The Art of Forgiveness – Jared Wilson

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The Art of Forgiveness

Guest:Jared Wilson

From the series:The Art of Forgiveness (Day 1 of 1)

Air date:June 17, 2025

Jared:It feels like a death: “I’m losing something to forgive you!” That’s why we don’t want to do it, or we just find it so difficult to do. I want to do it—the spirit’s willing—the flesh is weak. “Why is it so hard to forgive?”—because it’s going to cost us something. It feels like a little death: I got to put aside comfort; I got to put aside a sense of rightness. I feel like I’m letting you off the hook; that doesn’t seem right. I got to die to myself to be able to do this.

Ann:Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave:And I’m Dave Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave:Alright; so today we get to listen to a cruise talk that Jared Wilson gave last year on the cruise, which was awesome. But guess what? We’re sailing again this February.

Ann:Hey, we’re going to be on the ship February 14th through the 21st on the brand-new MSC World America ship. It’s brand-new.

Dave:And it’s amazing. Last year was incredible. You won’t believe this: the boat is 90 percent sold out for next year, for February. Here’s the deal: you’ve got to get signed up right now; this is the month we give you a discount. Dennis and Barbara Rainey are going to be on the boat this year, along with Bob Lepine. We got Tenth Avenue North. Anyway, it’s a fabulous week in the sun. It’s a marriage retreat for a week on a boat. I’m telling you: you don’t want to miss it.

Ann:Book now; you can go to FamilyLifeToday.com or—

Dave:—you can call 803-358-6329 to get more information. Don’t forget: the special pricing ends June 30.

Just to give you a little taste of last year, here’s Jared Wilson from the cruise last year, talking about the difficult art of forgiveness.

[Love Like You Mean It Message]

Jared:Forgiveness is a love; it’s a gift of love. You might say: “I have forgiven people I don’t love,” or “…that I don’t feel loving towards, but I forgave them.” We have to remember that love isn’t a sentimental idea. Love isn’t just a romantic category, as wonderful as the romantic category of love is. Love is a gift; and because love is a gift, that means love is meant to be given.

To be for-given is to be given love, to be given a kind of love. Forgiveness is how we demonstrate, in fact, the relationality of grace. Grace can remain for us, sometimes, just sort of a doctrine—a concept, an ideology, an idea—but it’s when we take the concept of grace; and we sort of press out, horizontally, across the room to others—that’s relational grace. Relational grace is God’s grace put into Christian action in relationships.

Perhaps, you’ve heard the definition of grace as: “Not getting what you deserve.” Anyone ever heard that? Grace says: “When you don’t get what you deserve. Because of our sins, because of our failures, because of our flaws, none of us deserves free blessings, free favor.” Well, relational grace is when we don’t give others what they deserve; instead, we give them the blessings they don’t deserve. Why would we do that?—it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when we do that.

Because that’s what God did for us, and this is the connection that John makes in our passage here about love. We’re to give love to others, not because they’re lovable, or because they deserve it, but because God loved us. The grace of love that we give to others is predicated—it’s founded on—the grace of love that God gives us.

Let’s read 1 John, Chapter 4; we’re going to read verses 7 to 21:

Dear friends, let us love one another because love is from God; and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love, does not know God because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way. God sent His one and only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we remain in Him and He in us. He’s given us of His Spirit, and we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent His Son as the world’s Savior. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him and he in God. We have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love and the one who remains in love, remains in God, and God remains in him.

In this love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love. Instead, perfect love drives out fear because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love.

We love because He first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he’s a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. We have this command from Him: the one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.

This is the Word of the Lord. “Father, we thank You for this Word. We ask that You would bless our time together. Father, help us to take the theoretical and make it actionable. Help us to embrace—not just a doctrine of grace, a doctrine of love, a doctrine of forgiveness—but to embrace the mandate. And Father, to do that, we need Your Holy Spirit empowering us, filling us, anointing us. Father, help us to end this week empowered by Your presence to love and forgive. It’s in Your Son’s name we pray these things. Amen.”

