It’s one thing to say that Jesus had every single fruit of the Spirit to perfection, but quite another to look at what that really means when you have the authority and power to do absolutely anything you want. It isn’t so much about what Jesus did but what He was capable of. That makes Him even more amazing!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.

A lot of times, when people talk about Jesus, they make Him look like a normal guy who could work miracles. But today I want to introduce you to the unique Son of God who was all-powerful but never used that power to hurt people. I want to talk about what He could have done when He was sad and angry and frustrated and when people disrespected Him.  What would we have done? What do we do in those same sorts of situations? What would we be capable of if we had the same power Jesus has? The first time I really thought about it, it scared the snot out of me. There are a lot of good reasons why I am not God, and if I had powers, everyone would figure it out really quick. Even though I am better than I once was, and even better than I was last month, I still don’t have as much self-control as Jesus. And that’s what we are going to talk about today—self-control.

Self-control is just what it sounds like, controlling ourselves! Self-control isn’t controlling our emotions because those happen without us even thinking about them beforehand. We can’t stop feeling happy when we see someone we love for the first time in a month. We can’t feel calm when we walk into a dark room and all of a sudden all of our friends yell, “Surprise!” and we see a cake and a pile of presents just for us. When a pet dies, we can’t keep from feeling sad. When someone hurts us, we can’t feel anything but angry at that moment. If our pants fall off at school, we can’t help but feel really embarrassed. That’s how I felt in the first grade when I sneezed while we were singing “God save our gracious Queen,” and I peed all over the floor. I was living in Canada, and we actually called it grade one—that’s why we sang that every morning along with “Oh, Canada” in English and sometimes in French. But there was no way I wasn’t going to feel really upset about having an accident in class. Fortunately, my teacher’s aide saw me and got me out of the class before anyone noticed. Those reactions are normal because our emotions are normal—they are what they are. They are gifts that God has given us and they happen without asking for permission. Although they can change as we get older, they never go away. So, self-control isn’t about controlling our emotions. Self-control is about becoming able to control how we act when we have an emotion.

When we are babies and we are hungry or thirsty or need a diaper change, we might throw a fit because we don’t have any words to talk about how we are feeling or to ask for what we want. When we are that small, we don’t really understand that we won’t die just because we are hungry right this minute. But as we grow older, we know that hunger just means it’s time to eat but even if we have to wait a while, we aren’t in any danger. It’s just a bit uncomfortable, that’s all. We learn that not everything is a big deal. We don’t need to cry when we are hungry or tired or don’t always get what we want. But it takes a lot of years to figure those things out. Parents have to be patient and remember that kids don’t know what they don’t know and that big emotions can erupt in really big ways.

Did Jesus cry when He was hungry? Of course. For a baby, that’s talking. There is nothing wrong or sinful about a baby crying. As He grew older and became able to talk, just like the rest of us, He learned better ways of dealing with getting what He needed. Babies don’t have any self-control at all. They can’t decide not to poop and pee until they get to the bathroom. But we can, because we can control ourselves. Toddlers will sometimes hit or bite to get what they want because they are having huge emotions, but hitting and biting isn’t okay and they have to be taught to control themselves and to be angry in other ways. When I was little, a man named Mister Rogers taught me how to deal with being angry—by pounding on clay or hitting the piano keys and making a big sound or by talking to a friend about it. But never to hit or be mean.  We can’t obey Jesus when He says to love our neighbors as ourselves when we hit people or scream at them every time we get angry. No one likes for that to happen. It hurts. And because everything Jesus did was about showing us the love of God, we have to pay attention to all the things He didn’t do. And we can’t do that unless we know all the things He could do.

Satan gives us our first clues as to what Jesus was able to do. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness when He hadn’t eaten for forty days and was really hungry, he dared Jesus to make bread out of rocks. Why would Satan do that if it was impossible? He knew exactly what God’s power in Jesus could do. He wanted Jesus to stop trusting in God just because He was way more hungry than we can even possibly imagine. That means that Jesus could have made the rocks into bread the very first day, or the first week, or the first month—but He didn’t because He was trusting and obeying God. Wow. If I could make rocks into bread then I could also probably make them into cream puffs and that would be the end of eating healthy and all the rocks in my yard would be gone, right? Jesus could have, but Jesus didn’t.

