CTRL+ALT+FRGV+APLGZ // Hack The Wayback // Read
The Wayback Machine is an online digital library, holding over 580 billion web pages. It works by storing original source code so that previous versions of web pages are accessible—even if the page no longer exists. Did you know the Enemy has crafted his own Wayback Machine? Your past—regrets, sins, mistakes—are all archived, and He is working at a feverish pace to make sure you visit them again and again. But through the Holy Spirit, we have a way out. We can Hack the Wayback, turning the Enemy’s greatest weapon against him.
Our words, thoughts, and actions aren’t the only things archived in The Wayback Machine. The Enemy works hard to catalogue every hurt we’ve caused and every pain we’ve endured. The end goal is resentment, bitterness, and self-loathing. But we have a way out. We can destroy the Enemy’s program with two simple, powerful words—Forgive and Apologize.
So good to be here with everybody. Man. Don't you love that song? Don't you guys love that song? I love that one Here Again. Do you believe that God is here? Do you believe it? Do you believe it? I feel it. I feel that he is here, wherever you're watching online today he is there he is present with you. We're talking in the series, the Wayback Machine. We're talking about our past, right? Jumping into our past. And what I love as we're singing that song is just realizing that God isn't just here. He was there. Right? He's not just here in this moment. He's not just present in this current reality that we find ourselves in. In the past that we've been talking about in the days that have happened, the stuff we've gone through, he's been there. He's been there through it all, walking with us through everything we faced everything we've been dealing with, even whenever you didn't see it. He's been there in every high and every low. He has been there, man, what comfort that should give us what confidence that should give us as believers knowing that we can never walk through anything by our self. You never face anything by yourself. He's always with us. He was with us then. And he is here with us now.
So what I want us to say is, together as we start today, I want to echo words that we see from Scripture, from the prophet Samuel, whenever he was a young boy, there's an account of him feeling like he's hearing someone calling his name. And he's not sure who it is. Eli, kind of his mentor tells him hey, that's, that's God. That's God talking to you. So the next time you feel impressed, you hear him calling out your name, I want you to say to him, speak, Lord, Your servant is listening. And so as we start today, I want us to take that same humble approach. So why don't we say this together? Repeat after me, "Speak, Lord, Your servant is listening." Let's be listening for him today. Okay, let's be listening for him. As he speaks to us.
I'm so excited you're here today, that you are worshiping with us. And I want to welcome everybody online as well for worshiping with us today, at Cornerstone real quick, if you're new today, please make sure you connect with us. Okay, you can connect with us. If you're watching online, in the comments, just you can connect with our hosts with our eFam. We want to get to know you and get you hooked up to the life of our church. And if you're here on site, just stop by the Welcome Center after service, stop and talk to me after service, I want to get to know you, and want to get you hooked up to what's going on here, Cornerstone cause there's something special going on here at Cornerstone. This is a unique move of God, and we want you to be a part of it. So make sure that you connect with us after service today.
So let me recap us real quick. This is week two of this series that we started the "Hack the Wayback" and what we're talking about in this series is, has anyone ever heard of the Wayback Machine? The Wayback Machine? If you were with us last week, you should be raising your hand right now. Unless you just completely tuned out the whole service. Right? The Wayback Machine it's it's, you know, been made famous by that old cartoon, Mr. Peabody and Sherman. But what it actually is, it's a real thing. If you go online, there's an Internet Archive called the Wayback Machine. And what it does is it stores the original digital source code of pretty much every website that's existed. So you can go on the Internet Archive, and you can see what websites look like, like the actual website. At that moment in history. It's like a snapshot of what this thing looked like. And so I was telling you last week, you can see like, the original Space Jam web page with clipart. And all of this looks glorious, right? Looks, looks crazy. It stores all of these things.
But there's a nefarious side to it. People have used that to tear other people's lives down. Right? They go back and say like, oh, look at what you said, or look at what you did. We don't care if you've changed. We don't care if you've, you know, become a different person. Look at what you've done. And so people lose their jobs over it, they lose the reputations over it. It's this crazy thing. And we talked about the idea that the devil, our enemy has actually created a wayback machine for us. He has been carefully cataloging and archiving and saving everything we have ever done, every thought you've ever had, every word you've ever uttered, every action you've ever made. All of these things have been carefully archived and saved.
