Show Mercy, to Be Shown Mercy

Welcome to this week's message from the Church at Chelsea Westover.

Our core values are vibrant worship, intimate fellowship, fulfilling service, and clear biblical truth.

We pray that this message changes your life.

Let's tune in to today's message and see what God has in store for you.

All right.

I am very honored to be before you today with Pastor Danny out of town and him giving me the honor and the privilege to come and to share what I believe God's put on my heart.

That's been on my heart for a while.

Actually, I was right back there at the camera before the wall even uh came down.

Uh one of the last times that Sylvester preached for us, it was actually two times ago that Sylvester preached.

And um his his sermon, uh, you you might remember was uh on the verse that if my people will humble themselves and pray and turn from their wicked ways and seek my face, then I will heal them and I will restore their land.

And so as he was sharing that verse, one of the things, one of his illustrations that he that he talked about in that time was forgiveness.

And God used that point in his sermon uh to prick my heart, and that I knew exactly uh what I was going to share with y'all uh this morning in that moment.

And so it's been exciting being able to study, uh being able to lead up to uh this this point when I can present that to you.

So so if you would, if you have your Bibles, I hope you do, if you would turn into in your Bibles to Matthew 18, the first of the Gospels, if you'll turn to Matthew 18, uh that's where we're gonna uh spend the majority of our time here today.

Um while you're turning there, I wanted to share a uh a quote with you that um uh that that is from C.S.

Lewis.

I'm sure most of you are probably familiar with C.S.

Lewis.

This is something I do for the students every week.

I try and give them a quote of somebody that is not me.

Uh you know, I'm not famous enough yet to have some quotes going after me, but I try to give them quotes from different theologians, from different people that have gone before uh different Christian leaders, that um so they can hear somebody say it other than me, somebody that might trigger in their brain something that was said.

And so that's why I put that quote there.

But it was C.

S.

Lewis that said, To be a Christian is to forgive the inexcusable.

And he goes on to say, and that's because the inexcusable was forgiven in us.

See, that's what this message today is all about, is about forgiveness.

And you see, that's the basis of our entire salvation.

Our entire faith is about forgiveness.

Would you disagree?

Is why we have why we're here, while we're meeting today, while we have our faith, while we have our salvation.

So you see, that's what I'm going to share with you today.

But what we're going to look at today is the parable of the unforgiving servant, the unmerciful servant, depending on your translation.

And so, with those, you see, we've got a few verses there when Jesus was asked a question.

This happened multiple times in Scripture, that Jesus was asked a question.

He answered the question kind of, but then he told a parable.

Now, we use parables today, that we don't call them parables, uh, but we use parables today that in order to understand a point, we use a story.

Uh, for instance, football.

We use football a lot because let's face it, we live in Alabama.

We use football, we use movies, we use music, we use um school, we use stories from our life.

We use all these different things because that's how it gets the point across.

They're called illustrations, is a lot of times what we use here.

And so Jesus was using this parable, and he was using what they had.

Now, unfortunately, what they had and what we have are two pretty different things when you look at it.

Jesus didn't have football, he didn't have movies, he didn't have music, he didn't have pop culture, he didn't have any of that.

So, what Jesus used is what people knew.

And a lot of times you see him use things like farming and shepherding and all these different points that he's able to come and he's able to say, okay, I'm gonna explain it to you in this way.

And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna break this up into two sections, because first of all, in order to understand the story, or we have to understand the story in order to understand the meeting.

See, if I just told you a story and said, That was fun, you would have no idea what I was talking about.

You would be able to pull some meaning from it, maybe.

You would be able to take take some some some maybe something that I said and say, Oh, that was a really good point.

I'm glad he said that.

But unless I tell you the understanding, unless I explain the story to you, there's no way you can understand the meaning of what I was trying to say in that.

And so that's what we're gonna do today.

We have to understand what is in the text.

