Lectionary: Matthew 18 - Living in Christ Centered Community | September 6, 2026

Totally forgot to mention this when the kids went out, but as of last week, two weeks ago, we're now offering child care for kids ages one to three.

From now until the announcements, it's in the room out there, back and to the right.

So if you have a kid ages one to three and you'd like them to go hang out back there, I think Gabe's hanging out back there.

My kid's not quite there yet.

But um, we'd love for you to have the opportunity to go drop off your kids.

It'll be a lot of fun.

We have great volunteers back there to hang out with them.

Um anyway, thank you for bearing with me for that long gospel reading.

Also, thank you for being here on a on a long holiday weekend.

I know that there's greater temptation to sleep in on these types of weekends.

But anyway, my name is Matt, and I'm one of the pastors on staff here at Trinity Burke.

As we walk through all of chapter 18 of Matthew's gospel this morning, it would be helpful if you had a Bible open in front of you.

Uh, if you didn't bring a Bible with you, feel free to hop up.

You can grab one from the table in the back.

Uh, if you're looking at your phone this morning, I'll just assume you're looking at the Bible app and absolutely nothing else.

Um before we begin this morning, let's pause for a moment and pray together.

God, would you give us open ears to hear, open minds to understand, and open hearts to receive what you have for us in your word this morning?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all your people's hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight.

O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

So I'm not sure if you've you've ever experienced this, but there is there's a very particular type of silence that happens when someone asks a question that everybody in the room has been thinking, but no one has had the courage to say out loud.

Um, this often happens in meetings, it happens in church on the Sunday morning, sometimes it happens when there's an awkward situation that someone may not want to bring up, and when they finally do bring it up, everyone else has that look of like, oh my gosh, did they just ask that?

And this particular type of silence happens in Matthew 18, when the disciples say out loud for the first time, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

Now, to really feel what's wrong with this question, you have to know where it comes from.

One chapter earlier, Jesus told these men plainly and for the second time, that his, that he is gonna be handed over to men who are gonna kill him, and on the third day he'll be raised again.

In Mark's gospel, this story accounts that the disciples they've actually been arguing about who is greatest on the road behind Jesus.

So you can imagine Jesus walking down the road on his way to Jerusalem, and the disciples a few paces behind kind of arguing to themselves about the seating chart of who's going to be sitting where next to Jesus.

And the disciples, their response to the cross being predicted is it's to argue about rank and who's the best.

So there's this there's this huge gap between what Jesus is about to go do and what his followers are preoccupied with.

Now, their actions, arguing over who is best, is actually the opposite of the community in the life that Jesus is calling them to.

So what we're gonna see, what follows in the rest of this chapter, is Jesus describing what true community looks like when it stops asking who is greatest and starts learning to be small.

And four things that we're gonna look at this morning, four things happen in such a community.

One, greatness gets redefined as smallness, two, the vulnerable get protected, three, the strain get pursued, and four, the offender gets forgiven without limit.

So that's our path this morning.

And with this framework in mind, let's look at verses one through five as we consider our first point.

In a truly loving community, greatness gets redefined as smallness.

Starting in verse one.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.

Now, one important thing to understand is the world of the ancient Near East, when Jesus was alive, is a very different world than the world we live in today.

Children weren't really looked at as these innocent, cute little kids who come into the room and we get excited when they enter.

A child in that time had no property, no vote in the conversation, no legal standing.

A child couldn't advance the household or defend your honor.

A child was in that time a person of no account.

The one thing that a child in that time unquestionably had was dependence.

He was dependent on everyone around him.

In fact, a child was the human embodiment of what dependence is.

And Jesus says in verse 3, unless you turn, or in the Greek, literally reverse direction and become like that, like a child who relies on someone else for everything, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven.

And you see, what the disciples are doing is they're they're climbing a ladder.

They're working out who's on which rung, who's the most important.

And Jesus tells them that the door to the kingdom of heaven is not at the top of a ladder, it's at the bottom.

You see, you don't climb your way into the kingdom of heaven.