And it's so easy for us to access them, isn't it? The second you step in the shower, the second you go for a long drive, the second you put your head down on the pillow at night. You start to access these things, man, why did I say that? Man, why did I look at that? Man, why did I have that thought? It just kind of starts popping up and popping up and it's the Wayback Machine, the enemy wants us to be there. But what we talked about last week is this idea that your past doesn't define you. Right your past where you've been, what you said, what you did, what you've thought, of course, it's important. Of course, it matters, but it doesn't define you. And in fact, the things in your pas, the things that the enemy wants you to look at,wants you to remember, and he wants you to feel guilt and shame over that, we can actually take that, and we can hack it. And we can hack the Wayback Machine, we don't have to try to erase our past. I've been there before where you feel like you just want to erase it, because you remember what you've done and what you said and thought and you're like, I don't even want to, I just want to erase it, you can't erase it. It's impossible. It's been set. Your past it happened. But you don't need to erase it. In fact, you can embrace it, you can embrace your past, because whenever you embrace it in the healthy way, looking at what Jesus has done for you, you don't need to be scared of it anymore. It doesn't need to induce guilt anymore. It can induce gratitude, right? Anybody out there feel that whenever you look back at your past, now you're like, oh my gosh, I don't have guilt anymore. I'm just so thankful. Like, thank You, Jesus, for what you have saved me from. Thank You, Jesus, you've redeemed me. And that's not who I am anymore. And that doesn't get to define me, that doesn't get to have the last word. And so that's where we kicked off this series last week. And today, I want us to continue this internet analogy that we're using throughout this series.
Who knows that internet use is not independent? And what I mean by that is you you don't use the internet in a vacuum, do you? No. Pretty much every web page that is visited and traffic, every single one of them has a communal aspect to it. All of them do. Comments, reviews, people sending things back and forth members of Facebook. Does Facebook still have a poke? Does anyone know? It is? Wow. Man, that is just the weird one. I don't know what that's about. It's all this communal aspect, right? It's internet use is not independent. Every site has interaction. And anything with internet connection is all about interaction, even video games. This is still something that I don't really understand. Because I'm I loved video games when I was younger. And typically for guys, especially for guys, that love just continue throughout their whole life. Like they just, they play games until the day they die.
As soon as I got to high school, I just never really played video games anymore. And so I'm like, trapped in time where all of my idea of video games is still like Mario 64 and GoldenEye like that's, that's what I think of. And so nowadays, whenever I'm seeing games, and like, we have a little one of our old phones that we have hooked up for the girls to be able to play games on and stuff like that. And seeing how all of these games, we have to be so careful. Because all of them, you think you're just downloading it, and they just play it on here. But now they're talking to people, like they're, oh, I'm talking to sissy. How are you talking to sissy on her thing? Well, because it's all connected. We're like, well, not anymore. Give me the phone, click. Ain't connected anymore. Right? It's crazy. All of these things are connected. Every aspect of the internet is communal. Nothing is independent. We don't act we don't speak in a vacuum. The Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, it includes interactions, includes conversations, includes messages. And have you noticed this? For every one good interaction online for every one positive story you see, there's 100 just god awful ones, right? For every one good thing you see, like a nice uplifting comment, like oh, that was nice, there is a dozen that are just tearing someone down. Just completely awful mean vile, just terrible stuff. I don't think there's any worse place in the world than the comment section of a page. It's just awful. It's awful.
Whenever we do a sponsored post for Cornerstone, you can hear some of our staff members laughing because they know, whenever we do a sponsored post for Cornerstone on Facebook or on any of the social media pages, we instantly know that we have to pay very close attention to it. Because more eyes are going to be seeing it and some of those eyes belong to trolls. Right. And so we'll get crazy things that people will post in the comments section. It'll be a completely innocuous video just felt like hey, we love you and we love God and people be in the comment section like you're awful. You people are the scum of the earth. You're like whoa, this is crazy, right? We had people one one time saying like you know, how did he word it? We had one guy commenting on it and said, oh, good. I love mythology and comedy. This should be great. And we're like, this is just weird, man, people are. People are weird. And they can be mean. They can be mean.
You see it on Facebook, you see it on YouTube, you see it on Instagram. Sadly, you see it from a lot of Christian accounts. I follow a lot of Christian like meme pages on Instagram. It's shocking how snarky they are. How just mean and honestly just cruel. They are, like, just very cruel. And you're going my goodness, this is just like, I wouldn't want that archived. I wouldn't want that archive that I said that, that I did that, that I treated someone that way. Unfortunately, it is archived. Because not just the internet Wayback Machine archives, that stuff, my Wayback Machine archives that stuff. Yours does too. Yours does, too. Last week, we talked about very independent things that the Wayback Machine archives, the way that I feel about myself, the way I talk about myself, the things that I do in private that I'm so upset about. But we don't act independent in life. We act in communal ways, until those hurts aren't just relegated to ourselves, our hurt extend out to other people. And the enemy, Satan, he is working very hard to catalogue and to archive and to save every hurt that we have caused, and every pain that we have endured.
