Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:21-35)

Welcome to Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. What the Bible means and how we know. For more talks and study materials, visit wednesdayintheword.com. Speaker 1: Welcome again. This parable isn't quite as difficult as last week, I don't think. But again, it's got some interesting questions in it. We're in Matthew 18. We're looking at the parable of the unforgiving servant, and it's uh we're on page 27 in your study guide if you're since we have a couple new people. In our culture today, tolerance is one of the most highest virtues or most prized virtues, but it's changed meaning. When I was growing up, it to be tolerant meant that I might vigorously disagree with your opinion, but I would also vigorously defend your right to hold that opinion, and that was being tolerant. But today, tolerance means all ideas are equal, all ideas are right and valid, and if I disagree with your opinion, then somehow I'm no longer being tolerant because I've been judgmental. And I I think that's the wrong view. Consequently, sin and guilt have fallen out of favor because how could you possibly be guilty if all ideas are equal? And how could any action be judged a sin if there are no absolutes and what's true for you isn't true for me, and vice versa. And so our vocabulary has changed. We don't lie anymore, we misspeak. And we're not sinful, we're broken, and we're not guilty, we're victims. And I think all this has spilled over into the church, and the church has become reticent to talk about judgment or hell or God's wrath because it's just too offensive to our culture now. It's not seeker friendly, so we don't like to talk about it. But then we come to one of these parables where we have to talk about it because it raises the question: what if you are in fact guilty? And what if you are objectively, morally, legally, ethically guilty? And you feel guilty because you are in fact guilty, so despite our notions of tolerance. Well, the only real solution to real guilt is real forgiveness, and that's what our parable's about today. Forgiveness is a universal need of humankind, and it's not only something we need, it's something we have to give. But there's a lot of questions that that raises, like how many times do you have to forgive someone? The one Peter asked. What if the person doesn't ask for forgiveness? What if we forgive someone who doesn't want to be forgiven? Must we still forgive them? What if I don't feel like I'm forgiven? How do I ask? And so on. Well, now that I've promised you the world, I'm not going to answer all those questions. I'm going to try to start to give you an answer, but I probably won't answer them all. So we're going to look at the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, and we're going to ask primarily the question we're going to try to focus on is what's the link between getting into the kingdom of heaven and being a forgiven person? Because it seems pretty clear that that's a link Jesus is making. So we're going to have to figure out why. Why is there a link and what is he trying, what does that mean for us? So as usual, we're going to go through the the parable kind of section by section, looking at the background and the culture, and then we're going to spend the hopefully the last part, uh maybe even as much as half the time, just talking about what forgiveness is and what it isn't. Okay, so we're in Matthew 18, we're going to start in 21 and 22. This is the context for our parable. Then Peter came and said to him, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times. And Jesus said to him, I did not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. So what's going on here is the rabbis looked at the law and they said, You're required to give forgive three times before you can take vengeance or seek restitution. And they base this on Amos 1.3 and Amos 2.6, which in Amos 1.3 it says, Thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of Damascus, and for four I will not revoke its punishment. So he says, For three transgressions I will look, but the fourth one I won't revoke its punishment. And again in Amos 2.6, thus says the Lord for three transgressions of Israel, and for four I will not revoke its punishment, because they sell the righteous for money. And so they looked at that and they said, Well, God lets it go three times. He overlooks the first three, and then after that he seeks punishment. And the other verse they based it on was Job 33, 29 and 30. It says, Behold, God does all these oftentimes with men to bring back his soul from the pit that he may be enlightened with the light of life. And that word oftentimes is literally three times. So he's saying, for three times God brings back the soul of men, he forgives them. So they looked at that and they said, okay, God requires us to forgive three times. So if we forgive seven, four more than actually required, then we know we're all right. So it was building a hedge around the law to say, okay, if I do four more than I'm required, then I can look at myself and I know for sure that I have kept the law and done my duty. And that's what Peter is asking. He's saying, are they right? Do are we do we have to forgive up to seven times, four more than required? So like the lawyer in the parable of the Good Samaritan who asked, Who is my neighbor? Peter is asking, How much is enough? How far does my responsibility go? And just like the parable of the Good Samaritan, we're going to see Jesus turn the question around. And he instead of saying, Well, here's the line, like Jesus