The Three-Legged Chair
Kingdom Stories, part 3
Wildwind Community Church
David K. Flowers
March 25, 2007
When was the last time you were the recipient of grace? Grace is a great thing to talk about in church, because grace is the cure for what ails us the most deeply. Grace is the cure for guilt. Grace is the cure for inadequacy. Grace is the cure for sin, both intentional and unintentional. Grace is the cure for arrogance and weakness. Grace is the cure for fancying ourselves both better and worse than we are. Grace is an equalizer, because no matter when or to whom it is given, it is never deserved. Anyone who has ever received grace and thought you deserved it – if you really did deserve it, it wasn’t grace you received. I mean, I should just say it, shouldn’t I? Grace is amazing.
So when was the last time you received grace? When’s the last time you were forgiven before you even asked? Many of us who are parents have had incredible grace moments with our kids, haven’t we? I’m talking about those times when we say or do something so hurtful to one of our children and, when we finally get the guts to apologize, we can tell they had already forgiven us in their hearts long ago, simply because it was their desire to forgive.
I have told the story before so I will not belabor it, but grace was me having come completely unglued with my girls when they were smaller. Me laying on my bed looking up at the ceiling, humiliated by my own behavior, unable to look Christy or my girls in the eyes, when Christy comes in and says, “Are you coming out for dinner?” I replied, “I can’t face those girls after how I just treated them.” Christy said, “Your girls are requesting your presence at the table – they told me they would like to serve you dinner.” Grace is what happened in my heart when I brought myself to stand up and walk into the dining room and sit down in my chair, and three little girls who I had deeply wronged took my order and put food on my plate and kissed my cheeks and said I love you. Grace brings life. I sat in that chair looking down at the floor, feeling like I wanted to just dissolve and disappear, but at the same time, the shame began to melt away, drowning in love and forgiveness and affection – and within minutes I was free. Free from the self-hatred I was wallowing in – free from the slavery of my expectations of myself – free from the hopeless accounting that was going on in my heart – “let’s see, I’m good because of this and bad because of that, but good because of that and bad because of this.” Grace is a three-legged chair. It’s the thing that shouldn’t be able to bear your weight, but you throw yourself on it and find you are more than okay – you are completely safe, and you find you can rest there with the load off that you have been carrying. Grace is the cure for comparison – I’m better than you, but not as good as you, and probably halfway between you and you. Grace defies logic, but carries with it a logic of its own, that comes straight out of the Kingdom of God. Grace is otherworldly. Grace as a way of treating people was virtually invented by Jesus, as was the idea that God is a God of grace. Interesting isn’t it that before Jesus, the understanding of how God thought of us was just another version of how we already tend to think of ourselves. Do this and you’re okay, do that and you’re not okay. Hang with these people and avoid those people, do these things and avoid those things, and you’re okay. Jesus changed that, introducing the world to a God who loves sinners who are down and out, people who are at the end of their ropes, the end of themselves, the end of all hope and all sense of self-reliance and self-esteem. A God who doesn’t need to draw boundaries between good people and bad people, who is willing to simply declare righteous anyone who comes to him with the one character quality necessary to receive grace – humility. Without humility, you cannot receive grace. And that’s too bad, because as I have said, grace is what we most need. There’s something scary about the fact that some of us are incapable of receiving what we most need. See you have to muster up some humility to come out of the bedroom where you are sulking and counting your failures and sit down and be served by the one you have wronged – to allow that person to love you, to forgive you before you’ve even asked, to see through your failures right straight into your fear of being unloved and unlovable, to bypass what you do and go straight to who you are – or who you wish you could be.
What’s your hurt this morning? Where do you need grace? I want to talk to you today about grace, about this strange, incredible three-legged chair God invites us to sit right down on and find the rest we are all looking for. I even hope that you will experience a bit of that rest this morning as we think about and talk about grace. And why are we talking about grace? Because we’re telling Kingdom Stories in this series – we’re looking at how Jesus described the Kingdom of God. I have already said grace is other-worldly and that it comes from God’s kingdom. Let’s look at what we can learn about that Kingdom through our study of grace today.
Our text comes from Matthew chapter 18, verses 23-35.
Matthew 18:23-35 (NIV)
23 "Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.
25 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.
26 "The servant fell on his knees before him. ’Be patient with me,’ he begged, ’and I will pay back everything.’
