ADULTERY AND PORNOGRAPHY ARE NO MATCH FOR THE POWER OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

Brad and Molly came to us in crisis. Three weeks earlier Molly had discovered Brad’s pornography addiction and his multiple affairs, including Molly’s best friend, Brad’s best friend’s wife and prostitutes. She was shocked.

A couple of days after the initial confrontation, Brad picked up his Bible. As he began to read something inside him broke. For two hours he tearfully read the Bible and, for the first time, understood the grace of God and the forgiveness provided for him through the blood of the cross. He was dramatically transformed. Heart cleansed. Desires changed.

Molly recognized the change but couldn’t get over the offense. “I thought we had a great marriage. I swore I would not be like my mom, but now I have become my mom because he has become my dad.” She went on to explain how her father would leave her in the car as an alibi while he had affairs with women.

Conventional wisdom wouldn’t give this couple good survival odds, but conventional wisdom doesn’t understand the power of forgiveness. I looked at Brad and asked who hurt him as a child. He described the horrific sexual abuse his sister committed against him from the time he was five years old until he was age eleven. We gently told him, “You must forgive your sister.”

As Brad began to forgive the numerous wounds from his sister, Molly began to weep uncontrollably. Toni knelt beside her and cradled Molly in her arms. After Brad finished forgiving the wounds from his sister, he forgave himself. I asked him, “How is your heart?” He told us he would never have believed his heart could be any better than the day he trusted the Lord, but in fact it was better now than ever. He was unmistakably free.

Then Toni looked at Molly and said, “You won’t be free, totally free, until you also walk through forgiveness.” After forgiving Brad and her father, the change in her countenance was remarkable, and as they stood up to leave, Molly embraced Brad for the longest time for the first time in three weeks. In fact, on the way home, she unbuckled her seat belt and slid over and snuggled next to him. He almost wrecked the truck! When we saw them a month later she told us their marriage has never been this good. Forgiveness trumped conventional wisdom.

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Nov 20, 2024

FORGIVING FORWARD IN SOUTH KOREA

Nov 20, 2024

Our recent trip to South Korea may have been our most consequential trip to date in terms of the number of significant pastoral leaders we had the privilege of connecting with. I taught 24 sessions to 11 different groups in the two weeks we were there. We shared the message with pastoral leaders from some of the largest churches of various denominations in Korea and, in one case, the world. A conservative number of congregants in the churches represented by these pastors would be well over 125,000 people. We were blown away at the privilege God afforded us on this trip.

To be candid, we were a little apprehensive heading into the sessions with the pastors. It has been our experience that, for a variety of reasons, pastors are often the ones who are the most resistant to the Forgiving Forward message. With this in mind, we enlisted our prayer team and prayer partners to beseech God specifically that He would open the hearts and minds of the pastoral leaders to whom we would be teaching. And God answered in incredible ways.

Nov 20, 2024