Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Forgiveness: An Open Forum

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

The theme of forgiveness is something that’s in so much of opera, theater, and literature—because it’s a very important issue in human living. So our theme comes in the form of a question: should we always forgive? Forgiveness is always easy when you’re asking someone else to give it. And it’s always hard when someone’s asking you to give it. A lot of people have problems with forgiveness. They say forgiveness seems to make light of what was done wrong, or they say they can’t forgive unless the other person asks for forgiveness. But if you look at the whole story arch of the operas, you know that whenever people fail to forgive, bad things happen. This Open Forum, with a talk and open mic Q&A, is specifically designed for skeptics or those wrestling with the claims of Christianity. We’re going to discuss 1) whether we should forgive, 2) what it means to forgive, and 3) where we might get the resources for it. This talk was given by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on May 1, 2013. Series: Redeemer Open Forums.  Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Believing in Christianity doesn't automatically change your life. For example, you may believe God loves you, but often we're easily discouraged or self-conscious, and it can be hard to see how your life has been transformed. So how do we experience actual change? It's through regular Christian practices or spiritual disciplines. Today on Gospel and Life, Tim Keller continues a series on the practices or disciplines that help and still beliefs into your heart, resulting in real transformation. After you listen, we invite you to go online to Gospel and Life.com and sign up for our email

updates. When you sign up, you'll start receiving our quarterly newsletter with articles from Dr. Keller as well as other great Gospel-centered resources. Subscribe today at GospelAndLife.com. I'm Tim Keller, I'm a pastor here at the Redeemer Church. And what I want to do is talk about the theme of the music, which is forgiveness. Or the question, you might say this talk, and the theme of the evening has been put in a form of a question, should we always forgive?

The music, which I've had a chance to, I spent some time reading and listening to the last week or so, because unlike most of you, New Yorkers, my Italian and my French is just a little rusty and so I had to get them in translation and read through them. And the music's magnificent, but also the theme of forgiveness is something that in so much of opera, so much of theater, so much of literature is brought to us,

because it's actually a very important issue in just human living. And what I learned, or what I think we can learn just from the pieces that we already heard, about forgiveness or these things. Number one, forgiveness is really hard. It seems to be especially hard for baritones for some reason. I'm not sure. Though I'm not sure that's a random sample there. Forgiveness is always easy when you're asking somebody else to give it. You always say, why can't you just forgive? It's always hard when someone's asking you to do it. And there was a very famous Gallup poll some years ago, 1988, when 94% of all Americans

said that forgiveness is important. And then when they were asked, can you forgive, or do you need help forgiving, or do you find it possible to forgive? On 85% of people said they can't forgive, or they need a lot of help to forgive. So 94% of everybody said you have to do it. You should do it.

Important. So almost the same number said, it's really hard for me to do it or I can't do it. And it is very hard. Now some of the reasons is hard. And actually, if you listen carefully, here's three problems that people have with forgiveness. They kind of come out in the music.

One, of course, is the problem that people have that forgiveness seems to make light of what was done wrong. Very often people will say, I don't wanna forgive, I want justice. If you just forgive, like when Zerlina is, when Elvira and Zerlina are going back and forth in Don Giovanni, one of them of course is already been wrong and the other one is trying to say,

just get past it, don't worry about it, don't try to get revenge, you know, just forgive it. And it sounds almost like she's saying he's not going to change, there's nothing you can do about it. And so one of the problems people have is, man, if you just forgive, you're just letting the bad people have their way. You're something that bad people have their way. If a wife is hit by her husband, should she forgive him or should she have him

locked up? So one of the problems is forgiveness seems to let the bad people get away with it. Another problem people have is just that very often forgiveness, a lot of people would say, I can't forgive unless the person asks forgiveness unless the person repents. And very often, the person who's done wrong can't repent or doesn't want to repent and therefore how can I forgive? Another problem of course people have is just say, well I can forgive but I can't forget. Do I have to forget as well?

So there's a whole lot of issues that people have that explain why forgiveness is so hard. But in the end, if you put these songs in the context of the whole story arc of every one of the operas, you know that whenever people fail to forgive bad things happen. In fact, one of the objections that I don't want to forgive, I want justice. One of the objections that objection is that in the history of the world, there's nothing that's led to more injustice than a failure to forgive. There's nothing that's led to more violence and more injustice than vengeance.

