“Lord, how many times do I need to forgive a person who’s hurt me?”

Relationships can be difficult. People don’t always speak to each other in charitable ways and people don’t always treat each other kindly. We can’t really expect the relationships in our lives to be “perfect” because people aren’t “perfect.” And what that means is that we’re all going to need to have healthy boundaries that we create to protect ourselves, and we’re all going to need to find ways to rebuild relationships after we’ve been hurt.

In this week’s message, “Too Big to Forgive?”, we’re challenged to ask ourselves two huge questions: (1) How do we know when the sins that people have committed against us are too big to forgive? and  (2) How do we decide when someone’s hurt us too many times?

When we’re hurt by others, we usually step back and do an inner “damage assessment” to determine the magnitude and the severity of the hurt. The decision to forgive doesn’t always come easily. We may, in fact, need to talk with other people and to process what has happened to us. But, on the bottom line, forgiveness is always going to involve the decision to forgive. Forgiveness is always going to be about learning to open our hands and let go of something that has happened to us that was real. And sometimes, what we need to release may be little. And sometimes, what we need to release may be huge.

Has someone done something to you that’s “Too Big to Forgive?”

Let’s open our Bibles to Matthew 18:21-35 and explore that question together as people of faith.