How a famous European thinker navigated forgiveness

Welcome And A Warning

Welcome to today's episode of Guilt Free Faith. I am your host, Frank Ligans, and today I'm going to challenge you by first starting with a warning. The whole guilt-free faith movement is based on the freedom to explore a variety of approaches to your Christian walk without that guilt and fear that you're going to be damned to hell. What techniques can you use to get from unforgiveness over to forgiveness when you don't have all the answers? When you don't have perfect self-control, when you don't have a way to brainwash yourself or forget about what that person did. Do you agree? Hey, God, that's that's your mandate. That's what you want me to do. You want me to go from hatred? You want me to go from unforgiveness or bitterness and get over to this forgiveness? Great. Carry me there or give me the map. Give me the GPS. Oh, I can't get any of that. And yet you have this expectation for me to get there. Do you have any freedom? Do you have any license? Do you have any latitude for how you get from here to forgiveness? If you go in an imperfect way, like let's say you're angry for five years, maybe you even take revenge on the person somehow. Maybe if it's someone that hurts you, you tell a lie about them. Or maybe it's somebody that cheated you and you beat them up. So in this metaphor, that's you stumbling around. You may very well still get to forgiveness. Oftentimes, after you've flipped out or hurt yourself or hurt someone else, or developed an addiction, or learned the healthy yoga practice to better regulate your emotions. In all these ways, you're trying to stumble over to this healthier state of mind. What's God saying? Is he saying, well, only certain of these paths are legitimate, or only certain of these paths are righteous. And you're saying, but God, I want to get there, but I can't just like turn the switch. I can't just teleport from where I'm at today after someone just ran me into a guardrail and then to the perfect peace of forgiveness that you had on the cross. I'm going to introduce you to an idea that a famous European polymath used to regulate his emotions and to help keep himself in a more peaceful state of mind in the midst of wounds and disappointments and just the vicissitudes of life. It's unorthodox, and people are going to think I'm crazy or that I'm a secret agent for the devil by proposing this or just even asking the question. But I guarantee you'll at least find it interesting. You might even find it helpful because the truth is, once you're able to put aside your fear of God, once you're able to truly dare to embrace his forgiveness, when you're ready to go the guilt-free faith way, to drop all the rules and boundaries and what do I do? What shouldn't I do? As if you could fulfill everything God wants you to do in your own power, which you can never do. The Bible tells you you can't do it. We still act like we can do it. People still guilt us or threaten us into trying to do it or be something or act some way that we can't without help or without help from the Holy Spirit. There was a famous European polymath. He wrote about science, philosophy, religion, a deep thinker, and somebody that lived a very full life, not only in terms of years lived, but in terms of the experiences and ultimately the contribution that he's made to the Western canon of literature and wrote Faust, that famous play about making a bargain with the devil. He confessed to a friend of his that the way he was managing hatred, disappointment, and woundedness, he wasn't just trying to jump from A to B or A to Z and just miraculously forgive the person. I don't have a negative word to say. Turn the other cheek, all that. That's not what he said. He said, I keep a private journal. And in this journal, people I'm mad at or had a bad experience with, I write out all those feelings about that. I might write out how vile they are. I might write something satirical about them. I might write a little poem about how I think they're ridiculous, petty, or profoundly evil, right? But basically, in this kind of private space, I don't try to suppress my natural feelings of wanting revenge or recompense or wanting some form of justice, wanting to somehow set things right. I don't artificially try to suppress myself. I don't just say, oh yeah, forgive him. Yeah, like what my dad would tell me. So you can imagine when somebody ran him off the road or ran his cart off the road, whatever the equivalent was, he would journal how he felt about that person. And he would just vent that all out. Now, most of us have heard about journaling, and I think it's pretty well established that journaling is good for your mental health. It does have a therapeutic effect. It is a healthy way of letting your emotions out. It can give you clarity, it can reduce stress, it can help you develop a more realistic perspective on things. Essentially, it gives you some distance between your circumstances and your emotions and thoughts. Instead of being bound up in the catastrophe of that day, the journaling allows you to kind of step back and go, oh, okay, okay, yeah, I can acknowledge what happened. This person, they ran me off the road. Now I have to file with my insurance. My payment's gonna go up$200 a month. My car is gonna be in the shop. But okay, putting it all in perspective. I'm glad I didn't do what some people are doing now with road rage and trying to catch up with the guy and shoot him through the window or something. Yeah, okay, I'll pay Vector insurance. Fine. I'll be without a car this week. Could have been worse, right? I could have been injured, I could have lost a limb, I could have been killed, right? There's lots of things that could have happened. That journaling can help you get that type of space. That's kind of miraculous. I've tried journaling on and off in my own life, and I can say when I do it, which I'm not good at doing, but the few periods of my life where I've attempted to do that with any regularity, I have found that it is indeed therapeutic. So I'm willing to believe Goethe that, especially as somebody who is doing this routinely, what he's saying is actually helping him. It is keeping him calm. He is spitting that anger and that venom through the pen, not through the sword. So from that perspective, I'm thinking, wow, what can you say against that? Like he's not acting violently, he's not taking out revenge, he's keeping the peace. And the only thing he's doing is writing out these feelings in a private little book he carries around. I mean, it's not like he's publishing insults about the people or slandering them or no, he's not doing any of that. He's just literally his own private therapist. But here's the thing though. Would Jesus do that? Was Jesus journaling what techniques was Jesus using to forgive people? We will talk more about this next time. Let me know what you're thinking in the comments.