We are guilty so many times of reading a text of scripture and saying, stumbling over a word or being like, oh, I wonder what that means.

Oh well, and then reading on instead of digging in and trying to understand what the text is actually saying.

And so we're gonna look at that today.

We need to know every word, we need to understand every part of it so that when we read it, we understand exactly what Jesus was trying to say.

So if you would please, and the boys home has joined us, if you would please, it took me a minute to get there.

If you would stand, that's something I like to do.

Let's stand together as we read this text out of Matthew 18.

Stand together as we read God's holy word.

And I will add a side note.

If you'll forgive me, the text got put into the computer in King James Version, and I'll be reading out of the ESV.

It's all the same Bible, but some of the words might be a little bit jumbled up, so forgive me for that.

Then Peter came up to him and said, 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 ten thousand talents.

And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and 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 the debt.

But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denari.

And seizing him he began to choke him, saying, Pay me 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 he went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.

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

Then his master summoned him and said to him, You wicked servant, I forgave you all the 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 the master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debts.

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

You may be seated.

So the first thing that we have to do is we have to understand the parable.

Like most of Jesus' parables, he was asked the question, and then that led to this answer.

And so the first thing that Peter, we all know Peter, Peter was kind of short-tempered.

Peter was, he acted before he thought.

And so Peter, to me, this is the, as I said on Sunday, this is the Stevo International version, to me, Peter kind of seems a little bit arrogant.

Peter seems like he might have had a little bit of an attitude, thought, oh, you know, he said, on this rock I'm going to build my church.

Look at me, I'm Peter, you know?

And that's kind of how I view Peter a little bit.

That's just my thoughts.

But with Peter, he said, he was asking this question, but he kind of gave an answer too.

You see what he did there?

He said, How many times am I supposed to forgive my brother if he sins against me?

Seven times.

And he put a little hidden meaning in there because in the Bible, seven is the number of completion.

That's how we get there seven days in a week.

That uh that it took seven days to complete the creation of the universe.

So we see that.

And he was kind of, I kind of hear this little tone with him.

He said, Oh, how many times are they supposed to forgive him?

Seven times.

And then Jesus comes back with a rebuttal and says, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Or in other translations, like the King James Version probably said, is seventy times seven.

And so do we take that as a literal meaning?

Should we do it seven times, or we should do it 491 times?

Or is there a different meaning there?

Because you see, in Psalm 90, verse 10, it talks about the lifespan of man.

Psalms 90:10

Now that's not a for sure thing, but it talks about 70 years.

So what Jesus did was he said 70 years, which would have been very common knowledge for people in this time, was 70 years.

Well, he's talking about a lifespan.

Times seven, completeness.

You're always supposed to forgive your brother.

That it's 70, the year, the lifespan, times seven completely.

It doesn't matter how many times that somebody sins against you, you should always forgive them.

And then he jumps into the parable.

He goes right into it.

He said, There was a king.

So that's your first part.

We need to understand the king of the parable.

There was a king.

Now the king, we don't know for sure, but we believe that what he's saying is more of a master, a lord of a land.

That he has he has lots of servants, he has lots of people working for him, he he owns a lot of real estate, and he's just employing these people.

But he also, because they owe him money, he continues to go to that.

So as we're looking, that a lot of people would have been enslaved to him.

And that's what we see a lot, even in the book of James.

Um he starts and he says, I, James, a bond servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That meant that he couldn't repay that debt.

That there was nothing that he could do.

He was a bondservant, he was a slave.

And see, the fun part about that is James was actually the half-brother of Jesus.

So he was talking and saying, I'm a slave, I'm a bondservant.

There's nothing I can do to get away from it.

But he was his brother.

So you see, we see these terms, but once again, these people are servants.

They're connected to this king.

Okay?

So, next, there was a debt.

Now, this is the fun part.

This is a fun part.

I'm a math guy, the youth know that.

Some of y'all know that.

