Sermon Tone Analysis
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Anger
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Disgust
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Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Tone of specific sentences
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“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:
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