Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord,
how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?” “No,
not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven! “Therefore,
the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his
accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his
debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his
master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything
he owned—to pay the debt. “But the man fell down before
his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it
all.’ Then
his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his
debt. “But when the man left the king,
he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He
grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment. “His
fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be
patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t
wait. He had the man arrested and put in
prison until the debt could be paid in full. “When some of the
other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything
that had happened. Then the king called in
the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you
pleaded with me. Shouldn’t
you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ Then the angry king sent the
man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt. “That’s
what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers
and sisters from your heart.” Matthew
18:21-35(NLT)
Forgiveness
is at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A Christmas card I once received had this paragraph:
"If our
greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God
would have sent us a scientist. If our
greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist. But since our greatest need was forgiveness,
God sent us a Savior."
There
are countless examples of forgiveness in the Old Testament. Esau forgave his tricky brother, Jacob. Joseph forgave his nasty brothers who sold
him into slavery. In the New Testament,
the Gospel is replete with forgiving.
Jesus forgave sins – he forgave Judas in advance – he forgave his
executioners from the cross – he forgave Peter for his denial.
Where
does forgiveness start? The dictionary
defines forgiveness as:
to grant pardon, to cease to blame, to cease feeling resentment
towards.
Those
are verbal descriptions of what happens when forgiveness is given; however, it
doesn't answer the question about where forgiveness begins. The Bible answers forthrightly (as with every
other important question of life), that forgiveness begins in the heart.
The
Jews, God's very special people, were used to write almost our entire
Bible. In Jewish thought the human heart
is the hidden spring of the personal life.
In
the Jewish wisdom library we find the Book of Proverbs, 30 chapters of the
collected wit, lore and God-inspired thought of the race. In those thirty chapters are more than eighty
references to the heart as the center of living.
The Jewish
concept of the heart is organized into three fields:
Reason or logic is our sense of understanding. In Western thought we say it is the
mind. It is where intelligent creatures
separate from the animal kingdom.
Problem-solving is a matter of the heart.
Emotion is the visceral announcement of the heart's condition and
desires. Much of our lives revolve
around such emotions as love, anger, compassion, self-preserving instincts or
emotions.
Will or moral choice is the place of the soul.
· Reason corresponds to the mental, or spirit capacity.
· Emotion corresponds to the body, and the
· Will is the soulish part of us that makes moral decisions of right and
wrong.
When
we understand the different concepts of the heart of humans, (reason, emotion,
will), it is then much easier to understand that, for the heart to truly
forgive, all three must be involved. It
is the surrender of the total, threefold heart.
Surrender of Reason
In
our parable the king knew that the debt was not payable. There was no satisfying such a great sum ($10
million). The Hatfields and McCoys felt
the same way. The 1880's newspapers were
filled with accounts of this family feud.
Nobody seems able to recall how the thing got started. Reports are that it was either Metaphysical
and Philosophical divergence on the Civil War postures, or it was hog
stealing. Either way, nearly 100 men
women and children died. It didn't make
a lot of sense. There was no surrender
to reason.
In
1976 Jim McCoy and Willis Hatfield – the last two survivors who took part in
the fighting – shook hands at a public ceremony to dedicate a memorial to the
victims. McCoy died at 99 years old in
1984. His burial was conducted at the
Hatfield Funeral Home in Toler, KY.[ii]
Christian
reasoning is different from the worldly reasoning; the Bible tells us to be
different. The world sees unilateral
forgiveness as a refreshing exception.
In the Kingdom of God it is the living, breathing norm!
The
surrender of our reason means allowing our thinking/mind to be controlled and
governed by God's Word. There are
several components to surrendering our “reason”:
Response to the command of Jesus
(seventy times seven)
Peter
knew the Jewish rule; forgive a wrong once, twice, three times, then take
revenge. He thought he was being
magnanimous by more than doubling it to seven times. Jesus told him to forget his scorecard, and
just forgive. We are also commanded to
forgive like that.
Reconciliation
And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him.
2 Corinthians 5:18(NLT)
Our
business as the church is the ministry of reconciling people to Christ. We cannot imagine to even begin to talk of
reconciling others to a God we cannot see if we cannot forgive and be
reconciled to the brothers we can see.
A
lack of forgiveness hampers the work of the Holy Spirit of God in us. There are some things that do not break our
fellowship – these hardly need to be considered. However, if there is something that
continually eats away at your insides, it must be dealt with. A good rule of thumb is: Anything that can't be forgotten is probably
not forgiven either! It must be driven
from your relationship with your Christian brother or sister in open,
face-to-face reconciliation.
Restoration
There will be no mercy for those who have
not shown mercy to others. But if you have been merciful, God will be merciful
when he judges you. James 2:13(NLT)
Surrendering
our reason means allowing God to have final say in our thinking process.
In
our text, the unjust steward, who wouldn't forgive his fellow servant who only
owed him $20, didn't reason well. He had
been forgiven much; he wouldn't forgive even a little.
We
have always heard how the Father's love is unconditional; this is not the case
with His forgiveness. When we refuse to
forgive, we refuse to be forgiven. A
dear friend of mine said to me recently that forgiving others is the hard
part of that! Uh…yeah!
