in. And it was about my heart. I know calling her was not an option. She had some mental issues and that would not have went well. She had some medically confirmed mental issues, you know, and it wouldn't have went well.

And there was not an option to have that. You know, but whether that's a person you can't physically talk to or God's calling you to forgive somebody in the past, it's no longer alive. And he's called me to forgive my dad on some things and my mom on some things.

And a great mom, you know. But still there were times that he would bring me to these points where he said, I need you to forgive here. And it was always about my heart. Now a lot of times that other person is impacted and that's an amazing thing. But I'm telling you, most of the time God's after your heart. It's about you.

It's about making you whole and healthy and at a place where you feel good about yourself. And you can get to where Dolph Lundgren talks about loving yourself. Truly. Not in a selfish way. Yeah, not over loving. Like we have many in society today that just love themselves and tag with anything else, right? This is true love for yourself because I have love for my neighbor as well. Yeah, I like who I am as a person. You know, I like who I am as a parent.

I like who I am as a – fill in the blank, right? And know who you are in Christ. Right, and have your identity in him. And that's what he's after in this whole thing of forgiveness.

So whether it's somebody on Facebook, it's somebody on a social post, whether it's somebody intimately in your life, he's still calling you to forgive. Yeah, and that's where one of the counselors that's a pastor that came to talk at our church, I really have tried to use it to help self-counsel myself, is he uses – somebody comes to him with, I've got this problem, whatever, and he's like, okay, well, what do you feel? And then they talk and discuss, okay, that's what you're feeling. I got you, got you, okay. Okay, what is it that you – oh, gosh, I want to go to the last step, but what do you feel? What do you think? Then it's, okay, this is what you think about it.

Okay, this is what you're thinking. And then what do you know? So what is it that you know that God says about you? And when you can go there and start to understand what you know and get back to Scripture and what God says about you, you can live with yourself so much better. And I've tried to use that a little bit. Okay, I feel a certain way and I think certain things, but what do I know?

And that helps me get grounded a lot. Yeah, I guess at the root I'd ask you what has holding on to unforgiveness done for you? Nothing good.

Exactly, name one positive thing. One of the things that just sort of came out, and I think most of the listeners have maybe already made this connection, but interchange the words love and forgiveness biblically and in your life. The real source of forgiveness needs to be love. God's forgiveness for us came through his love for us, and it's unconditional, so says forgiveness.

Now, we're not capable of that, but Jesus talked about, well, you know, if you love the people that love you, big deal. If you forgive the people that forgive you, big deal. If you can get to the point of loving someone enough to forgive them, even though what they've done is unforgivable, that's being Christ-like. Yeah, and Andy, I know you didn't get to talk on the show, but you were talking earlier about the Scripture in Matthew, where it talks about, you know, the guy's forgiven a whole lot of debt, and he won't go out and forgive the other one. And it's always great that you bring Scripture in. I want to make sure I gave you the credit for that, because you brought the Scripture into it. But it's great to go read that in Matthew, that that's the forgiveness that we sometimes don't have, right? I mean, we get a great forgiveness from someone else, and then we won't forgive this little minor thing. You know, and God's saying, no, that's not good. That's what Jesus was saying, is that's not good, right?

Those little things count, and the big things count. And I'd ask you to just spend this time this week just praying to God. Maybe make the list. Say, God, who are you calling on me to forgive this week? And I'd love for you to go register for the boot camp coming up in April, masculinejourney.org. This is the Truth Network.