Bad news, good news

“I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that people can hurt you. Sometimes people you trust let you down, betray you, abuse you, and it goes deep. You not only feel hurt, you feel wronged. You didn’t deserve it.

You can’t forget it. It’s like a videotape recorded inside your mind, and there is no-on-off button. It comes on randomly. Every time it shows that rerun, you get walloped all over again. There’s no delete button. You’re stuck with it.

But there is good news. The good news is that God has developed a way to cope with that hurt and to overcome the pain. He invented it. He called it forgiving and he invites us to do it with him. There is nothing more important to Jesus than human relationships and nothing more grievous than when a relationship is demolished by someone doing another wrong. It happened to him. He knows. And so he tells us, “Forgive each other.” It’s the way to bring something good out of a horrible situation.”

-John Ortberg, et al. “Session Five - Forgiveness.”
Groups: The Life-Giving Power of Community.

This past Friday at Aletheia Fellowship, our Bible Study was based upon this chapter from the book “Groups: The Life-Giving Power of Community”. In the next few days, I will be posting quotations from this chapter we just studied on forgiveness. Let’s just say, the session was not very Word-heavy but still the message hit home hard.

Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?”   Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. (Matthew 18:21-22)

“You and I are made to worship, you and I are called to love.
You and I are forgiven and free…” -Chris Tomlin, Made to Worship.