told the lawyer, you have to be a neighbor to anyone who needs you, he's going to tell Peter, you have to be forgiving, period. It's unlimited. And then the parable explains why. So Peter's question is behind his question is the assumption that we have a right to restitution. That when someone sins against us or hurts us in some way, that we have a right to redress, a right to restitution, and then forgiving is giving that up. So if someone offends you, you can demand an apology and some sort of appropriate compensation, whatever form that may take, and then to forgive is to let go of that right. And what Jesus is going to say is when God asks you to forgive, He's not asking you to renounce a right because we actually were all guilty. We have no rights in this matter. We are just as guilty as the person who offended us. And that's essentially, I think, where the connection is going to come from. But let's look at how the parable explains this. So again, we're going to go through it section by section, and then we're going to look at what is forgiveness. So let's start with 1823. For this reason, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. So right off the bat, we want to ask the question, what's being compared to what? And usually when we read the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king, we think, okay, the kingdom of heaven is and is being compared. So the king is being compared to God, and that's what's going on. So we try to look for some kind of parallel between the king and then um God. But I think what's going on is but when he says the kingdom of heaven may be compared, he's saying those who want to enter the kingdom of heaven, or those who will enter the kingdom of heaven, may be compared to this whole situation in the parable. So the idea is not that the king equals God, but that there's some dynamic in the story that explains something about those who want to enter the kingdom of heaven. And the idea is those who want to belong to the kingdom of heaven may be compared to this situation. And that's the point he's going to make. So when it comes to forgiveness, the character of those who belong to the kingdom of heaven is going to be different than Peter's question of how often. So, from that opening statement, what would we expect? We'd expect a story in which someone is constantly wrong and constantly forgiving. And that's kind of what he sets us up for. But instead, we get a story where there's a person who does not forgive, and it's it's not what we're expecting. So let's look at this first section. We're going to start with 23 through 27. For this reason, so because of the the question about forgiveness, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began to settle them, one who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him. But since he did not have the means to repay, his Lord commanded him to be sold, along with his wife and children, and all that he had in repayment to be made. So the slave fell to the ground and prostrated himself before him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will repay you everything. And the Lord of that slave felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt. So the first thing we have to understand is this debt is limited, is limitless. Ten thousand talents is something like two point five million pieces of silver. That is an astronomical amount for that day. The idea is it's beyond reckoning. It's like our national debt. It's just, well, how big is 16 trillion? The ancient, just to give you a context, the ancient historian Josephus records that the provinces of Judea and Samaria, if you took all the taxes, everyone who lived in both those provinces paid for a year, it was 600 talents. So for one person to own 10,000 talents is huge. When the entire pro two provinces paid taxes of 600 talents, Galilee, that province paid 200 talents per year. So you can see the scale. It's just beyond conception. So 10,000 was the highest unit of reckoning in their language. The talent was the largest unit of currency. And I don't think the parable means it to be an exact amount, but just a huge, unlimited number. So it's similar to how we might say he owed a gazillion dollars. It's just this huge astronomical amount. So the second thing we need to know then is that the king's actions are very reasonable and would have seen as within his rights and very reasonable. Jewish law covered who could be sold into slavery and under what circumstances. And according to Exodus 22, a thief who's unable to make restitution can be sold to pay the debt. So this is Exodus 22, 1 through 3. If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for the ox and four for the sheep. If a thief is caught while breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no blood guiltiness on his account. That's a reference to don't take vengeance on his family. But if the sun has risen on him, there will be blood guiltiness on his account, he shall surely make restitution. If he owns nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. So the law provided if you can't pay back, you can be sold as a slave. But it goes on that if the value, if your value as a slave was more than the value of what you took, you couldn't sell them for slavery. So there were limits on that. A Jew could sell himself to repay a debt, but he would not be considered a slave. He'd be a hired man and he would have was supposed to be freed in the year of Jubilee. So that's in Leviticus 29 uh 25, verses 39 through 42 talks about that. I'll just read it for you. If a countryman of yours becomes so poor with regard