Satan also took Jesus to the tiptop of the Temple in Jerusalem on the holiest day of the year, on Yom Kippur, and dared Him to jump down and make the angels catch Him. Satan wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t know that Jesus could tell the angels to do absolutely whatever He wanted them to do. In fact, if He had done that, then everyone in the Temple would have seen it and would have known that Jesus was God’s Messiah right then and there and no one would have been able to kill Him. Everyone in the world would have followed Him immediately. But Jesus had to control Himself because if that happened, we would all still be doomed to be sinners forever and we would still die at the ends of our lives and stay dead. Jesus would have gotten old and died too, and He never would have fought Satan on his own turf and destroyed Satan’s kingdom. Jumping down would have been easier and more pleasant, but Jesus had to control Himself and do things the hard way so that we could be saved.

Finally, Satan told Jesus that he could give Him all the power to be king over all the kingdoms in the world. By doing that, Satan was showing us that Jesus had the ability to choose whether or not He was willing to be loyal to God, His Father. Jesus wasn’t a robot. He made choices every day. Because He was with God from the very beginning, Jesus had always known what was right and had always done what was right. When He became human, like us, He understood how hard it is for us to make the right choices but He still always did exactly the right and good thing. But Satan wouldn’t have kept telling Him to do what was wrong if Jesus had no choice about His own actions. Jesus had perfect self-control but that doesn’t mean that His choices were easy ones to make when He was hurting, sad, angry, and afraid. Jesus had all of our emotions, but He made better choices than we do with how He handled them.

Sometimes, Jesus had to make certain choices because of what the prophets had written about Him—things that only Jesus could do and that don’t apply to us. Jesus walked on the water because Job says that only God Himself can do that (9:8). Jesus told the terrible storm to stop because the Psalmists say that only God can do that (65:7, 89:9, 107:29). And there is one especially famous episode, in all four Gospels, where Jesus walked up to the Temple Mount and was standing in the Court of the Gentiles, where people from all over the world came to worship and learn and teach about God. But on that day, you couldn’t hear the Levites singing praise music and you couldn’t smell the incense burning inside the Temple, or the frankincense or bread burning on the altar or the smell of roasting whole lamb.

Jesus had visited the Temple, His Father’s house, the day before and what He had seen had made Him very angry. People had come from all over the world to celebrate the Passover—many had traveled for weeks to get there from places like Babylon and Rome. But the people who used to sell animals for sacrifices on the Mount of Olives had been given permission by the corrupt High Priest and his family to sell them right there on the Temple Mount. It would have been very noisy, and stinky, and you would have heard the people who were making deals and paying for stuff. But first, they had to buy the special money, which cost them even more money. They had turned God’s holy Temple, the house of prayer for the whole world, into a shopping mall where they were hurting poor people by forcing them to pay way too much to obey God and getting richer and richer every year. And so Jesus did something that only Jesus could ever do. And people who don’t understand what was happening will tell you that Jesus lost control and flipped out, but Jesus knew exactly what He was doing because He had seen it all the day before and went away to think about what He would do the next morning. Jesus was angry and disgusted by what He saw, but He calmly went to the home of His friend Lazarus to plan what He would do the next day. Believe me, if He was flipping out, He wouldn’t have left and come back later.

Psalm 69:9 tells us something important about the Messiah. It tells us that He will be consumed with zeal for His Father’s House—the Temple. What is zeal and what does it mean to be consumed with zeal? Zeal is a fancy word that means we care very, very much about something. Some people are zealous to protect others—like the members of the Underground Railroad who risked their lives, their families, and everything they had to help people who were being kept as slaves to be free. That kind of zeal is good. That kind of zeal comes from God. Other kinds of zeal can be very bad. Sometimes people care so much about this or that thing that they hate anyone who doesn’t feel the same way—even their own families. That kind of zeal isn’t from God. Jesus cared about the Temple because it was the place that Jews from all over the world came to worship God, every single day of the year. But these people who were doing business and selling money and animals were just out to get richer than they already were. In Jeremiah 7:11, the prophet calls the Temple a den of robbers because of how people were treating it. A den of robbers is where people who steal from others go to hide out and be safe. That people who were doing evil things would think that they are safe doing them right there in God’s House is really messed up.

