1. OPENING ILLUSTRATION:
Discussion about the movie “Warrior” about two revenge driven brothers competing in a mixed martial arts tournament. Central Theme of movie – Unforgiveness
Sermon focus – Discipline Forgiveness
2. BACKGROUND
A) Jesus teaching disciples about handling conflict importance of forgiveness
B) Peter follows up with a question…”How many times must I forgive my brother…..?”
C) Jesus answers…”77 times.”
D) Forgiveness should be unlimited
E) Jesus tells a Kingdom parable that supports this radical idea about the man who was forgiven a great sum of money, yet tries to get money from the person who owes him little. Both men end up in prison.
F) Point: we have been forgiven a great debt (our sins) and so we should forgive others and it begins within the church community.
3. APPLICATION
G) There challenges and conflicts within a church community
H) We can use it as an opportunity for personal growth
i) Discussion about various lens we view conflict
J) Forgiveness allows God’s grace to continue to flow through the church
k) We need to learn to overlook an offense
4. CONCLUSION
L) Failure to forgive leaves both people in prison (the unforgiven, and the one who won’t forgive.
M) Closing scene from the movie Warrior – Two brothers forgiving each other, a modern day parable
How many of you have seen the movie “Warrior”? A few of you. “Warrior” was a movie that came out in 2011 starring Nick Nolte and a couple lesser named people. I think the guys name was Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. Here is a picture of the movie poster. The movie “Warrior” was actually filmed in Pittsburgh. If you were to watch the movie you would see locations such as Don’s Diner in the North Side off McClure Avenue. You would see North Hills High School and you would even see the Twin Drive-In Theatre out there in Robinson. It is a great movie. It has a really basic plot. The central theme of this movie is un-forgiveness. It is the story about two brothers who really don’t like each other. In fact, they hate each other. They are able to actually take out that revenge at a mixed martial arts tournament in Atlantic City. Some of you might not know what mixed martial arts are. I really didn’t know much about it. But apparently mixed martial arts involves a little bit of boxing, a little bit of kick boxing, and a little bit of wrestling. That is why I don’t engage in that sort of activity because I’m just not that type of guy. It is a really intense movie, and it is about these two brothers who are trying to take out their revenge for each other because of the hatred they have for each other. That revenge began actually several years earlier while they were still in high school. They were living under the roof of a dysfunctional home. The father was an abusive alcoholic. It was very dangerous for the children and for the mother. One of the brothers, Tommy, decides he is going to take the mother and take her out to Seattle or somewhere in the northwest to protect her from the abuse of the father. The other son stays behind because he has a girlfriend and he decides he is going to stay back in Pittsburgh. The brother who is out in Seattle, he is left to care for his mother, to protect his mother, and his mother gets very sick. I think she gets cancer or something like that. Because they don’t have the means to pay for health insurance, the mother gets very sick. She can’t get her medication, and she ends up dying. So the brother, Tommy, on the left ends up being very upset and becomes very bitter not only at the dad but at the older brother because the older brother didn’t come out and help at all. The brother that stayed in Pittsburgh becomes embittered toward the dad and also Tommy because Tommy didn’t let him know that the mother was that sick. What you do is you have a three-way hatred for each other. Both the sons hating the father and the sons hating each other. Really what you have here, though, is kind of a parable. It is kind of a parable like today’s story out of the Book of Matthew. It is a parable about forgiveness and specifically what happens when that forgiveness is withheld.
If you have your Bibles, please open up to Matthew 18:15-35. As you know, we have been going through the four core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. We are back around to the value of discipleship. Discipleship simply means that we are trying to be like Jesus. We are disciples of Jesus, so we are trying to be like Jesus, to follow his example. In order to follow his example, we have to practice what is known as the spiritual disciplines, which are things that he practiced. Things like prayer, meditation, fasting, bible study and those types of things. Last month we looked at the discipline called solitude. I was very pleased but very surprised that a number of people in the congregation actually practice solitude and actually had some good results from it. Today, as we consider these spiritual disciplines, the one discipline we don’t think about as really a spiritual discipline is the discipline of forgiveness. When we think about forgiveness, it doesn’t sound like something that is a discipline. A discipline is though, by definition, something that you practice on a regular basis. As we see in today’s story, Jesus is not saying you need to practice forgiveness one time or occasionally or two times or three times. No, he is saying that the discipline of forgiveness needs to be a lifestyle. That it is important. In order to keep that generous grace of God flowing down to us, we have to continue to practice the forgiveness to each other. That is what we are going to look at today. We are going to begin reading from Matthew 18:21 and reading down all the way to verse 35. (Scripture read here.)