to you that he sells himself to you, you shall not subject him to a slave service. He shall be with you as a hired man, as if he were a sojourner. He shall serve with you until the year of Jubilee. He shall then go out from you, he and his sons with him. He shall go back to his family that he may return to the property of his forefathers. So this was all kind of m um mo practice of the day. So the debt is large, and the price of slavery would have been considered small in comparison to the debt. So for us, it sounds like a that's really harsh. It's an incredibly harsh treatment that the the king inflicts, but for Jesus' audience, they would have seen that as, yep, that's what the king's or the landowner, the lord of the slave is supposed to do. If he the that's normal, that's just normal restitution. So selling the slave and his family and all his possessions won't even begin to approach the amount that's owed the master. Slaves sold for about five hundred to two thousand dinars, which if you translate our um talents into dinars, it's like a hundred million is what is owed, and he can be sold for five hundred to two thousand. So this is a reasonable action the king's taken. The king is perfectly within his rights and within reasons, even though for us it sounds how could you possibly do that? So now we have the situation where the debt is astronomical, the king is acting perfectly reasonably and rationally, the slave just asks for forgiveness and he's granted it. Even though repayment is possible or is impossible. He forgives the slave everything. So when the servant requests patience and says, I'll repay you everything, that's wishful thinking. That's abs it's impossible. The debt is just too big. So he's saying, Give me a chance to repay is like saying, Give me a chance to win the lottery three times and I'll I'll uh pay it back to you. It's just not gonna happen. The word for prostrated in 25 is very strong and it has the idea of throwing himself completely on the king's mercy. It's the most urgent form of plea there is. And then the word translated, have tri patience, carries the idea of long suffering. The idea is put aside your wrath, set aside your anger, set aside the justice that is due you for me. So what you see then in the in the king is a complete act of mercy and grace. He's forgiving the servant, he has no hope of gaining back any kind of repayment from the servant in commensurate with what has been taken from him. Justice demands that the debt be paid in full, that the folly be punished, and yet simply asking forgiveness gains him forgiveness. So that's the dynamic of the first scene. Let's go back and now let's look at the second scene, 1828 through 31. But the slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred deniere, and he seized him and began to choke him, saying, Pay back what you owe. So his fellow slave fell to the ground and began to plead with him, saying, Have patience with me and I will repay you. But he was unwilling and went and threw himself in prison until he should pay back what was owed. Or threw him in prison until he should pay back what was owed. So when his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and came and reported to their lord all that had happened. So now what we have to see is the debt this second slave owes is very small. It a hundred denarii is possible to repay. This is about four pounds of silver, it's a very small amount. I tried to find an equivalent of to translate that into talents so we'd all be on the same kind of level of currency, but I couldn't find it. But every commentator I looked at said the debt is small, it is repayable, and patience is warranted here. If the first slave waits, he will most likely get all his money back. So the other thing is to clutch a debtor by the collar of his toga and drag him to prison was considered legal custom. So he is, when it talks about seizing him and choking him, it's probably an idiom for this. That was the way they kind of drug people off to court. And again, wouldn't have been would have been seen as kind of the natural reaction. He's not being overly violent. So you have a situation where this first slave owed an unlimited amount of money. He had no chance of repaying it, he was granted forgiveness for no reason whatsoever, other than he asked, and now someone has owed him a very small amount, and he is unwilling to show that same kind of forgiveness. So now we need to bring in the final scene, 32 through 35. Then summoning him, his Lord said to him, You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave in the same way that I had mercy on you? And his Lord moved to anger, handed him over to torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. My heavenly father will also do the same to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart. So the king's response here is intense. The Jews regarded torture as inhuman and they did not practice it. Well, with the exception of Herod the Great, who actually practiced it abundantly. But traditionally it was against their culture, it was against their ideas of right and wrong. So torture was employed in other Eastern cultures and the pagan cultures that were their neighbors, but traditionally the Jews did not practice it. So to use it here is to intensify the wrath that this king feels to explain how upset or how um how intense his reaction is. So notice Jesus gives us two summary statements, verses 33 and verse 35. The first one's in the mouth of the master in the story. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave in the same way that I had mercy on you? And then the second one in his own voice, my heavenly Father will also do the same to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart. So from those statements, we can we can conclude that if you don't forgive, you will not be forgiven. And in that, he's no Jesus is not different from the rabbis of his day. The Jewish rabbis thought that if you didn't forgive, your sins wouldn't be forgiven you. The difference is they thought you had to forgive three times by the law, four times more to be really safe, so you had a limit on that. But Jesus is throwing in forgiveness is not only necessary, it's unlimited. So it raises the question, well, who can do that? Who can possibly forgive everyone who has ever hurt them, every any kind of hurt ever? I mean, how how can any of us qualify then? How can we say that any of us will be in the kingdom of heaven? Well, don't panic. That's the question we're going to answer. Because that's the the key to this understanding this is why is the kingdom of heaven like this? Why would lack of forgiveness disqualify you from being in the kingdom of heaven? Does it mean that if you there's a hurt you just can't let go of that you'll never get to heaven? I mean, how could any of us have any hope then? How should we live? Or does it mean that we have to be viligant about settling every account and every every wrong? So why is there a link between forgiveness and entering the kingdom of heaven? And that's what I want to try to unravel. And the the short answer is forgiveness is an integral part of saving faith. And we know that you have to have faith to enter the kingdom of heaven. So Jesus can say, those who want to enter the kingdom of heaven will be forgiving like or should be forgiving unlike this servant in the story, because forgiveness is a part of faith, and you have to have faith. So let's talk about how we know that. So first make sure we're talking about saving faith. So the thing that you must have to that makes you a believer and sets you apart from non-believers. So we're not talking about you know the faith that might get you through a trial or what you know, ordinary everyday faith that that kind of gets you through day-to-day. We're talking about the thing you must have that marks you out as a believer. So I'm going to give you my famous hands analogy. Many of you have seen this before, but I like to throw it in every year. So my uh my left hand is us, and my right hand is God, and we start out face to face in fellowship with God before the fall. And God gives us life and blessings and joy, and we are in in fellowship with Him. What happened at the fall is we turned our back on God. So I've turned my left hand away, and we said, No, thanks. I'm gonna be God, I'm gonna set right and wrong. I don't want what you have to offer, I want to be God in your place. And that was the fall. That introduced sin into our world, such that we now have death and destruction and bitterness and war and anger and broken relationships and all the negative consequences of sin. That was the first consequence, but the second consequence is now God turns his back on us. So I've turned my right hand away, so they're back to back. That's what Paul describes in Romans 1, where he talks about God gave us over to our sins. In his wrath, he responded and turned his back on us, so he's no longer offering us life. So that is a n so it's not just that our rebellion was unfortunate, it was wrong. So we now have a debt to justice, and justice must be satisfied. So there is now a legal obligation that we are under because we have broken the law, and that's why God turns his back on us. Now, in this state, I don't believe we can, but if we could turn back around and seek God, we still have this problem of God's back is turned. So what happens is God, in his infinite grace and mercy, does for us what we could never do for ourselves. He sent Jesus to pay our debt to justice. So now the price has been paid, the crime has been acquitted because someone else paid our penalty and God can turn back around and grant us life. That's justification. So being in the situation where God's wrath has been satisfied and you are right with him and that your debt to justice has been paid is what we call justification, then God calls us back to us or back to him so that we turn around and face him and we are reconciled and have fellowship with him again. So justification is solving this problem of God's wrath, of paying our debt to justice. The Bible's very clear that what is required is the blood of Jesus and faith in the blood of Jesus. And that's what saving faith is. It's trusting that God will, in fact, make me righteous and forgive my debt to justice because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now, I haven't explained how forgiveness works into here, but let me make a couple other observations. Saving faith is not obedience. It's not the same thing as loyalty. So it's not a quality of being dedicated or loyal or committed to God or obedient to his word. We may be those things. We may be dedicated and obedient and loyal, and those are good things to be, but that's not what gets you into the kingdom of heaven. Neither is saving faith intellectual assent. So it's not believing the right doctrines. It's not just knowing, being able to take a theology quiz and getting the right answers versus the wrong answers, or having all my theological tenets lined up in the exact proper order. Now we ought to believe truth and not falsehood, but doctrine alone will not save us. I mean, Jesus says the demons know the truth, but they don't, it doesn't save