So, in Mark chapter 11, Jesus sees all of this on His first day in Jerusalem. And He didn’t do anything. He went to the home of Lazarus, Mary and Martha a couple of miles away, and then went back the next day. John says that He made a little whip, the kind that ranchers use to get animals to move in a certain direction—not like a big old dangerous Indiana Jones whip. This is what Mark says happened, “They came to Jerusalem, and he went into the temple and began to throw out everyone who was buying and selling animals. He tipped over the tables of the people selling the special Temple money and the chairs of the men who were selling doves to the poor, and He wouldn’t let anyone carry anything on the Temple Mount. He was teaching them: “Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves!”

Mark said that Jesus was teaching. Not that He was out of control or flipping out or whipping people. Sometimes you will see painting that make it look like it was a rampage, but Jesus would have been arrested by the Roman soldiers in the Fortress Antonia that was attached to the Temple Mount on the northwest side. They always had an eye out for troublemakers. And it wasn’t strange not to let people carry things on the Temple Mount—we see latter that the Rabbis wrote that no one was allowed to do it ever and so those people were doing what was already wrong by Jewish law. They were disrespecting God by turning His Temple into a shopping mall. Jesus tipped over their tables so that the money went everywhere and it was impossible for them to do business. He told them to get out of there and made sure they knew that if they tried it again, He’d come back and tip their tables again. And then He taught the people who were gathered there trying to worship God that what they were doing was an insult to God.

But what could Jesus have done if He had wanted to? If He had no self-control? That’s a scary thought. When He was being arrested, the night before He was killed, one of His disciples took out his knife and cut off someone’s ear and Jesus point blank told him (probably Peter) to put the knife away and if Jesus wanted to, He could command more than twelve legions of angels to do whatever He wanted them to do (Matt 26:53). Oh man, now that’s a scary thought. No one can defend themselves against an angel. No one. No one is smarter than an angel. Angels can’t be killed. And only God can order angels around and tell them to do things. No one else can. At all. One of these days, read the Gospels and ask yourself, “What if Jesus had called down a huge truckload of angels to deal with that guy?” Because a legion—when Jesus was on earth, that number could mean anything from three to five thousand soldiers but sometimes just meant a huge group. So, at minimum, Jesus was telling them that He could call for thirty-six thousand angels on the spot if He wanted to. Boom. Immediately. To do whatever He wanted them to do. So every time Jesus was angry at someone, or frustrated, or whatever, He could have summoned angels to kill them all but He never did. Be really glad that I can’t tell angels to do stuff. It would be bad. I can get super feisty.

What about the time the disciples were ticked off because the people who lived in Samaria didn’t want to let Him come through their town because He wouldn’t worship at their Temple? In Luke 9, Jesus is heading down to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover and He sent some messengers down to one of the Samaritan villages so they could get ready for Him, but when they found out He would be going to the Temple in Jerusalem instead of to Mt Gerizim where they kept the Passover, they told Him that He wasn’t welcome there. And James and John, they got really angry and asked if Jesus wanted them to call down fire from heaven and kill everyone in the village. And Jesus was clearly angrier at them for even suggesting it than He ever could be for being rejected by the Samaritans. James and John wanted to do their worst, just because they felt disrespected. Which reminds me of someone else we have studied about in the past—Lamech, the first guy in the Bible to have more than one wife. Do you remember the song he sang to his wives when a kid hurt him in Genesis 4? A kid???

“Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, pay attention to what I am saying. I killed a guy for hurting me, a young man for hitting me. If Cain is to be avenged seven times over, then for Lamech it will be seventy-seven times!”

One, it’s just creepy when someone writes a song about themselves killing a guy for something so ridiculous as hitting him and frankly, from the sound of this nonsense, he probably had it coming. Two, this guy is so over the top with no self-control whatsoever that he sounds more like a toddler having a tantrum than a grown man. Three, that this guy is going to assume that God will be on his side and defend him if other people want to come and get revenge is ridiculous. Four, can you imagine what would happen if this guy had twelve legions of angels he could boss around? But that’s why the Bible included his story—not to tell us that yeah, God is going to defend him but to show us what having no self-control looks like. I mean, the guy wanted more than one wife and if you scratched him he would kill you. This guy is ridiculous and the Bible wants us to know it. And what isn’t always obvious is that the Bible didn’t have chapters and verses until like the last five hundred years so when it was originally read, the story of Enoch being so awesome that God took Enoch away to be with Him happened just about right after that. We’re supposed to roll our eyes and facepalm and not want to be anything like Lamech—at all. Those kinds of comparisons happen a lot in the Bible. We will see that a with Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19.

