If you do not forgive
“If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.”
Matthew 18:21-35
Outline
1. Lord’s Prayer
· How many have every prayed the Lord’s Prayer?
· Not surprising that most of us have. We are going to pray that today actually.
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
· Okay stop. I want us to stop there for a moment and consider, do we really mean that when we pray, “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.
· You understand right, that what we are praying for God to do is forgive us like we forgive others. That can be a scary thing.
· Realistically if you are like me, you probably have prayed this prayer a thousand times and never really given it much thought, but I want us to think about it today. Because after the prayer Jesus makes some comments that is one of those things that sometimes we may wish he never said.
· Ill. There was a season of my life where the Lord’s prayer was my standard prayer. It was what I prayed before I fell asleep. A lot of the time I said it without really thinking probably even falling asleep before my head hit the pillow.
o Ill. Me driving trying to remember the most common version.
· Jesus doesn’t just stope with the prayer though, he makes some comments after the prayer. Look at Matt. 6:14-15:
For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
· That’s the scary part.
· Another part of Scripture addresses this issue of unforgiveness. It’s in…
2. Parable of Unmerciful Servant – Matthew 18:21-35 (paraphrase)
One day a wealthy business owner decides to collect all the money that people owe him. He has one particular employee who is into him for millions of dollars. So he calls the guy into his office and says “Time to pay up: Gimme my money.” And the guy says what everybody who owes somebody money says, “I don’t have it.” But this guy’s not lying: it’s millions of dollars? He’s not got it to pay back.
But he begs and promises to work hard to pay it all back, if the boss will just give him some time. The business guy says “No, I’m not going to wait, I’m going to take the collateral you put down, and sell you and your family as slaves until you make enough to pay me back”. -- A little different than getting hit with late fees and high interest rates, huh? -- Odds are him and his family would have been slaves for the rest of their lives because no way could they work off that kind of debt. This guy’s reaction is pretty much how I would expect a guy to react after he realizes he has just sold his family into slavery - He falls to his knees and begs for time to pay him back. -- The owner, in an unexplained and amazing moment of graciousness says, “No, I’m not gonna give you time to pay it back. Just call it even. Your debt is forgiven.”
Now at this point in the story, how would you expect the guy with the forgiven debt to react? -- How would you react? All your debt is wiped out – no more …
- mortgage payment,
- car payment,
- credit card payments,
· school loans – all of it- poof, gone.
How does this employee who’s just been forgiven millions react? His reaction is as amazing as the owner’s actions. The guy who’s just been forgiven millions of dollars, doesn’t celebrate - not even one attempted cartwheel. He immediately goes out, finds a co-worker who owes him about 10 bucks, and starts choking the guy saying: “Gimme me the money you owe me. Gimme my money now!” Can you believe that? That’s pretty messed-up, isn’t it? The guy he goes after says he can’t pay it back (sound familiar?), so he has him thrown into jail.
· I don’t know about you, but that’s just plain messed up. When you hear it told like this, it makes you think that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Why would this guy who had millions of debt erased not erase the small amount of debt that someone owed him?
A part of the answer may lay in the fact that brain-researchers tell us that when we dwell on vengeful thoughts, it stimulates what they call pleasure centers in the brain. Kind of like drugs do. Thoughts of vengeance actually feel good . . . for a while. And it’s true isn’t it? Unforgiveness feels so empowering, doesn’t it? We play the tapes over and over again . . .
- How could this person do this to me?
- I can’t believe they did this!
- The nerve . . .
- They owe me big-time.
That kind of head-talk is all pretty intoxicating stuff. So sometimes we’re drawn to unforgiveness on one level because it feels good.
· I think the unmerciful servant’s motivation actually lays elsewhere. If you back up to verse 26-27, we read this:
The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
· This guy didn’t ask for forgiveness. He asked for time. Time to repay. And when got forgiveness, he didn’t celebrate. He went immediately out to get money out of someone else.
· I think what’s happening here is that the guy never accepted forgiveness. I think in this guys mind he was going to try and pay back his debt. I don’t think he was being greedy. He just didn’t accept the forgiveness that was offered him. In his mind he was it couldn’t be real. Surely the master didn’t really forgive him. So he thinks he still owes him.
· He didn’t receive forgiveness because he didn’t really understand forgiveness
· Before we move on, I need to point out at the end of the story when the master finds out what the guy did, he throws him in jail to be tortured until he can pay back all that he owed. Catch that. In jail, tortured until he can pay back… There’s no way he will every pay it back.
· And then Jesus says this:
This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart (35).
· Unforgiveness is serious business. We simply cannot afford to ignore it.
· Now let’s be clear, Jesus is NOT saying that to refuse to forgive someone is the unforgivable sin. Jesus point is that it is unconscionable, outrageous and dangerous for a person who knows how special it is to be forgiven by God to then refuse to forgive another. Jesus is using language to wake us up, shake us up and to get our attention as to how incredibly messed-up it is to not forgive people when we claim to be forgiven people.
· We may say we accept God’s forgiveness but then try to collect on debts we think are owed to us. That’s not really receiving forgiveness. We are not operating on a grace based system. We are trying to live on an earned base system. Whenever someone wrongs me they must pay:
o comments,
o looks,
o subtle or not-so-subtle reminders of what they did,
o resentment,
o gossip,
o going over and over in our minds whatever it is they said, or did, or didn’t do . . .
