Ron + Hope: Unfiltered - Love and Forgiveness​

Foreign.

Hello, guys. We are here again. Ron and Hope.

Unfiltered.

Unfiltered.

What's the three Rs?

Real raw and relevant. So glad to be back with you guys.

She won't let me do that. She's scared of my.

Because he will mess it up. He always, always, always messes it up. I think he does it on.

I lost my place. I have my notes all ready to go here. I had some things.

That's real.

Yeah, this is real raw. Here we go. This is wrong. Yep, here we go.

But what are we talking about today?

Love and forgiveness. And they're the two wonder twins. Because you can't have one without the other.

Nope.

They go hand in hand.

So let me ask you this. Is there any time, is there any wrong done where it's okay not to forgive?

Not biblically. People might can justify it in their.

Mind, but I hear people say that a lot. They're like, I'll never forgive him for. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I'll never forgive them for what they did.

What he said. What she said. Yep.

And what does that do? Does it hold them hostage? No, it holds a person hostage.

I don't care how many books have been read or how many sermons have been preached on the subject. That's the whole misnomer, is that somehow me retaining this poison in my life is hurting you.

Right.

I told people one time, I said, unforgiveness is like wanting somebody else to die while you drink poison.

Right. It makes no sense.

It really doesn't. And now you get into all the teachings and you can hear this anywhere from Oprah to a pulpit. You know, it empowers you. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.

It sets you free.

Yeah. Whether the other person even knows they've been forgiven can be irrelevant. It is a gift that you give you. And so Jesus, I could even go further to say, nobody preaches these scriptures either, baby doll. But the fact is, Jesus says, forgive and you will be forgiven. So I could make a case that the freedom I get in my relationship with God will parallel the same freedom that I give others.

Say it again. Say it again.

So in other words, let me say it again that the freedom I experience in my forgiveness will parallel the freedom that which I'm willing to give others. So forgive and you'll be forgiven. I'm not going to realize everything God has for me in my forgiveness until I learned to let people go at the same level.

Look, Matthew 18:21 22 says this. Peter, one of Jesus disciples came to him and asked, how often should I forgive my brother who sins against me? 7. I bet Peter was thinking that was pretty generous, right? Offering to forgive someone seven times, you know, for the same sin. That sounds like a lot. You know, you let somebody just hurt you and hurt you and hurt you, and you keep saying, I forgive you, I forgive you. I forgive you. But he says, no. 7, 70 times 7. What is that?

And he really ain't.

How many times is that?

He ain't saying 490 times. That's not what he said.

490 times.

What he's talking about is if they hit you 491 and cut them off. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is this thing has no number on it.

Right?

In other words, he's saying, peter, you're not even close, right? This thing has no number on it. So let's talk about the different kinds of love, baby.

Okay, let's talk about the love.

How many?

Four times, four kinds.

In your Bible, Biblically, in your Bible. Here's one place where our English language really handicaps us. The fact is, you know, I read my Bible and it says, love your enemies. It says, love your wife as your own body. Okay? So I see these words, love, love the Lord your God, with all your heart. But the New Testament was translated from Greek. The Greeks had four words for love, right? So you got to understand they were four words that had four distinct meanings. Because there's kinds of love, right? Okay. So they had the word eros, from which we get our word erotic. That is not in the Bible. It has to do with sexual love. That Greek word is not in there. But then they had the word phileo. Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.

Family love.

That has to do. No, it's friendship. Friendship, love. Then strikeo. Family is family love. And then you had agape, the love of God. Okay, so whenever.

That's a tough one.

Yeah. Whenever you read your Bible and you see in the word love, it's one of three different Greek words with three different meanings. Yeah. I never understood hope. When Jesus asked Peter three times, do you love me? That didn't make any sense to me. He told him, yes. He said, no. Do you love me? Yes, Lord. You know all things. You know that I. But Jesus was saying, do you agape me? And he was saying, yes, I phileo. You see, that changes the whole story. Jesus was like, do you love me? Without condition and without restraint. And he said, I love you like a friend. No. Do you love me? Without performance, condition, or restraint. Yes, Lord, I love you like a friend, Jesus. And he said phileo all three times. Jesus never got what he wanted.

