A New Way of Forgiving
In Color
On April 14, 1967, something happened that has impacted pretty much everyone in this room in one way or another. It was one of those moments in history that was a defining moment. One of those moments where, when this changed, everything changed.
On April 14, 1967, WMT-TV Channel 2 in Iowa made television history when it broadcast, for the very first time, part of it’s evening news broadcast in color!
It started in black and white. The news anchor was a man named Bob Bruner. He was seated at the news desk with the station manager Doug Grant. They made the announcement about this big change, from black and white to color, and then Bob Bruner got up from the news desk, walked across the studio to a brand new news desk with brand new cameras capable of shooting video in color, and then continued the broadcast!
Before he jumped back into the news, he said:
“Well, first I’d like to say this. I feel very honored to be chosen to be the first one involved in our big change, because there are so many, much more colorful characters around here than this reporter.”
We live in a world of full spectrum color. And we often associate different emotions with different colors.
If someone is sad, we might say they’re feeling… blue.
If someone is feeling sick, we might say they look pale.
If someone is greedy, we might say they are green with envy.
Anger
Whenever we think about anger or being angry, we call that seeing RED! We know what color corresponds to anger.
Just about every week, something happens when I’m driving down 59 that, if I’m honest, makes me see RED! That causes a little bit of ANGER to well up within me.
But I’m not the only one. The world we live in right now is making everyone see Red. It might be road rage, or it might be social media. It might be what you see on the news, or it might be something you hear on a podcast. It might be politics, or it might be a situation at work. It might be a family dynamic, or it might even be something that happened at church.
What’s interesting is that in the world we live in, anger is common. It’s normal. Rage is rampant. We’ve monetized anger, outrage, and hate.
It sells. It gets clicks. But it’s doing something to our souls. People go viral if they rant about this or that. It’s easy to blame, shame, and complain. But this is not the way it’s supposed to be. And it’s doing something to our souls. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is not the way things are in the Kingdom of Heaven. But this is the way things are in this world. We live in an angry, rage filled world where everyone is seeing red.
Whenever we talk about anger, we’ve got words and phrases that everybody agrees with. We say things like,
“They’ve got a short fuse.”
Or, “they’re a little hot around the collar.” Or we may even call someone a “hot head.”
Heat.
Hot head.
Dead red.
All of it relates to feeling ANGRY.
God knows that sometimes we see red, we feel angry.
He created us with all of our emotions. All of our emotions serve a God given purpose. But left unchecked, they can lead us down a dangerous road. That is especially true with anger.
Jesus invites us to live differently.
In the Sermon on the Mount, He calls us into a new way of living where hurts are healed, faults are forgiven, anger is handled in a God honoring way, and community is grounded in love for God and one another.
Six times in Matthew 5, here at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to address six different ways He is calling us to live from a life of love. He is inviting us into a new way of living in His Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. And every time he does this, He starts with, “You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…”
It’s almost as if Jesus was saying, You used to live in the land of black and white, but let me tell you what life looks like in all the vibrant colors that God has for you in the Kingdom of Heaven!
You used to live this way, but let me tell you what life is like in the Kingdom of Heaven!
We don’t have time to work through all six, but I do want us to take a moment and reflect on this first one.
Jesus says in Mathew 5.21-26:
21 “You have heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.’
And when Jesus said that, everyone listening was shaking their heads in agreement. Absolutely! Amen! Murder is wrong. Murder is a sin. But then, Jesus kept going. He says,
22 But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment!
And then He says, And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.
Murder is wrong, we all agree with that. It’s one of the 10 Commandments. When God met Moses at Mount Sinai and gave him the law, this was #6! (Exodus 20:1–17; Deuteronomy 5:4–21).
Even people who don’t believe the Bible believe that murder is wrong. We believe murder is wrong because we believe that every person is created by God, in the image of God, for the glory of God.
But then, Jesus shifts the conversation. He says, even if you are angry with someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell!
We live in a culture of contempt. Rage is rampant. You can go viral if you get angry enough and make a video ranting about this or that.