· And why do we do this?
o Well, it feels good…for awhile.
o But it really begins with this failure to understand forgiveness..God’s forgiveness. We do not see ourselves as being forgiven of an insurmountable debt.
· If the problem of the servant in this particular story is not really accepting and understanding forgiveness then that’s the key. We have to understand forgiveness.
- Forgiveness is not…
- Forgiveness is not denial or dismissing the wrong that’s been done.
· Sometimes people will say “Don’t worry about it, no big deal” and think that’s forgiveness, but it’s not. Forgiveness is not making light of something that really mattered, that’s just being dishonest with yourself.
· Some think of forgiveness as “fuggitaboutit”
- Forgiveness is not the same as healing.
· Sometimes people will say, “I thought I’d forgiven this person, but I still feel a lot of pain over what they did, so I must not have forgiven them, huh?” We tend to think we think that real forgiveness should make the pain of what someone did go away, or maybe the memory of it. -- You know, “Forgive and forget” that’s in the Bible, isn’t it? Nope, it’s not. Sorry. Tricked you. And it’s not in the Bible because how I feel is usually evidence of emotional healing, not forgiveness. Many times forgiveness is given to someone a long time before what they did to us has emotionally healed. Somebody once said, “You can forgive without healing, but you cannot heal without forgiving.” Forgiveness is the beginning of the healing process.
- Forgiveness is not a one-time decision. · We also tend to think forgiveness is some big one-time decision that we make and if we do it right, then the resentment will go away and it will be like nothing happened. But the reality is that forgiveness is a lot like working out. You can join the gym, but just because you join doesn’t get you in shape. You actually have to work out. I know..weird.
· Forgiveness of some significant wrong is usually like that. I make the big decision to forgive, but it doesn’t stop there. One of the definitions of forgiveness that I love is simply this: Forgiveness is having every right to punish someone who has wronged you, but choosing not to.
· Each time I have the chance to hurt that person for what they did to me (with an unkind word, or a sharp look, or with some other kind of payback),
· Each time I pass up the opportunity to hurt them back for hurting me, that’s like one forgiveness rep.
· And we will know that we stay strong and healthy by repeating the reps. You will grow in your capacity to forgive. And the good news is that over time it gets easier and more natural. Nobody can say how long it will take to start feeling better, but remember, “You cannot heal without forgiving, but you can forgive without healing.”
This is what forgiveness is not, so what is forgiveness. The best understanding of forgiveness we have is God’s forgiveness.
4. God’s forgiveness is…
Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgivena whose sins are coveredb. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against himc and in whose spirit is no deceit.
-Psalm 32:1-2
a. Carrying sin away.
· We could look at other Scriptures in the OT and see that that exact same word is used to convey the idea of carrying something away.
· Here it is saying that God carries away our sin.
· That is significant because what happens when something is carried away is that it is carried out of your hands, your presence to someplace else.
· That’s what God does with our sin. He carries it away from us. With forgiveness sin is no longer with us.
- Covering sin so it is unrecognizable. – Gen. 38:15 · In Gen. 38 we read about an incident between a man named Judah and his daughter-n-law.
When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face.”
· That’s the same Hebrew word. And that’s what God does with our sin. He covers it so it is unrecognizable.
- Not counting sin against us. – 2 Cor. 5:19 · This is more like a financial way of looking at it. What happens here is that there is a debt owed, just like in our story earlier, but the debt is not counted against you.
· So it would be like Citibank calling me up and saying, “Mr. Gamble, I am calling to inform you that Citibank is not longer counting your credit card balance against you. It has been paid for by the company.”
· What was once your responsibility, suddenly gets taken out of your hands and counted against someone else.
· That someone else, is Jesus.
· Jesus on the cross carries away our sin and by His blood he covers our sin so we don’t recognize it and then because he pays the price for our sin, it is no longer counted against us.
· Just to help us picture this, I’ve brought some garbage today…
· What happens with our garbage?
a. The garbage company takes it away. They carry it away from us.
b. They take responsibility for it. It is no longer ours
c. And then they eventually bury it until it becomes unrecognizable.
i. Bobby was telling about an old garbage dump in Cinc. Right next to a school. But because so much time had passed, it was unrecognizable as a garbage dump. They even built tennis courts on top.
· This is how God treats our garbage:
a. God takes our sin
b. God takes ownership of our sin.
c. God covers our sin so that it is unrecognizable.
i. The actual place where Jesus was crucified was an ancient garbage dump.
· Jesus on the cross carries away our sin and by His blood he covers our sin so we don’t recognize it and then because he pays the price for our sin, it is no longer counted against us.
5. When we understand how God has chosen to forgive us, how can we choose not to forgive others?
· Our capacity to forgive increases with our understanding of God’s forgiveness.
- It is a process. * It can begin today when you choose to forgive.
· When you choose to remember how much you have been forgiven.
· If you have been thinking of someone you need to forgive, then I would ask you to pray for two things:
· God’s help to forgive them.
· A constant reminder of how much God has forgiven you.
· Warren – what I realized is that he wanted me to pay.
· Forgiveness is messy business. It doesn’t mean things will wrap up nice and neat.
· We are going to watch a video at the end which is a retelling of a short story that Jesus told. It’s a reminder of everything we have talked about today.
He who has been forgiven little loves little.
Luke 7:47
But if you have been forgiven much, you will love much.