FORGIVE AND FORGIVEN

Introduction

-{Matthew 18}

-Corrie Ten Boom and her family resisted the Nazis by hiding Jews in their home. They were ultimately discovered and sent to a concentration camp. Corrie barely survived until the end of the war; all her family members died in captivity. Seared by this terrible trial by fire, Corrie’s faith in God also survived, and she spent much of her time in the post-war years traveling in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, sharing her faith in Christ.

On one occasion in 1947, while speaking in a church in Munich, she noticed a balding man in a gray overcoat near the rear of the room. She had been speaking on the subject of God’s forgiveness, but her heart froze within her when she recognized the man. She could picture him as she had seen him so many times before, in his blue Nazi uniform with the visored cap—the cruelest of the guards at the Ravensbruck Camp where Corrie had suffered the most horrible indignities, and where her own sister had died. Yet here he was, at the end of her talk, coming up the aisle toward her with his hand thrust out. “Thank you for your fine message,” he said. “How wonderful it is to know that all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”

Corrie had said that in her talk. She had spoken so easily of God’s forgiveness, but here was a man whom she despised and condemned with every fiber of her being. She couldn’t take his hand! She couldn’t extend forgiveness to this Nazi oppressor, could she? She realized that this man didn’t remember her—how could he remember one prisoner among thousands?

“You mentioned Ravensbruck,” the man continued, his hand still extended. “I was a guard there. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. But since then, I’ve come to know Jesus as my Lord and Savior. It has been hard for me to forgive myself for all the cruel things I did but I know that God has forgiven me. And please, if you would, I would like to hear from your lips too that God has forgiven me.” And Corrie recorded her response in her book:

I stood there—I whose sins had again and again been forgiven—and could not forgive. It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. For I had to do it. I knew that. It was as simple and as horrible as that. And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. And so, woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me.

And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, and sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. “I forgive you, brother,” I cried. “With all my heart!”

For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.

-Most of us haven’t had such traumatic events in our lives, and hopefully we will not experience those things. And hopefully we haven’t been or won’t be as sinned against as Corrie was. And yet, we too sometimes come face to face with people who have wronged us in some way, big or small. What do we do?

-As we continue looking at Jesus’ parables, we find another parable speaking about forgiveness as a kingdom value. I spoke last week about our response of love toward Jesus because of the forgiveness we have received—we are forgiven much so we love much. If we don’t love much we don’t think much of God’s forgiveness if we have even received it at all.

-In today’s parable Jesus advocated that mercy and forgiveness are not only kingdom values that we receive for ourselves, but they are also values that we extend toward others, no matter what they had done. Divine mercy and forgiveness received leads to our own mercy and forgiveness freely given to others. May God help us in what truly is a struggle.

READ Matthew 18:21-35

-I want to begin with some context to help us where this parable came from. Jesus had just taught the section that we attribute to church discipline. When a brother sins against you, go talk to him yourself. If they won’t listen to you or make things right take some others with you, and if they don’t listen to them then bring them before the church. When someone clearly sins against you through broken laws according to Scripture (they stole something from you, they lied about you, etc.), this is what you do. This is also a good procedure for reconciling when there has been some sort of personal dispute that doesn’t have anything to do with sinning according to Scripture. So, it brings up the topic of forgiveness—someone did something to you, and you forgive them.

-This is all well and good, and the disciples are fine with this, but in natural human thinking there has to be a limit to how much you forgive someone, right? I mean, they can’t just keep sinning against you and you just keep forgiving them, can you?

~There were Jewish rabbinic teachings that said that you forgive someone up to 3 times, and then after that you just kind of forget it. They based these teachings on twisting some verses in the book of Amos and elsewhere. If someone sins against you a fourth time, then curse them or whatever.

-So, after Jesus taught about dealing with someone who sinned against you, Peter asks the natural question about how many times you actually forgive your brother or sister who sins against you. He asks: Should I forgive them up to 7 times?

~Peter thought he was being pretty generous with that number. I mean, it’s more than twice what the rabbis said. That seemed pretty pious.

