Expected to Forgive - Luke 17:3-10

2:03I'd like you to imagine that instead of going to church tonight, you decided to go to the movies and you went to a huge movie theater. And you enter the door there and you realize almost every seat is taken. You're having a tough time finding a seat, but there's two seats down in the front. And so you and maybe a friend of yours, you come down there into the front. And you notice that everybody in there, you know, pretty much everybody. Your family, your friends, your relatives, and enemies even are there gathered to see this film, the premiere showing. And you sit down, there's a lot of excitement, and the lights dim. And on the screen comes your picture. And it has your name at the top of the screen as the title of the movie. And underneath it says the unexpurgated version.

2:57And you look at your friend and you say, what does that mean? Expurgated mean? And they say, it's the whole thing. It's everything you've ever done. It's everything you ever thought. Let's just suppose this movie could out Hollywood, Hollywood, and there in 3D and high definition are the thoughts, the things you've said under your breath about everybody in that room, the things you've allowed yourself to wallow in, those times where your mind has drifted on things you shouldn't have drifted on. All it's going to be up there.

3:32The things you would have liked to have done if you thought you could have gotten away with them, that would be the juiciest part of the whole movie. There, it's going to be shown. How many of you in that situation would say to yourself, hey, let's stick around. This is going to be good, you know, and take a bow afterwards. Not me. No way. I mean, there's a film like that. If I find that out, I'm out of here backwards on my hands and knees, like trying to get out the closest door.

4:02You hear that, and you say, well, I'm glad there's not a film of my life. No one has a film like that, but someone does. God does. And what's more, he's not going to show up before such a small crowd as I've described to you. The entire universe, this film, will be displayed. In Luke chapter 12, verses 1 through 3, if you want to turn back there, Luke 12, beginning in the towards. The end of verse 3.

4:34Towards the end of verse 3, it says, Sorry, at the end of verse 1, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known. Accordingly, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, whatever you have whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed upon the housetops. Everything you've ever said, thought, and done, it's there. It's recorded. That's why you need Christ. That's why we need a Savior. We need somebody to erase the film. We need somebody to take the film and replace it with a film of a perfect life so that on that day, when you stand before God and it's time for your film to be put in and displayed before the whole universe, they put in Christ's film. And your name pops up, but it's Christ's life.

5:32And you're saying, but that's not me. And Christ says, I know. And God looks at the film, He says, Another perfect life. Well done, my good and faithful servant. Enter into your rest. Wow. Forgiveness is your greatest need. You need forgiveness more than breath. We had a guy in our church and South Africa, who could hold his breath for five minutes. He entered a breath-holding competition, and he went into the ocean and went under for five minutes, and he won a diver's watch.

6:17I got a diver's watch, too, but I just went to Costco. Five minutes. You need forgiveness more than breath. There is no greater need than you have than forgiveness. And as we saw this morning in Bible hours, we looked at the passage about the unmerciful servant. We are expected also to be forgivers. And this passage teaches that same thing. God expects us to be forgivers. And in Luke 17, verses 3 through 10, we find three steps to forgiveness. We also see three excuses that we might have when it comes to withholding forgiveness from others. So we're going to look at three steps to forgiveness and three excuses that we shouldn't have that keep us from forgiving. And the first step of forgiveness is to confront. Take a look at verse 3. Luke 17, verse 3. Be on your guard. Let me just stop there. This is a word in the original that is a word of warning. It means beware, look out, take heed.

7:30You could translate it uh-oh. I mean, it's trying to get your attention. It could apply to what comes before it, or it could apply to what comes after it. It could apply to both, actually. What comes before it is quite frightening. It's a warning for unbelievers. Take a look at verses one and two. He said to his disciples, It's inevitable that stumbling blocks come. The word for stumbling blocks there is scandala. We get the word scandal from it.