A
preacher wrote, Can you humbly beseech God, and with tearful eyes look up to Him for
pardon while you have your foot upon your brother's neck or your hand at his
throat?"[iii]
Surrender of Emotions
The
text says the servant's master took pity (had compassion) on
him. It is not easy to surrender your
emotions, especially when you believe you've been wronged or hurt. It is perhaps the most difficult part of
forgiveness to place yourself in the other person's shoes, and feel his
pain. It is not right to fake
compassion, attempting to manufacture or manipulate feelings that aren't really
there.
However,
The Bible demands (and integrity dictates) that we earnestly seek to surrender
our emotions, and let God help us with feeling for those whom we need to
forgive.
There
are two disciplines we can enter into in order to help our compassion:
Identify
with the Immensity of our debt
The
wicked servant owed $10-12 million.
That's a large debt! (Except for our government -- they don't notice
anything under sixty billion!)
George
Buttrick said, A cross was raised to forever silence the heresy that forgiveness
was easy.
When
someone has wronged you, it will be easier to surrender your emotions if you
first consider how much Jesus has forgiven you before you get all hurt and
angry over what your brother has done to you.
Imitate
the Intensity of His Love
Be kind and compassionate to one another,
forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Eph 4:32 (NIV)
The
family of God is tied from individual to individual with a bond of love. Love is verbal, visceral and visible. To surrender our emotions to each other means
we cannot be "cold fish," nor can we be seething hotbeds of
anger. We must seek to imitate the
intensity of the love of Christ. It was
He who wept over Jerusalem who stoned the prophets; it was He who wept over
Lazarus; it was He who groaned for each of us in the Garden of Gethsemane.
To
imitate the intensity of Jesus' love is to act that way until we feel that
way. C.S. Lewis wrote, "It would be
quite wrong to think that the way to become 'loving' is to sit trying to
manufacture affectionate feelings. Some
people are 'cold' by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is
no more a sin than having a bad digestion is sin, and it does not cut them off
from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning 'love.' The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you
'love' your neighbor; act as if you did...When you are behaving as if you loved
someone, you will presently come to love them. If you injure someone you dislike, you will
find yourself disliking him more. If you
do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less."[iv]
Surrender of Will
In
the story of the wicked servant, the king wiped out the debt and allowed the
man to start over. A church member told
me that her family had a dozen children.
When they were grown, whenever one was ill, or had other trouble, the
other eleven would band together to help with the bills. When the trouble or illness was over, there was
nothing to repay.
This
is the way God forgives us when we act in faith. In Exodus we read of God's people being passed
over by the death angel.
Moses had instructed the people to kill the lamb and put the blood on
the door posts. Those that did were
released from their debt of sin, and the death angel would pass over that household. Forgiveness demands that we:
Have a
Passover
A
man's wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an
offense. Prov 19:11 (NIV)
Sometimes
you are absolutely right. Sometimes the
other fella is absolutely wrong. He hurt
you, he was wrong, he should be hung!
(At least we think so!) I want to
assure you that the details are less important in the eyes of eternal Almighty
God, than the relationship of your brother and you. In the early part of this chapter the Lord
said if your brother offends you (even if he's dead wrong) you go to him and
begin to get it straightened out!
Make it
a Priority
Experience
tells us that reconciling and forgiveness require all three parts of a man's
heart. When we forgive only with the
reason, or mind, it will fail us when our emotions flare up. Forgiveness that is based solely on an
emotional tug of the heartstrings will fade with time. There must be reason, emotion AND a definite
choice of the will. When we submit that
will to Christ, and humbly forgive, our prayer is heard in heaven.
How Do You Do It?
How
do you forgive with the mind, emotions and will, and actually make it stick?
Five
Suggestions:
1. Pray - Nothing great is ever accomplished without God.
2. Choose to forgive, and then choose to
never again hold it against him/her.
Remember, when God forgives He casts our sin into the deepest part of
the sea’ then He puts up a No Fishing sign.
3. Seek for some good quality in that person on which to dwell. Consider that person your former
adversary.
4. Relax Don’t judge, and don’t worry. Let your own goodness be the only thing the
Holy Spirit has to use to convict the person of wrongdoing.
5. Do something sacrificial for that person.
According
to ancient Oriental tradition, whenever a debt was settled, either by payment
or forgiveness, the creditor would take the canceled bond and nail it over the
door of the one who owed it. Anyone
passing by could then see that it had been fully paid.
Jesus
did that for us. That is exactly the
meaning of the word Jesus cried out from the cross: tetelestai – it is finished!
We
should do it for each other. We should
do it now!
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. Amen
Footnotes
[ii] Peter
Johnson, USA Today, (4-14-88) Mrs Naomi
Perry of Gainesville, Fl is a descendant of the original McCoy's. She was married to my father-in-law for a
brief time (they didn't get along any better than her ancestors).
[iii] Marcus
Dods, The Parables Of Our Lord, (NY, Fleming H. Revell Co, c.1900) 130
[iv] The
Bible Illustrator, (Hiawatha, Ia,
Parson's Technology, 1990) 2200-2209
