The Power of God’s Grace – Forgiveness
Matthew 6:12, 14-15
I feel led to talk with you this week about the catalyst behind God’s grace and that is forgiveness.
Forgiveness isn’t something we want to talk about.
In fact, by the end of the service today, all of you may want to go out the right hand doors to avoid me.
Of all of the things that God asks His children to do, forgiving each other is the hardest thing of all.
We all know about people who have held grudges against others for years and never attempted to forgive the other person.
Family members go to their graves bearing grudges against each other because no one had the audacity to say “I forgive you.”
I have listened to people say things like “they never once said that they were sorry. All I want is an apology.”
My personal favorite is “I can forgive but I can’t forget!”
By the way, if you can’t forget, you haven’t forgiven either.
Jesus had a lot to say about forgiveness. While every other word He said wasn’t about forgiveness, it seems as if the most powerful messages He spoke were about forgiveness between God’s children was one of the main messages that Jesus wanted us to understand in order get our lives right with God.
So if you want to ever experience the power of God’s grace, you must first be able to forgive others.
Matthew 6:12 (NKJV)
12 And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors.
Right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount was Jesus’ message on prayer.
If we look at Luke’s gospel, we see that what led to Jesus teaching on prayer was a request by the disciples to teach them to pray.
And right there in the middle of the prayer was verse 12.
Debt, in the Aramaic language means sin.
Sin is the debt that we could never pay.
Jesus was explaining to the disciples that if they were going to receive God’s grace, their sin debt would have to be paid.
And in order for God to forgive them, they in turn were going to do some forgiving of their own.
I’m fairly confident that when Jesus taught the disciples this part of the Lord’s Prayer, that the wheels started turning in all of their minds.
They probably all started thinking about people that they were holding grudges and resentment towards.
Let’s face it, there was a zealot and a tax collector as part of the 12 disciples!
These guys belonged to two groups of people that despised each other.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
Forgive our sins in the same way we forgive those who have done wrong to us.
Aren’t our sins already forgiven?
Yes they are.
The truth is that when we allow unconfessed and unforgiven sin to fester in our lives, it can in and of itself create a very big problem in our walk with the Lord.
1st point
I. Unforgiveness is a roadblock to God’s grace
There’s a very good reason that Jesus put “And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors” right in the middle of the prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer.
Every person who ever confesses Jesus Christ as their personal savior is forgiven of their sins.
But we may have very well sinned 5 minutes after receiving Christ as Lord.
(It happens okay!)
When that happens, it creates a roadblock between us and God’s wonderful, unfailing grace in our lives.
And to be truthful with you, unforgiveness is a biggy.
You will never be able to have the relationship with God that you need if you are harboring a spirit of resentment towards another person who you just can’t forgive.
1 John 1:9
9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
When we confess our sins, we are able to remove the roadblock to God’s grace and we are restored to a complete fellowship with God.
Our confession restores our complete fellowship with God. It isn’t that God stops loving us when we sin or that he’s angry with us when we sin.
It doesn’t mean that we’re going to hell. It means that we’re out of whack. We have “unfinished business” between us and God, until we fess up and admit that we’ve sinned and claim his forgiveness.
Being forgiven should work hand in hand with forgiving.
This verse says, God forgives us as we forgive others. That doesn’t mean that we are forgiven because we forgive others.
We are forgiven as we forgive others.
And the point is that we can’t have true fellowship with God if we are mad at someone who did something to us 20 years ago.
You have no idea of how many stories I’ve heard about married couples who got into an argument and from that point on remained bitter with each other to the point of not speaking to each other “till death did them part.”
One husband that I read about happened to build houses for a living.
He went so far as to cut his home in half and moved half of it onto an adjacent lot and spent the remainder of his days living apart from his wife over something silly.
The truth is that our unwillingness to forgive is a sin.
That sin keeps us out of fellowship with God
If you harbor unforgiveness in your heart toward someone else, you need to forgive them and be released from that bondage before it’s too late.
Matthew 6:14 (NKJV)
14 "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
While God’s love is unconditional and we are forgiven for all of our past, present and future sins, forgiveness is conditional.
Jesus was fully aware that the Jewish people were a vengeful people and that believed in “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
Unfortunately, there are people in the church right now who harbor the same type of feelings.
Even so, Jesus was saying that forgiveness of others went hand in hand with God forgiving us.
Imagine if God held a grudge like we do
In Matthew 18:21-22, Peter asked a very important question
Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" 22 Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.
Depending on what translation you have, it could say 77 times or 490 times.
LOOK OUT ON # 491!!!
Who wants to forgive someone that much?
We have a hard enough time to forgive someone 1 time.
Jesus was not only telling the disciples that they needed to forgive others but they needed to do it as many times as necessary.
And what really struck a chord with me was the fact that Jesus said nothing about determining who was right or wrong.
For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
Forgiveness Jesus style avoids the question of who is responsible all together.
It really doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong. All that matters is “I forgive you.”
“I forgive you” disarms people of bitterness and rage and the desire for vengeance.
I ask you again: What if God held a grudge for something that you did?
