Grace is Greater than ________
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We are spending four weeks talking about the GREATER than or less than equation.
And here’s the premise for these four weeks:
My Savior, God, to Thee
Grace is greater than whatever.
How great thou art
How great thou art
That’s what Paul says in in a couple of different places: The glorious grace of God is greater.
It’s greater than ________?
It’s greater than ________?
I don’t know what you would put in this blank.
Last week we talked about how grace is greater than our brokenness.
I want you to take a moment to fill in this blank in your head.
I don’t know what you might write.
I don’t know the sins you’ve committed or the mistakes you’ve made.
I don’t know the failures you carry.
I don’t know the regrets that keep you awake at night.
I don’t know the secrets that you keep.
But what I know is this equation: that grace is greater than anything you might write in that blank.
On the one hand, I love talking about the incredible grace of God.
On the other hand, it’s really frustrating to try to explain something that can’t be explained!
With grace, I can explain it; you can read about it; you can hear about it.
But again until you experience it, you don’t really get it.
Until you experience it, you really won’t know what I’m talking about.
But you can see the way people worship.
And You can see the difference grace makes in their worship.
We see it in , where this woman who is forgiven much loves much.
It changes the way she worships.
Grace impacts us at the core of who we are.
If you’re a Christian, grace makes all the difference.
And so we celebrate it as a church, as a community, on a really regular basis.
Because if you’ve experienced God’s grace then you know that it’s like we’ve all been sentenced to life in prison, and we find out we’ve been set free.
It’s like we’ve all been diagnosed with this terminal illness, and we find out there’s a cure.
It’s like we’ve all racked up this huge debt and there’s no way we could pay it, and we find out the debt is forgiven.
Well, of course we’re going to celebrate that!
Of course we’re going to be joyful.
And so we celebrate God’s grace in our life.
But here’s what we’re going to do today:
We’re going to flip the grace coin over, and we’re going to talk about messy grace.
Because when you’re on the receiving end of grace, it’s all good, right?
Everyone likes that, and we love to talk about it.
But when you’re talking about giving grace, it gets a little bit messy.
It gets a little bit hard. We all agree that grace is a lovely concept … as long as we’re not talking about the father who berated you or the spouse who cheated on you, as long as we’re not talking about the boss who fired you, the coworker who stabbed you in the back, the relative who abused you.
Grace is a fine idea as long as you’re on the receiving end, but it’s a lot messier when we are called to give it.
The Bible says in
Each heart knows its own bitterness,
and no one else can share its joy.
that “every heart knows its own bitterness,” meaning that all of us have been hurt.
that “every heart knows its own bitterness,” meaning that all of us have been hurt.
We all carry burdens, even from years ago.
All these sins that have been committed against us, and we remember them.
Maybe you were betrayed, or you were abandoned, or you were abused, or you were victimized, or you were ignored, or you were rejected, or you were embarrassed, or you were bullied — grace suddenly gets a little bit messier.
Here’s what we’re going to do. If you have your Bibles, turn to .
We’re going to study together a parable called “The Unmerciful Servant,” and here’s what we’re going to learn:
Grace is only grace if it goes both ways.
Biblical grace, grace that comes from God — the only way that it’s grace from God is if it goes both ways.
If all you do is receive but you never give, then you’ve stopped short of what grace really is.
What I really want to make clear is that the extent to which we are willing to give reveals the extent to which we have received grace.
It reveals how much we really have received from God and how much we’re just faking it.
It all becomes real when we’re called to give it.
Let me put it to you this way, though this will make some people uncomfortable.
The litmus test for the reality of the Gospel in your life is the extent to which you give grace and forgiveness to the person who’s hurt you the most … and deserves it the least.
In that moment you find out that God’s grace in your life is real.
Look at .
Peter comes to Jesus with a question. Like a lot of Peter’s questions this one was loaded.
It’s a general question, but I feel certain there’s a specific story that motivates it. Verse 21 says, “THEN PETER CAME TO JESUS AND ASKED, ‘LORD, HOW MANY TIMES SHALL I FORGIVE MY BROTHER OR SISTER WHO SINS AGAINST ME? UP TO SEVEN TIMES?’”
This is a math problem.
It’s an equation.
Peter throws a number out there.
Is seven times greater than grace?
Now if you know Peter then you know Peter probably thinks he’s being pretty gracious.
