Sarah Jakes Roberts, who pastors The Potter’s House at One LA with husband Touré Roberts, recently appeared on popular radio show “The Breakfast Club” and challenged the hosts on forgiveness.
Roberts appeared on the program on April 12 to discuss her new top-selling book, Woman Evolve: Break Up with Your Fears and Revolutionize Your Life. During the interview, co-host DJ Envy asked Roberts, the daughter of Bishop T.D. Jakes and Serita Jakes, what it was like growing up as a pastor’s kid and how she handled being an unwed mother at 19.
“What about forgiveness, though,” he asked. “Is it easy to forgive when you talk about people going at your dad, or even you being a pregnant teen mom, and I’m sure the congregation had things to say. Is it easy for you to forgive?”
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Roberts responded that it was to the contrary.
“I don’t think forgiveness is something that you flip the switch on and you’re automatically walking in it,” the pastor and author said. “I think it is a decision that you have to remind yourself that you have made over and over again.”
Co-host Charlamagne tha God eventually chimed in, saying, “It was so freeing to hear you say that about forgiveness, because that’s something that I’m constantly working on.” Yet, he made a distinction between actively forgiving others, and wishing that people get what they deserve. “And I don’t even mean that in a positive and negative way,” he added.
Angela Yee, the third host of the popular morning show, offered that forgiveness was really about freeing oneself more than it was about the offending party.
“But we want forgiveness, too. So if we want people to forgive us, we have to also be willing to forgive,” Yee said.
DJ Envy, on the other hand, dismissed Yee’s take and insisted that forgiveness was conditional.
In response, Roberts pointed to comments the late rapper DMX made about trusting people.
“Well DMX said that you can just come to a place of forgiveness by just trusting people to be who they’re going to be,” she said. “And in a way that is freeing because it’s like I’m not going to keep expecting for you to walk with integrity, to say the right things and do the right things. I’m just going to trust you to be you.”
Roberts also clarified that “forgiving and forgetting are two different things.”
“Just because I forgive you doesn’t mean I’ve had to forget it, and I feel like that’s exactly what DMX was kind of speaking to in that clip that we’ve seen recently,” she added.
The exchange on forgiveness begins at about nine minutes into the video.
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