7:59It's inevitable that people will cause you to trip up. But woe to him through whom they come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble. Little ones is a phrase Christ used to describe young believers, probably children here in this situation, but he's anyone who causes one of his children to stumble. It's a warning to unbelievers. Millstones in those days, when you had your maize, your dried corn, or your wheat, and you wanted to crush it, they carved a big rock into the shape of a tire, like a bus tire, and they would carve a groove in the ground that just went into a circle, and they'd have somebody in the middle, or maybe an animal that would be on the outside of it, and it would spin it around, and they would, as that big rock wheel would come around, you'd put the grain underneath it, and it would smash it and go round and round and continue to smash it. And the road. Romans found a unique way to get rid of the old ones. They would take criminals out onto the ocean or into the sea, and they would gather people on the shore, and they would tie a rope around the criminal's neck and tie the other rope around the millstone, and they would roll the millstone off the boat into the water, and then the criminal would go down with it. It's very possible that when Jesus was teaching this, they were near the Galilee region and they could have seen this happen. In fact, a few years ago, archaeologists, when the waters receded on the Sea of Galilee, they found a lot of millstones there in the shallow waters, which were shallow then because of the water receding.

9:42And Jesus said it would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck than for you to cause one of his little ones to stumble. That's the warning for unbelievers. He says, beware, look out. Now the warning comes for believers. He turns to his disciples and he says, Take heed to yourselves, be on your guard. If your brother sins, rebuke him. That's the first step. Confront. Confront. Somebody sins against you, you should confront. Step number one is confront. There are two Greek words that are translated in English, rebuke, and one of them is harsher than the other. The harsh word means to prosecute accusations. Prosecute a case against another when he is convicted of the crime of which he was accused. So it's to stand like a judge would in court and say, You're guilty. That's the word rebuke. But that's not the word in this passage. This passage is much more gentle.

10:47This passage has a word which is also translated in English as rebuke. And this word means with caution, tentatively, to warn in order to prevent an action. After I graduated from seminary, I was still a youth pastor and I took on a second job to help pay off some student loans from my college days. I became a first-grade school teacher in the Long Beach Unified School District, part of LA Unified, LA Los Angeles County. And I was teaching in an inner city school, first grade. I think every seminarian should go teach first grade after seminary. Just my personally, I think it benefited me.

11:30But I remember one day I was there helping a girl with her math. Her name was Misha. I was leaning over her desk. I was helping her with her math. And she looked up at me and she said, Mr. Beatibach. And I said, what? She goes, when you talk, your mouth smells bad. You see, she was tentatively, cautiously rebuking me to help me from preventing a further action. It was that kind of thing. She cared about me. She said it quietly. I said, thank you. I said, thank you. I went to my desk and had a bunch of breath mints.

12:12Yeah, we need to confront one another in a way that's not condemning or holier than thou or self-righteous, but in a way that cares about someone to prevent them from further harm to themselves or others. That's step number one. And I think it's significant that that's step number one because that's normally not our first step. When somebody offends us, we tend to tell others, which is violating step number one. Step number one is go to them. Confront them. Notice the responsibility lies on the one who's been offended.

12:52Jay Adams, in his excellent book, From Forgiving to Forgiving, has a saying. He says, the one with the hurt toes goes. And he gives the illustration of someone in church who someone steps on their toes, sticks their nose up in the air, and runs out of the building. Your first response would be to say, Did you see what they just did to me? We need to pray for that, brother. Or we need to pray for, you know, that's if you want to be really spiritual. If you don't, just say, did you see what they did to me? And you're angry, right?

13:21But if you go to them, and he says in his illustration, what if you went to them and they said, oh, did I step on your toes? I had no idea. I had to start. A bloody nose, and so I stuck my nose up in the air and ran out, and I didn't know what was going on. It's a possibility, isn't it? I mean, that's why I think the responsibility lies on the one who has been offended.

13:45That doesn't mean that if you're the one who offends someone else and you know it, that you don't have any responsibility to ever go to them. Because in Matthew 5, 23 and 24, it says, if you are presenting your offering at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go your way. First, be reconciled to your brother and then come and present the offering. So, whether you really are the offended one who has been offended or the offender, if you're aware of it, you have a responsibility to seek reconciliation. So, confront. Step number one is confront. Let's move to step number two. Step number two is forgive. Forgive. Again, take a look at Luke 17:3. Be on your guard. If your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. Forgive him.

