Guilt and Anger: Matthew 18:21-35

Well, good morning.

Several weeks ago in early May, Pastor Tom asked me to preach on this Sunday, and I asked him, What would you like for me to preach about?

And he said, Why don't you decide?

And as the weeks unfolded, as I as I prayed and I reflected about it, I felt that it would be appropriate for me to start with you all, the congregation, where I began with your session, your elder board, last August.

The session when I met with them about joining the team here at APC.

The first question they asked me was, how did God call you into ministry?

And so I'd like to answer that question this morning for you, weaving it into the parable that Matthew gives, that Jesus gives in Matthew 18, the parable of the unforgiving servant.

In some ways, I'd like to give testimony of Jesus' power in my life and let it be the illustration for the power of Jesus' word.

Hear now the reading of God's holy word from Matthew 18.

Then Peter came up and said to him, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

As many as seven times?

Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy, seven times.

Therefore, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.

When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents.

And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold with his wife and children, all that he had, and payment to be made.

So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.

And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.

But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owned him a hundred denari, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, Pay what you owe.

So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, Have patience with me, and I will pay you.

He refused and went out and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.

When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place.

Then their master summoned him and said to him, You wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.

And should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?

And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt.

So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

This is the infallible, inerrant word of God.

Let me pray.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as we are gathered here this morning in your presence, Lord, we do come long to hear from you.

Lord, amidst the clamor of our culture, amidst the clamor of our own heart, Holy Spirit, would you come and make your Jesus' word effective in our hearts?

Lord, where we need to be changed, transformed, do a fresh work.

Lord, where we need to be consoled and comforted.

Put a healing hand on us.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, my call to ministry took place in the fall of 1999 and the spring of 2000 as two kind of completely unrelated set of circumstances suddenly overlapped.

The first was that I was attending a church in our same family of churches in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I was 20 years old, and in that church, two older women in the congregation in their early 50s began to be burdened for some of the troubled young men and the young women of our community.

And so these women went to the county government and said, Hey, would you permit us to come into the local juvenile detention center and do a Bible study?

And if you're not familiar with that, if you're a minor and you're under 18 and you commit a crime, you don't go to a regular prison, you go to a facility, especially for troubled youth.

And so they wanted to go into that facility.

The county granted them permission, and they went to the pastors of our church and said, Hey, we're gonna go do this, but we'd like for a young male to go with us.

And this wasn't something on my radar, wasn't something I was seeking to do, but the pastors came to me and said, Matt, would you go with them?

Uh this is gonna be every week on Monday nights at 8 o'clock at the Rappahannock Regional Correctional Facility.

Uh and I was, again, it wasn't something I was looking to do, but uh sure, I'd be glad to go.

Well, on Monday nights, all through the fall of 1999, uh, we would go through these three barred doors uh into a room about the size of a lobby out there, where there was typically 20 to 30 uh young men uh in orange uniforms, uh, and this was their free hour.

Uh, and we would invite them to say, hey, we're from the community, uh, we just want to express the love of God to you guys.

We're planning to do a Bible study.

If you'd like to come, we'd love to have you.

And so we would kind of pull off to one side of the room, and usually about half of the young men uh would come.

Yeah, I vividly remember particularly one uh young man in particular.

Um, there was a violent crime committed in Fredericksburg uh in the fall, and uh this actually made the Washington Post.

Uh this happened on a on a Saturday night in the parking lot of a Baptist church, and um yeah, it made the news.

But who was in my Bible study the following Monday night sitting right across the table from me?

But these two young men who had committed this violent crime, uh, and one of them was kind of the associate, one of them was definitely kind of the leader, and I remember the look of the young man's face, who was kind of the leader in that group.

I just remember the look on his face.

And the look on his face, and this was similar to all the young men that were there, was one of both guilt and anger.

You know, Pastor Tom shared in the inquirer's class uh yesterday that no one ever believes that they're a sinner by being told they have to be shown.

Well, these young men had been seen, you know, been shown to them plainly, before them, for the whole community, before the criminal justice system.

And they definitely had a sense of guilt, not just before the state and for the community, but before God.

The question of can I be forgiven?

