We live in a world full of vengeance. Social media. Liam Neeson movies. Batman. For as long as we've been around, we've built our societies upon the notion that retribution and vengeance can really bring the peace and restoration we're hoping for. Yet over and over again it has failed. So what can we do to bring the peace and restoration we're hoping for.
Listen as Pastor Clint unpacks the next line in the Apostles' Creed: the forgiveness of sins. Looking at Jesus' parable of the forgiving king and unforgiving servant, we find that the true way to peace and restoration doesn't come through vengeance, but through forgiveness.
Sermon Resources:
1. "Forgiveness, Health, and Well-Being: A Review of Evidence for Emotional Versus Decisional Forgiveness, Dispositional Forgiveness, and Reduced Unforgiveness," by Everett L. Worthington, Charlotte Van Oyen Witvliet, Pietro Pietrini, and Andrea J. Miller - published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, August 2007
2. "The Book of Forgiving," by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu
3. “In heaven, there are only forgiven sinners. There are no good guys, no upright, successful types who, by dint of their own integrity, have been accepted into the great country club in the sky. There are only failures, only those who have accepted their deaths in their sins and who have been raised up by the King who himself died that they might live. But in hell, too, there are only forgiven sinners. He forgives the badness of even the worst of us, willy-nilly; and he never takes back that forgiveness…The sole difference, therefore, between hell and heaven is that in heaven the forgiveness is accepted and passed along, while in hell it is rejected and blocked. In heaven, the death of the king is welcomed and becomes the doorway to new life in the resurrection. In hell, the old life of the bookkeeping world is insisted on and becomes, forever, the pointless torture it always was…The only thing that can keep us out of the joy of the resurrection is to join the unforgiving servant in his refusal to die.” -Robert Farrar Capon, "The Parables of Grace"
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