Matthew 6:14-15 "What is Forgiveness?"

0:59That's really wonderful for you. I'm very proud. Please don't do it right now. I do think you are the same people, right? If you get a phone call, you're offended. A phone call? What? Don't they know how to text? Okay, if you didn't raise your hand, then you're probably in the second group, which is me. How many of you, when it comes to texting, kind of don't know what you're doing? Yep. Okay. I hear you. That's me. I was recently flummoxed by a texting exchange with my teenage son, Tal. I texted him a dad joke because. Of course, I did. And I get this little message: Tal laughed at your message. I was like, no, I didn't even know that was possible. Quickly followed on by, Tal removed a laugh from your message.

1:44Ouch. I didn't know that was possible. Now, no, that's not nearly as bad. I'm not nearly as clueless on this, on texting, as the people who think that LOL stands for lots of love. Think about how badly that can go. The funeral's on Wednesday. LOL. Right. Okay, let's imagine a different texting scenario. Here's what I want you to imagine. Your best friend, you tell your best friend something in confidence, and they blab. They tell other people, and it turns into a whole mess.

2:20And as a result, you end up embarrassed and hurt. This is your best friend. Your best friend realizes, like, oh, this has gone horribly wrong. And you receive the following text. Your best friend says, What I did was careless and wrong, and it has ended up hurting you. I'm so sorry. How do we respond? All you texting experts, you know the answer. How do we respond? NBD. What does that stand for? No big deal. That's how we respond. I think something may be wrong with us because this Is our default mode to forgiveness? Either we're not forgiven at all, or if we do forgive, we try to minimize the offense and say, let's move on. Not a big deal. NBD.

3:14That's what I want to talk about today. I want to show our passage today. It's actually quite short. It's just two verses. Matthew 6, 14 through 15. If you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Heavenly Father forgive your trespasses. It's a short verse. And this follows immediately, you just heard from McKinsey, this follows immediately after the Lord's Prayer. Last week from Pastor Allen, you heard Pastor Allen speak about that line in the Lord's Prayer that says, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And Pastor Allen talked about what that debt is, that we all owe a tremendous spiritual debt, and God has totally and graciously forgiven us that spiritual debt. It's one that we could never repay no matter how many good works we do.

4:08Today I want to focus on that next part, which is our difficulty in forgiving each other. I want to bring forward three questions for you note-takers. Bless you. For you, note-takers, we're going to discuss three questions. What is forgiveness? The second question may be the big one on your minds already. Does Jesus really mean what he says? Seems like God's forgiveness is conditional. In verses 14 to 15. And the third, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard for us to forgive each other?

4:37Okay, let's start with the first. What is forgiveness? This is actually a somewhat controversial question because you may think, like, is forgiveness like something I do internally in my heart where I say I forgive? Or is it something external where we actually have to have a conversation? And someone has to say, I'm sorry, and I have to say, forgive. Which one is it? And do I have to? What if the other person never says they're sorry? What if they never apologize? Do I still have to forgive? It turns out these two perspectives both find some support in Scripture.

5:09Let's see if I can find it. In Mark 11, Jesus says, whenever you stand praying, forgive. This is Mark 11, 25. Whenever you stand praying, forgive. And if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. That means when you're forgiving and you realize I have something against someone, boom, forgive right there. Doesn't matter what they do, you forgive. That's clearly a you thing, and it's internal.

