Parables of Grace: The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant; Receiving and Giving Grace

Well, happy Father's Day.

We're glad you're here with us.

We also recognize maybe today's not a great day for you because maybe you lost your dad this this past year, or maybe actually Father's Day brings up more bad memories than good memories because your dad wasn't that great.

Maybe your dad was distant.

Maybe your dad was just sort of a bad dad.

Or maybe the opposite is true, and today is everything that you would want a Father's Day to be because you had a great dad.

And so today is full of gratitude for you.

Or maybe you do the single parent thing or co-parenting.

And so at times you feel like you're a mom and a dad, or at times you feel like you're a dad and a mom.

And so Father's Day is always mixed feelings for you.

So what we're gonna do this morning, we're gonna talk about a parable, that parable Sam just read for us of the unforgiving servant.

We're going through parables this summer.

So we'll talk about this parable for a little bit, and that will be sort of like to all of us.

And then by the end of it, I'm gonna talk to dads just very briefly from this parable what it has to say for us.

So a few months ago, I went with our students on a student winter retreat.

I talked about it back when we went on it, and on the that Saturday we did some high ropes elements, and so we did this one deep climbed up and you did this huge swing and you're harnessed, and there's cables.

And then there's another one where you climbed up a big pole, like a telephone pole, they call it pamper pole because you uh you need pampers on by the time you get to the top because you're so nervous.

And you get to the top and you have to get on top of it and jump out.

And and I was forcing myself to do these things.

These things used to be quite natural to me.

I used to work on a ropes course in college.

I used to like you know jump off of cliffs and rappel down.

And like, I mean, I had no fear, right?

The pre-frontal lobe had not developed yet in my mind.

I I just I would go for whatever, but I so as a you know 39-year-old, almost 40, I was forcing myself in front of these students that I will do these things.

And then after those two things, we went over to the obstacle course, which was like 50 feet up in the air, and it was a whole bunch of cables uh connected, and you you're harnessed in the whole time, and you work yourself from tree to tree, 50 feet up, and there's obstacles in between on these cables, you're climbing over stuff through stuff and you're zipping along and all this.

And so before it, I I went up to uh this this one student, let's call him Harry because his name's Harry.

Uh I went up to Harry and I said, Hey, I said, Harry, let's go, let's go at the end of the line.

Let's because you're in line and you're cabled.

So if you're in the middle, you're stuck.

And I know Harry's wanted to go nuts on this thing because I was Harry 25 years ago.

And so I said, Let's go to the very end.

You can be the last one.

You can go nuts.

You can zip back and forth.

There'll be nobody behind you.

So you'll be able to work this thing backward and forth over and over again.

So finally, we wait.

We have to wait forever for everybody to kind of work their way through.

Finally, it's my turn.

I force myself again out.

I'm afraid, scared, all of that.

I force myself out on it, and I'm holding on to everything the entire time.

Anything I can get my hands on, I will hold on to.

Now, mind you, I'm harnessed, I'm clipped in, I'm double clipped in, like the whole time.

I am holding on.

I work myself across the first cable and I get to that first tree, little platform, not big, little.

They built them nice and small for you, but I'm literally hugging that tree, hugging it.

And I and I turn around and I look at Harry, he is flying back and forth, he's leaning out.

I mean, he is free, and I am I am holding every single thing I can get my hands on.

Right?

Both of us are clipped in.

Both of us are safe.

He's just as safe as I am.

We're both secure, but only one of us is really free.

Right?

And it's not me, because I want to tight grip everything.

Harry was the one who was free.

And this is the point we always have to remember when it comes to forgiveness.

And this is the first point.

When you hold the debt over the one who hurt you, you're the one holding on.

When you hold the debt over the person who hurt you, you're the one that's still holding on.

You're not the free one.

You're binding yourself.

Peter has this question.

Like he's hearing all this stuff from Jesus about grace and forgiveness.

And he's going, maybe he got wounded.

Maybe somebody just did something to him.

But he's trying to figure this out, right?