So everything that we've done, that's hurt someone that's brought somebody down, that's been cruel. He's saving it in great detail. He's taking a snapshot of what that looked like, and he is saving it for us. And he's also taking everything we've ever gone through, anything people have said about us, the way that they treated us, the way that they left us out, or they degraded us. He's saving that too. He's saying no, don't worry, I'll get both sides. I'm not gonna just save what you've done to other people, I'll make sure that I hold onto, and you're able to remember in great detail everything that other people have done to you, as well. I know this for a fact. Because I experienced it. I experienced it. I can still experience I can still feel I can still recall every hurt that I've caused to my kids. Every time I've like been neglectful, every time that I've been short with them every time I've said something in just kind of a harsh way to them or to Jessica, boom. I'm not kidding. As I'm talking to you right now. I'm having instances pop in my head where I'm like, oh, man, yeah, that oh, that was bad. Oh, why did I talk like that? Why did I take that tone? They're all coming back.
Maybe you're experiencing the same thing right now as we're talking about this. And you're having those same kind of thoughts go through your head. Oh, man. Yeah, I remember saying that. Oh, I remember doing that. Oh, I remember the way that it hurt them. And I remember the ways that I've been hurt. You know, since I've taken over as lead pastor back in August of last year, coming up on a year of me being in leadership here. You know, since I've taken over, people have left the church. That sucks. Can I just be vulnerable for a second? That's hard. That's difficult. And guess what? I wish I could tell you that it makes me just go, You know, I pray for them. I fast for them. I put on sackcloth, and I sit and I pray for the people that I know have left because I know that they they're just misunderstanding me. And if they knew my heart, and if they knew everything we'd all be good - nah, that ain't where I'm at. Usually, I'm like, Oh, those idiots, what are they thinking and they're so wrong. And man, Cornerstone is gonna be awesome. And they're gonna be like, hey, can we come back? I'm like, No, you can't, like you cannot come back. You're never allowed back. Right? I don't know if I'm gonna make it to my one year anniversary of being your pastor. At this exact moment, all of our leadership board members are like, we need to have an emergency meeting. This dude needs to get out of here.
But no, I feel that because those are the pains that I've endured, right? The pains and I'm like, Oh, it's just it's frustrating. And if I'm not careful, it makes me feel bitter. Makes me feel angry. Makes me feel resentful, makes me feel judgmental about people. And guess what? That is exactly what the enemy wants. That is exactly why he does this. It's exactly why he saves all of these pages. It's exactly why he makes sure they're so well catalogued and so well archived because he wants me to remember. He wants me to remember the pain that's been caused to me. He wants me to remember the way that I've treated other people. Because when I do that, when I think about the ways that I've hurt other people, it causes me to have self-loathing. I can't stand why was I like that? Why did I talk that way? Why did I treat them that way? Whenever I think about what I've caused to other people, I hate myself. And he wants me to hate myself. And when I think about what other people have done, to me, it creates bitterness and resentment, and hate, and anger and frustration. And he wants all that. That's exactly where he wants us to be. He wants us to self-loath, he wants us to be bitter.
And here's what happens whenever these things come into our life. Whenever we have that tendency to go back in the Wayback Machine and see the way that we've hurt other people, other people have hurt us. What tends to happen is looking back makes us want to run away from it. Chances are you experienced that just a few minutes ago, as I was talking about the ways that I know I've hurt people, you probably had a thought come in your head about you hurting someone and you stuffed it. And I don't want to think about it. Whenever I mentioned people hurting me that old hurt resurfaced. I picked at your scab a little bit now you're feeling it a little right? Makes me feel frustrated. You kind of want to run away from it, trying to get your mind on something else. Maybe you're thinking like, let me pull out my phone, let me do something to get my mind on something else. It makes us want to run away from our past, run away from the things that we've done, run away from the things that others have done to us. But let me tell you, running is the worst thing you can do. All the couchpotatoes say amen. Running is the worst thing you can do. You're gonna take it, you're gonna take that and you're gonna run with that, right? Like, hey, pastor said, Pastor says it's the worst thing you can do. Running is the worst thing you can do. Continuing in life with broken relationships, it is poison. It's poison, it infects your life.
I don't know if you know this, I did a little bit of research on this. If you're ever bit by a snake, you ever get bit by a spider or something like that. And there's poison, right? What's the worst thing you can do? Panic. The worst thing you can do is panic. Because when you panic, chances are you start moving a lot. That is the worst thing you can do. If you read up on it, you see the poison it actually it's a common myth that poison travels through your bloodstream. That's not how it works. It goes through your lymphatic system, it goes through that. And what that means is, it moves through your system, the more you move. So the more that you're moving, the more that you're panicking because you got bit and you're trying to find help, the more that you move, what you're doing is you're killing yourself quicker, because you're spreading the poison, you're spreading the venom, even more than you would have if you would have just stayed still.
