Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our text this morning is the gospel lesson that was just read a few minutes ago, Matthew 18,
verses 21 to 35. In the name of Jesus, dear Christian friends, what makes Christianity
different from all the other religions of the world? The answer is simple. Jesus.
That's it. For only Christianity has a savior for our sins. All the other religious systems
of the world require that we have to work out our own forgiveness. But Christianity teaches
us that God loved us so much he sent his son into this world to rescue us from all of our sins.
As Paul told Timothy, for there is one man and one mediator between God and men,
or one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself
as a ransom for all men, the testimony given in the proper time. Or as Paul told the Corinthians,
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness
of God, a savior from sin, Jesus Christ. That's what makes Christianity different
from all the other religions of the world.
What's a trademark? April showed the kids some trademarks this morning in the children's lesson.
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a trademark is, quote,
any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination used or intended to be used to identify and
distinguish the good services of one seller or provider from those of others.
As we look at our gospel lesson today, we might say that our trademark as Christians
is that we forgive as Christ has forgiven us. Our trademark is forgiven and forgiving.
Now, the obvious lesson of our text today is that there is no limit as to how often we should
forgive other people, that if we follow Jesus, God expects us to be ready to forgive the people
that hurt us. And this expectation is quite a challenge for us because we are very prone to
having a double standard when it comes to forgiveness. We are more than willing to
point out to other people that they should forgive that person. You need to forgive so
and so, we tell them. But it's a whole different story when we're the one that is hurt.
We find it very hard to forgive. It's just not in our nature. We like to say you have to forgive,
but I don't. What a double standard that is. In the first verse of our text, Peter asks the
question, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? It's such a human
It's such a human question. We feel that there has to be some kind of limit as to how often we
have to forgive someone. After all, if we keep forgiving them, they're going to keep hurting us.
And if they keep hurting us, that's abuse. So how many times, Peter asks,
and then he gives a little possibility, up to seven times.
I mean, that's very gracious on his part. For the rabbis of that day taught that you had to forgive
three times. And so Peter doubles it and adds one more for good measure to get seven. That perfect
number of God. And I can almost see the other disciples nodding their approval. Yeah, Peter,
you got it right. Until Jesus knocks them off their feet when he replies, I tell you not seven
times, but 77 times or 70 times seven, depending on what translation to use. You see, there's a
disagreement among translators as to how to translate that number in Greek. Is it 70 plus
seven or 70 times seven? Whichever it is, it's way bigger than Peter imagined. I remember seeing a
skit once that was called 490 and pal. It had a couple who were pretending to be married. And
every time the wife hurt her husband, he would smile at her and say, that's okay, honey, I forgive
you. And then he'd turn around, walk over to a chalkboard and make a slash.
And when he got to 490 slashes, 490 times of forgiving her, he let her have it.
That's not what Jesus is teaching here. Forgiveness is not some kind of record book where we keep a
tally of our forgiveness. Once we understand that seven is the perfect number of forgiveness,
once we understand that seven is the perfect number of God and 10 is the number of
completeness in the Bible, we begin to understand that Jesus is teaching Peter and all of his
disciples and us, that there is no limit to our forgiveness. And yet we're always to be forgiving,
to forgive without ceasing, without end. Now, if that's God's standard for forgiveness,
we often come up short because in our sinful nature, we like to limit our forgiveness.
We like to have that double standard. And so we keep coming up with ways in which we might be
able to get around it, water it down or a weasel out of it, or somehow modify the absolute words
that Christ spoke. Sometimes we'll say, OK, I'll forgive you this time, but don't expect me
to forget what you did. You know, we like that luxury of having a little bit of a grudge
in our hearts because it allows us to partially forgive somebody, but not completely when they
hurt us. There's a scene in a movie many years ago, the movie was called Nobody's Fool.
And in that movie, Paul Newman played a man named Sully.
He was about 60 years old and had lived in the same town his whole life.
His parents died and they left him their house. He never moved into it. Instead,
he just left it alone. You see, it was the house where his father had beat him as a child.