Just a little background on the letter. This letter is written by the same John who wrote the Gospel of John, John’s Gospel. This is the disciple John; he followed Jesus for three years. He was one of the apostles of the early church, but John was not just a disciple of Jesus. He was a very close friend of Jesus. If you remember—Jesus had, of course, a community of disciples, who began to grow and gather around Him—those who had pledged allegiance to Jesus, who decided to follow Him. But within that community of disciples, there was the 12, the 12 disciples. They were His closest followers, His closest friends. They become the apostles sent out on mission after the ascension of Jesus.

But even within that 12, do you remember there were 3 that it seemed like Jesus spent even more time with and would show special things to: Peter, James, and John. He’s always pulling aside Peter, James, and John. They get to come with Him up the mountain; they get to see the transfiguration. He’s spending extra time with Peter, James, and John. They seem like His circle within the circle, His closest friends within His closest friends. But then, even within that three, there was John. It seems like John is maybe—if Jesus has a best friend—would be Jesus’ best friend. The Gospels refer to John as the beloved disciple, which is kind of interesting; like He didn’t belove the other ones? The disciple whom Jesus loved; as if He didn’t love the others. Well, He did love all His disciples, but He just seemed to have a special closer relationship with John.

John, who’s writing this now, is working from a place of up-close knowledge, relationship, personal experience of the love of Jesus. Many scholars think that one of the purposes of this letter that John is writing is to help the recipients—the church that’s receiving it—navigate the threat of a heresy called Gnosticism. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that term, the early heresy of Gnosticism. It’s still endorsed today in some forms, but it was a heresy that promoted a kind of enlightenment through esoteric knowledge, like a special knowledge. Some people are enlightened, and some aren’t. You have to have the secret code to be able to get this sort of secret knowledge.

One thing that Gnosticism taught was a downplaying of physical matter. They would say that physical matter is cursed; it’s broken; it’s evil. In the early heresy of Gnosticism, they would deny, for instance, the incarnation. They would say God didn’t really become a man. He just sort of appeared to be a man, almost like an illusion of some kind; because God could not put on flesh, because flesh is inherently evil or inherently dirty. They downplayed those sorts of things.

Here we have John, who says in his Gospel: “The Word was made flesh,” “The Word became incarnate,”—He put on skin. “The Word walked, and prayed, and fished, and ate breakfast with us.” This John, with this knowledge, is adamantly opposed to the concept of knowledge that comes apart from the incarnate, risen, ascended Jesus Christ. We’ll see how his emphasis on love then is not grounded in esoteric or mystical conceptions of love—sentimental, romantic, purely emotional views of love—but his idea of love and forgiveness, by extension, is grounded in the incarnation concept of love as the grace of God, who came in Jesus Christ, the Son of God in the flesh.

Now, you may notice, as you look through this passage, or as I read through it, the word, “forgive” and “forgiveness” don’t exactly appear in the passage; but the concepts are there. We look again, especially at verses 17 and 18: “In this, love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear because fear involves punishment.” Now, what is forgiveness but the removal of punishment?—the removal of judgment?—the foregoing of vengeance? John is implicitly putting forgiveness into the framework of this relational grace. He does that by grounding it in the goodness of God and the good news of Jesus Christ.

We’re going to see, in this passage, at least three facets of forgiveness that help us navigate the difficult art of forgiveness. John starts by showing us, first, that forgiveness displays the grace of God’s person. We make God known; even make God, in a sense, feel real when we love and forgive others. Our love reflects the grace that comes from God’s very self.

Look at verses 7 and 8: “Dear friends, let us love one another because love is from God; and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love, does not know God because God is love.” Whoa!

Now, I ask for your permission to do a little bit of Bible teaching. I’m going to ask your permission to do a little bit of theology; is that okay? It’s not the whole sermon, but just the first part of the sermon; a little bit of theology. I know you didn’t come on the cruise ship to do doctrine, but here we are. John grounds love in God’s very person. This means that love must be a really big deal. Love must not just be a glorious thing, a weighty thing that we sing songs about; it must be an indispensable thing. If God, Himself, is love, we should not think lightly or sentimentally about love any more than we should think lightly or sentimentally about God.