I want to let you know the poison of broken relationships, the poison of the times that you've hurt people, but you've never reconciled. The poison when someone else has hurt you and you're still holding on to that bitterness, that poison is going to kill you. And if you try to just move on with your life, it's going to continue to kill you. And it might even kill you faster than if you would have just stayed still. Poison of broken relationships moves as you move. So you may think it was just something that happened back there and you'd never needed to deal with it. So you move into a new relationship. You move into a new friendship, you move into a new job. And guess what, it follows you. It still follows you. Some people go from marriage to marriage with this poison still following them. People jump from relationship to relationship, wondering why it's still there is because the poison moves through your system. The more you move. The more you move, the more that it moves with you. It kills you.
What you thought was just a part of your wayback machine, it was just something that happened way back then you're shocked to find no it's still affecting you in your present. And if there are broken relationships, and there is no reconciliation, let me tell you, there is no peace. There's no peace, there's no life. It will eventually lead to relational death. You know, there's no peace whenever there's no reconciliation, right? Because you've experienced it. You've seen that person at Target and you've ducked down aisles to avoid like, oh, no, no, no, no, right? You feel it. They're, they're the person that keeps popping up on your Facebook friends to Add list, right? Like they're the one that keeps coming up. Like what sick tyrant is making this algorithm where they keep popping up? Like just make them disappear from Facebook, I don't want to see him anymore, right? The more that we run from it, the more that we try to move, the more that we try to get away without actually dealing with it the way we're supposed to, the quicker it kills us.
And God knows this, because he made us, He made us. He knows how best we should function. So I want us to look at Matthew 5 real quick. We're going to be looking at two major passages, one from Matthew and one from Colossians. But I want us to start in Matthew 5, real quick, starting in verse 22. Listen to what Jesus said this is during his famous Sermon on the Mount. This is what Jesus says regarding dealing with issues with dealing with hurt starting in verse. Let's start in verse 21. Jesus says this, "You have heard it said to people long ago, you shall not murder and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you, that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment." You see what Jesus is doing is saying, look, you, you thought that if you murdered it was bad. That's what the law told you. I'm raising the bar. And not only am I raising the bar, I'm showing you what's actually at the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is not murder. No, just if you're angry with someone, you are subject to judgment. "Again, anyone who says to a brother, a sister, "Raca," what that word means it's an Aramaic word, it literally means worthless. So anyone who calls another brother or sister worthless is answerable to the court. "And anyone who says, You fool, will be in danger of the fire of hell. Therefore," listen to this. "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them, then come back and offer your gift." I want to read that again, just to let this really soak in listen to this. "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar, and you remember, your brother or sister has something against you leave your gift there. First go and be reconciled to them then come and offer your gift."
That's how serious God takes broken relationships. That's how serious God takes that hurt that you've caused to other people. But you're just trying to ignore it and act like it didn't happen. That's how serious God takes that bitterness that you're holding on to from someone who hurt you. And you're never going to try to reconcile it, you're never gonna try to forgive them, but you're just holding on to it. That's how serious God takes it, and why we have to fix it. Think about this for a second. God is literally telling us to pause our praise. That's how serious it is. All throughout Scripture. You see God is about getting glory. He's about us recognizing who he is and who we are in his midst. But here in Matthew 5:23, we suddenly get this abrupt shift where it says no, no, no. Don't praise. Don't come before me. Go fix it. Go fix it. You want to offer your praise? You can hit pause on that. Pause your praise for now. Go fix what is broken. don't offer your gift until you at least try your best to make things better, until you try to reconcile this relationship. That's how serious it is.
And when I read things like this, it's so hilarious to me how often we rail on other sins, how hyper focused we can be on these other sins. While we are holding grudge after grudge while we're still bitter against other people, but man we can sure call people out on other sins can't we? We can sure call people out on other things. But here Jesus is saying this is so serious. I don't want you to praise me until you finish it. I don't want you to praise me until you fix it. Leave your offering there and go to your brother or your sister and fix the issue. And you know why I think we do that why it's so easy to rail on other sins in light of this it's because this is one we don't want to let go of. We don't want to let go of because whenever it comes to this whenever it comes to the way we've hurt other people or the way they've hurt us this is, Yeah, but you don't know. You don't really know everything I've been through, you don't really know what they've done to me. You don't really know what I did to them and I can't go back and ask forgiveness, it'd be too awkward. It'd be too embarrassing. I just, I can't do it. But the fact is, Jesus commands it because it's poison. It's poison. And the more we move, the more we try to get away from it, the quicker it moves through our bloodstream.
