It’s Wonderful to Be Forgiven

The Big Idea: Learn how to help others to receive the wonders of Christ’s forgiveness. (Excerpted from Spiritual Friends.)

Grace Dispensers

When a brother or sister repents of sinful patterns of the heart, we need to become dispensers of Christ’s grace who communicate “it’s wonderful to be forgiven.” Three categories summarize the types of gospel conversations that enlighten others to grasp the wonders of forgiveness:

• Calm the Conscience

• Assure the Conscience

• Comfort the Conscience

Calm the Conscience

Since little counsel can be received when the conscience is in intense turmoil, refuse to let sin overwhelm the conscience. The worst sin of all is denying grace. Therefore, the worst thing that you can do is to allow Satan to overwhelm others so they despair of grace in the midst of their sin. Sin can be forgiven, but believing that sin can’t be forgiven leaves people hopelessly despairing. Satan tempts us to deny Christ’s claims, claiming instead that our sin is greater than Christ’s forgiveness. To calm the conscience, help people to distinguish between law and gospel, as Martin Luther did:

It is the supreme art of the devil that he can make the law out of the gospel. If I can hold on to the distinction between law and gospel, I can say to him any and every time that he should kiss my backside. Even if I sinned, I would say, “Should I deny the gospel on this account?”

To counter Satan’s lies, engage in spiritual conversations: 

• Where were you recruited into the idea that God is angry with you and rejects you when you sin? Who modeled this idea for you? Does it seem to square with your understanding of the Bible? Of grace? Of Christ?

• In the Scriptures (Psalm 1, Psalm 32, Psalm 51, and Romans 8:1-39) and throughout Church history, Christians have meditated on images of God and Christ. What images could you meditate on to increase your conviction that God is gracious to you even when you fail him?

• Christ always loves you and accepts you. What mental pictures have you used to keep this truth in the forefront of your mind?

• What do you think a person should do when they feel overcome and overwhelmed by sin?

• What does the Bible suggest that you do when you feel overwhelmed by sin?

• What does your pastor suggest that you do when you feel overwhelmed by sin?

• What do your Christian friends suggest that you do when you feel overwhelmed by sin?

• What do you tell others to do when they are overwhelmed by sin and crushed by guilt?

Assure the Conscience

The spirit of bondage enslaves the fleshly conscience, causing it to feel that it’s still under the weight of the law and the condemnation of God who it views as a harsh Judge. The Spirit of sonship liberates the spiritual conscience, causing it to understand that it’s now under the freedom of grace and the forgiveness of God who it correctly views as a merciful heavenly Father. The Spirit of sonship frees the conscience from fear, releasing it to trust. Knowing these truths, spiritual friends benefit from spiritual conversations:

• Throughout the Scriptures (Romans 5:1-11; 8:1-39; Galatians 3:1-29; 5:1-26) God tells us that we have peace with him through Jesus Christ. When do you experience his peace to the greatest extent? What are you doing differently when you experience his peace?

• Tell me about your experience of God’s peace. What is it like for you?

• I’m wondering how peace with God motivates you to love God and others.

• The Bible assures us that we’re no longer under condemnation. The spirit of bondage to guilt has been defeated. We’ve been set free to experience the Spirit of sonship—forgiveness, acceptance, and liberty. How are you allowing the Spirit of sonship to reign in your heart? By faith, how can you accept your acceptance in Christ?

• According to the Scriptures, who are you in Christ? Who are you to Christ?

Comfort the Conscience

The Bible teaches that believers are priests (1 Peter 2:1-8) and that God commands Christians to confess their sins one to another (James 5). Throughout Church history, believers knew mutual confession as the mutual consolation of the brethren through private confession.

When we have laid bare our conscience to our brother and privately make known to him the evil that lurked within, we receive from our brother’s lips the word of comfort spoken by God himself. And if we accept this in faith, we find peace in the mercy of God speaking to us through our brother (Luther, Bondage of the Will, 1531/1947, p. 201).

You can help people to experience a comforted conscience through spiritual conversations like:

• Tell me about times when you’ve experienced God’s forgiveness. What was it like?

• What Scriptures have you turned to, to find Christ’s forgiveness? Grace? Love? Friendship?

