Forgiving Forward at Dallas Theological Seminary
Dr. Mark Bailey: Our speaker today is Dr. Bruce Hebel. He is the international speaker with a compelling message that is revolutionizing the hearts of people from all walks of life. Raised in a pastor's home and educated to pastor the local church, he is now following God's call to the church at large. Back with over 30 years of experience in leading churches, all of his training has now led him to this, and that is helping people experience the freedom of the gospel through forgiveness. His passion is pointing people to Christ in you of the hope of glory. He's a graduate of DTS. He is president of Regenerating Life Ministries. He's an adjunct professor at Carver Bible College that's led by one of our grads, Dr. Robert Crummie. Along with his wife, Toni, he's the co-author of Forgiving Forward: Unleashing the Forgiveness Revolution. He and Toni have been married for 34 years and have been blessed with three adult children, one of whom is Andrew, who is a student here. He and his bride have just given Bruce and Toni their very first grandchild. So he is coming as a proud new grandfather. Pretty exciting. We were talking in the green room prior about all of that blessing. Would you join me in welcoming Dr. Bruce Hebel?
Bruce Hebel: Wow, it's an honor to be here. Someone asked the other day, are you going to mark this off your bucket list? I said, "No, this has not been on my bucket list in the same way that throwing the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl was not on my bucket list." Because sitting where you're sitting back in the 80s, there is absolutely no way in my mind did I ever think that I would ever be speaking in chapel here. Me speaking in chapel here, it should be an encouragement to all of you that if you just don't quit, something might happen well for you. That's about the only reason I'm here. I just didn't stop.
God expects forgiven people to forgive others, so much so that he connects his forgiveness with ours. I was raised in a pastor's home. My dad was a pastor in some small churches and medium sized churches and at age nine I knew I was gonna be a pastor. That's what I knew. It's kind of strange I know, at age nine that you would know that, but I did. I began to watch my dad and if you're going to follow your father's footsteps, you want to learn from your father. If you're a father, you want to train your son if he's gonna follow you. You hope that your son stands on your shoulders and goes farther than I do. I'm hoping Andrew will take things much greater than I've been able to take them. So I watched my dad and I noticed this about my dad in church ministry. He got hurt a lot because, let's face it, sheep bite. They bite hard and they sneak up from behind you and they bite you very hard where you don't want to be bit.
And so I said, "I'm going to learn from him and I'm going to learn from his mistakes and not let people sneak up behind me." I go to Bible College. I come to cemetery — I mean seminary. I mean, you guys in Hebrew do feel buried alive, don't you? It's a confusion we get all the time. I got mentored by some of the most significant people on the planet. You guys know them. Bill Lawrence was my personal mentor, I interned at Gene Getz, we spent time with "the Prof" — of course, everyone spent time with "the Prof" — and he poured into all of our lives. We leave this place where you learn how to do it right and we go into ministry and we got bit. A lot. Multiple times in multiple places. In fact, Toni called the Focus on the Family pastoral hotline. Did you know that the Focus on the Family has a pastoral hotline? Does it concern you just a little bit that they need one? But they have one and hundreds of pastors call them every year. And Toni tells them our story and at the end of the conversation, there was silence. Which was broken by the guy going, "Man, that's the worst story we have ever heard. Why are you still doing this?" Because we had a call.
There was a point in time in our ministry, about a year probably, the ministry was going great. We'd gone to a church, it was kind of a mess. And we brought a lot of healing and health to it and it was growing and it was doing well. But something happened. An old wound — have you ever had that happen — an old wound that you think you dealt with, the scab gets kind of knocked off and suddenly it's there. But you're not supposed to, as a pastor, have problems with old wounds. So you don't tell anybody about it. I don't tell Toni, I don't tell anyone. But inside, I'm a mess for about a year. The only way I can describe it is just internal torment. Just eating me up. A friend of mine said, you need to figure this out. I think you've got a forgiveness issue.
"No, no, I dealt with all that."