So I don't think it's any coincidence of Jesus saying, stop moving. Don't take another step. You have poison in you. You have bitterness, you have unforgiveness, you haven't apologized yet, you haven't even sought reconciliation, you are poison, don't take another step, fix it, fix it, address the issue, get the poison out. Essentially what God wants us to do, I'm going to jump back to our internet analogies. Essentially, what God wants us to do is hit Control + Alt +Delete, on our life real quick. Whenever we realize there is an issue going on, whenever we realize man, there is unresolved hurt, there is unresolved tension here, there's a relationship that has just been severed, there are bridges that have been burned, what God wants us to do is hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, if you have ever hit that on your computer, I used to hit that all the time, whenever I'd be firing up Limewire on my parents computer, right, that thing would try to crash and destroy my parents computer downloading music, I had to use that all the time to like, get out of the program, because that's what Ctrl+Alt+Delete does. This is literally what the definition for Control+Alt+Delete does on a computer. It interrupts or facilitates interrupting a function. So whenever you hit Control+Alt+Delete, what you're doing is the function that is currently running on your computer. You're putting it to a stop. You're halting that. You're saying, no, I'm not going any further. I'm causing this program to stop. So when your computer is going to have Control+Alt+Delete, and when your life is going to hack, because of burned bridges and broken relationships, God wants you to do the exact same thing. Ctrl+Alt+Delete, hold on. Let's just wait a second. Don't take another step. Don't move any fruit. Stop the function. Stop it. Don't take another step until you address it.
And addressing it looks like two words: forgiveness and apology. Forgive and apologize. Those are such powerful world changing words, forgiveness, and apology. And they can be hard. They can be difficult. They can be awkward. Can we be vulnerable for a second who's actually good at apologizing? Anyone here? I see that one hand, hallelujah one hand. I am happy that there is so much honesty. I hope there was honesty online as well. Because it's hard. It is hard, apologizing. It's hard admitting you were wrong. And it's hard letting someone off the hook. Essentially, it's hard letting someone go whenever they've wronged you. These are hard things to do.
One of the most godly men, I know my dad, Charles Young. That man had the hardest time apologizing. My sister, my mom, they're smiling because they know it. That this was the the pinnacle of my dad's apologizing career. This is what you would get from him. Like if you would say like, Dad, you did this and you know this hurt and you shouldn't have done it, or like hey, you said you're gonna do this. He didn't do it. If you got one of these from him, you're like, there it is. There's the apology. What he would do is he would go "Well..." that's it. That's it. You guys were waiting for something else. That was it. We'd be like, Dad, you should have done this. He's just like "Well..." and that was it. That was where it would be. And if you got one of those, you're like, alright, he meant that. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. You really had to get that out of there. Right? And it's funny, because it must be you know, being passed down because it's hard for me. I have a hard time apologizing. And now my daughter, Evelyn, she has a hard time with it too whenever I'll tell her like tell your sister sorry. She'll do everything she can to not actually say the word sorry. To say sorry. Like, no, say it so I can hear it. Like I want to hear, but she knows what she's doing. She's way too smart for her own good. But it's hard. It's hard. It's difficult. It's awkward, and it feels weird.
And it can be so frustrating. It can be frustrating to apologize. Because it's admitting you're wrong. And it's admitting that you you aren't perfect, right? That's hard. And man, it is hard to forgive. It's hard to reconcile because we kind of want to forgive, but we also kind of want to remember, we kind of want to forget, but also be like, but I'm not totally gonna let you off the hook, because I'm always going to remember this. And I'm going to, if anything comes up in the future, I will use this against you. I'll remember what you did to me, talk to me. It's hard. It's awkward. It's difficult, and it's necessary. It's necessary, we have got to forgive, we have got to apologize.
One of the things I love too, that Matthew records in his gospel that Jesus says here is this idea, that religion that God finds, pleasing and acceptable to him is not vertical. Religion isn't like just me and him, just me and him and no one else matters. It's just independent, just me and him. What Matthew records in his gospel Jesus saying, there's no religion that my father finds pleasing is communal. It's communal, it's not vertical, it's horizontal. I don't want you to come here and offer your praise to me while you're bad talking everybody in your life, I don't want you to come here and light the the pyre on the altar while you're not even remotely attempting to reconcile with people who have wronged you. Don't do it. It's a useless fire. It's a useless offering. Jesus is saying acceptable religion is horizontal, it is communal, which lines up with what we see in John 13, when Jesus gives this new, radical, world-changing command where he sums up the entire law in one command, "Love others, as I have loved you." "Love others, as I've loved you."
Communal, healthy relationships, displaying the love that Jesus showed to us to everybody around us. It's a revolutionary idea. And it shows us the importance of relationships to God. How we treat others matters. It matters. It matters so much, that in some ways, Jesus is saying it matters almost as much as how it matters how you treat me, which any parent knows, any parent, if you've got kids, you know how someone treats your kids means more to you than how they treat you. They can do the kindest things and the nicest things for you. And you're like, hey, thanks. But if they do it for your kid, if they stand up for your kid, if they love your kid, you're like, man, I will go to war for you, like I will, I will do whatever you need me to do, because you love my kids. And that's how God sees us. He's like, man, you're all my kids, I want you to love each other. I want you to be reconciled to each other. I don't want you to have all this brokenness between you. I don't want there to be burned bridges in my family.