David's about to get the explanation of his question, why I came up to him with all these math questions, you know, with the baby and all of that going on at the house.

I couldn't think.

I couldn't get my brain going.

So, um, so I was asking David, how do I get to this point of math?

I need to know this point.

And, you know, it was really big numbers, and he's good at that, and I'm not.

So here's where we're at.

The a talent, you see right there, it says 10,000 talents is what this guy owed him.

Anyone know what that means?

I knew kind of until I started studying it this week, and now I know exactly what it means.

A talent is the equivalent of six thousand denarii.

A denarii is the equivalent of one day's wage.

Okay?

So we're already talking about six thousand days' wage in one talent.

So, if we take today's, I took kind of an average of uh what a a worker of this sorts would make, it's about$70 for a day's wage.

Would we agree?

That's pretty pretty general uh average wage for somebody that's working a day,$70 a day.

If you take$70 a day times six thousand denarii, that's$4,200 or$420,000 in today's money.

$420,000 is a lot of money where I'll come from.

$420,000 is a lot of money.

But you see, don't forget, that's just one talent.

We're talking about 10,000 talents.

That in today's currency is$4.2 billion.

With a B.

A B.

4.2 billion dollars.

So this servant owed the master$4.2 billion dollars.

That's a lot of money.

It's a lot of money.

Let's move on, shall we?

We'll get back to that.

I'm not gonna set the hook, I got the hook set.

I'm just not gonna reel it in yet.

Now there was a response.

You see, the the king wanted justice.

If I was the king, I would have gone way before it got to$4.2 billion to go get my money.

But that's a different point, okay?

He came and he wanted an answer.

He wanted to know where his money was.

And he came to him and he said, Where is the money that he was trying to settle accounts with everybody?

So he said, Where's the money that I'm owed?

The$4.2 billion.

And he said, Oh, I don't have it.

Uh please be patient with me.

I don't have it, I will pay it back to you.

And he he said, Well, no, no, you're gonna be sold.

I'm gonna sell you, I'm gonna sell your family, I'm gonna sell everything you own, and then I'm gonna get my money back.

And that's when the servant begged and he pleaded and he said, Please be patient, please be patient.

And so the king said, Okay, all right, I'm gonna be patient.

Not only that, I'm gonna forgive the debt and I'm gonna release you from my service.

Because he said he released him and he forgave the debt.

So not only did he say, Don't worry about the 4.2 billion, he said, I don't even need you to work for me anymore.

That calls for a hill click if you're for me.

You know, like, whoo! Yes, let's go.

That's awesome, that's great.

But you see, that's not what he did.

Look what it says in the next part.

It said, but that went servant, that but that servant went out.

With that conjunction of but there that pulls those two thoughts together, okay?

This is pay attention, youth.

This is what I'm trying to tell you.

You gotta read the Bible like it's there.

But that servant went out.

It didn't say, but he spent four years doing whatever and then he went.

He left the service of that king and he went out and found another servant.

Okay?

It's an immediate action there.

It's an immediate action.

He wanted the money that was gone.

He immediately forgot what had been done for him.

He immediately forgot that he had just been released of all that money and of service to the king.

There was a debt.

Now, this is the fun part.

This is when we start to see it, okay?

We've already talked about a denarius or a denarii.

That's mul that's a plural.

A denarius is one.

Denarius is equivalent to a day's wage, which we said was$70, for example's sake, right here.

A hundred denarii times seventy, seven thousand dollars.

Now, do you think these are just numbers that Jesus was throwing out?

Just I think I'll tell a story and just started throwing stuff out there?

Absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

If you take seven thousand and four point two billion, this is the question that I needed uh David and Gary Welch's help on.

That seven thousand is sixteen hundred thousandths of one percent of what four point two billion is.

So you see, a drop in the bucket isn't even a good illustration for that.

It was nothing.

It was nothing.

It'd be like if I asked Donald Trump to buy me a dollar tea from McDonald's.