They say that social media posts that express outrage and anger get more likes and shares. Does that surprise anyone? Me neither! The algorithms actually reward anger. If you want to get noticed online, if you want to gain followers and be social media famous, just be angry!
We know a little something about anger, don’t we?
Jesus takes our anger seriously.
We all know that murder is wrong. But Jesus takes it a step further. He says, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgement!
So in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is teaching His disciples what life is like in the Kingdom of Heaven. And here’s the Good News, the Kingdom of Heaven is not an angry place. Anger is not a fruit of the Spirit. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
Jesus is ushering in a new Kingdom, a new way of living, a new way of seeing, and it truly is revolutionary. It’s even more dramatic than what happened in 1967 when we went from watching TV in black and white to color!
The Drama Triangle
So you may be wondering, how do we do this? What do we do when we get angry, feel angry, see red!? Surely Jesus knows this is a natural human emotion that we all feel sometimes.
And the answer is yes. Absolutely. Jesus knows. Jesus understands. There will be times when we have conflict, disagreements, and problems. Sometimes, we will get angry. We are human. But here’s the good news, when that happens, Jesus tells us what to do! He says…
23 “So if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, 24 leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.
Whenever problems arise, when there are disagreements, when there is tension in the relationship, Jesus tells His disciples to go to the person and be reconciled to the person. That’s what Jesus tells us to do. But that’s not what most people do.
Do you know what most people do? Most people, if they have a problem with a person, they don’t go to that person, they go to another person and tell them their problem, their complaint.
They call it triangulation.
Maybe you’ve seen this before. This paradigm was developed by psychologist Stephen Karpman in 1968. It describes the unhealthy relationships people often default to whenever they encounter conflict.
It starts with a Victim. This is the person, something has happened TO them. They feel powerless, mistreated, misunderstood. They are upset about what is happening TO them.
Then you have the Villain, or Persecutor. It’s their fault. Whatever happened, they did it. They caused it. And the villain lashes out in response with blame, shame, and anger.
Next comes the Hero, or the Rescuer. They’re the ones who are going to jump in and save the day. They can fix it.
And 9 times out of 10, the victim is going to run find someone to be the hero and depend on them to fix their problem instead of going to the other person directly to resolve it and work through it.
That’s why it’s called triangulation. Instead of going directly to the person with whom we have a problem, we go to someone else. We talk to them about it, gossip about it, talk bad about the other person so that we can feel better about ourselves.
It’s easier to talk about each other than it is to talk to each other, isn’t it?
Anybody, like me, ever been stuck in the drama triangle?
This isn’t what Jesus taught, but this seems to be the human default. We get caught up in the vortex of the drama triangle where, more often than not, we play the part of the VICTIM. We blame someone for something and they become the VILLAIN. And instead of going to them directly to work out our differences, we go to another person and invite them into our drama. We want them to hear our case, fix our problem, get involved, be our HERO.
The problem with the drama triangle is that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t resolve conflict, it creates it. It doesn’t remove drama, it adds drama. Karpman may not have known it, but he was tapping into a deep theological truth.
The way of Jesus leads to life. His way is different. He says, if you’ve got a problem with someone, or even if you’re on the way to worship and it dawns on you that someone may have something against you, stop what you’re doing. Before you go to worship go and be reconciled with that person!
Forgiveness
Then He says…
25 “When you are on the way to court with your adversary, settle your differences quickly. Otherwise, your accuser may hand you over to the judge, who will hand you over to an officer, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 And if that happens, you surely won’t be free again until you have paid the last penny.
Jesus calls His disciples to settle their differences QUICKLY.
Have you ever felt like your worship was blocked in some way? That you aren’t experiencing the nearness of God like maybe you have before? Is it possible there’s a person in your life you need to make things right with so you can worship God?
Jesus says, Loving others is this important. Be reconciled with others so you can really worship God (Romans 12.17-18 –> as much as it depends on you).
He goes on to say in the next chapter:
Matthew 6.14-15:
14 “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. 15 But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.
