Forgiveness

Intro: picking a little deeper than past few weeks, NFC Championship Game story

What would it take for you to withhold forgiveness from someone?

Read passage, pray.

Three questions: why don’t we forgive, why should we forgive, how do we forgive?

1. Why Don’t We Forgive?

We like being forgiven, so why don’t we forgive others? There’s two reasons, and the first one is pride. Look at verse 21. This passage is placed in the broader context of the paragraph before it about church discipline. We’re going to look at this passage next week, but the Sparknotes version is that Jesus is giving his disciples, and by extension, his church, the blueprint for what it looks like to reconcile with someone when they sin against you. So, Peter asks the question on everyone’s mind: how many times do I have to submit myself to this? I like to imagine that Peter really thought he was being noble by saying as many as seven times, as though Jesus was going to come back and say “of course not, if they do it a third time, you’re good to not let that sin go and give up on them.” Because there’s an assumption inside of the question that Peter is asking, and that assumption is, “I shouldn’t have to forgive anyone.” He’s assuming, I owe forgiveness to no one. At the very least, he’s assuming he is entitled to forgive, but not forget, such that if we get a repeat offense, I’m going to remember. There is going to be an account that you are withdrawing from and it’s fine for a while, but eventually you are going to reach a point where you have taken out all the funds and I am entitled to withhold forgiveness from you. At this point, any forgiveness I offer to you is strictly out of the goodness of my heart.

And let’s be honest, if you’ve ever been hurt, especially by someone else, this sounds like a pretty good deal. That person wronged me, they don’t deserve my forgiveness. They didn’t deserve my forgiveness, but I decided to give it to them and they had better make sure not to do something like that again. That seems like the natural order of things. People do bad things and they reap the consequences of their actions. We love justice. This is why Marvel makes so many movies, because people eat up stories where a team of heroes go and they squash the people who are doing evil. We are addicted to people being given their just desserts. Of course, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to hope that injustice is met with justice, but the problem comes when we make ourselves the arbiter of justice. That person wronged me, I’m not forgiving them because that’s justice. But what is the ultimate motive for personal justice? What motivates you to withhold forgiveness, or worse yet, get revenge, because you were wrong? The thought that “I deserve better.” And again, I want to walk carefully, because in saying that, I don’t want to give the idea that it’s wrong to want to be treated fairly, or that if you’re wronged, you should say to yourself, “I deserve this.” But if you let the thought that you deserve better consume you, especially to the point that it’s impacting the way you relate to others, then that is idol worship. You are worshiping yourself because you’re saying, “I should get to call the shots.” It’s saying, yes, I know God calls me to forgive, but if he knew what I was going to go through, this passage wouldn’t have made it into the Bible. At the very least, there would have been an exception put into a footnote. It must not be so in the church. We have to always be killing our pride.

So the first reason we resist forgiveness is pride, and the second reason really goes hand-in-hand, which is that we don’t understand the depths of our sin. After Peter asks his question, Jesus launches into a parable. Verses 23-25. Now, the meaning of verse 24 gets a little bit lost in translation since a talent is not a denomination of currency that we use today. If you’re reading in other translations, it may say that this man owed 10,000 bags of gold, or millions of dollars, but the monetary unit that is being modernized in some of those other translations is a talent. Now, if you’re reading out of the ESV, the translators have done you a favor here and put a little number next to the word talents, and if you find the corresponding footnote at the bottom of the page, it says that “a talent was a monetary unit worth about 20 years’ wages for a laborer.” So, obviously the exchange rate of USD to the talent is not going to be one-to-one, but let’s contextualize this. A quick look suggested that the median US salary is in the ballpark of $62,000 a year. That would mean, if we just strictly plug in the numbers and don’t pay attention to anything else, that a talent in America would be worth somewhere around $1.25 million. That’s a lot of money. But the situation is far more dire than that. This servant doesn’t owe a talent. The servant owes ten thousand talents. I don’t even know how you manage to accrue that much debt, but if a talent is equal to 20 years worth of work, then this guy owes money equal to 200,000 years of work, or in our Americanized version of this, $12.4 billion. That changes your view on this parable a little bit. If you think a talent is just a dollar, then $10,000 doesn’t seem too bad. Even if a talent is roughly equal to $10, then it’s $100,000 – nothing to scoff at, but he’s only being forgiven a couple years’ salary by a king, certainly he isn’t going to be crippled by missing out on this amount of money, but when it’s $12.4 billion? That’s money that I would guess all of us can’t even imagine. As a matter of fact, to even quantify this is really missing the point of what Jesus is doing here. In throwing out a hypothetical debt of 10,000 talents, he’s not trying to say “imagine how great this debt is,” as much as he’s trying to say, “this debt is so great that you can’t imagine it.”