And so what lessons can we take away from learning about Jesus’s self-control? What do we do when we are right? What do we do when someone else is wrong? How do we treat children, and especially as you get older? How do we behave when we are bigger, stronger, smarter, richer, or more popular? How do we use what we have to help or to hurt others? What do we do when someone hurts us? How much getting even is enough? Do we forgive the small stuff that people do to hurt us? How do we handle the really big things people do to hurt us? Do we call the police, or do we do something even worse to them instead? Do we require everyone around us to be perfect and punish them whenever they aren’t? What does it look like when grownups in our lives don’t use their self-control. Is it scary? Does it make us mad? How do we use our words and our bodies or whatever else we have when we know they can be hurtful?  Are we careful not to embarrass and humiliate people when it isn’t absolutely necessary?

Those are all very important questions and as you get older and become more mature and get to know Jesus better in your own life, He will help you to use the good things in your life (and even the bad things) to help other people instead of hurting them. Sometimes the meanest people in the world are the people who have been hurt badly by others, but sometimes they are just people who enjoy being mean. Sometimes the kindest people in the world are the people who have been hurt the most but don’t want to make others feel the same way, and sometimes kind people are just people who were always treated kindly. There are no rules to why some people control themselves so that they can be a blessing to others and why some people don’t. But there is one thing that is absolutely true—anyone who is determined to listen to and follow Jesus will become more able to control themselves, more able to bless others by being kinder and gentler than the world around them.

God gave us each gifts that can be used to do good for others or do bad to others. Strong people can be bullies or they can be protectors. Smart people can teach and invent things or they can make other people feel stupid or trick them. Rich people can hurt others and get richer or they can help others with their money. People who are popular can change the world for the better and help people who are suffering, or they can make the lives of other people just miserable. Our emotions are just like the gifts we have—do we use our anger to get even with people we are mad at or do we get angry when someone else is being hurt and do what it takes to help make their lives better?

There are always going to be people who take what God has given them and make people’s lives better and others who will take what God has given them and selfishly make other people’s lives worse. Your life is about what you decide to do with your gifts and talents and blessings. No one else can make those choices for you. The people around you can make it harder or easier for you to do what is good and right, but you have all the power to decide if that is what you want to do. Learning about Jesus helps us, but learning from Jesus changes us from people who don’t care about others into people who do care.

I love you. I am praying for you. Maybe you don’t know your gifts yet, but as you figure it out, I pray that you will always remember to ask God what He wants you to use those gifts for. We aren’t all the same, and we can serve God and other people in thousands of different ways and they are all good no matter who we are or where we live or what we are good at.

Forgiveness is hard to understand and even harder to do. Grownups ask me all the time about what forgiveness is and isn’t, and if it means forgetting and acting like nothing happened or if we can still be careful when someone is dangerous. Learning about the forgiveness from God we have through our King Jesus, and what Jesus told us to do, and how He helps us grow from people who never want to forgive and don’t know how to even begin, to people who are able to forgive, helps us to follow God maybe more than any other thing He asks us to do.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.

Forgiveness is a really tough thing to understand. It’s even tougher to do, and especially when we are confused about what forgiveness is and isn’t. What about when we are told we need to forgive someone? What about when we want someone to forgive us? Does forgiveness mean pretending like nothing happened or that everything is okay? Does forgiveness mean that everything goes back to the way things were? These are all questions that grownups really struggle with and I get questions all the time. The answer to all of the questions about is—it depends on what happened and why it happened. Like all difficult things in our lives, we need something called wisdom when it comes to dealing with forgiveness. And when things require wisdom, we know that there are never any easy answers or rules that apply to absolutely every situation in the same way. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to forgive or that it’s going to be easy. Not at all. Forgiveness is something that has to be learned, and true forgiveness isn’t something we can fake. But it is something we can get better and better at as we learn to walk with God and listen to Him, and we can also get better at deciding what forgiveness looks like in different situations. Not all sins are the same and so not all forgiveness is the same either. I guess we should start with looking at the forgiveness God gives us through Jesus.