In Matthew 18, 21 and 22.

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?

Right?

Like he can get his mind around that.

It's a lot, seems pretty gracious.

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

And it's Jesus' way to say, uh, you never stop forgiving.

Don't ever hold the debt over someone else.

You'll be the one who, you'll be the one who's still holding on.

And Peter's attitude here is sort of like, do I get to keep holding on to something?

Right?

And you can feel sort of this fear and anxiety inside of Peter, and Jesus just destroys it here.

And then Jesus starts to teach this parable, this story to teach something.

And he says, okay, so here's the story.

We have a king who has a slave, and this one slave's gotten himself into debt to the king, huge debt, 10,000 talents.

You know, you go, how much is that?

And some people are saying, oh, it's a few million dollars.

Some people say, oh, that's a billion dollars.

The point is, for this slave, it is way beyond his ability to repay it.

It's like he owes on his F-150, he owes on his television to Best Buy, he borrowed money to buy his mattress at the mattress store.

There's no Dave Ramsey plan to get out of this guy's situation.

He's in over his head.

And so finally he goes up to the king and he just says, Hey, uh, forgive me.

Begs.

And the king is gracious and he forgives the entire debt, and you think, well, that's a great story.

But Jesus continues, the story keeps going, it sort of shifts.

You wouldn't see this coming.

You didn't you didn't feel this coming in the story, because this guy goes, he finds a fellow slave that owes him money, a hundred denera, not nearly as much.

This would have been a burden to this other slave.

Maybe it's a thousand dollars on a credit card, right?

I mean, it's something you feel, but it's not something that's unreachable.

And this forgiven slave takes the one who's in debt to him and has him thrown into prison.

It's sort of an odd turn of events.

It makes us have a few questions.

I mean, did this first slave really understand what happened?

Did he embrace anything that happened?

Seems he's still holding on.

Feels a little bit more like me holding on to that tree than Harry being free.

And here's point number two.

I feel like I need to take a little bit of a pastoral tangent just for a second before we continue because as soon as we start talking about forgiveness, uh, some walls start going up.

And so, pastoral tangent, point number two, forgiveness does not void consequences or erase memories.

Pretending like forgiveness is easy and the cloak of Christian virtue is only a stuffing of that sorrow down into yourself that only creates like bitterness and cynicism and a lot of unhealthy things down the road.

So let's say when we're up in that, those trees, uh, Harry sneaks up behind me and he unclips my clips, right?

Great, great joke, 50 feet up in the air to do to someone.

Let's just say that happened.

And let's say I go to zip out on the next cable, I fall 50 feet down, I break my legs, I'm in a wheelchair for six months, I'm in rehab for six more months.

I am angry, I'm sad, I'm grieving, I'm crying.

Now, maybe I forgive Harry.

Right?

I forgive him, I say, you don't owe me anything.

But maybe Harry and I are not rock climbing buddies in the future.

Maybe we're more like on the ground friends.

Right?

Like the memory memory of some wound does not go away.

It doesn't erase consequences.

Right?

Like all these things still exist.

Boundaries can still exist within forgiveness.

Forgiveness is just saying, you don't owe me anymore.

I'm not gonna hold on to that anymore.

Point number three.

Forgiveness is paid for by the grace of the offended.

Forgiveness, somebody has to pay.

Somebody always has to pay.

Forgiveness is paid for by the grace of the offended.

Years ago, I was working for my father-in-law, as before my wife and I were married, so it was my boss, but not my father-in-law, had not made that transition of marrying my boss's daughter yet.

And I was installing a new printer in his home office.

Brand new house, beautiful house, big, beautiful house, brand new hardwood floors.

And so I take this big printer box and I set it in the middle of his office on the hardwood floors, and I start to you know unpack the box, and I'm working to get the printer set up and unpacking stuff, and I move the printer around every once in a while.

I need to move it, and I'm working to get it into the cabinetry, and I'm doing all that.

I get that I get it all set up, I pick the box up, I take it out to the garage and break it down.