Can I change?

Is there any hope for me?

But right alongside the guilt, there was a lot of anger in these young men.

For they had been neglected, they had been mistreated, they were sinners, but they were also sufferers.

And they needed to believe that they could be forgiven, that they could be changed, they needed hope.

But they also needed to be confronted about their anger.

They needed the power to forgive.

And this is really where the title of the sermon comes from: Guilt and Anger.

That's what I saw in those young men.

Again, I was not looking for that experience, I was just drawn onto it.

Uh, what I was looking to do that fall uh was to prepare for law school.

Uh that was my approach in college, was to get into a law school, and that fall I applied with the Attorney General's office in Richmond to do an internship.

And I was granted an internship uh in January and February of 2000.

Attorney General at that time was a gentleman named Mark Early.

And the Attorney General's office in Richmond has 21 specialized sections.

You know, and they kind of look from, they'll say, where do we have need?

Where do we have, where can we put this person?

You know, we really don't need interns, but where can we just dump in to kind of get some experience?

Uh and I was assigned just kind of randomly to a section that addressed the appeals of inmates.

So just to explain, uh, if you're a man and you're convicted of a crime, uh, you go to prison, but you were able to appeal the ruling or your sentence uh with your own legal effort.

And so, yeah, the inmates have a lot of time, they get a very sophisticated knowledge of the criminal justice system, and they file appeals.

And our job was to travel around to the 25 plus uh facilities, the jails, the prisons in the state of Virginia, and basically address these appeals to have men that were in the system that were incarcerated stay in jail.

That was our job.

Um, and as you can imagine, um, the AG's office is very, very effective.

Of all the men that I saw in courtrooms uh with appeals to have their sentence reheard or reduced, no one ever won.

The AG's office uh always won.

And I was just kind of a in the a spectator.

And as the internship unfolded, it was a great internship.

Many of you had these experiences when you were 19, 20, 21, 22.

But for me, I got a chance to meet a lot of judges uh in their chambers and just got a chance to talk with them about the legal field.

Uh I got a I got to sit in on a meeting of some of the prison wardens of the state of Virginia, uh, which was very interesting.

Yeah, and for me, the uh the legal field had just kind of this luster and this excitement to it, this prestige to it, which was very, you know, very appealing.

Uh so tied off the internship, everything went really well, and I returned back to Fredericksburg uh to continue school, and I went back to that volunteering at that local juvenile detention center back with the young men on Monday night, and suddenly those two experiences, which were completely separate, suddenly converged.

And I was deeply troubled because I felt like when I was with uh the juvenile detention center, I was seeing the criminal justice system from the bottom up.

I was seeing young men who were who had just committed some of the first crimes and were just entering the system.

But separate of that, with the Attorneys General's office, I felt like I was looking at the criminal justice system from the top down.

I was watching and seeing men in these courtrooms that had been in the system their whole life.

And I could see the structure of the prisons and the way the whole thing worked.

Um and I could see, and don't take this as a criticism of our criminal justice system, but I could see that because of the secularism of our culture and the way that constrains the criminal justice system, the system is not set up to touch the men's hearts the way that I experienced that they really needed to be touched.

In other words, there was nothing gonna minister to them of the fact that they could be forgiven, and that God gives power through his Holy Spirit to change.

And there was nothing ever gonna be confronted about how God commands us to forgive.

Yeah, there was nothing that was gonna address their guilt, nothing that is gonna address uh their anger.

Yeah, and that young man who was sitting across the table from me that fall, who committed that violent crime.

Um, he was tried as an adult and he was sentenced uh to 85 years in prison.

And the way the laws are structured in the in the state of Virginia, you have to serve 85% of a uh a prison term, even with good behavior.

So it's likely he's gonna be in his early 90s, maybe late 80s, when he will come out of the criminal justice system.

Yeah, his name is Frederick Christopher Stevens.

If you if you search through the Washington Post, you can find his name, you can find all that took place.

The young men needed to be comforted, uh, but they also needed to be confronted by the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, such as we find here in Matthew 18.

And as that reality gripped my heart, uh I suddenly, this is gonna sound very strange and kind of weird and esoteric.

