Exploring the complexities of human relationships and divine forgiveness, we tackle the idea that many of us carry a ledger, meticulously noting the wrongs of our partners. As we delve into the scriptural insights from Paul and David, we reveal how understanding God's approach to our sins can lead us to a more gracious stance in our marriages. We confront the uncomfortable truth that if we believe God is merely tolerating our failures, we may replicate that behavior with our spouses, leading to resentment and distance. However, the biblical narrative presents a God who delights in mercy and transforms our failures into opportunities for growth and renewal. This episode serves as a reminder that true forgiveness is not about erasing memories but redefining them in the light of grace. By learning to forgive as God forgives, we can foster a nurturing environment where love flourishes, ultimately strengthening our bonds and enhancing our capacity for compassion and understanding.

Takeaways:

• In understanding God's forgiveness, we must consider how it shapes our relationships, particularly in marriage.
• The way God handles our sins teaches us to extend mercy rather than keep a ledger of wrongs.
• Forgiveness is not about erasing the past but transforming our view of it through grace.
• A husband's love should reflect God's mercy, moving towards restoration instead of maintaining a record of failures.
• Mercy is not a sign of weakness but a reflection of divine strength in our relationships.
• When we forgive as God forgives, we create an environment of grace that fosters intimacy and healing.

Welcome again to our study. We're thankful that you're still with us. And we're looking at a very important topic.

It's one of those topics that once it's seen it's conforming, it's transforming, for sure. Up to this point, we've exposed the disease. We've shown that the human heart naturally keeps a ledger of lungs and why it does that.

But we would certainly be amiss if we just stopped here, because Paul didn't write First Corinthians 13 to expose us. He writes to call us to a love that reflects the character of God.

I want to talk with you a little bit more about God's ledger and ours because there's an important question that every Christian husband must answer. What does God do with the record of our sins?

And that question is not merely theological, it's very practical, because the way we understand God's forgiveness will shape the way we forgive our wives. And so that's the reason we need to spend a little time thinking about this.

If we imagine that God really tolerates us while secretly detailing every account of our wrongs and every forgiven failure, then we will consciously imitate that same pattern in our marriage. If that's what we think he's doing, that's what we'll do. We'll say, I forgive you, but inwardly we're going to preserve the debt.

But if we can discover that God deals with forgiven sin in an altogether different way, then maybe we can begin to understand why Paul says that love keeps no record of wrongs.

The remarkable truth about the Bible is that God never minimizes it, yet neither does he preserve it as an endless accusation against those that he's already forgiven. And those two truths must always remain together. Our culture often speaks of forgiveness as though it means pretending nothing happened.

The Bible never does that. God doesn't forgive because sin is not important to him. He forgives because Christ has fully satisfied the debt, the demands of his justice.

So it's not ignored, it's paid for. The record is not erased by wishful thinking. It's removed because someone else has borne its penalty. That's Jesus Christ.

I think this is why David's words in Psalm 103 is so remarkable. When he reflects on the mercies of God, he writes this. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquity.

So David tells us what God has done. He first tells us that what God has not done, God has not treated his children as their sins deserve. If he had the there'd be no hope for any of us.

Every husband that's thinking about this and understands this quote knows enough about his own heart to admit that he's failed many times to love as Christ loves. He knows he's spoken hastily. You know that you've acted selfishly and that maybe you've neglected opportunities to serve.

You may know that you've harbored resentment or wounded the very person that you promised to cherish. If God responded to you the same relentless bookkeeping way that you practice toward others, we would stand condemned every day of our life.

But notice, David says, as the heavens is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. Mercy is one of the most beautiful words in all the Scriptures, and I'll tell you why.

It reminds us that God gives his people something they never did deserve. We never could earn it. Justice gives us what we deserve. Mercy withholdeth what we deserve. You see, they're really Siamese twins.

Mercy is not giving us what we deserve, while grace is giving us what we don't deserve.

When David reaches for an image that's so wonderful that no human mind could invent it, he would say, as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. It's just worth pausing for a moment think about that expression, because the Holy Spirit chose his words carefully.