You don't even walk your way into the kingdom of heaven.

You get carried into the kingdom of heaven.

You get carried into the kingdom of heaven just as you would carry in a tired child to the house from the car after a long and weary road trip.

Now, but Jesus, he actually takes this one step further in verse 5.

Look at verse 5 with me again.

Jesus so identifies himself with the lowly that how you treat them is how you treat him.

So greatness in the kingdom of heaven, greatness is smallness.

It is approaching Jesus with childlike dependence.

But Jesus, he doesn't, he doesn't stop here with a lesson about personal humility.

He immediately turns to what happens when the strong get near the small, which leads us to our second point.

In a loving community, the small and the vulnerable are protected at all costs.

Now look at verses six through nine with me.

But whoever causes one of these little ones who believes in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Woe to the world to for temptations to sin.

It is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one whom by whom the temptation comes.

And if your right hand causes your foot or sorry, if your right hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.

And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.

It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.

Now, this is some of the most severe and jarring language we see in the entire gospel.

But notice here, notice who Jesus is calling us to protect.

Verse 6 says, These little ones who believe in me.

Now the picture here is widened.

Jesus isn't, he's not just talking about children anymore.

When he says little ones, he's talking about all the vulnerable inside a believing community.

And if someone threatens one of these little ones, they're to be dropped into the water with a large stone around their neck.

And if you cause someone to stumble, if you go out and you cause one of these little ones to stumble, you are to cut off your hand or cut out your eye.

Now, good news here, Jesus is speaking hyperbolically.

You don't actually have to cut off your arm or cut out your eye.

And the church has always understood that this is hyperbole.

But hyperbole, it means something.

And what it means raises a question, and this is a really important question.

Are you willing to treat the sin in yourself with even a fraction of the seriousness you are willing to bring to the sin of somebody else?

Because if you like, if you're like me, you're an expert at verse 6 when it comes about someone else, but you're an amateur when it comes to verse 8, and you're talking about sin in your own life.

Now, now you may not think that in a church community we need to be so on guard about protecting people.

You may not think that in a church community, in a loving church community, even like our own, we have to be so on guard protecting the little ones.

But unfortunately, that's just not the case.

The church can harm people in ways that are absolutely heartbreaking.

And if this has happened to you in any way, I am so deeply sorry, and I'll continue praying for you.

But that is why Jesus commands us to guard the vulnerable with language that is meant to frighten us and catch our attention.

Now, if the chapter, chapter 18 were to end here, we'd be left with a warning and nothing else.

So watch what Jesus does next.

Having told us how seriously he takes harm done to the small and the vulnerable, after seeing how seriously Jesus takes this, he tells us how far he'll go to get one of them back.

This leads us to our third point in verses 10 through 20.

In a loving community that's centered on Christ, the straying are pursued.

Starting in verse 10.

See that you do not despise one of these little ones.

For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.

What do you think?

If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?

And if he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.

So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

Now you've probably heard this story before, if you've been in the church your whole life, but you may only know it from Luke's gospel and Luke's account of what happens.

Now, in Luke's account, it's where Jesus, he tells this parable to a crowd of grumbling and angry Pharisees.

And in that situation, the lost sheep is someone who's outside the fold, right?

Someone who doesn't know the Lord and needs to be sought and needs to be brought in.

But that's not the setting here.

That's not what Matthew's talking about in this situation.

Here, the context, it's less, it's less evangelical and it's more pastoral.

The sheep is one of these little ones who is already in the flock, already in the fold, who has left and gone astray.

And the audience for the story, it isn't the Pharisees from the outside looking in.

The audience is now us.

Now, with that in mind, look at verse 10 again.

See that you do not despise one of these little ones.

Now the word despise in the Greek, it means more to look down on, to regard as beneath you, to regard as someone who you don't really care about that much anymore.

So the sin that Jesus is naming here toward the person who has wandered off, it's not hostility, it's dismissal.

It's the shrug toward those who left the church.

And I don't know if you guys have ever felt this way.

I've admittedly felt this way before, but it's the feeling of, well, you know, I guess they never took their faith too seriously in the first place.