"Okay, great. You need to go away. If it's not that, it's something. So you just go spend time with God."
So I go to a lake house a friend of ours let us borrow in Alabama for three days to spend time with me and God. And mostly in Georgia when I tell people that they go, "Why would you do that? God never actually goes to Alabama." But he was there that week on a tourist visa. And on the third day, God just spoke to me. And it wasn't an audible voice. Understand, God does speak to us. It's the Holy Spirit's job to communicate to us. And he convicts us. He says to me — and I have these weird conversations and I always lose the argument, by the way. But I had this conversation — and he says, "You haven't forgiven" and he mentioned this man's name. I said, "But, God, I did forgive him. I wrote him a letter and told him so." And God said, "I know, I read your letter. You shamed him in it."
"But God, he did all of these things. And it's hurt us this way." And God says, "Yeah, but you had praised me and told people about all that I did to rescue you out of that situation. So how is it that you are blaming him and praising me for the exact same event?"
I said, "I don't know." And I made a difficult decision to forgive the specific things that that man had done to wound me and my family. And I cannot describe what happened in my heart. There was a leap in my spirit.
I just started cranking up the iPod, singing at the top of my lungs. The people across the lake were going, "I thought that house was empty. What is that weird noise coming out of there?" I'm doing amazing, I've never felt that well. So I went home, I shared it with Toni. She had been wounded by the same event and by the same man and she chose to forgive. Then we brought our kids together and we began to share what God had taught me about forgiveness and they forgave that man. In fact, we went out and burned every evidence of what happened. It was an actionable offense that we just got rid of all of the evidence. And we said "Amen, God it's all on you." Eleven hours that day we spent not only dealing with that issue, but other issues and issues they had with us, we had with them, they had with each other. It was the most transformational day in our family's life. Unbelievable freedom, when we made the decision to forgive.
About two, three weeks later, we're in Paducah, Kentucky, where I was raised by mom and dad. We'd gone to spend a little time with them and on the last day we were coming back home. It's breakfast and mom is somewhere — I don't know where she was — running an errand. It was just my dad and Toni and I sitting at the table. And my dad was, we call it, kvetching about a couple of men. You know what kvetching is, it's a Yiddish word for grousing and complaining. You know, you've seen it. I heard the spirits say you need to speak into your dad's life about his unforgiveness. We'd shared our story. He knew the freedom we'd got. And I said, "But sons don't speak into their dad's life." He said, "They do if I tell them to."
I said, "How do I know it's you?"
"You know it's me. The other guy wouldn't tell you to do this."
"But it's going to upset him."
"Which one of us do you want upset?"
"Good point."
I swallowed. And I said, "Papa...I don't want to upset you, but don't you think it's time to forgive John and Don? Don's been your friend for over 50 years. What he did, it wasn't a sin. It just didn't meet your expectations. It wasn't something you wanted him to do. It's been 50 years Dad, he's been your friend. And Johnny, he was like your son in the ministry. He was like my brother. Carla is like my third sister. It's been 35 years, Dad. They still think you're mad at them."
And I didn't do this physically. I just did this internally — you know how you do that sometimes internally — I went like this. But my 76-year-old retired pastor father looked at me and said, "Son, I stand rebuked. Will you help me?" And he got on his knees and I was able to coach him to forgive both of those men. And when he was done, he was in tears, weeping with joy. Said, "Son, go get that CD from Heartland, play that song Holy, Holy." It was his favorite song. We just cranked it about three or four times. It was like Dad, can we pick another song? It would be great. But he's just celebrating. Why? Because his heart was free. In fact, it's interesting, he was so free that God orchestrated a reconciliation between my dad and both of those men within two weeks. So much so, that, 17 months later, when my father passed away, both of those men spoke at his funeral at my dad's request.
Now, I want you to know something about my father. He was not a bitter, angry old man. He was a good man. He was a godly man. When he passed away, we stood in line as a family for over four and a half hours nonstop. Some people were waiting an hour and a half in line to pay their respects.
