Forgive and Forgive: Living in Forgiveness | Part 2

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Do you have people in your life that owe you things?

Do you have people in your life that owe you money?

People in your life that owe you an apology?

People in your life that owe you a year of your life because of the way they treated you, or a season that just stacked up debts.

This is what forgiveness deals with.

It's why it's a weighty subject, is because many of us walk through life carrying various debts.

Here's what forgiveness is forgiveness is the God-given ability to say to someone else, you don't owe me anything anymore.

The ability to look at somebody and cancel a debt.

It's the ability to freely give away something that is sometimes really hard to give away.

This, this is a really, really difficult thing.

I think this is forgiveness.

I said this last week.

It's the most untapped resource in Christian life, I think.

Been a pastor for 15 years.

I see so many Christians not walk through life issuing forgiveness, but walk through life withholding it and harboring a kind of bitterness or resentment or vengeance over the course of your life as you grow and that accrues.

It's no way to live.

And yet that's how many of us live, Christian or non-Christian.

Forgiveness is a profound teaching.

It's something in Scripture that is not just suggested, it's commanded with some of the most, man, some of the strongest language.

Look at Matthew 6, verse 14.

Matthew 6:14

Jesus says this for if you forgive others their trespasses, you know, when trespasses, somebody steps in your territory and someone steps on your life, it's a sin, it's a grievance, it's hurt.

When someone says, if you forgive others that kind of thing, your heavenly father will forgive you.

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

You see, our experience of God's forgiveness is contingent upon our ability to issue forgiveness to others by God's power.

Now notice I said, I did not say that God's forgiveness is contingent upon our ability.

It's our experience of God's forgiveness that is contingent on our ability to issue it all by God's power.

Everything in forgiveness involves God.

And maybe you're struggling to believe in God right now.

And I hope that this message encourages you because here's what I want to say to you today: something maybe dramatic, but something I really, as I've been thinking and studying this and praying through this and praying for you this week, man, I am convinced that forgiveness, true and full forgiveness, is impossible without the power, the reality, and the relationship of the living God.

I just don't think it'll work.

I think at some level it'll work.

Like you can get by, forgive some people, kind of let things go.

But true forgiveness, forgiving difficult, difficult things, man.

Um I don't know if it's possible without God's power.

Our experience of God's forgiveness is contingent upon our ability to issue that forgiveness to other people by God's power.

You see, our relationships with each other, they are inextricably linked to our relationship with God.

We would love it to be separated.

And actually, most of us act and operate bifurcating our relationships with other people and our relationship with God, our spiritual life and our social life.

But the Old and New Testament have no concept of that.

The way that you treat somebody else is the way you relate to God, and the way you relate to God is through the way you treat other people.

It's just tied together.

They're inextricably linked.

You can't separate them.

And most of us try to ignore that or work to separate them and live lives lacking peace and grace and joy.

And I've lived that way before.

I've lived that way before.

And daily I can fight a temptation where I want to live that kind of way.

Forgiveness is essential for human life.

Desmond Tutu says, there is no future without forgiveness.

Without forgiveness, humanity itself has no future.

Are those dramatic statements enough to get us going?

Maybe they are.

Here's five lies we talked about last week.

I'll just go through them quickly.

Five lies about forgiveness, just because if you missed it last week, I'd love for you to listen to it last week.

But man, this is really important because I hear these lies all the time about forgiveness.

The first is this forgiveness is forgetting.

You know, you've heard it, forgive and forget.

But true forgiveness requires remembering.

Why?

Well, if we are gonna say you don't owe me anything anymore, we have to know what is owed.

Forgiveness requires remembering.

Secondly, a lie I hear all the time is that forgiveness is an event.

It's something we build up to, we issue, and after that, it's over.

So we say it all the time, I forgave them for that, past tense, like it already happened.

And what forgiveness really is, is a daily process of living in forgiveness towards the people that have hurt us.

To live constantly with those that are around us, saying, You don't owe me anything anymore, I'm not gonna hold it against you.

It's not an event, it's a process.

Thirdly, many people equate forgiveness with reconciliation.

They see it as the same thing.

You know, forgiveness and reconciliation are one and the same, meaning that we think when we issue forgiveness, everybody's gonna be friends again.

We're gonna be reunited and all is gonna be good, but that's not the truth.

