This is a message from leading the way with Dr. Michael Youssef.

We pray that it will encourage you in your walk of faith.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. Youssef or leading the way, please visit

ltw.org.

A prominent professor from the University of Wisconsin express deep lament over the shallowness

by which we have taken this whole concept of forgiveness and issuing public apologies, insulting

people, and then kind of issue public apologies.

In fact, he rephrased the old adage, to err is human, to forgive is trendy.

As a professor calls it, is a fluff, not the real stuff, and that is weakening us morally as a nation.

It undermines the seriousness of what it means to forgive. It is even trendy today in some churches where pastors and preachers are encouraging their congregations to forgive God.

Can you imagine the arrogance? That we need to forgive the perfect, holy, righteous, pure God. We forgive the one who gives us our very breath

to breathe. We forgive the one who forgives us our wrongs. We forgive the one who suffers

with us whenever we suffer injustice.

This whole kind of modern preaching and teaching is not only repugnant, is revolting,

because it places us in an arrogant place that we are in God's place and God is in our place.

It says that I am God and God needs my forgiveness, not the other way around. Forgiveness is a very serious business. It really is. And that is why it was the very first

statement of the seven statements from the cross that our Lord Jesus uttered.

And today I begin a seven-part series on these awesome words that uttered from the cross by our Lord Jesus Christ. The first statement is found in Luke chapter 23, verse 34.

As our Lord Jesus was suspended between heaven and earth, the Bible said, he said,

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing. Forgiveness is such a serious matter

that Jesus had to deal with it first and foremost.

I remember many years ago when I lived in Australia, a well-known psychiatrist said to me,

...