David could have said that God removed our sins as far as the north is from the south. If a man begins traveling north, eventually it comes to a point at which he starts traveling south. North and south ultimately meet.

East and west never do. No matter how far one travels east, he never begins traveling west. The distance is, though. It's immeasurable.

So David isn't giving us a lesson in geography, friends. He's giving us a lesson in grace. And the point is simply that God has forgiven his people.

The point is that he has removed the guilt of their sins so completely that those sins no longer stand between him and those whom he has redeemed. They have been separated from us by an immeasurable distance as far as the east is from the west. Now bring that truth into your home.

How different would our marriages look if we treated forgiven failures the way God treats ours? How many arguments would never occur if we refused to keep dragging yesterday's forgiven sins back into our conversations?

And how much bitterness would quietly disappear?

And if we stop measuring our wives by the worst moments of her past and began viewing them through the mercy that God Himself has extended to us that doesn't mean that husbands become forgetful, though that's probably true of me. I'm just forgetful all the times. But God certainly has not ceased to know every event of history. He possesses perfect knowledge.

And yet the issue here is not divine forgetfulness, but it's divine relationship. He doesn't hold it against it. It's never brought up again.

God no longer deals with his forgiven children according to the debt that once stood against them. The account has been settled, justice has been satisfied, and the relationship is now restored. It's done. It's a thing of the past.

So there is a profound difference between remembering that something happened and continuing to treat a person as though the debt remains unpaid. Do you see that one of them belongs to wisdom and the other belongs to the ledger? Many husbands confuse the two.

They somehow imagine that because they still remember the offense, they have not forgotten or forgiven. Scripture never requires the impossible task of erasing our memory, but it does call us to surrender our claim upon the debt.

We remember the event, but we no longer use it as a means of condemning or defining the one that we love. That's exactly what God has done for us. And so for a man to love his wife as Christ loved the ecclesia, that's what's required.

He knows every sin that we've committed more perfectly than we do. And yet, because of Christ, he no longer deals with us as condemned criminals awaiting the sentence of death.

He receives us as beloved sons and daughters whose debt has been fully paid. And so, you husbands, you must linger here. You must really think about this if you rush on too quickly here.

And you must first understand, in amazement, something about the mercy of God. You must remember what kind of man that you were when Christ found you.

To remember the countless times that God has been patient with you since then, and the repeated failures that you've made since then. And every day you wake, you realize, by the grace of God, there go I.

It's not that you've earned another day of God's favor, because God's mercies are new every morning.

A man who lives in the shadow of that mercy, he finds it difficult to keep a ledger against his wife because he doesn't want to be treated that way by God.

And so the more clearly we see the magnitude of our own forgiven debt, our own sins, then the smaller those deaths of hers begin to appear by comparison. It's not because her failures are imaginary or we need to ignore them as being insignificant.

It's simply because God's grace has become larger than both of their failures. I would like to take us now as we move to some examples just to emphasize this point of mercy. It says he delights in mercy.

And that's Micah 7, verses 18 and 19 greatest passages in the Old Testament on the character of God. Probably most writers never fully develop it. They quote it.

And I don't want to, I'm not going to quote it this morning, but I want to walk through Micah's thinking and just show why the prophet asks the question that he does. Up to now we've been examining our hearts and we've examined God's heart.

Because the only thing powerful enough to transform a husband's heart is the first vision of the heart of God. If we're going to love like Christ, we have to know the kind of love that Christ had. And that's why I started there.

But when we think about comparing God's actions toward us, we must ask, who is a God like unto thee? In every discussion of forgiveness eventually reaches a point where human effort is no longer enough.

Up to our study so far we've examined the tendency of the human heart to try to preserve these offenses and keep them in a ledger. We've seen how husbands become bookkeepers of their own wives failures. We've watched pride maintain that ledger, fear also preserve those wounds.

We've seen how self righteousness can strengthen our case against another sinner by keeping ledgers. We've seen how this destroys trust and suffocates the intimacy in a marriage. But exposing the disease doesn't provide the cure.

A husband can readily admit that he keeps a record of wrongs and still discover that he can't stop keeping it. He didn't understand why he's still doing it.