This is a parable, kind of an earthly story with a heavenly meaning that I suspect many of you are familiar with. In fact, if you have been in the church for a number of years, you have probably come across this story and you probably even know the basic principle. God forgave our sins, so we need to forgive others. It’s simple. We all have it down. Let’s go home. Not so fast because it is an important discipline this idea of forgiveness. That is why I think Jesus emphasizes it so much. Really, we are going to go through a little bit of the details and hopefully can refresh the importance of it. When you think about where this story takes place, Jesus was walking along doing what he does teaching. He began to teach the disciples about how to handle conflict. The importance of when you have a problem with someone going directly to that person, and if the person doesn’t listen, you bring another person along and hopefully you would resolve the conflict. Following that discussion, Peter, as he often does, decides he is going to follow it up with a question. We know that when he follows it up with a question, Jesus is going to have an answer, and it might not be the answer that he is looking for. We see early on that Peter asks Jesus “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to 7 times?” And Jesus answered “I tell you not 7 times but 77 times.” Peter is here getting ready to pat himself on the back. I am a pretty holy guy. I am willing to forgive a person of an offense 7 times. Back then, in Jewish law, you were really only required to forgive somebody three times. Peter is thinking I’m being very generous and Jesus says, no, not 7 times but 77 times. In fact, if you use some translations, some translations say 7 x 70, which is 490 times. Really, the number is not so much important. The point of what Jesus is saying is that forgiveness should be unlimited. You shouldn’t attempt to put any sort of restriction on forgiveness. Then he goes on to tell a story that supports this radical idea of forgiveness. He says the kingdom of heaven is like this. When he says the kingdom of heaven is like this, he is not saying it is this. He is saying it is similar to this. In other words, you can draw principles from this story. So he goes on to say the kingdom of God is like this. It is like a king who came and decided he was going to settle up accounts with all the people that owed him money. So he calls in a servant that owes him the most, which is 10,000 talents. I have a hard time trying to nail down exactly the value of 1 talent but some suggest that 1 talent could be up to 75 lbs of gold or silver. So 75 lbs x 10,000 is a lot of money back then. Today’s equivalent some suggest is at least 40 or 50 million dollars. That is the size of the debt that this man owed. Of course, as the story goes, the man can’t pay that debt. He doesn’t have the ability to pay. So the king says we have to put the for sale sign up and begin to sell your house, sell your property, sell your animals, and even sell your wife and kids. This guy is really stressed out. So what does he do? He throws himself on his knees. He throws himself before the king and says please have mercy on me. I will pay this back.
This is where it gets very interesting. This is where people would sit up and take notice because instead of throwing him in prison, what he does is he cancels his debt. The servants master took pity on him, cancelled the debt, and just let him go. He said get out of here. Go. You’re free. What most would suggest is that this picture is a picture of the gospel. That is what it is. In this little image, this little snippet here, we see what God did for us. We see what God did for all humanity. The collective sin of all humanity is laid before God. Every sin. Every moral failure. Every lie. Every theft. Every murder. Every hatred thought. All this stuff is laid before God and man knows there is no way they can pay that penalty for their sin in order to get back in the right relationship with God. Out of the blue what happens? He sends his son Jesus Christ. He cancels the debt. He brings out that big rubber stamp and says that debt is cancelled. It’s over. We see that clearly in Romans 5:8 where it says “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were there with all this massive mound of debt, Christ was willing to die for us. God was willing to send his son down for us. That is what is going on in this particular parable.
Then the parable takes a very interesting and really not a good twist. The servant leaves the presence of the king. He had just been relieved of a debt of the equivalent of several million dollars and what does he do? Instead of walking out gratefully and extending that grace to others, he goes out and finds the first guy that owes him money and he puts a chokehold on him and begins to demand that he would pay him back. In that particular section, it talks about the man owed his fellow servant 100 denarii. We don’t know the exact equivalent but some suggest it is in the range of $50. You have this guy who has just been relieved of a debt equivalent to $40 million, and he is not willing to relieve the debt of his fellow servant who owes him 50 bucks. It would be like if I was going down to the bank. Let’s say I go down to Citizen’s Bank and I have my mortgage there. I have my car loan there. I have all the stuff there and all of a sudden the banker says, you know what, it’s all done. It’s all cancelled. Get out of here. So I leave and instead of extending that grace to others, what I do is I find the first person on the street that owes me a few bucks and I put a stranglehold on them. I say give me that $50 that you owe me or I am going to throw you in prison.
