Embracing & Extending Forgiveness

Pastor Melinda Song
23 January 2022

Forgiveness is a BIG issue to God. Today, for a better understanding of what forgiveness is let us turn to . . .

Matthew 18:21–35 (NLT)
²¹ Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?” 
²² “No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven! 
²³ “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. ²⁴ In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. ²⁵ 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. 
²⁶ “But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ ²⁷ Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt. 
²⁸ “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. 
²⁹ “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. ³⁰ But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full. ³¹ “When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. ³² 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. ³³ Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ ³⁴ Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt. 
³⁵ “That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.” 

The passage begins with Peter asking, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me?

Rather than listening for Jesus’ answer, Peter proposes his own—seven times. Seven is generous. The rabbinical standard was three, based on Amos 1-2—”For three transgressions … for four, I will not turn away its punishment”, a phrase repeated several times in those chapters. The idea is that God forgives three sins and punishes the fourth. Peter senses that Jesus wants the disciples to extend themselves even further, so he doubles the standard and then adds one more for good measure. BUT Jesus replied, “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven!” 

This is not a math-lesson, but a grace-lesson. 

• Jesus is not asking us to keep careful records, but is setting a standard that makes record keeping impractical. 
• If you are forgiving so habitually you cannot help but become a forgiving person. 

Jesus then tells a parable to illustrate the kind of forgiveness that he is asking of his disciples. 

He told of a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. One servant owed a large amount, 10,000 talents. 

• A talent is the largest unit of money in New Testament times—equivalent to 6,000 denarii—a denarius being a day’s wages for an ordinary labourer (20:2, 13). 
• Ten thousand (myrias) is the largest number for which the Greeks have a word. 
• When Jesus says “ten thousand talents,” he multiplies the largest unit of money by the largest Greek number, and the result is unimaginably large—the equivalent of a working man’s wages for 60 million days or 200,000 years–far more than King Herod’s realm would gain from taxes in a year (Boring, 382). It was an astronomical and unpayable debt. 

Since he was unable to pay, the master ordered that the servant, his wife, children, and possessions be sold so he could repay as much of the debt as possible. The servant pleaded with his master, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’. The master took pity on the servant, cancelled the debt, and set him free.

But shortly thereafter this servant found a fellow servant who owed him 100 denarii which represents a working man’s wages for one hundred days. The hundred denarii debt is tiny compared with the ten thousand talent debt but becomes significant when immediate payment is required. 

The second debtor uses exactly the same words that the first debtor used in verse 26 to persuade the king to give him a chance to repay the debt. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it’ Now note a big difference: The first debtor had no chance of ever repaying his ten-thousand talent debt, but it is quite conceivable that given some time, the second debtor will be able to repay his hundred denarii debt. 

The first servant demanded instant payment and refused to show mercy toward his debtor. In fact, he had the second servant thrown into prison until he paid the debt. 

The other servants, aware of all that had happened, were greatly distressed by this turn of events and told their master what had transpired. The master summoned the first servant and turned him over to the jailors for failing to show mercy to a fellow servant when he had been forgiven a much greater debt.

In this parable Jesus is holding up a mirror in order that we might see ourselves. We are the servant who has been forgiven a vast and staggering amount of money, and God is the great king that has forgiven us. We in turn are to extend forgiveness to others

Forgiveness is central to our faith and has to be embraced and extended. We can pass on only that which we have received. Forgiveness is passing on what we have received from God. 

³⁴ Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt. ³⁵ “That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.” 

Some, reading verses 34 and 35, think that this parable means 

• a person can lose his salvation, OR 
• the servant wasn’t saved to begin with

However, we should understand that parables like this are generally not teaching such deep theology. Instead, it is teaching a simple and easy to understand point: God has forgiven us and He wants us to forgive others like He forgives us. 

When we refuse to extend forgiveness we need to question whether or not we have actually been forgiven in Christ ourselves. Because if we really understood just how much God has forgiven us in the gospel, we will not be able to keep from forgiving them. Because forgiven people forgive. Those who have embraced forgiveness should be able to extend forgiveness. Forgiveness is passing on what we have received from God. 

Life is all about relationships and relationships often bring hurt and the need to forgive. As believers, we ought to speak the language and live the life of forgiveness because we are forgiven, people.

Ephesians 4:31–32 (NIV84) 
³¹ Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. ³² Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. 

But that doesn’t mean forgiveness is easy. Or natural. Or without its challenges. Forgiveness can be very hard. C.S. Lewis wrote: “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive”.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FORGIVE?

A. It violates our sense of justice. People are hardwired to retaliate when they have been hurt by another person. We want justice. The person must pay!

