Forbearance Podcast Episode

Or if you are in the midst of church work, family, home, whatever it might be, you’re going to have these cases. And I think it’s really helpful. It’s been helpful for me just to put a finger on it and say, ah, this is an opportunity for forbearance. Welcome, everyone, to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. 

Kaleb Beyer and Arlan Miller are here with me today. Looking forward to a conversation, guys. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for being here. Glad to be here. The topic today is forbearance. And let me set the stage to get a sense that we all understand forbearance. Okay. For any parent out there who’s been trapped in a vehicle with kiddos for a period of time. Yeah. It really doesn’t have to be that long of a time. And you pretty much realize what forbearance looks like. Oh, sure. Yeah. Because, oh my goodness, they’ve got to stop that. Yeah. And siblings, one with another, yeah. The power of forbearance on a long car ride is required. 

It really is. I mean, unless you’re going to let some of them out midway through. Sure. Right. But I think that captures a key component there, Matt, forbearance, I think by definition is something that’s ongoing. It’s a continual type of thing. It’s very similar to that. In this situation, we’d like to just eject, right? 

Yeah. Find the button there. Exactly. Yeah. Either eject or completely correct to my likeness. Does that make sense? There’s really two ways for me to fix the car ride without forbearance and that is somebody’s hitchhiking home or duct tape. It is going to come into my likeness. 

Yeah, okay, but so much of life, whether it’s with our spouses, our children, our families, our communities, our workplaces, and our church communities we have to have forbearance. Ejection and change are not going to be options. Yeah, I think just the fact that Paul emphasizes that in Colossians, you’re right. 

He says, forbearing one another and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so forgive them. Right. And he separates that out and it’s an important thing. Let’s start with that separation. I think we do have a pretty good grasp of forgiveness. 

Yeah. Does that make sense? So, Kaleb, maybe tease out some of the differences between what forgiveness is and what forbearance is. Sure. Forgiveness, we often think of it as an event where someone has been betrayed or there’s been a sin. Okay. So, there’s a debt based on something that’s taken place, that’s occurred. Right. And so, both forbearance and forgiveness are very much an individual process that I choose. But forgiveness is choosing to release that debt. Right. Whereas forbearance is like Arlan referred to earlier. It’s like this ongoing reality of acceptance and acknowledging. 

There’s this quirk that is really annoying, that I don’t need to accept and continue to accept. Yes. So, if child A hits child B in the car there’s an offense there and forgiveness now is at play. Right. If child A likes to make pig noises, we now are in forbearance. 

Is that right? Because there’s not really an offense here. There is not a sin, right? We all have those annoying habits that we don’t think are annoying, but for some reason our spouse or friend or coworker thinks is annoying. And that’s part of, in some ways, being human. Okay. So, we see it differently and separate from forgiveness. Kaleb, I know you’ve presented on this topic before, and you’ve drawn another distinction between forgiveness and facing. 

So, forbearance finds its place sort of in between forgiveness and facing. Let’s draw the distinction of what we mean by facing. Well, there comes a time in situations in relationships, sometimes we do need to acknowledge or bring things up and talk through them. And that is facing, it is addressing a certain situation or circumstance that isn’t just an individual process. 

So, we’re addressing the non-sin. My loved one is always forgetting X, Y, or Z. And to simply forebear and let them be forever forgetful might not be the most loving act, but to face them in this. So, there’s a place for that. We’re going to call that facing, but we’re really today zeroing in on forbearance, which is a beautiful middle, and it has a place. 

We probably go through it more commonly than we realize. I mean, it happens to us a lot. You have an option, right? You can totally live off by yourself somewhere completely removed from society. Some people do that because they can’t play nicely with others, so to speak. Or if you are in the midst of church work, family, home, whatever it might be, you’re going to have these cases. 

And I think it’s really helpful. It’s been helpful for me just to point a finger on it and say, ah, this is an opportunity for forbearance. Okay. So that’s where we want to go. There is a really unique and special love that forbearance requires, Forgiveness has its own special love, facing has its own special love, and forbearance has its special love. 

We want to identify that today and provide some helps here along the way. Okay. Kaleb, what’s the lesson here? What does forbearance require? I think the first thing it requires is to acknowledge that there is that annoying habit, right? I think the first step is the reality that I’m being bugged. 