Forgiveness is the power behind grace.
It allows a relationship to start over or to be put to rest.
It also breaks the chains of bondage that unforgiveness can so easily imprison us with.
2nd point
II. Forgiveness is more powerful than resentment
Forgiveness is the key to God’s grace but it is also the only thing powerful enough to break the bonds of resentment we can carry toward someone who does something to us.
Forgiveness is a lot like grace in the fact that it is often unmerited, undeserved and unfair.
We want so desperately to seek revenge on old “what’s his name.” He deserves it. He had no right to say what he said
HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW ME THAT WELL!!!!!
And Lord, I pray for him. I pray that You strike him with some kind of injury or disfigurement that causes him to feel so bad he will just come running back and beg for forgiveness.
Why in the world would God require us to forgive the mean rotten people of the world?
Because most of them are sitting near us on Sunday mornings.
Christians, church people can be really mean and unforgiving even though the Bible calls us to forgive each other when we sin against each other.
And even though the OT is full of all sorts of righteous indignation, we are called to do something that is unnatural.
We are called to humble ourselves and unconditionally forgive somebody when they say mean things about us and go around in the corners of the church gossiping about us.
We are supposed to do what is unnatural to our human nature and forgive others
We would struggle to forgive someone who murdered a loved one
We would struggle to forgive an unfaithful spouse
We would struggle to forgive the person who stole our retirement or life savings
Jesus calls us to do just that!
He calls us to turn the other cheek!
I had a man in a SS class I used to teach who was a prisoner of war in WWII.
He struggled with forgiveness of his captors.
He said “no way will I ever forgive those Nazi %&##
If I ever got the chance, to this day I would kill every one of them!
Other than that, he had no problems with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And he went to his grave unable to forgive them.
He died as a prisoner of resentment.
Forgiveness is the one element of grace that is powerful enough to break the chains that imprison a believer in misery and sorrow.
Matthew 6:15 (NKJV)
15 "But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Jesus pointed out an amazing thing in this verse.
He was essentially giving the disciples the conditions upon which each of them could be forgiven by the LORD for their sins.
Real simple.
The forgiveness of our own sins is directly related to our willingness to forgive others who sin against us.
Jesus wanted the disciples to understand that the condition of unforgiveness was the same as forgiveness.
If we want to have an unhindered relationship with the Lord, we have to have an unhindered relationship with other people.
There are consequences to holding on to our feelings of unforgiveness.
We become a prisoner to it
It molds us not in God’s image but in an image of the flesh!
God didn’t forgive us of our sins and save us so that we could go on living in the flesh
We are under grace.
We have received the unmerited favor of God and we are forgiven
Jesus was essentially telling us that those who sin against us deserve the same pardon that we received.
3rd point
III. Grace is the key to forgiveness
You have to be willing to extend the same grace toward others that God extended to you.
How can we expect the Lord our God who is creator of all to forgive us if we aren’t willing to put aside petty differences and forgive others?
2 Corinthians 1:12 says:
12 For our boasting is this: the testimony of our conscience that we conducted ourselves in the world in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom but by the grace of God, and more abundantly toward you.
Grace has the ability to release forgiveness in us.
Grace is more powerful than anything anyone has ever done to us.
And because of God’s marvelous, infinite matchless grace, we were forgiven.
Doesn’t it only seem that the natural outgrowth of that grace toward us is to extend it to others?
In the spirit, yes but in the flesh, not on your life!
Forgiveness is never easy for us.
We’re never completely satisfied in these bodies when we extend forgiveness.
We want to see them suffer the way we suffered.
The wounds of their transgressions on me still leave open wounds, not scars but real wounds that still hurt.
The hurt doesn’t disappear because we say “I forgive you.”
The hurt does begin to heal because we say “I forgive you.”
And that’s what I had to do with my dad.
Our relationship wasn’t actually a relationship at all.
He never apologized for being an abusive alcoholic.
He never apologized for all of the foul things he used to say and do.
But the Gospel proved to me over and over that I needed to be able to say “NO MORE!”
What was it profiting me to hold a grudge when the Lord whom I dedicated my life to said:
And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors.
Forgiving others may never change them
But it can change you and it can change me!
When you’ve been released from the weight of that resentment, hatred and misery, it will be the most liberating feeling in the world.
And you never know whether or not your ability to forgive may be loosening the bondage of guilt from that other person.
You both may come to a place where you can give up all of your unforgiving baggage and enter into a fresh and open relationship with the Lord.
I’m not sure if any of you are hanging on to any unforgiveness this morning.
If you are, I hope you can leave it at the foot of the cross today.
If you haven’t received God’s forgiveness and you haven’t surrendered your life to Christ for salvation, I encourage you to invite Him into your heart as your personal savior.
If unforgiveness is holding you back from entering into believer’s baptism, join in formal membership with this church or rededicate yourself to the Lord, I invite you to come and surrender all of that.
If you just need to let go of resentment so you can enter into a fresh relationship with the Lord, I invite you to come.
Jesus is calling. He calls everyone publicly and when you step out in faith, you are taking the first step in professing a need for Jesus Christ in your life.