14:39What is forgiveness? We started to talk about this this morning in Bible hour, and we said that forgiveness is not forgetting because forgetting is passive. It's something that we as humans do. We lose our keys or our cell phone or our glasses. I forgot where I put that. My father used to get up in the morning, and he would feel his tooth. Brush and because he couldn't remember whether he's brushed his teeth yet or not. And this is when I was a kid. You know, you'd see him get up and he would do a bunch of things, be up for a while, have his coffee, and eventually he'd go brush his teeth. But he would always feel the bristles first. If they were wet, it meant he'd already brushed his teeth. And if they were dry, he hadn't brushed his teeth yet. I always thought it'd be fun to just every morning get it wet, you know. But the thing is, the thing is that he's forget, God's not forgetful. God doesn't say, oh, I totally forgot about that. But he can actively not remember because in Isaiah 43, verse 25, it says, I, even I, am he who blots out your transgression for my own sake and remembers your sins no more.

15:55You know what that means? It means when you have a conflict with your spouse and the night before you reconcile and you forgive one another and you go to bed and the next morning you wake up and the first thought in your mind is Grr, I should be angry at her or I should be angry at him. You need to realize that you've promised to not remember it and now you're dwelling on it, so you're breaking your promise. So you need to stop and say, Lord, please help me now to not remember this.

16:29Please help me. Me not to dwell on this. I've already forgiven this. And because you've forgiven me of much greater offenses, help me to have that same attitude with those that I love and those that are hard to love. Psalm 103, verse 12 says, As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. I love it that he says east-west and not north-south, because we know how far it is from the north to the south. 12,430 miles. That's if you go to the north pole and you, you know, go to the south. But if you want to take a shortcut and go through the middle of the earth, 7,899 miles. You know, and if you start here in America and you go north over Canada, you go over the North Pole, you go in the same direction. Eventually, you'll be heading south. You'll come around the other side of the world, you'll come up through South America, and you go north, south, north, south. But you know what? You start heading east, you'll never be going west.

17:27That's the picture here. The idea is: as far as you can possibly imagine, I'm separating your sin from you. I will remember it no more. It's phenomenal. It's active. We used to have an expression in my home that when you asked for forgiveness from someone, that the way you could grant that forgiveness is instead of saying, I forgive you, you went further than that. You said, I forgive you, and I promise that I will not dig up these bones again to make you smell them.

18:00It's a pretty graphic way of saying, I forgive you, isn't it? Cory Tin Boom, who was in a concentration camp during World War II, her and her sister. She went back from Holland to Nazi Germany after World War II, no longer Nazi Germany, but she went back to former Nazi Germany and she gave speeches on forgiveness and reconciliation after having survived a camp that her sister died in, where she was harshly treated. One evening, she said she gave a speech, and normally people would just file out afterwards. They wouldn't say anything. But on this occasion, there was a man in a brown hat, a brown coat with a dark hat, and he was coming up towards her. But she didn't see the brown coat and the dark hat. What she saw is his former uniform. He was an SS officer in the very camp Ravensbruk, which she had been incarcerated in. And as he came forward, she just, this man had seen her naked. This man had been cruel to her. This man had been part of the cause of her sister's death. And he came up to her and he said, Fraudlein, I heard your speech on forgiveness. And since the war is over, I have become a Christian. And I know that God has forgiven me. But I would like to hear it from you. Will you forgive me? And he stuck out his hand. And she said, everything inside her didn't want to forgive him. But she thought, if I do not forgive him his trespasses, neither will my heavenly father forgive me my trespasses, that parental forgiveness we talked about this morning. And so, woodenly, she stuck up her arm and she said, I forgive you, brother. And she said, as she said it, streams of tears started to come down her eyes. Forgiveness is a promise, it's active.

20:07Now, this raises a theological question, and I want to divert from my outline. Don't panic. I know I've only gotten for two of my points, but they're going to go quickly, really quicker than this morning, I'm sure. But there's a theological issue here, and that is: is forgiveness conditional or unconditional? In other words, do I need to confront all the time? Can I forgive unconditionally, unilaterally? I want to answer that by giving four principles about forgiveness, four biblical principles. This is just a side. This is free. This is another sermon. I'm sneaking in here.

20:44First principle: sometimes you must confront. That's the principle. Sometimes you must confront. It's obvious from scripture that forgiveness sometimes must be conditional. Luke 17:3. Says, if he repents. It's a conditional clause. If he repents, meaning if he doesn't repent. Now, we need to separate forgiveness here from bitterness. Never are you allowed to harbor bitterness against someone else. But if forgiveness is a promise that I will never bring this up again, that I will bury this, then you should confront the person and be able to make that promise to them. So sometimes it's a two-way transaction that involves confrontation. And practically, that's difficult because it can't be like that all the time. I mean, if we confronted everybody that offended us, that's all we as Christians would be doing, right? You know, you really offended me the way that you spoke to me before. Oh, really? Well, now you offended me again as you just said that. You know, and you just be all the, I mean, that's all Christians would be doing. So it can't be all the time, but sometimes you must confront. That's principle number one. Principle number two is other times you must overlook. Mark 11:25 and 26. And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. But if you do not forgive, neither will your father in heaven forgive you your trespasses. This is especially true of petty offenses.

