The Unforgiving Servant
THE UNFORGIVING SERVANT - MATTHEW 18:21-35 The subject of forgiveness is one of, if not THE mark of a true Christian. It is one of the most important things that you need to learn how to do. The teaching of Jesus Christ on this subject is absolutely powerful and very radical and it cuts against the grain. In fact Jesus gave one of His great parables on the subject of forgiveness. It does sound like a cliché for one to say “forgiveness is lovely, forgiveness is nice, you should forgive”. It all seems very nice until somebody really hurts you, and then suddenly it’s all a bit different. It seems unreasonable all of a sudden: “Why should I forgive that person? Don’t you realise what she/he did to me? I don’t see why I should forgive that person.” Jesus is absolutely uncompromising about forgiveness. I once read a story about a husband who, in his conversation with his friends said of his wife, “Whenever I do something wrong, she gets historical.” And they said, “You don’t mean that, you mean hysterical, don’t you?” And he said, “No she gets historical. She begins to drag up everything I’ve ever done in my life.” Forgiveness means wiping the slate clean, even when they may not deserve it. Forgiveness is not pretending that what they did was somehow okay. Forgiveness is not trying to play down or minimise what has been done. Forgiveness is to look at what was done to you in its full horror and to wipe the slate clean. Forgiveness is refusing to punish, judge or take it out against that person. It takes the grace of God to sincerely forgive someone. The parables of Jesus were not just nice stories. Sometimes we read them from a distance and we think they are just nice stories. Actually they are stories that have a great punch to them. One example of a parable was in the Old Testament where King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and in order to get Bathsheba’s husband out of the way, he arranged for him to get killed in the war. So David was guilty of murder as well, but somehow in the hardness of his heart he didn’t realise what wrong he had done. So God sent a prophet called Nathan into the presence of David and Nathan didn’t just say, “You are wrong, David.” Nathan began telling a story, a parable, and he brought David involved into the situation and he told this story in which there was a great villain and he said that this rich man had all that he wanted while there was a poor man next door who didn’t have anything except one precious lamb. David is getting interested. Nathan continued saying the rich man had someone coming to dinner but did not want to use any of his riches, so he took the poor man’s lamb and slaughtered it. David is getting absolutely mad right now. Nathan asks David what he should do about this rich man. David says, “He should be killed!” He has been brought into this story. Then Nathan says, “You are the man”. And David has been trapped by the story because he was the one – he had taken from Uriah the one precious thing Uriah owned – even though David had the choice of all he wanted from the kingdom. He was big enough to hit his knees, repent and ask God’s forgiveness. (2 Samuel 12:1-7) We will now look at the parable that Jesus told in Matthew 18. Matthew 18:21: Then came Peter to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Till seven times?” Jesus said unto him, “I say not unto thee until seven times but until seventy times seven.” (That is four hundred and ninety.) “Therefore is the Kingdom of Heaven likened to a certain King which would take account of His servants” meaning that the king is bringing his servants before him and they have got to give an account of themselves. “And when He had begun to reckon, one was brought to Him that owed Him ten thousand talents” (about twenty million pounds). “As much as he had not to pay, his Lord commanded him to be sold and his wife and children, and all that he had and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and worshipped him, begged him, saying ‘Lord have patience with me and I will pay you all.’ Then the Lord of the servant was moved with compassion and loosed him and forgave him the debt.” If somebody took twenty million pounds from you, wouldn’t you find it hard to just let go of it? This is a lot of money, and it was even more in those days. The average wage was something like twenty pence a week, so you can imagine what twenty million pounds would be. “And then the Lord of the servant was moved with compassion and loosed him and forgave him the debt. But the same servant went out and found one of his fellow servants that owed him a hundred pence” (about twelve pounds). “And he laid hands on him…” not to pray for him and to bless him, he actually laid hands on his throat to throttle him. “He laid hands on him and took him by the throat” and this is what they would do in those days if you wanted to put someone in prison you would grab them by the throat and you would haul them down to the prison or to the courts. … saying, ‘Pay me what you owe me.’ And his fellow servant fell down onto his feet and besought him saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will pay you all.’ But he would not, but went and cast him into prison until he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what was done, they were very sorry and came and told unto their Lord all that was done. And then his Lord, after He had called him, said to him, ‘O thou wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you asked me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, even as I had compassion on you?’ And his Lord was wrothed and delivered him to the tormentors till he should pay all that was due unto Him. So likewise,” and here is the message, “shall my Heavenly Father do also unto you if you do not, from your hearts, forgive every one, his brother, their trespasses” (or their sins). That is a very powerful parable when you get into it. Who is the villain? It is this man who has been forgiven twenty million pounds and he is such a small person that when he meets someone who owes him twelve pounds he really takes it out on him and makes him suffer for it. What a terrible thing that is. But the message that Jesus is getting across is that this is exactly how we are. We have been forgiven a mountain of sin. And yet somebody does something little against us that looks like a grain of sand compared to that mountain and we really get upset. We want to torture them, we want to put them in prison, we want them to suffer, and there we are. We have been freely forgiven by the Lord. We are the villain of this piece. So we are going to take a little journey through this parable. It is called The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. Jesus had been talking about forgiveness in the church. In verse 20, He had said, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” And verse 19 H e said, “If two of you shall agree on earth touching anything they ask it shall be done for them of My Father in heaven.” And He is saying, in the church it is so important that we are united, that we are of one heart and one mind, because only then are our prayers going to be answered. We can only impact those around us for the Lord Jesus if we are of one heart and one mind. That means we have got to learn how to forgive one another when we tread on each other’s toes, we have got to learn how to forgive others. We have got to keep the unity of the Spirit in order for the power of God to really flow through us together. Because the current teaching of that time was that of the Pharisees, which was considered to be the best, Peter was thinking, ‘wow the Lord is really radical in this teaching’. The teaching of the Pharisees was basically this: One time we will forgive, two times we will forgive, even three times we will forgive. But four times we will not forgive. Okay? Three is the limit. I can take once, I can take twice, with a great stretch and a great spiritual flex of my muscles I can handle three times, but the fourth time, that is too much. And they felt very righteous in not forgiving. So Peter comes to him (verse 21) and says, ‘Lord how often should my brother sin against me and I forgive him. Till seven times?’ Wow. ‘Lord are you saying that I should be twice as good as these Pharisees, that not just three times, but seven times?’ But Jesus as usual has a surprise. He takes the limits off. Verse 22 He says, ‘No I never said that, I never said you should forgive seven times.’ That is what He says. So Peter is thinking, ‘Phew, I thought that was a bit radical.’ Jesus says, ‘No, I am telling you seven times seventy times. Four hundred and ninety times.’ What Jesus is really saying here is, you must forgive. There must be no limits on your forgiveness. You must forgive freely. We must perfectly and completely forgive. If we are honest, what Jesus said is very strong and very difficult to understand. How could this be possible? But Jesus kindly explains why this is the only way to live. And He tells the parable like this. The King in the parable represents God. The King’s servant represents us, especially when we don’t forgive. Then the servant’s servant, the other character, is anyone who owes us because they have sinned against us, they have hurt us, they are in our debt. So let’s look at the parable: First of all, the first stage of the parable is the King and I. And it’s all about the forgiveness that we have all received from the King, from the Lord. That is in verse 23. And He says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is likened to a certain King which would take account of His servants.” He is saying, ‘I had better check up on my servants and see what they are getting up to.’ And this particular servant had not been very good. He had probably borrowed a bit of money and probably gambled on it, or he had lost it somehow. He spent it frivolously, he thought, ‘the King is too busy, He will never check up on me.’ He was probably a very high servant to have access to all that money. “And when they started to reckon”, you may think that God doesn’t watch what is going on in our lives but there is a reckoning by the way. He is watching us all very closely, and there is a day that we will stand before Him. There is a day we will give account to Him. And it says, “He was brought to Him that owed Him the twenty million pounds” but of course he didn’t have the money, and the natural thing is that he will have to pay it back. And he and his family will have to pay for it with their life. They are to be sold into slavery to make part payment for this great debt. They were basically going to have a living death. And you know, were it not for the grace of God that would be our destiny. We would be sold into a living death, an eternal place of separation from God and darkness. We would be slaves in prison for ever because of this huge debt that we owe God. Do you know, as God’s creatures, we owe God our love, our obedience, our submission in the totality of our lives? The Commandment is “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all they soul, with all thy strength.” But do we always fulfil our obligation to God as creatures to our creator? No we don’t. And whenever we sin, that is like a debt. We owe God. We have let Him down. We have turned against Him. And there is this mounting pile of debt that our sin is causing. Self examination Do you know that even if I sinned just three sins a day, three bad thoughts, three wrong words, three bad attitudes, three selfish things that I did. Three things that I didn’t do that I should have done. Do you realise in a year that would be a thousand sins? In a lifetime perhaps seventy thousand sins. What an enormous amount of forgiveness I need. Psalm 40 says that our sins are more than the hairs on our head. Now that is a lot! And the Bible says we forget 99% of what goes on. We are ignorant of 99% of our wrong doings. So all of us, have a huge mountain of debt that we owe. The Ten Commandments Just to highlight this to us I thought it would be interesting to take a quick trip through the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) were given for our blessing. For if we will live by them we will be blessed. If a society will live by the Ten Commandments there will be great freedom and blessing in that society. The Ten Commandments are also to show us how much we have sinned and how much forgiveness we need. Commandment One: Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. This is saying here that nothing and no one should be more important to us than God. Your god is what you love, what you seek, what you worship, what you serve, what you allow to control you. That is your god. Whatever is first in your priorities, that is your god. And God says “You shall have no other gods before Me, I must be number one in your life. That is the first Commandment. And how many times have we broken that? Colossians 3:5 says that what you covet in your heart is your god. It is your idol because that thing that you covet after is the thing that controls your life. God must come first. The loyalty and devotion of our heart must be first of all be to God and if we put God first we will also have more and more capacity for love for other people, and we will have greater capacity to enjoy the things in this world. But the essence of sin is that we let something else come in the place of God. Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. If these Commandments bring you under conviction, that is fine. It is to show us how much we need God’s forgiveness. Commandment Two: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image nor any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them for I the Lord am a jealous God." What He is talking about here is that we should not reduce God to a physical likeness and worship that, whether it is a mental or a physical image. This would be pulling God down to our earthly level. We should not put God in a box and think that we can control God. God is greater than anything you can imagine or see. Don’t make some little picture of God and worship that. That would be wrong. Because you are not worshipping the true God, you are worshipping something your imagination has conjured up. The only way you can know and worship God is through the Bible, through what the Word of God says. You should not make any image of God, anything that pretends to be like God, and use that in your worship, that would be wrong. In other words, we should honour God in our imagination too. Commandment Three (verse 7): "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes His name in vain". This is simply saying we should honour God with our words. This is really talking about profanity; we should never take the precious name of the Lord in vain, or use it in a frivolous or insincere way. Never use the name of Jesus or of God in profanity. We should not use God’s name to try to put something spiritual over on other people. Especially when you are wondering if God might have spoken to you and you want to make other people fall into line with that (‘God told me. So how dare you question me?’). It also means, of course, that we should keep our promises. Whether or not you invoke the name of God when making a promise (in fact if you read Jesus’ teaching, He says it does not make a difference.) This is a difficult piece of scripture but the Pharisees thought, ‘Well, if instead of swearing by God, there is a commandment that says not to do that, what if I were to swear by the temple? Or what if I swore by this pulpit? Then it would be alright and if I break my promise, it does not matter as I was only swearing by the temple.’ Jesus said, ‘No, when you swear by the Verse 7 says, “The Lord will not hold him guiltless…” Don’t think you will get away with that!