And so every day Sully drove by that house and he watched it slowly fall apart.
One day he took a friend of his, a builder in the community, over to that house.
And the builder walked through the broken down house and he said, Sully,
you could have saved this place. You could have fixed it up and put it out to rent or you could
have sold it and put some money in your pocket. Instead, you decided to stick it to your old man.
What's it been, 30, 35 years now? You still keep and score? Well, here's the good news. You won.
For 30-some years, the man had not forgiven his father. For 30-some years, he had carried a grudge.
And what did it get him? A whole lot of heartache and a broken down old house.
And you know what? It didn't hurt his father at all because his father was dead.
His inability to forgive had only hurt Sully.
Another way we sometimes limit forgiveness is by expecting full forgiveness for me, but not for you.
Or for you, yeah, for me, but not for you. That's the essence of the famous parable that Jesus told
in our text, the parable of the unforgiving servant. The king calls his servants to give an
account of their deaths and one man comes in and he says, I'm going to tell you a story.
One man comes in and he has a tremendous debt. The Bible says he owed 10,000 talents.
Now, 10,000 talents is 10 times the annual revenue of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea combined.
It's a number that's very hard for us to figure out in today's world, but let's try.
A talent is roughly 75 pounds of silver. Last Tuesday, the price of silver on the market was
$66 an ounce. That means one talent would be worth about $79,200 for one talent.
This man owed 10,000 talents. That means his debt was approximately $792 million.
$792 million. The king says, pay it up. He begs for mercy.
And the servant's master took pity on him, canceled his debt and let him go.
With such a tremendous gift of forgiveness, you would expect him to be filled with gratitude
and that he would be considered of those who might owe him a debt as well.
But not in this parable. He goes out and he sees a servant who owes him 100 denarii.
Now, denarius was the coin that you paid a worker for one day's worth of work.
So in our world today, let's say it's eight hours of work at $15 an hour, 120 bucks.
He owed him 100 denarii. So he owed him about $12,000.
His servant begged him for mercy.
And he refused to forgive him. He threw him in prison until the debt could be paid.
The servant who had been forgiven $792 million would not forgive $12,000.
That's the standard, the double standard that we humans often have when it comes to
forgiveness, also to living for Jesus. We tell our children not to curse,
but you know, we let a few words come out once in a while.
We take our kids to Sunday school, drop them off and then head back home so we can watch the game
or go to the store. We wring our hands over all the problems of drugs in our society, but
we're addicted to alcohol or tobacco or food. We condemn politicians because they sling mud at
their opponents in their commercials and yet we're more than willing to share some juicy gossip with
our friends. We tell people that they're not supposed to steal, but we're more than willing
to share our password for our streaming services so our friends don't have to pay.
We tell our kids that they have to forgive their friends,
but we're not about to forgive that church member who made us mad. You know, we could go on and on
and on with examples like that of how we often live our lives with that double standard like
the servant in our text did. But you know, God doesn't allow excuses. When his fellow servants
When his fellow servants saw what the man did, they went to the king and told him what happened.
And the king called the man in, expressed his outrage,
and threw him in prison where he would be punished until that tremendous impossible debt was paid.
And when he finished the parable, Jesus added these words,
This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.
The one thing that is absolutely clear in our text today is that God expects,
no, God demands that we forgive one another completely, always.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer. There's a petition in the Lord's
Prayer we're familiar with. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
Notice what Jesus doesn't say. He doesn't say, forgive us, Lord, and help us to be forgiving
of others. That's not what he says. He says, forgive me, forgive us, Lord, in the same way
that we forgive others. And then to make sure that we get the point he adds at the end of the prayer,
For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.
But if you don't forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive their sins or forgive your
sins. That's a hard teaching of Jesus. And the implication is very clear. If you don't forgive,
God won't forgive you. That's how strongly God feels about this command to forgive.
And there is no limit to the number of times we are to forgive, full and complete forgiveness.
You might say that in God's mercy, he expects us to always be ready to forgive.