Wow.

He never changed. He said phileo, fileto, fileto. And so those four words for love right there, number one, you talk about forgiveness. If I don't love you, you can't hurt me. I mean, you can talk about me, you can gossip. I'm not talking about. But you can't wound my soul if I don't love you. So the only people that have the ability to hurt you or people that you care about. Okay? The deeper the love, the deeper the offense. So the more I love you, the more you can hurt me. Let's flip to the other side. First Corinthians 13. Can I read it?

Yes.

First Corinthians 13. Love suffers long, is kind, does not envy.

Wait a minute. What? Love suffers long.

Love. Oh, I'm coming back to it. I'm coming back. Love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy, does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. Pardon me. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. Okay, So I said, nobody can hurt you unless you love them. On the flip side, if I really love you, you can't hurt me.

Ooh, that's deep. You can't offend me if I. If I really love you like this. If I love you like this, nothing you can do.

You can't make me run, right?

Oh, nothing. You can make me Duke, and make me stop loving you. Love has no conditions.

So I don't hear anybody talking about that. It's the two sides. Number one, you only can hurt me if I love you. But if I really love you with the love of God, you can't hurt me.

So the comments of. I don't love them anymore because they. That doesn't even make sense.

That's a feeling.

Yeah.

Now, see, we've gotten over to a feeling. Now, I just read the definition, biblically, of love. What emotion in there, did you hear?

None. There were no emotions.

What's love but a secondhand emotion? I heard the other day on a forensic. You know, love is a powerful emotion. I want to stick my head through the TV screen. It has nothing to do with emotion. Now, love carries with it deep and passionate emotions, but love is not a deep and passionate emotion.

It's a choice.

It's a choice that you make and a commitment that you come to. And you don't say for better, for worse, richer, for poor, sickness and health over a feeling. No, because the feeling's not going to stay. Feelings come and go. You can change the way you feel about where you're going to eat supper four times, and we. Do you know what I'm talking about. You can change how you feel about what you're going to wear that day five times in your closet. And you're going to get married out of that. You're going to become one out of something that is so fleeting. Feelings are all over the place. And I'm going to tell you something else. Feelings are liars.

Yeah, they do.

Feelings lie to you. When I sit in an altar with hope, this is what I was saying. Suffers long, kind, does not envy, does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely. Those were the things that I was meaning. I didn't mean whether or not I always feel exactly like I'm feeling right now. So I don't know. I'll let you have a woman's perspective since they tend to be more feely. Men tend to be more logical. Seriously. And women tend to be more. In other words, men will tell you what they think about a subject. But after I get through telling Hope what I think, you know what I ask her, I say, now, how do you feel about that? Because I know she'll probably, in general, first feel and then think. I think first and then feel. And that's one thing you have to learn about marriage, how the two operate one another. But I see you've got your book in here.

I know.

Which was a hit, by the way.

If you don't have this book, I hope you get it. The most beautiful disaster came out in May of 2021. And it's our story. If you don't know our story, we'll talk about it one day in depth. But this. This whole book talks about our.

We don't want to traumatize our death.

Our resurrection, our life, our God story, God's redemption story of our marriage. And a lot of forgiveness in here. A lot of forgiveness in our life and in our marriage and how we've overcome a lot of things. And you know, that's a hurdle when you feel like you've been violated so deeply, like we talked about earlier, you feel like you have a right to hold on to some bitterness or unforgiveness. But, man, the blessing on the other side of forgiveness, you Know, and unforgiveness causes more than just a spiritual trap. It really affects your physical body, too. I wrote in here, in one chapter that hostility levels of the stress hormone cortisol elevated in your body, which can trigger a whole range of bad outcomes, including high blood pressure, the immune system issues, and tendency to gain weight. Huh. High blood pressure, immune problems, obesity. Could it be that our health problems.