A couple of doctrinal notes: first, John is telling us that God is love; is telling us what God’s very nature is. It’s telling us that God has a triune nature. What does it mean for God to be love? It doesn’t necessarily mean that God is simply loving. God is loving, but that’s not necessarily what it means. Judaism, Islam, Mormonism—all of those teach a God who loves, at least, occasionally—but when Christians teach that God is Himself love, they’re saying that real love, itself, has its origin and its essence in God’s very person. This cannot be true unless God is a trinity. If you just think about it: a solitary, non-triune God cannot be love. He might learn to love; He might yearn for love; but He cannot, in Himself, be love because love requires an object. Real love requires relationship, and so the doctrine of the Trinity explains how God is love.

We finally see how love is part of the fabric, even of creation, because it’s part of the Creator. It’s essential to the eternal need-nothing Creator God. From eternity past, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit have been in relationship with each other. The Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; the Father loves the Spirit; the Spirit loves the Father, so on and so forth. They’ve loved each other; that loving relationship is bound up in the very nature of God Himself. If God were not a trinity, but merely a non-triune divinity of some kind, He could neither be loved nor be God. Because if He was alone—if He was not triune—He could not be love. But if He was alone; and thus, needed someone or something to love, He would be deficient in character—God is not deficient in character—He would be imperfect; thus, He wouldn’t be God.

Michael Reeves, a theologian, says this: “Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty and irrelevant dogma; but the truth is that God is love because God is a trinity.” If you’ve ever wondered: “Why do we even believe this? No other religion believes this thing. Maybe, the Bible kind of says it—maybe—but can we downplay it? Can we just kind of put it in the background?” It’s kind of complex; it’s hard to explain. Every time we try to teach it to kids, we wind up in some kind of heresy of some kind. This is a pretty tricky sort of thing.

Now, we’ve got a forefront—number one—because this is who God is. But also, because the Trinity is not some weird religious aberration that we have stupidly clung to; it’s the answer to the deepest longing of the human heart! The Trinity answers history’s oldest desire. It even clarifies the question for us. It makes us go deeper than ethereal feelings, sentimental notions. Emotions come and go; emotions wax and wane, but our God lives forever. This puts us on solid ground with the idea of love that we have been chasing forever—the love that does not change, the love that does not fade, the love that does not go away—the Trinity explains love because love is grounded in God’s triune nature.

A second sort of doctrinal note here: John, telling us that God is love, is a reminder that we cannot define love outside the framework of the holiness of God. This means we aren’t free to define love however we want to define it. There’s a major slogan that’s popular right now; I’m sure you’ve heard it: “Love is love.” You heard that? —“Love is love,”—No; God is love, which means that there’s no behavior that God forbids— no kind of sexual immorality, whether homosexuality, or adultery, or any kind of fornication, or lust—none of that is love because God is love. Because God is love, love must be grounded in His holiness and defined by His commands because love is from God. We’re not at liberty to pervert love or redefine it. Whenever we do that, we’re not actually loving. When we’re not loving, we’re not showing that we are born of God or that we know God. So mainly, what John is telling us is that we make God known when we reflect godly love. When we reflect godly love, we display the grace of God Himself.

[Studio]

Dave:This is FamilyLife Today. We are listening to a message that Jared Wilson gave on the Love Like You Mean It cruise last February; we’ll be sailing again next February. Man, this is powerful.

Ann:Really good.

Dave:That’s the kind of stuff you get on the boat. We’re only halfway done, so let’s go back and hear the rest of Jared’s message.

[Love Like You Mean It Message]

Jared:Forgiveness displays the grace of God’s pardon. What are we really doing when we forgive each other? We are showing the grace that God has given in the gospel of Jesus. When we put others before ourselves, we display the grace of the Son, who set aside His own glory to serve us, even to die for us. Love displays the grace of the gospel of God’s forgiveness on the cross, which is God’s pardoning sinners in the good news of Jesus Christ. Verses 9 through 11: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way.”

