Matthew 18:12-35 • Forgiveness
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Our scripture reading this morning is long, but I'm going to ask you to turn to it anyway, Matthew 18 verses 12 through 35.
I ask you to bear with me in reading a very long portion of scripture because of a recollection that is in my own mind.
I can remember the very first time that I began to minister to a family that had lost a child killed by a drunken driver.
I can remember as a young pastor going home to my wife and being in some sense of frustration and despair, saying to her, "I cannot fix this.
There is hurt.
There is great pain.
There is grief. I so much want it all to go away, but I cannot fix this.
What can I do?"
My wife said, "Tell them the word.
Give them the word.
It has the power you do not.
It is God's ministry to them."
I'm going to ask that you come under the word this day as I acknowledge to you my weakness and my inability and praise God for the word that is His power. Would you come under the word by standing with me and let's let the word of God humble us and prepare us for His truth.
Matthew 18 verse 12, Jesus is speaking. He says, "What do you think?
If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?
And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about the one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off.
In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.
If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault just between the two of you.
If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.
But if he will not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or tax collector.
I tell you the truth.
Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
Again I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.
For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?" Up to seven times?
Jesus answered, "I tell you not seven times, but seventy-seven times. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents, that's millions of dollars, was brought to him.
Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
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.
But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, that's just a few dollars.
He grabbed him and began to choke him. "Pay back what you owe me," he demanded.
His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, "Be patient with me and I will pay you back."
But he refused.
Then he went off and had that man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
Then the master called the servant in.
"You wicked servant," he said, "I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
And you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you."
In anger, his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed.
This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother
from your heart.
Would you pray with me?
Heavenly Father, open our eyes that we may see. Our ears that we may hear, our hearts that we may receive, the truth that is in your word, the grace that is in your heart.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Please be seated.
It was a day not unlike yesterday afternoon.
Fall, sunny, beautiful, and my son Jordan was on a breakaway going down the line, the only one with the soccer ball, ahead of everyone, no one between him and the goal but the goalie.
We were on our feet cheering.
We knew good things were ahead.
And then another player, slower, much larger, it became obvious, had an angle on Jordan.
And as Jordan approached the goal, there was no way that the player had a chance at the ball, but he wasn't aiming at the ball.
He took a bead direct on my son.
Jordan was going full tilt, as hard as he could go. And while he was in full stride, the other player blindsided him, put a shoulder in his back, sent him flying through the air. He landed hard and awkwardly on a shoulder. He crumpled to the ground, and he did not move.
Suddenly there was a man in the stand who began to scream at the top of his lungs, "Penalty!
Raph! Red card!
Can't you see?"
He was crazy with anger.
Everyone looked around to see who was yelling like that.
It was me.
When someone we love is hurt, when we feel we have been wronged, something can come out of us that even we do not recognize, did not even know it was there.
And it can be so harmful, so damaging, not just to people on a soccer field, but even to the people of God in the church of Jesus Christ, that Christ Himself saves His sternest warning to say, "Forgiveness is not an option."
In the church of Jesus Christ, "Forbidness to rule is to destroy the power of the gospel."
And therefore, He says, even to an apostle Peter, "If you have been the one wronged,
you still must forgive."
Why?
Because unforgiveness clearly damages the gospel.
You see that from the very structure of the passage that I put in front of you. Do you remember? Jesus talks about the love of heaven itself as the good shepherd, goes after the one wandering sheep, even though ninety-nine are safe in the fold. Here is the heart of God displayed toward those who are hurting and lost and saying, "I want my grace to go and capture the lost. That is what I want."
And He's so serious about that, that the grace should be evident in the church, that He speaks about grace becoming evident in the church, saying, "If a brother sins against you, there's a process that we are to go through in the church of Jesus Christ so that we can be reconciled with one another." And then curiously enough, the Savior speaks about the power of that reconciliation in the church.
These verses that we so often use at weddings, if two or more come together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Nonetheless, the actual context of the Scriptures is that the power of God, so that if we ask anything that we will and are agreed in the church for that, God will perform it according to His will with power. The power in the church, made evident by the unity, the peacefulness, the reconciliation of the brothers and sisters in the church, so that He says, "This is the power. The world doesn't understand, but the church must."
And to make the point, He then tells the parable of the King who has a servant who is forgiven much, but will not forgiven a little, and then Christ ends with the awful warning. Because this man was turned over to the torturers in prison, so we don't even think Jesus could speak of His heavenly fathers, but He says it, "So my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive from your heart." The picture is of this stream of mercy that begins in heaven's highest realms, in the heart of God Himself, and then it flows down through the middle ground of earth, through the church, and then it is meant to flow out through the ocean of humanity as we learn to forgive one another, become reconciled to one another, so that the peace of God intended for His grace for individuals is known by the ministry of the church.
