January 12, 2002 Matthew 18:21-27
“…as I forgave you.”
INTRODUCTION
I want to start off with a verse this morning that is not in the text that we will be studying today. It will be the guiding principle for our services for the next several weeks, so pay close attention. The verse is Colossians 3:13 – “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
We began the year as a church last week with the challenge that I put out for all of us to put ourselves in a position where we could hear the Word of God so that our faith might grow. Almost all of you accepted the challenge to listen to the audio NT for 19 minutes a day for 60 days beginning Jan. 26. Any of you who were not here or have made up your mind since last Sunday can join us in that challenge today. As you listen to your Bible, you are going to hear a theme that runs through the Bible and ties it all together. That theme is forgiveness.
How many of you struggle with the issue of forgiveness? Probably over the course of 2002 maybe even already in 2003, there are some things that have happened or some words that have been said that hurt you. You may be harboring some resentment, anger or bitterness. Maybe you did some things that you have not yet sought forgiveness for, and you are feeling the burden of guilt and broken relationships. One of the first and most important steps to preparing for the future is to get rid of the negative things in the past. Paul said, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal” (Phil 3:13-14) I come to you this morning to give you hope. It is possible to receive release from the past and to gain and give forgiveness. It is possible to get rid of that heavy weight that you bear.
We are not the first generation to struggle with this issue of forgiveness. Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples, came to him one day and asked Him how many times he should forgive someone for something that they had done to him. Jesus answered that our forgiveness toward someone else should be limitless. And then, as Jesus did many times to illustrate the truth of what He was saying, he told a story. That story is going to be the focus of our attention this morning.
Through this story, we learn about two things. First, we learn about the kind of forgiveness that God has given to us. You may be a person here that has already received the forgiveness that provides an eternal place with God in heaven. If so, this message will be nothing new to you. But rather than shutting down your brain, pay attention to the message so that you can be reminded of what was done for you. You need that reminder planted firmly in your brain so that you will live in a constant state of thanks to God for His greatest gift to you and so that you will never take for granted His forgiveness. There may be others here who have never received this forgiveness. Pray for them that today will be the day.
The second thing that this story teaches us is about the proper response that we must give when we experience the forgiveness of God. We must forgive other people for the offenses that they commit against us. “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” That will be the focus of the message next week.
Let’s take a look at our story and see what we can learn.
1. The reality of the situation was desperate. (vs. 23-25)
a. The servant owed a real debt. “ten-thousand talents”
Somehow, this servant had accumulated a debt that was unimaginable at this time. Wherever you see the word “talent” in the Bible, it is not referring to some special ability that you might have – like the ability to juggle ten credit cards all at the same time. It was a measure of money just like a dollar is a measure of money today. Only then, they would measure money according to weight, not according to the number that was placed on it by the government, and money would be in the form of gold or silver not paper. A talent equaled around 75 pounds. So assuming that the talent spoken of here was gold, and assuming the price of gold today to be around $300 an ounce, the debt that he owed was $3,624,000,000! That would be a huge debt today. And back then, the average pay was about a penny a day. It was a hopeless situation.
b. The servant had no ability to pay. “he had not to pay”
To make matters worse, the Bible records that this man had no means to pay back the loan – not even a portion of it. He was bankrupt. Somehow, he had lost it all. Maybe he had made some bad investment decisions. Maybe he had stolen the money and used it on wild parties and world travel. I don’t know how you could spend or lose that kind of money, but he had found a way. $3,634,000,000 gone!
c. The servant was about to lose everything. “all that he had”
When the king discovered how much the servant owed him and that there was no hope of the servant ever being able to pay him back, the king gave the command that the servant had feared. He ordered that the man, his wife and his children be sold into slavery, and he ordered that all that the man possessed be sold to help repay the debt. He was going to lose it all – his freedom, his family and all of his possessions. The way of life that he had chosen, though it had been fun while it lasted, had brought him to this dreadful day. No party, no matter how lavish, no chariot, no matter how many luxuries, no wardrobe, no matter how stylish was worth the punishment that he was getting ready to suffer.
I think that we would be pretty safe to say that his situation was desperate.
Let’s stop right here in the story for just a few minutes. Go back up to verse 23. Do you see where it says, “the kingdom of heaven is like”? Jesus used that phrase over and over again when He told stories like this one. By saying that phrase, He was telling those who heard Him then and we who are listening today that there is a spiritual truth that parallels the circumstances of the story that He was getting ready to tell. He wants us to do more than just enjoy the story. He wants us to learn something about God and our relationship to Him through the story. So let’s see what kind of parallels we can draw up to this point.