And studies show what you know, you don't need studies, but you know that studies show that people who forgive are happier than people who don't. So forgiveness is important, but it's hard. All right, next. How can we move forward then? I mean, if it's that important, if the world needs forgiveness, if our culture needs forgiveness, and you need forgiveness, yet it's incredibly hard, how do you move forward? and you need forgiveness. Yet it's incredibly hard. How do you move forward? Let me give you three ideas that I think might help us move forward.

The first idea is it's helpful to learn and to think. And when I first say it to you, it might not seem true to you, but I'll try to make my case here, that the idea that you should always forgive everybody who wrongs you. You should always forgive, not just sometimes forgive your enemies, but always forgive your enemies. That idea basically comes from Christianity.

The reason that that's out there in the world is it's mainly come from Christianity. Now if you say, wait a minute, I thought all religions say that we should forgive, and it's true. Pretty much, I think, all the world religions talk about forgiveness, but they're not really saying the same thing. For example, when Buddhists say you should forgive, you understand what Buddhism says is you should forgive

because evil is an illusion. You should forgive, you shouldn't stay angry because actually it's an illusion evil is, and therefore You should forgive, you shouldn't stay angry because actually it's an illusion evil is and therefore you should forgive because it's not real. That's a very different understanding of forgiveness than to say that because that evil is real and you need to forgive that. Very different. And the other thing that's important to see is that Judaism, Islam and the other thing that's important to see is a Judaism, Islam, and the other religions that I was looking up. All say you should forgive if your enemy asks forgiveness.

If your enemy repents, then you forgive. But you don't forgive if the person who has done the wrong isn't asking for forgiveness. There is nothing in the other religions like Mark chapter 11, 25, where Jesus says, if you are standing and you're praying and you have anything against anyone, you must forgive them. Jesus says, if you have anything against anyone, you must forgive them. There's nothing in the other religions like that or a little more famous passage, this

is from the Cermon on the Mount where Jesus says, If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt and over your coat as well, you've heard it said, love your enemy and hate, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil in the good

and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. There's nothing like that in the other religions. Many religions say you should forgive if someone repents. It's only Christianity came up with that idea you should always forgive. You should always forgive. So that's the source, Christianity is the source of the idea that you should always forgive. Secondly, it might help, because I'm trying to give you some thoughts that might move

us forward. Secondly, it would help if we broke forgiveness now to its components into its constituent parts. And for that, I'd like to go to some of the books by a man, a writer named Mirislav Wolf. Mirislav Wolf is a Croatian Christian theologian. And out of his own understanding and experience in the Balkans over the last 30 years,

with the genocide and with the terror over there and with all the struggles that people have with violence and then the efforts at building bridges and making peace and reconciliation. Out of that, he's written a number of great books on forgiveness. One of them is free of charge, giving and forgiving in a culture stripped of grace. And in here, he says this, how do you break down forgiveness? And what is it actually?

And here's what he says. First of all, to forgive is to name the wrongdoing and condemn it. To forgive is to name the wrongdoing and to condemn it. Remember how I said a minute ago, some people say that if you forgive, you're making light of what was done wrong. But Volf says, unless it's wrong, you can't forgive it, unless it's terrible, you can't

forgive it. Forgiveness is not making excuses. Never. In fact, if you don't admit that it's wrong, if you don't condemn it as what it is, you can't actually forgive it. An illustration would be if you're walking along a road and there's a log in the middle of the road. If you just try to pick up one end of the log and give it and throw it, not only will

probably not go anywhere, but it might hurt you. If you're really going to get rid of the log, you have to look the whole thing up and bear its entire weight and then give it a heave. And if you're really going to forgive something, you can't make excuses for it. I've seen people do that and Volv says, if you think forgiveness means make light of it and say, well, I guess it's okay. You didn't really mean it. I guess there was extenuating circumstances.