5:35You do it automatically. But then there's other passages like Luke 17:3 that says, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. So that sounds like, well, if they repent, then you forgive them. So what's the deal? It turns out the Bible actually cares about both aspects, both your internal forgiveness and the reconciliation of that relationship. This actually shows up in the Old Testament law in Leviticus. Most ancient laws. Didn't really talk about that internal part. Most ancient laws from Egypt or Babylon, they would say things like, try not to stab each other, okay? But Leviticus actually goes beyond that. This is in Leviticus 19. It says, You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

6:28So note that both the internal aspect, you shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall not bear a grudge, that internal part is there. For you, what that means is for you to forgive someone means that in your heart you're saying, just like Mark prayed a few minutes ago, he said, give up ill will, give up hostility, give up bitterness, give up resentment. Be willing to give that up in your heart. For most of us, what that really means is that we are prone to replay the tape of what was done to us. Someone hurt you, and you replay the tape over and over in your mind. And you almost relish how in the right you are, and how in the wrong they are. And you think, maybe if I think about it over and over, and if I hold that hostility toward this person, it somehow punishes them.

7:18Right? This low-grade vengeance. And so Leviticus here tells us: don't hate your brother. Get rid of that ill will. Instead, love them. To love someone means to earnestly delight and desire in their good. And then that inward forgiving heart allows for the possibility of reconciliation. That means the person who's wronged you, if they are willing to apologize, if they're willing to amend the relationship, you've already forgiven them in your heart. You're already ready to have that reconciled relationship.

7:58Now, I want to note, for many of you, that second part, the outward reconciliation, that restoring of the relationship might not be possible. It's possible the person never says they're sorry. They never repent. They never apologize. They never ask forgiveness. It's also possible they're not a part of your life anymore. It's also possible they may have died. In any of those cases, it's going to be pretty hard to restore the relationship. But what God cares about is not merely the outward acts, not just I didn't take outward vengeance, but I didn't take inward vengeance. I didn't hold a hostile, bitter, resentful heart against that person. That's what God cares about. So forgiveness involves both of these things. Some of you may have noticed in that passage a moment ago, that little part at the end, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You say, oh, I recognize that. Jesus talks about that. Indeed, he does. In fact, when Jesus is talking about that phrase, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, some of his audience says, like, wait a minute.

8:57We're talking about loving our neighbor, right? Like, not like Romans or Saints. Samaritans, or anyone like that. And they say, who is my neighbor? And Jesus actually follows that question with the story of the Good Samaritan. It says, that person who you think of as your enemy, that person who you're naturally hostile to, that is who I mean when I say, love your neighbor as yourself. Let's move on to our second question, which is, does Jesus really mean what he says?

9:26Here's our text again. Look at the phrasing of Matthew 6, 14, 15. If you forgive, your heavenly Father will forgive you. If you don't forgive, your Heavenly Father will not either. Right? If, then. This is what we call a condition. It seems like it is a condition. That should strike you a little strange. We generally think of God's love and forgiveness as being unconditional, and yet there it is, a condition. If you don't forgive, your heavenly Father will not forgive you. If, then, right? That strikes us as pretty weird. It almost sounds like a precondition. I mean, think about how weird it would be to say, like, if you'll mow my lawn, then I'll forgive you, right? Like, we don't normally talk about forgiveness that way. So, honestly, like, the truth is, most of us, we read these verses and we kind of don't like it. And it's for that reason. It seems like it makes God's forgiveness conditional. Thankfully, Jesus actually tells an entire parable later that illustrates what these two verses mean. In Matthew 18, Peter is asking, Jesus, like, how many times do I have to forgive my brother? And Jesus ends up telling him a parable. It's called the parable of the unforgiving servant. There's a king who wishes to settle accounts with his servants. And there's one servant who owes an astronomical amount, like so much that it's not even possible that they would be able to repay. And this servant throws himself on the mercy of the king, and the king forgives this enormous debt that the servant has.

10:59The servant immediately, then, as soon as that happens, the servant immediately goes out and finds a second servant who owes him money, a much smaller amount, and shakes him down to pay, literally shakes him down to repay and chokes him. And Jesus' audience is outraged. The king is outraged. We are outraged. Jesus' audience is outraged. Everybody's outraged. The question is, why? Are we outraged because it's cruel to shake someone down? That is wrong. But it seems especially horrible for this servant to refuse to forgive their fellow servant immediately after the king has made this amazing offer of forgiveness of this huge debt. That's what makes it outrageous. The reason that we respond to that story the way we do is it's very clear that this servant is trampling on the king's offer of forgiveness. He is devaluing it.

