RELATIONAL GENERSOITY
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· 6 viewsForgiveness means to release someone from their debt.
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Generosity . . .
According to the Bible, generosity is more than financial giving. It is possible to be technically generous with your money and not at all radically generous.
Generosity . . .
It is quite possible to give your money away but for profoundly selfish reasons. People give because they need to be needed. They want to be though of as generous. Many are the reasons for generosity but most give with strings attached. I will give but I need to be in control.
Radical generosity means you will be pervasively generous.
Meaning you will be characterized by a spirit of unselfish service in every single area of life. Generosity has been relegated to money because we don’t realize that there are other forms of currency.
What is a currency? A currency is a medium for exchanging value.
When you hear the word currency, right away you think of money, but there’s more than one currency.
EMOTIONAL CURRENCY
I’ll write a check, and I’ll give the money, but I don’t want to get emotionally involved with that person or those people; I mean, it’s just too draining,” such a statement shows that emotional currency is far more valuable to you than your money. You may be generous with your money but you are not radically generous.
PHYSICAL CURRENCY
It’s called hospitality. Do you let people into your home? Do you let people into your things? Do you just write your check? You say, “Oh, I’m very, very generous,” but you don’t want anybody to walk on your rug.
TIME CURRENCY
Your happy to write the check but hold onto that which is most important, your time. Your generous with your money but you are not radically generous.
PERSONAL RELATIONAL
There are those who are quite generous with their money and time. They volunteer their time. They help. They’re charitable, yet they’re not relationally generous at all.
What does it mean to be relationally generous?
Well, a perfect example in the Bible is in the garden of Gethsemane
And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled.
Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.”
And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour?
Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Relationally Generous
When they wake up, he looks at them, and what does he say? He says, “I can’t believe …”? No, what he says is, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He is saying, “You’re weak! You let me down.” He is not giving them an excuse. He providing an explanation.
Relationally Generous
Jesus is not overlooking their sin. He is looking into the source of their sin, there heart. Here we see personal relational currency being exchanged. Here is radical generosity.
Relationally Generous
Today I want to preach on a specific form of relational generosity that must characterize all Christian believers. Forgiveness.
Why forgiveness?
Because there are people out there who relationally owe you. They owe you because of how they’ve treated you.
Forgiveness means to release someone from their debt.
How do we become relationally generous?
The enormity of forgiveness
The enormity of forgiveness
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
“Increase our faith!” which is another way of saying, “This is beyond our ability” What caused their statement of inability?
and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”
Seven. . .
Say you received an invitation to a feast which read “Come to my feast. You may eat seven fish”. Your invitation is not limiting you to seven fish nor is it telling you there will seven courses of fish. You are being invited to eat your fill. Eat until you can eat no more.
Seven “beyond which no more is possible”.
He is saying if a person would wrong you as completely and as fully as any person could wrong another human being, you must forgive him.
Seven “beyond which no more is possible”.
Imagine the worst thing that anybody could possibly do to you. Jesus says, “If you’re my disciple and someone wrongs you like that, you have to forgive them.” No wonder the disciples said, “Increase our faith!”
The Enormity of Forgiveness
I want you to see the enormity of the challenge and that we can’t shrink from the challenge. We can’t shrink from the enormity of the challenge because of the enormity of the danger. There’s a little phrase here that almost goes by unless you realize what Jesus is saying.
Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him,
He says, “If someone hurts you and harms you, watch yourself. Watch yourself very closely.”
Pay attention to yourselves
See, that’s not what usually happened. If someone wrongs us, we pay a great deal of attention to that person. “Why did you do that?” Jesus says immediately when someone wrongs you, you should pay a lot of attention to your own self in your heart.
Pay attention to yourselves
When someone wrongs you, watch yourself. Anger will always tell you it’s not anger. Anger will always say, “I just want justice.” Anger will tell you something. “I just want the truth.” If you keep anger, if you hold on to anger, it will defile you it says in
See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled;
Word Study: Anger
Let me give you a little, quick word study. Four English words all derive from the same old English Anglo-Saxon root: wrath, wreath, writhe, and wraith.
What does wrath mean? An older word for anger but that is not all it means.
What does wreath mean? It is a set of branches or flowers or whatever which have been twisted into a shape.
