Many live a life in the shadow of pain, guilt and shame. They are carrying a burden for which they can be freed if they can learn to forgive. 

Called to Serve

<p>Many live a life in the shadow of pain, guilt and shame. They are carrying a burden for which they can be freed if they can learn to forgive. </p>

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ASI Southwest

Eric Walsh

Forgive: The Power of Letting Go

A message tonight is entitled, The Power of Letting Go.

Father God, we thank you Lord for this opportunity to study your word and the spirit of prophecy on this issue.

Now Lord once again I ask that you make me just a nail upon the wall, a rusty sorry nail Lord.

Upon that nail Lord I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ.

Let Eric Walsh not be seen or heard tonight, instead Father let us hear a word from the throne room of grace.

As our prayer in Jesus' precious and holy name.

I had a patient once who was constantly ill.

I work urgent care, so I often see a lot of people who, sometimes they see their primary care physicians a lot, but a lot of times they don't make that connection, so they come in and see us.

And this woman in her 30s would come in with various complaints all over the place and always would seem like it was the end of life for her with every complaint.

So if it wasn't a serious migraine headache, it was very vague abdominal pain, sometimes it was lower back pain, all kinds of different things.

And in dealing with this patient I found that she had, it wasn't really medicines she was looking for.

And if we had time this weekend, I could really talk about this whole opiate epidemic and what it really is about here in America.

She was dealing with emotional pain that had never been resolved.

And she was doing what we call in medicine, she was somaticizing.

In other words, the pain on her spiritual being, on her mental being, on her emotional being, her body was sending into her physical body to make her aware that there was something that had never been dealt with.

And so she was living from symptom to symptom, condition to condition, as her body is only really reflecting that her mind has unfinished business with her past.

Long story short, it turns out this woman, when she was younger, had been sexually assaulted, She had been abused, she had been neglected, some horrible things had happened to her, and in time all of those things had manifested and the individual and individuals plural who had caused her this pain, she was still carrying resentment for.

Now these people were long gone out of her life, but the weight of what happened, and almost as importantly, if not more importantly, the weight of who did it was riding her and causing her disease.

In our health message a lot of times we're really good about the organic aspect of it, but there is a whole emotional component to being healthy.

And that's 1 of the reasons I believe that we are given the Sabbath.

We're given the Sabbath because the Sabbath, 1 of the most important components of the Sabbath is to get your spiritual, emotional, mental rest.

It's not just physical rest, There's a whole other component.

In fact, when they're cast in Revelation, as we're studying Revelation in the cyber school lesson, a line I like is they say, and they have no rest day or night.

1 of the greatest punishments you could have is to never rest So if you never deal with what or who caused your pain you might not ever rest The Bible has so many stories we'll go through a few of them on forgiveness.

And normally in a sermon I don't give multiple Bible stories, but the common theme of forgiveness is in all of these stories.

Genesis 50, verse 15, the Bible says, and when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, Jacob had died, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him.

And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, thy father did command before he died saying so shall ye say unto Joseph forgive I pray thee now the trespass of thy brethren and their sin for they did even they did unto the evil and now we pray thee forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father.

Look at Joseph's response when his brothers sent him this message.

The Bible says, Joseph wept when they spoke to him.

So his brothers, and you all know the story, Joseph's brothers are some of the most grimy guys in the whole scripture.

I mean, granted, they're half brothers, but come on.

And granted, my wife and I have this discussion all the time.

Whether he was big-headed or arrogant or spoiled brat, what he was.

He had some crazy dreams and told everybody about them.

He should have kept that to himself, all things considered in his family dynamics.

But I don't think it warranted death or selling a poor kid into slavery.

But his brothers did this, and I can't imagine what it would have been like.

As Joseph was on the back of that caravan, probably looking backwards as the Ishmaelites took him off to Egypt, screaming and agonizing, I'm your brother.

I can't imagine what it would have been like for him, that long ride as his brothers fade into the distance as Joseph is screaming for their help and assistance, don't do this.

And watching on some of their faces as they laugh.

Some of them look away in shame that they didn't have the courage to stand up to the rest of the mob of the Brotherhood and stop it.

Some of them feeling like they'd got finally gotten back at him.

That showed on their faces and as Joseph, can you imagine when he pulls into the wherever the quarters are that they sell the slaves in Egypt and he looks around and a foreign people, a foreign land, foreign foods, foreign gods, He knows nothing of any of this.

Can you imagine when Potiphar picks him out of a lineup?

To bring him to his house to work All that time he's thinking why did my brothers do this to me?

His brothers don't forget what they did to him.

So much so that they think the only buffer between them and revenge from Joseph is the fact that Jacob is alive.

That tells you how little spiritual growth they had as well.

Joseph was literally the second most powerful man on the planet in many ways.

If he wanted revenge, Jacob could not have stopped him.

When Joseph, who had forgiven his brothers completely, hears that they are still wrestling with what happened in ways he has moved beyond, he begins to weep.

And I would argue He weeps, I think, for them more than he does for himself.

Verse 18, and his brethren also went and fell down before his face.

And they said, behold, we be thy servants.

Joseph said unto them, fear not, and this is a key statement for forgiveness, revenge, and retaliation.

Joseph says, fear not, for am I in the place of God If you are unable to forgive if you live your life hoping to exact revenge on those who have hurt you, you sit in the place of, you're trying to sit in the place of God.

Most of you probably know who the Bloods and the Crips are.

Bloods and the Crips are 2 street gangs that started in Los Angeles after really an industrial kind of collapse of jobs in the city and some other things happened.

And where we were in Altadena and Pasadena, the Crips were in Altadena, I believe.

And a church, a Sunday church, has started a ministry reclaiming these young men and some young women back into society, back into the fold, into church.

As my role working at that health department, They brought me in and I was working with them.

I'll never forget, I got a call at about 530 1 night that 1 of the guys that we were working with had been shot 6 times in Los Angeles.

Worse than that, his girlfriend and the mother of the child that they had together was shot once.

The news was that he survived his 6 bullets, she did not survive the 1.

They called me at my office and said, you need to get over here because these guys want to the guys that are here want to go and get revenge on who did this to the guy who was shot and his girlfriend.

Walsh, we think you're the only 1 who can stop the revenge from happening.

The baby fortunately was in the car but wasn't hit.

I get there and here's these strong, and let me use the word I would use, these are street soldiers.

These are guys who do not fear anything or anyone, who have no trouble pulling the trigger to defend the honor and reputation of a gang or of their friend.

And here these big strong guys are weeping and crying that this thing has happened.

I sit at the head of the table and I don't know what to say to stop them from going and exacting revenge.

In fact, 1 of the talks I used to give in the city was a talk called Violence as a Contagious Disease.

What you find is that when violence happens, it often spread like a contagion.

And here was an example where these guys could all go and shoot somebody else.

And of course, it would then escalate into a full-out war on the streets.

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Forgive: The Power of Letting Go

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