them. And so there's a difference between knowing what's true and actually believing it and counting on it. And we want to take that further step. It says saving faith is not obedience, it's not intellectual knowledge, and neither is it believing without reason. And that this one that's like my soapbox. It just drives me crazy when you see on TV and in the airwaves the idea that the less reason you have to believe something, the more virtuous it is to believe it. It's completely irrational. This has nothing to do with saving faith. There is no virtue in believing something you have no reason to believe. And in fact, I think Christianity is very logical, very rational, very intellectually satisfying. There are very, very good reasons to believe what we believe. And we can face into those hard, difficult questions because of that. So I'll try to get off my soapbox there, but that one really bugs me. So saving faith is not believing without reason. We have great reasons to believe what we believe. So saving faith is the permanent, ongoing trust that God, because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, will free me completely from the consequences of sin. Not yet, but he's in that process. So he's already granted us the legal forgiveness, and he is now in the process of beginning that to free us from all the effects and consequences and make us into people who are holy and righteous. So it's very specific. It's trusting someone for something particular. And it's trusting him to free me from my sins. So it's not trusting him for health, wealth, power, happiness, um, success. I mean, it's okay to trust God for those things, but that's not what saves you. Yeah, that's not part what gets you to justification. Lots of people would like to trust God for their daily bread, but they really don't care about holiness or being freed from sin, and that's not faith. So saving faith itself is a gift of God from Him. We don't manufacture it, we don't earn it, we don't deserve it. It's not that we have to come up with it, and then God will give it to us, or then God will justify us. It's that God in His mercy did for us what we could never do for ourselves. He found a way to satisfy His wrath, satisfy our debt to justice, and then He gives us the gift of faith all without any merit. We don't deserve it. We in fact we stand at the foot of the cross and mock and jeer and are his enemies, and yet he loves us enough to overcome that. So the only thing that's required on our part is trust, is asking him. So saving faith, I think, has four parts which correspond to those ideas we just uh talked about. So first is a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself. What Jesus means by hungering and thirsting after righteousness. So it's not just that I'm sick of the consequences of my sin, it's that I hate sin now. I long to be freed from it. I want to be a different kind of person. So there's this myth about, you know, being good is boring and being evil is exciting. If you believe that, you haven't yet learned how awful and distasteful sin is. So you haven't yet acquired that taste for holiness. So I don't say, great, God's going to grant me life, I'll go pursue all the sin I can in the meantime, because that's the very thing God's saved me from. Part of the gift of saving faith is not only freeing me from my sin, but freeing me from my desire for it. So that now when I sin, I grieve over it and I hate it, and I say, God, please free me from this, make me a different kind of person. I don't want to be this kind of person anymore. That's what I mean by a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself, or hungering and thirsting for it. So that's the first aspect. The second one is left to myself. I know I'm incapable of obtaining it. So there's nothing I can do on my own to make myself holy. I can't muster it up, I can't learn tips and tricks. I have to trust God for it. And again, that has to be more than an intellectual theory. It has to be how I see myself. I know that I'm morally bankrupt. I know that without the grace of God, I cannot make myself righteous. I cannot free myself even from the smallest sins, but I trust that God will do it for me. So a desire for holiness, knowing I'm incapable of obtaining it myself, third is knowing that God does not owe it to me. I have done nothing that requires Him to save me. There's no divine spark inside me that requires God to save me. I have no standing before God whatsoever apart from the grace, uh, his grace and the work of Jesus Christ. Now again, that's easy to say as an intellectual doctrine, but it's another thing to let it permeate my life, influence my being, and live my life that way. And that's what I mean. It's got to go from just intellectual knowledge to this is how who I how I see myself. I'm no I make no presumption on God, I'm not worthy. So no want longing to be holy, knowing I can't I can't get there on my own, knowing I've done nothing to deserve it, God does not owe it to me, and then the fourth aspect of saving faith is trusting that God both intends to and will in fact grant me that holiness in the age to come because of the blood of Jesus Christ. So God will grant me eternal life as the kind of life in the kingdom of heaven that will be free completely from sin. And freed completely, not just from the effects and consequences, but from the very um bondage of it, and so that I am no longer a person who we've become people who no longer want to sin, and we are going to be grow into people who no longer sin at all, and that's the promise and the hope we have before us. Okay, so