You'll find as the time goes on, you haven't forgiven. Forgiveness means admitting it's wrong and condemning it. Secondly, forgiveness means to not count the wrong doing against the other person. Not hold them liable. Now this is the key, I think, because most of us Americans tend to think of our feelings as almost sacred things, sovereign

things. We must net way our feelings as who we really are, in spite of the fact they're all contradictory anyway. And so what we have a tendency to say is, I'm still angry, I can't forgive. And Vols says, wait a minute, forgiveness is granted before it's felt. Forgiveness is determining not to make that person pay back, not to hold that person liable. That means not to be cold to them, not to berate them,

not to try to harm their reputation with other people. Not to constantly think about it and stir up your own anger. It means you're not treating them as if they continue to owe you something. That's what forgiveness means. It's like, forgive a debt. And that's what's so important is that forgiveness then is something that you actually do before

you feel it. And if you don't do it, you'll never feel it. And if you wait to feel it before you do it, you'll never do it. Did you follow that? I didn't really. And so secondly, very important, and that gets rid of this idea of the feelings thing, is forgiveness means not counting the wrongdoing

against them, but thirdly, and this is actually quite important. Forgiveness is a form of love, right? And to forgive someone and love someone never means making it easier for them to keep on sinning. So if you love somebody and you're forgiving them, you're loving them by forgiving them, it's certainly not loving to let them keep on doing

what they're doing. And what this is, why? So for example, not to put too fine a point on it. If a woman is hit by her husband, beaten by her husband, what should she do? The answer is she should forgive him and have him arrested. You say, wait a minute, how can you do that? Well, you know, we've just talked about it. To forgive someone means to let go of the desire to pay the person back. We say, what, she's calling out the police, isn't that paying them back? No.

When people say, I don't want to forgive, I want justice. I want to tell you the fact is, unless you forgive, you won't really go after justice. You'll go after vengeance, and you won't get justice. If you don't forgive, if you don't let go of that need to get to exact from that person what you think they owe you. If you don't let go of that, if you don't name it, condemn it, and then forgive it, not hold the person liable. Then if you try to stop that person from continuing to do what they do, which is what you should

do, because that's the only loving thing to do. You won't be out for vengeance because you won't be out for your own sake. You'll be trying to stop them for their sake. You'll be trying to stop them for other people's sake. If you're a Christian, you'll be trying to stop them for God's sake. But if you don't forgive, you won't be out there, for the name of the community, or caring about other people, or caring about the person, or caring about justice, you'll be caring about yourself.

And what you're gonna be doing is just trying to get, trying to get out of them what you owe. And I'll tell you, if you go to a person who you haven't forgiven in order to confront them to show them their error, you'll never convince them. Because they'll see the anger, they'll see that you're not really trying to convince them, you're trying to make them feel bad, and they'll shut the anger, they'll see that you're not really trying to convince them, you're trying to make them feel bad and they'll shut the door on you.

And vault is absolutely right. Real forgiveness is granted before it's felt, it's naming it, it's granting it, not longer holding it liable, and then out of love stopping anything that is really unjust and going wrong. And once you understand that, that gets rid of almost all the objections, all the problems that people have that it's making light of things, that it's letting people just go on doing, that I can't help it because of my feelings, or they haven't repented, therefore I can't do it. No, no, it gets rid of all.

Once you break it down, like that, then it's possible. Or is it? Here's the last thing we got to talk about. A lot of people, I know over the years that I've talked to about these things, shared the books, laid this things out. They look at it, and they say, it's still really, really, really hard.

And I think to be realistic, and here I'm going to stick my neck out a little bit, but we have a question to answer time so you can push me on this if you want. I think, as I said, the idea that we should always, always forgive, came from Christianity. Didn't really come from anywhere else. And if that's the case, it probably makes sense that it's in the resources of Christian faith that you'll really get the resources that you need in order to forgive.

We said forgiveness is important, but it's incredibly, incredibly difficult. Well, the resources are not, I don't think it's still a matter of willpower. I think because Christianity gave us this idea of always forgiving, Christianity actually is the resources, and what are those resources. And maybe you already object to the idea that you need to be a Christian, I didn't say

you need to be a Christian to forgive. What I'm just trying to say is Christianity has unparalleled resources to do this. Let me give you some evidence. In year 2006, October 2006, a young man in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, broke into a one-room Amish schoolhouse, took ten hostages, shot them all, they were children, school children, Amish school children, five of them died, all girls aged seven to thirteen, then he shot himself. Before the night was out, before the day was out, by that evening, the Amish community had found, he was a young man, had found the parents of the murderer, and had gone to visit them to say, we forgive your son, we forgive you.

We're reaching out to you because you're going to have a miserable time for the next weeks and months. Every bit is miserable as us. You're in pain too. You lost a son. This is going to be hard. We want you to know we forgive you and we love you and we're reaching out. We want to be a support to you for the day was out.