He may desire to forgive and yet he keeps finding himself going back over and over at the same painful memories. He may understand perfectly Paul's command while discovering that his heart refuses to obey it.

The question therefore becomes much larger than just marriage itself. Because where does a man learn to release the debt that his heart insists on collecting?

The answer is found not by looking more carefully into ourselves, but by looking more carefully at God. It is possible, I think, to understand forgiveness of I don't think.

Rather it's possible for us to understand forgiveness until we understand the God who forgives.

We do not learn mercy by examining our own hearts because our own hearts are naturally deceptive and they're inclined towards self preservation and justification. We learn mercy by standing in awe of the God whose mercy has no equal.

I mean, that's precisely where the prophet Micah leads us in the seventh chapter. The closing verses of this prophecy contain one of the most remarkable descriptions of God's character.

After speaking of Israel's sins, God's, Micah ends with God, not Israel. In amazement, he asks, who is a God like unto thee that pardons iniquity and passes by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage?

What a wonderful question. It's extraordinary. Micah is not merely beginning a new paragraph in the writing.

He's inviting everyone to consider a truth that's so remarkable that ordinary languages can't express it. He doesn't say simply nekuda, God is forgiving. He asked, who is a God like unto you? The implied answer was quite obvious. There is no one like him.

No king has ever forgiven like that, and no judge has ever ruled like that. Say, no father has ever loved like that, and no husband has ever shown mercy like that.

Micah is seemingly overwhelmed, not simply by what God has done, but by the kind of God that he is. Now, that distinction, I think, is very vital. We often speak of forgiveness as though it were merely one of God's activities.

But Scripture speaks of it as an expression of his character. He forgives because forgiveness flows from who he is. Mercy is not something that God practices.

On occasion, when he happens to feel compassionate, mercy is woven into his very nature. Everything he does reflects the perfection of his character.

And so one of the most beautiful aspects of his character is his delight in extending mercy to those who repent. And so notice carefully what Micah says next. He retains not his anger forever. Why? The answer is because he delights in mercy.

Those words deserve to be read very slowly. I want you to think about that. He delights in mercy. Again, he's not.

He could have just as easily said, God shows mercy, but now he's talking to us, telling us about something about his nature. He delights in it. Now, that single word, delight, is a window into the very heart of God.

There are a lot of things a person may do of necessity rather than a desire. A judge can maybe sentence a criminal because justice demands it, not that he really enjoys it or desires it.

A father can discipline a child because he loves, and love requires correction, but he certainly doesn't desire it. And a physician can perform painful operation because a healing demands that. But these are all actions.

They are necessary actions, and yet they're not described as delightful. But Micah deliberately chooses this word God delights. He takes no pleasure. He rejoices in.

So he's not reluctant to forgive those who genuinely Repent. He's not persuaded against his better judgment. He doesn't reluctantly set aside his anger after a lot of internal debate.

But when justice has been satisfied according to his holy purpose, he delights in extending mercy to because mercy reveals the beauty of his own heart. It says something about the character of God, and that truth alone has the power to change the environment of your home.

Many husbands, I think, believe that mercy is something to be dispensed sparingly, because if you do it too often, it just encourages weakness. They fear that too much grace is going to diminish accountability, so they have to be hard.

But the God that they worship is never afraid of extending mercy. He's never afraid that his mercy will somehow diminish his holiness.

His mercy is never opposed to his justice, because both of them flow from the same perfect character. And so the husband who begins delighting in mercy rather than merely tolerating forgiveness, has begun walking in the footsteps of his Father.

You see what Micah continues to say as he moves deeper into this? He says he will turn again. The prodigal son thought his father might allow him to become a servant. He said he's going to go to him.

He had it all figured out. When I go there, I'm going to tell him, father, I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me a hired servant.

That's what he thought he'd say to his father. But instead the father ran to him. See, that's always the direction of grace. You run to them. Grace moves toward the repented.

It doesn't stand at a distance, waiting for a more opportune time to remind them of yesterday. It moves toward restoration. Micah is describing more than a some legal transaction. He's describing the heart of an almighty God. He delights in mercy.

And he moves. He turns again. He's describing the heart of a father.