how does that bear on forgiveness? If that's saving faith, those four things, wanting holiness, knowing I can't produce it in myself, God doesn't owe it to me, but he will grant it to me because of the blood of Jesus. How does that bear on forgiveness? Because I said earlier that being forgiving is an integral part of saving faith. Well, this is um, I think it comes to this. Recognizing my own need for mercy should make me realize I'm in no position to judge others. Because part of my of saving faith is recognizing I don't have holiness. I'm morally bankrupt before God. I am that slave who owes ten million gazillion dollars to God. My debt is unlimited and I cannot pay it. And if I truly recognize the depth of my own sinfulness and that God owes me nothing, then how can I turn around and say, okay, forgive me all that debt, God, but throw the book at my husband, because he's annoying me. Or whatever it is. So once I've realized how much I'm indebted to God's grace and how dependent I am on his mercy, I have to realize that no one else can sin against me in in any way that even approaches that. I am just as guilty. The same evil that I'm uh see and judging them for lurks in my heart, and I any basis that I judge them on condemns me. So apart from the grace of God, um I'm well I may not have committed the sin I'm I'm annoyed with them for committing, but apart from the grace of God, give me a chance, I will. Because I'm just the same sinful person. So that's that's part I think part of it is realizing there's no sliding scale of sin. Uh we like to compare ourselves to others and go, well, I I may be a sinner, but I'm not as bad as that person. You know, I didn't do X, Y, Z. But the whole point is sin is sin is sin. Uh I may have refrained from adultery and murder, but pride and arrogance and selfishness are just as bad. They're just easier to hide, and they're a little more socially acceptable, you know, and I can hide my selfishness from you a lot easier than I could hide, say, a murder, but that doesn't make me any less sinful. The same evil that causes adultery, causes murder, causes selfishness, causes arrogance, and I am just as guilty. So I have to be prepared to be judged by any standard I use to judge other people's. And once I recognize the depth of my own sinfulness and my own need for the grace of God, then I should say, everyone else is in the same boat. It's it's hypocritical to say, thank you for forgiving me, but don't forgive that other person because I'm just as guilty. So I have no right to restitution in that sense. Once I've seen my true position before God, I realize I am just as guilty, and there's nothing that I can do or say that is not as guilty as this person I'm I'm holding against. Okay. So saving faith is trusting God to freely, uh to free you completely from all the effects and consequences of sin. It means recognizing your own need, recognizing your own inability to save yourself, and recognizing your guilt that you need forgiveness. And once you recognize that, you ought to realize everyone else is in the same boat and you're in no position to judge, thus you forgive. Okay, now you can probably are looking at me going, great, what if I still have trouble forgiving people? Because I may unknow all that, but then there's this person that hurt me that I just can't let go of. So let's talk about that a little and talk about what is forgiveness and what it isn't. So I think I've given you the kind of the theological or the intellectual tie, but then what does that mean for us in life? The first thing I think that I find really helpful is realizing that when it says God does not remember our sins in the Bible, every time I've found it so far, it's a legal term. So when it says we confuse forgiving and forgetting, and those are not the same thing. And it's easy to m make that mistake because the Bible talks, especially in the Psalms, about God will not remember our sins. But that's a legal term. Every single time I've tried it, it's closer to our word for pardon. So he's not remembering them and that he they are no longer on our account. He has wiped our account clean. We are legally not no longer responsible. It doesn't mean that God developed amnesia about them. It means that he has chosen not to hold them against us. And I think that's helpful because we sometimes think, well, if I forgive someone but I remember it and it keeps coming back, then does that mean I haven't forgiven them? And I want to suggest that's not true. Forgiveness is not the same thing as forgetting. Forgiveness is choosing not to hurt back, choosing not to seek vengeance, choosing not to hold it against them. So I may remember, and I may remember day in and day out, and each time I may have to choose again to let go of the hurt, to let go of the revenge, to not seek a gr hold a grudge, and to ask God to help me get over it. So it's a decision I make that maybe despite my emotions or my anger or my painful memories. So that's the first thing I want to say. If you're if you're having trouble with forgiving someone and you think it's because you keep remembering it, I'd say, don't worry. Ask yourself instead, have you hurt back? Have you taken vengeance? Have you demanded payback? If you haven't, then you've chosen to forgive. If instead when they when you remember, you turn to God and say, God, help me get over this, help me forgive, help me become the kind of person who can let go of it, that's the right step. Now, it would be nice if we could forget our sins and the sins of others, but sometimes they're just, you know, like high school pictures. They