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Breakout Session
Forgiveness: What the Bible Teaches, What You Need to Know
Andrew and Leonard Kuyvenhoven

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The father-son duo of Andy and Len Kuyvenhoven led an afternoon session with the same title as their recent book from Faith Alive Christian Resources. The book is part of a series (What the Bible Teaches, What You Need to Know) designed for individual or small group bible study. Both pastors have contributed to other books in the series, on topics such as miracles and the end times, displaying their theological expertise and pastoral acumen.

The afternoon session was preluded by Len Kuyvenhoven's homily at the conference's morning worship service in the chapel. His message for the attendees touched on scriptural teachings on forgiveness, including Christ's parable of the unmerciful servant. In a lesson that would carry over to the rest of the day's conference sessions, Pastor Len showed how the debt owed to the master was indescribably large compared with the debt of the other servant.

The afternoon session turned out to be a double portion of preaching on forgiveness as the two preachers traded turns at the microphone. The format followed their book, moving from the topics of forgiveness in the Old and New Testaments to how the Church both receives and manages forgiveness.

Pastor Andy began with his teachings on the act of forgiveness. He laid out God's promises found in the stories of both the Old and the New Covenant by tying it to our understanding Isaiah 55. Verses 8 and 9 read, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

This is not meant to rationalize God's wrath towards us, Pastor Andy explained; rather, it is to show us the amazing quality of his love and the depth of his forgiving character. The previous verse refers to the wicked forsaking their ways and the abundant mercy of our God who pardons. This truth of God's character is what makes forgiveness possible, and what begins the discussion of why and how to forgive.

Following his father, and speaking with the same conversational tone and passionate sincerity, Pastor Len went on to discuss the roles of forgiveness in the stories of the lame man in Matthew 9 and the woman in Luke 7. These two instances, where Christ verbally acquitted the sins of those before him, show us the surprising nature of God's forgiveness. Even when we neither ask for it nor expect it, Len pointed out, God's sovereign love grants forgiveness when faith is put into practice.

Len also made to sure to touch on the concept of grace that is not merited by good deeds. When forgiveness is seen as a necessary reward for repenting behavior, we lose sight of the truth that God's forgiveness is a divine attribute that is beyond our understanding and is given to us a free gift. The faith that gratefully puts forgiveness into practice is one that recognizes God's previous gift of grace and forgiveness.

The Kuyvenhovens concluded the session with remarks on how the Church has been given the responsibility of “binding and loosening” sins by Christ, and how it has sometimes fallen short. As it matriculated itself in Church discipline, the power of the clergy to offer forgiveness has been abused in the ancient and recent past, and Pastor Andy gave examples of both. He lamented the fact that confession became legalistic and that the Church has not been without its historical misuses of ecclesiastical power. He recalled a story of a woman who had been denied membership through profession of faith because she could not quit her job on Sundays. Stories like these, he said, serve as examples of human attempts at biblical discipline gone wrong, but the fight to maintain the effective use of the Gospel by Christ's body, the Church, is as pertinent as ever.

Overall, the words of the two Reverend Kuyvenhovens were refreshing and poignant in their honesty. Their critical exegesis of what the Bible says and compels us to do was exact and true, and was well-received by attendees.

—Mark Hofman