What Did Their Sin Cost You?

Father, we lift up your name in this place.

We adore you.

You are the God worthy of all praise.

We continue to praise you, worship you in every area of our life.

Lord, help us to live for you in all areas.

God, we love you for all that you've done for us.

Through the shedding of blood through your Son Jesus Christ at the cross, for the forgiveness of sins, raising him from the dead so that we could be made right with you.

So that we could receive mercy.

So that we could receive grace.

God, we love you and we worship you always in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

So if I uh struggle throughout the sermon, I apologize in advance.

Uh, I want to get the prayer that we've been going through up on the screen.

And if I can ask the church to say this prayer with me this morning, starting with our Father in Heaven.

Ready?

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Amen.

I want you to hear the middle line one more time.

And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Jesus teaches this prayer.

He finishes it.

And then he does something he doesn't do anywhere else.

He goes back.

He picks out this one line and says more about it.

He doesn't do that with hallowed be your name or your kingdom come.

He does it only with this line.

In the same chapter in Matthew 6, you drop down and you look at verse 14 and 15, it says, For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins.

Now there's a tension there that we're going to address in a little bit here.

But first I want you to notice what Jesus did here.

In verse 12, he uses the word debts, the language of money.

Something you know, something uh owed to someone else, right?

Debts.

Two verses later, he says sin, and then he tells you whose sin when they sin against you, if you do not forgive others their sins.

So the debt Jesus is talking about isn't actually money.

The debt is sin.

The sin you've committed against God, the sin you've committed against somebody in your life, and the sin that has been committed against you.

He's talking about sin.

So let's start off.

Let's actually talk about our debt to God.

Because we gotta understand the vertical if we want to understand the horizontal.

And honestly, I think the church has gone soft with the word sin.

Not just this church, I'm talking about everywhere.

Look, most of us don't mind calling our sin a weakness.

We're fine with the word mistakes or broken.

And look, and we are those things.

We are broken, you know, we are weak, those are good things, but I think those words let us off a bit too easy.

A debt is different.

A debt doesn't just let you off.

A debt is something you owe.

You can regret a mistake or a bad decision and just move on.

You cannot regret a debt away.

It sits there.

Sorry doesn't just clear it.

See, Jesus uses debt as a picture of sin.

And how much you owe, hear this, how much you owe depends on who you owe it to.

See, the consequence of sin is proportionate to the power and authority of whom you have sinned against.

Okay, let me illustrate it this way.

We're gonna take the sin of lying, okay, as an example, because I think lying is something every single person in this room has done.

Yes?

Amen?

We've all lied, right?

Okay.

Let's just say you've lied to your friend.

What happens?

Well, you might lose a friend.

Well, let's increase the power and authority.

You lie to your boss.

What's the consequence?

You get fired.

Let's increase the power and authority again.

Let's say you lie to the government on your taxes on a federal form.

Now it's not a conversation anymore.

Now you're in a courtroom and you might go to prison.

Same sin, lying.

What changed is who you lied to.

And the bigger the authority, the bigger the debt, the bigger the consequence.

Now, what happens when you lie to the eternal authority, the eternal ultimate power?

What happens when you lie to God?

The eternal God, the one who made you, who has given you every breath you have ever taken, who has never once lied to you.

What is the consequence then?

Well, the consequence when you lie to an eternal God is eternal death.

It's not a small debt.

And a debt like that doesn't just disappear.

Somebody pays it.

Or somebody absorbs it.

That's how debts work.

And look, look at who Jesus says can pray this.

You go back to the beginning of the prayer in the first line.

He starts with our Father.

Church, understand, he is not walking you into a courtroom.

He is walking you into a home.

See, listen, if if you're new this morning or maybe you're new to the faith, I want you to understand something because this can cause confusion.

I want you to understand, when maybe when you first heard this verse recited, you probably wondered, wait a minute, do I have to forgive it?

Do I have to forgive everyone in my life that has wronged me in order to be saved and forgiven by God?

Listen, when when you come to faith in Christ, you've got to understand this.

When you come to faith in Christ, the verdict came in not guilty.

And it never comes back up.

Romans 8 tells us, therefore, there's now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

In other words, if you are in Christ Jesus, you are no longer under the penalty of sin.

You have been forgiven.

Now, on the flip side, if you have not placed your faith in Jesus, you still owe a debt.

You still owe a debt.

But God is ready to forgive you today if you will come to Him and give Him your life.

So, why do we still ask for forgiveness?