It's nothing.

You don't even think about that.

But this was so important to him.

That's the equivalent of sixty million denarii.

Sixty million.

That's almost one hundred and sixty-four.

Actually, it's almost one hundred and sixty-five thousand years of work what he was ever given.

Over a hundred days of work.

So you see these numbers, they're they're not they're not coincidental, they're not happenstance.

Let's move on.

Let's look at the servant's response, okay?

What does it say that the servant did?

He went to him in anger, choking him, and demanding his money.

This was not out of love.

This was not out of forgiveness and grace and mercy.

This was out of anger and greed.

So what was the reaction?

The reaction was that the master came back and he said, Shouldn't you have forgiven him his debt?

If I forgave you all of that.

So he backed up and he said, forget it.

He threw him in prison.

And he ordered it that way until all the debt was repaid.

So now that we've dug in a little bit deeper at what this parable means, let's look at just a couple of truths that we can pull out of this parable that Jesus did.

Let's understand the meaning now that we understand the story.

Okay?

There's two different groups here.

There's what God does.

Now, if you've been in church any time at all, you could probably tell that kind of where Jesus was going is that God is the master or the king, and that we would be the servant.

Okay?

Just to catch you up to that point.

That what God does, the first thing that he does with us, and he does this with all of us, is that he's firm with us.

God's firm with us.

Sometimes we need that.

Pastor Danny kind of hit on that last week.

That God's firm with us.

Sometimes we need correction, we need direction, we need to be rebuked and put back in the right path of where we should be going.

Let's look at Matthew 18, 25.

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

God's firm.

He demands justice.

Our God is a just God.

Yes, he is a merciful God, and he's a patient God, and he's a loving God, but he is a just God.

He demands payment to be made for the things that are owed to him.

And we see that in our sinful life, in our sinful nature.

He demands for us to pay him what is owed.

Now we have ways to do that through Jesus and through his sacrifice and through the cross.

But he demands payment.

And if we don't have that payment to him, then we will be sold.

We will be thrown and payment be made.

He disciplines us gently.

It's something that only a father can do.

Only a mother can do.

It's to gently discipline.

You see, see, when when when Cassie and I discipline James or Jude, and thankfully not Joe yet, but we know that's coming because he's got James and Jude to help him get to that point.

But but when we discipline the boys, it's not because we're angry, it's not because we're mad at them.

It's not because we're anything.

It's because we want them to do right in the sight of the Lord.

That's what we have to keep reminding ourselves sometimes when we go into the bathroom and there's an entire roll of toilet paper that we just put in there, flush down the commode, and it's like, oh, what are we doing?

What are we doing?

We have to remind ourselves that it's because we love them, we care for them.

And that's what the master is showing here.

He wants payment, but he does it in a way that's soft and is gentle.

He wants the payment.

Look at Hebrews 12, 6.

Hebrews 12, 6.

For the Lord disciplines the one he loves.

He chastises every son whom he receives.

Now, now think about how messed up it would be if James got away with anything in the world and Jude didn't.

Would that be fair?

Would that be loving?

Would that be just?

If Jude got in trouble every single day all day long and James could do anything he wanted to?

Absolutely not.

But you see, what we do is we just like God, we discipline the ones we love.

We love our kids.

We care for our kids.

We want them to be raised and do right and grow up in the ways of the Lord.

But you see, if we don't treat them equally, if we don't treat them fairly together, then that's not love.

That can't be love.

Because you see what it's saying, the Lord disciplines the ones he loves.

So, separate side note, think about that the next time that God's stepping on your toes, as Danny always says, be glad he's stepping on your toes.

If he wasn't stepping on your toes, you should be worried.

See, disciplines the ones he loves.

Look at Proverbs 3.11.

My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof.

That's what I'm saying there.

You don't despise what God's doing for you.

Don't despise this direction, this correction that he's giving you, because he's doing it because he loves you.