The forgiveness we have in Jesus is different than all the other kinds of forgiveness that we have here on earth. In the days of Jesus, the Jews were talking about sins in terms of a debt or a bill that needs to be paid. A debt is money that you owe to someone. Like a house payment or a car loan or maybe you borrowed five dollars from someone and promised to pay them back. That’s a debt and the Bible tells us how important it is to pay our debts—especially when someone has done work for us and we owe them money for it, because they have to eat, right? But the Bible also tells us to be merciful when people owe us money and they just don’t have it. Every seven years, the children of Israel were commanded to forgive the debts of anyone who owed them money. That’s right, they had to just tear up those bills and toss them in the fire. God promised to make things right for the people who were generous and kind to people who just couldn’t pay them back.

And you know what? By the time I finally started listening to Jesus, I had such a huge bill from all the sinful, mean things I had done, and all the lies I had told, and even the mistakes I had made that hurt people—well, there was no way I could ever pay God or the people I had hurt back for all the awful things I had done. And I was doing just fine (well, not really) until the day that God told me how much I was hurting people and hurting Him too. Wow. And it took him two whole months of talking to me all the time, poking and prodding me with thoughts about how much I needed Him and that He wanted me to be an entirely different person. Boy oh boy did I put up a huge fight. But it was that last week that was just the worst because day and night, night and day He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was determined to get through to me that He loved me, even though I wouldn’t understand it for many years. I just thought He wanted to be the boss of me and, in fact, when I finally gave my life to Him that’s exactly what I said, “Okay, I get it, you’re the boss of my life.”

And even though I was wrong about that—well, not totally wrong but I sure didn’t realize that God loved me yet—things began changing in big ways in my life. That was twenty-five years ago and I am still changing a lot. I was really messed up, so He is still working on me. So, anytime you think you are hopeless because your life isn’t changing overnight, just remember that God is still working on Miss Tyler to get her to where He wants her to be. No one can go from being like I was to being like Jesus overnight—it takes a lifetime and even then we aren’t exactly like Him. He’s perfect.

The thing is that God wanted to rip up the bill I owed Him and everyone else so He could throw it in the fire. He knew that I couldn’t ever hope to carry all those terrible sins and make a fresh start. Have you ever heard that expression? To make a fresh start? It’s like those poor people in ancient Israel who owed more money than they could ever pay—maybe because a famine had destroyed their food or their land or enemy soldiers had come in and stolen everything. There are lots of reasons why someone can be too poor to pay their bills. But unless someone tore up those bills, they would be paying them for the rest of their lives and they wouldn’t ever be able to have a chance to be free. We all need to be forgiven sometimes, right? It might not be money—sometimes we need for people to forgive us when we have done something wrong so that we can be friends again or at least not enemies. To forgive someone else is a very great gift. Until we forgive a person, they have to carry their guilt forever and even after they are sorry and have changed.

Have you ever done anything to hurt someone, where you feel really sorry and want to be friends again but they won’t forgive you? That hurts a lot, right? It’s like they are holding you in a prison that you can’t ever get out of until they say so. Maybe they do it because they are hurting and they don’t want to hurt anymore and they are so angry that they want you to hurt as much as they do. They might be angry that they can’t go back and change things to the way they were before they were hurt in the first place. But when we hurt people, or help people, we change their lives. They can’t go back to being the same person that they were before they were hurt or helped—they have that memory in their mind and they were changed whether they wanted to be or not. That’s why, the sooner we give our lives over to God as our King, the better because we can’t ever totally take anything we say or do back. When we agree to let God be our King and believe that Jesus is our King, and let them change us, we will hurt people less and less because we will begin to care more about them and the Holy Spirit helps us to stop being mean, little by little, day after day, year after year. That’s how we learn to love people the way Jesus tells us to.

When we start to understand that Jesus wants us to have a clean slate, meaning a fresh start, by forgiving what we have done in the past, it means that we have the freedom to start living a different way. We aren’t stuck in that ditch of sin forever. God lifts us out of it and we can be different people. Imagine if you owed someone else a bazillion dollars and you had to pay them back a thousand dollars a day. You would know that there was no way you could ever get it done. It would be hopeless. No one has that kind of money. But with God, it is never like that. Sure, we owe Him a bazillion dollars but His favorite thing to do is to tear up bills and throw them in the fire. It’s what He wants most in the world. He isn’t just hoping to be able to punish us—that’s the last thing in the world He wants. He wants us to accept Him as our King so that He can forgive us and show us a new way of living where we can begin to forgive others too, the way we have been forgiven. But we can’t do that unless He forgives us first. That’s one of the ways that we follow Him. But what does forgiveness look like in our lives?

