Read: Matthew 18:21-34
What does it mean to forgive someone? This is an important question. Before we can begin to talk
Before we talk about what forgiveness is, let us talk about
what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not a feeling. Too
often, especially in our culture, we gage the effectiveness of something based
on whether or not it made me feel good or not.
In forgiveness there is a large range of emotions that we have to work
through and they are not all good. We
cannot base our forgiveness on how we feel about someone. "I will forgive when I feel better about
that person." That is not
forgiveness and is found nowhere in the bible.
Next forgiveness is not forgetting. To forget something is to have brain
damage. When you get hit in the head and
lose your memory that is something that you are completely passive to. You do not have a choice in the matter. If your brain will not hold information that
is a passive thing. When the bible says
God forgets our sins it is not saying that he cannot recall them but it is
saying that he chooses not to recall them against you. It is a legal declaration of your new status
before God.
Forgiveness is not an excuse. “Oh, that is ok.” “You didn’t really mean it.” “You couldn’t
help it.” When forgiveness is needed there is a true statement that what was
said/did was beyond excuse. There was a
volition. To quote Ken Sande*, “We both
know that what you did was wrong and without excuse. But since God has forgiven
me, I forgive you.” Forgiveness must
deal honestly with the offence or else it is a lie.
What then is
forgiveness? It is an active decision. I
am going to forgive someone it is a choice.
In this parable the king actively chose to forgive, at great cost the
servant. The servant actively chose not
to forgive. Passively not dealing with a
situation it is not forgiveness but an active decision to escape from a conflict
or a hard confrontation. You have to
choose to forgive.
In Forgiveness you
release the right to vengeance. You
actively say I will no longer use this incident against someone. This is where we choose to no longer hold the
history against them. How many husbands
and wives have a section of the journals dedicated to all the ways their spouse
has harmed them, saved for just the right occasion, to bring that subject back
up, just to harm the other or justify some action? Forgiveness is saying I will not hold that
against you again. You will no longer
“get even” with that person.
Forgiveness is actively absorbing the debt. When someone has harmed us a debt is made,
and to respond to that in forgiveness someone has to absorb that debt. We see this happen in this parable. The first servant had a tremendous debt and
that debt was canceled. This does not
mean the ruler suddenly has his money back.
Instead he absorbs it for the sake of the first servant. This
is forgiveness releasing the right to repayment for an offence.
Let us ask a questions of this text: Why do we forgive? In this
passage we see the story of a servant who was given a tremendous grace and
spurned it. So here is what happened
some servant owed the king a large debt 10,000 talents.
To put this into perspective a denarii is equivalent to a
day’s wage and a talent is about the equivalent of about 6000 denarii. So working at a denarii a day it would take
you around 20 years to pay off 1 talent.
It would take you 2000 lifetimes to pay off this size of debt.
One guy worked out this level of debt, in American currency
it is a 7 billion dollar debt. The size
of this debt is to demonstrate the tremendous scale that is being
forgiven. When the servant falls to his
face and say’s, (v.26) “Have patience with me, and I will repay you everything,”
the King realizing he could never pay this debt absorbs it and forgives the
servant. I wander what it would be like
to sit there and hear the verdict: you are forgiven of this debt? I would not be able to contain the Joy!
So this servant was given the grace where this astronomical
debt is forgiven with a wave of the hand.
The good ruler absorbs the debt. He is now free. Whereas he would have had to spend his entire
life and the next 1999 lives repaying the debt, he can now go home to his
family and they can live a new life.
But what does this servant do? This servant is quite evil. The parable tells us that same servant left
the presence of the king and went to another servant who owed him 100 denarii. Put it this way if you were just given a
reprieve on 7 billion dollar. Debt would you begrudge a 5000 dollar debt?
This servant did. He
went straight away and put his hands around the throat of a fellow
servant. This is one of his peers, and
he chokes this dude out screaming, “Give me my money, or ill break your
legs.” Listen to the response of the
second servant, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.”
Where did we hear those words before? That is right the first servant just said the
self-same thing to the King not 5 minutes ago!
The only difference is the 100 denarii servant could actually pay back
his debt. The evil servant had the
second servant thrown into jail.
What was the king’s response? The king was furious, hear the evil servant
was forgiven a massive debt and he could not turn around and do the same for a
fellow servant? This is the part that
the king invokes his authority as king and reinstates the debt. This evil servant was clearly not a servant
to this gracious king. The application
here is profound for us.
Who we are as child of God is a direct reflection of the
forgiveness we received From God. If
your sin and mine required the payment of God himself, then the payment was
infinite in its offence. The debt
absorbed was the life of God the Son.
You could not repay that debt if you were given 2000 lifetimes to live a
perfect life. So when we see the cost of
our forgiveness, and the cost of our adoption, we should regard, even large
offences against us, in light of that infinite price absorbed.
When we face even murder we are still called to forgive
because of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf.
When a shooter went into an Amish school in Lancaster
in 2006 and killed 10 little girls the Amish community stunned the world. The first reaction we always have is, “Get
that evil jerk his family and hang them up!”
But these wonderful people extended, that same day, forgiveness to the shooters family.
Parents of the slain went to the funeral of the shooter to demonstrate
their love and forgiveness to the family.
Here is a community that understands the depth of their own forgiveness
when they can respond to horror with this level of forgiveness.
It steals your argument, “you don’t know what they did to me
pastor, I cannot forgive them, I will never forgive them!” This reveals your heart, and speaks to which
servant you are. I am not making light
of the sin that happened against you, nor am I saying that it is
excusable. What I am doing is holding it
against the holy standard of God’s forgiveness, and you see how it doesn’t
begin to measure up.
Who is our king? Who is our
heavenly Father? How we forgive will be
a direct reflection of how we view Christ’s forgiveness to us. So when you hold your fellow servants to pay
for their debts/sins against you, with no regard for the forgiveness given to
you, then you are not a member of the family of God, you are the evil
servant. It was once said,
“un-forgiveness is the poison you drink hoping someone else dies.”
Where does this leave us?
It seems rather desperate I have to forgive yet forgiveness is so
difficult. Make no mistake this is not
something that you do on your own. When
you are a member of the family of God you have the help of the Holy
Spirit. He indwells you and empowers you
to do the most incredible things.
It is the Holy Spirit that empowers you to forgive a man who
murders your daughter. It is the Holy
Spirit that empowers you to work through the pain of divorce and the
forgiveness required. It is the Holy
Spirit that allows you to forgive after your spouse commits adultery. It is the Holy Spirit that empowers you to
forgive when your child tells you he never wants to speak to you again.
The application I would want you to draw is a dependence on
the Holy Spirit in forgiveness. As we
enter into conflict and we find opportunity to confess our sins we will find
opportunity to forgive. And you will
find that forgiveness is not easy. It
takes a day by day step by step intentional dependence on the Holy Spirit. You will have to pray time and again, “Lord I
believe help my unbelief.” Or “Lord I
forgive help my un-forgiveness.”
There will be times when we think I finally forgave and the
pain from a deep wound resurfaces. In
those moments and we have to pray once again, “Holy Spirit help me to forgive.” The Christian is marked by a willingness to
forgive. The Christian is not expected
to be flawless in this but willing to improve.
When we are a family marked by Christ empowered, Christ emulating
forgiveness we will develop a deep level of freedom and intimacy that is the
envy of the world.
* Ken
Sande, Peacemakers, Baker Books Grand
Rapids MI, p. 206
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