This is the debt that we owe to God. We are all, by nature, sinful. We aren’t naturally good people who occasionally sin, we are naturally bent towards serving ourselves and our desires and we do not seek to glorify God or honor him. And God is infinitely holy, and is worthy of all glory and all honor, and so to sin against God creates a gap that you can never cross. There is no checklist to complete, there is no number of good deeds to do to balance the scale, you owe an unimaginable, unpayable spiritual debt. There is no hope for the sinner to justify himself before a holy God. And yet, because Jesus died in our place, we are offered forgiveness even though the gap between us and God not only cannot be crossed, but was created by us in the first place because of our sin. Paul in Colossians 2 says that God canceled the debt that stood against us with its legal demands, setting it aside by nailing it to the cross. When we read that this servant was pardoned of a debt of 10,000 talents, this is what Jesus is imploring us to imagine. You are this servant. You have been forgiven an unquantifiable debt. And the depth of this forgiveness clearly doesn’t hit the servant. Verses 28-30.

So, as with the talent in verse 24, the ESV gives us a footnote about the denarius, that it is equivalent to one day’s worth of work, so 100 denarii would be 100 days of work. Certainly not an inconsequential debt, right? A few months of income isn’t nothing, but it’s about 730,000 times less financially significant than what this servant owed his master. And again, don’t get too caught up in the numbers. It’s helpful for us to feel the weight of what Jesus is saying in this parable, but the point you should see is that every debt that we are owed, whether we are actually owed or not, is dwarfed in comparison to the debt that we owe to God. Remember, this isn’t a debt that the servant couldn’t pay at the moment, this is a debt that he couldn’t pay ever. There is no universe in which he is ever paying back 10,000 talents, so when he says to the king in verse 26 that he’s going to pay him everything, that isn’t true. The same with us towards God, we can’t pay him back no matter how hard we try. But when this person asks for patience and says he’ll pay him, it’s completely within the realm of possibility for him to make it up. But he wants justice and he wants it on his terms. And so often, we’re the same way. We see red when we feel slighted and we lose sight of the great forgiveness that we were given. I want to submit to you that it’s totally possible to know something but not internalize it. The servant knows he’s forgiven. How could he not? He had an insurmountable debt and now it’s completely wiped away – but he doesn’t internalize it. He doesn’t feel the reality and the weight of that. Because when Jesus forgives you, it changes you. It has to change you.

2. Why Should We Forgive?

There are two reasons why we should forgive, and they really play off of the reasons why we don’t forgive. We said the first reason we don’t forgive is because of pride, and the first reason we should forgive is because it is a mandate from Jesus. If we circle back to the beginning of the passage, Peter asks, how often should I forgive my brother, and Jesus responds in verse 22. What’s interesting about verse 22 is that it’s rendered as different numbers in different translations. If you’re reading out of the ESV you may be surprised to see 77 times as opposed to 70 times 7, especially if you grew up on VeggieTales. The Greek is actually a little ambiguous here – it translates literally as seventy times, seven. So it’s not super clear if it’s referring to 70 7s, being 490 times, or if it’s referring to 70 times and then 7 more times. Just as with the talents, though, the point is not whether we’re counting to 78 or to 491, the point is that we as those who follow Jesus are called to forgive more times than we can imagine forgiving someone.

The thing that we have to remember is that we don’t get to call the shots in our life. No matter how badly we want to, no matter how badly we think we should get to, we don’t get to call the shots. When Jesus says you must forgive your brother, it isn’t optional. We westerners seem to have this problem with authority. I feel like with most non-Christians or name-only Christians, the rub is always that we don’t like authority. I listened to a sermon one time on the kingship of Jesus and the pastor said that Jesus is supposed to be our king. He is the Lord Jesus Christ, his commands hold supreme and final authority in our lives. He is supposed to be our king, but often times we treat him as our consultant. We treat him as a counselor or a trusted friend who we can turn to for spiritual advice, but ultimately, we get to decide if that advice is worth taking or not based on our convictions, our feelings on whatever matter he’s speaking into, how much it’s going to cost us – we pick and choose which commandments to follow from Jesus based on how much we like them. But what is Jesus’ demand for being his disciple? If anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross, deny himself, and follow me. Jesus’ call to us is to complete submission to his will. We don’t get to section off parts of our lives that we get to keep control over. It’s not 50%, 75%, 99% Jesus and we get to keep the rest. It is 100% God’s authority over our lives. To withhold forgiveness is sin. Full stop.