There are different kinds of forgiveness. A lot of people don’t understand that. The first kind of forgiveness is called “turning the other cheek.” In Jesus’s time, reputation was very important and if someone slapped a man, he had to slap them back or he would be shamed and made fun of by the other men. His whole family would get angry at him for making them look like a bunch of wimps. Getting revenge was very important to them so that people would respect them and their family. But Jesus told them to stop doing that—when someone insulted them by smacking them across the face, they had to forgive that insult by refusing to get even. That wasn’t something that anyone wanted to hear. That was the opposite of what they were all doing and had been taught to do. I can hear them grumbling in the crowd, “What? How on earth does He expect us to be respected if we just let people get away with insulting us? Everyone will think we are pathetic weaklings! They will walk all over us and our lives will be ruined!” And maybe they were right, but Jesus was very serious. Not insulting those people back was a way of forgiving them for being mean. Jesus was telling His fellow Jews that it was important to God that they become peacemakers by letting the small stuff go. People insult me on the internet all the time, but if I fight back then I know I will start looking just like them and then people will take sides and it will be a mess. But if I talk to them calmly instead and they keep insulting me, it makes them look bad and people see that they don’t need to take sides at all because I have things under control and I am not hurt at all. When I do that, I am forgiving them and giving them another chance.

But what if someone robs my house or attacks me with a weapon? Do I get them back by robbing their house or going after them with a weapon? Jesus says no. I should call the police to let them know that there is someone dangerous out there who needs to be stopped, but if I go after them then I am just getting revenge and revenge is the opposite of forgiveness. And I won’t be happy no matter how much I hurt the person who has hurt me, scared me, or robbed me. I will just keep hurting them over and over again because my hurt will never go away. As long as we are getting even, we will always be angry and hurting because nothing will ever be enough. We have to know when to say enough is enough and so enough has to be before we get even in the first place. Justice is very important to God and so it should be important to us too. People do need to be caught when they have done bad things, by people who will hold them responsible—the Bible teaches us that. But it’s about impossible for us to do it and still be merciful when what we want isn’t justice but to get even. Getting even with someone else is always about doing something worse to them than they did to us. That’s why we call the police because hopefully they will be fair.

Jesus told His disciples that they need to be willing to forgive or they wouldn’t be forgiven and that scares a lot of people but I don’t want you to be scared. Jesus knows how hard it is for us to learn to forgive, and that we have to be taught how to do it and how to be gentle and loving. He is very patient to teach us all those things and He understands that it isn’t something we can just decide to do and suddenly be good at it or wise about it. The best place to start forgiving is to be kind to the people who have hurt you and are really very sorry and want another chance. Maybe someone lied, or maybe there was just a misunderstanding and they got mad at you for something you didn’t do, and they said something mean. That happens to all of us, and we all do things that hurt other people. We want people to forgive us and give us a hug when that happens and to understand that it wasn’t because we hated them. That happens in families all the time, right? We get frustrated and cranky and we say something nasty just because we want someone to feel hurt, but then we come to our senses and realize that it just made things worse and we want a clean slate to start over again. So, we say we are sorry and do nice things to try and make up for it. Forgiveness means that the other person decides to be kind and understanding and accept you again. But if they hold a grudge and don’t forgive you for even the small things, that can feel worse than anything you did to them. That’s another way to get revenge—by not forgiving.

That’s a very dangerous kind of unforgiveness because we are all guilty of sinning that way. I have apologized to my kids and my husband for being mean—a lot! I want them to know that I love them and that I am sorry and that I was wrong to be mean. I want them to know that they deserve an apology. I want them to know that they are important to me, and that I owe them an apology. I don’t apologize to get them to forgive me. I can’t make them do that. I apologize because I was wrong and they didn’t deserve what I did to them. I can’t make it so that my sin never happened, but I can let them know that I was wrong. We won’t all steal or hit someone with a stick, but we have all said and done things that are hurtful. If we aren’t willing to forgive others when we do the same things that they do, then how can God forgive us for doing the exact same things? Fortunately, He is very patient as we learn how to forgive. It takes a long, long time. But it also gets easier the more we do it.