And three days later, when the murderer was his funeral, and he had a wife and three little children, at the funeral half of the people who came to the funeral were the Amish, who expressed nothing but love and support for the widow and the little children and lots of concern for them. Now, if some of you might remember, that this was like the talk of the United States

for a little while. And everybody said, how could they do that? How could they do it? It's incredible that they do it. And some people were kind of incredulous. Like, I said, they're not really doing that. Are they? Two years later, just to show you how hard it is for most Americans to understand that kind of forgiveness. It's two years later there was a TV documentary made, not a documentary, it was actually a TV movie, slightly fictionalized TV movie about the incident. And just to show how most Americans couldn't really figure this out or get their head wrapped around it, was in the movie they created a fictional character.

And her name was Ida Graber. In the movie, she was the mother of one of the murdered children. There was no Ida Graber, so they just created her as a part of trying to tell the story. What was interesting, Ida Graber was Amish. She was an Amish woman. When her child dies, she is killed. Most of the movie, first of all, she's mad at God, incredibly mad at God,

and she can't believe in him, and so she pretty much loses her faith. And secondly, she cannot forgive. The other people are saying, that's forgive. She can't forgive, and so she's angry, and she's having trouble. But near the end of the movie, she starts to struggle her way back to something better.

Now, all of the spokespeople for the Amish, all the Amish themselves, also, I'll mention them in a minute, the three sociologists who were working on a book about the incident and who were doing the interviews, everybody said there was nobody in the Amish community that got mad at God. And there was nobody in the Amish community had trouble forgiving, nobody. But you see, the American filmmakers actually felt like we've got to put somebody in here who reacts like most Americans would react. Otherwise, we just not can be able to relate to these people.

When the average American experience is something like this, they get mad at God and they get mad at people. They can't forgive God. They can't forgive. And they had to put a person like that in the movie to even be able to relate to these folks, except there wasn't such a person. It didn't happen that way. Now, four years later, 2010, it was a really very interesting book written by three sociologists,

Donald Graybill, Stephen Nolt, and David Weaver, David Weaver's Ercher, and they wrote the book, was called Amish Grace, How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. What was interesting about the book was they did lots of interviews and all. And it was pretty much recounted what happened. But here's what they said as a kind of conclusion. They said the American society will not produce this kind of forgiveness. And probably as the years go by it will get harder and harder for American society to produce the kind of forgiveness to the Amish produced.

Why? They said because the Amish had two things that American society doesn't have. The first, he said, they said, was they meditate on, the Amish in their community, they meditate on, they sing about, they pray, they imagine, they reflect on, they talk all the time about the central act of Christianity, which was God becoming Jesus Christ and dying on the cross for his enemies and dying as he dies, forgiving the people who are killing him. And the sociologist said, that's at the very heart of the Christian message. There's no other religion that has anything like that. No other religions as God suffers.

No other religions as God came, made himself honorable, and forgave the people who were murdering him. This is the Amazura community that particularly center on this basic Christian truth. And he says, that's going to have an effect on you. If you think about it all the time, if that's the center of your life, the center of your faith, of course it's going to have an effect on you, but that's not the center of most Americans, even though even Americans are going to church, it's not really something that most Americans focus on. But here's the second thing, and I think this was brilliant. They said,

forgiveness is an act of self-renunciation. Think about it. In forgiveness, you're saying, I give up my right to pay back. It's an active self-denonciation. And what the sociologist say is, that's not how American society works. American society is now a consumeristic and individualistic society in which children, from the very, you know, the youngest age, all children are taught self assertion. You've got to make sure that what your needs and your interests that nobody comes and makes their needs more important than your needs,

you have to stick up for yourself, self assertion. But they said the heart of the Christian faith and the omniscient understand this and as a tight knit community, they probably are able to, you might say, saturate each other with it better than most other Christian communities. The Christian faith knows that the meaning of life is to deny yourself. Jesus says, he who tries to find his life will lose it. And he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