-Jesus answered Peter not to forgive 7 times, but 77 times (or, some translations say 70x7 because the Greek is hard to figure out exactly). But either way, Jesus isn’t setting a fixed number. He isn’t saying that you can stop forgiving people at number 78 or number 491. 7 is the number of completeness and perfection. He’s bunching up the number 7 in order to convey to His disciples that their forgiveness of others is to be complete and perfect and unlimited.

-That is a tall order, but that is part of God’s Kingdom—Jesus begins the parable saying the kingdom of heaven can be compared to this. This is part of being in God’s kingdom. It is like a king settling accounts with some of his servants. God is obviously the king, and we are the servants. And so, what do we quickly learn from the parable about forgiveness.

1) Unpayable debt

-The servant in the parable owes the king 10,000 talents. A talent was the largest sum of money known at the time, equivalent to roughly 15-20 years’ worth of wages, and then it’s multiplied by the largest number known in the Greek language, 10,000. We can’t get too caught up in the numbers themselves, but if you must know, it would probably rack up to the billions of dollars in our day and age.

-But the exact total is not the point. Jesus is using the largest monetary unit times the largest number in the language to speak of a debt that is insurmountable. There is no one who would be able to pay this debt back. And that’s the point.

-This servant represents all of humanity, but to make it personal he represents each of us. The Bible talks about sin as a debt to God, owed for having broken God’s law. It is a debt that every single human being has. And here’s the thing, there is no one who would be able to pay that debt. There is no amount of good that you can do to pay the debt. There is no amount of religious rituals that you can do to pay the debt. The debt is unpayable by you.

-Imagine you owing 200,000 years’ worth of wages to someone. There is no way you could pay that. Even if you got a second job that paid the same amount, that would cut it down to 100,000 years—anyone going to live that long? It is an unpayable debt.

-The servant couldn’t pay so the king said to sell him and his family into slavery and sell all his assets so the king could get something out of him. The man would receive the natural consequences of the debt.

~And that is all of humanity. We owe a debt we cannot pay so we will receive the natural consequences of God’s justice. But thankfully it doesn’t end there, because then we find:

2) Unconditional mercy

-The servant fell on his knees before the king and asked for patience in getting the money together to pay the debt, which everyone involved knew to be impossible. There was no way that the servant would ever pay such a debt. He would deserve the justice that the king would give him.

-That is all of humanity. You can try to bargain with God all that you want, but there is nothing you can do to settle the sin-debt and there is no amount of time to ever make it right. Even one sin would put you into an unpayable debt with no hope in yourself of ever making it right. The servant, and us, get what we deserve and deserve what we get because of our debt.

-But then the king in the parable does something unbelievable, and the original audience of the parable would have been shocked—the king had pity and compassion on the servant and forgave him the entire debt. The servant was completely released from anything owed to the king. He was completely free with no strings attached.

~The king didn’t say that the servant would be free from the debt if he did this or that or accomplished some favor. The king, out of compassion, showed mercy and grace and freed the man completely.

-This is the forgiveness found in Jesus Christ. God owed us nothing other than justice, and yet He showed pity on humanity, and out of compassion He paid the unpayable debt Himself through the death of His Son. Jesus paid the debt completely on the cross saying IT IS FINISHED and for those who trust in Him every bit of debt is paid.

~The king in the parable didn’t shave off a few thousand talents from the debt and expected the servant to take care of the rest—he forgave the entire thing. And that’s what God does for us—He forgives the entire debt. If you are in Christ, not one bit of your sin remains to your debit—Christ’s blood has been credited to you, wiping the whole ledger sheet of your life clean.

-But, as the parable then continues, we also find:

3) Unavoidable expectation

-This newly freed servant goes about his day and runs into someone who owes him money. This fellow servant owes the original servant 100 denarii, which would have been 100 days of wages for the common laborer. It isn’t a small amount by any means, but by comparison to what the original servant owed the king, it’s nothing.

~200,000 years’ worth of wages vs. 100 days’ worth of wages.

