"Forgive us our debts" Sermon at FFMC 10/6/18)
12 and forgive us
our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
14 For if you
forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but
if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive
your trespasses. (Mt 6:12-15)
21 Then Peter
came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I
forgive him? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “I
do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times. 23 “Therefore
the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts
with his servants.[g] 24 When he began to settle,
one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents.[h] 25 And since he could not
pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that
he had, and payment to be made. 26 So the servant[i] fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have
patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27 And out of
pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.
28 But when that same servant went out, he found one of his
fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii,[j] and seizing him, he began to choke him,
saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29 So his fellow servant fell down
and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30 He
refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. 31 When
his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and
they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. 32 Then
his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all
that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 And should not you
have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ 34 And
in anger his master delivered him to the jailers,[k] until he should pay all his debt. 35 So
also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your
brother from your heart.” (Mat 18:21-35)
Introduction
Forgive us
our “trespasses” vs. Forgive us our “debts”
Every major English version (KJV, NIV, NASB, ESV) uses the latter.
In the early 1500s, William Tyndale translated the first mass-produced
English Bible based on the original Greek and Hebrew languages. He used the
phrase ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against
us.’ When the first Anglican Book of Prayer was produced in England some
twenty years later, it used Tyndale’s translation as its source – and so the
Lord’s Prayer was said using ‘trespasses’. And as England was the dominant
superpower around the world for a few hundred years, the Church of England’s
version of the Lord’s Prayer became the dominant version used. As Methodists
who come from the Anglican church, we too use “trespasses”. Well, Tyndale’s
translation of the Lord’s Prayer was wrong. Perhaps he chose “trespasses”,
because he figured people would confuse “debts” with financial matters, rather
than sin. The Greek word used in v.12 is opheiléma, not paraptóma as in
v.14. When the King James Version was crafted some ninety
years later, the scholars would use a great deal of Tyndale’s translation in
the creation of the KJV, but they chose not to follow his translation using trespasses,
and quite correctly translated it as debt. Even in Luke’s version of the
prayer, Jesus says, “and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive
everyone who is indebted to us” (Lk 11:4).So Jesus had the sense of debt
in mind when referring to sin in the prayer he taught his disciples. A debt is
owed, but a trespass is an intrusion, and offense, an injury to someone. It is
clear in Mt 6:14 that Jesus talks about our sin as both debt owed and a
breaking of the law of God.
Jesus gives
a very special emphasis to the place of forgiveness in the life of the
Christian – of the seven petitions of the Lord’s prayer the petition “Forgive
us our debts” is special in two ways – there is a condition, (“as we
have also forgiven our debtors”) and there is an explanation for why
forgiveness must take a central place in our lives (“for if you forgive”...
“but if you do not forgive...”)
Jesus
elaborates on why this is so the parable in Matthew 18.
Let’s make
some observations on this parable.
- There is a debt this servant owes to the King.
- There is a debt owed to this servant by another servant
- These are real debts, not the result of unjust claims or arbitrary demands
- The debt to the King is vastly greater than the debt to the servant
- The cancellation of the debt to the king is a very great mercy; the refusal to defer payment of the fellow servant is refusal of a relatively small mercy.
- Justice is done: lack of mercy is rewarded with lack of mercy
Jesus’ point
is that anyone who does not forgive is like this unmerciful servant. His
hard-heartedness is so obvious that even his fellow-servants cannot stand his
behaviour. We applaud the justice of the King, and yet we are caught in the
parable, because we behave so much like this unmerciful man. Why?
- We don’t see how much we owe.
We must see
how much we owe God – a talent was about 20 years of wages for a common worker.
This man owed 10 000 talents – clearly an impossible sum.! If minimum wage is
$S1000 per month, the man owed $S2.4 billion. This man still felt he could pay
it The king had every right to put him in prison and throw away the key. He was
in a hopeless situation – the loss of everything he owned, lifelong
imprisonment and the destruction of his family. Most of us have never been in a
place when there was disaster in your life? A failed exam? The loss of a job
and of any means of support for the family? A possible jail term? A bankruptcy?
A life-changing crime committed against us? A dread disease you did not know if
you could survive? Imagine God stepping down and completely, instantly,
removing our greatest burden and responsibility from your shoulders. This is
what happened to that servant. The king pitied him and cancelled all
that inconceivable debt. He did not ask the servant to pay off the debt slowly
in instalments.
The truth is that we were in a worse state than
this servant. We were hopelessly dead in trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1). We were
“children of wrath” (Eph 2:3). Condemned already (Jn 3:17) “separated from
Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the
covenants of promise, having no hope
and without God in the world”
(Eph 2:12).We were rebels and traitors to the King, doomed to eternity in hell.
Now we have been “transferred from the
domain of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col 1:13). “Once
you were not a people, but now you are God's people;
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Pe
2:10).We have eternal life. What a
relief! Have we felt this?