That's why Paul said, be kind and compassionate to one another,
forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. So how can we do that?
You know, it's completely out of the realm of possibility for those of us who call ourselves
human. And the only way we're able to forgive other people is when Christ's forgiveness
gives us power to do that in our lives. As we look at the parable of the unforgiving servant,
we see that the primary character of the parable is not the servant who at the beginning
who refused to forgive. The primary character is the king.
The king who forgave such a humongous debt and expected his servant to do the same thing.
The king is God himself. And the debt that we owe God is beyond our understanding.
Over and over again, we hurt God. When he doesn't give us what we want,
we often turn our backs on him and try to get it on our own in this world.
When some kind of tragedy strikes, the first thing we do is we blame God for all of our troubles.
Not only do we break God's commandment every day by disobeying his law, by cursing, swearing,
stealing, hurting others, lying, gossiping, coveting what isn't ours. We also break his
commandments every single day by not doing what he requires. Not reading the Bible,
not worshiping, not praying, not defending those whose reputations have been tarnished,
not completely forgiving people who hurt us. And the list could go on and on because it's
limitless, because we are sinful, full of sin, deep down in the very core of our being.
And yet in his great love, God sent Jesus to pay for every single one of those sins.
Think of the penitent thief on the cross.
Here's a man who does not deserve forgiveness.
Now, we don't know exactly what his crime was. The Bible doesn't tell us. But what we do know
is what he tells the other criminal on the cross. And he said,
we are punished justly for we are getting what our deeds deserve.
And whatever they did, they deserved capital punishment.
And yet when the man asks Jesus to forgive him, Jesus is really, or to remember him,
Jesus is very quick to forgive him, saying, today I tell you, you will be with me in paradise.
Complete forgiveness. That's what God does.
Paul told the Colossians, when you were spiritually dead because of your sins and
because you were not free from the power of your sinful self, God made you alive with Christ,
and he forgave all your sins. He canceled the debt which listed all the rules we failed to follow.
He took away that record with its rules and nailed it to the cross.
And what does that forgiveness cost us? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's completely free.
Near the end of his suffering on the cross, Jesus cried out, it is finished. One word in Greek,
It's a business term. It means paid in full. And there's nothing left for us to do because Jesus
has completely and fully paid for every one of our sins and for all sins of all people for all time,
for all people who will ever live on this planet Earth.
For all people who will ever live on this planet Earth.
Through Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. You're free from your sins. They're gone forever.
You're free from fear because you no longer can be condemned by Satan because
when the judge looks at your record, it's been wiped out.
You're free from death. Death no longer is the punishment for our sin. It is now the door
to that eternal paradise that Jesus promised the penitent thief on the cross.
A promised paradise for all who received his forgiveness.
Paul Tripp wrote, every time you ask for forgiveness, you recognize that the biggest
problems you face in life exist inside of you, not outside of you.
Jesus not only cares about what happens around us or the outside of us, he cares deeply about
our inside and he purifies it completely through the forgiveness of all of our sins.
Dear friends, in Christ, there was a doctor who died and
after his death, the family was looking through his ledger and they noticed that there were several
accounts listed on the ledger that had been crossed out and in the margin it had been written,
forgiven, too poor to pay.
Later, his wife decided that those counts really needed to be paid. And so she proceeded to
sue each and every one of those people for the amount of money they owed the doctor.
When it finally came to court, the judge asked one simple question,
is this your husband's handwriting?
She said, yes. And he replied, there is no court in this land that can obtain a debt
once the word forgiven has been written.
It's finished. That's the good news of our gospel lesson this morning.
That God's attitude is not, I'll forgive, but I won't forget.
His attitude is forgiven, forgotten forever.
Everything has been forgiven by the great King, our Lord Jesus Christ.
And so in amazement for God's love for us, we join the psalmist in saying our psalm for today,
the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse us, nor will he harbor his anger forever.
He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
Praise the Lord, O my soul, all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Amen.
Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding,
keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.