Forgiveness without limit and forgiving others

Heavenly Father, give us faith to receive Your Word, understanding to know what it means, and the will to put it into practice through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. How many times do You forgive when a family member repeatedly slills from You, or a friend behind your back gossips? How often do You forgive an acquaintance who betrays You, or a neighbour who's looking out only for their own interests? I read last week the story of a 101-year-old grandmother who is angry because her neighbour's erected a fence and it doesn't sit on the boundary line. What does forgiveness look like in that situation? To put it another way, is it okay to hold a grudge? A smouldering dislike of someone because of something they did, or maybe it was because of something they didn't do? Is there a measure of sin where it is okay to not forgive? How many times do You have to forgive? Well, in our Gospel reading today, Jesus answers this very real question. And it's real because we've all had people sin against us in some way, shape or form. And we too have been the ones who have sinned against others. Jesus has been teaching in the Gospel of Matthew about the Kingdom of God. And Jesus uses this question from the disciple Peter to continue teaching about how forgiveness works in the Kingdom of God. And here is the question. It's in verse 21, in Matthew chapter 18. Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times. Now Peter understood that being a follower of Jesus required a level of forgiveness of others. And for him this level was seven, seven times. Other standard teaching amongst Jews at the times was three. Three times is enough. So seven is a bit of a stretch goal. Forgiving someone once is hard. Doing it seven times for the same person is much harder. Now do you keep a mental tally of all the times that you've had to forgive someone? And Jesus' teaching would have been challenging enough if he had just left the number at seven. But he doesn't. He multiplies it by 11. Verse 22. I tell you not seven times, but 77 times. Now how are we to do that? Well, Jesus goes on to tell a parable to help us understand his answer about forgiveness and forgiving others in the Kingdom of God. And as we look at this parable, we see that there is a big debt of sin. It's God's big act of mercy and then our big act of mercy. First, a big debt of sin. Verse 22. Therefore the Kingdom of Heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And then in verse 24 we're introduced to a servant who owes lots of money. 10,000 talents or in the NIV 10,000 bags of gold. The amount by itself was a large sum of money. The equivalent of working full time for about 24 years at average wage. 10,000 talents is just off the charts. We're talking billions and billions and billions of dollars. Jesus uses this extreme amount to make a point. The debt is big. And there is no way that this servant is ever going to be able to pay back this debt. Imagine the tax office gave you a call this week and said, oh, you've got a debt of $25 billion. Can you pay that back, please? He'd be like, well, no, I can't. You can imagine the anxiousness, the sweat, the repotein coming to take your car, your house. And for this servant in his case, his family and himself to jail. And so we see that in verse 25 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 repaid the debt. As Jesus teaches us about the nature of forgiveness, in many ways, we're exactly like the servant in this parable. We have a debt before God that is too big for us to pay. And it's not a financial debt, but it's the debt of sin. Every time we sin against God, we incur his anger. Sin is an act of rebellion that tells God we'd rather not listen to his good word to us. We'd rather not trust his good promises that he's given us in Jesus. And instead we take the path of Adam and Eve and we do what we want to do. We turn away from God. And sin is more than just doing the wrong thing. There's a relational aspect to it. There's a rebellion. We hear, we break the commands that Jesus gives us regularly, don't we? We fail to love God. We fail to love our neighbour. And the payment of which is judgement. Hebrews chapter 9 verse 27 says, People are destined to die once and after that face judgement. An eternal judgement. We don't much like talking about judgement today, but it is very real. But when we think about it, it makes sense that there is judgement. We know that God is love, but a loving God that lets evil continue for all eternity would not be loving at all. We expect that God will make the things that are wrong in this world right. We want God to fix the evil and the injustice in our world. What makes us uncomfortable is the idea that we are part of the problem. That our sin will be called to account, that we will face judgement. But yet a final day of reckoning is coming. Jesus promises it. We will be called to account brought before the King who demands payment. And we cannot pay it. Relationally with God, we're separated from him. Because of our sin, it's like we're locked in a cell and the jailer has thrown away the key. So we cannot access God. So we can be extraordinarily thankful for our next point. God's big act of mercy. Now what does the servant do at this point? Well he does the only thing that he can do. In verse 26, the servant fell on his knees before the King and said, Be patient with me, he begged. And I will pay back everything. He can't, the debt is too much. But then the King does the most surprising thing. He doesn't demand justice. In verse 27, the servant's master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go. Now I'm going to read that again. The servant's master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go. The debt cancelled, forgiven, gone. Like walking into a bank where you've got a huge mortgage that you can't afford there are payments on. And the bank's saying, I understand your circumstances. We're going to just make it so the mortgage never existed. That's what the King does. The forgiveness is undeserved. And all that the servant did was throw himself on the mercy of the King because that is all that he could do. And the King doesn't say, OK, well let's work out a payment plan. You work for me for the next 1,000 years and we'll get this sorted. Some in the church at various times have taught that we need to work on a payment plan for our sins. Often today people in their minds create personal payment plans with God. If I do this for God then surely I'll be OK with him. But that doesn't work. Our debt is too big. We need the King to cancel the debt. And this is forgiveness without limits. God's forgiveness to us. We have sinned against God more than 77 times. Yet when we put our trust in Jesus, all of our sins are forgiven. Hebrews chapter 9 verse 28 says that Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many. Every rebellious thought, every word that reveals the sins of our heart, every action that we have done that has not