11:54He says, forgiveness, no, that's not my thing. Forgiving debts is not. I'm not in that business. It is effectively saying no to the king's offer of forgiveness and saying, I don't play that way. John Calvin actually phrases it really well. He says, If we retain feelings of hatred in our hearts, if we plot revenge and ponder any occasion to cause harm, by this prayer, we entreat God not to forgive our sins. It means refusing to forgive is effectively an anti-prayer. It's praying, God, don't forgive my sin. That is what this unforgiving servant did. He is effectively saying, King, I don't believe in forgiveness. Think about what that means for how you pray the Lord's Prayer, which comes immediately before our two verses. So we go to the Lord's Prayer, and you think, let's just mark out that part about forgiving our debtors. Let's just mark that out. What we just talked about is that if you say, I don't believe in forgiveness, you're going to have a really hard time asking God to forgive you. And it doesn't stop there. Think about how difficult it becomes to pray the Lord's Prayer. Let's try it. Wait, our? Who's our? Who's included in our? That person I refuse to forgive, are they part of our?

13:13Forgive us our debts. Give us our daily bread. Is that other person part of us? I don't forgive that person. I don't want to be in a family with them. So you cannot, if you refuse to forgive, you cannot get even one word into the Lord's Prayer. A refusal to forgive cuts out our ability to pray this prayer. It's tantamount to saying, Lord, count me out. I'm not in the forgiveness business. I don't want to be a part of this family.

13:45So, what I hope you see from that is that this means that forgiveness is not, our forgiving others is not a precondition for God forgiving us. Rather, it is a characteristic. If we are forgiven, if we embrace God's forgiveness, that naturally outflows into a forgiveness toward others. To put it more succinctly, forgiven people forgive people. It is a characteristic of being in God's family that we forgive one another. When Paul writes to the church in Colossians, in Colossians 3:12, Paul says, Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Similarly, Paul writes to the Ephesians in Ephesians 4:32, be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. That's a beautiful picture of what it means to live as part of God's family. He's describing what does life look like in the church. I hope you realize what that means for this room, for the people in this room. That means this room, and everybody, we all look at each other, this is forgiveness central, right? That forgiveness comes naturally to us because, think about those words I just read, kindness, patience. These are the fruits of the Spirit. Our forgiving heart is a natural outworking of God's Spirit changing our heart and turning us into a family, a family that reflects God's forgiving nature. That's why it becomes natural for us to forgive each other.

15:31I want to make that really clear because it may be tempting to think, like, okay, I have to use my willpower and just like, ugh, forgive. It's not that at all. We are able to forgive because God's Spirit changes our hearts and gives us a forgiving spirit. Okay, time for a quick gut check. There's a quick problem. I noticed this in myself years ago. Whenever you read a story about Jesus and Jesus is like in conflict with the Pharisees or he tells a story like the parable of the unforgiving servant, we, churchy people, have a real bad habit of being like, yeah, that unforgiving servant, whew, that's there are some people who really need to hear that. Yeah. I mean, you tell them, Jesus. Yeah, absolutely.

16:13We tend to, like, we don't see that unforgiving servant and put our face on the unforgiving servant, which means that we don't fully embrace the serious nature of this passage. Jesus is effectively saying that there is a danger that, like the unforgiving, Servant, we will not see the unbelievable forgiveness of God for what it is. We should take that warning seriously and say, when we read the parable of the unforgiving servant, we should read it and shudder and say, Lord, I never want to go there. I never want to be that person who says no to your forgiveness and devalues it.

16:51In the other extreme, some of you may be having a feeling right now of, oh, I've been struggling with forgiving a person for years. Am I even a Christian? What do I do? I will tell you, this is important because I struggled with this for many years. When I was young, I would constantly have these moments of like, no, no, no, I'm a Christian. Oh, wait, am I? Oh, and I would think, like, maybe there's somebody I haven't forgiven. Maybe I did this wrong. Okay, we're going to start over. Here we go.