Yeah, despise it if somebody's not doing it out of love.

If somebody's just being mean, that's different.

But he's doing it out of love.

He's doing it because he cares, because he wants you to be on the right path.

This was one of our memory verses a couple of weeks ago, 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.

All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

That the man of God may be complete and equipped in every good work.

So that's why he's doing it.

He's trying to direct us.

He's trying to train us, just like a coach would do.

Think about Jason Neely.

He's a baseball coach for a middle school.

Think about how weird and crazy it would be if his team was doing stuff wrong.

If they were short hopping the ball to second base too much.

And he didn't try and correct them, so they didn't short hop it.

And he just said, eh.

Oh well, that's fine.

It doesn't really matter.

But he trains them, he coaches them.

He teaches them.

He tries to work on their swing.

He tries to work on the outfield, the infield, the catcher.

He wants them to all work together and be seamless and smooth in their playing because they're working towards a goal.

You see, that's what God's doing for us is that we are working towards a goal.

We're working towards his goal.

And unless we're all working together like cogs in a clock, and it's chaos.

That's why he corrects.

That's why he rebukes.

That's why he teaches.

That's why he tries to build us up together in him because he's got this picture.

The youth has heard me talk about the picture.

There's this giant picture that God's painting.

And all we've got is one little swatch, the sample set we're trying to, that he's working on with us.

If we're only focused on this one little swatch, we're thinking, oh, I'll bet it's a beaver.

No, I think it's a guitar.

No, it's not a guitar.

It's a grassy field.

No.

We can't see the picture.

That's why it's so important that we listen to his direction, that we follow his direction.

Last one before we move on.

Romans 11, 22.

Note then the kindness and the severity of God.

The severity toward those who have fallen.

But God's kindness to you provided you continue in his kindness.

Otherwise, you too will be cut off.

Kindness sows kindness, and severity sows severity.

That's what that verse is saying.

That if you are following in the kindness of God, his kindness is going to be reaped back onto you.

But oh, be careful.

It's just like the last verse says here in Matthew 18, verse 35.

Matthew 18:35

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

See, kindness reaps kindness, severity reaps severity.

God is patient with us.

God is patient with us.

We've all heard that phrase before, you know.

There's just a few of those things that we know what God is.

God is love, God is patient, God is kindness, God cares for us, he's compassionate.

Look at these verses here.

The servant begged for patience.

See, he begged for patience.

He said, I will repay you.

Please just be patient with me.

And the master was.

He said, You know what?

You're right.

I'm going to be patient with you.

Psalm 86, 15.

But you, O Lord, are a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Now that's the most, I guess we're going to call a scripture popular.

That's the most popular of those verses.

But that verse, that phrase that God is slow to anger and rich in love, happens a bunch.

I tried to find exactly how many, and then it got to the point where I was counting and counting and counting, and I couldn't continue to find them.

Okay?

But that phrase happens a bunch in the Old Testament.

And here's what I discovered in that.

It's used in Nahum, Joel, Nehemiah, Exodus, Numbers, Jonah, and Psalms, just to name a few.

Okay?

That last one was from Psalms.

For the most part, who wrote Psalms?

David.

We know who wrote Jonah.

Jonah.

I went a trick question.

Sorry.

And think about for we talk about Numbers and Exodus.

Moses.

And who was the characters in those?

Not a trick question.

David, Moses, and Jonah.

Those are just to name a few, okay?

Think about what they're saying.

Think about their lives, first of all.

Think about David was an adulterer.

Moses had an anger problem.

Jonah, just flat-out rim from God.

But look at what they said.

But you, O Lord, are merciful and gracious.

You're slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

They were sinners just like you and me.

But they caught it.

They recognized it.

They recognized that God is slow to anger and he's rich in steadfast love.

Steadfast, another word, for patient.

For patient love.

See, once again, for the parents out there, that's what we have with our kids.