honored God, forgiven, wiped clean. Jesus provides the key that unlocks the jail cell as He dies for us on the cross. And then Jesus, when we put our faith in Him, He takes us to stand before the King. Not as a criminal with a debt, but one who has had their debt wiped clean and forgiven. And it means that if our faith is in Jesus, on the day of final judgment, our sin won't be countered against us. Jesus will be there mediating for us. We will approach the throne of judgment and Jesus will say, He is mine, or she is mine. I shed my blood to forgive their sin. Their debt is paid in full. And this offer of forgiveness is open to all who trust in Jesus. We're all rebels. We can all have our sin forgiven when we trust Jesus. So we've seen the big debt of sin. We've seen God's big act of mercy. Lastly, we see our big act of mercy, because the parable doesn't end there. The problem with the servant was that he was not thankful. In verse 28, when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him 100 silver coins. He grabbed him, began to choke him. Pay back what you owe me, he demanded. The servant, he walks out of the courtroom with a wiped slate of $25 billion, and then he lays his hand on a man who owes him lunch money. And when his servant in verse 29, fell to his knees and begged him, be patient with me and I will pay it back, the forgiven servant didn't show mercy like he had been shown. He did not show forgiveness. In verse 30 it says, he refused and he had the man thrown in prison until the debt could be repaid. The servant refused to copy the king's generosity and compassion. He didn't let his forgiven debt change how he dealt with those who owed him. It's thankless, it's heartless. Those witnessing the behavior agreed. When others saw the treatment of the servant, they were angry. They went and told the king. And in verse 31, the king too was angry. And in the outcome as recorded in verse 32, the master called the servant in, you wicked servant he said, I canceled 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 handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed. The king's mercy should have affected the servants showing of mercy. And then we come to verse 35, where Jesus comes back to where we started. Jesus says, this is how my heavenly father will treat each of you, unless you forgive your brother or sister from the heart. Now this verse is not suggesting that God will take away from us our salvation, but rather that the lack of thankfulness of the servant points to a heart that never responded to God's grace in the first place. But when we have responded to God's grace, when we have received that forgiveness through Jesus Christ, how many times do we forgive? As many as it takes. Seventy-seven is a number that tells us that our forgiveness should be as generous as God's forgiveness is to us. And this is a hard teaching. It's hard because people are sinful and people are cruel and people are thoughtless. Sometimes it is genuinely hard to forgive people because in their sin, they really do hurt you, they really do cause pain. Or they hurt those that you know. Some sins committed against you leave you angry and reeling and pained and feeling betrayed. Forgiveness is not glib. It's not like when a child is told to say sorry and they do it because they have to. Forgiveness is hard. So how do we obey this command to forgive others as God has forgiven us? Well we need to remember that through faith in Jesus we are forgiven. Our forgiveness with God is also not glib. Jesus, the truly human and divine Son of God, really did have to die on the cross so that we could be forgiven. That came at a great cost to God. You can read the emotion in the accounts of Jesus' death. Jesus, he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As we share in communion each week, we do so to remember the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins on the cross. The great cost. And then as we know the depths of what God has forgiven us, the depths of our sin, we will be able in time to forgive others who have sinned grievously against us. See, the command to forgive doesn't just sit by itself as if it's something in us that we have to try and do. Now it's a command couched in the gospel of Jesus and the forgiveness he's given to us. When we come to Jesus, when we receive his forgiveness, Jesus then changes us by his Holy Spirit so that we will be able to forgive. And often it's an ongoing and slow process for us to be able to forgive others. Now the first helpful step in forgiving someone else is to bring it before God, to pray about it. To acknowledge first your own sin before God and give thanks to God for the forgiveness of sin that you have received in Jesus. But then ask God to give you a willing heart to forgive. Then pray for the person who has sinned against you. This itself can be hard, praying for those that have hurt you that you're angry at. Yet because of God's grace towards us we can. Pray that the person who sinned against you might know God's love and mercy and that they might approach him for forgiveness. It requires us to have faith in God and to not want revenge. We have to leave it to God. And ultimately forgiveness would end in reconciliation, the restoration of relationship. That's what we see with us and God isn't it? Christ died for our sins to bring us to God so that we could be in relationship with God. And where there is sin and then forgiveness that leads to reconciliation that is such a blessing. And if you've had the experience of that reconciliation you know it. But we do need to acknowledge that we live in an imperfect sinful world. And sometimes reconciliation is neither possible nor advisable. Reconciliation requires mutual trust and repentance. And even in those situations though sometimes God can over time give us his peace. So that even if it were possible that we would be in a position to reconcile. We can let go of the grudge, we can let go of the anger and we can trust God. But it's only possible because of God's work in us and because he's first forgiven us. So how many times shall we forgive? Well the answer Jesus gives is 77. But the point is that there should be no limit on forgiveness because there's no limit on the forgiveness that God has given to us in Jesus Christ. Our God is immensely merciful. Romans chapter 8 verse 32 says, He who did not spare his own son that gave him up for us all. And because of this we're able to forgive others. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have forgiven us. That you sent your son as a sacrifice for our sin. So that our debt that we could not pay could be paid for. That was costly to you. You sent your only son to die for us. Help us Lord to respond not as the servant does in the parable, but with thankfulness, with gratitude, with praise for your goodness. And we ask Lord that you would work in us by your Holy Spirit. That we would be able to forgive others as you have forgiven us Lord. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.