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JESUS: His Stories “Forgiven/Forgiving” Matthew 18:21-35 (Mark Jesus loved to tell stories. As a matter of fact, that’s the way He did much of His teaching. Mark Matthew Parables are stories with a point. They are not told to entertain, but to teach. And as long as we get the point of the story, they are wonderful tools. But often people in Jesus’ day did not get the point. Even the Disciples at times asked the meaning of the stories He told, and He would have to explain it all to them.
What we have before us today is another of Jesus’ stories. And when Jesus makes the application of the story to the lives of those who follow Him, He makes a startling statement. Let’s read it. Read Matthew 18:21-35. Jesus uses a literary device here called “hyperbole”, deliberate exaggeration to make a point. He did the same when He talked about a camel going through the eye of a needle. The hugeness of the camel and the smallness of the eye of a needle make the comparison seem ridiculous, since it would be impossible for a huge camel to pass through that tiny hole in a needle. Here in our reading today the first servant owed his master 10,000 talents. A talent is a unit of weight, often applied to silver and gold – somewhere between 90 and 100 lbs. It was the largest measure of weight the Jews had. If we take 90 lbs. per talent, in 10,000 talents there are 14 million ounces. If this was 10,000 talents of silver, at today’s prices it would equal about 170 million dollars this first servant owed. If it was 10,000 talents of gold, the debt goes up to over 9 billion dollars. “Be patient with me; give me just a little more time and I’ll be able to repay you. I’ll get a second job or something.” The debt the servant owed was enormous, and to repay it would have been impossible. A day’s pay at that time was a denarius, which was 1/8 oz. of silver. With 14 million ounces in 10,000 talents, it would have taken this servant 112 million days to repay the debt; that’s 306,000 years working 7 days a week. Yet he pleads “Please be patient. Just give me a little more time.” But instead of a little more time, he is granted complete forgiveness of his debt. It’s cancelled – all of it. He walks out totally free because of the grace of his master. Then comes the contrast. He meets a fellow servant of his who owed him 100 denari. This was no small amount. It represented 100 days wages. In today’s economy, at $12/hour it equals nearly $10,000. If I were to ask you how many of you are at least $10,000 in debt today, the majority of you would raise you hands. You probably wish you weren’t, but $10,000 is possible to repay. One way of looking at the contrast is to see the second servant with 50 denari in each pocket – total weight just over 1 pound. But the first servant has a line of people with 90 pound packs on their back standing 3 feet apart stretching from here to the Yet the first servant, who was forgiven 900,000 times more than he was owed, refused to forgive his fellow servant. He went out from the presence of one who forgave him a huge debt, and began to choke the man who owes him a comparatively small debt. He demands to be paid in full – immediately. The second servant uses the exact same words the first servant had in pleading for more time. But instead he is thrown into the debtors’ prison until he can pay his debt. The other servants were deeply grieved at his behavior, and carried the news to their master. When he heard the what had happened, the master recalls his servant who he had forgiven. And he revokes his forgiveness and sends the servant to the debtors prison to be tortured. And Jesus concludes with those surprising words: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” (Matt. 18:35). This is a story that is both for us and about us. Jesus tells it in response to Peter’s question in v.21: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Peter is not being stingy here. The Rabbinic teaching was that a person was obligated to forgive 3 times, but the 4th time they were no longer obligated to forgive. So Peter had gone far beyond what was required in his day when he ups the number to 7. I expect that he thought he would be commended by Jesus for being so generous with his forgiveness – more than twice what was required. But Jesus was always raising the bar. “Not 7 times, Peter, but 70 times 7.” And even that was not meant to be a legalistic limit, but rather an indication that our forgiveness of others is to be unlimited. Let’s look at three things we see in this story Jesus tells us here. 1. GOD’S FORGIVENESS IS UNLIMITED. This first servant did not deserve to be forgiven. His debt is portrayed as an honest debt. He rightly owed that huge amount. The point is not in what he had done to incur the debt, only that it was one he rightfully owed. And understanding that this story is really about us, we must conclude that we owe a great debt as well, a debt that is rightfully ours but which we can never possibly repay. Some of you may think that you owe God nothing, and that He owes you everything. You have it all backward. God