22:30Overlook the offense. Forgive it unilaterally, unconditionally. 1 Peter 4:8 says, keep a fervent love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins. Proverbs 10:12, hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all transgressions. And the Bible appears to equate those two, making a parallel statement in Psalm 32:1, he is blessed, how blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Covering over sin is the essence of forgiveness. So sometimes you must confront, other times you must overlook. But the question comes up: well, when do I do which? When do I confront, and when do I overlook?

23:25So the third principle is: whenever possible, it's best to overlook. Whenever possible, it's best to overlook, especially if it's petty or unintentional. Ephesians 4, verses 1 through 3 says, bearing with one another in love. So forbearance is that generous tolerance of one another, overlooking. 1 Corinthians 13:5, love is not easily angered. So if you were the offended party, you may choose. You have two options. I can go confront the person. And by the way, the earlier the better. If this is an old thing, especially if it's petty, it's hard to bring it up again. But if you are the offended party, you can go confront or you can choose to forgive unilaterally, unconditionally. You overlook the offense.

24:23Even Joseph did that with a major offense, like being threatened to be killed and sold into slavery by his brothers. Joseph in Genesis 45, verses 3 through 5, his forgiveness was not preceded by any remorse from his brothers. You remember when he revealed himself to them? Crying, sends other people out of the room, and he says, I am Joseph. Does my father still live? But his brothers could not answer him, for they were dismayed in his presence. And Joseph said to his brothers, please come near to me.

25:02Wow. Sometimes you must confront. Other times you must overlook. Whenever it's possible, it's best to overlook. But the key is to do what's best for others. And that's the fourth little principle. Do what's best for the other person. Do what's best for them. You're trying to decide, should I? Ooh, I'm so angry. They just did whatever to me, or said this about me, or I heard this, and they said they wouldn't say it again, and they said it. I mean, you fill in the blank. It happens all the time, right? You know it. So, do I go to them? What's best for them? Philippians chapter 2, verses 3 and 4 say, Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourself. If you go to someone confronting them, you should be able to say, I'm coming to you, and I know this is awkward, and I know that it's uncomfortable, and I'm risking our relationship because you might be offended by this confrontation, but I'm coming to you because I honestly believe it's best for you that you know how much this has offended me.

26:07And I don't want to see you do it to others, and I don't want to see it destroy our relationship, and I don't want to see it destroy the relationships in the church body. That's the attitude we have when we come. If it's a petty offense or if it's something that you can overlook, and you say, you know what, it's better for them right now if I just don't bring this up because I brought it up 47 times already.

26:29If it's better, I'm just going to overlook this in love, and I'm going to pour love on them. So, step number one: confront. Step number two, forgive. Step number three is found in verse four, and step number three is repeat steps one and two as often as necessary. You ready? Verse four of Luke 17: and if he said, Against you seven times a day and returns to you seven times saying, I repent, forgive him. Forgive him.

27:10It was Peter. Remember this morning we talked about Peter who had asked Jesus up to how many times shall we forgive? Up to seven times? If he had in mind what the rabbis were thinking with that wrong theology that you only needed to forgive somebody up to three times, Peter was saying, Shall we forgive up to seven times, twice as much of the rabbis, and then one? Jesus says 490 times, seven times 70. But his point wasn't to count them because love keeps no record of wrongs. So how do you get up to 490 if you're not keeping a record? That's hard. So you just repeat steps one and two over and over again. You have the option of not confronting and forgiving unilaterally. But if it's for their benefit, you go to them, you confront them, and then you forgive.

28:08And notice it says, if he sins against you seven times in a day, it could be seven different sins. This is why we're to be on our guard. This is why, look out, beware, be on your guard. Essentially, Christ is saying, you've heard it said that you should forgive someone who repents, but I tell you, no matter how many times they wrong you, you should. Forgive them. I was preaching on this issue one time, and a lady came up to me and she said, I have a question to you. This is after the service. She says, very softly and with tears being held back, do I forgive someone who abuses me?