One decision could change it. One decision, because that's what forgiveness is.

To forgive could change even lifelong life.

You choose health problems to forgive. It is a choice that is within your control. You cannot control everything that happens to you because you can't control people.

No.

But you can control your response to.

It, your sinful response to it.

And they say that most people who struggle in life, that they emotionally and mentally got stuck at their last trauma.

Ooh, wow.

So the last thing that traumatized you is where you still are emotionally. Now, this is not biblical. This is, of course, clinical clinicians and this and that and other clinical science and data. But people who get to a place where they emotionally stop developing and they stop growing, they can't make a new friend, they can't enter a new relationship. Exactly right. They never let whatever happened in the last trauma go. And so, basically, there's a couple of things I just want to say about forgiveness. Can I teach you a little bit right here? You have not forgiven until all your desire for revenge is gone. If there's still any sense of, I want them to pay, that decision is not so.

If you're laying in your bed and you're thinking, man, I could run over them with my truck, put it in reverse and go back over them again and maybe choke them out in the night.

You're thinking about how wonderful the thump would be under the car. Yes.

See that right there.

You can't. Forgiveness has not completed itself.

Right.

As long as you have some desire to make someone pay. Let me tell you, number two, why would you want to make someone pay? Jesus never made you pay. Whoa.

Come on, somebody.

Now, what if Jesus held you responsible?

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

What if. What if your God was unforgiving? What side of the fence would that leave us on? And so Jesus says, as I have loved you, so love one another. In other words, he said, I'm slow to anger. I'm abounding in love. I'm rich in mercy. As I have loved you, I want you to love one another. Another thing that we have to understand about forgiveness is I've talked about the poison part of it. You know, it's like drinking your own poison, hoping somebody else will die. Talked to you about the fact that it's not complete until all your desire for revenge is gone. Lastly, the last thing I'd have to say about it is you have to forgive from every angle.

And that's progressive. That's not just one and done. It comes up.

You know what? I don't know that many people have heard that. Not that we're smart, but, I mean, that's something we learned the hard way, right?

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Okay, you have a violation in your marriage. Let's say, hypothetically, let's say you have a wife that ran up $20,000 on full credit cards and you didn't even know the credit cards existed. Okay, let's say she got them, she ran them up. You didn't even know they're there. And then your trust financially in that family now has been violated. You're angry, you're mad, you feel deceived, you feel hurt, you feel distrustful. You're flooded with all these emotions out of that event. Now you have to come to the place of the initial you know what? We're going to find a way to pay this off. And I forgive you.

Do you trust them?

But then you go to buy a house and find out that your credit is ruined. The same feelings that you felt at the beginning will flood you again.

Yeah.

And you know what you're going to have to do? You're going to have to make the same decision again.

It's called forgiving from every angle.

And then you had to take your vacation money to catch up the credit card bills. And then when it comes that time and now you have a staycation because you don't have the money to go anywhere, don't have to forget again. You're going to be sitting out on the back porch looking at your fence instead of looking at the ocean. And you're going to be sitting there saying, you know what? Doggone it.

And the opportunity to be offended.

Exactly. And you'll go back in the house with something that's whirling in your mind and take it out on that person. They don't even know what you're thinking about because it's been in your mind, it hasn't been in theirs. And you walk in the room and wear them out because of what you're feeling on your spirit.

Because we don't sin in a vacuum.

Exactly.

It affects people.

It has a domino effect. It has a domino effect.

Right. And it affects areas in our life. And that's why you will have to. You'll be confronted with having to forgive not just one time, but you'll have to forgive that 70 times 7.

Every.

Yes.

In other words, the domino effect of the poor decision has many. Has a lot of collateral damage. Every time the collateral damage manifests, you'll have to come back there again.

Yeah.

You have to come right back there again.

You have to come right back there and you better give it. Because the same amount you give out.

Whatever you measure, will be measured unto you.