At about that time in the story, people are listening and saying I can’t believe the insanity, the horror of this that this man would do such a thing. As the story goes, the man has a chokehold on him. He is demanding that he have his payment. The guy can’t pay. So what does he do? He throws him into prison until he can pay. In the old days I guess they had something called a poor farm where you would go to work off your debts that you couldn’t pay.
Which reminds me of a story that has absolutely nothing to do with this particular sermon but it is a little moment of levity. I used to work at home when I was back in Oregon. My daughter Natalie was about 5 years old and she would always want to play. I would be out the in garage in my little office, and she would come out and she would want to play. She would badger me and badger me and finally one day I said Natalie, leave me alone. I need to work or we are going to end up in the poor farm. What is her response? Daddy, will they have horses there? She didn’t care whether I was going broke. She just wanted to know if there would be horses at the farm when we got there.
Anyway, getting back to the story. The idea was this guy was demanding this payment and when he didn’t pay, he sent him to prison. So word got back to the king about this injustice. The king was very upset. He was extremely mad and he went to the guy and said you wicked servant. You wicked, wicked servant. How could you do such a thing? He goes off and he says I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? As the story goes, he goes and puts that guy in prison and he allows the jailers to begin to torture that man. Basically what you have is you have two men in jail. Two men in prison. The king didn’t go and release that first servant. They are both in jail. About that time, Jesus wraps up the story. He looks out at his disciples and he says this is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. Peter is there, I wish I didn’t ask that question. What was true of the disciples back then would be true of each of us that would call ourselves a disciple of Jesus Christ. The principle is pretty basic. We have had, those born again believers have had their debts wiped clean because of the blood of the lamb on the cross. Because of the forgiveness of sins that came through Jesus Christ. So we have the responsibility to keep that generous grace flowing to other people. It is pretty straight forward. It doesn’t mean we do it occasionally or when we feel like it. It doesn’t mean we do it 1 time, 2 times, 3 times, 7 times, 70 times, 490 times. It just means that it needs to be a way of life for anyone who would call themselves a disciple of Jesus Christ.
That way of life begins in the church. The church is the first place where we need to learn to practice this idea of forgiveness. I talked about last week the value of worship. We talked about the idea of worship experience and how everybody brings their own idea of how worship should be. People come from a Catholic tradition, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, whatever, they come in and say well I think you should do worship this way. They have their opinion. They are viewing it through the lens of tradition. We look like a blended family but in addition to all these ideas of how worship should work, people are bringing in their personalities. They are bringing in all their personal baggage. They are bringing in all the stuff from their past. They are creating the perfect mixture for an extremely dysfunctional family. I can see that is why there are people that come to church and they never get connected to community because they have been burned in the past. They say I don’t want anything to do with this community. I just prefer to stay on the outside a little bit because I’ve got enough drama in my life. I’ve got enough drama at home. I have enough drama at my work place. I don’t need more drama, so I am just going to stay on the fringes. I get that. There are times I don’t want to be involved in community but Debbie says I have to because I am the pastor. Seriously though, it is tough being around people. The sad thing is the more you are around people, the more you get yourself familiar with people, the more opportunities for you to have contempt for people. Isn’t there a phrase like that? Familiarity breeds contempt. What is that saying? It is saying you get to know people, you get involved in peoples’ lives, and you are going to find out things you don’t like about them. They are going to get on your nerves. That is personally why I don’t take vacations with people that I know. I take vacation with family but it’s hard enough to get along with my family let alone with strangers. So I personally don’t like to take vacations because that whole idea of familiarity can breed contempt and if contempt is not checked that can turn into bitterness, possibly betrayal, possibly divisions. But at the same time, God has called us into relationships inside the church. We are the body of Christ. It goes back to the idea of community. We all are part of one body. We are going to have friction. That is what you have to first realize. You can’t get this many people together. Last Sunday we had 275 people. You can’t get that many people together without expecting some form of friction. Some form of offense. Somebody is going to tick somebody off. It is just a matter of time. It is how we view that offense of others. It is how we look at that offense. Do we look at it as a threat or do we look at it as an opportunity. See God looks at it like an opportunity. God allows those things to come into your life in order that we may practice the discipline of forgiveness. So he allows these things to come into the church and he says, okay, what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with this thing? How are you going to respond? Unfortunately, the typical response is anger. It’s bitterness. It could take root in all sorts of behavior. It could take root in anger, bitterness, an angry email, an angry phone call, passive-aggressive behavior. All sorts of things. It really does. What happens, if that is left unchecked, over time you start having these divisions in the church. The church loses its focus. The church loses its power in the community. The church loses sight of its vision and pretty soon a church could die.