27 The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28 "But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ’Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
29 "His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ’Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
30 "But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32 "Then the master called the servant in. ’You wicked servant,’ he said, ’I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
33 Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’
34 In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35 "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."
The first thing that is established in this parable Jesus told is the fact of our debtor status before God. In the story, a man owes the king ten thousand talents. The talent was the largest Roman unit of currency. In America our largest unit of currency is the $10,000 bill. $10,000 bills were printed until 1946 and then discontinued, and there are about 350 of those bills in circulation today. [$1000 bills are no longer made either, but you can go on eBay and purchase a $1000 bill – the bid when I checked on Friday for a $1000 bill was $2,501.00!] Anyway, just like the $10,000 bill is our largest unit of currency, the talent was the largest Roman unit of currency. But to make things even more interesting, ten thousand was the largest Greek number. So Jesus combined the largest Greek number with the largest Roman unit of currency and that’s how much money he said this guy owed to the King. Now in our system of numbers there is no absolute highest number, because you could always go up one more number, but the largest number that has been given a name is the googolplex, which is a 1 with 100 zeros after it. You can imagine that’s a pretty big number. So if Jesus were telling this parable to Americans today, he might say that a man owed a king a googolplex of $10,0000 bills. Now I decided not even to do the math there to figure out how much money that is. The point is that Jesus is telling us that this guy owed the King an absolutely, impossibly, ridiculous amount of money – more money than he could ever earn in a hundred lifetimes, actually more money than was even in circulation in all of Palestine at that time. Have I made the point? Jesus went out of his way to put this guy in a debt so huge he would never be able to repay it.
That’s the first thing we learn about the Kingdom in this story. You and I are in so much debt to God that we can never repay, no matter how hard we try. In the parable, the King says, “Sell his wife and kids and everything he owns to recoup some of my losses.” The man begs the King to give him time.
Matthew 18:29 (NIV)
29 "His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ’Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
Yeah, right. You’re going to work real hard, pick up an extra job, save your extra pennies, milk a few more cows, and come up with that googolplex of $10,000 bills you owe the King. Isn’t that how you and I often are with God? In the face of this massive debt we owe, our overwhelming position as debtors to God, we still say, “I can earn this. I can pay this back, I know I can. God, I’ll just be really good. I’ll walk to church barefoot every Sunday on broken glass. I promise never to enjoy myself again. I’ll pay you back, God, for this debt I owe you.” But we, just like the man in the story, are fooling ourselves. There was not enough money in Palestine to pay this man’s debt, and we don’t have enough goodness anywhere in us to relieve us of the debt that we owe to God. If we are to understand what Jesus is telling us here about the Kingdom, it starts with the fact that you and I owe a massive debt to the King – one we can never repay. And just like the King orders this man’s wife and children and all his possessions sold to cover some of his losses, so the most valuable and precious things we have are still not enough.
The second important thing here is that the King cancels the debt. Why? Simply because the man is facing losing everything that is important to him, and he begs the King not to sell his family. The King has two choices – sell the family or forgive the debt. He knows this guy is never going to be able to repay this debt. So he takes pity on this man and cancels his debt. The King is the only one who could do this. None of the King’s servants could cancel this debt. The debtor could not cancel the debt. But the King had that power, and he chose to exercise it. My friends, this enormous, unpayable debt we owe God – God is willing to cancel it. He’s willing to consider it paid.
Psalms 103:12 (MSG)
12 And as far as sunrise is from sunset, he has separated us from our sins.
Remember what we said about grace? It’s all about not deserving it. It’s all about being in a position of owing a debt you can’t repay. There were no words that could reverse the hurt I had caused my girls that day. No apologies were sufficient, no money could buy them off, no acts of service could earn my way out of responsibility – I was in debt to them and the only way out was by their grace. The only way out of the debt we owe to God is by his grace. And God is willing to extend that grace to us – to give us the thing we do not deserve. And why is this? The parable says the King does this out of pity. God feels sorry for us! God knows we’re on a hook we can never get off of unless he lets us off. It’s just that simple. And feeling pity, or compassion, for us, he does exactly that.
Next, we see this man immediately go out and shake down a guy who owes him a hundred denarii. That’s about ten bucks. Because of the compassion of the King, this man has just been forgiven of trillions of dollars of debt, yet he refuses to forgive a debt to him of ten dollars, saying, “Throw this man in jail.” I mean, what kind of callous jerk do you have to be to do that? We see in this parable our third point, that there is an expectation of reciprocity. No one could possibly owe us a debt even close to what we owe God, and yet God has forgiven our debt completely, and expects us to do the same for others. Why? Because as I said earlier, the only way to receive grace is with your head down. When you have received grace, and you know it, you are humbled. Humbled beyond belief. Humbled because you know you have just been given what you do not deserve. Did the King extend grace to this man? Yep. Did this man really receive grace from the King? Of course not. In his mind, what he received was a free pass. He got to skate. He may have even left the King’s court that day thinking “Sucker! Man, I took him, didn’t I?” That would be like if I had come out of my bedroom that evening and while the girls were serving me dinner thought to myself, “Yeah, they’d better serve me dinner. I’m the king of this castle and I can say whatever I want.” Just because somebody is extending you grace, doesn’t mean you’re receiving it, even if you are enjoying the fruits of it.