“How do we know God loves us?”—John says: “This is how we know God loves us. God sent His one and only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. And love consist in this, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends,”—verse 11—“Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another.”

How was God’s love displayed to us?—God sent His Son to die for us. This is John, in a sense, plagiarizing himself from his most famous verse, John 3:16: “This is how God showed love to the world. He sent His only begotten Son that whosoever would believe in Him, would not perish, but would have everlasting life.” We didn’t invent love: God did. He demonstrates His inventive grace by the grace of the gospel of Christ on the cross.

“Why does loving the unlovable often feel so difficult? Why does it so often necessitate a kind of dying to ourselves? It feels like a death: ‘I’m losing something to forgive you!’” That’s why we don’t want to do it, or we just find it so difficult to do. I want to do it—the spirit’s willing—the flesh is weak. “Why is it so hard to forgive?”—because it’s going to cost us something. It feels like a little death: I got to put aside comfort; I got to put aside a sense of rightness. I feel like I’m letting you off the hook—that doesn’t seem right; there’s just something that doesn’t sit—I’ve got to die to myself. I got to die to myself to be able to do this. This is exactly what Christ has done: He dies to forgive.

Real love is cross-centered love. John explicitly connects our love for each other with the Son of God’s atoning sacrifice. He’s adamant about it:

“If God loved us in this way, we also must love one another.”

In Ephesians 4:32, Paul puts it this way: “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as, in Christ, God forgave you.”

In Colossians 3:13, he says: “Bear with one another; and if you have a complaint against another, forgive each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive.”

“Why love?”—because God loved us. “Why forgive?”—because Jesus forgave us. To hold onto unforgiveness is to assume that we deserved the grace that God gave us: “I can’t forgive them; that’s too big. But I’m sure going to enjoy the grace God gave me. Of course, He would’ve died for me; I’m a good person.” If you’re a good person, Jesus would not have needed to die for you. Jesus didn’t die for good people; He died for sinners. So to hold onto unforgiveness is to hoard grace, to be stingy with the grace that God has so lavishly given to us. To hold onto unforgiveness is to hold that grace cheaply as if Christ’s death and resurrection aren’t precious enough to cover the cost of our forgiving others. When we hold onto unforgiveness—when we are graceless—it’s like looking at the cross, and saying, “That’s not that big a deal. That’s not worth what it might cost me.” If we withhold forgiveness, we hold the cross in contempt.

But loving this way feels like death, doesn’t it? Forgiveness feels like death. This is from a Christian writer by the name of Sheila Dougal; she shared her story at the website for Gospel-Centered Discipleship. This is what she says:

Seven months pregnant with our second son, I sat at the desk in our living room, devastated by the letter I had just read. My husband didn’t want to be married anymore. I remember standing on the patio of the home that my husband had purchased with his portion of our divided assets, months after we separated. I was bouncing our eight-month-old on my hip and keeping my eye on our two-year-old while he showed me all the things he was finding at Daddy’s new house. Hot tears spilled; my throat tightened. I loved this man. I wanted our family whole; but instead, it was broken. I felt my heart could literally be bleeding out of my chest.

She later writes:

When my husband told me he wanted out of our marriage, while I was weeks away from giving birth to our second son, bitterness stood at the door, ready to take me in her arms and poison me and anyone I rubbed against. Vengeance visited my thoughts daily, enticing me to use the power I had to make my husband pay. Fear tried to deceive me into enabling my husband by making excuses for him and blaming myself. And I’d be lying if I said these three insidious visitors don’t come knocking, to this day.

She says:

That was nearly 19 years ago; and by the grace of God, my husband and I have reconciled; we’re entering our 30th year of marriage. Forgiving my husband did not guarantee reconciliation; forgiveness is not reconciliation. It takes one to forgive; it takes two to reconcile.

When we set out to forgive others, in obedience to Jesus, we aren’t promised those we forgive will respond rightly. We may forgive and keep our distance from the person who wounded us. There were many days, while my husband and I were on our way to divorce, when I had to ask God: “How am I to love this man like Jesus has loved me when this divorce is final? How am I supposed to forgive him and treat him, with undeserved kindness, when I have to drop off our boys at his house?”