If we are in Christ Jesus, if we have given our life to Him, why are we still asking for forgiveness?

He's already given us forgiveness.

Because a boy who disobeys his father doesn't just stop being his son.

Nobody's taking his name away.

He's not on trial.

But he still walks in and says, Hey, Dad, I did that.

I was wrong.

Forgive me.

Not because he's afraid of losing his last name, but because he loves his dad.

And love will not let him stand there pretending that nothing happened.

That's what this verse is.

It's not a criminal begging a judge to reconsider the verdict.

No, it is a child coming to his father and telling the truth.

And telling the truth means saying what you actually did.

Understand, I'm not talking about some safe, generic confession.

Right?

Most of us have a sin we confess regularly and we keep it safe.

Lord, forgive me for my pride.

Right?

Pride is a safe one.

Pride's a perfect one.

It sounds spiritual.

No, and you know, everybody deals with pride.

All of us struggle with pride.

So, Lord, forgive me for my pride.

It sounds good.

But nobody has to actually find out or know what you actually did.

Right?

God, forgive me my pride doesn't really cost you anything.

No, what I'm talking about is getting specific.

God, forgive me for what I said to my wife on Tuesday night.

Forgive me for the tone I used.

Forgive me for wanting to win more than I wanted to love her.

And God, God, before I ever even sinned against her, I sinned against you.

Forgive me for that.

Are you hearing the difference?

You see, that prayer changes a man.

The other one doesn't.

And here, and here's the graciousness of it.

See, there's a reason this line sits right next to give us this day our daily bread.

Give us this day our daily bread, and then right after that, and forgive us our debts.

It's almost as if it's the same breath, same frequency, same open hand.

See, last week we learned about you don't have to stockpile bread.

Likewise, you do not have to stockpile God's mercy.

You come to Him daily, and He has plenty to give to you daily.

Every morning you come to the Father, not to get saved again, but because forgiven children still confess their sins.

And the mercy Christ purchased for you, it doesn't run dry.

It never runs out.

Now I know some of you are already looking at the second half of that verse.

As we also have forgiven our debtors, still struggling with it, still thinking that this kind of sounds like a game show.

You know, let's make a deal.

As if God is saying, you go first, forgive enough people, and then I will forgive you.

And I know many people hear it exactly that way.

But I understand something, you follow that out, you follow that thread.

I mean, think about this.

The man who has been hurt by a lot of people has a lot of people to forgive.

So he has a long way to go before God will hear him.

On the flip side, a man whose life has been easy, who doesn't really have anybody to forgive, well, he's fine, he's good to go.

So what, so what, in other words, the more you suffered, the further you are from God.

That can't be right.

That's not what this is saying.

I want you to look carefully what word Jesus actually used.

He said, as we have forgiven, not because we have forgiven.

See, you become a forgiving person when you've received forgiveness from God.

It's a marker of a Christian, not a perfect one, but a growing one.

We forgive because we've first been forgiven.

In fact, Paul says it without with clarity, without any ambiguity in Ephesians 4.

He says, be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Understand the order.

God already did it.

Past tense, finished.

Yours comes after his, and it comes because of his.

So I want you to, I want to be crystal clear about this.

Your forgiving does not buy God's forgiveness.

Your forgiving is what comes out of a person who's already been forgiven.

Another way to say it is forgiving others is evidence that God's mercy has actually reached your heart.

Mercy received turns into mercy given.

That's how it works.

That's how it works.

Mercy received turns into mercy given.

Except, let's be honest.

We don't always do that, do we?

I mean, here's the truth: we don't forgive people who hurt us.

I mean, at least we don't want to.

You know God forgave you.

I mean, you believe it.

In fact, you'll tell others about it.

You'll tell anybody else and everybody else about his forgiveness.

But then you think about your sister who really hurt you, and you can't do it.

You just can't forgive her.

You know, Jesus told a story about a man like that.

A king.

He calls in his debts.

A man is brought in who owes him 10,000 bags of gold.

10,000 bags of gold.

That's a lot of gold.

That's more money than this man could ever see in a thousand lifetimes.

So obviously, he can't pay it back.

Everybody in the room knows he can't pay it.

So, what does the king do?

He orders that he and his wife and his children and all that he has needs to be sold in order to repay the debt.

The man falls down to his knees, begging the king to be patient with him.

The king doesn't give him more time.

He doesn't cut the number in half.

He releases him from the debt.

All of it.

Just gone.

