Faith and Action

Father, as we gather this morning, we are reminded that Jesus Christ died for the ungodly.

While we were yet sinners, it was not when we cleaned up our act or had something within us that was worthy of forgiveness, which was not possible to do.

But that you and your great love and your mercy reached down and rescued us as a brand plucked from a fire.

And you cleansed us.

And you call us your own.

Lord, it's hard for us to even comprehend the degree to which we have been forgiven.

May we look to Christ.

May we look to the cross.

And Father, I pray that through your word our faith will increase and we will have a greater understanding of all that you have done for us.

And may we in turn extend that same grace and mercy to others that we have received from you.

And so, Lord, as we study your word, as we continue to consider the reality of forgiveness, may these moments that we have just shared together in special communion with you by faith, may they not be forgotten.

As we continue to think of the implications of the cross and how that moves us to respond as well.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Encourage you to turn there.

And if you don't have a Bible with you this morning, uh they're right in front of you.

There should be a Bible in that uh that little shelf there, and you can find it.

Uh the scripture passage on page 876, and so I would encourage you to turn there.

And as a church, we believe that God's word is so central and vital that we want everyone to have a copy of the Bible for himself or herself.

And so if you're here this morning and you don't own a Bible, that you don't have one that is yours, that it's accessible to you at any time that you might want or need, I want to encourage you to take that Bible that you're using right now and to take it home with you as our gift to you.

That you'll read and study it, uh, that you will learn from it, and through the Word of God, that you will come into a relationship with Jesus Christ by faith.

And so please take it, make it your own, and then bring it back each week and join us as we study God's word together.

I'm going to back up and read from the beginning of chapter 17 through verse 6.

And he said to his disciples, Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come.

It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.

Pay attention to yourselves.

If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.

And if he sins against you seven times in the day and turns to you seven times, saying, I repent, you must forgive him.

The apostles said to the Lord, Increase our faith.

And the Lord said, If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, Be uprooted and plant it in the sea, and it would obey you.

Thus ends the reading of God's word.

When I was a kid, we had neighbors that did not like us.

We had never done anything to them.

They decided they didn't like us for the sheer fact that we were Mexican.

That was it.

That was the great crime against humanity.

Interestingly, my parents had lived in that house 15 years before these neighbors moved in, and yet they didn't like the fact that we were in their neighborhood.

As a child, I recall receiving, uh being on the receiving end of their hate.

One of their sons and his buddy tried to beat me up when I was a little kid.

My brother's window of his truck was shot out.

The police came and they found that the trajectory had come from our neighbor's yard, but there was no proof that they had done it.

Our bathroom window was shot out with the pellet gun.

Again, the police came and saw that the trajectory that was, would have been somebody standing in their yard, and yet there was no evidence that they did it.

They denied uh doing it.

When my parents were building a new garage and uh the foundation was about to be poured for it, uh they came in the night, they measured out the the lines of uh of our garage and found it was one foot over code for our neighborhood and made a formal protest, so we had to uh begin over again in our garage.

And this went on year after year after year.

All of this happened as a child.

When I was in high school, my parents became Christians.

Eventually, these neighbors moved away.

Years later, my parents found out that these neighbors, these former neighbors, were ill.

And when Mrs.

O was in the hospital, an amazing event occurred.

My parents told this to me, and they went to visit her and they shared the gospel and asked her if she would receive Christ.

I don't know if she ever came to Christ, but as my parents went to visit the two of them while she was in the hospital, after years of hatred and contempt, they had admitted all the things that they had done to us and they apologized for their evil acts.

How do you respond when you are sinned against over and over and over again?

One theologian and commentator writes, but what if we had to offer such forgiveness repeatedly?

This is what is happening here in verse 4 of Luke.

It says, if he sins against you seven times in a day and turns to you seven times saying, I repent, you must forgive him.

How could we even do it?

The Croatian theologian Miroslav Wolf wrestled with this question after giving a public lecture on Christian forgiveness.

As soon as the lecture ended, the German theologian uh Jurgen Moltmann stood up and asked, But can you embrace a Setnik?

Here's how Wolf explains what Moltmann was really asking and the answer he gave.

Wolf says, This it was the winter of 1993.

For months now, the notorious Serbian fighters called Setnik had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities.

I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemy as God has embraced us in Christ.

Can I embrace a Setnik?

The ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other?

What would justify the embrace?

Where would I draw the strength from?

And this theologian writes in the commentary, sooner or later, this is the question we all have to face.

Can I embrace the Setnik in my life?

The person who has done me the most harm?

Can I forgive the abuser and the betrayer?

Muroslav Wolf waited a long time before giving his answer.

But he finally said, No, I cannot.

But as a follower of Christ, I think that I should be able to.

How is this type of forgiveness possible?

As a follower of Christ, we are able to do what we can't do in ourselves.