Relationships are so important to God. He wants us to pause everything we're doing to make sure we get them right. He wants us to stop the poison, to stop whatever function we're running, Ctrl+Alt+Delete that thing and don't let it spread. Don't let it spread. Don't move on into many new areas of your life with this thing still unresolved. What that means for some of us, some of us that means today, you need to be hitting Ctrl+Alt Delete, like today. Not like oh, yeah, there's some things I need to do this week. No, like you have some phone calls to make. Now. You have some conversations to have right now, you have some texts that you need to send right now. Because God is saying, hey, I don't want you to praise me. I want you to pause, I want you to go fix it. I want you to go reconcile. I want you to make this right, because relationships are that important.
Some of us need to interrupt our life today and forgive. Some of us need to interrupt our life today, and apologize and we won't be able to truly praise, we won't be able to truly have purpose in our life until we do. Because I've been there and I know it. I've been there whenever I have bitterness in my heart. And I try praising and it just doesn't feel the same way. It feels like there's a bad connection. I'm getting spotty cell service or something. It's because that like at a deep core, you may have not even known that that verse for Matthew, but you knew it. You didn't know that Jesus articulated in this way. But the Holy Spirit convicts you and talks to you. And so you know, yeah, man, I've I've been trying to come up to the altar and offer praises to God and it just hasn't felt right. And now you know why. Because there is stuff going on in your life and until you resolve it until you fix it, you will never be living up to the potential that God had in mind for you.
So what does it look like in our last couple of minutes together? What does it look like for us whenever we do want to apologize when we do want to forgive? What do we need to do to model for this? I want us to look at the book of Colossians. Colossians 3, this is so good what we're about to read if Christians would just grab a hold of this, my word how different the world would look. My word how different social media would look, like how different everything would look, if Christians could understand this idea of forgiveness and apology and reconciliation that would change so much. This is what the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Colossians 3, starting in verse 12, "Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourself," listen to this, "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another. If any of you has a grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love which binds them all together in perfect unity."
That's what it looks like for us to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and to truly reconcile the people that we've wronged and reconciled with those who have wronged us. It looks like that. It looks like having compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, be our clothes. I love that analogy that Paul uses talking about, clothe yourselves with these things. You know, that means that the clothes that I'm wearing right now, this shirt, what it's doing, it's touching me at all times. At all times. It's intimate, right? It's up close and personal. I feel it all day long. People see it, they see me. And that's what Paul is saying. He's saying when people see you, they need to see compassion, gentleness, patience, kindness, and not just that, you need to feel it. Clothe yourselves. And so you're constantly feeling it throughout the day. You're constantly feeling kindness, and patience, and humility and gentleness. Have it be your clothes for the day.
And if we do that, if we if we actually embody that, and if we pray every single morning to the Holy Spirit, man, let that be true of me. Let that be true of me. I know I can't do it on my own. But through your help, transform me. Make me a kinder, gentler, more patient person. If we do that, in verse 12. What Paul says, than what he says in verse 13 becomes a whole lot easier in verse 13. He says, "Bear with each other, and forgive one another. If any of you has a grievance against someone forgive as the Lord forgave you." The only way that verse 13 is possible is with us putting verse 12 into practice. The only way we can bear with people and forgive them, as Jesus has, as the Lord has forgiven us, is if we truly have compassion, and kindness, and humility and gentleness and patience, be the clothes that we wear on a daily basis.
I love the word that Paul uses whenever he talks about bear with one another, that word bear, whenever we look at the actual words that he wrote, because the Apostle Paul, he wrote his letters in Greek, and whenever we look at the Greek word, that word bear, and actually comes from two separate Greek words, to make this word bear, and what the words mean in Greek is "cling to" and "in the midst." So these two words, make up what he's saying, whenever he says, bear with one another, so cling too. And in the midst, essentially what he's saying is in the midst, stop, stop what you're doing right here in the midst, here and now. Cling to each other. Stop what you're doing, and bear with one another. Don't take another step. Be present. Be here, and cling to one another.
Forgive one another, don't go any further, forgive and apologize and forgive as the Lord forgave you, that should make us shutter in our boots. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. If you were with us last week, we talked about how the Lord forgave us, right? The fact that everyone else, even the most gruff of us, at worst, we've only shared our PG-13 testimony. We haven't actually shared our R rated our NC-17, X-rated testimony, because everyone holds it off at a certain degree. But we know the thoughts we've had we know the things that we've said in private we know the way we felt about God that we've not shared with anybody. We know all of that. And God forgave us of that. He didn't forgive us of our TBS, edited for TV version testimony. He forgave us for the real one. And so because of that, we have to praise Him, we have to worship Him. And we have to forgive like him.