You know, Jesus says in Matthew 18, and we're gonna look at this passage actually in particular this week, he says that we should forgive our brother or sister from the heart.

Meaning you don't have to talk to that person to forgive them.

Some people are really damaging, some people you should never speak to again.

Some people are unhealthy influences in your life, and to go back to them will enter their manipulative cycle once again.

You do not need to go back to them.

We can forgive people and not be reconciled.

God's heart is reconciliation, his command is forgiveness.

Fourth, forgiveness removes consequences.

We often think, this is one of the harder parts about forgiveness, is that if I issue it to you, you'll be scot-free.

You'll be released of the consequences that you must bear for what you have done.

That's why we think it's somewhat unjust.

But I put up there, no, you can actually forgive someone from a prison cell.

The example being Pope John Paul II, the assassin, the would-be assassin on his life, Mehmet Agjat, died in an Italian prison.

This is a picture weeks after he was shot, the Pope was shot, he recovered from a hospital his in the hospital, he went to the prison, he sat with him.

This iconic photo, he looks at him, he prays over him, the man who attempted to kill him, and he said, I love you and you don't owe me anything anymore.

Well, Agjat died in an Italian prison, and he lived pretty much all of his life in prison.

You see, we can forgive people and they will still maybe sleep in the bed that they made.

Forgiveness and consequences are not uh to be separated.

Sometimes they work together.

Finally, oftentimes we think forgiveness is free, like we're just gonna wave a magic wand and it'll be fine.

Nothing, you know, just kind of forget about it, like it's a lot like lie number one.

But we think there's no cost associated to it, but there is definitely a cost associated to forgiveness.

I said forgiveness has a cost, but it is freeing.

It's not free, but it's freeing.

You see, there is always a cost to offer forgiveness, but is there a cost to withholding it as well?

That's what we asked last week.

And we looked more last week at what does it look like to withhold it?

The withholding is bitterness, resentment.

It's no way to live.

I want to talk this week about the honest cost of issuing it and how we can possibly issue forgiveness when it costs so much.

Because important with this question is this What does it cost to offer forgiveness?

What's the cost to withhold it?

Key question after that which one is greater?

Is there a greater cost to withholding forgiveness than issuing it?

That's what we need to look at today.

Look at this quote from C.S.

Lewis in his famous book, Mere Christianity.

He says this everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive.

Right?

As we had during the war.

He wrote this right after World War II.

And then to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger.

It is not that people think this too high and difficult to virtue, forgiveness, it's not too high and difficult.

It is that they think of it as contemptible, it's like reprehensible, it's disgusting.

Then he imagines this conversation post-World War II.

I wonder, you know, a hypothetical person asking C.S.

Lewis, I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew, forgiving the Nazi regime.

He says, so do I.

I wonder very much.

I'm not trying to tell you in this book what I could do.

I can do precious little.

I am telling you what Christianity is.

I did not invent it.

I don't know how much has changed in the last century since he wrote this, because culturally and personally, forgiveness is also seen as somewhat contemptible.

In our culture today, there are certain aspects and places where to issue forgiveness is seen as an unjust action.

It is seen as something that is morally reprehensible because we think that it removes the consequences from someone.

And so culturally, depending on where you're at, your experience, your political persuasion, to forgive a racist or to forgive a terrorist or to forgive a murderer is seen, again, it's not a great act of justice and morality, but seen as an act of immorality and injustice.

And then personally, this operates in our life too.

People do things to us that we call unforgivable.

And the people in our life support us to not forgive people because of the egregious action that someone made on us.

It simply is so hard to imagine forgiveness when you imagine it at its grandest scale.

You and I, again, we can make it work for enough time for little things.

Someone's late to a lunch, you can forgive that and absorb the cost.

Someone lies to you, minor lie, you can forgive that, absorb the cost.

Someone messes up at work, right?

You see what I'm saying?

We can operate in the small debts.

But what happens when the debts stack up, man?

What happens when they get too high?

All of you have people in your life that they, man, you they've owed you something at some level to a point that you're going to need to figure out if you can even issue forgiveness.

I'm convinced that the fundamental reason we actually do not release people of their debts to us is because we cannot fathom the idea of absorbing the cost ourselves.

Because when they owe you, you want to make them pay.

And when you no longer make them pay, you kind of absorb it.

And you can't imagine bearing the thought of them being free.

So you enslave yourself.