We have a patient love.

Now it's not perfect.

By no means am I perfect.

My kids will be the first to tell you.

Sometimes I'm the opposite of patient.

But it's patient love.

We don't give up on them after one mess up.

We don't give up on them after they waste that roll of toilet paper and say, Well, forget it, I'm done.

I'm not going to parent you anymore.

It's not the way it works.

We say that it's a patient love.

We work with them.

We walk with them.

Look at Numbers 14, 18.

Numbers 14, 18.

The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Yeah, we get that.

We've we found that.

That's one of those verses where that's mentioned again.

But look here.

Look here.

Forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty.

Visiting the iniquity of the fathers of the children to the third and fourth generation.

See, you we've we've covered that, that God is patient, he's compassionate, he's slow to anger, he's rich and abounding love.

But he won't clear the guilty.

He won't clear the guilty.

Let's move on.

God is merciful to us.

God is merciful to us.

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

He shows mercy on us who have no hope to be forgiven.

There's no way that we can be forgiven.

Would you agree?

We talked about the 4.2 billion.

If you today, if four of you won the like the biggest lottery ever, I don't I don't do the lottery stuff, so I don't know.

But if you won the lottery, I know that they when they get really big, they start talking about them on the news, and they're like 280 million, stuff like that, 300 million, and people start to really flip out about it, like, oh my goodness.

When once again, the math just doesn't work on the lottery, so don't do that.

But but if you with the if you won four times in a row and it was three hundred million dollars, you'd still have three billion dollars to go on that debt.

So so you see, there is no way that that debt could be repaid.

You see that now, right?

That we've broken down these numbers into today's numbers.

4.2 billion dollars.

If you owed that to somebody, there's no way you could pay it.

Absolutely none.

But look here.

He shows mercy, and even just like back up.

The 4.2 billion.

There's no way it could be forgiven.

And let's look here again.

But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious.

You're slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

He is merciful and he is gracious.

Let's break those words down.

Merciful.

What is merciful?

What is mercy?

It's forgiveness.

Mercy is when you deserve something and somebody says, Oh, you know what?

We're not gonna do that.

I'm gonna have mercy on you.

Think about the kings in the in the gladiator times when they would say, uh, you know, no, we're not gonna kill him.

They'd have mercy on him.

Okay?

And gracious.

What is gracious?

If God gives graciously to us, he gives so much more than we ever need.

So not only is he merciful, not only is he merciful, he makes sure that the things we do we don't get the things that we deserve, he gives us more of that mercy than we actually need.

So you see, this is this is completely usurping the entire setup of that 4.2 billion.

That's why he used such an elaborate number.

Think about what the people that Jesus told this parable to.

They said, 10,000 talents.

I've never seen that much money.

Who has that much money?

They're trying to equivalate it to a king or somebody in that time.

And they couldn't come up with it because it was such an obscure, just random number.

And then he pulled it back to the 7,000.

But you see, he is merciful and he is gracious.

He gives it when we don't even need it.

And here's the the verse to sum that whole section up.

Romans 5.8.

Romans 5.8.

Some of you know it.

But God, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

You see, that's mercy, that's grace, that's forgiveness.

That's this whole thing summed up into one verse.

One short little verse.

That's when he exemplified his grace and his mercy to us best.

Isn't that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us?

So, with that being said, let's look at two things very quickly.

What we do.

What we do.

We must show mercy.

Let me say that again.

We must show mercy.

32 and 33 in Matthew 18.

Then the 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 servants as I had mercy on you?

Look at what he says.

I forgave you all that debt.

You see, even the master realizes that it's not about there's not a difference here.

It was all that debt.

He realized that as in in comparison to what he was forgiven and what he was unwilling to forgive, it's a night and day difference.

It's the 1600 thousandths of a percent that he wouldn't forgive, even though he was forgiven of so much more.

The point of the parable is not the forgiveness of the servant's heart.