I walk back into his office and I look on the floor, and there are five huge scratches right in the middle of his brand new hardwood floors home office, and my stomach sinks, right?

Because I'm not making a lot of money at this point, and I'm saving up money to steal his daughter away from him for that ring, and I see it, and all that's all I think.

500 bucks, it's all I think.

You know, like immediate.

I'm just like, oh, I and I I'm not at the place where I can just like waste money and I see that.

I'm a stomach.

I know I have to call him.

There's no hiding it, it's in the middle of the room, right?

So I I I call him, I tell him what happened, you know.

That says my fault.

I said, you know, if you you just I said, let me know what it costs, I'll pay for it.

That was that was my fault.

You know, I should pay for it.

My fault.

And he says, no, no, he said, you know, thank thank you for being honest, no problem.

I pay for it.

Right?

That's that's forgiveness.

Right?

Forgiveness is the one who is offended absorbs the bill.

Right?

The floor still had to be fixed.

Now maybe he would even have chosen to not fix it.

He did fix it.

I walked in a few weeks later, it's all fixed.

He paid for it, so the offended pays for it, but even if he had not paid some repair guy to come pay for it, he would have been paying for it every time he saw the floor.

He still would have been paying for it in the fact that he had an imperfect floor.

You see, someone always has to pay.

When your friend says those things to you and it hurts you, either you revenge back and make them pay for it back to you, or you decide to forgive them, you absorb that wound.

And that's what forgiveness is.

Somebody has to pay.

And in this story, the king is the one who's paying.

Right?

He absorbs the debt.

He takes it on himself.

He's out that money.

And what Jesus is saying to us is he's saying, none of your mistakes, none of your failings from your past or your present or your future, your imperfection, your brokenness, your flaw, your sin, none of it is on you.

I will take all that on, I will absorb it.

We know this in the cross.

Our sin put upon Jesus, his righteousness put upon us, so he absorbs it.

The one who is offended absorbs it.

But this moron slave, he's given this forgiveness.

He turns right around, closes his eyes to it.

And this is fascinating.

But I don't think it should surprise us.

Because you've known a cranky, miserable Christian before.

You've probably been a cranky, miserable Christian before.

I have.

And this is point number four.

You can have salvation because you believe in Jesus and know nothing of the joy of that salvation.

Meaning, the joy of your salvation is in the receiving and in the appropriating of that into your life.

So it may be declared upon you.

You may have received Jesus as your Savior, and you keep living out of your fears, never appropriating unconditional love, your acceptance and absolution into your entire life, into all of your fears.

Never converting from a merit unto success type of life into a grace unto acceptance type of life.

Never asking these questions.

What does unconditional love mean to my fears?

Right?

I mean, that's what it means to grow in grace.

I mean, this guy he receives the forgiveness.

He just moves right back into being greedy.

He never appropriates that into some sort of need he had to feel like he needed to be repaid or some sort of greed that was going on in his heart.

And then this brings us to the end of the parable, which is incredibly sobering and a little confusing.

Verses 32 through 35.

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

And should not you 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.

So the parable ends in verse 34, and then Jesus makes a point in verse 35, and this raises a series of questions, at least for me.

Enough to read a lot, enough for me to ask a few people this week.

Is God going to throw us into some sort of prison, even as a Christian, if we don't forgive our brother?

Well, I think this is a really strong words of Jesus that say, like, if you're not a person of grace and forgiveness, it does demand enough for you to do a little contemplation of whether you are a person of the grace of Jesus and forgiveness.

It's a strong warning.

But it's interesting because it's metaphorical in verse 34.

And then verse 35 feels a little vague, but really it doesn't sound like good.

Like it's strong.

And is Jesus talking about hell?

Is this prison hell?

Because I've not forgiven people before.

I mean, there's been times I haven't forgiven people, or maybe I took a long time to forgive someone, or maybe I thought I forgave someone, and then later on I realized, like, wow, I really haven't let go of that quite yet.

And so was I going to hell during this period of time where I was not forgiving someone?