17:19Pray the sinner's prayer. Okay, now I'm a Christian. And I would constantly be trying to restart my Christian life because I thought repentance and getting everything right is how you start the Christian life. That is not the case. If you are feeling the pangs of conscience right now saying you should forgive this person, that doesn't mean you need to restart the Christian life. That means you're normal. It is normal. The normal life of the Christian is to say, I repent, I believe, every day. Every day. The first thesis in Martin Luther's 95 theses that he nailed on the door in Wittenberg, the first thesis is, the life of the believer is one of continual repentance. That means when you wake up, Tomorrow, you can say, Lord, I repent. I believe. I forgive. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day. In fact, Jesus says in Luke 9:23, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself daily and take up his cross daily and follow me. That means there's a daily dying to yourself, including that bitterness that you want to hold on to. So when you think, how do I forgive? Is that something I do and I get it right and I never struggle with it again? No. It's something you have to daily die to your bitterness and hostility and forgive the way that Jesus forgives us.

18:37If there is someone here who's never accepted Jesus as their Lord, I want to make it really clear: this is not the kind of faith where you have to reform your life by your own willpower and then you're able to come to Jesus. Come to Jesus today. If you feel that feeling of conscience in your life, today. Today is the day to say, I forgive, I repent, I believe. Let's turn to our third question, which is, why is it so hard to forgive?

19:08Why is it so hard to forgive? Let's be brutally honest with ourselves. Brutally honest. You ready to be brutally honest? We hate forgiveness. We hate it. Because when you forgive, there's a little thing in your heart that's like, I don't want to do this. This feels wrong. I hate this. You know what we love? I'll tell you what we love. We love vengeance. We love vengeance. We have lots of vengeance-themed movies and things like that. Let's see if you can track with me, right? Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father.

19:48Prepare to die. Yes, very good. Vengeance. We like vengeance. By the way, a few years ago, I thought, you know what would be really cool? I'm going to check to see if you killed my father, prepared to die at gmail.com is available. It was not. So we have lots of, we really like vengeance. If we have a superhero team, we call them the Avengers. Very good, right? We like vengeance. In fact, in one of the Marvel movies, they have to come up with a new superhero team name, and they can't think of anything, so they're like, the Revengers. I don't know. So we really like vengeance. In fact, recently a prominent politician told their supporters, I will be your retribution.

20:32I don't know what policy that means, but the crowd ate it up. They said, yes, vengeance, we like that. So we really like vengeance because vengeance says that when someone hurts me, there will be payback. No good can come of that hurt that I've endured. So the only possible thing we can do is vengeance, payback. You ultimately see this if you go online. Go online and try to find some forgiveness. Go online and say, is anyone? Forgiving each other on social media. No.

21:04The name of the game is outrage. If you go online, right? Outrage saying, let's just make a sentence. Blank is unforgivable. Social media says, oh, I have all kinds of things to put in that blank. And there's this big, long list. And if you do any of the things on that list, then it's unforgivable, right? That's what social media is. That's how you get clicks, is through outrage. That feeling of like, oh, someone, number one on the list, someone disagreed with me politically. Oh, you are dead to me. You are dead to me. You will taste my wrath.

21:40This doesn't quite have the power that I thought. Okay, I'm going to type the meanest thing I can think of. The meanest thing. Bless your heart. Sinned. It's the meanest thing we can say in Texas. If you're not from Texas, if a woman over the age of 50 says, bless your heart, like, you're not going to recover. I'm just sorry. You're not going to. Right. So we like vengeance. Social media brings out the vengeance and out the outrage in us. And if you say, hey, instead of vengeance, how about forgiveness? And the response is like, I don't think you understand. If we forgive, that is the equivalent of saying, no big deal.