We owe a real debt.
The debt that we owe cannot be measured in financial terms because in the kingdom of heaven, money has no worth. Our debt is calculated in the terms of what is valued in heaven – righteousness. God has placed certain requirements – certain expectations – on mankind. These include things like the Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20, but God’s expectations go far beyond that list. Jesus made that clear when, in the Sermon on the Mount, He said things like, "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ’Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment… anyone who says, ’You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. (Matt. 5:21-22) or how about this one: "You have heard that it was said, ’Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matt 5:27-28). Here’s one more: “You have heard that it was said, ’Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” (Matt. 5:43-44). Every time that we fail to live up to one of God’s requirements in our lives, His calculator adds another row to our bill. (cha-ching) If our debt to God was only based on what we say and do, the debt would be high enough. (cha-ching) But when you tack on every evil, lustful, greedy, vengeful, selfish, lying, mean thought of our hearts, the debt doesn’t add up – it multiplies. (cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching)
We had no ability to pay.
Some people actually have tried to pay off their sin debt through financial giving, but you are not so foolish to think that you can pay off a spiritual debt with something so menial as money. You may have recognized long ago that you are a debtor to God because of your sin, so you’ve been trying to pay off that debt with your good works. Righteousness is after all the only currency that God values, so you try to repay Him with your own brand of righteousness. But the Bible has something to say about that. It says “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6) If someone owed you $3,624,000,000 and as payment, they brought you some filthy, mildewed, torn rags, would you accept it? Why in the world would you think that God would? The Bible goes on to say "There is no one righteous, not even one; (Rom 3:10) a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ…by observing the law no one will be justified. (Gal. 2:16) In ourselves, we have nothing with which we could pay our immeasurable debt. But that’s okay. We are a society that is used to living with debt. Debt is something that we can live with…until it comes time to pay.
You may have bought your Christmas presents with the credit card. If you haven’t yet, you will soon be receiving your statement reminding you of how many times you yielded to temptation and how much more you spent than you had planned. And if you’re anything like me, you will be shocked by the total because there will be things that you bought that you forgot all about. The credit card company will be more than happy to remind you of all your debts – both remembered and forgotten.
What is the only way that a person will ever be able to get himself out of accumulated credit card debt? He has to stop using the credit card.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that we DID have the ability to pay back our debt to God and that our currency DID work in heaven. It would be like a heavenly credit card. At the end of every month, we would get our statement from God telling how much we owe. So we would go out and do our good works to try and cancel out the debt. There’s one problem with this scenario. Even as we are doing our good works to pay off last month’s debts, we continue to yield to temptation and create new debts for next month. Our total debt just keeps getting higher and higher because we don’t have the ability to stop using that heavenly credit card. We don’t have the ability to stop sinning. We know that the day of reckoning is coming, and we dread it.
We were about to lose everything.
Sin works its way into our lives because it promises us everything. More than anything else, it promises us control. “I’m going to be the master of my own life! No one is going to tell me what I have to do. I will decide if I am going to be kind or mean, but I will do it because it is my choice. I’m going to live life on my own terms.” And you might live life on your own terms. But you will end life on God’s terms. And in the end, you will have to suffer the consequences. You will lose your family; you will lose your stuff; you will lose your children; and you will lose your freedom. You valued your control above all things, and control will never be yours again for all eternity. You will lose everything.
You, like the servant in our story, were and maybe still are in a desperate situation. Let’s see how he tried to get himself out of it.
2. The request of the servant was shortsighted. (vs. 26)
a. He saw the worth of the king. “fell on his knees”
There, right in front of the king, he could not help but behold the king’s glory. At that moment, he recognized the king’s worth and his responsibility to have been more careful with the king’s resources. So he fell on his knees as a response to the worth of the king. He had not recognized the king’s worth up to this point. If he had, he wouldn’t have gotten himself into the mess that he was in.
There is coming a day, spoken of in Phil. 2 among other places, when all men will stand before the King of kings, Jesus Christ. On that day “every knee [will] bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (vs. 10). They will be in His presence, they will see His glory, and they will bow the knee that they refused to bow while they were on earth.
b. He saw the pain of the punishment. “he begged”
Do you think that this man knew that there was a day coming when he was going to face some kind of punishment or accounting for the huge debt that he had built up with his master? He had to have known. All of us know that when we build up debts, there is going to come a day that we will either have to pay back those debts or suffer the consequences of some kind of punishment. He knew that punishment was coming, and he probably had a good idea of what the punishment was going to be. He may have even been in the king’s presence when the punishment was handed out to other people. But the punishment had never been staring him in the face before. He had always been able to push it into the background so that he didn’t have to deal with it. It had always been in the distant future, so he wouldn’t let the threat of punishment control his actions in the present. Now, the punishment was staring him in the face. He could ignore it no longer. It forced him to beg for mercy.