Am I going to hell right now for some offense I'm still holding on to, someone who said something or did something to me and I'm wrestling with that?

Am I going to hell right now?

Well, frankly, to me, that sounds ridiculous because I don't want to go to hell.

So I'm a little self-oriented on that.

But it also sounds ridiculous in terms of the entire biblical narrative.

I don't think Jesus is actually talking about hell here.

I don't.

You can probably find someone who thinks differently.

And I don't think God quit loving this slave.

I mean, we can't forget the rest of the New Testament.

We can't forget Paul's writings that there's no condemnation in the love of God.

We can't just like forget that.

So what is this?

Well, to me, I think it's a little bit, maybe a little bit of a mystery.

I'll embrace a little bit of mystery here, but I do think Jesus is making an important point using the strongest language possible.

It is illogical and imprisoning to receive grace, never integrate grace, and then never dispense grace to others.

And the flip is wonderfully true.

This would be point number five.

I got really motivated with points this week.

It is wonderfully freeing to receive the grace of God in Jesus, to integrate the grace of God into all of your life, and dispense the grace of God onto others.

That whole process is wonderfully freeing.

We have a king who is always forgiving and gracious to us.

And in fact, if we look at the biblical narrative, we look at Paul's writings, not only is the dead erased, but he takes slaves and he makes us children.

And this is where Father's Day comes in.

Because being a great dad is not about being perfect, because that won't happen, in case you haven't picked up on that one.

It's about being as present as you can be.

It's about being that child more than that slave.

Right?

So you're not a slave to your job until the point that you can't be present with your kid.

You're not a slave to money unto the point that you can't love your kid or be present.

You're not so preoccupied.

And you, as a child of God, that you understand your greatest calling in this life, when you become a father, is no longer your job.

It's no longer your career.

It's your kid.

It's your children.

That you work your job in order for you to be able to come home and raise your kids.

That you as a child of God are on a mission to impute upon your children, your imperfect children, to impute upon them a righteousness, a righteous standing that they have not earned by their behavior.

They haven't earned it by merit, and you are granting it upon them over and over and over again.

You are imputing to them, just like the Heavenly Father has imputed to you righteousness, you're imputing to your children a righteous standing over and over again.

And there's still guardrails, there's still consequences, but the ethos of the relationship is grace and imputation, so that when the child fails and they're five or they're 15 or they're 50, they know they can come home and talk to dad.

They would want to come home and talk to dad.

That's what brings a child home.

We're not perfect before this, but we're also not even defined by that.

We're also not even defined by how good of a dad we are.

That's actually what helps us be a good dad.

Or a good kid, or a good mom, or a good student.

Our wickedness, the wickedness in this parable, the wickedness is merit.

To be a slave to merit, merit unto acceptance, or merit unto absolution is wickedness, the grace of God known in Jesus for your acceptance and absolution as a human being, a child of God, righteous before God, that is truth, godliness, and freedom.

Religious moralism, fundamentalism, legalism, anything of merit-based living, parenting relating to God is wickedness.

It's a break and assault on God's grace to you and the grace you should be bestowing upon your children.

The grace of God, known in Jesus the Christ, experienced in the Holy Spirit day by day is the path of godliness and truth and freedom.

Galatians 4 says this But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoptions as sons.

We could say sons and daughters, and because you are sons and daughters, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son.

And if a son, then heir through God.

My brothers and sisters, may you no longer live in this world as slaves, but as children.

And if you are a father, may you bestow upon your children positions of righteousness.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that in Jesus we are forgiven and we are free.

You do not view us as a slave, but we have been bestowed positions of children, not because of our merit, but because of you, because of your act before us on the cross.

Because of Jesus.

You took the price.

You were offended.

We rebel and want to self-save and make our own way and prove ourselves.

And you see all of it and you die.

You die for our sin.

You absorb our sin.

Thank you for the gift of the cross for our acceptance and absolution.

Would you help us to trust in Jesus in greater ways?

Appropriating that great grace of God into the greatest fears that we're still holding on to.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.