Yes. So if you want a lot of forgiveness for yourself, you have to give a lot of forgiveness now.

Love, baby. There's a lot of people that have jacked up definitions of love. You know, a guy slamming a woman up against the wall and smacking her and says, I love you.

Oh, my. That's my definition of calling two men in a truck.

Yep.

You can love me from Oregon, but you ain't gonna love me right here.

But you know what? It's happening all over the place right.

Now because that's what they learned growing up.

Love identifications. Yeah, Love identification. How do I identify Love because of the experiences that I've had, right?

And we do. That's what we do.

There's a lot of people that think, you know, they had some really bad relationships early in life, so they sit there later in life and say, why do I keep attracting the same kind of guy? It's because you see love that way, right? When that kind of person shows up with that kind of action towards you, in your mind, you have identified that with love. And so you're being loved at that moment that you're getting that crazy behavior, right?

Just like kid growing up and you got spanked harshly or beat, and your parents would look at you and say, I'm doing this because I love you. I want you to be a good kid. I'm doing this because I love you. So to you, that's what love is. So how can you identify with the love of the father who is gentle, who is gracious, who is kind? And you hear that, and you hear him being a heavenly father, but the only thing you've seen as a father beat you growing up.

So amazing how people hear love, right? So people hear this and they experience this. You know, people see this and they experience this because of love identifications. You know, there's no wound. I've always said, probably worse in a household than a father wound. The father wound is a tough, tough wound. There is a mother wound, but the father wound is tough to get over because it has a lot. The father wound is so detrimental, baby, because when you do come in a relationship with God and then you call him Father, you already identify father with a negative experience. So I come to God and he's my ABBA father, and all I can remember is the bumbling drunk screaming at Mama in the other room. You know, all I can remember is hearing screams, or you didn't have one at all, or there was a huge void and absence, right? So you had no definition at all, right? And then you try to come to God. I want to talk to some people who have had a difficult time responding to God and your relationship with God because you had a father wound. Let me tell you something. That is most dangerous out of a father wound is performance orientation. Now, I know you got a lot to say about that. Talk about performance orientation. When it comes to love, love is not performing.

No unconditional love. God's love is not. It is. I love you no matter how on your good day, on your bad day, when you got it right, when you didn't get it right. But what we have been Taught growing up is if you're good, if you're right, if you come home on time, if you make the grades you're supposed to make, then you get the reward. But see, God's love is so different. He paid the price for us when we were all wrong.

Here's where we mess up.

And we don't have to perform for him.

You have to work for things, but you should never have to work for love.

Right.

So, yeah, you're going to have to study and get good grades if you want the scholarship. Yeah, you're going to have to perform if you want the scholarship. Yep. You're going to have to make that company some money if they're going to give you a bonus or give you a raise.

Your love doesn't have conditions.

That's not love. That's not love. So we take this orient. Our whole world is oriented that way.

Right.

So we take this over into a relationship. And a lot of times we say, I love you. And this is what we mean. If I love you, as long as you're a good father to my kids, as long as you take care of me, and as long as you don't ever cheat on me, and as long as you always pay the bills, as long as you take care of the house. And we don't say it verbally, but in the back of our mind, let them fail to perform.

Yeah, we have these conditions. But God's kind of love and how he tells us to love has nothing to do with the other person. It has everything to do with us and our relationship to him. We love because he first loved us. We don't love because of what you do. We love because he first loved us.

So this is so hard to say. I know people will say, pastor Ron, you said a hard thing in this. Okay? This love right here talks about how. It talks about my standard, but it doesn't talk about the person I love's performance.

None.

I suffer.

It's all about me.

I bear all things. I hope all things. I'm kind. I'm not rude. I keep no record of wrongs. I'm not easily provoked.

How we treat people actually is a mirror relationship with God. Sure it is how we treat people.

If you say you love your God.

It'S not about you.

And you do not love your brother. The love of God is not in you.

Is not in you.

The love of God is not in you.