The first servant has every right to exact payment from the second servant. But he had also received great mercy from the king that based on justice, he doesn’t deserve. 

Moreover, the paltry sum owed to him by his fellow servant does not belong to him but should have rightly been used to offset the astronomical amount he owed to the king.  

Like the first servant, the forgiveness we receive through Christ is not earned or deserved. Jesus paid the debt of my sin, I could never pay myself. The price that was paid to set us free from the wrath and penalty of sin and reconcile us back to God was the “Blood” which was shed by God’s own Son, Jesus Christ at Calvary while we were yet sinners who were separated from God because of our sins.

The whole point of the parable is summarised in Ephesians 4:32 where we are to forgive one other UNCONDITIONALLY, just as God in Christ has forgiven us. The Bible doesn’t say only forgive if the offender says sorry. Nor, does it say, forgive as long as they promise not to do it again. 

B. Holding a grudge against someone gives us a false sense of control and power. We often withhold forgiveness to punish the offender so we can feel good about ourselves again. 

In reality, we are the ones losing control and giving over the power to the offender because that punishment can be unproductive and ineffective if the person isn’t aware or don’t care that they have offended you. So here you are carrying the heavy burden of a grudge while the other person is moving on with their life. Who is being punished here?

• Refusing to forgive someone else is like drinking rat poison and expecting the rat to die.
• Holding on to anger, resentment and the resulting unforgiveness has also been likened grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else—you are the one who gets burned. 

The message is clear, the holder of the resentment is the loser in this scenario. 

• You are the one with the stress and anger. 
• You are the one living in the past at the expense of the present. 
• You are the one who brings that bitterness into your other relationships and experiences.

Forgiveness releases the offender, the offence and the situation into God’s hands. 

Romans 12:19 (NIV84) 
¹⁹ Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. 

He alone is the omniscient righteous Judge. He will settle the accounts. God is the One to whom we can entrust our hurts.

C. People don’t deserve forgiveness because their sins are too big to forgive. When we view sin through a worldly lens, we determine its “level”. We judge the sins of others, categorising their offences as forgivable or unforgivable. 

Let me share with you an illustration of the skyscraper line. When we stand facing buildings they are all different heights. Some bigger, some smaller. We tend to view sin in the same way. But God has a top view. Every building is the same height. That is how God sees sin. There is no sin greater than another.

When we see sin through God’s eyes we would recognize that all sin is forgivable. “I can’t forgive”, wouldn’t be part of our vocabulary.

D. We don’t feel like forgiving. Biblical forgiveness is never presented as an option but as a requirement. We are repeatedly commanded by Jesus to forgive as we’ve been forgiven. Our forgiveness of others is to be a natural outworking of God’s forgiveness of us. 

There is no hypocrisy in forgiving someone when you don’t feel like doing so. Hypocrisy, from the vantage point of being a Christian, is to say one is a Christ-follower, but refuse or reject to abide by his teachings. To grant forgiveness while still hurting is not hypocrisy, it is obedience to the commands of the Lord. 

Forgiveness is an act of the will done in obedience to God’s Word through the help of His Spirit.

In his book, Caring Enough to Forgive, David Augsburger rightly calls forgiveness “a journey.” Even after we have forgiven someone, resentment, hate, or hurt may periodically rise up within us, but over time we will find that feelings eventually line up with our decisions after the decisions are made.

E. We cannot forget the hurt. “Forgive and forget” is simply not realistic and nowhere in Scripture does it infer that once we forgive, we must forget. 

Some quote Hebrews 8:12 where God promises, “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” God being omniscient doesn’t forget our sins as we might forget where we placed our keys. What it means is that God, out of the abundance of His mercy and love, chooses not to hold our sins against when we put our faith in Jesus Christ.  

In biblical forgiveness, God redeems and heals the past rather than erases it. Like Joseph you will be able to say. . .

Genesis 50:20 (NIV84) 

²⁰ You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. 

Some offences are quite painful, even traumatic. It may be impossible to completely forget the incident or the pain related to it. The key is not to erase one’s memory of the past, but to learn like Joseph how to honour God when past memories seek to infringe upon one’s present awareness. The hurt happened, the scar remains but you are no longer in pain. 

F. We mistakenly think that forgiveness releases the offender from consequences. Forgiving seems to send the message that we are condoning the offence or saying it was OK. But forgiveness doesn’t excuse the wrong or absolve the offender from responsibility.

Robert Jeffress observes, “One of the greatest barriers to forgiveness is the myth that forgiveness automatically frees our offender from any consequences for his actions.”