What does writhe mean? It means to twist.
Wrath means then not just to be angry but to be twisted and distorted by anger.
What does wraith mean? A wraith was a ghost who had been wronged and, after death, is doomed to relive what the person had done to them.
They have to relive because they have never been able to forgive. Therefore, now their eternity and their future are completely controlled by the past.
Pay attention to yourselves
If you stay angry at people, if you hold a grudge, if you stay resentful, if you don’t forgive, you will be distorted and twisted by the anger.
Pay attention to yourselves
You’ll become a less joyful person. You will become a person who is inordinately afraid of trusting other people. I mean, not just the normal rightful kind of careful. We don’t want to be naïve. You don’t want to be clueless.
Pay attention to yourselves
Obviously you can’t just trust anybody. You need to look. What happens is if you let anger in there and keep staying there, you will be inordinately afraid of trusting people.
Pay attention to yourselves
You’ll become a hard, exacting person. It’s terrible! Watch yourself. If someone wrongs you, be on high alert! Watch your heart. because of the enormity of the danger, we cannot shrink from the enormity of the challenge.
The practice of forgiveness
The practice of forgiveness
Scripture teaches forgiveness is granted before it is felt.
Forgiveness is not issued when we feel like it. Scripture teaches forgiveness is granted before it is felt.
There are three action you must take if you’re going to avoid becoming a wraith.
The first thing you must do if you want to forgive somebody (and you should want to forgive somebody) is you must refuse to caricature the wrongdoer and instead identify with them.
Don’t caricature them; identify with them.
Jesus says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him …” He is talking about Christians wronging Christians. Remember that’s a brother or a sister. You have a common family. Don’t talk about the lack of relational connection. See what you have in common.
Don’t read this and think forgiveness is to be administered only to other Christians.
And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”
We forgive fellow Christians because we share a common family and we forgive unbelievers because we share a common humanity.
Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.
Common Humanity
You must remind yourself that you are the same as the person who wronged you. You’re both sinners. Don’t exclude yourself from the community of sinners. It is impossible to stay angry at somebody unless you feel a little superior to them.
Common Humanity
If someone has wronged you and you’re really mad, it’s because inside you’re saying, “I would never do anything like that.” Actually, you might not do anything exactly like that, but because you’re a sinner, you certainly can do something like that.
Common Humanity
To stay angry is to basically assume you have some higher nature or something. You must remind yourself you’re both sinners, but you also must remind yourself you’re both human beings.
Forgiveness flounders when you exclude yourself from the community of sinners and you exclude the wrongdoer from the community of humans. What does that mean?
Common Humanity
The Bible says we’re all made in the image of God. We’re like God in this way. Every human being is this rich, complex being of great dignity and worth. That’s not how you feel when someone wrongs you.
Common Humanity
What you do is you immediately reduce them to what they’ve done. For example, if someone has lied to you, what do you think of them? You say, “See that person? That person is just a liar!” But if you get caught in a lie, you say, “Well, yes, that was wrong, but it’s complicated. I mean, I shouldn’t have lied. There’s no excuse for it, but I wanted this, and I wanted that.”
Common Humanity
You’re a human being, and that person is a cartoon villain. You’ve excluded that person from the community of humans, and you excluded yourself from the community of sinners.
Common Humanity
You need to see what you’re doing. You need to bring yourself down. You need to bring that person up, as it were. You need to say, “We are the same.”
Do not caricature the wrongdoer, but you must identify with him or her.
Next you must inwardly surrender your right to repayment and pay the debt yourself.
There were several words that Jesus could have used when teaching on forgiveness. The word he uses means to basically release a person from a financial debt.
How do you forgive? You can only forgive if inwardly you forego seeking repayment.
Most wrongs are not actually financial wrongs. People have not robbed you usually of money, happiness, reputation, or opportunity. They rob you of joy in some way. What does it mean to make the person to pay?
The answer is they made you unhappy; you’re going to make them unhappy. They made you hurt; you want them to be hurt. There are three ways to do that.
One is directly try to hurt them.
You do things to make their life worse, or you just go and you tell them off and just make them feel badly.
The other way is to go to other people and ruin their reputation.
Gossip about them. You know, criticize them.
