“12 Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors... 14 For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
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Can anyone tell me which book this image comes from?
The Way Things Workby David Macaulay spent fifty weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list for good reason. Macaulay playfully and skillfully explains how things works. He shows us how printing works. Here we see how window shades and seat belts work.
Here we see how cutting machines like razors and can openers work.
Finally, we see how a Blu-Ray player works. Macaulay drew these clever diagrams with cartoon mammoths to make complex things simple and entertaining.
If this is helpful for things like seatbelts and razors, how much more helpful would it be for something like forgiveness? Forgiveness is complicated. We need to know how it works.
Could you break down forgiveness and explain it to someone who needs to forgive? This morning’s sermon is about how forgiveness works. This morning’s sermon is the diagram. If you have the Holy Spirit working within you, you can operate forgiveness. You can forgive. By God’s grace, you can forgive. That’s the claim of this sermon: by God’s grace, you can forgive.
We are going to open up forgiveness and look inside. When we do, we see three components: reorient, speak, and move forward. Those are the three points of our study: reorient, speak, and move forward.
First: reorient. When you are sinned against, you lose perspective. You are disoriented. You begin to think of yourself primarily in terms of what was done to you. You begin to think of your offender primarily in terms of what she did to you. You begin to think of God as siding with you against your offender in all things. When you think this way, forgiveness doesn’t make sense. You need to be reoriented. You need to see yourself, your offender, and God rightly.
Jesus reoriented Peter. After Jesus taught on sin and forgiveness, Peter asked, “how many times should I forgive my brother who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Peter probably thought that seven was a rather generous number. When you are thinking in terms of what was done to you, seven seems generous. When you are thinking of the other person solely as an offender, seven seems overly generous. When you are imagining God standing totally with you against the one who hurt you, seven seems to go above and beyond.
Jesus disagreed. “I tell you not seven times but seventy times seven.” Jesus wasn’t saying that 490, seventy times seven, was the limit. Jesus gave Peter a number that no one with Peter’s perspective could stomach.
Can you stomach forgiving someone seventy times seven times? If you are wrongly oriented, you cannot. You will see this lavish forgiveness as a call to be an eternal doormat.
If that’s how you understand Jesus’ instructions on forgiveness, you need to be reoriented. Jesus reoriented Peter by telling him a parable. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him twenty years’ worth of wages was brought to him. Since 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 repay the debt. At this the servant fell on his knees before him. “Be patient with me,” he begged, “and I will pay back everything.” The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.’ That servant then turned around and refused to forgive a fellow servant’s debt. He had just been forgiven the equivalent of a million dollars and he refused to forgive the equivalent $137.
Jesus wanted Peter to see that he had been forgiven a million dollars debt and must forgive his brother’s debt. Peter was thinking in terms of, ‘how forgiving should I be?’ Jesus reoriented him to ask, ‘how forgiving should I be as someone who has received forgiveness?’
Jesus reorients you by showing you yourself. You are not first and foremost an offended party. If you are a Christian, you are first and foremost a recipient of mercy. When you have been sinned against, you need to remind yourself that your identity is that of a sinner who needs the same grace you are called to offer.
Jesus reorients you by showing you your offender. You are not above your offender. You have been forgiven the million-dollar debt. Your offender owes you the equivalent of $137. It is a real debt, but you have been forgiven much more.
Jesus reorients you by showing you the Father. The Father doesn’t side totally with you against your offender. The Father offers mercy to you and He calls you to offer the mercy you’ve received. “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?” The Father is also willing to forgive your offender just as He forgave you.
Are you reoriented to forgive? Do you see yourself as a forgiven sinner? Do you recognize that you stand in need of the same grace as your offender? Do you see your offender as a fellow debtor or do you think you are somehow cut from a different cloth? You too have fallen into temptation. You too have failed to love your neighbor as yourself. You are more like than unlike your offender. You have received mercy. You must give that mercy. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
When you are reoriented to forgive, then you speak with your offender. That is the next component of forgiveness: speak.
Jesus instructs you to speak to the one who sinned against you. Matthew 18:15, “If your brother sins, go and point out his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won him over.”
