In Episode 14 of Journey Through the Song, Sam and Debbie take a deeper look at one of the most powerful forces in any relationship—true forgiveness. As they continue in the Song of Solomon, this episode explores what it really means to forgive when you’ve been hurt, and why forgiveness is not just a feeling, but a deliberate choice. (Song 6:4-12 continued)

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Welcome to the Fortifying youg Family podcast.

It can be daunting to navigate through an anti marriage and family culture.

Our teacher will expound biblical principles to help fortify our families and keep these sacred institutions strong.

And now, here's this week's teaching from Sam Wood.

Solomon's forgiveness is Christlike, and According to Ephesians 4:32, should be the pattern for every Christian.

Let me just remind you what it says in Ephesians 4:32.

And be kind, one to another.

I love this verse.

Tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you.

From this verse, we see that our forgiveness is to be modeled after God's forgiveness.

And this brings up a very important question I think every married couple needs to understand the answer to, and that is, what is forgiveness?

Because in marriage, we're going to continually have to practice forgiveness.

So we need to understand what forgiveness is.

When God forgives us, he says, I'll remember your sins no more.

I'm gonna put them in the depths of the sea.

I'm gonna put them as far as the east is to the west.

I won't remember them anymore.

And since we're to forgive as God forgives, when we forgive someone, we're making a promise to them to not remember the wrong that they have done to us.

Forgiveness, then, is a promise to erase the account of the wrong and to never bring it up again to the wrongdoer, the person who offended you, or to any other person, or even to yourself.

That's right.

Or forgiveness, we might say, is when you absorb the debt that's owed to you, rather than making the person who wronged you and hurt you pay that debt.

Wow.

I love the illustration Tim Keller gives concerning this and what I'm sharing with you.

He says, let me say that someone visits your house and you may have had this happen, and they come in, sit down, maybe they turn a table over or they turn, knock a vase off of the table and they break something, a piece of furniture that's worth several hundred dollars at the moment.

They break that furniture, you've got a choice to make.

You can either make them pay for it or you can pay for it.

You can forgive them, but if you forgive them, it means you absorb the loss.

Either way, somebody has to pay.

They got to pay, or you got to pay.

But let's say you're not talking about a material thing, a piece of furniture, a vase, or something like that.

Let's say your spouse has wronged you, like in this Instance with Solomon and the Shulamite, maybe they said something about you that's not true or something that's harsh and mean or disrespected you even as the Shulamite did.

Solomon.

There's no monetary debt that's owed, but rather there is an emotional debt.

And you, like Solomon, are experiencing emotional pain because of what your spouse said to you or maybe something they did to you.

And there's really only two possible things you can do.

Number one, you can make them pay.

You can make your spouse pay for what they did.

And how do you do that?

You can try to make them suffer the same way you did.

You know, you can try to get them to hurt like you hurt.

You get angry with them.

You avoid them, not around them.

You quit talking to them, Give them the silent treatment.

You gossip about them.

You hope in your heart that they suffer in some way and feel the pain that you're feeling now.

I'm talking about a husband and wife here.

Two people who came together on the wedding day and say, I love you and I'll never leave you.

You're the love of my life.

And they enter into covenant together.

But we get hurt by someone, and when we're unforgiving, so, so many times we want to hurt them back.

That's right.

Why?

Because when you inflict pain on somebody else who hurts you, it makes you feel better.

You're paying your emotional pain debt down.

We might say you're kind of paying that debt down by making them suffer.

Yeah, I've seen so many husbands and wives do this with their hurt and their pain.

They make their spouse pay for the pain they've caused.

You know, we can say, does it work?

Well, actually, to a certain extent it works slowly.

You may feel less and less of the pain they caused you by seeing them suffer.

Hopefully you wouldn't do that.

But when you make the other person pay the debt down this way, it affects you.

You know what?

It changes you.

Your unforgiveness begins to control you.

You become a bitter person, and you filter all of life through that bitterness.

Yeah, and it destroys you.

It's like drinking poison.

You know, the alternative to this, to making your spouse or the person who hurt you pay the debt, is to absorb the debt yourself.

As we gave the illustration of the furniture, for example, how did God absorb our sin debt?

That's a question we ought to all ask ourselves.

You know, God is holy, God is righteous, God is just.

So the debt had to be paid.

Our sin debt had to be paid.

Some Way.

So God the Father, in his love, in his grace, sent his Son into the world as God incarnate Jesus Christ to die on a cross for man's sin so that anyone who calls upon his name for forgiveness will be forgiven.

So Jesus absorbed your sin debt, my sin debt, on the cross of Calvary.

And to forgive as God forgives, we must be willing to absorb the pain and the hurt that other brothers and sisters inflict upon us.

Doesn't make it right.

It doesn't make it right what they did.

But if we're going to forgive as God forgives, then we must absorb that debt.

You can't do this by ignoring it, because it's not going to go away.

You must willingly pay the debt down.

How?

It requires that you voluntary suffer yourself.

And you know, when you want to avoid your spouse and give them the silent treatment, you don't do it.

You just don't allow that to happen.

And it hurts you because you want to do it.

You know, when you want to.

To gossip and tell other people how bad your spouse treated you, you don't do it.

You know, and it hurts when in your heart you think.

Start thinking about how much you would like to see them suffer.

You refuse to let yourself think that way.

