"UNlimited Forgiveness, Unlimited freedom"

Unlimited Forgiveness, Unlimited Freedom

Matthew 18:22-34

I went to see my dentist last week, and once again he reminded me that I should floss my teeth twice daily. I told him that I always floss, but not twice a day unless I absolutely need to. Then, I will have another appointment and he reminds me the same thing again. He said that he’ll keep up his responsibility and remind me and I should keep up mine and floss twice a day. And then he reminded me that If I wanted to have my teeth when I get older, I needed to floss twice a day.

That is why I am preaching on forgiveness once again – to remind you that you need to do it! Although your teeth are very important, and flossing will save your teeth, forgiveness will save you soul!

We know that we can’t live in this world very long without being hurt. If I were to ask who here has been hurt, every hand would go up, including mine. We’ve all been wronged. As a pastor and teacher, I can’t begin to count the times I’ve heard from people about how they’ve been wounded, mistreated, or victimized.

I’ve sat in restaurants and heard stories of betrayal and heartbreak that have wrecked me. I’ve had co-workers call me and share about things that have happened to them that have broken my heart.

You may have walked through the doors of this church today carrying the weight of a serious wrong that was done to you this past week, this past year, or years ago. If that’s your situation today, and that has been me at points, the message I want to share is going to be hard to hear because it involves spiritual surgery. While surgery is never fun, the good news is that God wants to remove what’s toxic to our hearts, so we live our lives with love, joy, and freedom. That surgery is called forgiveness.
Jesus has just given some teaching on confronting a church member who has sinned against you, and Peter comes and asks him, “How many times must I forgive? Isn’t seven times enough?”

I don’t think that Peter was asking an abstract question here. I bet you that there was one of the disciples who was driving him nuts, maybe even his own brother Andrew! Peter has had it up to here, and he now wants the right to stay angry, to not forgive, to hold the wrong against his brother.

He is being quite gracious, or so he thinks: The Rabbis taught that you had to forgive your brother or sister for a wrong, only three times, and then they had gone too far, three strikes and you’re out. Peter says he is willing to go as far as seven times! Isn’t that enough? Jesus says no, you must forgive your friend seventy times seven!

I don’t think that Jesus meant that Peter should count up to 490 times forgiving this person, and then cut him off. Jesus just picked a very large number to say that we need to forgive over and over again. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 that true love “keeps no record of wrongs.” Psalm 130 says of God: “If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?” If we are to be Godly people, like God, we must not keep track of the times that we forgive. If we do, it is not true forgiveness.

But it is easy to keep count for those we are closest to, isn’t it? There’s the old story of the man who says to the marriage counselor, “Every time we have an argument, she gets historical!” We like to bring up the past. I know a couple who have been married almost 40 years, and she just told me about an argument they had when they were married only six months, and the pain from that argument was never dealt with, so it keeps coming up again and again. The people with whom we are closest are the people that we usually need to forgive the most.

Remember, forgiveness does not excuse sin, it does not say “O that’s alright, your sin really wasn’t a bother: Forgiveness says, you hurt me, and what you did was wrong, but I will not hold it against you, I will not try to get back at you and I will not hate you for it.” When we keep track, that is when we continue to hold it against them.

After telling Peter to never stop forgiving, Jesus tells a parable that explains why we must forgive and gives us the power to do so.

There was a slave who owed the king 10,000 talents, which turns out to be $10 million in U.S. currency! This fellow was a slave, and therefore had little personal earnings. If he was free and went to work to pay off the debt, giving all his income to the king and living off nothing, it would take him 150,000 years! Jesus used such a high amount to explain what deep trouble we are in with God. Just as the slave could never pay back what he owed; we could never pay back what we owe to God.

This is the way Paul describes our situation before we met Jesus:

Ephesian 2:1-9 (NIV)

“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no-one can boast.”

We too owe a debt that there is no way we can pay.

The king decides to settle his accounts. So, he calls the slave in, and since there is no way that the slave can pay, he orders him and his whole family thrown into prison. The slave cries out “just a little more time, and I will repay!” The king decides to have mercy on the man, and he completely cancels the debt!

The slave leaves and on his way out he finds a friend who owes him 100 denari. A denari was worth about a day’s wage, so he owed him about $20.00 in today’s money. (That’s three month’s wages for the average man in the days of Jesus—$80 a year.) This is no small amount, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the huge amount that he had just been forgiven. The slave grabbed his friend by the throat and said, “Pay what you owe.” This man who has just been forgiven a debt of $10 million is grabbing a man by the throat for $20 talking about “pay what you owe.”