It’s here that it would probably be appropriate to give a caveat, because I understand that forgiveness is hard. For most of us, withholding forgiveness isn’t something that stems out of a petty argument. If you find yourself in a place where you are struggling to forgive, it’s probably a deep, real hurt. To forgive as Jesus calls us to forgive is not to just pretend as though the hurt wasn’t real, or that you weren’t actually wronged and you just made it up. I’m not telling you that the Bible is saying you need to gaslight yourself into thinking you’re being overdramatic and to just let it go. And know that this is something that I’ve walked through in relationships in my life. I’ve had relationships where lines have been stepped on by people I trusted, sometimes multiple times. I’ve had to walk through what it looks like to forgive deep hurts, I’ve had to walk through what it looks like to forgive repeat offenses – this is not something I’m standing up here and barking Biblical orders about, this has been my life. What I’m also not telling you is that once you forgive that the relationship has to necessarily going to look the same as it did before. Sometimes, forgiveness will be followed by the reestablishing of boundaries. All of that deserves a whole other sermon, and as I said earlier, Pastor Jason will preach on reconciliation next week, so put a pin in that for now, but I felt it was important as we talk about the mandate of forgiveness to say that it’s not something that’s easy, it’s not something that is a denial of real hurt a stoicism that denies your own emotions, it’s not even a restoration of relationship back to the way that it was.

With that said, the first reason to forgive is because Jesus commands us to. The second reason is that it reflects a relationship with God. Looking again at the parable, the servant chokes out one of his fellow servants and throws him in prison, and then, picking back up in verse 31… (read through 35). Now, this is something that might cause us to bristle a little bit, and this actually isn’t even the only time that Jesus says something to this end in Matthew. The other place is in the Lord’s Prayer. We all know the part of the prayer, right? Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And then, following the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says this in Matthew 6:14–15: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” And this might cause some tension in us. We’re taught, as Protestants, the idea of salvation by faith alone, and so for some of us, this feels like it’s adding requirements. I thought it was by grace through faith, not of works that no one may boast? Jesus isn’t saying that you have to forgive to secure your salvation, he’s saying that forgiveness is a natural outflow of salvation. If you can’t forgive, then you don’t know God.

And notice that here in Matthew 18, he qualifies it. It’s not just that you forgive, it’s that you forgive from the heart. There’s actually an interesting Greek word in verse 27. It’s translated in the ESV as the king having pity. The word there in the Greek is the word splanchnistheis. And it rooted in a word that refers to someone’s internal organs, and so this is referring not just to feeling bad for someone, it’s to feel moved to compassion and mercy in your whole inner being. I actually love this, one of the transliterations for this word is “to have the bowels yearn.” This word is actually used of the father in the story of the prodigal son. Luke 15:20 says, “his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” That’s the love that God felt towards you. That is the compassion that moved God to send his Son to die for you. I mean, you have to think about the implications for your life of God being so grieved by your sin – not just grieved in that your sin is an affront to God, but grieved in the way that it saddens the heart of God that your sin has alienated you from him – that it moves him in such a way that it’s as though he is feeling it in his inmost being. If you can’t imagine offering that grace to others, then you’ve probably never received it yourself. Again, I’m not saying it’s always going to come easily or naturally to you, but if you have no desire to offer that grace, then you should ask yourself whether you have a relationship with God in the first place.

3. How Do We Forgive?

Again, the answer to this question is a two-parter, and they’re going to go hand-in-hand with the answers to our other questions, but they can both be put under one umbrella answer of we need to recognize who we are. What do we mean by that? Well, first we need to recognize that we aren’t God. Because the truth of the matter is that to withhold forgiveness is to put yourself in the place of God. If you refuse to forgive someone, what are you saying? “That person doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. I want that person to get what they deserve.” But if you are trying to administer justice on your terms, then you are effectively putting yourself in the place of God. You’re making yourself the judge, jury, and the executioner. And the only one who has the right to be any of those things has told you to be none of those things. And if you say, “sure, I can forgive you because God’s gonna take care of it and he’ll make sure you get repaid,” well then you haven’t forgiven from your heart. If you’re forgiving while holding out for the one who is entitled to judge to punish the other person, then you haven’t forgiven from your heart. If you’re forgiving just to make sure you do the right thing then you haven’t forgiven from your heart. Forgiveness is a call to humility, forgiveness is a desire for the best for the other person. The gospel is not about doing the right things to make sure your boxes are checked, it’s about a changed heart that desires to do the right things.