That man, he walks out of the palace a free man.

And on his way out, he sees a fellow servant who owes him a hundred days' worth of wages.

Now he again, he's just been forgiven everything, so you know what he does, right?

Nope.

Grabs him by the throat, choking him.

Pay me what you owe.

Now let's let's try to understand this guy.

Hundred days worth of wages?

That's real money.

Four months worth of work?

I mean, if a man owed you four months of your pay, you wouldn't call that nothing.

Jesus never says it was nothing.

The problem is, well, let me say it this way: the problem is not that he wanted justice.

Justice is right, justice is good.

The problem is he took the king's mercy, then refused to give any of it away.

And church, that's us.

Think about it.

We want the blood of Jesus Christ to cover our debts.

We want the blood of Jesus Christ to cover our sin, and we want the man who owes us to pay every cent.

I mean, this man, he was forgiven everything.

And he walked out and choked a man over four months' pay.

I mean, are you starting?

Don't you see what's happening here?

It never got in him.

He heard the forgiveness.

He heard the mercy.

It just never got to his heart.

He wasn't changed by it.

Look at the prayer again.

Hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done.

Give us bread.

Lead us not into temptation.

Deliver us from evil.

Every one of those you're asking, you're making a request.

There's only one line in this whole prayer where you say something about yourself.

As we also have forgiven our debtors.

Notice that's not a request.

That is a claim.

You are standing in front of God, asking God for mercy, and you are telling him you have already given it to others.

And in fact, every one of us said it out loud this morning about 15 minutes ago.

Some of you have prayed this prayer.

Maybe you prayed this prayer this morning in your kitchen as you were getting ready to come to church this morning.

And you meant the first half, forgive us our debts.

You meant that part.

Then you go on to the second half and you're lying.

Not on purpose, but you just didn't think about it.

You've been saying it so you've known this prayer for so long.

You've been saying it since you were a kid.

Yet there's a man you won't speak to.

There's a sister you haven't called in four years.

There's a woman in this church you walked the other way just to avoid.

There's a grudge.

There's bitterness.

There's anger that you're holding on to.

You can't forgive him because maybe you start thinking to yourself, I would never have done what they did.

Which actually reminds me of a story of the Pharisee in the Gospel of Luke.

Not greedy, not like a cheater, not like an adulterer, not like the tax collector over there.

And for those of you who remember the story, what does Jesus say?

He says, The tax collector went home to be right with God, not the Pharisee.

Here's what that means.

The only thing worse than being greedy is being proud you're not greedy.

The only thing worse than being a cheat is being proud you're not a cheat.

So whatever that man did to you, whatever she did to you, the only thing worse than than than doing it is standing there with pride that you would never do it.

Are you tracking that?

Because let's get real for a moment.

I'm gonna get real for a moment.

I'm not better than him.

You're not better than her.

If it wasn't for God's grace, I'd be where that person is.

I would do what that person did, maybe worse, probably worse.

See, 300 years ago, there was a pastor, his name was Hopkins.

He said something about a person like this.

He said, a person that prays this isn't praying.

A person with this sort of posture isn't really praying this prayer.

He said, That man is cursing himself.

Because what he just asked God for is to treat me the way I'm treating him.

Treat me the way I'm treating him.

You just ask God to treat you the way you're treating him.

So don't think that you're better than that person, because you would never do that.

You would never do what they did.

Given the right ingredients, given the right circumstances, we might very well do exactly what they did.

Or maybe worse.

But the question still remains: why can't we let go?

Why can't we forgive?

I'll tell you what I think.

And I want to just try to say this as as carefully as I can because for some of you, this may be the heart of it.

This may be the real thing.

You hold on to it.

Because it's all you've got left.

See, somebody didn't let you say goodbye to your loved one.

Somebody owes you money, real money, and you've been trying to collect it for years.

Somebody told you a story about you that wasn't true and it went around.

It circled the room and people believed it.

Somebody took your marriage, took your childhood that you were supposed to have.

Somebody took the reputation of your name and you never got it back.

But I think for some of you, it's simpler and harder.

See, the wound is the only thing left.

It's the only proof or evidence left that it happened.

That it mattered.

That you're not crazy.

So letting go feels like saying it was nothing.

It was it was no big deal.

So you hold on to it.

Because holding on feels like the last way you can say it is a big deal.

But honestly, underneath all of that, I think you have forgotten that your father loves you.

See, a man who knows he's loved doesn't need to hold on to a wound to prove that it matters, to prove that he or she matters.