You must deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me. What is that? Basically, the heart of the Christian faith is this. God didn't hold on to his glory, but emptied himself and became a human being and went to the cross and died for our sins. And the same way then, we are not supposed to live for ourselves, but for God and other

people. We give up our freedom. We give up our interests. We're following the footsteps of Jesus. We do self-renunciation. That's the name of the game. That's the meaning of life. And at the end, what they said was, a culture in which the meaning of life is self-renunciation

and giving up your interest and freedom for God and other people. That when you, those people, a culture like that, when you, they experience suffering, they're going to respond and forgiveness. A culture of self-assertion, when they experience suffering, they're going to respond with revenge. Self-assertion plus suffering equals revenge. Self-renunciation plus suffering equals forgiveness. And they actually said, at the end of their book,

near the end of their book, they said, most of us in America have been formed by an individual's to culture that nourishes revenge and mocks the idea of grace. And therefore, we can't expect that in the future, America is going to be able to summons forgiveness when we're wrong. So here I'm done. Hannah Arrent, the great Jewish philosopher who wrote a bunch of break books, but one of her books was called The Human Condition in 1958,

and she wrote this at the end of it. The only remedy for the inevitability of history is forgiveness. In the natural course of things, we're stuck with our past and it's effect on us. We may learn from our history, but we cannot escape it. We may forget our history, but we cannot undo it. We may be doomed to repeat our history,

but we cannot change it unless we can forgive. The one thing that can release us from the grip of our history is forgiveness. As the holidays approach, the days leading up to Christmas can become very busy, and it can be a challenge to take time to focus on the glory and joy of Jesus' birth. We want to help you prepare your heart for Christmas this year with a free Advent

devotional email series. When you sign up today, you'll receive daily email devotional during Advent to help center your heart on the meaning of Christmas. Emmanuel, God with us. You'll also receive Advent Meditation videos each Sunday by Tim Keller, followed by a brief discussion of the meditation between Tim and his wife, Kathy. Sign up today to receive this Advent devotional email series. Go to gospelandlife.com slash advent.

That's gospelandlife.com slash advent. Now here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. Any questions? Any thoughts? Okay. Well, tell you what, could you hand her the mic? Yeah, you're in. Yeah, hand it on my. Go ahead. First of all, thank you for the lovely evening. It was really touching. I don't know that I think so much about forgiveness as much as I think about compassion. And I think it was Levin As the philosopher who talked about having an ethical responsibility to the other. And it sounds like that's what the Amish did.

They saw it in the other person, even though the other person was different than themselves, their ethical responsibility towards that person. Right. Right. Okay, well listen, the sociologist said that that's 90% of people in America would say something like that. We have the ethical responsibility of compassion. What they thought was interesting is when most people

actually get wrong, they don't respond that way. There's a gap, they said, for most of us, there's a gap between what we believe about forgiveness and what we do. Well, the Amish, there wasn't that gap. So they were trying, they were trying to just determine why the Amish don't have that gap that most of us do. Yeah, I wasn't talking about. So they were trying, they were trying to just determine why the Amish don't have that gap that most of us do.

Yeah, I wasn't talking about as an intellectual concept. I was talking about it's an ethical responsibility that we're born into. I don't use your language, but. Oh, no, no, right. But so you're saying you understand what the sociologists say, what they mean. I'm going to make sure I'm maybe not understanding you. They're saying we have that responsibility we're born into, we say, but then we don't carry it out. We don't actually act compassionately. And so they were trying to figure out what there was about the Amish that enabled them

to do what Levinus says, we should do what we don't. Well, isn't, I'm not Christian, but I was, I'm asking, isn't that what you're saying that Christ and on the cross, he saw the other in himself? Yes, okay, absolutely. Yes, so we're saying the same thing, just in different words, I think. That's right, well, listen, I think you need to know,

I'm actually being a little self-critical. This is, we're not Amish, I'm a Christian minister, of course. I think that it's likely that the average person that comes to my church here would probably also respond with revenge rather than, or at least wouldn't be able to forgive. They'd be more like Ida Graber, the fictionalized, created person in the documentary. And I think it's because what the sociologist said was that Christians have this great idea, Jesus dying for their enemies. It's a very powerful idea.

And we have this idea that we have responsibility for the other, we have responsibility for compassion. But we don't really respond that way because it's not deep in us. And the amish because they're a very, very tight community, they hold each other responsible to live like that all the time, and we're not. We're more individualistic, we're consumeristic. And so we come and we, you know, we participate and we're part of this group in that group, but we're not really part of a coherent community that really says this is how we're going

to live. So I'm being critical of myself. I really think, though, that they did show something special that most Americans can't do. And I'm just trying to come up with some explanation for it. I thought the book was pretty. The book wasn't from a Christian perspective. It was just a kind of an empirical, sociocé science perspective.