And I think it’s important to note as well that God is himself good, and he is concerned with our good, which means that the things that he commands are good for us. Forgiveness is good for you, in the same way that cauliflower or a vaccine or cold medicine are all good for you. It may not taste good. It may even hurt. But it will be good for you, and if you don’t take your medicine, if you don’t eat your vegetables, you’re going to be spiritually weak and sick and diseased. There’s a famous quote that withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping that the other person dies. You’re harming yourself praying that you can harm the other person. I’ve watched this happen. I had a mentor of mine be plagued and shredded by unforgiveness, and it led to one of the messiest departures from a church I’ve seen. Unforgiveness is a real, serious spiritual threat. Don’t let it be you. Don’t harm yourself hoping to take someone else down with you.

I want to show you something from another part of the New Testament. Let me read to you 1 Peter 4:12-16:

1 Peter 4:12–16 ESV

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.

Now, Peter has in view being persecuted by non-Christians, but I want to submit to you that there is something to be applied to the topic of forgiveness from this passage, and that is this: to forgive is to suffer for the sake of Christ. And when I say suffering, obviously I’m not talking about suffering in the same way that our brothers and sisters in the Middle East or in Nigeria or these places where Christians are persecuted are suffering for the sake of Christ, but there is an element of suffering to offering forgiveness to someone. What does it mean to offer forgiveness? Among other things, it means you’re saying, “I don’t care who is right or wrong.” Again, not saying that there was no wrong committed, but that your submission to God and your relationship with your brother or sister trumps your need to be justified. There’s a very well-known passage in Philippians 2 that talks about the humility of Christ where Paul says that though Jesus was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he humbled himself. When you forgive your brother or sister, you are bringing yourself low. Whether you deserve to be on the pedestal of being right or not, you are giving up your spot on that pedestal. You are sharing in the sufferings of Christ, who chose to bring himself low – even though there was no question of if he deserved to be on a pedestal. And you are suffering for the glory of God. However much I want to be right deep within me, I choose to surrender myself to the will of God because I love him and want nothing more than to glorify him in my own heart and in my relationships. You are saying the same thing that Jesus said in the garden of Gethsemane – not my will, but yours be done.

Which takes us into the second part of recognizing who we are, and that is remembering that we are sinners saved by the grace of God. One of the most influential verses to me in my journey with forgiveness was Colossians 3:13 : “if one has a complaint against another, [forgive] each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” Our forgiveness should flow out of our forgiven-ness. Our forgiveness of others is to be rooted in Jesus’ forgiveness towards us. And where do we see Jesus’ forgiveness towards us on display? We see it in the cross. We have been forgiven an unimaginable debt – it would be more feasible to pay off the debt of 10,000 talents than to pay the debt of sin we owe to a perfectly holy God. On the cross, Jesus receives the unforgiveness that should have been given to us so that we might be forgiven. Even in his suffering, he says in Luke 23 of those mocking him, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He has every right to strike them down, but he humbles himself, he seeks their best, and he entreats God to forgive them. And as an ultimate display of humility, he dies as the sacrificial lamb whose blood atones for every past, present, and future sin for those who place their trust in him. Your past sins are forgiven by his sacrificial death, and your future sins will be forgiven because of his sacrificial death. You are completely, totally, freely forgiven. There is not an ounce of work you have to do to receive the forgiveness of God, you simply place your trust in him and that he has offered you a way back to him, not of your own merit but of Jesus’ merit. This is how you can forgive others. You look at Jesus on the cross. You see him forgiving you completely, totally, freely, expecting no atonement from you, and when you know in your heart that you have been forgiven this way, you become empowered to look at others and forgive them completely, totally, freely, and expect no atonement. Not in your head – the servant knew in his head that he had been forgiven, he still choked the guy who owed him – it has to hit your heart.

So, as we prepare to respond this morning, where do you find yourself? Maybe you’ve never experienced God’s forgiveness, and now is the time to repent of your sin and experience his forgiveness. Part of faith is to believe that when he says that he has forgiven your sin is to believe that you need forgiveness, and part of faith is to believe that you truly have been completely forgiven. Your next step may be to see that you need to experience that forgiveness. Is there someone in your life that you are finding particularly hard to forgive? If so, I urge you to really examine yourself. Have you experienced the grace of God? Have you really sat with the reality that you were a traitor and a rebel in the kingdom of God and that God forgave you and brought you to himself? Meditating on the cross and everything that means will crush your pride and will fill you with a drive to honor the God who would go to this length to save you. Even if it costs you your pride, the love and mercy of God displayed for you in the death of Jesus will change the way you live if you allow it to. It won’t be easy, it won’t be instantaneous, but it will change everything about the way you live.