Sermon Tone Analysis

Message

I’m so thankful to be part of a Love Your Neighbor church like Christ Journey — we are one church with many campuses meeting together in real time every Sunday with a ‘High tech, high touch,’ reaching all across our county and the world, together!

We are joined at the heart by our vision and joined at the hip by our technology, sharing Christ’s hope as we journey together!

Let us pray—Gables campus, Kendall campus, church online campus, all of those streaming live with us now—for the Miami Beach launch party taking place as we speak!

Father, for your grace and mercy, for your forgiveness, we ask that your presence fill the lives of those who live on the beach!

May the power of your Spirit dwell in those who make up your church, and through them, may so many others come to know your love and goodness… in the name of Jesus Christ we make our prayer!

Amen!

Today, we meet the Creed in the most vulnerable and visible place of our lives: the forgiveness of sins.

Now, on the most practical, real life level, forgiveness may be the most extraordinarily difficult act that any one of us may ever experience in our lives, no matter what side of the forgiving equation in which we find ourselves.

On the one hand, forgiveness is essential for life.

We need it like we need breath in our lungs.

Yet, on the other hand, forgiveness also confronts our faith and forces us to ask ourselves: do I really believe in this God who claims to wholly forgive me and then calls me to do the same with others?

Hence why pastors and theologians across the centuries have called Jesus’ forgiving sacrifice on the cross: scandalous.

Do you know what scandalous means?

It means an offense against morality.

Forgiveness offends our sense of right and wrong.

Karma makes moral sense.

Good people get the goods things that they deserve, and bad people get the bad things that they deserve.

Vengeance makes moral sense.

Vengeance inflicts exact punishment for a wrong.

If someone harms you, then vengeance exacts that same harm back to them.

That’s why we love movies like Gladiator and Braveheart.

The protagonists impose exact revenge against those who harmed the ones they loved.

Movies like these affirm our sense of right and wrong.

Unlike my dear friend, Bob, who forgave the drunk driver that killed his wife.

At the sentencing hearing, my friend, Bob, even asked for a lower sentence because—and to quote Bob—“he didn’t want to see another life lost in this tragedy.”

Now, that’s scandalous.

Some of Bob’s friends criticized him for not asking the judge to issue the fullest sentence allowed by law.

To some, what Bob did was immoral.

Though a moral God created us in his image, our fallen morality seeks to judge in God’s place.

All of us fall for the lie that we are god, and able to declare right and wrong without ever seeking God’s will on these matters.

Forgiveness offends our sense of right and wrong, but not God’s.

No wonder so many religious, moral, do-gooders found Jesus so deeply offensive during his public ministry.

He forgave people of their sins, rather than exacting the fullest punishment of the law upon them.

Most of all, Jesus offended the pharisees, religious leaders, who observed the strictest adherence to the religious law.

In fact, the Pharisees wanted to kill Jesus because the forgiveness that he offered upended their entire moral system.

Forgiveness offends our sensibilities.

It contradicts those deepest desires within all of us that seek to control and preserve our moral superiority.

***Now, this kind of moral superiority ought not be confused with those who are called to bring order and justice, such as law enforcement, firefighters, military, lawyers, government officials, and others who faithfully serve in order to see these virtues of God’s heart come alive in our world.

That’s different than those who refuse to forgive because they want to maintain some sense of control or self-preservation.

Forgiveness always costs something of the forgiver, regardless of the size of the offense.

By definition, forgiveness of any kind means that the offended assumes the offender’s debt.

Forgiveness always comes with a price tag.

Debts don’t just disappear.

Whether they be financial, emotional, or physical, we live in a world where the ledgers of our hearts need to zero out.

One theologian wrote on forgiveness, saying, “Forgiveness seems almost unnatural.

Our sense of fairness says that people should pay for the wrong they do.

But forgiving is love’s power to break nature’s rule.”

Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget, xvi

Think about that: Forgiveness is so offensive that it breaks the rules of nature.

Grudges, revenge, resentment, harsh words, neglect, gossip….