You see, good people, godly people can be caught in the sin of unforgiveness. And make no mistake, unforgiveness is a sin because God expects forgiven people to forgive others. So much so, he connects His forgiveness with ours. We all know the Lord's Prayer, right? What is the one clause in the Lord's Prayer that has a condition attached to it? It's forgiveness. Forgive our trespasses as we forgive our debtors. But it's not the condition I would expect. If I were predicting a condition Jesus would give us about forgiveness that we're to pray in a model prayer, it would be, "Help us forgive others as you have forgiven us." But it's exactly the opposite that he tells us to pray. Jesus says, you are to pray this prayer: "Dear Heavenly Father, please use the standard I use in relating to people who wound me as the standard you use to relate to me."
Well, I don't want God using anything I do as his standard, much less that one. In fact, it's the only clause in the Lord's Prayer Jesus gives immediate commentary to when he says, "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your Father will forgive you." If you don't, he won't. Now, he's not talking about eternal security. That's a whole different question. What he's talking about is the way we relate to people who wound us impacts the way God relates to us while we're walking on the planet. And I can give you passage after passage in the Gospels where Jesus says something very similar. In Mark, he says, "Whenever you stand praying, forgive if you have something against someone." And again, you all know that the technical word "whenever" means whenever. It's at any time you stand praying, if you've got a wound you have not dealt with, you go forgive it. Otherwise, I really don't want to have a conversation with you God is saying. God expects forgiven people to forgive others.
But the most shocking statement Jesus makes in all the Scripture to me — it's really kind of embarrassing to say that I came here and studied it, pastored for many, many years, reading this passage hundreds and hundreds of times and until just a few years ago, it didn't click for me. I went, "Uh-oh." This is an uh-oh moment for me in Scripture. Oops. You have a-ha moments: A-ha, the just shall live by faith. A-ha! This is a uh-oh.
In Matthew 18, Peter asks Jesus a question. "How many times do I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Is seven times enough?" Well, he knew that the Pharisees said that if someone sinned against you twice you had to forgive him three times if you want to be generous. But after that you don't have to forgive, probably shouldn't. So when Peter was saying seven times he was doubling the maximum of the Pharisees and adding one and going, "Did I do good Jesus?"
Jesus said, "Now, how about 70 times seven." That's an unlimited number. That's 490 times. You know it's unlimited because if you get to four hundred and seventy-something and you're still counting the first one, you probably haven't forgiven them. You won't keep track that long. Then he gives us a story, and whenever he says "the Kingdom of Heaven is like" you want to pay attention. When he says "the Kingdom of Heaven is like" he's opening the curtains of heaven and giving us a glimpse as to how God wants things to work. He says a metaphor, a story. Here's the story: A rich man, a ruler, came to collect debts from some slaves who owed him money. Now, you notice you have a ruler and you have someone under his authority. The first slave he came to owed him 10,000 talents. He says, "Pay me what you owe me." And the slave said, "I don't have it." And the ruler said, "I'll throw you and your family in debtor's prison." Kind of one of the dumbest concepts in all of history I think. If you can't pay it while you're out working, not sure how you're going to do it while you're in the joint, but that's kind of what they would do. And the man didn't ask for forgiveness, he asked for time. He says, "Please, please, please, please, please give me time. I'll pay it back." But the ruler didn't give him what he asked for. He gave him more than he asked for. He forgave him the debt. Now we all go, "Wow, that's a great story," until we understand what a talent was worth in that day. A talent was the equivalent of 60 mina and a mina was the equivalent of three months' wages. So one talent equals 60 times three. That's 180 months' wages. That's 15 years' wages for just for one talent. This guy owed 10,000 of them. That's 150,000 years worth of wages. "Please, please, please give me time?"
If you've got a student loan, why don't you see if they'll give you a 150,000 year pay-out plan. They're not going to give it to you. There's no 150,000 years mortgages. Why? People don't live that long. At 50 grand a year, that's 7.5 billion, with a 'B', dollars that the ruler forgave. Which means his net worth dropped by that much and the net worth of the slave came up by that much.