Uh, it sounds strange to me even as I say it.

I literally felt like God came up to me and very gently put his hand on me and said, Matt, I want you to set down law school and I want you to go to seminary.

You see the way the secularism of our culture gives people no hope.

And I want you to go wade into that.

And it was the kind of a touch, it wasn't, you know, some, yeah, it's like this.

If you're out in the North X and you're having conversations with people and your wife wants to get attention to you, she doesn't grab you, right?

She just kind of very gently touches you.

And that's what it was.

But when that, I remember vividly when I that first entered my heart and mind, for me it was a system of uh a sense of great dread.

Uh, it was um a sense of my flash of really great loathing.

It was like if you've ever been in a in a room, uh, maybe like this, and somebody gets on the intercom and says, you know, the person with the black CRV with marin license plates, we need you to move your car right now.

And you realize it's your car and you don't want to stand up, but they keep saying it, you know, and then you you you have to stand up, right?

And everybody looks at you and like, oh, you're the you know, it was that type of feeling.

Um yeah, but when the Lord calls, uh he wins out.

And what does that mean for you and I?

Well, Matthew 18, uh, 21 through 35 is a passage that was so effective in the hearts of the Ozone men, a word of comfort, but a word of confrontation.

And it is a word uh that you and I need today.

I know this uh parable is uh very familiar to many of you.

Pastor Tom teaches a class every spring called Walking in the Spirit, and I believe it's week eight, where he talks about uh an unforgiving heart, and he actually talks about this passage.

So I know it's very familiar, but I hope it's uh it's it's it's fresh and it's pressing for you this morning.

Let's look at it if you would.

Matthew 18, verses 21 to 35.

Matthew 18:21–35

Peter comes, came to Jesus, and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that I forgive him?

As many as seven times.

And you can feel, Peter feels like he's being pretty generous.

But Jesus said to him, I do not say seven times, but seventy-seven times.

You can just feel Peter's jaw hit the ground.

And the parable is an explanation of verse 22.

Verse 23.

Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.

And that is settle accounts of debt.

Sin is described as a debt.

And that may be kind of a little strange to think about, but it's a failure to render to God the obedience and honor he deserves.

Our trespasses of God's commands warrant penalty, they warrant restitution.

So the king comes to call in the debts.

Verse 24, and when he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents.

10,000 talents, when you work it out to a wage, it's 60 million days' wages.

If you could think about how much you make on a daily basis, and then multiply, think about working every day straight for 60 million years, or better yet, having a debt that is accruing interest, and it's that massive, it should shock us, it should startle us.

If anything, it might it might even offend you that Jesus would say that you and I have that type of debt before the one who is holy, holy, holy.

But as the Holy Spirit begins to show us our hearts, what does my failure to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength?

My failure to live for his glory, my sluggishness to praise and adore him, what is that total?

What does my failure to love my neighbor as myself, simply to show the same courtesy, thoughtfulness, and understanding to others, which I which I so easily show to myself?

What does my greed and self-indulgence, my self-righteousness and critical spirit, my idolatry and unbelief, my pride, conceit, what is that total?

Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, what's the sum of that?

What do the sins of my heart and mind, my longings, my lusts, my fantasies, my cravings, my grumbling, my complaining, my envy, my discontent?

Well, suddenly you start thinking about sins of omission, commission, sins of thought, words, or deeds.

And Pastor Tom touched about it in an inquirer's class this past weekend.

Simply the way that we use our body and we use our money.

You start to say, no, I I 60 million years of pay.

That could that could be the right amount.

And the parable continues in verse 25.

Since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold with his wife and his children and all they had, and payment to be made.

So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, said, Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.

You can hear his desperation, the crushing weight of a debt that he cannot pay.

And then verse 27.

What kind of God rules the universe?

Out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him that debt.

What is God like?

God is the one who forgives the massive debt.

He is the God of abundant grace.

He is a God who is merciful beyond our widest hopes and expectations.

And how could those with such a debt go free?

Because, of course, one is making payment on our behalf.

This is the power of the cross.

This is why it adorns our sanctuary, adorns our architecture in the church service and the church building.