-After having received mercy, instead of extending that mercy to his fellow servant, he chokes him trying to get the money out of him, and when he could not, he throws the guy in prison. He just had an unpayable debt forgiven him, and here he is assaulting someone over an amount that is so tiny in comparison to his great debt. And yet, he completely forgot the debt lifted off of his shoulders and presses the small debt that is owed to him.

-Yes, there is an expectation that when you have been shown mercy by God that you show that mercy in return. Remember the beatitudes:

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. (Matthew 5:7 ESV)

~If God has forgiven your sins, then He expects you to forgive others. It is not a suggestion. So often we look at the teachings in Scripture and think they’re nice but unrealistic, and so we tend to ignore the teachings that are hard to live out and just go do our own thing.

~But listen to me—forgiving others isn’t a suggestion. It isn’t like how we normally deal with the speed limit where you think you have some wiggle room or think it’s an ideal, but nobody really follows it so I’m just going to ignore it. GOD COMMANDS AND DEMANDS THAT YOU FORGIVE OTHERS NO MATTER WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO YOU.

-Because the point Jesus is making is that what other people have done to you is miniscule to what you have done to God in your sin. You take your sin so lightly and think everybody else is the moral equivalent of Hitler—but YOU are the one that owes the 10,000 talents, while anybody that sins against you merely owes 100 denarii.

-The king couldn’t believe that the first servant would act that way. He cries out: YOU WICKED SERVANT! I FORGAVE YOU ALL THAT DEBT BECAUSE YOU PLEADED WITH ME. AND SHOULD NOT YOU HAVE HAD MERCY ON YOUR FELLOW SERVANT, AS I HAD MERCY ON YOU?

-God is saying that to you right now, shouldn’t you show forgiveness and mercy on another human being just as I forgave and showed mercy to you. Because what you do with forgiveness is a reflection of your heart. So, very quickly,:

4) Unshakeable truth

-The servant in the parable is delivered over to the jailers—literally over to the torturers or tormentors. He is given over to punishment. And Jesus gives us this warning:

SO ALSO MY HEAVENLY FATHER WILL DO TO EVERY ONE OF YOU, IF YOU DO NOT FORGIVE YOUR BROTHER FROM YOUR HEART.

-This is serious, y’all. We’re not talking about the Christian cliches about being nice and doing good. Jesus says that someone who has received the forgiveness of God is expected to forgive other people without limit; and if you refuse to forgive other people then you are demonstrating that your heart truly never received the forgiveness of God through Christ.

-Jesus isn’t threatening that you’ll lose your salvation or anything like that; Jesus is saying that you never knew salvation to begin with. Because if you knew the salvation of Christ, knowing the debt that was forgiven you, then you would have no problem forgiving those who wronged you.

-Is it necessarily easy? Of course not. Do you think that it was easy for Corrie Ten Boom to forgive that newly converted Nazi prison guard after all he did? Absolutely not. But she did it because she knew Christ and she knew the debt that had been forgiven her.

-If you absolutely refuse to forgive someone, then it is time to check your heart.

Conclusion

-Back in 2006 a man walked into an Amish school in Pennsylvania, shooting 10 young girls, killing five of them, and then killing himself. What a devastating loss for a people of faith. But even in that tragedy they extended forgiveness and they demonstrated that forgiveness by donating money to the killer’s widow and three young children. Several of the families of the victims attended the killer’s burial service at the cemetery hugging the widow and hugging other members of the killer’s family.

~How could they not have been bitter, and since they couldn’t focus their bitterness on the culprit, focus it instead on his family? Instead, since they couldn’t show forgiveness to the killer, they demonstrated their forgiveness to the family.

~How? Why?

~Because they knew that through Christ they had been forgiven so much more; and even in this tragedy they followed the commands of their Lord.

-Christian, maybe you are having a hard time forgiving someone—you need to deal with it. Stop ignoring it. Stop justifying it. Deal with your unforgiveness. Come to the altar and ask God for strength to do what He expects.

-But maybe you have never received God’s forgiveness for your sins…

-{Prayer for Randy Dunn