Right. How we treat people is a reflection of our relationship with God.

God loves you according to foreknowledge we love people according to past knowledge. So we say, man, I love you, and we pass them by them in church. And what that means is, I love you based on everything that I know about you up until this point. But if you screw up tomorrow, we.

Say that, oh, I love you. To the people who's been good to us, who hadn't hurt us, but our love that.

I'm feeling my thunder. I'm going there.

Yeah. Oh, I love you. Should be the same to the people who's hurt us.

So God loved. God made a commitment to love you. You were saved. You. You weren't saved in 1994. No. You were saved before the foundations of the world.

That's right.

So what did God do? He decided to love you. He made a decision, and it has nothing to do with your performance.

It's so good.

He loves you according. So before you had a chance to mess up.

I just love you.

I love you. He loved you when your past was still in the future. He's already decided. And you know what? We don't need to throw that word around. Because when we tell somebody we love them, that packs a punch. Coming with it. I'm real careful about just going in a room full of preachers telling all of them I love them. I do care about you. But the fact is, everybody in that room, I'm not going to ride to the bottom of the ocean with them. But now when I tell you I love you, you know me. I love hard and I love deep. So if I tell you I love you, I'm willing to go through whatever it is you're going through with you. But understanding that even God himself, when he chose to love, he didn't do it based on an emotion or a feeling.

It's a choice.

It's a decision that God's made. Knowing that I'm going to have some real rough days where I'm going to miss the mark and I'm going to disappoint him and I'm going to say things that don't please him. I'm going to have attitudes that don't please him. I'm going to have thoughts that don't please him. I'm going to do things that don't please him, and it does not move the needle we got. He'll never love me any less on a great day. I mean, on a bad day. And he'll never love me anymore on a great day. It's always constant. It's always pure.

But then he says, love, hope. Love, Ron.

Like that now, you talked a minute ago about loving people that are good to us. Jesus talked about that in Luke chapter six.

He did. He said, even sinners do that.

He says, if you love those who love you, even sinners do that.

Even sinners do that. He says, what does it account? What does it.

What can I put in your account? He said, what does it credit you if you love those who love you? In other words, God said, I am not impressed at all. Because anybody can love people that love them.

Yeah, that's easy.

What's hard about that? It's easy to treat people good. That treat you good, Right? It's easy to give to people who give to you. It's easy to love people.

But there's nasty people in Walmart cut in front of you.

But you know, this is the Sermon on the Mount. So Jesus is preaching. This is his first time he's opened his mouth and he's blowing these people's minds. Because Jesus said, you have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. In other words, you've heard it said. Yeah. He said, whatever they give to you, you give it back. That's what you've heard. He said, but I tell you, love your enemies, Pray for those that persecute you. Bless those, Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who speak all manner of evil against you falsely for my name's sake. So he says, the people that are talking about you, the people that are cursing you, and the people that are a sworn enemy of you, he said, that's when I can put something in your account.

Yeah, when you pray for them and you send them flowers and you give them a Christmas gift. Bottom line, some of us might need to send some flowers to somebody today. Some of us might need to get on our knees and start praying for some people today instead of thinking about how many times we want to run over them with our truck. Right?

What do you need to forgive? What do you need to forgive? Forgiveness, I've always said, can be tricky. Forgiveness and unforgiveness and pride, those two little things will hide. They create little pockets. And you'll think you've forgiven. You will, and then somebody else, then.

Their name will come out.

Oh my gosh. And you're sitting there saying, why in the world am I experiencing that? I've already gone to the altar, I've already put their name on a post it note and nailed it to a cross on Easter Sunday. I mean, I've been doing it. And why am I feeling that unforgiveness is tricky.

It does hide.

It hides. And when it's there, the heart is deceitful.

Who can know it?

Who can know it? And then unforgiveness unchecked leads to resentment, leads to forgiveness. And I've always said when you're angry and you're resentful and you don't ever get to express that, you don't ever forgive it, you don't ever get that toxicity. That's what leads to depression. Depression is internalized anger.

