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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kyle Idleman
Our ability to appreciate grace is in direct correlation to the degree to which we acknowledge our need for it.
We must acknowledge our sin before we can appropriate God’s grace.
As long as we think I’m not that bad, grace will never seem that good.
John Chrysostom put it this way: “The fire of sin is intense, but it is put out by a small amount of tears, for the tear puts out a furnace of faults and cleans our wounds of sins.”
We must grieve for our sins by acknowledging our offense against a holy God.
Today the church is Jesus’s community. And as our leader demonstrated through his actions and reinforced with his teachings, our core value is grace. Our churches should be marked by grace, flooded with grace, known for grace. So when one of our own refuses to be gracious, there should be outrage and deep sadness.
When someone in our community wants to receive grace from the Master but refuses to even attempt to give grace to someone who has hurt them, the community should be outraged and saddened.
Jesus made it clear that you can’t receive God’s grace and then refuse to give it to others. If God’s forgiven your sins, you can’t continue keeping track of the sins of others. If you do, if you hold on to the bitterness, your hurt will become hatred. It will poison you, and the infection will spread, and the not-so-subtle insinuation is that it could lead you to miss out on grace altogether. So instead of holding on to the bitterness of what was done to you, hold it up, realize it’s not sparking joy, and get rid of it.
Our emotions can tie us up, hold us down, and have a way of choking our resolve to forgive. They are roadblocks that keep us from moving forward with forgiveness.
Instead of making this journey dependent on our emotions, or relying on our own resolve, we need to ask the Holy Spirit to help us clean out our closets and finally get rid of the anger and the bitterness that have piled up and kept us from making progress.
“Does this spark joy?”
That’s the thing about suppressing our anger; eventually it’s going to come up.
A lot of anger over a little thing might reveal repressed bitterness that has turned toxic and is seeping out.
Another indication is if we complain about everything.
Instead of seeing the world through the lens of grace, they see the world through the lens of bitterness. It can end up defining them and that type of negativity has a way of becoming self-fulfilling.
You don’t repress what happened to you, you rehearse it. Rehash it. Replay it. Again and again. And it turns your hurt into resentment.
The idea is that when we repress or rehearse anger, we are giving the devil a place to establish a base camp from which he is able to carry out his missions. Unresolved anger is an open door the devil can walk through and use to gain access to the rest of the rooms in our house.
Don’t give the devil a foothold.
The Holy Spirit has made his home in your heart. He is working to help grow us up. He is working to grow his fruit in our lives. Galatians 5 tells us the kind of fruit the Holy Spirit wants to grow in our hearts: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (vv. 22–23). But if we keep rehearsing anger, the weeds of bitterness and rage begin to grow and choke out the fruit that the Holy Spirit wants to produce in our lives.
When we live in grace, releasing doesn’t mean giving up, it means giving it to God.
She offers forgiveness when he has done nothing to deserve it and hasn’t bothered to ask for it. This step of forgiveness is not dependent upon the person who hurt you to do something or say anything. It’s between you and God. You release the pain to him.
Paul acknowledges what was done and releases it to God, but then sets up some appropriate boundaries to prevent future harm. We may need to do the same.
It’s what Jesus taught all of us to do in Luke 6:27–28: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
This is SO hard!
Getting rid of those feelings is much more a matter of obedience than most of us realize. When one of those feelings comes boiling to the surface we must hold it up, examine it, and then decide to get rid of it. Instead of continuing to replay the offense and relive the hurt, level one forgiveness is releasing that pain to God. It’s making the decision to stop calling up what was done to us and start focusing on what was done for us.
This step requires a decision on my part. I must choose to release these hurts.
Complaining keeps us focused on what we wish was different rather than being thankful for what we have.
Complaining spreads from one person to another and can infect an entire community.
Paul says two things are absolutely sure: Life is hard (v. 22). God is good (v. 28).
God doesn’t waste our pain but rather can use it and work in it to call our hearts closer to him.