We are saved
by the righteous wrath of God by one thing alone: the grace of the King. Jesus
knew when he taught the Lord ’s Prayer, that the grace of God to us would be
fully shown in His coming death that paid for our sins. That price we could not
pay, He would pay. (“For our sake he made
him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. 2 Cor
5:21)
- We don’t feel what was paid for us
If we do not
know how much we owed and how much was cancelled, we will never, ever,
be able to forgive others their relatively trivial debts to us. But we also do
not show mercy to our fellow-servants because we do not feel forgiven of
our enormous debt. We have not felt free from our debt. We do not live in
gratitude for grace. The unforgiving servant had not taken the forgiveness
offered him to heart, so he did not forgive. His heart was not full of
thanksgiving.
We are not
amazed by grace. Instead, we have felt
entitled to it. We think it’s God’s job to forgive us and that it is unjust of
him not to forgive. So the impact of our cancelled sin does not strike us. We
do not feel the price paid at Calvary.
Grace is the
one of the main things that distinguishes Christianity from every other
religion. Grace encapsulates how God dealt with us before time began. (Eph
1:3-14). Grace is how God is to us day
bty day35 But love your
enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward
will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the
ungrateful and the evil. 36 Be merciful, even as your Father is
merciful. Lk 6 35-36). The good news of the Gospel is that Christ paid what
we could never repay. Having received grace, we must now show grace. We must be
willing to pay the price of forgiving others what they can never repay us. Real
forgiveness is never cheap. Some of us have suffered greatly, and suffered
unjustly. Forgiveness means absorbing pain, instead of inflicting pain on
others because of a vengeful heart. The equation of grace is clear: 32 Be kind to one another,
tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.(Eph 4:32)
In Luke 7 Jesus tells a short parable to draw the link
between forgiveness and our loving the Lord: “41 “A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed
five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they could
not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him
more?... But he who is forgiven little, loves little”
- We don’t see the consequences
It’s very
likely that the unmerciful servant would not have behaved the way he did if he
knew what the king would do to him. We like to see the judgement of the king on
the unmerciful servant. But we think we are not in the same boat. We feel that
we are basically OK and that God will never ever judge us for any failure to
forgive on our part. In this part of the prayer, and in this parable, Jesus
encourages us to forgive be telling us what will happen when we do not.
It is clear
the Jesus addresses the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples – those who should
already be saved. So here, forgiving others is not some good work that earns us
salvation. Forgiveness is an act that shows if we have really understood what our
being forgiven means. And if we, too, refuse to forgive, we show that our
hearts are not touched by the forgiveness of God. I’m not talking about
struggling to forgive – but about refusing to forgive.
Those who do
persistently refuse to forgive show that they are not really saved. They have
never felt the grace of God and are therefore unable to show grace to others.
“For with the judgment you
pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured
to you. (Mt 7:2).
Our failure
to forgive can show that we are not saved. We have not really known the grace of God, At the least, failure to
forgive means we grieve the Lord and that the sin of unforgiveness will be held
against us when we appear before God in judgement.
Mk 11:25
implies that our prayers will be unheard if we are unforgiven because we do not
forgive (“And whenever you stand praying,
forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is
in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”)
Let me address
some pastoral questions:
·
Should I forgive someone when he or she has not
repented?
Yes, we who
have been forgiven must forgive. Our hearts have to be open. Jesus sets the
example when He prays that His Father forgive those who were crucifying Him (Lk
23:34). But forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Forgiveness is building
a bridge at our end of a ravine. Reconciliation happens when that bridge is
completed. Reconciliation is restoration of a relationship. This is not
possible without genuine repentance from the wrongdoer. Even with God there is
no reconciliation without repentance.
·
What if the person says he or she has repented
but keeps doing the same thing?
The number
of times we forgives is not to be limited. God does not do this to us, but
forgiveness is not the same as trust. It is foolish to be taken advantage of
repeatedly, and unloving to allow sin to persist in the offender. We need to discern
when the person has truly repented.
·
What kind of sin can’t be forgiven?
We cannot forgive when no offence is committed against us personally.
If a politician in another country obtains money by corrupt means or is
embroiled in a sex scandal, and I am not personally involved with this, I can
be angry about the situation, but I cannot forgive someone who did not personally
offend me. So we have to distinguish between a personal wrong we can forgive,
and a public wrong that did not impact us personally. If you disagree with the
church leadership on the direction of the church, you can criticise them and vote
them out. But you can’t forgive them the way you forgive someone who as
personally wronged you. Public sins should be dealt with publically. Personal
offenses should be forgiven in private, unless the severity is such that it
impacts on the public good.
Conclusion
We must take
the words of Jesus seriously – some of us live with bitterness in our hearts
because of some real or perceived personal insult or neglect from people in
this church. Somehow there is the feeling that people owe us for something they
have done. This could be literal money unpaid, or more likely a feeling that
they need to pay us back in some way or do something for us or must pay back to
us. Or there may be a feeling of a trespass – someone has crossed your
boundaries and offended you, and they have never expressed remorse or given an
apology. This may have happened many years ago, and yet there is more than just
caution or distrust, or reserve – there is animosity. There is the desire for
revenge” This is most dangerous. The Word of God tells us, 4 Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no
one will see the Lord. 15 See to it that no one fails to obtain
the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble,
and by it many become defiled;” (Heb 12:14-15).
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