22:25It's minimizing the offense. It's saying the offense is not a big deal. Let's just move on. On. I hate that. It feels wrong. If someone's really hurt me, it's a lie to say that it's no big deal because it is a big deal. So we hate forgiveness. This actually exploded onto the national scene a few years ago. I'm going to show you a picture. In 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, this man, Dylan Roof, Dylan Roof, entered this particular church. This is Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He entered with the intent to kill.

23:03He later said that he almost didn't go through with it because the people in the church had been so nice to him. He went to a prayer time, and in the middle of prayer time, he removed a firearm and he shot multiple people there in the group, ultimately killing nine. He's currently on death row in a prison in Indiana, and his intent was to start a race war. Ironically, the opposite seems to have happened as the citizens of Charleston came together and loved and supported each other in the wake of the tragedy.

23:36Most notably, many, many family members of the victims publicly forgave him, including this man. This is Chris Singleton. Chris, as you can see, is a minor league baseball player, and he lost his mother to the shooting. Chris was one of several victims that very publicly said to Dylan Roof, I forgive you. What's interesting about that is there was a tremendous amount of backlash to the forgiveness. One journalist wrote, We can't keep doing this. We can't forgive things like this. This forgiveness is, and he used the word unconscionable. It's not a word we use every day. Unconscionable. That means it should bother your conscience to forgive.

24:22Why? Why should it bother your conscience to forgive? Because, he said, by forgiving, by saying, it's okay, let's move on. We are minimizing the evil that was done. We are minimizing the value of the victims. And some of you may resonate with that journalist saying that some of you may have gone through some real hurt that the rest of us have no idea. We have no idea what you've been through. And it is painful for you to hear someone say, you should forgive. You say, why? Why should I forgive? Because it's not a big deal. It is painful to hear this call to forgiveness because we think forgiving means saying no big deal.

25:06That's why forgiving often feels morally wrong. It actually offends our conscience. I'll tell you another story. In 2018, a man named Larry Nasser, his trial concluded. Larry Nasser was a team doctor for USA Gymnastics, and he was convicted of sexually abusing over 265 young women. At the trial, the closing statement was given by this woman. Let's see if we can get her picture. Here she is, Rachel Denhollander. Rachel is a remarkable woman. She was the original whistleblower who actually first brought these charges to everyone's attention, and then more charges started to come in, and people began to realize what Nasser had done. So they gave Rachel the final word in a sentencing hearing. And so Rachel made her case to the judge. She said, as we decide on a sentence for this man, the sentence needs to reflect the hurt that he's caused. And the phrase she used was, What is a little girl worth?

26:15As you decide, Your Honor, as you decide what the sentence should be, just think about that question: what is a little girl worth? If it was one to three years, what would y'all say to that? No? How about 100 to 300 years? That's what he got. Some of you may be thinking, like, 300 years, I think you got him. True, that is true. Practically, like, I think 300 years may be overboard, but Rachel was saying the reason you go for this number is not just for the practical effects on his prison sentence. It's communicating, our legal system communicating how much is a little girl worth.

27:00Rachel then went on to say, What you've done is so horrible that it is unforgivable, and I will never forgive you until I die. Actually, she did not say that. Rachel is a believer, and just like Chris Singleton, she publicly forgave Nasser. So at this point, you should say, Rachel, which is it? You just said, like, what is a little girl worth? It's worth all this prison time. Doesn't that also earn your undying hatred? Your hostility? How can you forgive him? You're minimizing what he's done, Rachel. This is wrong.

27:42You cannot say no big deal to what he has done. You cannot forgive him. You cannot pass over a wrong like that. You cannot lightly pass over a wrong. You cannot lightly pass over a wrong. You cannot lightly pass over a wrong. Does God lightly pass over our sins? If you think back to the original Passover, what you know is that it required blood. In Romans 3, Romans 3:25, it says, I want you to look for the word Passover, right? This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. Romans 3.25 is addressing the question, are our sins no big deal? God, you passed over our sins. Are they no big deal?