And if that is the heart of a father, what right has a Christian husband to delight in maintaining a ledger when God delights in extending mercy? You may say, well, now we're exalting God. What's that? I'm not God. Well, see, that's the progression that Paul himself follows throughout his letters.

He exposes the human condition that. But he never leaves us there. He always lifts our eyes to the character of God.

Because transformation begins not with trying harder, not with trying to maintain who we are and just work a little harder at it to get to where we need to be. Transformation begins with seeing God more clearly, or Christ.

And I think as we think about this further Notice the conclusion of Micah's prophecy here. He says he will subdue our iniquities, and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.

Now, I don't want to rush past those words, but I do want to ask why Micah uses those images subduing sin, casting it into the sea. Those are not poetic flourishes just for the purpose of being poetic. They reveal something very profound.

I think, about how God deals with the record of our wrongs, and perhaps this will help us as husbands. I believe they will become one of the high points. Micah's description of God's forgiveness reaches its climax with two remarkable images.

Having already told us that God delights in mercy and that he will again have compassion on his people, he says he will subdue our iniquities and cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. They invite us to look beyond the act of pardon again and look into the very heart of the one who does the pardoning. Micah says he will subdue.

And at first glance, those words may seem rather unexpected. We might have maybe anticipated the prophet to say that God would simply forgive our sins or overlook our transgressions.

But Micah speaks of God subduing them, and the language is that of conquest. It pictures a mighty king or conqueror defeating an enemy that has held his people in bondage.

And sin is not presented merely as a stain upon the conscience. And left to ourselves, we become powerless before it.

Or we may regret it, we may mourn over its presence in our lives, we may resolve to do better, but we can't conquer it. The history of humanity is the history of men trying to master sin, only to discover that it's mastered them.

But you see, the wonder of the Gospel is that God doesn't merely forgive the sinner while leaving him captive to the very thing that ruined him, but rather he comes to wage war against the sin itself. He subdues it. He places it beneath his feet. He breaks its dominion. And so the God who forgives is also the God who delivers.

His purpose is not just to cancel the guilt, but to reclaim the person who sin sought to destroy. All this is powerful, friends. It reveals something essential about forgiveness.

He doesn't simply wave his hand over the sin as though it were some minor inconvenience, or pretend that evil has somehow become unimportant. He confronts it with all the force of his holiness. But at Calvary, justice and mercy did not compete with one another. They embraced each other.

The cross became the battlefield where sin was judged. Satan was Defeated, the redemption was accomplished.

And when Micah talks about God subduing our iniquities, and he's directing our eyes toward a God who's not overwhelmed by our failures, but sovereign over them, he casts them into the sea. Even though our sins, though they be great, they are not greater than his mercy.

The prophet adds another image, and one that has comforted the people of God for centuries. The beauty of the statement that he gives lies not only in what God casts away, but where he casts it.

Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. Throughout the Bible, the sea is often represented by that which is immeasurable, or it's beyond human reach.

And in Micah's day, the depths of the sea, that was a place from which nothing could be recovered. There were no divers searching for the ocean floors, no vessel that was capable of exploring its hidden depths.

And what disappeared into the depths of the sea was gone and gone forever. That's the image that God chooses to describe forgiven sin. And so notice now what Micah doesn't say.

He doesn't say that God places our sin on a shelf where he may examine them later. He doesn't say that God stores them in an archive to be opened someday when we disappoint him again.

And he doesn't say that God keeps a detailed record so that every future failure may be weighed against every past problem. The picture is exactly the opposite.

They're forgotten, thrown into the depths of the sea, and it will never again be brought forth as the basis of accusation. What a striking contrast. It's so opposite the way the human heart often operates. We tend to preserve those offenses. We want to remember them.

We revisit those old conversations and all those painful memories, and we become reluctant. Forgiveness isn't easy. God presents himself all very different. He's not the divine bookkeeper who delights in maintaining a museum of our sins.

He's the redeemer. He's the restorer. He removes them from the field of accusation. And so the God of Micah is not searching the ocean floor for forgiven transgression.

He instead is calling his people to rejoice because his grace has buried them in the depths of the sea, never to be resurrected again. And so this is not because God again suffers from forgetfulness, but mercy reigns. And that distinction is very crucial for every Christian husband.