That’s how important forgiveness is to God. He wants you to forgive so much, he wants you to be in right relationship with others so much, that He teaches us to forgive and He says that if we forgive others of their sins, God will forgive us of our sins. But if we withhold forgiveness, if we are unwilling to forgive others, God, our Father in Heaven, will not forgive our sins.
What is the Kingdom of Heaven like? It’s the place and it’s a people where forgiveness reigns. Where people forgive and are forgiven.
You know what anger feels like. So let me ask another question, Do you know what forgiveness feels like?
Have you ever been on the receiving end of forgiveness?
Bill Courtney
Bill Courtney is known to many as the football coach from the Academy Award–winning documentary Undefeated. The film showcases how he took a group of disadvantaged young men at Manassas High School, players who had every reason to quit, and helped them believe in themselves. But what most people don’t know is that while Bill was helping his team heal, he was carrying an old wound that had never healed in him.
Bill grew up in Memphis, and like many kids, he wanted one thing more than anything else, a dad who showed up. His father walked out when he was four. Every now and then he’d reappear just long enough to stir up hope, then disappear again. And this hurt. It hurt deeply.
Bill pushed through life with a kind of determined anger. He worked hard, overachieved, built a business, raised a family, and became a mentor to boys who, like him, didn’t have a father. He could encourage them, push them, believe in them… but deep down he was still that young boy staring at the stands after scoring a game-winning touchdown watching every other dad celebrate his son and wondering why his own father wasn’t there.
For years, that hurt took a familiar shape: ANGER. It showed up around Father’s Day. It surfaced in little outbursts at work, he would be irritable at home, there was tension in his marriage. Bill did what so many of us do, he tried to bury it. But buried ANGER doesn’t die. It grows. It leaks. It distorts.
Then, one day something happened that changed everything. Bill’s wife had become friends with the wife of his dad’s stepson. His father had a new wife and a new family. She said, “I can arrange a meeting with your dad.”
That was the last thing Bill wanted. One awkward meeting couldn’t rewrite decades of pain. But to his credit, Bill prayed about it. And he kept praying. Slowly he realized something: God was not asking him to feel differently. God was asking him to forgive.
So Bill agreed.
On the day of the meeting, his father walked into his living room, He was older now, his hair was white, his excuses were ready. Bill stopped him and asked the question he had carried since he was a kid: “Why did you never call me?”
His father tried to explain, stumbled, then finally broke. “Oh, Bill… I’m so sorry. I’ve missed out on so much.”
And out of Bill came words he didn’t know he was capable of saying:
“Dad, I completely forgive you.”
In that moment, all the ANGER that had lived inside him for decades, anger that had shaped him, limited him, haunted him, it finally lost its power.
Forgiveness didn’t make their relationship perfect. It didn’t erase the past. But it released Bill from the prison of his own resentment.
Some of you may have a similar story. And not everyone’s story ends like Bill’s story. And if that’s you, just hear me say, I’m so sorry for what you have had to live through. God wants you to forgive because He loves you. And He knows if you can find a way to forgive, it’s not just about setting the other person set free, it’s about what will set you free.
Jesus says, Matthew 6.14:
14 “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
Anger is something we all experience. But God’s desire for us is to love Him and love each other. He always calls us towards reconciliation. And reconciliation begins with forgiveness.
Forgiveness is how God sets you free.
The antidote to anger is forgiveness.
Forgiveness has healing power. Not just for the person you’re forgiving, but for you.
Is there ANGER in your life today? Who is it directed toward? Who do you need go to and say “I’m sorry,” or offer forgiveness, and find a way to reconcile, to make things right, with another person? Can I encourage you to do that today? It will not be easy. But it is good. It is right. It is holy. And God will be with you.
In 1967, a new camera with new technology enabled the world to watch TV in color for the first time.
I wonder what would happen today IF we chose to see people the way Jesus sees people. That’s really what forgiveness is all about. It’s seeing someone the way God sees them — not by what they’ve done, but who they are as a person created by God, in the image of God, for the glory of God.
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