28:50Do I forgive someone who abuses me, physically beats me? And if you've ever counseled anybody in that situation, you should know that most domestic abuse, when it happens, the abuser asks for forgiveness right away. And my response to her was that, yes, you forgive. However, true repentance is only when forgiveness is asked before every offended party. I can't just rob a bank and take all the money and get home and say to my wife, Look, look at all this money. And she said, Where did you get that? I robbed a bank. What? That's wrong. The Bible says not to do that. You're right. Will you forgive me? I forgive you. Great. Where do you want to spend the money? I can't do that. I mean, that's not right.

29:45And you know what? In this country, beating someone is an offense against the law. And so the way I counsel people in that situation, when they repent, they need to repent before all offended parties. And so I take them. And I asked them to file a police report against themselves and to go down and confess their crime. And they repent before the person in their family and they repent before the law. And then, if it happens again that he's not repentant, I'm the first one down there to file another report. And the church body can gather around. There's a lot of ways you can help look after one another. But yes, we forgive. But repentance must be before all offended parties. That issue gets a lot more difficult if you're in some countries where it's not against the law to beat your wife.

30:40It's something to be thankful for in this country. Well, we've seen the three steps. I want to just move to the three excuses because I think that these are, you know, it's one thing to say, yeah, Pastor Brian, I hear it. I hear what you're saying. I know I should confront. I know I should forgive. And I know I should do that as often. And I knew that before I came in here. I knew that's what the Bible taught, and I've got situations where I need to do that. But I'm probably not going to do it. And I think that this text anticipated you saying that because it brings up three excuses that you often have on why you don't forgive, and it diffuses them. Excuse number one: he doesn't seem sincere. He doesn't seem sincere. That's the first excuse that somebody says. People have. Have you anticipated that? You know, have you ever experienced that? You go to someone and you say, you know, I'd like you to forgive me. And they say, well, you know, if you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it.

31:45Well, I am sorry, and I did do it. So now what? And I would encourage you, by the way, to use the words forgive. In your families, don't be legalistic about it. Somebody says, I'm sorry. Don't say, oh, no, I'm not taking a sorry. You say, forgive me, you know. But in our family, we have made a concerted effort to use biblical terminology instead of secular. Because I'm sorry doesn't admit guilt, but forgive me does. If I say, will you please forgive me? I'm admitting guilt. And if they say, yes, I forgive you, they're promising that they will bury it. That's what the terminology means. But if you dumb down the terminology, if you say, hey, I'm sorry about that, oh, don't worry about it. Well, I wasn't worried about it. It's sin, and so I should actually be concerned about it, but please forgive me. And you'll find that when you offend people and you say, will you please forgive me, they don't know how to respond. Our culture has lost that. Anyway, I encourage you, it's harder to ask for forgiveness than to say, I'm sorry. But if somebody has the excuse of, well, I would forgive them, but I don't think they are sincere. And if you're a believer and you're wrestling with that excuse, take a look again at our text because it says in verse. Verse 4, if he sins against you seven times a day and returns to you seven times, saying, I repent, forgive him. And I want to point out that that word saying is in the original, it's in the Greek. It doesn't say that if you think they're sincere, it says if they say, I repent.

33:19Now, if you know that they're not sincere, if they go, well, forgive me, you know, it's totally obvious that's different. But if you're saying, you know what, I'm not sure if they're sincere or not, what this passage is telling you is it's not your job to judge sincerity. It's your job to forgive, and God expects you to forgive. So excuse number one, he doesn't seem sincere, obliterated from this passage. Excuse number two, I don't have enough faith. Verses five and six. You might be thinking, well, you know, you were a missionary. I mean, you've got to do this. Otherwise, you know, you're getting booted off the mission field and nobody's supporting you. So you've got to be nice to people. But, you know, us normal folk, we don't have to do that.

34:11And maybe when I'm more spiritual, getting a little bit more faith, I can do that kind of thing. But right now, I'm still kind of a baby Christian, and so I just can't do it. And that's how the apostles were feeling, because they looked at Jesus in verse 5. And the apostles said to the Lord, Increase our faith. Notice they. Didn't say give us faith. They said increase it. They had faith. They wanted more. And the Lord said, if you had faith like a mustard seed, and you would say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.