These are natural responses to the broken world in which we live, but in Christ Jesus, forgiveness is love’s power to break our fallen nature’s bent toward moral superiority.

The Apostle Paul described the extent to which Jesus demonstrated God’s love power for you and me in his letter to the church in Colossae.

Paul wrote: For he - meaning God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth… has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Colossians 1:13-14

Really, what an extraordinary gift!

Paul’s reference here to Jesus’ Kingdom was first mentioned by the Evangelist, Luke, who recorded Jesus quoting the prophet Isaiah in chapter 61, saying:

***“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke 4:18-19

Here in this statement, Jesus identified himself as God’s Messiah, who would one day restore the world back to rights and bring the Year of the Lord’s favor.

This refers to the Year of Jubilee from Numbers chapter 25.

Here, Yahweh God decreed the law that Israel would practice a Sabbath year, every 50th year, in order to rest in the Lord’s favor and celebrate his goodness and plenty.

During this year, all debts would be forgiven, all slaves would be set free, and the land would rest from 49 years of work.

But in actuality, Israel never obeyed this law.

Can you understand why?

Because Forgiveness is hard!

Canceling debts and taking them on as your own is hard!

Israel obeyed many laws, but they couldn’t follow this one.

Even still, though, God desires for his people to experience this kind of freedom come true in their lives.

The year of Jubilee is essential to God's character.

In Christ, your Heavenly Father proclaimed the year of Jubilee on our lives by forgiving us of our sins.

On the cross, Jesus canceled our debt and paid it by his sacrifice.

Thus why Paul stated, in whom - our Messiah, Jesus Christ - we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Colossians 1:14

Paul links these two words together - redemption and forgiveness - for a very specific reason.

***In the original Greek, the word from which we derive the English word ‘forgiveness’ (Colossians 1) is the same word that Luke used for the word ‘freedom’ in reference to the prisoners (Luke 4).

Other translations use the word deliverance.

For those of you who grew up reading the King James Version of the Bible, then you may be familiar with the word ‘remission,’ which literally means the “cancelation of debt.”

***Either way, the Greek word ‘aphesin’ literally means: a sending away, a letting go, a release, pardon, complete forgiveness.

In the Colossians passage, Paul used these two words in order to cue the first century ear to remember the Exodus narrative.

Just like if I say the words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” together in the same sentence, then I am cueing you to think about… the Declaration of Independence.

Listen…

When Paul speaks of God rescuing people from one kingdom and giving them another kingdom in the son whom he loves, and of ‘redemption’ and ‘forgiveness’ as the central themes of that rescue operation, [[[what Paul is doing is]]] Paul is writing with the Exodus from Egypt in mind, which would have been the central heartbeat and hope of every Jewish person of God during the 1st century.

All of God’s people longed for the day when a new Moses, the new Messiah, would lead them into the fullness of their relationship with God.

In this passage, Paul identified Jesus as the new Moses!

In Christ, God came all the way down to us in order to deliver all of God’s people from the bonds of slavery to sin, which Paul identified as one kingdom, a dark and evil kingdom, into Christ’s kingdom, a kingdom defined by love, and marked by the forgiveness of sins!

What God has done in Jesus, and is now doing for every person who places his or her trust in him, is the new Exodus!

On the cross, Jesus set free our hearts from sin, forgave us, raised again for us, and ascended to the right hand of the Father for us, so that we may gratefully follow him all the way into freedom.

***Following Jesus means leaving the Egypt of our sin and, instead, entering into the promised land of eternal life!

Forgiveness and Redemption smashed into each other on the cross.

Jesus paid the ransom of our sin by dying the death that we deserved, assumed our sin as his own, forgave us for choosing our own way, and freed us from living hopelessly chained to our sinful desires.

Hence why Paul wrote elsewhere:

We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives.

We are no longer slaves to sin.

Romans 6:6

On the cross, quite simply, Jesus redeemed our lives back to God and forgave us of our eternal debt.

Forgiveness results from both grace and mercy at work in a person’s life.

At once, I am receiving something that I do not deserve, while also not receiving what I do deserve.

Quite literally, redemption means to “buy back.’