Even if the offender comes to God in repentance and receives spiritual release from judgment in the world to come, it does not cancel consequences in the world we live in now.  

Furthermore, forgiveness certainly does not give the offender permission to continue in their hurtful behaviour. Even if forgiveness is extended, a boundary might be necessary. To set a boundary means setting limits on how we ought to be treated.

G. We cannot forgive because trust has been broken. Trust is an incredibly important feature of meaningful relationships and it can be difficult to move beyond the hurt and pain of the betrayal to forgiveness.

Trust is built on tangible evidence. Trust, like a bridge, takes a long time to build but can be destroyed in a matter of moments. The same thing goes for trust in a relationship. Over time, trust is built on tangible evidence. Consequently, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.

Many misconceptions come from trying to tie forgiveness and trust together but trust and forgiveness are different.

• Forgiveness is a command (Ephesians 4:32) and trust is not commanded. 
• Forgiveness is a choice to obey God and sets us on a path toward healing. It is an unconditional choice requiring nothing of the offender and is solely based on grace.
• On the other hand, trust is earned by the offender through tangible evidence of trustworthiness. They must go beyond saying they’re trustworthy, to showing they are trustworthy. It is completely conditional and based completely on works. As a result, it requires much of the offender. Remember the bridge illustration.

The good news is trust can be rebuilt. And forgiveness is the first step on the road to healing and rebuilding trust. However, the duration of this path differs for everyone. 

H. We refuse to forgive because bitterness has already taken root. Unforgiveness leads to bitterness – the emotional state where a person is hurting and angry, and they want everyone else to feel the pain that they are feeling.

It is because of that need to make people feel their pain that they end up lashing out at everyone else, either passively or aggressively. 

Hebrews 12:15 (NIV84) 
See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. 

Once bitterness takes root, it gets harder to pull up. Its roots choke out joy and peace as anger and resentment spread through our lives.

Without forgiveness, we don’t heal from the pain caused by others. Too often, we mistakenly think healing must come before we can forgive. But it is forgiveness that opens the door to healing. 

I. We have forgotten or do not realise how much we’ve been forgiven. Whenever we think about forgiveness, always think about the story Jesus told. It is a humbling reminder of the debt we could never pay. Of the mercy that was extended to us. Of the grace that broke our chains and set us free.

SO HOW DO WE BEGIN TO FORGIVE?

There is no easy road to forgiveness. Forgiving another takes time and work. It begins with thanksgiving that we have been forgiven and acknowledging that we have been hurt and need to forgive the offender.  

Forgiveness begins with God at the feet of Jesus. We are the beneficiaries of the crucified one. We choose to obey God by releasing our hurts, the offender and the situation to God. 

For most of us, forgiveness is a process that we live in. We forgive and choose to forgive again and again because that’s the choice Christ made.

The word that the New Testament uses for forgiveness is the word, aphiemi, which means to “release” or “set free”.  This means that when you forgive, you are really releasing the other person from your right to judge them and hurt them back. You’re saying, “What they did was wrong and it has really hurt me.  However, instead of holding onto my right to punish them, I will allow God to judge them justly.”

It doesn’t matter whether someone deserves forgiveness—you deserve to be free. Lewis Smedes wrote: “To forgive is to set the prisoner free… and to discover that the prisoner was you.” So when you “release” someone, you’re really releasing yourself from the bondage of bitterness.

A traveller was in Burma and as he crossed the river, leeches in the waters came up to his whole body and he was infested with blood-sucking leeches. And we know that if that is allowed to carry on, he may just die like that. So in his natural instinct, he began to grab hold of the leeches, pull them out and throw them off. But the natives shouted to him, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!” You say, “Why?” “Because if you forcefully pull them, some parts of the leeches may remain in your flesh and it may cause poison and toxins to rise. Don’t do that.” “What should I do?” “Come,” they say.

So they brought him to this tub that they have made, they poured in some water, they threw in some herbs, some grass, some leaves, some flowers and told him, “Come, lie in there.” And so as he lowered himself into the tub, as he lay there, as he just lies there, let all that water soak and cause him to be submerged. Amazingly, one by one, the blood-sucking leeches begin to gently fall off his flesh.

You see, we want to deal with unforgiveness forcefully. We want to pull these leeches out of our lives. But I tell you the only way is when one soaks in a tub of Gospel love when one comes to see that Jesus is so much for us. God has forgiven us so much that our lives will be filled with that love that these leeches of unforgiveness can finally fall off.

Can I give you some homework today? Go back and linger there at the cross. Soak in the ocean of God’s love and relish in the amazing love of God. Remind yourself of what Jesus has done and forgive as you have been forgiven.