Even as we hear these words, we wonder how.

And this is the very question the disciples wrestled with when Jesus told them the nature of forgiveness, the superlative quality of a follower of Christ, and the attitude of forgiveness to all who sin against them.

And he says, if he turns to you seven times in a day and says, I repent, you must forgive him.

The disciples hear what Jesus said about forgiveness and they realize they can't do it.

And that was good.

But they don't quite understand the nature of faith and how it becomes possible for us to do what we can't do in ourselves.

They were looking at faith in the wrong way.

It's a very subtle misunderstanding of faith, but I think it has deep implications for how we live out our Christian life.

And so I want us this morning to first look at the wrong way to look at faith, and then secondly, to look at the right way to understand faith.

And so, first, the wrong way to look at faith.

Notice what the disciples say to Jesus.

The apostles say to the Lord, increase our faith.

And on the surface of it, this seems like a great request, Lord, increase our faith.

But what they're thinking in this regard is that faith is a quantity.

They're looking at faith quantitatively.

They see faith as an amount.

If I have more faith, then I can get things done.

If I have more faith, then I can forgive.

If I have more faith, then I can do the things that seem impossible.

So what's wrong with this?

What's the subtle misunderstanding of faith that the apostles have at this moment that Jesus corrects them?

We understand the misunderstanding that they have when we look at what Jesus says in response.

Look at the passage here in verse 6.

And the Lord says to them, If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to the mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.

They're thinking about the amount of faith that one must have in order to see God work.

And Jesus challenges them to realize that it is not the amount of faith, but it is sincere faith in the right object, in the right person.

So that it is the object of our faith that is important.

It's not a question of the amount of faith that we have.

Look at what Jesus is saying here.

He says, if you have faith like a grain of a mustard seed, and the mustard seed, proverbial, was the smallest seed that was used in common gardening.

It was so small in relationship to the other seeds, it was seemingly insignificant.

But he said, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea.

Now the mulberry tree, proverbially, conventional wisdom said that it had such a deep root system in it that it was so rooted and grounded within the ground that a properly planted mulberry tree could last for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And so that was the thought behind it.

And so it would be impossible to just think of something to be removed and cast into the sea.

And yet Jesus says, if you have faith like a grain of a mustard seed, you could do what seems impossible on the surface of it.

But more correctly, God can do what is impossible for you to do on your own.

And so we have to be careful when we think about faith, we think about it so often in the wrong way.

Sometimes we think of faith as willpower or emotion.

Sometimes we think if we just believe hard enough, then we'll have what we desire.

Or the intensity of our emotions will obligate God to respond.

If we psych ourselves up enough, that means that we're really believing.

And faith is not equated to our emotional state.

Faith is not equated to the amount of willpower we exert.

And sometimes without even realizing it, we begin to think of the Christian life wrongly.

We begin to see faith as, and I'll put this in crass terms, as magic and God as our genie.

And let me explain what I mean by that.

We would never say that so crassly, but when we misunderstand the nature of faith, I think that's what we do.

Now, magic can be described as saying or doing something in the physical realm that manipulates and controls the spiritual realm.

And so when a person who believes in magic, they believe by saying certain words in a certain way, that automatically there is going to be a certain response.

And so that our words are important and significant, and if we misspeak, if we say things the wrong way, we won't get the result.

And so the idea behind magic is that when you say something a certain way, you get the response that you anticipate, that you manipulate the spiritual realm by what you do in the physical realm.

If you cast a spell or say an incantation, the spirits on the other side are obligated to act.

And the danger that we have is we would never be so crass as to think that, but we think that if we can say just the right words, if we can pray in just the right way, that that is going to make the difference.

How we pray and the way we say things is determinative of God acting.

Or maybe we think that God is there for what we want, and we treat God as if He has an obligation and a responsibility to do what we want in the way that we want it.

And sometimes we think of that even in struggles in our lives.

That we we think, okay, God, here's what I'm facing.

And this is what I want.

I want you to work out the situation this way, and I want these outcomes and these results.

And if I really believe and I really trust, you're going to answer my prayers and give me my deliverance in my way.

And so we begin to view God wrongly, as if He must answer us in the way that we want, if we say things in the right way, or if we have the right attitude, or we exert the right emotion, or have the right willpower.

And so we can treat faith wrongly, thinking that if we have enough of it, then God will respond.

Well, what's the right way to look at faith?

And this is what I want to spend most of our time on, and then bring it back to the area of forgiveness, which is the larger topic of what we're looking at this morning.

What's the right way to understand faith?

The apostles ask Jesus, increase our faith, and they see this quantitatively, that something within them needs to be larger to have more of, and then everything will be okay.

Well, Jesus reminds us it's not the amount of faith that is in view, it is sincere faith in the right object.

And let's bring it down to a practical level.

The more I look at my problems, the less I look at Jesus.