On the other hand, if we look at this as an opportunity to really grow, God will allow us to grow through this. When somebody offends us, the first thing we need to do is to sit down and examine our own heart. That is a hard thing to do because the initial response is to lash out. What God suggests is why don’t you sit down and analyze. Why don’t you sit down and pray about it, think about it, and begin to look at your own heart. Open up your heart. Do some heart surgery and begin to ask yourself some questions. The primary question is what lens am I using to evaluate this offense. I talked about last week how we evaluate worship through our tradition. What we don’t know and don’t realize is that we evaluate offense through our past lenses. We could be evaluating an offense through the lens of our childhood. Maybe we grew up in an abusive setting. Maybe we grew up in a situation where dad didn’t love us or dad rejected us. So when somebody rejects us even in the most minor way, we don’t see that person. We see our dad standing there in front of us. What we do is we amplify that seemingly minor offense and we amplify it 10, 20, 30 times over and because we never dealt with that situation of rejection in our heart. Or it could be that we look at it through the lenses of a past marriage, possibly a divorce. When somebody offends us in church what happens is we are looking through the lens of the spouse who maybe treated us a certain way we didn’t like. We don’t see that person, we see the spouse there. What happens is we amplify that 10, 20, 30 times and, I hate to say it, but sometimes make a mountain out of a molehill. Sometimes we look through the lens of a past church experience. Maybe we come from a church that might have been a little bit dysfunctional or had some challenges. Maybe we were harmed. Maybe we were possibly even abused in a past church and we begin to look at that current situation through the lens of the past church experience. What do we do? We blow it out of proportion. As we blow it out of proportion, we don’t consider that what happens is we begin to build up walls around people. We begin to respond by building up a wall that basically keeps them isolated. That keeps them separated from us. As those walls start coming up all around the place because of all these unchecked offenses, all this different baggage being brought in, you end up with all these walls in the church that you can’t even see. These spiritual walls are just popping up everywhere. If the walls are not dealt with, what happens is you begin to choke the life of the spirit of God’s generous grace out of the church. Last week I talked about the idea of giftedness. I said that we receive the grace of God, we receive the gift of God in order not to hold on to that grace but to pass it on to others. I talked about the idea that we have each been given a spiritual gift. There are about 22 different gifts. Some people have the gift of mercy. Some people have the gift of discernment. Some people have the gift of prophecy. Some people have the gift of hospitality, service, generosity, even healing. I said how our responsibility is to identify those gifts and then use those gifts to minister to one another.
The perfect illustration was last Wednesday. I told Debbie I want you to instead of calling the prayer time prayer time, call it ministry time because the idea is don’t just pray for somebody. If you’ve got the gift of discernment then go speak into that person’s life with discerning. If you’ve got the gift of generosity and the guy is saying he can’t pay his rent, write him a check. If you’ve got the gift of hospitality, take him out to lunch. Prayer is just one of the gifts. Yes, we are called to pray, but we are also called to exercise our gifts. So getting back to this idea of these walls coming up, we have created this blockage where the gifts, the generous grace of God can no longer flow. We have stifled that generous grace of God that wants to find its way through the congregation. Thinking again about this first Wednesday, we had a gentleman, I won’t mention his name. Some of you know him, but he really hurt his back really badly. In fact, he could barely even walk, but he ended up sitting in the back. When ministry time came, basically a number of woman gathered around him, but one woman in particular felt the need that she really needed to pray for him and lay her hands upon him. He got home and his back no longer hurt him. I don’t know what you think about the spiritual gifts, but all I know is he called me at 10:30 at night and left a message and said he had been healed. That woman believes she has the gift of healing. Say it as you will. But what would have happened if three weeks earlier she was working with the man and had ministry going on with this person and he did something or said something that ticked her off. And she got an attitude. She got that root of bitterness going. So when the time to pray comes, she is feeling this prompting in her heart to get up and go pray for this guy, but you know what is stopping her, the bitterness. She is stopping the generous grace of God from flowing through the congregation. It could be anything. It could be you are mad at some other volunteer. You are mad at a ministry leader. You are mad at me. Whatever it is, you start setting up these walls and what happens is you are blocking the flow of God’s generous grace that wants to get out and wants to find its way and begin to heal people to bring them back to wholeness. If that happens enough, you’ve got a dead church. You’ve got a spiritually dead church. There might be people in the church. In fact if a visitor was to come in they might say this is a pretty good church. They are singing. They are very nice. They are very friendly. But after a while, they would say something is not right here. Something feels very empty about this church. And the problem is the spirit has left the building. Because the spirit is not allowed to move. The ministry is not allowed to happen. So slowly, one at a time, the various ministries of the people begin to dry up so you have nothing left but a shell, an empty, dry shell of a church.