It is impacting me. There’s no need to forbear when that’s not present. Yes. You know, I think that’s actually very hopeful, Kaleb, because I think sometimes, we feel bad that we’re annoyed. Yeah. Right? It’s like, oh, if I was a more whatever person, I wouldn’t even notice this idiosyncrasy that this person has. 

It drives me crazy. But what you’re really saying is you’re giving liberty to people to say, no, it’s okay to be bothered by it. That’s where love kicks in. Yes, exactly. It’s what we do with it and how we engage it. Yeah. Then you have a choice, right? And one choice is to say, well, this is annoying me. And so, therefore they need to become different so that I’m not annoyed by them.  Which is not what Scripture calls us to. It calls us to this other option of forbearing because of the love of Christ. It’s interesting how he ties that together so quickly. Right.  

I think that forces me down a level or two and say, well, who am I to think that my way of viewing the world is right. You know, let’s go down a couple notches in humility and look for an opportunity to love better. Both of you have used the term opportunity, and I think that is important to capture. Maybe it’s just me, but when I think about permanent, sometimes it comes with gritting your teeth, you know, and you’re just going to do it and get through it. 

Yeah, we’re going to get through it. That car ride. Oh, we’re 20 minutes out. We can surely do it. That’s not the forbearance the Scripture calls us to. And I think there’s another piece that I’ve seen, at least in my own life, as I’ve walked through experiences like that, is I think this forbearance is a wonderful opportunity towards sanctification in my own life because I see what that can do towards me and do towards my attitude or my expectations, and then that can translate into ungodly behavior towards another individual. 

And yet if I let the Spirit have his way with me to turn that into a sanctifying tension for myself, it’s so powerful. I think God smiles when we set off in the car for this road trip. Saying, oh, this is going to be a sanctifying trip and I’m not about to correct that behavior. 

Yeah, because it needs to sit there for everybody in the car to come to this place. Yeah. It amazing when you view a situation as how this is an opportunity to make myself more like Christ. To demonstrate Christ like behavior for myself, at least. It’s amazing how that can just shift the focus and lower some of the tension. 

And it puts the onus on myself. And again, we’re not talking about sinful, ungodly behaviors here. We’re talking about those, that’s important context there, forbearing opportunities that really can be great opportunities. Yep. You know, there’s a really neat word used in Scripture. 

It says, receive one another. And I think receive gets at the heart of what forbearance is. And you mentioned marriage. We stand up there in front of the church and say, I take you. And that taking is a reception which I think is really powerful. And if you go back to the school playground where we pick teams. I take Smith. I take Beyer. I take Kaufmann, right? That’s the way it goes. And, when that captain takes a person on their team, they take the good and the bad. Yeah. That’s all part of the deal. Does that make sense? And now they make their selections according to the drag of each person. 

Right. But the point is they get that team and that’s the team you work with and in just a really profound way we stand at the altar, and we say the same thing. Right. I take you, I receive you, brokenness and all. Yeah. Knowing that the team is better because of all those different pieces and components. 

If we all were the exact same robotic thing, you wouldn’t have forbearance. We are a team made up of different components that God has put together as it has pleased him. And we are better because of that. So that my spouse, who might be more present focused, is able to bring such a beautiful nuance to the marriage that I won’t bring because I’m so planful and organized and vice versa. 

Yep. That beauty of unity and diversity. And going back to what you were saying too, Matt, is we don’t know all our quirky habits, we know some annoying habits about ourselves, right? Yeah, might be in denial. But they’re not that bad, really.  

Anyway, go on. Well, just like Christ. He chooses us. We know, right? We do not deserve that. But to be chosen in that way is incredibly powerful. And that now is getting to the beautiful love here. Yeah. The beautiful love that allows a person to be broken and still loved. Yeah. That is the gospel. That’s loving as Christ loves, isn’t it? 

And we have that to extend to our wives and to our children and to our coworkers and to our communities. Yeah. And I think it goes to that term that you talked about there, Matt, this idea of receiving one another or accepting one another. This idea of choosing to open ourselves up to that is a beautiful concept that reflects that. 

Yeah, I accept you with that annoying habit, with the sounds that you think are funny and I think are just really annoying. Yeah. I take you. I receive you in that, and it’s through reception that then there may be some change. I think there’s a prerequisite, a lens of sorts, that we need to have in order to afford to bear well. 