Aren’t there whole denominations that treat God’s grace this way? “God has forgiven me – I got my get-out-of-hell free card! Yeah, no more worries for me.” And the forgiveness and grace God has extended, rather than leading to the same forgiveness and grace being extended to others, leads to a sense of superiority, a willingness to persecute those who are in our debt. A judgmental attitude that sets one’s self up as the standard for who deserves God’s favor and who doesn’t. Some come to God broken and bleeding, and God cleans them up, and then they spend the rest of their lives looking down their noses at others who are broken and bleeding. “Can you believe these nasty, sinful people? It’s just so offensive.” I’m afraid the world is full of so-called Christians who have been forgiven, but never actually received grace. The evidence that you have received grace is that you become willing to extend grace to others. The evidence that God has forgiven your debt is that you forgive your debtors. Now there’s no question that the King forgave the debt of this man. And there’s no question that the man allowed the King to forgive his debt. But what he would not do is put his head down. He would not receive grace – he would not marvel at how undeserving he was, and allow his heart to feel for someone else the same compassion the King had felt for him. This is a story about amazing grace, but also about a man who was incapable of receiving it.
As a result, and this gets to my last point, the King finds out about this and… well, let’s read it:
Matthew 18:32-35 (MSG)
32 "The king summoned the man and said, ’You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy.
33 Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?’
34 The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt.
35 And that’s exactly what my Father in heaven is going to do to each one of you who doesn’t forgive unconditionally anyone who asks for mercy."
How long do you think it took the man to pay back the entire debt? Theoretically, hundreds of lifetimes. Maybe an eternity.
See, this is where punishment and God’s judgment become a factor. My friends, when we think about hell and judgment and stuff, it’s almost always out of context. We ask questions like, “How could a loving God do this or that?” We rarely think of ourselves though. We rarely think of how reprehensible are the heart attitudes and behavior that would lead to judgment and punishment. We think of ourselves as basically good. We don’t comprehend the degree of debt we owed to God, or how massive was his grace in forgiving us. And so we might mosey along, taking grace for granted. So much so that we often have little problem getting upset with the person who owes us comparatively very little. We can resort to all kinds of sick stuff to get our pound of flesh from others – guilt, manipulation, demanding apologies, anger, silence – we have a pretty big bag of tricks. And the point of this parable is simply to show us how that looks from God’s perspective. And what Jesus tells us at the end here is that the King expects us to forgive our debtors as our debts have been forgiven. Not doing so will bring about consequences. Why, because God loves to punish people? No, not at all, but because refusal to be channels of grace indicates that we have never received grace in the first place. I hope I am making that clear. Folks, that’s the point of this parable. It’s what I call a spiritual law of natural consequences. When we sin against God, God does not move away from us – we step away from him. When we sin against God, God does not shrink our hearts – our hearts shrink and become less open to him simply because that’s what sin does. When we refuse to forgive others, we show that in our hearts we have never received what God gave us in the first place. To receive grace is to know that the one who has been forgiven most has the most to be grateful for. Watch this.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you see your debt as small, you will have a small amount of gratitude. If you see it as huge, you will be hugely grateful – and gracious. If we do not receive God’s grace, then we are apart from him. Period.
Every one of us owed a debt to God we could never repay. And God, through the death of Jesus Christ, declared that debt forgiven.
Romans 3:23-24 (MSG)
23 Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners…and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us,
24 God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.
That’s grace. Grace has its own kind of logic. It starts with something illogical – you owe me $100 trillion dollars, and I simply tell you to forget about it. Where does that happen? Only in the Kingdom of God. [That’s how the Kingdom works and we’re going to look at more about that next week on Friend Day.] Grace is against our rules of logic, common sense, etc. Grace always feels like it comes out of the blue as a massive surprise. Because grace really is a gift. If you give me something valuable, and I get excited and thank you for it, and then go out on the street to sell it so I can get something else I want, have I really received your gift? I’m not asking if I HAVE your gift, but if I truly received it. Of course not, because your gift isn’t just a commodity – it means something about how you feel and think about me. If I immediately turn around and try to sell it, I’m not receiving the gift, I’m using the gift to achieve my own aims.
Unfortunately, many do that with God’s grace. The man in the story, had it not been for the King’s grace, wouldn’t have ever been able to collect his debt because he’d have been in jail with his family. So he used the gift of his freedom not to grant freedom to others, but instead to put someone in prison. He took the King’s gift and used it for his own purposes – he never had any interest in it for what it was, but only for what he could get out of it. He never put his head down. He never received grace.
Grace is the three-legged chair. It seems cock-eyed and weird and out of sorts. But it will surprise you every time. It will hold you up. It might not even make sense when you look at it, but experience will confirm that it’s real.
You look at this picture and you realize there’s no way this baby could sit on it. There’s no way it’s going to stand up. But it does. How could grace really work? How could giving things to people that they don’t deserve be a sensible way to live life? Well, I don’t exactly know the answer to that, except to say that is how God treats us. And if we get it, if we have really received what he has given, that is how we will treat others. To the extent that we are loving and compassionate with others, we understand God’s love and compassion for us. To the extent that we are harsh and demanding with them, we do not understand God’s love and compassion.
Based on how you usually treat other people, how much do you understand of God’s grace? Have you truly received God’s grace, or do you just use it for what you can get out it? Do you usually extend to others the compassion and empathy God has extended to you? Do you withhold judgment from people and spend time thanking God that he is willing to withhold it from you? As we close I want to spend a few quiet moments reflecting on grace, thanking God for what he has done, and asking him to help us be channels of his grace in the lives of others.