Think about that, in the same way that God has forgiven you for your X-rated testimony, you are to forgive other people. That is hard. Let me describe how God forgives real quick, just in case you need a reminder. God holds back his anger for a long time, a long time. He tells us in His Word over and over again, I'm slow to anger, we see God time and time again, accommodate and accommodate and accommodate. In fact, in God's law, you want to know it's so funny. God gives us His law. And then he immediately follows it up saying and here's what to do when you break it because I know you will. Here's what I want you to do here is I want to I want you to act. And here's how I'm going to make it right when you don't act that way. Because I accommodate you. Because I am slow to anger. That's how God is. That's how God forgives. He is slowed anger. He holds back his anger for a long time. You know what God does? He reaches out to bad people.
You all have people in your life who are easy ones to forgive. Your best friend and people like that who you're like, oh, yeah, it's easy to forgive you. And then you have those like mortal enemies, the people who like yeah, never, right? And those are the people that God forgives. Those are the one that God forgives. Not just the ones, oh, I understand them. And they were having a hard week and everything like they of course I forgive you, no, he forgives the bad ones. He forgives the ones who have hurt him. God reaches out to bad people. God makes the first move. God makes the first move. He doesn't wait for someone to text him first. He doesn't wait for someone else who admits what they've done wrong first, then no, no, God makes the first move towards reconciliation. He id running to us. He makes the first move. That's how he forgives. How about this one, God, God forgives us knowing full well, we will sin again in the same way. As how he forgives us, knowing full well that whatever you did that thing, if that's the last time I promise, he knows no, it's not. And I still love you and I still forgive you. That's how he forgives. That's how God forgives us.
And lastly, God doesn't just forgive, He grants adoption to the offenders. He doesn't just forgive and then say now let me forget you like yeah, I'll forgive you for what you've done. But you're out of my life. Now I never want to see you again. Good bye, but I forgive you. God says no, not only will I forgive you, I want you to become my son, I want you to become my daughter, I want you to be a co-heir with my only begotten Son Jesus. That's how much I forgiven you. So all of that should give proper weight to what we read when Paul says forgive as the Lord forgave you. That's daunting. That's daunting, and we can't do it on our own. But through the power of the Spirit. We can we can forgive like this. And we can apologize. Like we are supposed to apologize, we can be sincere, we can acknowledge the hurt that we caused.
We cannot make an excuse. We cannot try to downplay the hurt that we've caused. Say yeah, but it really wasn't that big of a deal. But anyways, I'm still sorry, no, we can be sincere. We cannot excuse we cannot downplay. And we can just simply ask for forgiveness. And what a holy act that is to just truly and humbly ask someone for their forgiveness. Apologizing, forgiving. You need it. You need it. And so do I. I need it too. Because we screw up time and time and time again.
I was meeting Jessica, we're just talking the other day about that, about how we have no idea how much God accommodates us for how much we sin. We just do, we screw up. And others screw up. So we need to be offering forgiveness. We need to be apologizing because we realize we are not perfect. And when we do that, let me tell you, it's a relational game changer. If you can start to get this down through the power of the Spirit through you just walking daily with him and saying, hey, transform me, make me more like Jesus. Make me more like Jesus make me more like Jesus, the more that you do that, and you start to be a person who can apologize. You start to be a person who can let go of things and truly forgive people. It will redeem your past and it will restore your present, you will be a different person and you will be on a trajectory for a different life if you can get that down.
So if you are in any period of your life today, where you are running from things that have been done to you, or you've done to other people in your past, man, hit Ctrl, Alt Delete, stop running, stop running, and it's just going to make the poison, move more, and it's going to kill you quicker. Remember what God said? Remember how important relationships are. That he wants you to pause your praise until you get it right. Think about that. But he wants you to pause your praise until you fix or at least attempt to the best of your ability to fix the relationships in your life and make it right. And he wants us to do that. Because he knows how poisonous it is. And he knows how much better we'll feel after we do it.
Me and Jessica, dude I'll be vulnerable, I mean just because a few days ago we had a fight. I can't remember what it was about. Now. That's how stupid it was. Isn't that true about most fights? Like, man, it was so heated, and I can't even remember what it was about. But we had a fight and I was the one in the wrong. And it took like I couldn't admit it that night. Went to bed woke up the next day and like I left before she woke up. And then later that day, I'm like, I just feel like ugh. Man just feel bad. So I sent her a text, like, hey, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the tense morning. Sorry for treating you like this, I'm sorry. She wrote back, hey, I appreciate it. Thank you, I love you. Instantly, it was like, you just feel better. You just feel better. I felt like I was in a funk. I couldn't really work. I really couldn't do things until that happened in the second half. It was like a weight lifted off of my shoulders, A literal weight.