There's an inverse relationship.

The more I look at my problems, the less I begin to look at Jesus.

My problems loom large and Jesus seems small.

Problems are kind of imagine that my hand represents my problem.

And what happens is this I begin to focus on my problem, I begin to look at it, and the more that I look at it, the larger it becomes.

The more of my vision it occupies, the less I see around me, and the reality is the less I see of who God really is, so that my problems loom large and my Jesus seems small.

Now the Bible tells us that we can have weak faith or strong faith, but it's not the amount of faith.

It's slightly different than that.

It's slightly different from what the disciples were asking.

Our faith is weaker, strong to the degree that we look at Christ for the answers, that we look at God for the solution, as we take our eyes off of ourselves, off of our circumstances, and off of our situations and look at our Savior.

So our faith can be strengthened, but not in the way that we sometimes think.

First of all, our faith is strengthened when we know and trust our loving Father.

Now, my youngest daughter, Sophia, is three years old.

And if you've ever seen her walking around, she is fearless.

Nothing, I mean, she will go anywhere, she will do anything, she'll walk up in a crowd.

Nothing bothers her.

She is fearless.

This little, small, petite little girl.

And I wonder why she's so fearless.

Why is she so unconcerned?

She doesn't worry about what she's going to eat.

She doesn't worry about her clothes being clean.

She doesn't worry about her bed being warm.

Why is that?

I think in a very simple way, she knows that she has a father who loves her and who's going to take care of her.

She has a father who is looking out for her and watching out, whose eye is on her and cares for her and is for her.

And so she doesn't worry.

Because she's secure in her father's love, she can rest and have confidence.

No, eventually I will let her down in a way that's so significant that that will change her trust.

But that never happens with our Heavenly Father.

When we look rightly at our Heavenly Father, we have the confidence that He will never let us down.

You have a Father who knows you and loves you.

You have a Father whose heart is inclined towards you at all times, in every way, in every situation.

He has never stopped looking at you with love.

From the moment that you came to know Christ, he has looked at you and loved you.

And he cares for you.

He sees what you're going through.

He sees your hurt.

He sees your pain.

It says that when a sparrow falls from the tree, your heavenly father knows it, and you are much greater and of more value than the sparrows.

Your father's eye is always on you.

Your heavenly father is looking at you.

When our faith is weak, when we waver in our trust for God, we begin to doubt that He is willing or able to work in our lives.

We forget who our Heavenly Father really is.

And our faith is strengthened not by generating something within ourselves that needs to increase, but taking our eyes off of ourselves and looking at our Heavenly Father and begin to remind ourselves of who he is, of going to the Word and looking at His promises and looking at how He has always been faithful to His people.

And as we do that, our faith begins to strengthen.

Secondly, our faith is strengthened when we take our eyes off of our circumstances and ourselves and look to Jesus.

There's a classic saying that many have said, it's often attributed to Robert Murray McShane, and it says, For one look at the self, take ten looks at Christ.

I love that saying.

I wish I did it more.

For one look at this at the self, take ten looks at Christ.

For every one look at your problems, take ten looks at Jesus.

For every one look at your struggles, take ten looks at Jesus.

For every look at your pain and your sadness, take ten looks at Jesus.

And the reality is, is that ratio we often get in reverse.

We focus on ourselves and we focus on our situations and we focus on our problems and we become discouraged and despondent and depressed.

And then finally, when we get to the end of ourselves, then our gaze moves away from us to Christ.

But we we end where we should start.

For every look at ourselves, we should take ten looks at Christ.

Look to the cross of Christ.

In the cross, we see the love of the Father.

In the cross, we see the payment for our sins.

In the cross, we see the promise of forgiveness and acceptance.

We who were rebels and sinners, enemies and aliens have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

We have been forgiven, and we have peace with God, and he has made us our children.

He has made us his children.

We're given the Holy Spirit.

The third person of the Trinity lives within us to empower us and to come alongside us and to give us the strength that we need to look away from ourselves and to look to Christ.

When we look to Jesus, he's able to do things in us and through us that seem impossible.

Our faith, in a sense, does need to increase, but it doesn't increase by looking to ourselves or looking to our willpower or looking to our emotions.

Our faith increases when we turn away from looking to ourselves and we look at our Savior.

And our vision of Christ increases and our trust in Him grows, and our reliance upon Him and our dependence upon Him increases because we realize who Christ is and what He has done for us.

And so we need to not look so much at ourselves and our circumstances and our situations, but to look to Christ, to look to the cross.

Well, how do we apply this to forgiveness?

Let's take a very concrete example of what Jesus is talking about here.

He says that if someone sins against you seven times in a day and turns to you seven times, saying, I repent, you must forgive him.

The Bible says this be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

So we are to forgive others as Christ has forgiven us.