You might think if you'd been given a 7.5 billion dollar debt, you just might be in a good mood. I mean, ribs on me, guys. We're having a party. I'm covering it all. Bring everybody, we're partying.
This guy didn't do that. He went and found another slave. Not someone on level with him or under him, rather, but someone on level with him who owed him 100 denarii. And a denari was a day's wage. That's about sixteen, seventeen grand. He says, "Pay me what you owe me." The second slave said the same thing the first slave said to the ruler, "Please, please, please give me time. I'll pay it back." That's a manageable debt, sixteen grand. Everybody in this room eventually could pay back sixteen grand. Nobody in this room that I know of could pay back 7.5 billion dollars. If there is somebody, Dr. Bailey and I both have ministries we want to talk to you about.
But the first slave choked the second slave and threw him in prison. Well, the ruler heard about it. How? The fellow slaves ratted him out, it's kind of what they do. He summoned him and he said this, "You wicked slave." That, by the way, was not a compliment. "I forgave you all that debt because you asked for mercy. Should you not have also had mercy on your fellow slave the same way I had mercy on you?" How many of you think that's a legitimate question?
Then the text goes on, "And his lord" — little L — "moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay what he owed." What did he owe at this point? What did the first slave owe to the ruler at this point? Nothing. No money, right? He didn't owe the 7.5 billion because if you forgive a debt, you legally can't come back and reclaim the debt. So he didn't owe the money, but he owed something. What did he owe?
"Should you not also have mercy on your fellow slave the same way I had mercy on you?" He owed mercy forward — we call it Forgiving Forward — he owed the mercy he received passed on to someone else.
Now the word torturer referred to someone in that day who was assigned to the jail, who was trained and was skilled at exacting the greatest amount of pain for the longest amount of time without someone passing out or dying. Think Braveheart at the end of the movie. Have you ever watched 24? Any episode Jack Bauer was in, somebody was getting tortured. A horrific experience.
Now, it's important to note that Jesus now finishes the metaphor, he finishes the parable, the story, and he goes back to answering Peter's question. Who was Peter? He was a leader of the disciples. He was the guy, two chapters over in Matthew 16. Jesus said, "I'm going to hand the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven over to you." In other words, I'm going to die, I'm gonna resurrect, I'm gonna ascend into heaven and I'm gonna create a marketing firm. We're gonna call it the church. And Peter, you guys are gonna be responsible. We're taking this message and making it go viral. So if anybody is gonna get special treatment, you might think it might be the guys that Jesus spent three years training to make the church go viral. And Jesus said, "My heavenly Father, we'll do the same to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from his heart." The same what?
Well, today, I've used all my exegetical skills. Maybe you have better skills than me, probably sure you have better skills than me, but I can't see a way to make it mean anything but "hand you over to the torturers." What Jesus is saying, that the heavenly Father doesn't torture us, but He gives legal authority for us to be tortured. He withholds his protection from us when we don't forgive. Is that a bit shocking? In fact, this word torture is used seven to 18 times in the New Testament. It's also translated "torment" in the majority of the time. There is a connection in the use of the word with hell or demonic activity. What this is saying, that God with the Father withholds his protection from us, He gives permission for us to be tormented when we don't forgive.
We have coached hundreds of people in the last few years to freedom. And when you think of torment, we see it evidenced in Scripture or in our culture, in fear issues, anxiety issues, depression issues. You see it in addiction issues, drug, alcohol, sex, whatever addiction you have, control issues, paranoia, some physical issues, that God disciplines us because of unforgiveness.
And I'm going to tell you sitting here, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm going to deal with this." No, you're going to get wounded when you leave here. You know how I know? You're breathing and you're going to people who breathe.