The debtor said, just a little more time, and I’ll repay!” The slave would have none of it and had him thrown into prison. When the king got wind of it, he summoned him and said, “You wicked servant, I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t 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.

Jesus then said, “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”
Once again, we are faced with the hard truth that we read in scripture: If we do not forgive those who have harmed us, God will not forgive us.

When I used to tell the story, I hadn’t done the math and I used to compare the two amounts as being a billion and five – it seems I exaggerated even more than Jesus did! But the friend owed the slave a significant amount of money – it would have been difficult to forgive $20,000. If I loaned you $20,000, it would be money that I would need sooner or later, and I’d need it back! In the same way, when someone truly harms us with their sin, it is not insignificant. We feel the pain, and we often feel like they owe us, at least an apology, if not some form of penance. We might even feel like we deserve revenge. And those feelings are real, and they would be completely justified, if God had not first forgiven us.

Since God has forgiven us, the scales have completely changed. On our side of the scale, God has forgiven complete rebellion against him – we all like sheep have gone astray, and there was nothing that we could do to make up for that rebellion – and for that rebellion we owed our eternal life. In fact, Paul tells us that we were walking dead men and walking dead women – you were dead in your trespasses and sins he says. But God in his great mercy gave us our lives back, so that we might live with him forever! As Christians we are people who have come back from the dead.

I want you to grasp what your situation was before salvation. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:12:

Ephesians 2:12 (NIV)

“remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”

We need to remember this not so that we would be mired in guilt, but so that we would understand the depth of God’s grace. And this verse describes us whether we were good, moral living people, or whether we were the worst criminal – without God we are lost and without hope. But God took us and saved us and forgave all our sin.

We are not self-made people, we did not pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we did not endear ourselves to God and earn our way into his presence. We were taken from the mud pit and brought into the palace – kicking and screaming for some of us. And we find ourselves here only because God forgave us. We have been forgiven a debt that we could never dream of paying.

This is why we are able to forgive those who sin against us, we are able to show mercy because we have been shown mercy.
It is also why we are able to forgive over and over again. Sometimes we think of forgiveness as a banking system, that we are the bank, and all our friends and family members have accounts with us. When they do nice things for us, it is like they make deposits. But when they need forgiveness, they are making a withdrawal. For some people who need forgiveness constantly, we want to say, that’s it, you’ve made your last withdrawal, the account is closed.

But when we become Christians, it is like God has lavished so much forgiveness on us that everybody’s account gets topped off. The accounts that have been closed for years are reopened and the forgiveness can flow again. If any of those accounts start to run low, God just has to remind us of what Jesus did for us on the cross, and they all get topped off again.

When Jesus sends out the twelve, he says to them “As you go, preach this message: `The kingdom of heaven is near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matthew 10:7-8) He says the same to us, “freely you have received forgiveness, freely give it.”

He also says that if we do not forgive freely, our own forgiveness will be removed from us. Our own forgiveness enables us to forgive, and our own forgiveness compels us to forgive.

Closing Illustration

Tim Keller, told the following story about a man named Hasheem Garrett, who learned the art of forgiveness. Hashim was a 15-year-old, living with his mother and hanging out on the streets of Brooklyn with a gang, when he was shot six times and was left paralyzed from the waist down.

For most of the next year he lay in a New York City hospital, fantasizing about revenge. He later wrote: “Revenge consumes me. All I could think about was, just wait, till I get better; just wait till I see this kid.”

But when he was lying on the sidewalk immediately after his shooting, he had instinctively called out to God for help, and, to his surprise, he had felt this strange tranquility. Now during his rehabilitation, a new thought, struck him, namely, that if he took revenge on this kid, why should God not pay him back for all his sins? He concluded, “I shot a kid for no reason, except that a friend told me to do it, and I wanted to prove how tough I was. Six months later, I am shot by somebody because his friend told him to do it.”

That thought was electrifying … He could not feel superior to the perpetrator. They were both fellow sinners who deserved a punishment—and needed forgiveness.

Hasheem said, “In the end I decided to forgive. I felt God had saved my life for a reason, and then I had better fulfill that purpose … And I knew I could never go back out there and harm someone. I was done with that mindset and the life that goes with it … I came to see that I had to let go and stop hating.”