In fact, Jewish rabbis taught that you would forgive someone three times, but on the fourth time you didn’t have to forgive them.
So when Peter throws out the number seven he’s very confidently saying, “Would you say seven times, Jesus?
Or is that just what I would say?”
He’s feeling very sure that he’s going to get a compliment, that Jesus is going to turn to him and say, “Peter! Seven times?
That’s so generous!
Why can’t all the disciples be like you?” He thinks that’s what’s going to happen.
He’s throwing out this number that seems really gracious, but don’t you think that Peter had someone in mind when he asks this question?
There’s someone in life who hurt him
— not once, not twice, but my guess is exactly seven times — and he’s ready to be done.
Maybe for you it’s not a certain amount, but it is “the degree of offense.”
It’s not that you’ve been hurt seven times.
It was just one time, but the intensity of the hurt is so great that it feel like you’ve been hurt seven times all at once.
Who was Peter talking about?
I think it’s safe to assume that it’s probably someone he knew quite well.
Sure, sometimes people only come into your life just long enough to bring about destruction and devastation.
But most of the time the people who hurt us the most are the people that we love, right?
Because we give those people our hearts, and when we give them our hearts we also give them power over us.
And that power can cause a lot of damage.
Now there are some of you who learned early on not to do that.
Your heart isn’t safe if it goes to someone else.
So you’ve worked really hard most of your life to make sure that no one has that power over you.
You don’t give your heart to anybody.
You’ve carefully built up walls around your heart, and no one gets through that.
Because you’ve been hurt and you’re not going to be hurt again.
Because someone you loved and someone you trusted … they let you down, they hurt you, they betrayed you.
And so you don’t give anyone that power, because if you give your heart away then it’s only a matter of time before you’re hurt again.
I don’t know who it was for Peter.
And I don’t know what name would come to your mind.
But I know that behind this question for all of us is probably a name and probably a story.
Personally, I think Peter’s question seems good.
I think it’s probably one of those we’d all like to ask Jesus. How far is too far?
How much is too much?
When does grace run out?
So Peter sets Jesus up with this equation. Here’s what he wants to know: “Okay, Jesus, when is this greater than grace?
When does the hurt in my life, when does the pain that’s been caused me — when does that outweigh grace?
When does hurt become greater than grace?”And Jesus answers. In verse 22 he says, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Maybe your version says, “Seventy times seven.”
What’s Jesus saying here?
He’s saying, “Grace is never less than. Grace is always greater than.” Always.
We object to this.
We say to Jesus, “Let me tell you about my story. Let me tell you the story of my broken heart.
Let me tell you the story of my betrayal.
Let me tell you the story of my pain, of the injustice I’ve experienced.”
It doesn’t matter, Jesus says.
Grace is greater
When we hear that, we might accept it as truth because we’re Christians and we believe what Jesus says.
You think, “Okay, well, if Jesus said, ‘Grace is greater than,’ if he said, ‘Seventy times seven,’ then alright, I guess it’s true.”
But emotionally it’s hard to get our heads around.
We might acknowledge it’s true, but it certainly doesn’t feel true.
If you’re the one who’s been hurt, if you’re the one who’s been left, if you’re the one who’s been abandoned and abused — if that’s you, then you might say that it’s true, but it just doesn’t feel true, because it feels like grace runs out.
Jesus gives us a parable to help us emotionally get our heads around this truth that grace is greater than.
The parable begins in verse 23. “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.”
Imagine this high-powered, wealthy CEO-type who looks at the books.
He looks at the accounting books and he wants to collect.
And so verse 24 says, “He began the settlement, and a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him.”
That’s a lot of money — ten thousand bags of gold. It is the equivalent, roughly, to about one hundred and fifty million dollars for us.
Or maybe this will put it in perspective for you: In Jesus’ day, that was roughly ten times the national budget.
It’s an astronomical number.
It’s a debt that this man could never repay.
Verse 25 continues, “Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.”
So in the ancient world it was not unusual for there to be especially cruel treatment to someone who owed but wasn’t paying.
They would be sold into slave labor.
Their wife and children would be sold into slave labor.
Everything they owned would be sold.
And so that’s what this king says.
He says, “Look, you owe me one hundred and fifty million dollars. You’re not gonna make a dent in that, so I’m just gonna cut my losses. I’m gonna sell you and your family and everything that you own, and we’ll close the books.”
So it’s this huge debt.