And when you start to rewind that tape and in your heart and.

And replay the pain and the hurt they caused you, you have to refuse to do it.

Yeah.

How can we forgive this way?

We must.

Hey, I believe the only way we can do it is we've got to continue to remind ourselves of how much we have been forgiven ourselves.

That's right.

I love what Martyn Lloyd Jones says.

He said, I say to the glory of God and in utter humility, that whenever I see myself before God and realize even something of what my blessed Lord has done for me, I'm ready to forgive anybody of anything.

What a great statement that is.

We must continually.

To do that, we got to continually preach a gospel to ourselves so that we can destroy the pride that's in our heart.

And this practice will remind us of how much we've been forgiven.

It may take a few days, may take a few months or even longer to pay our debt down, but it will eventually go away.

And then we're free of its control over us.

But what if we just don't feel like forgiving?

You know, if we waited till we felt like forgiving, we would never forgive because we don't feel like doing it.

And we need to understand that forgiveness is.

Is not based on feelings.

It's an act of the will.

What I'm saying is that according to the Bible, you must grant forgiveness even before you feel like it.

When we willfully cut off the oxygen to our self pity and to our self righteousness and to the self centeredness and to the anger we have and grant forgiveness to the person who hurt us, we eventually start to feel forgiveness.

Solomon chose to forgive his wife before he ever saw her.

Wow.

We might ask how did she respond to his forgiveness?

How is she going to respond to this forgiveness?

Look at verse 11 and 12.

I love this.

You know, we have to remember she'd come in expecting that he's probably going to reprimand me, I deserve it.

She just didn't know what to expect.

Then he pours out all of that eloquent praise to her and she says, I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley and to see whether the vine flourished and the pomegranates but butted or ever I was aware my soul made me like the chariots of a minidab.

Remember on their courtship walk, this was back, I think in chapter two she compared the budding vines to their budding love that needed to be protected.

And so right here she's saying she apprehensively went to the garden to check those buds, they're their love to see if she had damaged their love and the wife.

I think she was hoping for forgiveness, but at the same time she was feeling the weight of the rejection she deserved.

And the forgiveness she received was way beyond what she could even fathom.

It was mind blowing.

She expected to be reprimanded, but instead said she was deeply admired and cherished.

She felt like instead of being reprimanded, she was being rewarded with a ride in the royal chariot.

And it was beyond comprehension for someone who had selfishly mistreated the king.

And she was not only correct in concluding, I am my beloved, but now her heart is yielded fully to him.

And what a picture of the forgiveness Christ has for us.

We're at times we're lazy, we don't want to get out of bed, we're self absorbed, we refuse to respond to him and, and we rebel against inconveniences, we complain against the aspects of of life that we don't like.

But when we think about the character and the goodness of our heavenly bridegroom, we want to be reconciled.

We want to bask in the beauty of the relationship with him.

So we bow and we beg forgiveness.

You know, as you share that I Just think, the forgiveness of Christ is beyond comprehension.

I think when she got there, it was beyond her comprehension that he would forgive her that way.

No matter how wickedly we sin against God, he loves us the same.

He loves us the same way he did on the day we were saved.

His love never changes.

And he doesn't hold our sin against us, but receives us back to himself with a heart that celebrates like the prodigal Father.

The prodigal son came to the Father and the Father ran to meet Him.

He celebrates every turn, you know, Sullivan.

Was celebrating her return.

Absolutely.

And when we failed him, nothing changes in his love to us.

Just like we saw the example of Solomon, nothing changed in his love, you know, to her.

What changes is our hearts.

As we repent, realize the depth of God's forgiveness and security of our relationship in Christ, we develop a stronger confidence in our relationship.

And as you know, as we close this session, I want to ask you a very important question.

We've talked about forgiveness here a lot.

At the end of the session, I want to ask you, have you experienced the forgiveness of your sins by trusting in Jesus Christ as your Lord and as your Savior?

Do you know this love of Christ that we're talking about that empowers you to forgive others even as he has forgiven you?

I say we're to model our forgiveness after God's forgiveness.

We can't do that if we don't know the love of Christ.

Do you know that love you know?

If not, I exhort you right now to trust in Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ alone, for your salvation.

I remind you what the Bible says in Romans, chapter 10 and verse 9.

If you'll confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

Thou shalt be saved.

For with the heart, man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation.

You know, I pray right now that if you don't know Christ, that that would be your prayer, that you would submit yourself.

You would humble yourself before God and say, God, I'm a sinner.

I've sinned against you and I want you to be my Lord.

I want you to be my Savior.

I turn from my sin and I turn to you.

If you've got questions about this, you need help more with this, feel free to contact us again.

You can email us, you can call us.

Feel free to contact this.

This is the most important thing that we could share with you in this session.

We've seen how forgiveness frees us to move forward in love.

In the next session, we'll investigate how the forgiveness this couple experienced changed their relationship and really improved their marriage.

I talked about and mentioned at the beginning that, you know, having marital conflict, it can make your marriage stronger if you'll let it, make it stronger if we resolve it the way God wants us to resolve it.

And so I pray that you'll join us next time in our journey through the song.

And if you've been blessed by these sessions, please share it with others, tell others about it, and again.

Until then, may the grace and peace and protection of our heavenly bridegroom be with you.

We love you.

God bless you.

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