• The Bible talks so much about God’s grace, forgiveness, and acceptance of us based on our faith in Christ’s death for our sins. When are you most aware of and impacted by these truths? What does God seem to do to bring you to these points of awareness? How do you tend to be cooperating with God as he brings you to these points of awareness?

• How are you allowing other Christians to help you to enjoy and appreciate God’s grace?

• Let’s talk about ways that you’re using the spiritual disciplines to appreciate God’s grace.

• What passages are you meditating on to help you to cling to Christ’s forgiveness?

• Who offers you human tastes of grace that somehow mirror God’s infinite grace?

Join the Conversation

Which sample spiritual conversation do you most need?

Tags: Forgiveness, Spiritual Friends

Gospel Conversations: The Remedy to “Take Two Verses and Call Me in the Morning”

The Big Idea: Do you want to remedy the shallow stereotype of “take two verses and call me in the morning?” Are you ready to stop putting band-aids on your friends’ suffering and sin? Then engage in mutual gospel conversations based upon a biblical way of looking at and living life. (Excerpted from Spiritual Friends.)

Gospel Conversations: Ephesians 4:29

People struggling with suffering and wrestling with besetting sins need whispers, not shouts. Don’t holler curses; whisper grace.

Caring gospel conversations use biblical wisdom principles to engage your spiritual friends in discussions that help them to think through their external situation and internal heart condition. The core relational competency necessary for this soul care art is the ability to trialogue.

In a monologue you speak to me, in a dialogue we speak to each other, and in trialogues together we listen to God as He speaks to us through His all-sufficient Word. In trialogues, we make the presence of God the central dynamic in our conversation. We interact in Jesus’ name helping people to face personal issues on a personal level. Our personal relationship with them helps them to deepen their personal relationship with Christ.

Gospel conversations invite your spiritual friends into an exchange so they can experience the passion of having been changed by grace. They invite your spiritual friends into a vivid, robust experience of grace narratives through grace relationships.

Consider just a sampling of biblical passages that depict trialogues:

• “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20).

• “See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” (Hebrews 3:12-13).

• “Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith . . . And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:22, 24-25).

The Shape of Gospel Conversations

The tongue has the capacity to offer life-giving resources that nourish the soul, or to be a power for life-draining energies that poison the soul. “From the fruit of his mouth a man’s stomach is filled: with the harvest from his lips he is satisfied. The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (Proverbs 18:20-21). Gospel conversations are good talk about our good God and Christ’s good news in the midst of our bad life in our sinful world.

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (Ephesians 4:29). Gospel conversations are grace conversations. Law conversations crush people and destroy relationships (compare Matthew 23). Grace conversations edify people and build relationships.

“Unwholesome” words are corrupt and rotten like decaying fruit. They’re putrid, defiling, and injuring words. They’re toxic speech—words that poison others, making their spirit sick. Paul’s emphasis is clear in the original language: “All words of rottenness, do not let come out of your mouth.” Spiritual friends restrain themselves, refusing to speak until they understand what words will be:

• Helpful: Good because they flow from moral character and promote beautiful living.

• Strengthening/Building Up Others: Edifying words that bring improvement and promote maturity.

• According to Their Need: Carefully chosen words that specifically fill up a need, meet a lack, minister to a want, or express care in a difficulty, where it is most necessary.

• Beneficial: Ministering grace. Attractive speech that helps others to receive God’s love poem and become God’s love poetry. They are grace-gift words—generously given, freely granted words that accept, that free, that empower, and that give hope.

To the Colossians, Paul writes, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone” (Colossians 4:6). Grace words are words of connection, giving, affirming, accepting, freeing, and justifying. They are seasoned with salt—they preserve relationships with God, others, and self.

James, after describing the fiery and poisonous nature of words (James 3:1-8), notes that, “with the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness” (James 3:9). In James 3:10-16, James teaches that Satan is the ultimate source of cursing words—harmful, hurtful, damaging words that wish a judgment upon someone.

The most harmful words involve cursing conversations, law relationships, and condemning speech filled with wrath and scorn. Grace words, by contrast, are motivated by purity, pursue peace, and produce the fruit of righteousness (James 3:17-18).

Join the Conversation

Who needs your grace words today? How will you minister to this person through gospel conversations?

Tags: Biblical Counseling, Gospel Conversations, Spiritual Conversations, Spiritual Friends