Well, let me invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Mark chapter. 11 for our time of study and the word this morning, we're continuing to talk about this most important subject of forgiveness, and this is the 6th week that we are looking at this topic which merits the amount of time that we, are giving to this because it is so important. Guys, if you can take the gospel and learn how to apply the gospel to the area of forgiveness and effectively be a good forgiver of the people in your life that have wronged you, there's nothing else out there that's, that's harder than that. So if you can do this, you can slay a 1000 giants in the process, walking.
in grace. And so if you want to give a title to the message this morning, it would be Choosing to Forgive Part 2, Choosing to forgive, Part. 2 In October, I think it was October 2nd of 2006, a man named Charles Roberts IV walked into an Amish one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, barricaded himself and I believe 10 girls in that schoolhouse, and ultimately shot 10 Amish girls execution style, intending to kill all of them. And ultimately ended up killing 5 of them, and the others were left wounded and profoundly traumatized for life.
When the police approached the building, Charles Roberts shot and killed himself. When the news of the story broke, this was in 2006, I think many of you remember when the news of this tragedy broke. We were all mortified, just horrified by this senseless tragedy, this monstrous evil that this man had committed. But the reason I bring it up in the context of our topic today is that something really interesting happened in the days following the, the, the tragedy., in the first couple of days after the, the story broke, the headlines were all about the atrocities that this man had committed, and the details of the story were awful.
There was just simply no making sense. Of what he had done and why, but somewhere on about the 3rd day, the story started changing and the headlines in the newspapers and And on the internet became more about less and less about the tragedy and more about the grace and the forgiveness that the Amish were showing towards this man who was dead, but in terms of their disposition towards this man, the forgiveness and grace they showed towards him and towards his wife and towards his mother and, their children and even towards this man's parents in law. The stories became all about the love that they were showing toward one another, and the grace and the forgiveness that they were showing. Literally, guys, the love and the grace of the Amish people changed the story....