This man had the same condition that many of us have. He had what I call “spiritual nearsightedness”. When he was in the presence of the king or the punishment, he responded to both of them in the proper way. When he was NOT in the presence of either, he forgot about both. “Out of sight; out of mind.” We, who are here today – we come into the presence of the King of kings. We bow before Him. We worship Him. We sing the songs, give the offering, say all the right words, repent of our sins to escape God’s wrath – everything is just as it should be…while these things are right in front of us. But as soon as we walk out the door, whatever is right in front of us – the pretty woman, the rude driver, the appealing buffet – takes control of our actions once again. We forget about the worth of the King and the pain of the punishment and start living for the pleasure of the moment all over again.
His near-sightedness allowed him to see what was close up, but it prevented him from seeing what he really needed to see.
c. He could not see the depth of his debt. “pay back”
He recognized the seriousness of the punishment that he was getting ready to endure, but he did not recognize the seriousness of the debt he owed. Otherwise, he would have realized that no matter how long a term he had on the loan, he would never have been able to make restitution. His focus was on the punishment, not on the debt. He made a stupid promise: “I’ll pay you back.” There was no way that he could pay the king back, but he didn’t understand this. He knew how easy it had been to get into debt, and he thought that it would be just as easy to get out of that debt. He was wrong. He had no idea how deep his debt really was.
I suppose that the main reason that we as Christians do not live the totally committed lives that we should is because we fail to realize how deep of a debt we owed before God forgave us. Jesus was in the home of a Jewish religious leader one day when a prostitute came in, and began washing Jesus feet with her tears as water and her hair as a cloth. The religious leader was incensed that Jesus would allow a woman like that to touch him. Jesus used that situation to teach the truth that the more a person recognizes their own sinfulness like this woman did, the more thanks, love and sacrifice they will give to God who forgave them.
Do you understand how offensive your sin is to God? I don’t suppose that there really is any way that we can understand it. In Romans 3, God gives one description of what He thinks of us in our sin: “there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes." (Romans 3:11-18)
What is the most repugnant thing that you can think of – is it the things that contestants on “Fear Factor” are asked to eat? Is it an HIV infected needle that is getting ready to be stuck into your arm? Is it the tiny little germ that causes spinal meningitis? Is it the biological agents that are so small that they can get through the smallest pores on the best gas mask and steal your life away after making you endure intense suffering? Whatever it is, magnify that by a million times and imagine that is what Jesus endured for you and for me when He took our sins on Himself on the cross! How much torture did He endure when He came into contact with my sin? Just how repugnant was the depth of my sin when it was poured out on Jesus?
You can put on a good show in front of the people that are around you, even the people that live with you. You can say as so many people have said to me before, “My sin is small. I’m no murderer.” The agent that causes the flu is small too, and 40,000 people died from it last year. And as much as you try to protest when someone calls you sinner deserving of an eternity in hell, when you look inside your own heart, you know that God was right when He said of your heart, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked…” (Jer. 17:9)
The debt that this servant owed was deep. He couldn’t see it. There was something else that he could not see.
d. He could not see the character of his master. “Be patient”
Did you catch the request of the servant? His request was for patience. We’ve already established that the King could have had the patience of Job, and the servant still would never been able to pay off the debt. Patience was not what he should have been asking for. That was not his real need. Forgiveness was his real need. He didn’t know that forgiveness was an option. He didn’t even think to ask for that. That would have been more than he could have ever hoped for or imagined. The reason that he didn’t think to ask for it was because he had not spent enough time around his master to learn the true character of the master. He had stayed at a distance from the master because he had always thought of him as cruel, demanding and harsh. He didn’t know that the master was a kind man who ruled His kingdom with love, mercy and grace. He asked for patience when his real need was forgiveness.
My family has incurred some pretty hefty medical debts over the past year. I had to call each of those doctors and hospitals and ask for their patience because I do not have the resources to pay the whole bill at this time. Each of them was gracious with me and was willing to set up a payment plan so that we could get the debt paid off.
How many of us ask for patience when forgiveness is our real need? “Lord, you be patient with me. I know that I am not where you want me to be or what you want me to be. But if you’re patient with me, I’ll get myself to be that good person that you want me to be, and I’ll pay back everything that I owe.”