Because Jesus Christ, the eternal and beloved Son of God, the Lamb of God, the surety, the mediator, He makes payment.

He makes restitution.

He takes penalty.

And what a word of grace that is to young men who are incarcerated.

To know that justice will be served before the state and before man.

But before Almighty God, there is grace and mercy in this life and for all eternity.

What a way to be relieved of the burden of guilt, to have a guilty conscience assuaged, to be reconciled to God.

But it is, of course, not just a word for those incarcerated, it's a word for you and me.

I think we all in some form or fashion live with a low-grade sense of defilement, of a sense of shame that shadows us, a sense that you haven't been enough, you haven't done enough, you haven't been good enough.

We can easily live with a troubled conscience.

1 John 3.20, for whenever our hearts condemn us, not if, but when.

And of course, uh Satan is the one who knows to accuse, uh, and all he has to do is tell you the truth.

But the gospel is so powerful because it takes these sins seriously and says, cheer up.

You're worse than you think, but you're more loved and pardoned than you ever dared hope.

Because we have a king that's abundant in grace, and the eternal Son of God in our place, in our stead, paid our debt at the cross.

And that is the power of the darkness, the power of the cup of God's wrath being poured out, that the guilty could go free because the innocent was condemned.

And your identity in Christ, the true you, is one of a child of God, holy, blameless, spotless, beloved beyond reproach.

And as we are recipients of grace, uh Jesus commands, of course, that we be conduits of grace, that we who have received this forgiveness of this great debt learn to forgive the smaller debts in our lives.

And that is where the parable turns to.

If I could, just returning us to verse 28.

He says, But when the same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred and a I, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, Pay what you owe.

A hundred and air I is a hundred day wages.

And the difference between the two debts is the key of the parable.

Well, the servant says nearly the same thing.

Have mercy on me.

He kneels.

Same words, same action, but there is no grace.

He's thrown into prison.

The master finds out, he's angry.

Verse 34.

It says, In anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt.

And you think about a debt that's of that amount and the interest of a cruise, will he ever be in jail long enough to pay that debt?

No, the parable, it's a thin, it's a warning.

That's a bearer.

Either Jesus will pay our debt, or we will be paying it for eternity.

It is a stark, sober warning.

And he concludes, verse 35, so also my heavenly Father will do every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

And this was what was read, of course, earlier in the service, in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus says the same thing that those who have received grace are to show it.

And forgiveness doesn't, of course, merit God's forgiveness, but it shows that we have truly understood.

And receive the gospel.

A heart that has received grace can't help but express it.

A heart that knows the immensity of the debt that's been removed can't help but remove all the small debts of our life.

And really, what's so helpful about that, I find for my heart and for the young men's heart, is it is a word of confrontation.

It's very powerful when you talk to angry young men and you say, Jesus does not encourage you to forgive.

The King of glory commands you.

It is not an option.

It's not open to debate.

And it is, it seems like a big debt.

But in your pride, your own sin seems very small, where the debts of others seem very big.

And so I hope you can feel it.

It's a word of comfort to those who are guilty, but it's a word of confrontation to those who are angry.

And it's a word of confrontation to you and I.

Pastor Tom talks again in walking in the spirit about what do we do with a guilty conscience?

And what do we do with unforgiveness?

What do we do when we're continually rehashing hashing things?

You know, it's a slight.

It's an injury.

And some, of course, are very severe.

We can have people really injure us in such a ways that are never going to be put right in this life.

Many of us are scoreboard watchers.

Who in your life have you been keeping score with?

In what ways are you keeping score even today?

Who have you iced out of your life?

Who have you dismissed from your life?

Who have you avoided because they've offended you?

Well, here, I shared the story last August with the elders.

But this morning I actually want to take it one layer past that.

This happened, I was called into ministry when I was 20 years old, but it really wasn't until my late 30s that I really began to understand why that experience had been so powerful.

You know, in your 20s, you're so busy with career and kids and marriage and family, but when life finally began to kind of slow down and catch her breath a little bit, I began to reflect back on why had that experience been so powerful?

Why, when I looked across that young that table at this young man, Frederick Christopher Stevens, why did it move me so much?