The subject is forgiveness, and it is as pertinent as headlines of Iran and Iraq, and an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, and it is as personal as what we may have said to one another in a bedroom this morning, or felt about another person as we entered a sanctuary today.
Why forgive?
Because the gospel for which Jesus died is damaged if it does not flow through us. For us to receive that great grace that flowed from the wounded side of Jesus, and then to say, "Though that stream of mercy has flowed from the cross itself through the blood of the martyrs through the century, it gets to me and it does not go past me."
Look what He did to me.
Look what that person did to my family.
This mercy will not flow past me. And do you imagine then that God takes it lightly that He who gave His Son for the mercy to flow simply says, "Okay, it doesn't matter to me." No.
With anger that is righteous wrath, God says, "The mercy must flow. That is why I gave my Son. The mercy stream cannot be dammed up."
It is occasionally. You and I know that.
And so God begins to speak of His wrath and terms that we don't like, but need to understand. Even a minister of the gospel, an apostle comes to Jesus and says, "But listen, can't there be a place that I have to stop showing mercy?"
Seven times.
Is that enough? Now you have to know what Peter is doing. The Pharisees said you had to forgive three times.
So Peter takes the Pharisee standard, doubles it, and adds one, and says, "Surely that's enough."
And Jesus says even to a minister, "No, no.
77." Some of your Bibles will say 70 times 7.
There's no limit to this. You can't stop this. This is God's purpose. And yet when the hard things happen, we can forget.
Some years ago now, I was at the ordination service of a minister. It was a re-ordination. He had been a pastor some 15 years previous.
But in a time of great tension in his church, there was a person who had shared a confidence that that pastor had given to him. And the sharing of the confidence resulted in that pastor being defamed, hurt in an irremediable way so that he was forced to leave the church. And as a consequence, he left the ministry.
The sharing of the confidence was nothing more than an intentional desire to hurt him by a man he had considered his friend. And he was so damaged that he just stopped being a minister. He didn't want to associate with the people of God at all.
But wonderfully, through the ministry of his wife, through the ministry of Christian friends, over a period of time, he began to see his own sin of anger, his own sin of unforgiveness.
And with deep repentance, he returned to the church, returned to the ministry.
But even as we ordained him, how his tears flowed to recognize the lost years of ministering to other people because of his own heart's anger.
It's not just ministers. You know that.
As a minister, one time I sat at a kitchen table preparing a funeral with a man whose father had just died.
And as we got to the end of those preparations, his wife came in the room and asked, "Is Betty, your sister-in-law, is Betty going to come to this funeral?" It was a very simple question.
But I watched as the face of the man flushed.
He got up out of his chair without a word, and he left the room.
Some minutes he came back.
He said, "Brian, I have asked God to forgive me, but I will tell you, if that woman, my sister-in-law, if she were to knock on my door today, I would spit in her eye.
Because she wanted a few more dollars, she encouraged my brother to go on a hazardous military mission.
And he was killed.
And because of his untimely death, my mother grieved so deeply that she died.
That woman killed my brother, and she killed my mother, and she will not come to my father's funeral."
Some months after that, I was ministering to that man's daughter.
She had been living with a man not her husband, but again by God's great intervention and grace. They had come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ, and they were coming to make their relationship right, to be married in the church.
And as we were going through the premarital counseling, and we're dealing with past sin in their life, their wrong relationship with each other, I ask at some point, do you understand the nature of the grace of God that pardons your sin, even for the way that you have been living, so that you enter this marriage with the knowledge of the grace of God over your life that puts the debt of your sin away?
Do you know what she said to me?
All I know is that I feel like slime.
My own father will not forgive.
How do I know that my heavenly father will forgive?
And I saw it so clearly that a man's decision to dam up the stream of mercy from his own heart not only hurt those that he wanted to damage, it damaged those dearest to him.
Whenever we decide that we will dam up the stream of mercy, that it flows not past us, we do greater damage than we can imagine.
That has to be the reason that verse 34 and 35 are in Matthew 18, "In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your..." It's so hard to hear. We think surely this is the exceptional passage. Surely there's another explanation. I mean after all God is saying here is if you won't, he won't.
If you won't forgive, he won't forgive. Well, that can't be right, can it?
Isn't it?
We pray it all the time, "Father, forgive me as I forgive my debtors."
And Jesus' own explanation at the end of the Lord's prayer is, "For if you do not forgive other men their sin, neither will my heavenly father forgive you your sin."
James the brother of Jesus writes it in his epistle, "Judgment without forgiveness will be shown to any who do not forgive."
We struggle because it just doesn't fit our theology. Now wait a second.
Is God's forgiveness dependent upon my actions?