34:47The fig mulberry tree could grow to be three stories tall, and the mustard seed was one of the smallest seeds known during that time. What is Jesus saying here? He's saying, It's not that you don't have enough faith, it's you're just not acting on it. If you had the smallest amount of faith imaginable, you could do what's unimaginable. So, this isn't an issue of having enough faith. If you have faith at all, if you're an unbeliever and you don't know what it's like to be forgiven of all your sins from Christ's mercy and grace, from his work on the cross, then it will be hard for you to forgive anybody because you don't know what it's like to have all of your sins, all of your offenses forgiven.

35:39But if you have faith in Christ, you can do this. First excuse, it doesn't seem sincere. Second excuse, I don't have enough faith. Third excuse, I don't feel like it. I know what you're saying, I know what I should do, I just don't feel it. Like doing it. Verse 7. Jesus tells a story, one that you might not think is connected here, but I think it is. Once I started studying this more, I think he's going on still teaching on this issue. Verse 7, which of you, having a slave plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he's come in from the field, come immediately and sit and eat. But will he not say to him, Prepare something for me to eat and properly clothe yourself and serve me while I eat and drink? And afterward, you made and drink? He does not thank the slave because he did those things which were commanded, does he? Let me just stop here. You got the picture? In ancient days, you could be in slavery for a number of reasons. You might sell yourself into slavery for a period of time in order to pay off a family debt. Some people chose to remain in slavery if they had a good master. I'm not saying slavery was fun or good or right. I'm just saying it's different than what we think of when we think of American colonial slavery. But in this case, the illustration is given of a servant whose job was to work the fields during the day and then come in and prepare food and serve it and clean up and then go home. That's the job. That was expected of the job. Those were the bare minimums of the job. It's not that the master here is ungrateful. It's just that the servant is not doing more than what's. Expected of him. So the master doesn't say, you must be tired. And of course, they would be tired working in the fields.

37:39Everything in them must have been, wanted to put, I want to eat that. I mean, if you've ever been serving other people in a restaurant and you're hungry, I mean, that's hard, right? And so, so, you know, this servant's been out there working all day, now smelling all the food, everything in them would want to eat that. And yet he doesn't because it's his job. He waits, he cleans up, he goes home. Jesus says in verse 10, so you too, when you do all the things which are commanded, you say, we are unworthy slaves. We have done only that which we have ought to have done. It is your duty. You are expected to forgive. This is part of being a Christian. Somebody who's been, if you don't forgive others, you don't understand forgiveness. We are expected to forgive. People say, well, man, if I forgive and I don't feel like it, I'd be a hypocrite, right? Wrong. You don't understand hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not doing things you don't feel like. I didn't feel like getting out of bed this morning. I did. Doesn't make me a hypocrite. I do things every day I don't feel like doing. Now, if I told you, whoo, I love getting up. 3 in the morning, can't wait. 5 in the morning, woo! Want to beat the sun up, you know?

39:01Then I'd be a hypocrite because it wouldn't be a true representation. The Bible's clear, even if you don't feel like it, this is part of your duty. This is part of your responsibility. This is part of understanding. Like that unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, who was faced with a debt that he could never repay, not in a million years. And he went to his fellow servant and couldn't forgive him three months' wages. Well, this is a challenging passage to us all, I know. Ephesians 4:32 says, Be kind and compassionate to one another, just as Christ in God forgave you. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for this time together in your word. Thank you, Father, for these challenges, but thank you for showing us this text so clearly that we are to confront and to forgive and to repeat that, and that we shouldn't use excuses like they don't seem sincere, or I don't have enough faith, or I don't feel like it. Ultimately, Lord, we would have no hope, we would have no feeling, we would have no compassion, no care, no joy without you. You are the source of all good things, and because of your grace and mercy, we are not. We, as sinners, can come before you and say, You erased the film. I can't believe you erased the film. I can't believe Christ's life is what you see when you look at me.

40:41Father, I pray that you would use us to reflect the joy and the grace that has been bestowed on us, that grace might be our teacher, instructing us to deny ungodliness and to forgive those who've offended us so much. So that when people come to members of this church and they say to them, How is it that you can be so gracious to me when I've been so evil to you? that they could look at them and say, Because of Christ, and that your name would be exalted. I pray that for each one who hears this message, Lord. May your name be exalted. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.