Sermon Tone Analysis

A Call to Forgive

VIDEO: signs of forgiveness:

This text represents

I’m a “Forgiveness Aspirant,” not an expert.

I’m WAY better at holding a grudge than I am at letting it go,

but for the most part, I want to be gracious and I really do believe that forgiveness is primary expectation in Christian life.

Not holding a grudge and not getting bitter and not wanting to get even when someone wrongs us is the exact opposite of what comes natural to us and what we feel like doing.

We want to see them come begging for forgiveness.

We want to make them agonize a bit before we forgive.

We’d often rather hold onto a grudge and let bitterness poison our spirit before we’d forgive – especially considering some of the things that have been done to us by our enemies and even by our friends and family.

I know that despite the hurt, we all need crawl our way back into the Light.

You can’t move on to the new life until you’ve either unpacked the old one—or burned it down to the ground.

Jesus was so serious about this truth that he also said in Matthew 5:23-24, “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee: leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother and then come and offer thy gift.”

(offering for sins against God.

You see forgiveness is such a powerful thing in our lives.

It is the easiest thing to receive and the hardest to give out.

But if we just remember the story of the unforgiving servant, what we realize is that when we truly have an understanding of what I have been forgiven of, it is easy for me to use that toward others.

It is not only necessary but freeing from the hurt in my own heart.

The only way to heal from a hurt in life is to forgive.

And what we find in forgiveness is that the prison it truly frees is me!

Matthew’s Advice to a Divided Community.

It begins and it is framed by Peter’s initial question on how often he should forgive.

How often should we forgive?

Lord, how often ywill my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?

Jesus’ answer?

seventy times seven

DISCLAIMER:

If you have been wounded in your past; if you have been victimized, I want you to know that we stand with you and in no way do we want to give you the idea that you’re wrong for your feelings.

If you are presently in a harmful situation I don’t want you to think that I am encouraging you to take more abuse.

I am looking that this text and I am speaking about the tendency for us to hold on to hurts.

It is interesting to me this parable is sandwiched in-between Peter’s trying to wiggle out of forgiving and a statement on divorce and in particular divorce related to a hardened heart.

So this is a story about hardness, stubbornness,

“seventy times seven,” which is forever and ever forgiveness; repeated/perpetual forgiveness.

Bernard Brandon Scott, “The King’s Accounting: Matthew 18:23–34,” Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985): 429

By the way Jesus, isn’t saying that we’re to keep tally or that there would ever come a point where forgiveness would be exhausted.

No Jesus is saying that our forgiveness for others should be unlimited.

It is a plea for humility, forgiveness and mercy.

This is hard.

It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury.

But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life?—to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son—

Matthew locates a story of a king and his servants.

Tax Farmers Trial-Success-rewards

the parallel passage (Luke 17:4) the challenge to forgive appears without the narrative of the unforgiving servant.

Matthew was a tax collector, so this story is very relevant to him.

A “twice told tale” of the King’s forgiveness with the servant’s lack of it

a story of a king and how he relates to his servants and a story of how God deals with those who do not forgive.

What the heavenly father will do to to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

Oh great

me no likey

Will do… to every one of you

Let the Holy Spirit sink that in...

if you do not…from your heart...

What does this mean?

Not forgive?

if you do not?

from your heart?

“Don’t do likewise!”

a negative example:

It should emphasize to us the King’s mercy and not his revenge.

The main point of the parable is Matt 18:33:

33 And shouldn’t you have (dei) had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’

“Dei” being, YOU, nature

“everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive”

C.S. Lewis

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

Marianne Williamson

. . .

you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart—every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.

The difference between this situation and the one in such you are asking God’s forgiveness is this.

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough.

But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine percent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent guilt which is left over.

To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

How can we do it?

Remembering where we stand

Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night ‘forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’

We are offered forgiveness on no other terms.

To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves.

There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: Harper Collins, 2001; Originally published 1949), 181-183 (paragraphing mine).

This parable lists three things we need to pay attention to, let’s go through them:

Took pity on him, canceled the debt, and let him go.

Take Pity

take pity on the person who has wronged you

If you want to avoid the feast of fools, if you want to avoid being twisted and being put into prison by your anger, the first thing you have to do is take pity on the person who has wronged you.

That doesn’t just mean you feel sorry for them.

This is a very important word in the Bible, this word that’s translated sometimes “have compassion,” sometimes “take pity.”

have your heart go out to somebody

The word literally means to have your heart go out to somebody.

What does it mean to have your heart go out to somebody?

It’s a good, vivid term.

What does it mean?

identifying with them, you’re putting your heart in them, in their shoes, in their life, you are feeling something of what they feel

You identify with the perpetrator.

To have pity on somebody who has wronged you means you deliberately do the internal work of reminding yourself of how much you have in common.

You put yourself in their place and you empathize, you sympathize.

“I’m really the same.”

That is not the sort of thing your heart really wants to do.

Your heart wants to accentuate the differences between you and the perpetrator, the wrongdoer, but according to the text, what you must do if you’re ever going to avoid the jailhouse of anger is you have to actually identify, as much as you can, with the person and say, “I’m really the same.”

Some years ago, I read an article (which I often refer to because it’s so good) that said when you are bitter towards someone … In a sense, you stay bitter toward people by caricaturing them, creating one-dimensional, distorted views of them.

That’s how you stay angry at them.