That can't be. I thought we believed in grace in this church. I thought we believed that it was God's work. You know that's the case.
Here we are only weeks from the cross where we clearly are made to understand that our forgiveness is based upon what Jesus does, not upon what we do.
What Jesus is doing here is he's not making a statement of cause.
We are not forgiven because we forgive someone else. It's a statement of fact that if unforgiveness is locked around our heart, then the plain fact of the matter is we don't understand grace. It is not real to us. This is what the apostle John says in his epistle, right?
If a man says he loves God and hates his brother, he's a liar.
For how can a man love God whom he's not seen and hate his brother made in the image of God whom he has seen?
It's not a statement of cause and effect.
It's just the reality of things.
How can you say that you love and know love and act so differently?
It's somewhat the experience of grace that the apostle is talking about here. It's like a child who does nothing but rage.
He may be loved, but he doesn't have any experience of that love. He's locked in the torture of his own rage.
When Jesus says here, it's as though we are imprisoned with torturers to be locked into our own bitterness, not to be able to forgive.
You know it's been said by others that bitterness is the acid that destroys its own container.
I know that. Don't you know that?
I've been at the seminary for some 20 years now.
I left a pastorate that I had been in for about seven and a half.
And some of you know, when a pastor leaves, new duties fall on people, all that reorientation of committees and churches and organization and so forth. And there was a particular committee that was being chaired by a friend of mine.
And once I was gone, the committee work didn't go very well.
People began to get angry at him, attack him.
In one committee meeting, when he was feeling the pressure, when he was feeling hurt by what people were saying, he tried to relieve the pressure by saying, "The reason that I'm doing poorly is Brian intentionally gave me some wrong information before he left."
I must tell you, when that word got to me, I don't think I've ever been angrier in my life.
You have to understand my relationship with this. I called him my friend.
He was a politician in our little town. And when political scandal came to our town and he was accused of wrongdoing, I was the one who stood with him in public to defend him. Because the economy was going bad in our little town and he had significant debts that he could not repay, I was the one that went to those to whom he owed money and asked for the extended time and the extended mercy on his behalf.
When his son was injured in a freak accident that resulted in being in the hospital for weeks, I didn't just visit the family at a hospital an hour and a half away. I took them food. I took their laundry back and forth.
And now, without a word of warning, without any just cause, in my absence, when I could do nothing about it to falsely accuse me, I have never been more hurt or angry. I must tell you, I could not sleep at night. I was so angry. I could not eat. I could not be a father. I could not be the kind of husband. It was eating me alive.
And in some sleepless night, some voice, I pray the Holy Spirit in my conscience began to say to me, "So this is what it feels like.
You have preached against bitterness for a long time, but this is what it feels like."
And with an aching in my heart, I prayed God to forgive me and to help me.
By God's wonderful mercy, I will tell you it was almost a full year later that that man and his wife drove here to St. Louis to sit in the living room of me and my wife and ask our forgiveness and to apologize for what they have done. And that was a beautiful moment.
But just so that you know how sinful I am, do you know that here, twenty years later,
sometimes I still get mad at him.
It is hard to forgive.
It is hard.
And that is why Jesus speaks so clearly of its necessity.
How do we rid ourselves of forgiveness? It is understanding clearly first what it is. I'm going to be technical for just a minute or two here, but I want you to hang with me. It's so important. What is forgiveness?
It is grace.
It is grace in our hands that we have received from Jesus offered to another.
That means it is unconditional love.
Now if forgiveness is unconditional love, what does that mean?
It means it does not await restitution or reparation.
"Oh, you pay me back and then I'll forgive you."
No, if it's unconditional love. If it's grace such as we have received, then we say, "Freely have I received. Freely do I give."
I'm not saying that restitution is inappropriate.
I am saying the desire to bless another does not await restitution.
It does not even await reconciliation. There are steps for reconciliation as clear in the scriptures of this passage as in any place in the Bible. How we go one on one, and then with witnesses, and then finally to the church if things can not be made right. But sometimes there are people who say, "Well, after we're reconciled, then I will forgive you." You must understand something.
Forgiveness is not merely the fruit of reconciliation. It is the fuel of reconciliation.
We even go through the steps of going to another person when we have been wronged, of seeking their restitution with the church, of seeking their reconciliation of God, of desire and redemptive purposes in their life, because our heart attitude, though it would justifiably want their ruin, desires their restoration.
There is an attitude of forgiveness that precedes reconciliation for the church to work as it must.
We don't even await repentance from the other person. I hear it said sometime in our circles, "I don't have to forgive if they haven't repented."
What do you think the alternative is?
"Oh, I'll hate them. I'll be bitter toward them. I'll exact my vengeance and retribution." You think that's not an alternative for the believer?