It’s funny, in a way, that God tells us that we have to forgive BUT we can’t force anyone to forgive us. All we can do is ask, and whether they forgive or not is up to them. That’s why we need to learn not to sin against other people because we never know what will be the last straw for them—the thing that they decide is too much and they never want to be around us again. We owe it to God to forgive people, but that isn’t the same thing as us being able to force people to forgive us. Honestly, when we do that, we aren’t looking like we are very sorry or understanding about what we did to hurt them. And some people will get angry over a misunderstanding and won’t forgive us even when we didn’t do anything. We can’t do anything about that either except to be kind and leave them alone. That’s really hard, let me tell you. I had a really good friend in the 8^th grade and we were close all through the summer before our first year of high school. One the first day back, she looked at me with hatred and hurt in her eyes but to this day I don’t know why. She would never tell me. I wouldn’t have hurt her on purpose, but I guess she thought I did and never forgave me. I had to be kind because the only other thing I could do was be mean. I wasn’t a Christian then, but I knew that being mean back to her wasn’t going to solve anything. I couldn’t make her tell me what was wrong and I couldn’t force her to forgive me. But I could learn to forgive her. It took a long time.

What do we do when someone hurts us and apologizes and then hurts us again and apologizes again and it just keeps going on forever? Well, there is the kind of forgiveness where we are friends again just like we were before and then there are sad times when we forgive the person who is hurting us but have to keep them away from us. When we can go back to normal with a person, that’s called reconciliation. Reconciliation is like a hug after an argument, okay? Where there is still love there and trust and the relationship you have with a person has been hurt but can get better again and you want to work on it. But what about when someone is dangerous? You can forgive them by not getting back at them and by being kind to them instead when you see them, but that doesn’t mean they should be a part of your life. Someone once told me a story and I wish I knew where it came from because it was a good one. Someone came up to Jesus once and asked him how many times he should forgive his brother for sinning against him—seven times maybe? Jesus said, seventy times seven times! And that doesn’t mean you keep a score sheet for every time you forgive a person—that’s messed up. It means that we keep on forgiving forever. But what does that look like in real life? Here’s where the story comes in–

A friend knocks at your door and you open it and they punch you right in the face and walk away. Then they come back later, knocking on your door and saying they are sorry, so you open the door and after forgiving them and talking a while, they punch you in the face again. And this happens again and again. Opening that door was reconciliation, okay? Trying for things to be good again. But there comes a time when forgiveness is all we can give because the other person doesn’t want the relationship to be good—they just want us to open the door so that they can punch us again. At some point, when you hear the knock at the door and the person says sorry, you leave the door closed and say, “I forgive you but I am not going to open the door again to give you any more chances to punch me.” I really like that story because it shows the difference between forgiving someone and letting them hurt you forever. You don’t have to let anyone hurt you forever. You can leave the door closed when it is dangerous to open it. That doesn’t mean you aren’t being forgiving, it just means that you are done with being punched. And, if anyone is doing something like that, I would suggest calling the police. You don’t deserve to be hurt. Forgiveness means that you don’t hurt the person who hurt you, but it doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you forever.

Forgiveness is really hard to learn. I don’t want you scared that God is going to like send a lightning bolt at your butt for not being able to forgive perfectly and especially not right away. There are times you will feel like you have forgiven a person totally and then something happens and you feel all the terrible anger and bad feelings for them all over again. That’s normal. It makes me angry when someone hurts me and especially when they don’t even care or never apologize. But when I don’t forgive, my mind starts thinking of all the terrible things I wish would happen to them. I don’t want them to change. I want them to be bad so that they can be punished forever. That’s what happens in my brain when I am unforgiving. But when I am forgiving, I start to understand that I do want them to change. I don’t want them to keep being bad just so that I can have my revenge against them. I want them to change to be good so that they won’t hurt anyone else and so that the world will be a better place. I want the people who have hurt me, to stop hurting others too. If they never change, then how many other people will they hurt? Satan wins when that happens. I want God to win. I want God to take the people who have hurt me the most and to change them into the kinds of people who are sorry for all the bad they have done, and help people instead. When we forgive them, and we don’t get even, we get out of their way and it makes it easier for God to reach them and change them.

There are people who did that for me, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. They didn’t get back at me when I hurt them—if they had, I would have just gotten back at them even worse because sometimes I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in the first place. But they were patient with me because God was patient with them. They showed me a different way and as they were kind even when I was mean, I started to feel bad when I would hurt them. God was using their forgiveness to teach me how to start loving others as they were loving me. I wanted people to forgive me. I needed people to forgive me. Sometimes, I needed people to walk away from me so I could understand that I can go too far. Without forgiveness—the forgiveness of God and other people in my life—I would still be who I was twenty-five years ago and the world would be a worse place than it is now, at least for the people who know me.