Does that help a little bit? Actually, you know what? I'm helping you break our rule because we shouldn't have go back and forth. Okay, I'll stop, but I don't know about help. I thought I was just saying it in a different way is what you were saying. I also think the omission, in this case,

had an amazing capacity for what you call forgiveness and what I think of his compassion. Totally. OK. All right. I wasn't disagreeing. I wasn't trying to disagree with you as much as I thought if we kept saying it, it would supplement.

We were supplementing each other, making it clear for everybody. I hope so. I hope so too. OK. That's my thing. Somebody else. Okay. If you can get up there, everyone. Sure.

Thank you. I believe it's important to forgive people. And it's something that, you know, when I don't forgive people, I'm harming really myself, because I'm the one who's harboring these grudges and carrying these things around years after the fact. But I find it very hard to do nonetheless. Even though I know it's something I should do, and it's something I would like to do,

and I would like to be rid of some of these resentments that I've been carrying around for years and years. And I guess the question is, and I suppose there's no simple answer, but the question is, how do you, you know, how do you forgive when you want to forgive, but you still find yourself unable to do so? Okay. Thanks. And well, I am trying to, as gently as I can, say, and I think this is probably what I need to be saying to my friend over here, my first questioner, was I don't know that I would

completely, I don't think I could, I'd like you to collapse what I'm saying into a completely horizontal way of talking. The Amish had both a horizontal meaning I have have I owe compassion. There's three things here. The Amish, you forgive for the sake of other people because you owe them compassion. You mention you forgive for your own sake because actually it's bad for you. It's bad for your heart, by the way, literally for you. I don't mean your spiritual heart. I mean your heart heart. But what you have with the advantage, I was trying to say there are some resources here, the Christian resources, there's a vertical, that there is a God who emptied himself, comes down, that's the Christian idea, and that ultimately I want to say, in my own past, when I was forgiving just because I wanted

to forgive, because I felt like it would make me a better person, it didn't work. Because the irony is, as what the sociologist said, is forgiveness at bottom is an active self-renunciation, not an active self-actualization. And if I, there were times in my life in which I actually saw forgiveness more as a way of actualizing myself, I want to think of myself as a good person. I want to be free from these things. I remember one time doing this as a pastor, I was talking to a 15-year-old girl who hated her father. And the only way I got through to her at one point was to say, you realize if you don't forgive your father,

he's going to run your whole life. When you're 50, 60, 70 years old, you're still going to be doing things because your father wouldn't have wanted you to do them. And so I said, you're never going to become a fulfilled, decent person, your own person until you forgive. Looking back, that's a completely horizontal, you know, kind of this world kind of perspective.

She didn't do a great job. I think I probably needed to say, there's another perspective. The other perspective is Miroslav Wolf, who's a Christian. At one point said this, to him, this was his key to forgiveness. I get to find a fast, ah, I'll read it carefully because it's not, it's involved, but I'll read it slowly. Forgiveness flounders, when I exclude the enemy from the community of humans, that's

actually what you were saying. But also, when I exclude myself from the community of sinners, no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for, along with out on the one hand, transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity, and transferring yourself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness.

When one knows that God's love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself and so rediscover one's own sinfulness. The vertical dimension that Volfo is talking about is it's not just I see these other people are human beings like me, or I see that I need, you know, to get past this for my own sake. But basically, I'm a sinner, I deserve punishment for the things I've done wrong. God forgave me. And because God forgave me, that humbles me away from feeling superior to this other person. Because you know what? You can't forgive somebody. You can't forgive them if you feel superior to them. You cannot forgive somebody as long as you feel superior

to them. No matter how much you talk about the common humanity, and what Volf is saying there is something, they have to have some perspective that makes you say, I really also deserve mercy and grace, and I only live by God's mercy. So I would just say the vertical is a very important resource. I'm not saying you have to be a Christian or to forgive people. I'm not saying that.

I'm just here to sort of try to expand the horizon and think about the various aspects of forgiveness. Somebody else? Yes. Yes. Good. Thank you. I've been thinking about this now for 12 years.

And I think it's time I just do it. I watched people jump out of the North Tower, holding hands from Cantor Fitzgerald, and then the South Tower came down about a hundred feet from where I was standing in front of a century, 21. So it's been on my mind to see if there is the tools to forgive. And so I'm going to do that right now and just say in front of all you good people that I forgive them. Thank you. Okay. I would.