The point of the parable is not the$4.2 billion.

The point of the parable is not the reaction of the king towards the servant, even though all of that is important.

The point of the parable is the servant's unforgiving heart.

See, the point of the parable is that the servant was unwilling to forgive his brother.

That's where it all comes back to.

That that, yes, I wanted to make sure that you knew the connection of in taking the money out of it, how much we were forgiven by our king, how much we were forgiven by our Lord, and then how minuscule these things that come up in our life that we're not willing to forgive of.

Do you see that it's not about the money?

It's not about the connection between the king and the master, it's not about any of that.

The real point of this story is the forgiveness of the brother's heart.

And we see that right there in Matthew 18, 35.

And so also, this is Jesus' final point, this is his right hook at the end of the sermon.

This is a conclusion.

He says, so also, so also will my father do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

That's the point he was trying to make.

It's about forgiveness.

It's about forgiveness of our brothers.

Sometimes it's hard.

Yes, I'll give you that.

Look at James 2, 12 through 13.

So speak and so act as those who are being judged under the law of liberty.

For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment.

Look at Matthew 6, 14 through 15.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

I'm speaking from experience here, so hear me.

Don't harbor that in your heart.

Don't do it.

You have to forgive.

Because when you don't, and you let that take root, it hurts so much more than what you think it's going to.

That when you harbor that inside, it leads to bitterness, it leads to anger, leads to hatred.

And you want to know who that hurts?

Not the person you're not forgiving.

It hurts you and it hurts your relationship with God.

You have to let go and you have to forgive.

John 8, 36 says, for if the Son has set you free, you are free indeed.

You see, he has set us free.

He has forgiven us.

He has taken that burden, that shame, that, that, that, that sin out of our life.

But you see, if we don't let him take that, if we don't let him have that and set us free, then we can't truly be merciful.

Matthew 5.7, it's part of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

That's what it's talking about.

If we show mercy, then we receive mercy.

And the youth have heard this too in our James study.

What is it?

If you expect to be, if you expect to be shown mercy, you better be showing mercy.

If you expect to be shown mercy, you better be showing mercy.

The last part.

We've chewed on it, we've tossed it around.

But what's so important for you to realize is that none of this is possible without one thing happening.

Without one thing happening.

In 26 and 27.

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 the debt in order for the servant to truly be free of that debt.

He had to receive that gift.

He had to receive mercy.

Because you see, if we don't receive mercy, if we don't initially receive that in our hearts, there's no way we can actually live out our faith in a way that people will see that.

Do you see that it requires us accepting that gift before any of this is possible?

See, that's why you see a world now that's that's being torn apart, being being tortured, the the hatred, the despise that's going on with with different cities and with different communities in our country, that they're fighting, they're angry, they're they're in just all of these things that are happening, that they're going at it with each other.

But you see, you first have to let mercy take its place in your heart, forgiveness to take its place in your heart, before you could expect to see that anywhere else.

Ephesians 2, 4 through 7.

But God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved and raised up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Those coming ages, yes, I do believe that is when we go with him in glory, but the coming ages can be here.

If we let that forgiveness explode out of our lives, that we're not harboring this with each other so that people actually are able to see the forgiveness that we've received from Christ.

How's anybody supposed to believe that Christ has set us free if we're not letting other people free?

This is my last verse, and I'm through.

Titus 3, 4 through 5.

But when the goodness and loving kindness of our Lord and Savior appeared, he saved us.

Not because of works done by us in His righteousness, but according to His own mercy by the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit.

See, it's mercy that saved us.

Yes, it was the cross.

Yes, it was the blood of Jesus.

Yes, it was the perfect Lamb that He was.

Yes, it was that He was fully God and fully man.

Based on this verse in Titus, it was by His mercy that we were saved.

Thanks again for tuning into this week's message.

We pray that your life has been changed.

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We hope you have a wonderful day and again, God bless you.