And listen, here's what I want you to hear.

Whatever has happened to you, whatever wrong was done to you, God saw it.

He saw it, he saw every bit of it.

He was there when it happened, and he hasn't forgotten.

Not one second of it.

Listen, you're not the only one who remembers.

But you're not the one who has to keep the record.

You know, there's a guy in my neighborhood.

He he would say really crude and vulgar things around my kids, and it actually got me angry.

And I could have let it go.

I could have forgiven him for it.

I didn't.

So I talked about him.

Not to him, about him more than once.

I told myself I was protecting my family.

I wasn't.

I was making him pay.

And I'd like to tell you that I made it right.

I haven't.

So when I'm preaching this sermon, I'm not just preaching it to you.

I'm not standing up here like a man who's mastered all of this, who is coming up here like, oh, all you know, holier than thou, and I've got it all figured out.

No, I'm also being convicted.

I'm preaching this sermon to me.

Because I gotta go make it right.

Look, some of you have been trying to forgive somebody maybe for years.

You've prayed about it.

You laid awake about it, you get up and you try again.

And maybe when I read verse 15, it scared you.

But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins.

And you think it means you're not forgiven.

I want you to hear something.

Struggling to forgive is not refusing to forgive.

I struggle to forgive sometimes.

It's not the same as refusing to forgive.

Jesus is not warning the man who's fighting.

He's warning the man who quit.

The one who says, I'm keeping this debt and I'm la I'm not letting it go.

If you're still fighting, if you're still fighting to try and forgive, with a desire to forgive, but you're just struggling with it, that's an indicator that you know you're alive, that you're spiritually alive.

Because dead men, they don't fight.

And let me tell let me say one other thing because sometimes this can trap people.

When it comes to forgiveness, you don't have to feel it first.

Forgiveness isn't a feeling, it's a decision you make.

It is a decision to give up my personal right to vengeance and entrust justice to God.

You do it before you feel it.

If you wait till you feel like it, chances are you're never gonna do it.

So you make the decision to forgive.

And listen, the memory's gonna come back of what they did, how they've wronged you.

It's gonna come back tomorrow.

And when it does, you have to make the decision again.

I forgive this person.

So right now, in your seats as you're sitting there, think about the person you need to forgive.

Think about the name.

Think about the face.

And now think about what that person took from you.

What is the debt they owe you?

An apology you never got?

A reputation they took from you?

A marriage?

A childhood?

The right to feel safe in your own home?

Whatever it is, name it.

And let me also say this forgiving that person doesn't mean you just hand them a key to your house.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.

They're connected, not the same.

Right?

When you forgive, it doesn't mean reconciling with an abuser and pretending that justice doesn't matter.

That's not what I'm saying here.

What I am saying is it means surrendering your personal vengeance to God.

So who's the person?

What do they owe you?

Name it specifically.

Because you can't give God something you won't name specifically.

It becomes very hard to surrender.

Okay.

If you got a name in your mind, you've got what they owe you, and if you're like me, you're still sitting here thinking, okay, I see it, I get it, but I'm still the man with the hands on that guy's throat, and I know what he owes me, I just don't know how to let go.

Let me tell you something about debts.

They don't disappear.

Somebody breaks let me put it this way.

Actually, let me let me illustrate it this way.

Somebody breaks something in your house, that cost for that broken item doesn't just float off into thin air.

Either they pay for it or you pay for it, or it stays broken on the floor, right?

Somebody always carries it.

I told you in the beginning of this sermon a debt gets paid, or somebody absorbs it.

That's how debts work.

So here's the question I've been waiting to ask all of you.

Who paid yours?

Who paid your debt?

See, Matthew has shown us Jesus teaching about debts and mercy and the kingdom.

But I want you to catch something.

Where's the price of forgiveness finally named?

It's not on a hillside when he taught this prayer.

He lands it somewhere else.

He lands it at a table with a cup on the night before the cross.

In Matthew 26, it says, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Matthew saved that word for a cup of wine on the last night of Jesus' life when he's telling 12 men what his blood is for.

I mean, church, do you guys understand what this means?

Forgiveness is not God being easygoing.

Being nice is free.

Letting something slide costs nothing.

But Matthew hands you that word forgiveness, and there's blood in it.

When God forgave you, he didn't just wave his hand at sin.

He didn't say it wasn't that, it's you know, it's not that bad.

He didn't lower the number.

No, it cost him.