28:47The this in this verse is referring to the cross. The cross is the ultimate declaration that our sins, our offenses against God, are a big deal. God does not forgive lightly. God does not say, oh, not a big deal. Let's move on. God says, your sins are a big deal, and I forgive them not lightly. I forgive them at great cost to myself. The this here refers to the cross. So when you think of the cross, you think, I'm sure children in here have asked this question, why did Jesus have to die? Why the cross? Ultimately, the message of the cross is that God's glory is of infinite value, and sins against God are a big deal.

29:39That means that when you think, okay, I have to forgive someone, but I don't want to forgive them because I don't want to imply that what they did is not a big deal. God says, no, no, I know they're a big deal. Look to the cross. That shows that what was done to you, that offense, that hurt, that abuse, it really is a big deal. It's this big of a deal. That then... Frees you to forgive them.

30:04We mimic Jesus's forgiveness, right? Jesus says, Father, forgive them. We can too. In 1 Peter 2:23, it says, When Jesus was reviled, he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins and his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you've been healed. That phrase, entrust yourself to the one who judges justly. That trust in God shows that forgiveness is an act of faith. Saying, I'm trusting in God that he is just, and I know the hurt that came to me was a big deal, and I forgive anyway.

30:46So I want everyone to go ahead and do what we know we've need to do, which is to think of that person. Think of that person that you struggle to forgive. Some of you may think, like, we're not doing this. Don't talk to me about forgiveness. You don't know what I've been through. I definitely don't know what you've been through. And I've not been through anything like what you've been through. But Jesus really does. Jesus really knows.

31:11And with Jesus, we can pray, Lord, I release my hatred. I release my desire for vengeance, my bitterness and resentment, and I trust you, the one who judges justly. Let's end here. What I suspect is that most of you right now are like, okay, Mike, Get it. I'm intellectually, I'm with you. I agree, that's what the Bible says. I need to forgive. That's what the Bible says. I need to do it. Intellectually, my mind agrees with you. I'm there, but my feelings are not quite there. I want to forgive. I know I need to forgive, but I don't feel any forgiveness. And I can't just like tell my emotions to catch up to my brain, right? So I want to forgive, but I don't want to forgive. I suspect that's where most of us are. I'm going to share with you a passage that means so much to me.

32:01The passage is Mark 9. There's a man who brings his son to Jesus. His son has an evil spirit that makes him have seizures and get injured. The disciples could not cast it out. And the man comes to Jesus and says, If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us. And Jesus says, If, if I can, all things are possible to the one who believes. And Mark 9:24 says, Immediately, the boy's father cried out and said, I do believe, help my unbelief.

32:35I resonate so much with this father. How many times have I thought that? I do believe. Help my unbelief. I think that father would be okay with it if we modify his statement a little bit to say, I do forgive. Help my unforgiveness. We're not trying to forgive through our own willpower. We're trying to forgive through the power of the Holy Spirit. We say, Lord, I do forgive. Help my unforgiveness. Through your Spirit, change my heart.

33:09We're going to pray, and I want to pray over you a passage from the book of Micah, Micah 7:18. I want you to listen to the description of God's forgiveness to you and have it change. I want you to hear not just the truth, not just the goodness, but the beauty of God's forgiveness. And allow through this passage the Holy Spirit to speak to you. Let's pray. Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity, passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance?

33:42You do not retain your anger forever because you delight in steadfast love. You will again have compassion on us. You will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. Lord, I thank you that that's true. I pray for everyone in this room, but especially those who are struggling with the lack of forgiveness right now. I want to pray with them. I do forgive. Help my unforgiveness. We thank you that you are a gracious God who is slow to anger and quick to forgive. Please mold our character to be like yours, to forgive the way that you do. In your name, we pray. Amen.

34:24Thank you for listening to the sermon audio from New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more. information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.