And I think it’s the ability to be able to see a God image bearer apart from the exterior circumstances that flurry, in much the same way that God was instructing Samuel when he was anointing David. Don’t look on the exterior, on the outward, but look on the inward. And I think that’s an actually really important point, Matt. 

The gospel is saying, you come as you are and take my yoke upon you and learn true rest. And in the beauty of that brokenness, I will bring you healing. He’s always going to be working on us, right? We don’t take the next step and say, he just accepts me as I am. No, we’re always going to be driven towards that image of Christ and the humility that involves. 

But that acceptance is a beautiful starting point there. Okay. I think this has really been helpful. We’ve identified very clearly what forbearance is. Let’s now paint the other side. What is it not, but we might think it is. So, this concept of what forbearance is not. Paint a few nuances, Kaleb.  

It doesn’t mean we’re never frustrated. It doesn’t mean we stuff our feelings. Of course, you acknowledge your feelings. You’re going to be frustrated at times. And sometimes it’s okay to say, you know what coworker? I know I’m frustrated. I want you to know I don’t expect you to change. 

This is me, but I’m acknowledging my feelings. Right? Because otherwise we set up a forbearance that’s unrealistic. Or else that will bubble up, we’ll stuff it, and then it’ll bubble up into an explosive type of behavior. Passive aggressive, Arlan, anything that forbearance is not. Yeah, there’s another piece that comes to my mind, and it’s the idea that forbearance is not ignoring people, and just isolating yourself and removing yourself from things, right?  

Forbearance is not in that car ride situation, putting the headphones on and just pretending like the world doesn’t exist. And actually, frankly, that’s what you see society’s response being quite a bit. It’s like, we just walk around with headphones on all the time, you know, heaven forbid that I would ever get in somebody else’s space. 

It’s not that there’s no skill building of forbearance going on there with any of those things. Well, I think you’re absolutely right. When you look at our culture, which is all about personal adaptation. Our devices adapt to us. Our devices learn our likes, learn our environments and provide an environment conducive to our every pleasure. 

And all the AI out there is working very hard to get into my psyche and to really know me and keep away from those things that annoy me so that they can feed me things that stroke me. Does that make sense? It’s very anti forbearing. So, all the more importance, I guess, for the topic. 

Yep. This takes intentionality. I mean, preparing ahead for the car ride, expecting it, at some level, to be annoying. And I think it takes a God view. Yeah. Which is what Scripture says, do as Christ has done to you. It takes a God view to have this. Yeah. I mean, let’s look at our church communities. Yeah. I mean, in the church community, are we not put in places where we need to forbear with one another? Yeah. I would prefer to have it this way. I’d prefer to have it my way. Yeah. I’d prefer, and we would maybe like to airbrush our communities to be just exactly what we’re looking for. 

And God doesn’t allow just what I’m looking for to ever really happen. And it shouldn’t surprise us. Yeah. And in fact, Matt, actually, historically speaking, that was one of the biggest hallmarks of the early church, right? If we could have the ability to descend into an early church meeting in somebody’s house in Colossae or whatever, right? 

You would have seen the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the slave, the free, the Jew, the Gentile, this huge diversity of race, ethnicity, all kinds of different people loving and existing and forbearing one another with the love of Christ as the center. And the world looked at that and they couldn’t comprehend that. They didn’t have a paradigm for that. 

And Christ himself foreshadowed it and says, by this do all men know you’re my disciples when you have love one for another. It’s a beautiful thing to think about. And it’s a challenge for me within, as I think about my own church community, to allow that. The beauty of that diverse culture and society to play itself out becomes a reflection of a love that’s beyond ourselves. 

It’s a love that’s truly God given. And also, I think Arlan alluded to this earlier, being able to see ourselves rightly in humility to know that as we see this annoying habit in whoever that is, a fellow brother or sister in the church, that we also realize that I will contribute to the, yes, you’re annoying. 

Yes, exactly. I’m annoyed. You can just come out and tell me I’m annoying Kaleb. That’s fine. It’s a little bit of an intervention here. Now you guys tell me. I am annoying with the best of them. All right. So, thanks a lot, brothers. I think you have articulated well this forbearance piece.  

Forgiveness is awesome love. Even facing is an awesome love. And this forbearance piece is an awesome love requiring a God view that adopts Christ’s reception of us. And we mirror that in receiving other people. Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Matt. Good to be here. Thanks to each one for being along. We trust and pray this has blessed you in some way. 

As always, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. Thanks and have a great day.