Forgiveness is free to you, but it was not free to God.

They drove nails through hands that never took anything from anybody.

Jesus never lied.

He never stole.

He never cheated a man out of a dollar.

He never once, his entire life, needed to pray, Father, forgive me for my debts.

He never had to pray that prayer.

And he hung on there on a wooden cross and paid what you owed.

That bill had my name on it, it had your name on it.

It had everything on it.

The thing that you did that nobody in this room knows about, the thing that you did that everybody in this room knows about, the man you talked about behind his back, Jesus paid for all of it in full.

And you and I, we walk out as free men and women, never putting up a dime.

Maybe you're holding on to something against somebody else this morning.

And in your head, letting go, you feel like it's gonna cost you something.

You're right.

It is.

And he did it anyway.

He did it for you.

In fact, you're not being asked to forgive out of your own supply.

You don't have enough.

I don't have enough.

You never did.

You're handing out what was handed to you.

Remember, forgiven people are able to forgive.

Let me close with a story.

In 2006, a man walked into a one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

It was an Amish school.

Ten girls in that room.

He shot all ten of them.

Five of them died, and then he killed himself.

I want you to hear what happened next.

That same day, not that year, not that month, that same day.

Amish families walked over to the killer's house.

They went over to his widow.

They went to his mother and to his father, and they told them they forgave him.

They forgave him.

One of the grandfathers was standing over the body of his granddaughter, little girl, and he looked, he looked at that granddaughter, and then he looked at the young men in his family, and he told them that they must not let hate get into them.

About 30 of these Amish folks went to the man's funeral, and photographers had shown up.

These men stood in a circle around his widow, so that the cameras couldn't get to her.

In fact, they eventually set up a fund for his children.

How does a person do that?

This horrific thing that happened.

How does a person do that?

They didn't decide that morning.

Nobody decides that in one morning.

They had been handed mercy and had spent their lives handing and extending that mercy outwards.

They had been taught to practice forgiveness their entire lives in families, in the church, in the ordinary hurts of living beside one another.

So when the worst thing that could possibly that you could possibly imagine happening walks through the door, forgiveness is what just comes out of them.

Not because they were stronger than you and me, because that's what was already in there.

It's what was already in there.

And look, hear me on this.

That's what church is supposed to be.

Hear the words again: forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

There's no I in this prayer, not one.

Even when Jesus teaches you to pray alone, he teaches you to pray as part of a people.

Our Father, give us.

Forgive us, lead us.

Some of the people you're supposed to forgive may be sitting in the chairs near you.

They may be praying this with you right now.

Look, I want us to be a church where forgiveness is what comes out when somebody gets hurt.

Not the cold shoulder, not the phone call to somebody else, not 18 months of walking the other way in a parking lot.

But that does not start when something big happens.

It starts small.

It starts now.

Maybe with the person who rose over.

So here's what I'm asking you to do this week.

Take it to God.

Say it out loud to him.

Father, this is what he did to me.

This is what it cost me.

I'm not calling it small, I'm not calling it nothing.

And then say this.

I'm not collecting anymore.

God, I'm handing it over to you.

And then forgive that person.

That means you stop bringing it up to that person just to make it hurt them.

You stop bringing it up to other people to make them look bad.

And you stop bringing it up to yourself at 11 o'clock at night just to keep the heat and fire going in your heart.

And listen, you're gonna have to do it again.

Because the memory's gonna come back again tomorrow.

And tomorrow you're gonna have to make the decision again.

I forgive him.

I forgive him.

Listen, you owe God more than you could even count and imagine.

You and I, we couldn't pay a penny of it.

He didn't lower the debt.

He didn't look the other way.

He paid it himself.

And it cost him his son.

In that story about the king, there was one question left at the end.

He turns to the servant and asks him one thing.

And this is the one thing I want you to carry out of here this morning.

Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?

You and I, we've been forgiven.

We've been let off.

So forgive that person.

Remember, a person who's been forgiven forgives.

So let's forgive.

Let's pray.

Father, there may be many of us, maybe all of us, who have somebody we ought to forgive.

We know it's not easy.

You never said it was easy.

Forgiveness comes at a cost.

Somebody pays for the debt that is owed, or somebody absorbs it.

God, you sent your son Jesus to absorb our debt, to take our debt upon himself so that we could be forgiven.

Lord, help us to extend that kind of mercy and forgiveness to those who have sinned against us.

Forgive us our debts, forgive us our sin as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Amen.