So you hold it into yourself and say, I will continue to hold it on.

And imagining letting go of that seems impossible.

I get it, I've been there.

Told you a little bit of my story last week.

My father left when I was 19 years old.

We had a mostly a happy home growing up, and under unexplained and vague circumstances, my dad left.

And over the course of those years hurt my family and I in various ways.

That when I thought about forgiving him, it seemed wrong.

It seemed like the wrong thing to do.

But I started with a word from the living Jesus Christ, the one who died and rose again and reigns.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him.

Even if you don't believe that and you're not a Christian, at some level, what Jesus says about forgiveness should be inspected.

And he says, forgive and you'll be forgiven.

It is not a suggestion, it is a command with the highest stakes.

How do we issue forgiveness when the cost is so great?

How do we give it when the other party has nothing to say, no step forward, no repentance, no humility, but continues to harm us?

How do we do that?

The answer is in a parable in Matthew 19, or in Matthew 18.

So if you have a Bible, please go there with me.

Matthew chapter 18, starting in verse 21.

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

Peter, one of his disciples, one of Jesus' disciples, he comes up to him and he says this.

He asks him a question.

Matthew 18, 21.

Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

Now, how often will my brother sin against me?

This comes in the context of an important chapter in Matthew.

In fact, if you're in your physical Bible or you're on an app, just scroll up to the previous section.

The header on my Bible says, If your brother sins against you.

Jesus just unpacked his conflict resolution teaching, which is very simple.

He's like, if somebody sins against you, go tell them, and if they repent, you're a brother and sister.

Done.

You know?

It's easy.

Now if they don't, you bring more people to help bring a reconciliation about.

Then if they still don't listen, you bring the whole church before them.

And if they continue in unrepentance, you know, your whole community is going to confront them, okay?

And then Peter asks this question Well, what happens if they never repent?

How often should I forgive someone who sins against me?

What if they keep sinning against me?

What if they sin against me and they never come back to see me and never apologize, never say anything?

What happens then?

How often should I forgive?

He says this.

And I uh you know, how much how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

As many as seven times?

You know, the uh teaching of the rabbis in the day was three times.

Jewish teaching was forgive somebody three times after that, they can be put in prison.

After that, make them pay the debt.

After that, justice.

So Peter is doing like the church kid thing where he's like, he's doubling, he's more than doubling the amount, right?

He's like, Jesus, seven?

You know?

He's doing what like I hope Jude will do one day, like the church answer, you know, Pastor's kid.

Um now Jesus says to him in verse 22, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven, or seventy-seven times, depending on your translation.

Seventy-seven times.

Now, is he making a literal statement?

No, the Jewish number of completion was seven, and he's making a play on the words of hyperbole to say, uh not seven times.

So not the rabbinical three, not even more than double the rabbinical three.

I'm saying to you to learn to forgive someone endlessly.

That's the teaching.

That there would be a way you and I could continually give forgiveness no matter how much people harm us.

It seems unjust.

It seems insane.

That's why Jesus kind of knew and he started telling a story as he does.

Verse 23.

Therefore, he says, the kingdom of heaven, which is like the range of God's effective will.

It's like the space he takes up, where in that space what he wants is being done.

He said, that space, it's like this.

It's like a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.

Settling accounts was a very serious thing.

In that day, you could be sold into slavery.

Uh, settling accounts was also the accounts was always taken by the person in power.

It wasn't like you had an Excel spreadsheet that you two shared the dock on and you could kind of work on it together and be like, hmm, I owe you a little bit.

It wasn't a bank statement where the bank is like, this is how much you owe, and this is how no.

It was given by the person in power and they told you how much they owed.

So this is a scary moment.

This is heightened drama.

He wished to settle accounts with his servants.

Verse 24.

When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents.

You know how much that is?

I'd be shocked if you did.

Okay.

Uh 10,000 talents is an old school, it's an ancient uh monetary value.

Scholars range on this as they do.

The lowest I saw was$5 billion.

The highest I saw was 12 billion.

And you should laugh because Jesus put this into a context where it would be laughable how much he owed.

10,000 talents.

You know, one talent was 20 years of a day laborer's wage.

One talent.

And he says this person comes to him and owes 10,000.

At this point, we should be laughing and thinking it's astronomical.

Verse 25.

And he says he's uh and since he could not pay, duh, right?