If you are willing to overlook an offense, if you are willing to just take that through the lens of your experience and say maybe I am going a little bit overboard with this, maybe I am, because of my past, making some sort of a mountain out of a molehill and you are willing to overlook that offense, what you are doing is you are practicing forgiveness. It is a wise thing to do. In fact, there is a proverb that speaks of that. It says “A man’s wisdom gives him patience. It is to his glory to overlook an offense.” To his glory to overlook an offense. And somebody is saying well I can’t overlook all of them. That is true. If you can’t get it past you and you really feel that you have taken it through those lenses and there is nothing from your past that is causing you to think this way, then as we learned earlier in Matthew 18, you go and you talk to the person. You go and talk to the person. Listen, I could be wrong, but this is how I perceive this thing. What you did really bothered me and you might be surprised if the person says I’m sorry, I didn’t even know it and I’m glad that you told me and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. What happens is that forgiveness flows. What happens at a spiritual level is that valve of God’s generous grace opens up and the living waters begin to make their ways again through the congregation. It begins to happen. Not only that. What happens is people actually become free because you remember in the story two men ended up in prison. The one that wouldn’t forgive and the one that couldn’t be forgiven. If you have ever been in a situation where somebody will not forgive you, both of you are in a prison. You are both in a prison. You are both under a bit of torture. Psychological torture. Whatever it is. It is a well-known fact that when you have pent up anger and un-forgiveness it often manifests itself in all sorts of stress and health-related issues. I got a lot more to say on this, but I decided I really can’t. There is too much more to say. I just need to leave you with where we are at with this. I know there are people out there saying, you know what, you just don’t know Chuck. I was deeply offended. I was deeply wounded. This happened with this person. This happened. Do I need to forgive this person? Do I need to forgive that person? My answer is I can’t say. Because if I was to say, I would be like Peter. I would be trying to put parameters on who you should forgive. That is not my responsibility. That is between you and God.
So I close this sermon where I began with the story of “Warrior”. The story of two brothers that really just hated each other. I’ll tell you this right now. I am going to seek your apology. I am going to seek your forgiveness because of what I am about to do. I am about to show the end of the movie. If you plan on watching this movie, I am giving you that spoiler alert. I am giving you that warning so when I show it, you can’t come back in a week and say I’m mad at you Chuck because you showed the end of the movie. But I am going to show it because, to me, it really, really illustrates this parable. Again, as I said earlier, you have two brothers who hate each other. You see it. You see it in their eyes. They can’t stand each other, and they can’t stand the dad. The dad was an abusive, alcoholic father that neglected the mother when she was sick. The other brother neglected to help the other brother. It is an awful, awful situation. In this final scene, you have the two brothers in the arena in Atlantic City. They are out there to get justice. The interesting thing if you were to watch the earlier part of the movie, you see that forgiveness is starting to happen. The father and one son reconcile. Then you see one son began to seek reconciliation. The one son, Tommy, he is still out for revenge. He is out to get that justice. But you also see that he is in a lot of pain. A lot of pain. So let’s watch that clip and then I will come back and wrap it up.
Hopefully, if you see that movie you saw some symbolism. You saw the pain in the one brother. He was fighting with a broken shoulder, but the pain in his heart was much, much deeper. You saw the chokehold. You saw that they were fighting in a cage, in a prison, but you also saw as one brother was willing to say he is sorry, the other brother was willing to forgive symbolized with the tapping of the shoulder. I released you. More importantly, you begin to see that cage become open and they both are walking free and overlooking them is the smile of the father. Isn’t that what is happening. It is a modern-day parable. As you learn to look at movies, you will see a lot of theology in movies if you are willing to take the time and look at it with any sense of discernment. We see this as a modern-day parable of forgiveness. We see the pain associated with un-forgiveness. We see the bitterness associated with the failure to give the forgiveness, but we see the release that happens when one person is willing to seek the reconciliation, say they are sorry, or simply just look away from that offense. We are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ. Consequently, we are called to practice the spiritual disciplines, including the spiritual discipline of forgiveness. Not 1 time, not 2 times, not 3 times, not 70 times, not 490 times, but that the discipline of forgiveness needs to be a way of life. As we begin to practice that, we take that generous grace of God as manifested in the cross of Jesus Christ, we take that not only into our own lives but the lives of the church and the lives in the world. Let us pray.