Now, clearly really early on here in this parable, this is meant to reflect our standing with God.
We talked about this last week.
That all of us have sinned and that sin has racked up a debt that we can never repay.
Now we live in denial of it.
We have all kinds of ways of trying to pretend like that debt isn’t there.
We compare ourselves to others.
And then we finally maybe accept some of it, and we try to work our way out of it. But look, it’s too big.
There’s no amount of good deeds or benevolent acts that’s going to balance the books.
And so begins with this reminder that we all owe this huge debt.
The Bible says we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
The Bible says that if you’re guilty of breaking one of the commandments, you’re guilty of breaking all of them.
It’s a huge debt.
And there’s no sense in denying it because God knows. He knows! He’s kept track of it all.
There are all these things we think we get away with that no one else knows about.
Your teacher doesn’t know about the paper you plagiarized in college, but God knows about that.
You may have deleted the history on your computer, but he has a history of the websites you’ve visited.
And no one may know about your drinking problem, but he knows.
And the windows on your house may be shut tightly so the neighbors can’t hear you yelling, but God can hear it from heaven.
And the boss may not know about the embezzlement; God knows about it.
He knows about it all.
He knows right now about the pride that some of you have because I didn’t just give an example that applied to you.
He knows about that.
He keeps track of all of it.
The Bible says nothing in all creation is hidden from his sight.
He pulls up our account.
Huge debt. Can’t pay it.
No way.
Back to . Verse 26 says, when the servant is called to his master to pay his debt, “At this the servant fell on his knees before him.” What else is he going to do? He says to his master, “Be patient with me, and I will pay back everything.”
Well, no, he won’t. It’s ridiculous.
There’s no way for him to pay that back.
There’s no way for him to make this right.
There’s no way for him to balance the books.
Jesus, especially, uses this astronomical number to make the point that repayment is not an option.
He has no chance of it.
But verse 27 says, “The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.”
One hundred and fifty million dollars!
And the king just cancels the debt, and he lets him go.
It is this incredible act of grace.
He doesn’t extend the note.
He doesn’t lower the monthly payments.
He cancels it.
He cancels it, he erases it, and he lets him go.
There are two verbs used here. One is translated “cancel the debt”; the other one is translated “let him go.”
Both of these verbs could be translated — and are translated in other places — “to forgive.”
But the verbs are used differently here.
And I want you to pack that away, because we’re going to talk about it in a few moments.
But first let me finish the story, because it takes this disturbing twist.
Verse 28 says, “But when the servant went out, he found out that one of his fellow servants owed him a hundred silver coins.” Twenty bucks
— he owed him twenty bucks.
“He grabbed him and began to choke him.
‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.”
This guy who’s been forgiven one hundred and fifty million dollars refuses to give twenty bucks’ worth of forgiveness.
And he grabs him by the throat and demands to be paid back.
Verse 29 says, “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’”
That’s the exact quote from what this guy had said to the master.
The second servant is asking for the same grace that the first servant had received, except to a much lesser degree.
Now if you’ve never heard this story before, what do you think is going to happen? Well, of course! Of course he’s going to forgive him. Of course!
He was just forgiven one hundred and fifty million dollars.
Of course he’s going to show mercy.
He was just shown mercy.
Verse 30 says, “But he refused. Instead, he went of and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.”
Now, verse 31 is a very important verse that’s really easy to overlook in this story.
Verse 31 says, “When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
“Jesus said the fellow servants are the ones who reported him. The fellow servants saw how much grace had been extended but that this guy himself refused to give it, and they were outraged.
Why?
Why were they so upset?
It’s because they all lived in community.
They all lived in this community together where they had a master who didn’t treat them as servants but as them as sons and daughters, a master who was over-the-top benevolent, generous and gracious.
This is the community they live in.
And when one of their own receives that grace but then refuses to give it, it’s a big problem, and they are outraged.
Maybe your version says, “They were greatly distressed,” or, “They were very sad.”
These are the appropriate responses when we see someone in our community who has received grace but then refuses to demonstrate it — feelings of outrage.
It probably seems strange a bit that within a sermon on grace there’s also a call to outrage.
But look, it’s the only way that this little community here works.
It’s not going to work if we just receive grace but refuse to give it.
And so when we see brothers and sisters who have received God’s grace act ungraciously — that’s a big problem.
When we see someone who’s received incredible grace start being judgmental to other people whose struggles are different than their own, we’re of course very distressed.