Like it's this natural, okay.

So since he couldn't pay, his master ordered him to be sold.

Now, this would be a totally normal thing.

In fact, this would actually be a consolation.

To sell yourself into bondservanthood or slavery would be one of the options in settling accounts.

Uh, in ancient Roman world, Jewish law, to sell yourself and sell your family into slavery would be a way to pay off debts and not be executed or put in prison.

It's a fine offer.

It's not crazy.

To us, it seems crazy.

To that day, it was a way debts were repaid, okay?

It was to just give labor when you couldn't offer the coin.

So he ordered the master to be sold with him and his wife and his children and all he had and the payment to be made.

26.

So the servant, he fell on his knees, imploring him, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything, will he?

No, there's no way.

Okay.

But he's desperate.

He's desperate.

He's just like, I will pay, I'll do anything.

And out of pity or compassion, the Greek says, movement of love in his body.

The master said to the servant, he looks at the servant and he released him and forgave him of his debt.

In the Greek it reads really cool, released him and forgiving him of the debt is in the same word group.

It's like double freedom.

He let him go, he didn't have to be his bondservant anymore, and he doesn't have to pay.

He let him go, and he doesn't have to pay.

Now he could have said, You don't have to pay, but you still have to, you know, work for me.

But it's that he issued freedom and canceled the debt.

Two words in the same word group, a really beautiful little line right there.

The servant looks at him, you don't owe me$10 billion anymore.

You can go.

But when the same servant went out, verse 28, he found his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denare.

You know how much that is, class?

I'd be shocked if you did again.

Um, it's about ten thousand dollars.

Okay?

About ten thousand dollars.

So now I know this is Silicon Valley, so for some of you, ten billion might not seem astronomical.

It is for normal people.

So can we just get there today?

Ten grand, maybe that's not a lot to you, it's a lot to me.

It's significant, but is it payable?

Yeah, it's payable.

It is definitely payable.

So he looked at the man who owned 10 grand, having just been forgiven, 10 billion, 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.

Sound familiar?

It's nearly identical in the Greek in the original languages.

31.

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

Then the master summoned him and he 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, which means till he died.

So also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother, and here's our line take from your heart.

This story should hurt a little bit.

But it is a story that is given to us to save our lives, to save us from the prison of bitterness that we put ourselves in.

How do you forgive endlessly?

How do you forgive 77 times?

70 times seven.

It's radical but true, you guys.

I think forgiveness, in the fullest sense, it is only possible when we know the living God of the Bible.

I really think this story is to put us in a kind of corner in a good way, to say what we owe versus what is owed us is very different.

I believe we can only give forgiveness after having received it from God.

And I'm telling you, all of the ways that we try to forgive in our own human ingenuity, I think it falls short.

There's a big movement in self-help right now around forgiveness.

In fact, there's an institute at Stanford right now, the Institute of Forgiveness, where psychologists are understanding the positive psychological ramifications of saying, you don't owe me anything anymore.

But I have a problem with some of that stuff that I've read as I look through it because it lacks what we're talking about here.

How do you forgive the unforgivable?

Like I said, there's so much we can do out of our own human ingenuity, but what happens when the deck, the deck gets stacked too high and the debt amounts to too much?

I think we need a deeper resource as human beings than our own self-help.

I think we need a deeper resource than looking inside and being able to just issue forgiveness to other people.

I believe that comes through the inspection of the two debts in this parable.

Jesus tells this story with two debts.

I don't want you to confuse the characters, by the way.

You are not the king in that story, okay?

You are not the one owed$10 billion.

All right?

In this story, you're also not the person who owes the 10 grand necessarily.

You and I are the person in the middle.

We have been forgiven an incomprehensible amount, and yet we hold on to a comprehensible amount.

We stew in it, we ferment in our own bitterness.

You see, you and I are in massive debt to God, this parable acknowledges.

But this parable also acknowledges that you and I have debts with each other.

And I love in this parable that he uses the hundred denare, the 10 grand.

Because he there's other monetary amounts Jesus could have used that are like shekels, like pennies.

And he could have like made it super, super big where it's like, you were forgiven 10 billion, and man, you can't even forgive pennies.

But he's not saying that.

See, I told you, and you might agree with me, that 10 grand is significant.

It is.

But the thing about the 10 grand, it is it is comprehensible and it's payable.