I had a pastor friend of mine that we had coached, call me not long ago and said, "I've got a pastor friend who needs help. He's a megachurch pastor and he can't talk to anybody. And he's from a different ethnicity than me." He says, "So he needs to find someone outside of his circle. Would you help him?" Sure. So he and his wife came to us. They were on the verge of marriage collapse because of issues he had been having in his marriage and she was about done and he didn't know how to fix it. He didn't know how to recover.
His church was going great. I mean, it's a megachurch. But he inside was a mess. As we worked with him, as we talked with him, as we helped him understand the principles that we were kind of touching on here and the rest of the stuff we developed in the book and the other seminars that we teach, we helped him understand that there is a root wound that predated their marriage, that was driving the torment that was causing the conflict in their marriage.
He was a son of a pastor, a prominent pastor, who was a tyrant at home. And he said, "Son, you'll never measure up. You'll never make it, you'll never do good." The wound of the father of "you're not good enough" and not affirming him was driving his desire to be all things to all men. In fact, his father, when he got his first church — the young man got his first church coming out of school — his father in his pulpit, which was also broadcast to the entire region, said, "That's the dumbest thing that church has ever done hiring that boy."
Deep, deep wound. And his personal life was a mess. And then he made the specific decision to forgive his father for the specific things he had done to wound him. And then we coached the wife to forgive her husband for the things he had done to wound her because wounded people wound people.
I said, "How's your heart?" He said, "I have never felt this free. I don't even know how to describe what I'm feeling."
His marriage was reconciled, he was healed. They went away on vacation the next week and he says, "Our marriage has never been this good." Then I talked to him about a week or two later. He says,"The work God is doing, the influence God is giving me, the things God's doing in my ministry since I forgave and got free is frightening me. How powerful what God is doing." And I can tell you, story after story after story, not just of ministry, but also individuals, people who were molested when they were children, all sorts of things, that they got free because they chose to forgive. Because we're not tormented because we've been wounded, we're tormented because we haven't forgiven the wound. Because God expects forgiven people to forgive others so much so, He connects His forgiveness with ours. He withholds His protection when we don't forgive, but He unleashes it when we do. When you forgive, you don't have to ask the tormentors to leave. There's nothing you have to do. You just have to forgive, the Father takes care of the rest.
And I ask myself the question: Why? Why does God discipline unforgiveness this harshly, because between me and you, I can't find anything else that we as a believer can do, that God disciplines this harshly. So why does he discipline unforgiveness this harshly? And the answer is this: Forgiveness is at the core of the gospel. You can't cut the gospel anywhere, it doesn't bleed forgiveness. In Luke 24, one of the last things Jesus says before he ascends into heaven to his disciples — he's kind of summing everything up for them — he says, "Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and rise again on the third day. So that" — that's a hidden clause. That's a purpose clause. Which means what I just said isn't the endgame. Death and resurrection is not the final goal, it's the means to the final goal. We did this "so that repentance for forgiveness of sins be proclaimed in his name to all the nations." The death and resurrection of Jesus was to bring about forgiveness of sin.
Colossians 1: "The Father transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption." Comma — in other words — the forgiveness of sins. Redemption, forgiveness of sins; the same thing.
You see, the gospel is simply this. In the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned, not only did man lose a lot, but God lost a lot. Man lost the relationship we were designed to have with God. God lost the glory we were designed to give him. He said, "I want my kids back and I want my glory back. But there's a big problem. They've got a sin debt. It's more than 150,000 years worth of wages. There's no way they can ever pay that back and get up to 100 percent. They can't ever deal with it at all. There's no way they can do it. Jesus. Is there something you'd be willing to do about this?" And Jesus said, "Yeah, Dad. I've got enough righteousness in my account. I can cover the sins of the world." So he came to the planet, lived 33 and a third years perfectly. And on the cross, stretched out his arms and he said, "It is finished."
What was finished?
The payment for the sins of the world, for He is the satisfaction for our sins, but not for ours, but also the sins of the whole world. Every sin that was ever committed at any point in time in history, past, present, future, any place was paid for on the cross by Jesus. People don't go to hell because they've not been forgiven. They go to hell because they've not repented to receive the benefit of the forgiveness.