Lawrence Sandi, the head of navigators, used to say it this simply. He said, "Bitterness is self-cannibalism.
For us to think because they have not repented, I have a right to be unforgiving, is to lock ourselves in with a tiger that we think we have control of while it is eating us alive."
What we struggle with is actually making wrong comparisons. In American culture, we take the word forgiveness and we put it right beside the word pardon.
If I forgive you, it means I have to pardon you.
Pardon means that I remove all earthly consequences.
That's not the same as forgiveness.
Ponderance means I am desiring heavenly fruit for you.
That may actually mean that there should be earthly consequences.
I don't know that I ever saw this as clearly as when the Anglican evangelical Michael Seward, a pastor in England, had a knock on his door one night.
And when he opened the door, three young men there attacked him with a cricket bat, fractured his skull, and assaulted his daughter.
And he forever honored the church of Jesus Christ and the gospel of our Savior when he went on national TV in England and said, "I forgive them."
But then a year later, when the court sentences came down and the men who had done such vile things were only given a few months to a couple of years of sentence, he went back on national TV and said that was an injustice and it was wrong.
That wasn't hypocritical.
That wasn't inconsistent.
Forgiveness is not the same as pardon.
Forgiveness is saying, "I, for the sake of God, want his redemptive influence in your life." We don't say because we forgive people that we open the prison doors and free all axe murderers and molesters. That's not, that is not pardon. That is redemptive or restorative. We are trying to express the gospel in the way that redemption comes into people's hearts and lives. And we make judgment calls of justice, but never for our retribution, never to satisfy our vengeance, never for the purposes of bitterness, but for the betterment of the individual. We are now, for Christ's sake, doing everything we can for their sake.
Those can be hard calls, but we do not need to take forgiveness and make it so impossible that it, that we cannot do it because it would somehow be something wrong. What we are saying is this, "I turn the face of Jesus toward you. You have turned the face of Satan toward me, but I turn the face of Jesus to you.
Whatever is best for you, that is what I'm going to try to bring into your life if it's accountability, if it's even the discipline of the church, but it is for restorative reasons not to satisfy my sense of wrong."
That's what forgiveness is, the heart of grace toward another. And that's why Jesus can say, "What are the limits of forgiveness?"
There are none because there are not limits to His grace.
If you understand this, there is one more thing to confess.
It is how hard forgiveness is to turn the face of Jesus to someone who has turned the face of Satan to me, how hard that is.
Maybe that's why there's a parable and then instruction and then encouragement and then another parable. For disciples who've already been with Jesus for three years, they should know it all.
It's this thing we have to confess to ourselves. Forgiveness is not a light switch. I can't just say, "All right, I'll have it."
Sometimes I have to get on my knees before God and say, "God, I have licked the wound so often. The poison has filled my heart.
I don't know how to get rid of this."
But begin to drain it.
Put your grace where my bitterness is. Put your forgiveness where my unforgiveness is. Fill my eyes with the vision of the cross that what I have received fills me more than what I want to give.
Notice when that begins to change us, that the gospel flows again and the church performs her task with power.
I have been teaching at the seminary preaching for now 20 years, and there's no question in my mind that the story that my students have told the most frequently that I hear at least a couple of times a year is the story of Cori Ten Boom, remember?
When after she and her sister for rescuing Jews from the Nazis had been in a concentration camp where unspeakable things were done to them and where her sister died, that Cori Ten Boom nonetheless after the war began to speak of the grace of God and the power of the gospel.
And she wrote in her book the hiding place of that time when after being at a church conference speaking of the grace of God, she went out of the building and there standing
was one of the Nazi guards who had treated her and her sister the worst.
And he stood and he spoke softly and bowed politely and head out his hand and said, "For Alton Boom, how good to hear your message of the grace of God that covers all our sin."
And she wrote she had not even a spark of forgiveness in her heart.
No desire at all to extend grace or a hand to this man.
And so she prayed, "Jesus, I cannot forgive him, so give me your forgiveness."
And she held out her hand.
She wrote later that we never experience the grace of God more fully touch the ocean of His mercy as when we forgive an enemy.
She said it is truly a great grace to receive the grace of God.
It is an even greater joy to give it.
The apostle says it clearly, "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you have against one another.
Forgive as God in Christ forgave you."
This is our joy.
This is our peace.
And this is Christ's power amongst us.
Pray with me. Father, for these people I thank you. What a wonderful congregation that has been a light to this community, a joy to my heart, strength to my own family.
Would you remind us all on this day of the Savior who has loved us well and by filling our hearts with the vision of Him, fill our hearts with their forgiveness that is His.
Use us, we pray, to be instruments of Christ's glory. We ask in His name. Amen.