When legalisms set in and try to make ourselves feel better by imposing rules that aren’t even in the Bible — that’s a problem, right?
Therefore, within this parable of grace there is also a call for some righteous outrage.
It says that as a church we’re not going to be okay with “ungrace.”
It’s not okay when one of our own is judgmental, condemning, gossiping about someone else who comes in and looks different or struggles with something different.
Because we all look different and struggle with different things!
And so within this community in the parable is this determination to reflect the master’s heart.
They tell the master, and the master finds out that this guy, who had received incredible grace, was refusing to give it.
Verse 32, it says, “THEN THE MASTER CALLED THE SERVANT IN. ‘YOU WICKED SERVANT,’ HE SAID, ‘I CANCELED ALL THAT DEBT OF YOURS BECAUSE YOU BEGGED ME TO. SHOULDN’T YOU HAVE HAD MERCY ON YOUR FELLOW SERVANT JUST AS I HAD ON YOU?’ IN ANGER HIS MASTER HANDED HIM OVER TO THE JAILERS TO BE TORTURED, UNTIL HE SHOULD PAY BACK ALL HE OWED.”
Well, that’s going to take a long time.
How long is it going to take him in prison to earn a hundred and fifty million dollars? A long time … like forever.
He’s never going to pay it back.
He’s going to spend the rest of his existence in prison, living with this overwhelming guilt over what he did. Do
you know what that’s called? It’s called hell.
Oftentimes when Jesus tells a parable the takeaway is a little bit vague. He’ll let people think through it and go home with and examine the meaning and the implications.
But there’s no vague message here.
Here’s how Jesus ends this parable:
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Now I know that immediately some of you push back on this. You say, “What? You’re telling me that if I don’t forgive the person who hurt me, who abused me, who betrayed me, who cheated me, who abandoned me — you’re telling me if I don’t forgive them, then God won’t forgive me?”
I’m not saying that. That’s just what the parable says. I’m just reading it.
In Jesus talks about this, and the lesson is clear.
Jesus, the one who is getting ready to pay your bill, says, “Look, I’ll pay it of. The debt is gone.
But don’t just receive grace from me.
You need to extend it to others.” It’s not okay for you to come here week after week and celebrate God’s grace that you’ve received and then still hold onto a grudge, or hang onto the bitterness, or let resentment build, or allow your hurt to become hatred.
I know it’s not fair. I know that.
Because those people owe you something, right?
They owe you at least an explanation.
They owe you a childhood.
They owe you a marriage.
They owe you money.
But forgiving them — that’s grace.
You will never be asked to give more of it than you’ve already received.
So Jesus answers Peter’s equation with an equation of his own.
Here’s the equation Jesus gives.
He tells Peter that a hundred and fifty million dollars is greater than twenty bucks.
In case you weren’t sure, what you’ve been forgiven of is a lot greater than what you’ll ever have to forgive.
This is not to make light of what you’ll have to forgive.
It’s to say that the more you understand the holiness of God, the more you understand yourself, then the more you realize how true this is.
I heard a quote the other day from Pastor John Laroe, and here’s the way he puts it: “If the biggest sinner you know isn’t you, then you don’t know yourself very well.”
There was a time I would’ve really pushed back against that.
I would’ve said, “Well, look, I’m a sinner, but I’m not the biggest sinner I know.”
And in saying that, I was demonstrating my sin.
This quote makes a lot more sense to me than it used to.
Paul’s words to Timothy are I am the chief of sinners.
He says, “Of who I am the worst.”
circle the verb “am” and wrote “present tense.”
Paul’s not saying, “I was the worst”;
he says, “I am the worst.”
The more you know yourself and the more you understand the holiness of God, the more you recognize that the equation makes sense.
We’ve been forgiven this debt, and the Bible says in that we are to forgive as the Lord forgave us.
And we know that he forgives us for a lot.
As we wrap up, I want to give you a few quick equations that will help us choose grace.
Number one: grace is greater than repayment.
Repayment is this idea that you have to make it right by God. I grew up being taught as a child that if I hurt someone, if I was disrespectful, if I was disobedient, then my job was to make it right. So I needed to say something or I needed to do something to make it right with the person I hurt. It’s a good lesson for a child to learn.
But it developed this unbiblical approach to forgiveness and grace
When it comes to forgiveness, when someone hurts me
“When you say, once you do something to make things right, then I will forgive you.”
that’s not forgiveness. That’s not grace.