God knows you. He knows that you are not made to carry this crap. You are not made to just burn bridges and run from it. You're not made to just have people hurt you. And rather than forgive them be like, no, I'm going to hold this against you for the rest of your life. And I'm going to hold o to bitterness, and as he knows that will destroy you. And he wants you to make it right. So do everything you can to make it right. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete today. Stop whatever function you're doing, and get things right. And now you might be saying, okay, but what if someone doesn't apologize? What if someone doesn't apologize? What if? What if I've hurt someone and they're dead now? Or they're gone now? And I can't really apologize? Or what if? What if the hurt that someone's done to me it's gonna be hard to get back in contact with him. And it will be awkward and it's just too much. And what if I, what if I forgive someone, but I still struggle with it. Like I forgive someone and still years down the road, I still find myself struggling with this and trying to forgive them. I get it. I get it. I'm not saying it's easy. But this is what I will say all of those questions that you have when it comes to forgiving, and apologizing. All of those questions that start with what if they? What if they do this? What if they do that? What if they don't admit what if they don't? What What if they? Every time you feel yourself getting ready to ask a what if they remind yourself? I still will? What if that? No, no, I still will seek reconciliation. Well, what if it? No, no, no, no. I will still seek to make this better. Yeah, yeah, no, I get that. But what if they? I will still I don't care how they respond. Of course I would love for it to be great. And, you know, sunshine and roses. That would be awesome. But I can't control anybody else. So what if they then, no, I will still. I will still do what I know God has called me to do I will leave my offering at the altar and I will go and I will try to the best of my ability to fix this. That is humility. That's surrender. That is humility. That is surrender. That is trusting God to handle it.
I want to read you real quick in closing this is a story from years ago now back in 2006. You may remember this there was a school shooting at a small Amish school in Pennsylvania. If you remember this story, horrific gunman went into a small little countryside Amish schoolhouse, barricaded the door killed five children and then turned the gun on himself. Killed himself and what was so amazing about this is how the families of the kids who were killed, forgave the shooter. Forgave him. This is a story from 10 years after the event. "Ten-years-ago a gunman barricaded himself in a one room Amish schoolhouse near Lancaster, Pennsylvania and opened fire. Charles 'Charlie' Roberts killed five children and injured five others before killing himself. But the Amish communities responded in a way that many found surprising. They forgave the shooter. In the years since they have grown close to his family. I turned on the radio on my way there. Terry Roberts, the shooter, his mother said the newscaster was reporting their admin a shooting at the local Amish schoolhouse. By the time I got to my son's house, I saw my husband in the state trooper standing right in front of me as I pulled in, I looked at my husband and he said it was Charlie. I felt like I could never face my Amish neighbors again. But that week, as the Roberts held a private funeral for their son, they went to the grave site. And there they saw as many as 40 Amish people from the community start coming out around the side of the graveyard surrounding them. Love just emanated from them,' Terry says 'I will never be able to forget the devastation caused by my son. But one of the fathers that night said this, none of us would have ever chosen this to happen. But the relationships that we've built through it, well, you can't put a price on that. And their choice to allow life to move forward was a healing balm for us. And I think it's a message that the world needs. This year,' he said, 'their choice to allow life to move forward.'"
The only way that life could move forward was because they stopped. They stopped. They didn't act like nothing happened. They didn't hold onto bitterness, they didn't hold on to hate or anger. They hit pause and they forgave. And because that happened, life was able to move on. The same thing is true for you. The same thing is true for me. Wherever you have a broken relationship, you have got to fix it today. In the next few moments, the alters are going to be open. If you have any kind of prayer that you have any kind of relationship, you know, man I, I have been so wronged. And I need to forgive. Man, I have hurt someone so bad. And I need to I need to repent to God and I need to seek reconciliation with this person. Whatever it is, wherever God is speaking to today, I don't know what he's putting on your heart, but whatever he is putting on you. We want to let you know that these next moments the altar is going to be open for you to come for you to pray. For you to contemplate what God would have you do as you look, to reconcile and make things right.
Let me pray with you real quick. Father God, we're believing right now the same thing we believe at the start of this message that you are with us. That you are meeting us right here right in this moment and you are talking to us and you are speaking to us, and God, your servants are listening. Your servants are listening. So if there is anything in our life, any relationship that is broken, any bridge that is burned, that needs mended, that needs fix that needs our attempt at reconciliation. God bring it to our mind in these next moments. So that we can go from this place and we can do exactly what you have done. Forgive and we can do exactly what we've asked of you. We're gonna apologize. And we can make things as right as we possibly can. We love you Lord, we pray this in your name. Amen.
