This past Sunday morning, I had the privilege of preaching at Cross Roads Baptist Church in Ooltewah, Tennessee, for my close friend Pastor Travis Rodgers while he is out of the country on a short-term mission trip to Guatemala.<\/p>\n
I am always grateful for the opportunity to come and worship with the precious people at Cross Roads, but there was a powerful sense of the Lord\u2019s presence in the service that morning. I do not take those moments lightly. Any time God allows His Word to be opened, His people to be helped, and His Spirit to deal with hearts, it is a mercy.<\/p>\n
The message I preached was on the subject of forgiveness. The Lord had already been working this truth deeply in my own heart through a Celebrate Recovery lesson I taught last week, and it is still resonating with me.<\/p>\n
The message is titled \u201cLet Go Of The Rope.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n When we refuse to forgive, it is like holding on to the rope of an old church bell. Every time we pull it, the sound of the wrong rings again in our heart and mind. We rehearse it. We relive it. We keep the noise of the injury alive, and with it a root of bitterness grows.<\/p>\n But forgiveness is the act of letting go of the rope.<\/p>\n That does not mean the wound was small. It does not mean what happened was right. It does not mean trust is instantly restored or wisdom is thrown away. It means we release our claim of vengeance into the hands of God and refuse to let bitterness keep ruling our heart.<\/p>\n Jesus spoke plainly about forgiveness. He did not treat it as optional in the life of a believer. Yet the same Christ who commands us to forgive is the Christ who knows what it is to be betrayed, lied on, mocked, wounded, and wronged. He does not command from a distance. He commands from the wounds of His own cross.<\/p>\n My prayer is that this message will help some believer who has been holding the rope far too long, and that it will point every hearer to the mercy of God found in Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n May the Lord help us to forgive as we have been forgiven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past Sunday morning, I had the privilege of preaching at Cross Roads Baptist Church in Ooltewah, Tennessee, for my close friend Pastor Travis Rodgers while he is out of the country on a short-term mission trip to Guatemala. I am always grateful for the opportunity to come and worship with the precious people at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"audio","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"tve_updated_post":"","tve_custom_css":"","tve_user_custom_css":"","tve_globals":{},"tcb2_ready":0,"tcb_editor_enabled":0,"tve_landing_page":"","_tve_header":"","_tve_footer":""},"categories":[366,335],"tags":[768,363,767,747],"class_list":["post-15916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-audio","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-audio","category-blog","tag-christian-living","tag-forgiveness","tag-matthew-6","tag-sermon-audio","post_format-post-format-audio"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Let_go_of_the_rope__800x500_wide.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15916"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15942,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916\/revisions\/15942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ronniebrown.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}