By the way, I would add that it's actually harder to forgive when the wrong wasn't done directly to you. In other words, I see somebody harming. If I see X harming Y, it's actually in some strange ways. It's easier for why to forgive X than for me. And you can just stay very angry and fill with anger toward those people and that person. So I'm glad you did it. But it's not easy. And it's actually in some ways could be a little harder than other kinds of forgiveness. Okay, yes, go ahead. So my question has to do with the idea of justice.

I think for me, I probably take, I probably am like the type of person that would end up wanting to seek vengeance. And so in forgiving, it kind of seems like you're giving up some kind of justice. So can you expand on like, I guess the idea of you- You saw me do a little move there and you're not completely sure what I did, right? Right. Okay. Okay. Well, I look at the, there's three, let's just say there's three kinds of wrongs maybe with regard to this.

There really is, there are some things that are done to you that are best just for given and where did you go by the way. There you are. Thought I'd look at you. Sorry. There are some things that probably don't need redress. There are some things that are not patterns. I mean, it'd be very wrong for you to go after a person

who they did something wrong once. There's a place in Galatians and St. Paul's letter to the Galatians where it says, if you see somebody caught in a trespass, go to them and confront them. And the idea of caught in a trespass, go to them, and confront them. And the idea of caught in a trespass means, if you see a person getting stuck in a way of doing things, and you know that person needs to be confronted because they're gonna hurt other people,

they're gonna do it other, if it's just a one off, sometimes there are people who have an overblown sense of justice and seem to want to have redress for everything. But then there's a second group, a second kind of wrong where it's not go to the law or not nothing large. It's moral matter of going and just trying to get the person to see how wrong they were and how they're hurting you and they're hurting other people. And getting justice in the sense of trying to really have the person make some restitution,

admit they're wrong, put things right. We're not talking to legal at this point. And there, for sure, unless you've forgiven your heart, if you're part of any kind of effort to try to rein somebody in or to talk to them or confront them or anything like that. If they sense, I think I tried to say this, but it went by pretty fast. If they sense that you're not there really to help them or to, you're not really there for justice, you're there for payback, you're there to, to exact some pain, you know, get, you know, exact some cost, make them squirm, humiliate them.

If you don't forgive them, you will actually be there to humiliate them. You won't actually be there to get them to really change. And so what I've discovered, for example, even in doing marriage counseling, when one person is sort of wrong the other person, I try to say, if you don't forgive the person, you'll never get them to admit that they've done wrong. Because they'll immediately sense that you're just trying to humiliate them and there's no real compassion and they'll get their back up and then they'll just do bad things back and it's on forever.

But then there's a last level where you really have to, you need to do public policy changes or go to the law or something like that. And well, I even gave an example. If a woman who's married is getting beaten by her husband, she should forgive him and have him thrown in jail. I'm not getting about that. As a pastor, I would always say that. The forgiveness means so that the poison of the person doesn't get in you and you become an angry person and a bitter person, just like we were saying before.

But it's also true that if there's any hope of the person making any kind of admission or change, so she needs to forgive. But on the other hand, yes, it's illegal. You're not supposed to do that. It's wrong. Forgiveness does to do that. It's wrong. Forgiveness does not mean that you don't uphold the law. And in fact, it's not good for the country. It's not good for the community.

It's not good for the society. And it doesn't honor God. So I would say the forgiveness and pursuing justice not only go hand-to-hand, but they are mutually interdependent. And almost always, when you fail to forgive, you overshoot. You don't just go for justice, you go for vengeance, you go to punish, you go to make them pay. That's the hope, by the way, that's the whole idea behind the Old Testament and I for an I and a tooth for tooth. That sounds terrible, doesn't it? But you know, if somebody

has put your eye out, you're going to put both their eyes out. And if somebody took about one of your teeth, you're going to knock all their teeth out. Because that's, see, eye for an eye and tooth for tooth is justice. Two eyes for an eye, whole mouth for a tooth, that's not forgiving. I think we have time for one more, but that's about it.

You're being very kind of a yes, go ahead. Thank you, and thanks for your words tonight. Kind of a question that takes us in a little bit of a different direction. You've talked a lot about the need to forgive, but what about the flip side of the need to accept forgiveness? So, you know, real interested in a thought is also about how knowledge plays into this. So, you mentioned Jesus as being obviously the great example of saying forgive them. And then the second half of that, though,

is they don't know what they're doing. So what about people who know what they're doing and still choose to do it anyway? Now wait a minute, I got two questions in there. That's all right. That's all right. I hear A and a B. The second question I heard, I'm in,

I heard right, I'm 62 years old. Well, but I'm a baby boomer 62 year old, and I went to a lot of rock band music. So anyway, concerts. So it's not like the second thing you're saying, how do you forgive somebody who hasn't, doesn't know what they're doing, they're just not admitting it.