just keep coming back and you know, and embarrassing you again and again. So it would be nice if we could wipe out all those painful memories, but sometimes uh it just doesn't happen, and it may not always be healthy because sometimes it's remembering those things that keep us on our knees that remind us that we need God and we need his grace. So forgiveness is not a feeling, and it's not well the first one it's not forgetting, the second thing is it's not a feeling. The only answer to real guilt is real forgiveness, and you may feel guilty and in fact be forgiven, or you may feel forgiven and in fact be f be guilty. So feelings are not an accurate indication of whether you've forgiven or not, or have been forgiven. Many years ago I was talking with a friend who was a new believer, and she was really struggling with forgiveness, and she sought me out for help because she was struggling with this, and she told me, you know, this this sin that was her in her past that she had confessed and and still felt guilty, and she said, You know, I've asked God at least ten times to forgive me, and I still am not forgiven. What can I do? Like like I had some great you know theological insight. And I could say, Well, doesn't the Bible say that God's faithful and just and merciful to grant you forgiveness if you ask? And she says, Yes, but I don't feel forgiven. And I said, That's the problem. If feelings are irrelevant, if you humbly convince your confess your sins, God has promised to forgive you, and you want to judge him on his word and his promise, not on your feelings. And your feelings are lying to you at that point. He has promised to forgive you if you ask, he has promised to grant you grace by the blood of Jesus Christ. And so the problem then is judging him by our feelings rather than by his character and his word and his promises. Now, hopefully eventually we will all get to that point where we have that joy of feeling forgiven, but the reality is it doesn't depend on your feelings. So before the law of God, you're either guilty or you're not, you're either forgiven or you're not, and how you feel about it may not be an accurate measure. Okay, so hopefully that gets us a little closer to understanding forgiveness. It's not the same thing as amnesia, and it's not the same thing as a feeling. So how do we know? What how do we know if we have real forgiveness, not just feelings? And um, I'm gonna try to give you some help on that. Again, I don't think it'll answer all your questions, but it should help. So I'm gonna give you four things to kind of judge whether or not you have uh real forgiveness, and they all begin with R. I know you're shocked because I don't usually do the mnemonic thing, but this time it worked. So the first one is repentance. The first R of forgiveness is repentance. The only cure for real guilt and real is real forgiveness, and the only way I can have real forgiveness is if I have real repentance. That is realizing I'm a sinner and I have done wrong. Um, there God doesn't unilaterally grant forgiveness to everyone across the board. The condition is saving faith, and part of saving faith is realizing that I'm a sinner, realizing that I have done wrong and acknowledging that. So repentance is both turning away from the sin and turning toward God. So not only am I guilty, that's the turning away from sin, I want to be free from my sin and I turn toward God in His grace to seek it. That's the turning toward Him. Now, the nature of us sinful people is that we often commit the same sins over and over and over again. Um but something changes, where and I mentioned this earlier, before coming to faith, we may not have been bothered by the sin. We may rationalize it or see it as perfectly defensible, or there's always an excuse, but after coming to faith, when you commit that sin again, now there's despair. There's an acknowledgement of I I hate this sin, I don't want to be like this, and grieving and uh crying over the sin. Maybe not at first, but eventually you get to that part. And that's repentance, that's turning away from your sin. So that's the first R of forgiveness. The second one is remission. And uh the best picture of this is Isaiah 118, where it says, Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins are scarlet, they will be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool. So Isaiah gives us a very poetic picture of this contrast between blood red and pure white, and that's the contrast between being guilty and being forgiven. So remission means to send away. The remission of sins is God sending them away from us, no longer crediting them to our accounts. So we are no longer legally or morally in debt. Our debt has been paid, the slate has been wiped clean. And again, that's not necessarily amnesia, it's not forgetting in the in the amnesia sense, it's legally wiping the slate clean. He remembers them no more. So we are to strive for that same kind of forgiveness. So if you tell me you're sorry and ask for for my forgiveness and I grant it, I should no longer hold it against you, so that if it happens again, I can't say, ooh, that's two. Because it's not two, because if the slate has been wiped clean, it's one. That's part of what it means, not to hold it against them. Now I still may feel hurt at times, but I choose not to hold it against you. Now, I don't know about you, but who can do that? I mean, I find it uh who can forgive like that? And I think the answer is apart from the grace of God and the blood of Jesus, none of us can. We are just not those kind of people left to ourselves, but God has promised to