There's a big difference between remembering an event that occurred and continuing to treat your wife as though the debt remains unpaid. Now, you can do that in a lot of different ways. You may not even have to bring it up verbally. Wisdom may remember.

Love refuses, though, to bring it up. It refuses to prosecute. You may remember the seasons of difficulty.

You may remember some painful conversations, but those moments are over, and they'll never be brought against the woman that you love.

You'll remember them only as monuments to the grace that carried you through, not as evidence that you're waiting to use to introduce during the next disagreement. You see, that's precisely how God teaches his children to think about forgiveness. He doesn't ask us to deny it.

He just asks us to interpret reality through redemption. Give redemption, husbands give restoration. Be forgiving. The cross forever changes the meaning of the past.

Sins that once testified against us now testify to the greatness of God's mercy. The record has not merely been closed, it's just been answered by the blood of Christ.

And so the Christian husband has to linger here a while, I think, because this is where forgiveness ceases to be merely a duty. It becomes an act of God. It becomes a divine act. It becomes an act like the Father.

And every time we refuse to reopen a forgiven offense, you're bearing witness to the God that refuses to reopen the case against you.

Every time you choose restoration over retaliation, you're proclaiming something that the character of your Father, of your heavenly Father, your marriage becomes a living testimony that the gospel is not merely believed with the mind. It's embodied in the home and in your marriage. The ledger can never produce that kind of marriage.

And only when the husband begins seeing his own forgiveness through the eyes of Micah will he possess the spiritual vision that's necessary to release the ledger that he's been carrying around against his wife. He needs to stand in awe of the God that delights in mercy, who subdues iniquity and who casts forgiven sins into. Into the depths of the sea.

He will continue believing that his records are too valuable to surrender if until he does that. But once he's seen that and once he understands the heart of God, the ledger begins to feel strangely out of place.

He no longer has any interest in it because it's no longer valuable to him. So we stand here at the top, looking down on all that we've looked at, we've come to looking at marriage, how it reveals the heart.

The heart keeps a ledger, the carnal mind does, and how the ledger destroys intimacy. And there's pride and fear and all kinds of other problems like self righteousness that maintains these things.

We've talked about how God delights in mercy and subdues our iniquities and casts forgiven sins into the depths of the sea. The next question almost does God really stop remembering?

When we come into the New Testament, we get a similar statement in Hebrews and we told that the Hebrew writer tells us that when he's talking about the new covenant that God says, I will forgive their iniquities and their sins will I remember no more. Well, again, what I want you to see is that this is covenant language.

And surely the Lord isn't suggesting that omniscience is somehow now diminished and he can't remember anymore. That isn't the point. But anytime God is said to remember something, it often means far more than just mental recollection.

He's talking about his promise. Like, for example, he remembered Noah and he acted to deliver him from the flood.

Or he remembered Hannah and granted her son, he remembered the patriarchs. And in each case it not that God forgot literally, but his remembrance was his decision to act according to his covenant.

And the opposite is equally true then.

And so when you find statements like the Hebrew writer saying that our sins and our iniquities, he'll remember no more, he's coming back to that covenant language.

This is one of the most liberating truths in all the Scriptures, which when God promises to remember our sins no more, he's simply saying he's not going to bring them up again. He'll never reopen the case. In other words, he's not going to bring forgiven sins back into the courtroom again for another hearing.

That's covenant love. That's grace, and that's the heart that Paul wants husbands to imitate. You don't bring up the past that.

A husband who loves as Christ loved.

Doesn't just stop mentioning yesterday's failures because mentioning them would be impolite. That isn't the point. He stops because that's what love dictates.

And once repentance has occurred and forgiveness has been genuinely extended, the goal is no longer to establish guilt. The goal is restoration. And so there is an important distinction that every Christian husband must understand.

Forgiveness doesn't erase history, it transforms history. The cross didn't make our sins imaginary,.

It made them answered.

God dealt with it. And that's how God would have husbands handle their relationship with their wife. Well, our time is up. I thank you so much for listening.

I trust you have a good day and a pleasant week ahead. It.