Get up close to here.

Depression is internalized anger. That's good.

That is so good.

Depression of those that never got to.

Run over the people.

They never got to run over the people, and they never decided to forgive them. So what do you do? You take all that and you stuff it, and it becomes plutonium.

It does.

It's true. That you carry around. And so what happens is you shut down emotionally because.

Can't run over people, y'. All. So we got to forgive. We have to forgive or we're going to have high blood pressure, heart attacks, and be fat. Seriously, studies prove it. So we've got to forgive for. I mean, for our freedom, for our spiritual freedom, and for our health, for our physical health.

I would like to speak to the millennials a minute, which it's already proven millennials watch more podcasts than anybody. Hey, Millennials, I want to speak to you guys a minute. You guys, the data that I've looked up, of course, I didn't do this study, so I'm depending on the accuracy of data that I can Google search. But you are supposedly the first fatherless generation, which means there are more of you that had no relationship with a father or a bad one than a positive experience. That's the first generation in history that statistically, they have said that to. So what that means is there are real relational voids in you because there are things about love that a mother was not designed to display. Mothers are designed by nature to nurture. That's what they're designing. Can they raise their kids? Yes. Can they be an authoritative. Yes. All you single moms keep doing what you do. I get you. You have to be all of it. You have to be. But I'm talking about original design and intent. The dad set the vision and the boundaries for the house, and the mother nurtured the house. So here's what you have. You have a generation that got nurtured but never got boundaries. So their life runs amok. Because now we go Back to Ezekiel 47. Ezekiel 47. Is this. There's a river that flows out of the throne of God that's called the river of God's love. And said, on the banks of the river are trees, and those trees will heal you. Healing was on the banks, not in the river. It was on the banks. What are the banks? The banks are the boundaries that are put in place to make sure the river continues to flow. If you go on and read Ezekiel 47, it said, but where there's a swamp, where there are no boundaries, nothing can live. And so we got a group of millennials that say, mama was good to me, but Daddy was not around. And here I am, 25 years old, and I'm facing problems that normally somebody 45 or 50 would face. But because I have lived life without boundaries, without the knowledge of those banks.

And pretty much spoiled. Pretty much spoiled, coddled a lot of.

Entitlement there with that. But the fact is, sometimes it's not even directed at a person. I've seen it directed at life, just directed at life. If it's directed at life, it's going to somehow end up being directed at God. We're going to look at. I didn't get what I was supposed to get. I didn't deserve. I didn't get what I deserved. I'm not supposed to be here. I should not be experiencing all these things.

I should have more.

I should have more. I should be further along than I am at this point in my life.

They didn't help me out.

So what I would say to you is, we haven't talked about trust. Maybe that's for another day. Forgiveness is a decision. Trust is not. You can't decide to trust. And you can say, okay, I'm going to start trusting you, but it don't matter if you say it. Trust is a process.

So is forgiveness an option?

Nope.

Forgiveness is not an option.

Forgiveness is not an option.

And how many times do we have to do it for freedom? Every single time. Every single time. Is this easy? No, we didn't say it was easy.

Probably one of the hardest things that God's commanded us to do.

It is.

It is because there's. Because it runs against every emotion and emotions are powerful, but you can do it. It can be done.

Some of you listening to this right now, you may have somebody in your life that you know you have got to forgive so that freedom can come to you. And I just believe right now, in the name of Jesus, that God's going to give you the grace. He's going to give you the grace, the same. Same flooding of freedom and forgiveness that he gave you. He's going to give you now to forgive somebody who's hurt you and violated you. I believe you can do it. In the name of Jesus. You want to learn more about this? Get my book. Two whole chapters. The most beautiful disaster. You can get it anywhere. Books. Books are sold. Books of me and Amazon. Anywhere, anywhere. And I believe that it will help you. It will minister to you. So until next time, it's Ron and Hope. Unfiltered, real, raw and relevant. We love you.