And the answer is because although I was in khakis in a collared shirt and they were in prison guard, although they were trapped in that facility, and I'm going to go get my car and go do whatever I wanted to do, I knew that when I looked across the table, I was really looking at myself.

Because I was a young man filled of guilt and full of anger.

The home that I grew up in was in many ways a dark place.

And when I was 14 years old, the summer between eighth grade and ninth grade, we lived in Richmond, Virginia.

My dad pulled up stakes and left.

And he moved 12 hours away to Birmingham, Alabama.

And I just remember being heartbroken.

I remember sitting on the front porch of our house and just crying and crying.

But then the real economic and social ramifications of his decisions began to really take hold.

We lived in a very tight-knit community.

We were part of society, we were part of a swim team and a tennis club, and we could no longer afford to participate in those things, and we had to drop out.

I remember when my mom had to apply for food stamps.

That was how low we quickly dropped.

And I just remember the neighbors, you know, people began to kind of pull away from you, saying, Well, we don't really know what happened, but it's not good, and you know, the Roberts are kind of damaged goods.

And I don't know if you've ever had that experience of real social shame.

But that's what I felt.

I went from sadness to shame, but it didn't stop there.

What did it turn into?

It turned into a whole lot of heat, a whole lot of anger.

It was a very angry young man.

And it was a type of anger which is either gonna explode on somebody else, or you're gonna implode on yourself, or you're gonna have to find another way to live.

And that fall, when I was uh 14, my mom decided to uh take us to church.

And against my will, I was required to go to a church in Richmond called Stony Point Presbyterian Church.

Uh some of our youth here actually, that resonates with you.

Some of you went because our protost group actually went this uh spring down to Stony Point.

It's a church in Richmond, much like APC.

Um, and that's where I was taken when I was a 14-year-old.

And what did I experience?

I experienced the grace of the gospel in community.

I experienced people who really loved me with great patience.

I was administered the comforts of the gospel, that uh I had a great debt, which I easily believed, but that God in love sent his son, the eternal son of God, the great I am, to bear the penalty my sin deserved, so that I could be released and forgiven.

And what a comforting, transforming word that was from my heart.

But also in that church, Jesus is not just proclaimed as Savior, just like at APC, he's proclaimed as Lord.

A Lord who forgives the great debts, but commands us to forgive the smaller ones.

And I was really confronted with the reality that I needed to forgive my dad.

That I needed to really love him, that I needed to honor him, that I wanted to pray for him, that I needed to pray for him.

And uh that was not something that my angry heart wanted to hear, but it was exactly what I needed to hear.

And I was confronted with the reality of Christ's command, such as we find in Matthew 18.

And for me, it was it was kind of like I don't know if you've ever had a fever and just felt like internally you're just really, really, really hot, right?

And you're sweating and you're shivering, but then suddenly the fever breaks, and you can literally feel your body beginning to cool down.

That was what those years were like for me.

As the anger and the resentment and the bitterness and the scorekeeping and the rehashing began to really dissipate and flow out.

And by God's grace, I was able to really love my dad, to honor him.

The few chances I had to visit with him, just to really love him and to respect him, not to hold him hostage, not to be resentful, but as a as a teenager, just to begin to really love him.

And that's a journey that I began all those years ago.

It's a journey, um, yeah, that was 1993.

It's uh it's a journey I've been on all these years, but it's really the journey of Matthew 18 and this parable.

Well, if I could uh to close, turn this around to you.

Uh who is it for you?

Who is God calling you even this day to pray for, to honor, to love?

Again, Tom says in the wits, we are commanded to forgive, but we will never be able to, without the work of the Holy Spirit convincing us to love as we have been loved, convincing us to forgive as we have been forgiven.

So I think that's the place to close.

Uh, let us close and ask the Holy Spirit to do a fresh work in us.

If you would, please pray with me.

Uh, Holy Spirit, we would ask this day for a fresh sight of the graciousness and kindness of the great payment made by our King and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And press upon our parts how much we have been loved so that we might love.

And press upon our hearts how much we have been forgiven so that we might forgive.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.