Blessed with Every Spiritual Blessing – Forgiveness
Pastor Tan Thai · May 20, 2018
This sermon focuses on the forgiveness of sins as the most precious spiritual blessing God grants to those who believe in Jesus Christ. Believers have received abundant forgiveness from God, yet often fail to forgive others because they have not truly experienced the depth of God's love and forgiveness in their daily lives.
The sermon opens with the theological foundation of Ephesians 1:3, affirming that believers are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. The Apostle Paul lists many spiritual blessings in Ephesians 1:3–14, but the pastor focuses on the forgiveness of sins (verse 7) as the first and most important blessing. Without forgiveness, no other spiritual blessing can be received — not adoption as children of God, not an inheritance in Christ, not the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
The sermon explains the nature of forgiveness: to forgive is to accept the cost of a loss that the offender should rightfully bear. Jesus Christ died on the cross to bear the punishment for our sins — that is the greatest act of forgiveness. The pastor uses practical illustrations such as a ruined new outfit, a lost engagement ring, and stories of marriages broken because neither party would admit fault, to show that true forgiveness requires accepting personal loss and demands genuine love.
The pastor highlights the paradox that everyone desires to be forgiven but finds it very hard to forgive others. Hemingway's story of 800 young men waiting for their fathers to forgive them, and the account in Luke 7 of the sinful woman who lavished love on Jesus because she was forgiven much, both illustrate the universal human need for forgiveness and its transforming power.
The primary reason believers struggle to forgive is identified as spiritual poverty: they have not truly and deeply experienced the immense forgiveness God extends to them daily. Those who are spiritually rich — who have truly received every spiritual blessing from heaven — will forgive easily, just as a billionaire easily overlooks a lost ring. True love is always inseparable from forgiveness, and forgiveness must become a habit of the heart, cultivated through daily practice.
The sermon concludes with a practical call to action: forgiveness is the first and most essential habit of the heart that every believer must develop. When believers truly understand that God has forgiven them immeasurably and has blessed them with every spiritual blessing from heaven, their hearts will be large enough and rich enough to forgive others sincerely and from the very depths of their being.