While walking through those damaged years in my marriage, I learned to turn away from bitterness and vengeance; and instead, bear the pain with a tender heart; and trusting the Lord, with all my rightful anger and fear, cleared a path between my husband and me. By God’s grace, my husband turned towards repairing our relationship on that path. I’m so glad he did. But even if he never did, I would still have tasted the goodness of the Lord in learning to forgive.

As Dougal says: “Forgiveness doesn’t always lead to reconciliation.” In fact, I think that’s one of the things that makes forgiveness really difficult sometimes, isn’t it? The person that we’re trying to forgive—they’re not sorry for what they did; it’s not like they’re begging for forgiveness—maybe, they won’t even acknowledge they did anything wrong or that they did anything in the first place, and I’m supposed to forgive that?

Sometimes, we get into trouble because we confuse the categories. Reconciliation requires two willing parties:

An offender, who’s repentant—not just saying they’re sorry—but is actually changing their behavior: going the opposite direction from the hurtful direction they had been in.

And someone who forgives; the offended party, forgiving.

Now, you can have one or the other. If we have Christ, whatever situation we’re in:

We should be able to repent, if we’re the offender, even if we’re not forgiven. Some of you in this room may have that experience, say, “Jared, I am not who I was; but I do not feel forgiven. My spouse has not forgiven me for that sin. I walk in a climate of judgment all the time.” The Lord will help you bear that, and we continue to pray that your spouse will forgive. But even if they don’t, you continue to walk in that repentance.

Or you may be in this situation: “I’ve got to choose to forgive every day; and every day, it’s an uphill slog to do that; because my spouse will not even admit how much they have hurt me,” or “…They’ll apologize; and then, they go right back into their old habits. They just keep hurting me, and hurting me, and hurting me.”

Well, you can repent, even if the one you’ve hurt doesn’t forgive you; and you can forgive, even if the one who has hurt you will not repent. In fact, this is how you know actually that you love the person when you’re willing to do the right thing, regardless of the response.

But a relationship can’t truly be restored until there’s both repentance and forgiveness. Forgiving someone, who has harmed you deeply—who’s abused you, even; that doesn’t mean you have to keep putting yourself in harm’s way or submitting to that relationship again—forgiving just means that you surrender the need for vengeance. You’ve handed what they deserve over to God—God says, “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay,”—and we say, “You know what? I’m going to trust You with that.”

Forgiveness is indeed a very difficult thing; it’s a difficult art. Sometimes, we have to make that decision every single day: “Choose forgiveness every day.” But that’s okay, because God has promised that His mercies will be new every morning. That hard task you got to face—each new day—He’s going to give you the strength that you need in that new day. He will give you the power that you need to forgive in the daily grace provided through God’s Spirit in the gospel of Jesus.

[Studio]

Dave:This is FamilyLife Today. We’re Dave and Ann Wilson. We’ve been listening to Jared Wilson, on the Love Like You Mean It cruise, from last February, talking about forgiveness.

Ann:That was a good reminder, wasn’t it?

Dave:Oh, it’s one of the hardest things—

Ann:It totally is.

Dave:—when you’ve really been hurt—to forgive. But it is the mark that identifies the difference that Christ makes in our life.

Ann:And if you are still contemplating: “Ah, should we go on that cruise?” The answer is: “Yes,—

Dave:“Yes.”

Ann:—“go on the cruise.” Sign up today; we’ll be sailing February 14th through the 21st. There’s nothing quite like it. We’re going to talk about marriage; we’re going to talk about our relationship; we’re going to bring Jesus into it and how He can help us.

Dave:And the whole boat is just us—it’s the entire boat—and it’s 90 percent sold out right now. If you’re sitting there, like, “Ah, should we?”—I’m just telling you—“You’re going to regret it if you don’t go.” Sign up right now; you can go to FamilyLifeToday.com; or give us a call at 800-358-6329. You can get more information there, and you get a special deal right now until

June 30. Man, we’d love to see you on the boat. It’s going to be a great week; you don’t want to miss it.

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