owes us nothing, and we owe Him everything. Until you understand that, you will never understand grace. You will never understand mercy. You will never understand God’s great love for you. Our sin puts us in debt to God. The Bible paints a pretty bleak picture of our condition before God. Listen to what the Bible says in Romans 3:9-20 (read). I am a sinner, and so are you. We can no more pay the debt we owe because of our sin than that first servant could pay the 10,000 talents that he owed. Our situation is hopeless despite the fact that we sometimes argue that if we just had a little more time we could somehow make ourselves good enough for God. Yet because of the cross and what Jesus did there, God can forgive us of the great debt we owe and still be just. On the cross, Jesus took the punishment for your sin and for mine. He paid the debt we owed, so God can freely forgive us. 1 John 1:9 says: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. Look closely at that verse. See if you can find any exceptions there. See if your sin is exempted from God’s promise to forgive. We acknowledge our sins to Him. We call them what He calls them – sin. We didn’t just make a little mistake. We didn’t just slip up again. We didn’t blow it. We sinned! We confess our sins to Him. We call it what He calls it – sin. And confessing our sin, we can’t continue to hold on to it. Our back is turned to our sin in repentance, and our face is turned toward God in repentance. But when we do that, the Bible says that because of His faithfulness and because of His justice, God will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I looked up that verse in 10 different Bible translations that I have on my bookshelf, & in each of them it said “all” or “every”. It is an all-inclusive promise. The whole debt is cancelled and God sets us free from both the penalty and the power of our sin. God’s forgiveness is unlimited. But what about our forgiveness of others? 2. OUR FORGIVENESS IS TO BE UNLIMITED. Here is where the road gets more difficult. Although we have been totally forgiven by God, it’s not always easy to forgive others. How this servant could leave the presence of his master who had just forgiven him his huge debt, and then refuse to similarly forgive the one who was indebted to him is a mystery. But that’s just what he did. And that’s just what we do sometimes. It’s not that the servant was unaware of how much he had been forgiven. He was completely aware. But he refused to allow his own forgiveness to affect his forgiving his fellow servant. And that’s where we find ourselves too many times. In the midst of our own hurt, we sometimes forget how much our sin has done to God. I think that’s one of the reasons we are to take communion regularly. Communion is a reminder that it was our sin that sent Jesus to the cross. It was our sin that caused His suffering. The suffering of Jesus was brutal. We have sanitized it and sugar-coated it. I considered showing the scenes from “The Passion” where Jesus is being beaten, and the blood is splattering everywhere. But the movie was rated R because of the violence of those scenes, and I wasn’t sure they might not be too graphic for some of the children who sit in these services. Our debt to God is huge, more than we could ever pay, yet He freely forgives us. And our receiving His forgiveness obligates us to forgive those who sin against us. Being forgiven, we are to be forgiving. That is what Jesus is teaching us here. Being forgiven by God, we are to be forgiving of others. Bible says in Colossians 3:13 Bear with each other & forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. That is given to us as a command from God: as I have been forgiven, I am to forgive. Why is forgiving others so difficult? Sometimes it’s because we want to protect ourselves. “But if I forgive them, I again become vulnerable to them. I don’t want to take that risk, so I won’t forgive them. As long as I hold on to that thing they did to hurt me, they won’t be able to hurt me again”. I spent time talking to a lady once whose husband was an alcoholic. And time after time he would go on a bender and do stupid things, and then come back asking for her forgiveness and she would take him back again. I asked her how many times she had done that, and she said it was probably 20 or 25 times. I was amazed. But I’m not sure that forgiving and trusting again are the same thing. When you break someone’s trust, you can’t just go back and say: “just trust me. It won’t happen again.” And then it happens again, and you say the same thing. Trust comes from trustworthy behavior. You can honestly forgive someone, but that does not mean you automatically trust them again. You may protect yourself by not trusting that person until you see some consistent trustworthy behavior over time, but as a Christian you don’t have the option of trying to protect yourself by not forgiving. Forgiven, I am to be forgiving. Why is forgiving others so difficult? Sometimes it’s because we want to get even. They have caused me to suffer and I now have a right to cause them to suffer. That desire to cause