And so we hold on to that debt, but it is serious.

And I think it's very gentle and generous of Jesus to say, you have been hurt, and people do owe you something.

They don't owe you nothing.

They owe you something significant.

And I want to acknowledge that now today.

Because Jesus seems to acknowledge that.

Like your debt that you owe, or that is that is owed between you and another person, it is serious.

But you have been forgiven a debt.

That debt, the 10,000 talents, is incomprehensible, meaning we can't really understand it.

It's absolutely incomprehensible.

Like it should be, like I said, maybe some of you can because we're in the tech land, but to me,$10 billion, I don't even know how to start thinking about that.

And Jesus is saying that's kind of like your relationship with the Heavenly Father, that there's an incomprehensible debt.

Secondly, the debt is unpayable, right?

The debt is completely unpayable, meaning, okay, I said that one talent was 20 years of pay for a day labor.

It's unpayable in this lifetime.

It will take multiple lifetimes to pay.

Thirdly, it is serious though.

Just because we don't get it or can't comprehend it or can't pay it doesn't mean we don't owe it.

It's serious and it's real.

But you'll see if that debt to God is incomprehensible, unpayable, and serious, you'll see that the debt between you and another person only shares one of those attributes.

It's the last one.

Because the debts we owe to each other is comprehensible.

It's also very payable.

Right?

Somebody owes you an apology, they can grant you the apology.

Somebody owes you an explanation, they can grant you the explanation.

At some level, it's payable.

The thing that it shares is that it is serious.

But it's serious at a scale, at a certain scale.

You see, on its own, when you view the 10 grand by itself with nothing else, it might seem incomprehensible, unpayable, and serious when it's on its own.

But what Jesus is trying to help you see, and he is trying to help you see something, is a picture into eternal reality that you cannot comprehend except by this parable.

You cannot understand the debt that you owe to God.

And that might sound dramatic, but welcome to Christianity.

Christianity sets up for yourself something you could never imagine.

A world in which God might grant you more mercy and more forgiveness than you can fathom.

I like Tim Keller, he says, the gospel of Jesus Christ, it says that we are more sinful and wicked than we could possibly imagine, but we are more loved and forgiven than we ever dared dream.

There's a debt there that without Christianity you'll never see the two alongside each other.

But what this parable is inviting us to do is to compare the sins.

And you might think debt in a weird way, it's a weird way of talking about our relationship with God because you might think, well, I haven't done that many wrong things.

The reason Jesus makes a laughable amount of money in this story, like a laughable amount, is because he doesn't want us to think it's like, you did this wrong, and that's one negative in your relationship with God.

Then when you were 10, you did this wrong thing and it was this negative, and you've just racked all of that.

That's not his teaching.

He's not a moral misdeeds god who just, you know, just condemns every little minor sin.

Sin, biblically, it's so much bigger than little minor moral misdeeds or many moral misdeeds stacked on top of each other.

Behavior.

Sin, the result of sin is behavior.

Sin is the disease that turns the self upon itself.

Sin is pride.

Sin is arrogance.

Sin is resistance.

Sin is rebellion.

Sin is a closed mind, a stubborn heart, the ability to look away when grace is issued.

Sin is the proclivity in the human being to say, I will do this on my own.

And so long as we have lived in that state which all of us are in, the debt is incomprehensible.

What would happen?

How can God forgive this debt?

How can he forgive?

How can he allow and look upon all of humanity?

Because you notice this story, it's just one 10 billion exchange.

Just like if Chris and I owe 10 billion and you own 10 billion and the person sitting to your right owes 10 billion, like, can we do the math and stack that up?

It's incomprehensible.

How does God forgive such a massive debt?

What is the value, even of all of that?

See, it sounds to me like Jesus is leading us somewhere, which is that the value, the only way to answer that great of value is the very life of God Himself.

How do you absorb the cost?

How do you forgive the debt?

God's very life would have to be laid down.

And that's what the New Testament reflects upon in Colossians 2.13.

And you who were dead in your trespasses in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, having forgiven all of us our trespasses.

There it is.

In what way?

How did he do it?

By canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

And where did it go?

He set it aside, nailing it to the cross.

The first step in forgiveness is to move our eyes from the debt we are owed to the debt we've been forgiven of by God and then compare the two.

Friends, the only way I can see us with a future is to look at this parable with seriousness and introspection.