Too often, we talk to everyone other than the person who sinned against us. Knowing that you must speak with your brother motivates you to be sure the offense was a sin. You might be angry because a decision was made that hurt your feelings. That is not necessarily sin. You might be angry because someone didn’t do what you expected. That is not necessarily sin. If you are willing to charge someone with guilt in your heart, you should be willing to charge that person with guilt in person. Each of us can build a solid case against our brother in our head. Many of these cases unravel if we know we must present our case in person.
Speaking with our brother also gives us an opportunity to hear form our brother. Maybe when you hear his side of the story you can see it form his point of view. Maybe it wasn’t sin. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Are you willing to find out? If not, why not? Is it because you can continue to feel one hundred percent in the right if you refuse to speak to your brother? IF so, that is self-righteousness. Talk to your brother.
Right now, you might be thinking that it would be impossible to talk to the friend who hurt you. It might seem impossible because your relationship would suffer if you named what he did as sin. The fact is that your relationship is already suffering. Are you avoiding this person? Are you unwilling to trust this person? If so, the relationship is already suffering. The only way to restore this relationship is by forgiveness and that involves speaking with your friend.
You might avoid pointing out sin because you are afraid of how your words will be received. You don’t want to make him angry. You don’t want him to yell at you. He might. He might not. His response is not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to name what happened to you as sin and to forgive it. Despite how he responds, you can still judge what he has done as sin. You can still tell him that you’ve been forgiven and so you forgive his sin.
Your friend might refuse to listen. If he does, you have options. Listen to Jesus’ instructions, “If he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.” If your offender is a Christian, you can bring other Christians into the conversation. You do so not out of a desire to get your way. You do so out of a desire to see a sinner repent. Your friend sinned against you. If he won’t repent, he will suffer consequences. Listen to James, “My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.”
Talking to your friend might be hard, but it might be the only way towards reconciliation. How many friendships among us have soured because we refused to speak with one another? How many families are strained because of a lack of communication?
Addressing your brother’s sin will also keep you from becoming a doormat. Lewis Smedes is right, “Forgivers are not doormats. To forgive a person is not a signal that we are willing to put up with what he does.”
Forgiveness doesn’t say that what you did to me was okay. Forgiveness says, ‘what you did to me is not okay. It is sin, but sin can be forgiven.’ Forgiveness doesn’t invite another offense. Forgiveness points out the offensiveness of sin and the grace of mercy.
When you speak with the one who sinned against you, you can determine whether reconciliation is possible. Forgiveness is always possible. Reconciliation is not always possible.
Let’s say that your friend betrayed your trust in a grievous way. If you don’t talk to her about it, you won’t reconcile. You will slowly but surely pull away from her. If you do talk to her about what she did, you might be able to reconcile. You can reconcile if she apologizes. If she doesn’t apologize, restoration of that friendship might be impossible. Forgiveness is always possible. Reconciliation isn’t always possible.
Imagine an employee embezzles $70,000. The boss is a Christian. He is called to forgive that employee because God has forgiven him. That doesn’t mean he should necessarily keep that man as an employee. He can tell that man, ‘I forgive you for what you have done. I’ve been forgiven by God and I must give what I’ve received, but your actions have proven that you are not fit to be part of this company.’
Spouses are called to forgive each other but sometimes one or both spouses make reconciliation is impossible. Jesus tells us that adultery can make reconciliation impossible. The apostle Paul tells us that abandonment can make reconciliation impossible. Is a woman called to forgive the husband who cheated on her? Yes, because she has received mercy from God. Does that mean that she must reconcile? Not necessarily. Is he repentant? Is he willing to work to restore the marriage? Reconciliation isn’t straightforward. The call to forgive is straightforward. Reconciliation isn’t always possible. Forgiveness is always possible for us who have the Spirit.
If you struggle to forgive, and in ourselves we all struggle to forgive, you must depend on the Holy Spirit. You don’t have it in yourself to forgive. If you are thinking, ‘but I can’t forgive him,’ you are right. God calls us to do all sorts of things that are impossible for us. He gives us the Holy Spirit so we can do what is impossible for us-like love Him, like please Him, like love as we’ve been loved. Pray that the Holy Spirit would help you do what you cannot do; “it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose.”