So I guess you could look it from that perspective. So how do you forgive someone who actually chooses to do wrong, that they know is wrong? Yeah, they're very deliberate. Right. And on the flip side, how is someone who knows that they're doing wrong and chooses to do it? How can that person accept forgiveness? Okay, sure. That number, the second one first, there's a book by Dan Allender, a psychologist, wrote this long ago now called Bold Love.

And he talks about the difference between what he calls an evil person, a fool, and a regular sinner. They're very helpful categories, by the way. In fact, we're going to do a little questionnaire tonight just to see which one you are. So anyway, I think I'm evil. Basically, what he would say, by the way, a regular center is all of us.

We all are selfish. We all have a tendency to be self-centered. We all have a tendency. It's very, very difficult for us to put ourselves in the shoes of other people when we do wrong. A fool is somebody who is unknowingly very destructive in his or her behavior. Their behavior is worse than most. They leaves devastation, lots of broken relationships, lots of unhappy people. And yet the person seems to be almost completely blind. An evil person is somebody who knows what they're doing.

There, it doesn't mean Hitler, E.D. I mean necessarily. It just means a person who is very, very hard knows exactly what he or she is doing and is just doing about doing it. What Dan says, of course, is you still have to forgive a person like that. Because actually, you're much more likely to become evil

if you don't forgive the evil person. So there is a certain amount of, in spite of the fact that I still say, don't forget the vertical. There's a certain amount of self-protection. If you, one of the big dangers with people that are that mean is that you feel absolutely, you have a warrant to start to do bad things to them and to really sit around scheming, what am I going to do to stop this person and then you become evil? However, he says you have to be extraordinarily

careful to keep your distance from evil people. You forgive them, you tell them once and then stick, stay away. He gives an example, for example, of a woman, she was in her 30s or 40s, and she had a completely abusive father who was in his late 70s. And he was very abusive, not physically, but just abusive to her, just talked her down, you know, yell that or told her she was nothing, she was worthless.

So Dan told her to say, look, you're my father. And therefore, every week I'm going to call you. But I want you to know, the minute you start to say, this, this, this, this, I'm not going to warn you. I'm not going to say, well, dad, what are you doing? Don't do this, dad. I hate you. I'm going to, in other words, I'm going to call you.

And in the minute you say, I'm going to say, talk to you next week, Dad, is hang up. And he's an over a period of like, I remember correctly, over a period of like months or years, slowly but surely. He got up to like three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. He got better. But basically, you know, you wouldn't, when I say evil, you say he was evil.

I mean, he knew what he was doing, he was doing it, and you have to have those boundaries. On the other hand, by the't, when I say evil, you say he was evil. I mean, he knew what he was doing, he was doing it, and you have to have those boundaries. On the other hand, by the way, when you say, how do you receive forgiveness, I think. You snuck me, no, I don't mean that you snuck me, but it's actually harder than you, well, you know, we wouldn't ask the question, wouldn't you? But,

Miroslav Wolf is right in saying, I think the vertical is important here. To receive forgiveness takes a certain amount of humility that a lot of us don't have, I think. To receive forgiveness means you have to, now you're talking about somebody who's saying, you've done wrong and I'm forgiving you, right? That what you mean by receiving forgiveness? No, just receive forgiveness means when somebody is forgiving you for something you've

done. Yeah. It takes us quite a lot of humility to say, thank you. I need that. Or thank you very much. Or just instead of making excuses or even taking a very, it takes a certain amount of humility. And I think the humility is the thing

that Americans don't have unless they have that vertical relationship. That's all. OK. I don't know how it's stopped us, because we've never done this since we've gotten into the building here. And I want to thank you for coming and listening. And I'll tell you what, I still see a couple of the musicians around.

They were unbelievable. So why don't you just applaud them and then, bye. Thanks for listening to Gospel and Life. And Dr. Keller's teaching on the Christian disciplines. You can get more content like today's teaching when you connect with Gospel and Life on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter. This month's sermons were recorded in 2008. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at every Deemer Presbyterian Church. you