To see at the heart of it that this is God's great care over your life, that He is so compassionate and so tender that He's forgiven you of more than you even know.

I think we're more sinful than we could possibly imagine, but because it's been forgiven, then we're more loved than we can imagine.

Could it be that you actually are missing out on the more love of God because you're holding on to the 10 grand that someone else owes you?

And it's real.

It's a real debt, it's acknowledged.

But Jesus is offering us the ability to compare the debts so that in light of the massive eternal debt that we have been forgiven, we can issue it out freely to anyone 77 times.

And we do, we have to live in forgiveness to other people.

I don't think we have a future without it.

I don't think I had a future without it.

You know, told you about my dad who left.

I was working up the courage and thinking about forgiveness a little incorrectly through my youth and 19, 20, 21, when I decided I needed to fly to Hong Kong, where my dad was living at the time, and I needed to forgive him.

I was viewing it still like an event.

I was gonna go there, I was gonna say, Dad, this is what you've done, this is what's wrong, and here's how I've forgiven you.

And somebody saved my life before I got on that plane.

Before I got on that plane, a pastor in my church came up to me.

He knew what was going on, he was in an accountability group with me at the time.

He said, Hey Chris, how are you feeling about the trip tomorrow?

How are you feeling about talking with your dad?

I said, Oh, I'm feeling good.

Like I'm gonna say all this stuff, I'm gonna say, I've forgiven you, you don't owe me anything anymore.

And I just feel like I'm coming back with like a lighter burden.

I'm gonna come back from Hong Kong with just freedom and lightness.

And he said something to me that seemed weird at the time, but I think it saved my life.

And he said this: He said, Chris, just be prepared for when you say all of that, for your dad to have no idea what you're talking about.

I was like, how could he have no idea?

I'm gonna lay it all out for him, I'm gonna say I've forgiven it, and we're gonna, again, miss thinking.

I'm we're gonna be wrecked, we're gonna be okay.

And it's not gonna be the same, and I get all that, but like, it'll be over.

And he also told me to read this parable, which I did.

And I went to Hong Kong and I talked with my father, and it went exactly how that pastor told me it was gonna go.

I said everything, and my dad basically looked at me and said, Well, it's been a hard couple years, and I guess, yeah, some big mistakes happen and life's hard, and glad you're here.

No reciprocation.

See, here's what I learned.

We don't forgive as an event, we live in forgiveness towards other people.

And you and I need the power of the good news of Jesus Christ to resource us when we're disappointed at an astronomical level.

You see, what's the other option?

We're gonna just bear the cost ourselves?

Through this parable, Jesus says the cost has been paid by Jesus Christ.

And because it's been paid, we can join with God in the activity of forgiveness in this world and experience his grace as we give it to other people.

Because here's the thing about that trip to Hong Kong.

I told you I was looking forward to coming back free.

But after that guy said that to me, and after I read this parable, I didn't come back free.

I went there free.

I wasn't banking on because here's what I realized.

I realized he's I was still accruing debt.

Because what was I doing?

I was expecting a response.

I was issuing forgiveness with an asterisk.

I was expecting something from him still.

And after that was said to me, and this parable sat in my bones, I realized I was missing out on God's grace, and I was missing out on freedom, and I was missing the opportunity to see things as they were.

My true identity, which is this I am not primarily one who is owed, I am primarily one who is forgiven.

To let that identity operate us and instruct everything we do will change our lives.

You are not primarily someone who is owed, you are primarily one who is forgiven, and that helps you operate in all of your relationships with the people that owe you something.

And so, my friends, I want to give you an exercise in reflection.

This has been a two-week brief series, and I want to invite the band out, and I want to give you two phrases for you to consider and to think about.

I want you to reflect and stay seated during this next song and think about this first reflection.

I am living in forgiveness from what?

Try to comprehend the incomprehensible.

What has God forgiven you of?

In what ways has God looked at your life and said, You don't owe me anything anymore?

Giving you grace.

And secondly, I am living in forgiveness towards who?

Towards what?

All I'm trying to do is shepherd you in a moment of comparing the debts.

I'm just trying to get us to look at this parable and actually apply it in live time, to think through these things at a spiritual and deep level.

What has God forgiven you of?

And how is that informing how you issue forgiveness towards other people?

As this song plays, as our worship team leads you, would you be led in forgiveness towards the people in your life?

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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