The last part of forgiving is moving forward. Too often we forgive but fail to move forward. Let’s see how in our third point.
How should you treat the person you’ve forgiven? If you are going to move forward with forgiveness, you need to treat her the way God commands you to treat her. You need to treat her with love.
Thomas Watson offers us these three ways of moving forward in love. If you are going to love the one you’ve forgiven, you need to resist revenge. Romans 12:17, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.”
The Father doesn’t take revenge on me for my sin. I, who am forgiven, am to resist revenge against my offender. Thoughts of revenge, thoughts of making him look like a fool, running him down in front of others, these are a sign that you haven’t moved forward with forgiveness.
Forgiveness releases you from the responsibility to even the score with your offender. Once you forgive your offender, you turn him over to God. Romans 12:19, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”
The call of forgiveness is a call of release. Forgiveness is not going to prison so the other person can go free. Choosing to forgive is choosing to go free. Lewis Smedes is right, “the first person to benefit from forgiving is the one who does it… when we forgive, we set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner we set free is us.”
God doesn’t tell you to resist revenge because He doesn’t want your offender held accountable. He tells you to resist revenge because it’s His job to hold your offender accountable. If your offender repents, she bears her sin no more. If your offender does not repent, it is up to God and not you to deal with her sin. If you live a life of revenge, Satan will have you. Only God is holy enough to dispense vengeance without being destroyed by it. Resisting revenge is part of forgiveness.
Praying for your offender is also part of moving forward. Matthew 5:44, “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
If your offender is an unbeliever, do you want her to die in her sin, especially her sin against you, or do you want to see her turn to Christ and know the joy of grace? If your offender is a disciple, do you want to see her sanctified so that this sin loses its hold on her?
You were once Jesus’ enemy, but he forgave you and now he intercedes for you. He calls you to love with the love you are currently receiving. Intercede for your offender.
Wishing your offender well is also part of forgiveness. Luke 6:28, “Bless those who curse you.”
What do you want for your offender? Emma wanted what was best for Gordon. In his book on marriage, When Sinners Say I Do, Dave Harvey tells us about these two. “Gordon and Emma met at a church function. She was an admirable young woman, and he was a fairly new pastor. Their wedding day seemed to be the launch of a godly couple in the promise of fruitful ministry in the decades ahead. But just a few days into their honeymoon, all of Emma’s dreams for her life were crushed. Gordon made it clear that he didn’t love Emma, and that he had married her simply because there were more opportunities for married pastors than single ones. For forty years, through the birth of six children, and the while functioning as a pastor, Gordon made no meaningful attempt to kindle love for his wife. Freely admitting to an adulterous affair that began after the birth of their fourth child, Gordon insisted he must remain married - divorce would derail his pastoral career. Marriage for Emma became a life of secret shame. She was relegated to sharing a room with their two daughters, while her husband stayed in a separate room, and their four sons in another.”
Given his continued adultery, Emma did divorce Gordon, but she also forgave Gordon. She wanted what was best for Gordon even if he didn’t want was best for her. Harvey writes, “Emma sent Gordon birthday cards and periodic letters, calling the lonely and rebellious man to God. She was tasting the sweet joy of a deep relationship with the Father, and increasingly longed for Gordon to know that for himself.”
Emma wanted Gordon to know God’s mercy. “Bless those who curse you.” Do you want what is best for your offender? Have you forgiven her?
This might sound like a lot of work, but not forgiving takes even more energy. It might take energy to wish him well, but it also takes energy to keep wishing him ill. It might take energy to resist revenge, but it also takes energy to keep hating him in your heart.
You benefit when you forgive, but you don’t ultimately forgive for yourself. You don’t ultimately forgive for the sake of your offender. You forgive because you’ve been forgiven. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Have you received the Father’s mercy? Did Jesus die on the cross for you? God calls you to give what you’ve received. You know how. If you have the Holy Spirit, you can do it. Amen.