Another passage puts it like this in Colossians chapter 3, verse 23: bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgive each other.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Well, there are, let me share with you five implications of this command from a book by Mike Wilkerson called Redemption.

Five implications of this command.

To forgive as the Lord has forgiven you.

This is what he writes.

First, we should forgive genuine debt.

He says, God knows exactly what sins he forgives.

He knew that you were a sinner when he sent his son to the cross for you.

When we forgive, it is fitting that we name the sin and the sinner and we condemn it as wrong.

So we don't deny the reality of the sin that is committed against us when we forgive.

He says, second, we should expect forgiveness to be costly.

The fact that God has given forgiveness freely doesn't mean it was cheap.

It cost him his son worth more than the whole world.

When we forgive, we must absorb much of the evil rather than retaliating in revenge against another person.

Yet we're able to do this because God has poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Third, he says, we should forgive generously.

God gives generously, he writes.

He spared no expense to reconcile the world to himself.

You might force the word, I forgive you, out of your mouth, but resist actually granting them from the heart.

But to forgive is to give people more than they're due.

It is a gift from the heart.

And so when we forgive, we forgive generously, he says.

Fourth, we should forgive even before the wrongdoer repents, and even if the wrongdoer never repents.

And we talked about this in greater detail last week.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Wilkerson writes, God did not wait for us to repent before expressing his love towards us.

Likewise, we can and should grant forgiveness to others regardless of their repentance.

He also writes, in your forgiveness, you turn him over to God, not primarily hoping that he will be punished by God, but first with the hope that he will eventually repent and receive God's forgiveness.

Even wrong, every wrong will be made right in the end, one way or another, and so we entrust the person to God, praying for God to have mercy and grace in that person's life, but knowing if that person doesn't come to Christ, that every wrong will be made right.

Fifthly, he says this: after forgiving, we should allow for appropriate consequences.

He says, sins causes damage that cannot always be undone and sets things in motion that cannot always be stopped.

We reap what we sow.

When we forgive someone, it's not always wise, if it is even possible, to spare them the consequences of their sin.

And then he adds, at times love causes us to forgive, even while wisdom warns us to keep our distance.

And yet forgive we should, and forgive we must, but we can't do it in our own.

But we can when we look to Christ and we look at the cross.

Let me close with a story.

Familiar story to many of us, shared in her book, The Hiding Place, by Corey Tenboom.

Following World War II, Corey Tenboom shared her story of God's protection, his love, and the forgiveness that is found in Jesus.

Before the war had ended, Corey had to endure painful loss, especially of her sister Betsy, through abuse and sickness at Ravensbrook concentration camp.

And before the war was over, she saw her sister wither away and die under the abuse at the hands of the Nazis.

In her book, she writes this.

I continued to speak, and she would tour around the world, sharing her story and the story of her sister Betsy.

She said, I continue to speak, partially because of the home that we ran, ran on contributions, partly because of the hunger for Betsy's story seemed to increase over time.

I traveled all over Holland to other parts of Europe to the United States.

But the place where the hunger was greatest was Germany.

Germany was a land in ruins, cities in ashes and rubble.

But more terrifying still, minds and hearts of ashes.

Just across the border was to feel the great weight that hung over the land.

It was a church service in Munich that I saw him.

The former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbrook.

He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time.

And suddenly it was all there.

The room of mocking men, the heaps of clothes, Betsy's pain-blanched face.

He came up to me after the church service when it was emptying, beaming and bowing.

How grateful I am for your message, Froline, he said, to think that, as you say, he has washed my sins away.

His hand was thrust out to shake mine.

And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloomingdale the need to forgive, kept my hand by my side.

Even as the anger, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them.

Jesus had died for this man.

Was I going to ask more?

Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.

I tried to smile.

I struggled to raise my hand.

I could not.

I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.

And so again I breathed the silent prayer.

Jesus, I cannot forgive him.

Give me your forgiveness.

As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened.

From my shoulder, along my arm, and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while in my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

And so I discovered that it is not on our own forgiveness any more than on our own goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on his.

When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself.

Look to Jesus.

Let us pray.

Father, even as we sit here this morning, our minds race with the hurt and the pain in our own lives.

Perhaps things from years ago, lying dormant, buried, trying to be forgotten.

Or wounds that are still fresh.

The painful memories still so real.

Because of how recently things happened.

Lord, you call us to have a heart of forgiveness, to forgive even as you have forgiven us.

And Lord, we can't do it.

In myself, I can't do it.

And so, Lord, by your grace and the working of your Holy Spirit, may we look outside of ourselves, may we look at you.

And by looking at you and gazing upon the cross, may you increase our trust and our faith.

And may you change our hearts.

Lord, what we cannot do, what you are able to do.

Give us the grace and strength that we don't have.

That we might forgive others even as you have forgiven us.

We pray in Christ's name.

Amen.