The third way is to inwardly root against them.
You root against them so every time you hear that something goes wrong in their life, every time you hear something goes wrong, you go, “Yeah.”
You’re being twisted
What’s happening every time you hurt them directly or indirectly or even root against them and see that something has gone wrong, you feel good because you feel like the debt is being paid. You’re being twisted.
You’re being twisted
In the short run, you feel good because it feels like, “Hey, I’m getting repayment.” In the long run, the evil has come into your life, and it’s going to suck out your joy. It’s going to make you a harder person. You’re being twisted.
To be or not to be Twisted
Dan Hamilton wrote a little book on forgiveness. Basically he goes through those three same points. A girl he was engaged to broke up with him, basically rejected him. He was furious at her, and he knew there were all sorts of ways he could make her feel badly.
To be or not to be Twisted
When he saw her, he could make her feel badly. He could talk her down to other people. Inside he could think about it all the time.
To be or not to be Twisted
But he realized if he didn’t do that, if every time he had the chance to get repayment, he refused, it would hurt! It would cost. It would bite in because all generosity is like that.
To be or not to be Twisted
This is relational generosity. If you really give generously, it’s going to hurt. You give enough of your money away that it hurts. That’s generosity. Forgiveness, if it’s really generosity, hurts.
To be or not to be Twisted
He says, “Once upon another time, I was engaged to a young woman who changed her mind. I forgave her, but … That was done in small sums over a year, whenever I spoke with her and refrained from rehashing the past.
To be or not to be Twisted
Done whenever I saw her with another man. Done when I had to renounce jealousy and self-pity …
To be or not to be Twisted
Done when I praised her and spoke of her value, though I wanted to slice away at her reputation. Those were the payments—but she never saw them. […] Pain is the consequence of sin; there is no easy way to deal with it.
Wood, nails and pain are the currency of forgiveness, the love that heals.
To be or not to be Twisted
What he says is every time he refrained, every time he refused to get repayment, he was paying it, and it hurt. Why? Because it was generous.
To be or not to be Twisted
If you go after vengeance, you go after repayment, you feel good in the short run. In the long run, you’re being twisted. If, instead, you do these practices of forgiveness, it feels hard. It feels very painful. In the long run, freedom.
No Confrontation; Only Forgiveness?
Somebody is going to say, “Okay, so you just forgive them? You never confront them? You never talk to them about what they’re doing?” The answer is no, no, no. Not at all. Take a look at what the passage says.
Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him,
It doesn’t say you don’t tell the person that they’ve done wrong. It’s not loving, by the way, just to let somebody go on and do anything they want.
Rebuke
You say, “Ah, good! Rebuke! I like that word.” You need to compare it to the parallel passage in Matthew 18. Then you’ll see clearly. If you don’t, you won’t.
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
Rebuke
Now you know what the purpose of the rebuke is. Now you also know why you have to be very careful in reading this verse, because I’ve had people say, “Oh, it says if your brother sins and he repents, forgive him. So if he doesn’t repent, I don’t have to forgive him.”
Rebuke
If you have not inwardly forgiven him before you go and rebuke him, then you are going to . . .
Get back at them not get them back.
To love the person, to wake them up, to help them see what they’ve done wrong so they can avoid problems in the future is what it means to get them back. You’re going to be going back just to make them feel badly, to get vengeance, to get back at them.
Justice?
People say, “I don’t want to forgive. I want justice.” I say if you don’t forgive, when you go to get justice, you won’t be getting justice. You’ll be getting vengeance. That person will not respond well, and you’ll just have a battle on your hands. Jesus said in mark 11:25
And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”
The third action you must take is willing the good of the wrongdoer.
You cannot say, “I forgive, but I don’t want to see them. I forgive, but I don’t want anything to do with them.”
The third action you must take is willing the good of the wrongdoer.
What you’re saying is, “I have refrained overtly from hurting them, but I don’t want their good. I don’t want them to thrive. I don’t want them to flourish,” which means you haven’t forgiven them.
The third action you must take is willing the good of the wrongdoer.
Just because you’re not punching them in the nose doesn’t mean you’ve forgiven them. It is so important to realize you must forgive inside before you go rebuking and talking to people.