someone else to suffer, to pay them back for what they have done to me, comes out of our sinful nature rather than our spiritual nature. It’s what the Bible calls our carnal nature, or the flesh. I one time had a conflict with a neighbor, and he came over and read me the riot act. He raked me over the coals and went up one side and down the other. And I just listened. And then apologized. But inside I was angry with him and resented what he had done to me. And in the weeks that followed, I thought of all sorts of things I should have said to him. He put all the blame on me. But he was the one who had started it. I had earlier tried to deal with the situation, but he had ignored me. And every time I thought about the situation, I could feel my blood pressure rising. Maybe I needed to go over and speak my mind to him just as he had spoken his mind to me, give him a taste of his own medicine. I needed to forgive. I needed to release him from my personal judgment. Yet even when I did, I still struggled with some of those feelings. Slowly, however, the Lord even took the feelings away. I understood God’s forgiveness of my great debt, and so I needed to forgive my neighbor of his tiny debt. Why is forgiving others so difficult? Sometimes it’s because our wounds are so deep. I’m not talking here about the ding in your car door that some careless jerk in the parking lot put there. I’m talking about the person who sexually abused you when you were young, about the person who raped your daughter, or who drove drunk and killed your son. I’m talking about your spouse who cheated on you and smashed your dreams of a happy marriage, or the investment counselor who talked you into putting all your hard-earned investment savings into Metropolitan Mortgage, or the close friend that you trusted implicitly and they betrayed you. When your wounds are really, really deep it’s hard to forgive. Sometimes it seems like it’s impossible to forgive. We try and try and try, but it seems the harder we try, the worse it hurts. So we just want to shove it under the sofa and forget about it. What God asks us to do, He will help us to do. Nothing that God asks us to do is impossible – if we will earnestly seek His help in doing it. And often God’s help comes as we reach out to another Christian and they come alongside us in the process. 3. WHEN WE REFUSE TO FORGIVE, THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES. Look again at v.34. Refusing to forgive others as I have been forgiven, I lock myself in a prison where I am tortured. Some would even go so far as to say that this passage teaches that God revokes His forgiveness when we refuse to forgive. He takes it back and we are no longer forgiven. I don’t know if that can be supported from other places in the Bible. That would make God’s forgiveness based on our good works rather than on His grace alone. Yet listen to what Jesus said at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in Mt. 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. There are conditions to God’s forgiveness, and when I refuse to forgive, I will not be forgiven. We Americans especially want God on our terms. We want to give Him our rules to play by, and one of our rules is that He is obligated to us but we are not obligated to Him. We become the master and He becomes our servant. We expect Him to be there for us whenever we need Him, but when He needs us, we just blow Him off. That’s not the way it works, friends. It’s God Who gets to make the rules, not you. And when He says “If you refuse to forgive, you will not be forgiven” then that’s the way it’s going to be. God doesn’t play by our rules; we must play by His. That’s because He’s God, and we are not. When we refuse to forgive, there will be consequences. And we can complain all we like about those consequences; we can even ask God to take them away; but until we forgive we are in a prison of our own making, and we suffer. Let me conclude this morning with two appeals: Perhaps you are here today in need of God’s forgiveness. You have sinned and you stand guilty and condemned before God. Unless you repent and seek His forgiveness, based on what Jesus did for you when He died for you on the cross, unless you seek His forgiveness you will die in your sin and be eternally cut off from God and from all that is good. If you need God’s forgiveness, He is here today to forgive you. No matter what you have done or how may promises you have made that you will never do it again, if you will turn from that sin and humbly confess it to God, He will forgive you. Perhaps you are here today in need of forgiving someone who has hurt you. Your wound may be superficial or it may be very deep. And you have not been able to let go of it. You have not been able to forgive. Jesus is here this morning to help you to forgive. He knows about deep wounds, yet from the cross He cried: “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.” He forgave those who so deeply wounded Him – and that includes you and me. And He can help you forgive those who have deeply wounded you. PRAY |
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