make those those kind of people, make us able to forgive. Just a little confession of how I'm not there yet. My husband and I decided we put a statute of limitation on offenses. So we recently just upped it to five years. So if we're in an argument and one of us says, Yeah, well, what about the time you did X? If it's over five years old, the statute of limitations has run out and you can't bring it up. Uh I belong for the day when I won't even remember them. But not there yet. So your memory starts to go in. Oh, there we go. Okay. There's hope. Your memory goes as you get older and you finally forget. I knew there was a good purpose for that. Okay. Okay, so repentance, remission, the third one is reconciliation. So um saving faith is realizing you're a sinner in need of grace. And if you don't believe you're guilty before the Almighty God, you don't seek reconciliation. But once you acknowledge your sinfulness and you seek his mercy and grace, then because of the blood of Jesus, we are reconciled to him. That means the relationship is healed. The relationship is restored. We're adopted into his family as his uh daughters, and we enter that relationship, and that's the kind of forgiveness we want to strive for with each other, too, of restoring the relationship, of wiping the slate clean and not holding that grudge. And we're sorry, we're running out of time, so I'm going to go quickly on to the last one, and that's restoration. And that's the benefit of being forgiveness. So this is like David wrote in the Psalms, restore unto me the joy of my salvation, or the prodigal who we saw was fully welcomed home and given complete sonship again. The fruit of forgiveness is not only that our sins are forgiven, but that God is in the process of restoring to us the image of Christ, of making us the kind of people who will now no longer, not only no longer not want to sin, but are in fact becoming holy and pure and have that mature faith. So if you're struggling for with forgiveness, my best advice would be pray for faith. If you're struggling over forgiving others or you're struggling over forgiving yourself, ask God for a more for a stronger faith. So I think the wrong response of this parable is to say, oh, I've got to be forgiving and try to, you know, work yourself up tight enough to become that kind of person on your own. That I think would be the wrong response. It's not the case that God has done everything he's going to do for you and now you have to get your act together. Instead, God is not finished with you yet. He is in that process. And to the extent that he's given you a mature faith, you're going to be more forgiving. To the extent that you're still in that process, it's going to be more of a struggle. So when you're faced with a struggle, I think the right response is to cast yourself back on God's mercy and his grace and say, here's one more area I need you to change me. And then trust that he will do it in his way and his timing. Now it might not happen by Friday, but we he will do it. He does promise that. So the first wrong response is to try harder on your own. The second wrong response is to to despair, to look at this and go, wait, I am so far below the standard that I'm never going to make it, and I might as well give up. Well, that's a wrong response because one of the aspects of saving faith is that trusting God is in the process of making me righteous, that He has promised to do that and that He will bring it about, and that's our hope. It's not wishful thinking, it's a guaranteed promise of God, that He has promised to grant us the deepest longings of our heart for righteousness and holiness and faith. And I may be tempted to despair, or when I'm tempted to despair, I should remember that promise that He He has promised to get me there. And that's better than relying on myself because left to myself I'll mess it up. I know I'll fail, but if I'm trusting God to get me there, then I know I'll make it. It's guaranteed. He's promised to do it. So Jesus can say in 35, So shall my heavenly Father also do to you if each of you do not does not forgive his brother from your heart, because if you have saving faith, you recognize your own need for grace, you recognize you don't have holiness and righteousness, and that God doesn't owe it to you, and he you are trusting him to grant it, and then the extension of that is everyone else is in the same boat. Having been forgiven that great a debt, I ought to realize my own moral bankruptcy and my own need for forgiveness and not stand and realize I have no leg to stand on to condemn anyone else. Just finished on time. Let me pray for us, and then um you can ask some questions. Father, thank you that you did do for us what we can't do for ourselves. And I prayed I'm sure in the group this size that many of us are struggling with forgiveness, either forgiving someone who's hurt us deeply, or forgiving ourselves for some something we have said or done or left undone. And I just pray that you would take these truths and make them real to us. That they wouldn't be head knowledge, that they wouldn't just be a theological idea or an intellectual concept, but that you would make them real to us, move them into our into our true and deepest understanding so that we become more and more people who not only see our guilt, but see your grace and long for it and trust in it and stand firm in it. In Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. What the Bible means and how we know. For notes and study questions, visit wednesdayintheword.com. We hope you'll join us again, and may God richly bless you.