The third action you must take is willing the good of the wrongdoer.
Saving face, putting a person in place, is revenge. “… to quote passages on justice in order to justify the nurtured bitterness of personal injury is for the Christian inexcusable.” Watch yourselves.
The key to forgiveness
The key to forgiveness
Lastly, where do you get the power to do this? We are like the disciples. We are incapable!”
The Key to Forgiveness
Everything after verse 5 is a response to the apostles saying, “We don’t have the power to do this.” He answers with a parable and a metaphor. First, the parable.
The Parable
Suppose you were the lord, and you had these household servants. They were plowing or looking after the sheep. At the end of the day, would you say, “Knock off. You’re off duty now. Come and eat”? Would you at the end of the day thank them?
The Parable
Jesus says to his hearers, “That would not be right, and you know it.” These household servants, are not really slaves in the way you and I think of slavery. They had not been bought and sold .
The Parable
On the other hand, they were not really employees either. In those days, if you fell into debt and you owed more money than you could pay, only two things could happen.
The Parable
One is you could be put in jail. You can actually see that in the parable Jesus tells on forgiveness in Matthew 18.
The Parable
Two, you go and you work for the creditor, and you work off your debt. Basically this was your way of being able to work off the debt instead of going to prison.
The Parable
So those in this situation where never off duty until there debt was paid. Furthermore, you would never expect the creditor, the master of the house, to say, “Thank you so much! You helped me so much,” because actually it’s the other way around. You’re doing only your duty.
The Hook
Then Jesus, at the very end, changes it around. Notice how he asked the listeners to imagine themselves as the master, saying, “Wouldn’t it be inappropriate for the servants to demand thanks from their masters, especially since the masters are giving them an opportunity to work off their debt?” Then at the very end, verse 10, he says,
So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’ ”
You’re a servant acting like a king.
Jesus is telling this parable in response to this discussion of forgiveness. What he is actually saying is, when you refuse to forgive, you are not remembering who you are. You’re a servant acting like a king.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
You owe God everything. He created you. He sustained you. Every minute of the day, he holds your molecules together. You owe him everything. If you’re a Christian, you also know he redeemed you.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
Therefore, he is the king. You’re the servant. When you turn to someone else and say, “I’m not going to forgive that person for what they did to me,” what you’re doing is you’re a servant acting like a king. You’re sitting in the judge’s seat.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
You’re saying, “This person deserves that.” How do you know what that person deserves? Are you God? Do you know what they went through? Do you know what has happened in their life? How do you know what they deserve for what they did? Do you have the right?
You’re a servant acting like a king.
You’re a servant acting like a king. That’s what Jesus is saying. He is looking at them, and then he actually goes, and he uses the metaphor. When they say, “Increase our faith; we don’t have the spiritual power,” he says, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed …” He doesn’t mean faith in general. He means faith in him.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
Here’s what he is saying: “If you had a smidgen of an understanding of what I’ve done for you, if you had the slightest understanding of what I have done for you, if you had the slightest, an ounce, of understanding that you’re a sinner saved by grace, you’ll be able to forgive. If you have any idea what I have done, you’ll be able to forgive.”
You’re a servant acting like a king.
You say, “Well, what did he do?” The real King became a servant. You’ll never be long-suffering until you see him going to the cross to suffer for you. You will never be able to forgive other people their little tiny debts toward you until you see him dying on the cross to pay your great debt.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
You’ll never stop being a judge, putting yourself in the judgment seat, till you see the real Judge of all the universe getting out of the judgment seat and coming down and going to court and being condemned and being tortured and killed for you.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
Here’s the Judge who didn’t stay in his seat but became judged for you. How in the world can you take a judgment seat on anybody else? Jesus says if you understand the gospel, just the grain of a mustard seed of the gospel will be enough to help you forgive.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
Only when you see, “I am a sinner saved by sheer grace only because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross,” does Jesus become your life.He becomes your self-worth. He becomes the source of your love.
You’re a servant acting like a king.
People can wrong you all sorts of places. It will be hard. It will be difficult, but in the end, they can’t touch you. You’ll be free. Watch yourselves. Even a mustard seed worth of gospel grace can turn you into a person who forgives radically and who lives generously.
Be a witness not a wraith.