So three days later, when God the Father, by the power of the Spirit, raised him from the dead, the Father was saying, "I agree. I received the blood of my son as payment for the sins of the world against me." So when we say God may forgive them, but I won't, we're basically saying this: "Dear heavenly Father, I am so impressed and so glad that you place such a high value on the blood of your son, that you receive it as payment-in-full of the sins of the world against you. But what happened to me? For what happened to me I need something more valuable than that. The blood of your son is not enough to satisfy me."
We say it this way: the blood of Jesus covers all sin including the ones committed against me, against you, against us. And I believe the reason why the church is so impotent today in our culture is because we have not mastered the art of forgiving one another. The world looks at us and says, "Excuse me, church, are you smoking what you're selling? You say you want me to believe in the forgiveness of God, but you're not willing to share it with anyone else." It hamstrings us in our ability to share the faith. But if...if we would learn it, if I had learned it, oh man, when I was sitting where you're sitting.
If you were to move into a ministry and you're going to say not only are we going to share people that God has forgiven them, but we're also going to share that they have forgiven each other and we're not going to tolerate unforgiveness in the community because it thwarts the gospel. We're going to address unforgiveness in the same way we address salvation because it's the same concept. Forgiveness, forgiveness, it has to happen. What kind of a difference would we make in our churches if we would learn to forgive?
I was teaching this at the largest Messianic Jewish congregation in Jerusalem a couple of years ago. Andrew is studying over there in a study abroad program, he kind of arranged it. There's about 350, 400 people there. I'm translated into Hebrew. I'm translated into four or five other languages. It's just kind of weird for this old boy from Kentucky to have that happen. But we did this and we're teaching it and at the end of this session, an 86-year-old man, Jewish man, came up to me and in his inimitable way, just this old classic stylish way, he says, "So, I was a boy when the Gestapo burst into my house in Poland and they took away my family, my parents and my siblings and they killed them all and I barely escaped. And you're telling me I have to forgive the Nazis and that won't dishonor my family?" Now, what would you tell him?
You have to understand, in the Holocaust Museum in Israel, as you walk in there's a plaque in Hebrew that says, "We will not forgive and we will not forget." Because they're afraid if they forgive, they will forget.
And I said, "Sir, I cannot imagine what you went through. It was wrong, it was evil. It was horrific. There is absolutely zero chance anyone could justify it. It was terrible and I denounce what the Nazis did to the Jews in every possible way. But to answer your question, yes sir, you do have to forgive them. Because the blood of Jesus covers all sin, including what the Nazis did to the Jews."
And he looked at me and thought for a second and he went, "Okay." And he shuffles off. I finished teaching the seminars, I taught them the protocols — which you can get at forgivingforward.com or back there, but we won't have time to cover today — and I saw him later that day forgiving. I saw him the next day and he was a different man.
God expects forgiven people to forgive others. So much so, that he connects His forgiveness with ours. He withholds His protection from us when we don't forgive, but He unleashes it when we do. Forgiveness is at the core of the gospel, because the blood of Jesus covers all sin, including the ones committed against me. Let me encourage you to let the Holy Spirit reveal to you the wounds of your past that are driving the torment inside you and deal with it. Take it and forgive it and apply the cross and the blood to it so you can have the freedom of accomplishing all God wants to accomplish in you that you're actually here trying to prepare yourself for. But if you don't deal with the forgiveness issue the rest of stuff will have very little impact.
Father, we're so grateful for your cross and we're humbled by your blood. And Father, we ask that you forgive us for our refusal to honor your blood by not forgiving. But, Lord, I pray that you will just not let us rest until we get free. And then you will just supernaturally, with the power of your spirit, transform our hearts so the people around us will see the freedom you want us to live in. Because you purchased it for us on the cross. In the powerful name of Jesus, we pray. And God's people said, "Amen."