We don’t have to ask for God’s patience. God already is patient. “The Lord …is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) God has been patiently waiting for you to come to Him and seek His forgiveness. He has been seeking after you, but you have resisted Him. Maybe it’s because you have the idea that God is a harsh taskmaster always requiring full payment of debts owed to Him. Maybe you think that you have been treated unfairly. Maybe you didn’t even understand that forgiveness is an option. If you didn’t understand all that, it’s because you have never understood the character of God. He loves you. “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son…” (Jn. 3:16) “God is love.” (1 Jn. 4:16) The character of God causes Him to offer us so much more than patience. He offers forgiveness.
3. The response of the sovereign was unexpected. (vs. 27)
a. The king released him from his fear. “compassion”
Look into the eyes of both of the men that were present on that day. What do you see in the eyes of the servant? I see fear…no, I see terror. Wouldn’t that be what was in your eyes if you were facing what he faced? Now, look into the eyes of the king. At first, you see anger and rightly so, because the servants actions were evil and deserved the wrath of the king. But when the servant humbled himself, the eyes of the king changed. What do you see now? I see compassion, pity, kindness. And when that servant looked up to see how the king would respond to his request, and he saw that kindness shining out from the king’s eyes, what do you think happened to the fear within him? It faded away.
Maybe you are afraid to come to God for forgiveness because you fear that you will only see anger in His eyes. You expect that He will be angry because it has taken you so long to respond to His conviction and you have messed up your life and your family’s life so bad. You expect that He will be angry because you keep asking for forgiveness for the same sin over and over again. You expect wrong. When someone comes to God for forgiveness, it wipes away the just anger of God, and you will find only compassion there.
b. The king released him from his bondage. “let go”
c. The king released him from his debt. “forgave”
It doesn’t say here that he lowered the man’s debt to a sum that he would be able to work off. It doesn’t say that he gave him a no interest loan. It says that he forgave the debt – completely. It was gone. He could leave the king’s presence a free, unburdened man.
The servant tried to come up with his own solution to the problem. His solution involved paying back the loan. His solution involved keeping himself under bondage, punishing himself until the loan was paid off. The king’s solution was for the loan to be forgiven. Which solution do you like better? Which solution would you like for yourself?
CONCLUSION
Tom McGee was a young man who went out for a night of partying & revelry. He got drunk & ran head-on into a car driven by a young man by the name of Ted Morris. He killed Ted Morris instantly while driving under the influence of alcohol.
This wasn’t the first time he had been arrested for drunk driving, so Tom McGee was put on trial for manslaughter, found guilty & sentenced to a term of several years in prison. Jack Morris, his victim’s father, visited Tom McGee in prison. After visiting several times, he started taking cookies that his wife, Elizabeth, had baked for him. And they became friends. Finally Tom McGee was released from prison, but he had no place to go. So Jack & Elizabeth Morris invited him into their home, & gave him a place to stay. They provided the means by which he could receive an education, & helped him find a job.
They were members of a Church of Christ in Tulsa, so they took him to church with them, where Tom McGee accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord & Savior. Jack & Elizabeth Morris have since formally adopted Tom McGee & made him their son. When Jack & Elizabeth Morris die, Tom McGee will inherit whatever they have accumulated in this life – all those things that rightfully should have gone to Ted Morris, the man he murdered in a drunken stupor. Only forgiveness can turn a sinner into a son.
INVITATION
Earlier this morning, I read a story about a young man who greatly offended his father and went off on his own to live a life a sin. That young man realized the error of his way, came back home expecting to be treated like a servant and was restored as the son that he was. Maybe that is a picture of you this morning. You had lost sight of what your sin looked like to God and how deeply you had hurt Him. But this morning, God has convicted you and reminded you of His ability and desire to forgive. When we begin to sing, would you leave your seat and come to this altar and get on your knees before the King of kings so that you can receive His forgiveness and have your debt canceled?
There may be someone here this morning that has never sought the forgiveness of God for their sin. You have never come to Jesus, admitted that you are a sinner, asked Him to forgive you of your sin and invited Him to become the Lord and Savior of your life. Maybe you’ve asked for God’s patience before, but it is not God’s patience that you need. It is His forgiveness. God has been patient with you for a long time, but at some point in your life, His patience will end, and He will call you to account. Won’t you respond to His invitation this morning? He’s calling to you. You can hear His Spirit speaking to your heart right now. After I pray, and we begin to sing, you come to me, and I’ll show you how you can have your debt canceled. Don’t worry that you have to cross over some people in order to get here. They won’t think you’re rude; they’ll be rejoicing that you have come. Come now.
