Hey, if you have a Bible, please turn to Matthew chapter 18.

Last week, we kicked off a brand new practice on forgiving as we have been forgiven.

If you were not here, please go back and listen to the podcast, a lot of myths and misconceptions around this idea of forgiving,

and it was Bethany Allen at her best. So please catch up on that.

For tonight, let's start off in Matthew 18. I'm having some kind of an allergic reaction to an allergy medicine,

which is kind of counterintuitive. So I feel like I had about 35 cups of coffee and not slept in days.

So we'll see how this goes. All right, no promises at all. Matthew chapter 18.

He lied to me straight to my face, went behind my back, and cut me out of this business that we had just started,

stole my intellectual property, went on to make money off of it. We had both quit our job to chase after this like craze was years and years ago,

to chase after this dream that was in our heart, and we had started money, set aside to live on for just a little bit.

Now here I was, like literally overnight, not only had my dream been crushed, but I had a mortgage payment due in three weeks,

and no way to pay the bills. To top it off, he was my best friend, or so I thought. And we went to church together.

Every Sunday, I would show up, and there he was, smiling like nothing ever happened. He's related to somebody in leadership,

there was nepotism in this church, and there was just, I think he was untouchable, and he knew it.

When I confronted him, he came up with this bizarre twist of logic to justify his behavior and refuse to even apologize.

Now because I am a follower of Jesus, I forget him, you know, like you do, water off my back.

If anything, I let him off the hook too easy, a few years later his whole life imploded, and to this day he's estranged from his family and most of his friends.

I wish I had actually gone farther after him.

But immediately, right then and there, I made the decision out of my will to not collect on the debt that was owed me, but the problem was I was still stuck.

I was able to release him, but I was not able to release me, and a year went by, and I was still stuck.

Every time that his face would come to mind, which was usually about once an hour, I was just racked by all sorts of emotions,

and the top of that list was the emotion of anger, and that anger would leak out at my family and my friends and my wife, and I wasn't angry with her, she was collateral damage.

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