People didn’t keep me in a jail by not forgiving me, and when they were wrong they said they were sorry. That showed me a different and better way. I liked how it felt when they said they were sorry when they had hurt me. I wanted other people to feel that way when I hurt them and knew I was wrong. And the more I did that, the more God could trust me and show me the other things I was doing that hurt people. And He showed me how to make things better. I still hurt people sometimes, but I know that making things right again is an easy way to help someone else’s heart heal. And I give people space when they don’t know how to forgive me yet. I can’t force them to forgive me. I also can’t force them to apologize. That’s God’s job. It’s good to learn to say sorry, but no one can make us mean it. God wants us to say it and to mean it. And He wants us to be able to learn how to forgive too.

Next week, we are going to start learning how to be more like Jesus and I am very excited about this. Before we move on to more of the life story of Abraham and Sarah, and then to Isaac and Jacob and his sons, we need to look at Jesus so we can see the difference between being perfect and being really messed up and in need of Jesus!

I love you. I am praying for you. And I know that you can change your life and the world around you by learning to forgive.

This week we are continuing with our short teachings about the “woes” of Matthew 23. This one was pretty harsh, harsher than it seems without context. So why were the tombs whitewashed in the first place? And when? And what did it mean to this Passover audience?

This week we are going to deal with the section of Matthew 23 where Yeshua/Jesus takes the Pharisees and Scribes to task about doing the dishes. Really? Well, not exactly. Being ritually clean at the dinner table was super important to them, but once again, they were missing the larger issue of how much more important it is to be clean on the inside of their hearts.

The longer podcast version of this teaching is available at https://characterincontext.podbean.com/e/episode-17-woes-part-6-the-inside-of-the-cup-and-the-circumcision-of-the-heart/

This week we are continuing with our series on the Matthew 23 “woe to you Scribes and Pharisees” verses. It’s pretty tough to teach our kids the difference between just rebuking people willy nilly and doing it with a pure heart and motives and with knowledge like our Messiah. This week, He gave them credit where credit was due before telling them how they were missing the point of tithing altogether!

This week I did a short video about something very frustrating that the first century Pharisees were doing. You see, they had some special rules for oaths and vows (types of promises) that allowed them to get away with not doing what they promised to do if they changed their mind later. Yeshua/Jesus was so angry about it that He told them they were dishonoring God and shouldn’t swear oaths at all–because God told them to swear all their oaths in His Name and they weren’t doing it. We’re going to talk about what this means for us as believers, because this is still a problem with people in general today.

The extended version of this teaching is available for download as a podcast here:

https://characterincontext.podbean.com/e/episode-15-woes-part-4-blind-guides-and-fools-the-maze-of-oath-rules-in-first-century-phariseeism/

This week we are starting a series on both context and showing good fruit in Biblical discussions. Grown-ups on social media often use what they consider to be “sanctioned” insults, but not knowing the context, what they meant, who they were being spoken to and why. They just sound mean and so people use them and make them mean whatever they want. We are going to talk about self-control and what it meant in the ancient world when you “lost it” in a verbal battle and got angry. This teaching will be the longest of the series because we have to cover some basics about showing excess emotion in the Bible world. I will be giving a short lesson on the good and bad about Pharisees and teaching the kids the difference between harmless traditions and the dreaded “traditions of men.”

Quite a few Roman Emperors show up in the Scriptures and they were all very different. Because the Gospel and Epistle authors were writing about their own life and times, a lot of times they will simply mention “Caesar” without getting specific. So this month we are going to discuss what was going on in the Roman Empire, why it was such a big deal when the Judean leaders shouted, “We have no King but Caesar” and why that tax coin was such a big deal.

I also found this silly video about all the Roman Emperors to the tune of the can-can music!

For all of you who have been praying for my kid – thanks so much, I have an update on his condition at the beginning.

So now we are getting into some cool context. The differences between Galilee, where Yeshua/Jesus grew up and lived as an adult, and Judea to the south, where Jerusalem and the Temple were, could be extreme. One of the biggest differences was in rulership. In the north, Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, but in the south, Judea was ruled directly by Rome. This month, we are going to be talking about why Judea was ruled by foreigners, what powers they had, what kind of military force they had at their disposal, taxation – and Pontius Pilate!