It’s justice.
See, we want repayment, but what do you do? What do you do when you’re hurt so badly that there’s nothing that can be said and there’s nothing that can be done to make it right? What are you going to do then? It’s going to happen to you if it hasn’t happened already — someone will do something to you that is so wrong and so hurtful that you know there’s nothing they can say. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing will make it right.
And that’s when grace comes in.
The Bible says in verse 27 of the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant that the master canceled the debt.
The idea is that he erased it completely, right?
He didn’t just extend the note or make it interest only. He canceled the debt.
That’s what God has done for us.
It’s not earned.
Trust may need to be earned, but grace is not earned.
When you decide that giving grace is dependent on the person who hurt you making things right, then you need to find a new word, because that’s not grace.
Secondly, grace is greater than revenge.
Revenge says, “I’m going to hurt the person the way that I’ve been hurt.” And that’s what a lot of us do.
We spend our lives with that approach.
Someone has referred to this as “sitting in God’s chair.” You don’t know their story. You don’t know how they’ve been hurt. You don’t know what God’s going to do in the future. You don’t know how he’s going to redeem and work things for them. You don’t know.
So when you decide you’re going to take things into your own hands, you’re playing God.
The Bible says in , “Don’t take revenge, but leave room for God’s wrath.”
This means that you’re going to release the right to retaliate.
That’s what it says in verse 27. It says, “He canceled the debt and let him go.”
The master let him go.
Release the person who has sinned against you.
Let him go.
Let her go.
It’s not fair.
I know it’s not fair.
They don’t deserve it.
I know they don’t deserve it. I know that.
Let them go.
It doesn’t mean you’re not going to hurt.
Grace doesn’t mean that you won’t feel pain anymore.
In some ways grace means that you’re choosing to live with pain and the consequences of another person’s sin.
That person can try to make things right, and that might make you feel better.
But ultimately, when you’re really hurt, there’s nothing they can say and there’s nothing they can do.
It just hurts.
Can you think of another story where someone took on your pain and your suffering and said, “I’ll take the consequences of your sin upon myself”?
Lastly, grace is greater than resentment.
Resentment says, “I’m going to quietly become more and more angry,” which is how a lot of us handle hurt from people we’re close to.
We know that life will go on, but we hold onto bitterness.
Maybe a lot of little things build up, and we quietly become angrier and angrier, and we nurse the offense and relive the pain.
We have this playback button in our head where we constantly push play, and we just remember how we’ve been taken advantage of or how we’ve been disrespected or how we’ve been mistreated.
We quietly become angrier and angrier.
But when you choose anger, when you choose resentment, do you know who ultimately pays for it?
You do.
Someone defined resentment as “drinking a bottle of poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
It’s not very effective.
Remember that the servant is forgiven a hundred and fifty million bucks, refuses to forgive twenty dollars, and then gets the second servant thrown in prison.
But do you know who paid for that, in the end?
He did.
That’s how it works. You
can punish your offender.
You can say that they deserve it. And you can lock them up and put them in prison and you can make them pay for it, but guess who ultimately pays that bill?
You do.
You’re the one who pays for it.
I love the words of the Matthew West song “Forgiveness” where he says, “The prisoner that it really frees is you.”
Here’s the perspective Jesus gives us: You’re never going to be asked to forgive more than you’ve been forgiven.
Grace is greater than.
It’s greater than your sins.
It’s greater than your hurts.
Because we owe this massive debt to God, but through Jesus he wipes it clean.
Our records are exchanged with the record of Jesus.
He takes ours upon himself, and we get his.
We are now, the Bible says, without blemish or defect. We are made righteous and holy.
Our sins are removed from us as far as the east is from the west and they’re buried in the deepest part of the ocean.
That’s us.
That’s what we’ve received, and so that is what we give.
Let me wrap it up just with this idea. The key to giving grace — hard, messy grace — is to stop thinking about what’s been done to you and to start thinking about what Jesus has done for you.
That’s it.
And it’s hard.
I’m not saying that’s easy.
I’m just saying that when the bitterness starts to grow, when the rage starts to set in, you have to let grace take over.
You have to stop thinking about what’s been done to you, and you need to replace it with thoughts of what has been done for you.
Because what has been done for you will give you the grace to forgive what has been done to you.
Let’s pray.