Or when someone wanders away, the ah, well, I didn't really know them that well anyway.

Or it's even the man, they left, but but I'll just pray that they find a new good church home.

And against this shrug, against this attitude towards those who go astray, Jesus says something enormous.

He says, their angels will see the face of my father.

What Jesus is saying here, he's saying the person that you stopped thinking about, the person who left, and you thought, ah, I didn't really know him too well anyway.

Jesus is saying that the person you stopped thinking about has never once lost their representation in the throne room of heaven.

And then verse 14, which I think is the foundation for the entire chapter that we're going through, it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

Now, the shepherd, this image of the shepherd, the good shepherd, going out into the dark and bringing back the sheep that was once lost, it's not mere sentiment here.

It's not feeling.

It is the literal will and the heart of the father that the shepherd goes out and seeks the lost and brings them back into the fold.

Now, these verses, these next few verses that talk about what it looks like when we go after someone who's gone astray, they have a bit of a bad reputation in the church.

Now, these verses, people hear church discipline when they hear them read.

And they picture something cold or they picture something institutional.

And that's why it's so important for us to listen to what Jesus actually is saying here, starting in verse 15.

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

If he listens to you, you have gained a brother.

But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you.

That every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.

And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Now notice notice the shape of these instructions.

Every step is designed to keep the circle as small as possible for as long as possible.

Now, step one, church, the temptation is to kind of gossip about it, but hide that gossip in the form of going to someone else for prayer.

Like if someone wrongs you, going to your community group and saying, Man, I'm having a really hard time with this person, and I hope it is detrimental to a church community.

But what we're being called to do here is go straight to the person who has wronged you, or straight to the person you think is strange.

I've gained your brother.

Now it's interesting here, the goal here when you approach that person, it's never to it's never to gain a victory, right?

You're not going in to like a debate club meeting where you're not trying what the gospel is calling us to do.

What Jesus is saying here is you're trying to gain a brother back by confronting them.

The aim is recovery, the goal is reconciliation, not to try to gain moral superiority over someone else.

And then we go to step two.

Take one or two others with you.

Now, Jesus here, he's directly witnesses.

Now, this this is an ancient yet very, very applicable protection.

Now it protects the community, protects everybody from a lie that could spread, and it protects the accused person from just one person's word.

And this is important if we're gonna truly reconcile.

Give the whole body of Christ a chance to pray, love, and care for a person.

But note that you're only telling it to the church after you've gone to the person yourself and after you've gone with one or two other people.

And then step four, and this one really, really takes you aback because it seems super harsh.

Step four, let them be to you as a gentile or tax collector.

Now it's really easy for us to hear this and think, man, tax collectors and gentiles, they were not well loved in Jesus' time.

So if someone wrongs us, if someone goes astray, we're just supposed to expel them and just continue on with our lives.

But let me ask you a question about the man who wrote this gospel.

What did Matthew do for a living?

Does anyone remember?

He was a tax collector.

Yeah, how ironic.

He was a tax collector.

Jesus walked right by Matthew's tax booth and said, follow me.

And this is amazing, right?

What Jesus is saying here, he's not calling us to stop pursuing people who have gone astray.

What he's saying is that the pretending it has to stop, right?

The relationship needs to be named honestly.

The pretense of fellowship may need to be dropped.

The person can no longer be treated just as everything is fine and everything is normal.

Instead, they need to be treated as someone who needs to be sought out and brought back into the fold.

Right?

That's what Jesus did with the Gentiles and the tax collectors.

He didn't push them away.

He didn't send them off, he didn't exile them.

What Jesus did with the Gentiles and tax collectors, he went after them.

He pursued them.

That's why the promise in verse 20 sits where it sits, starting in verse 18.

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.

Now I don't I don't know about you, but I have most often heard this quoted in a prayer meeting or a small group that does not have the level of attendance that it really wanted to have.

And it is used as an excuse for a mild disappointment about turnout.

But it does, it does contain some real comfort to know that when just two of us are gathered, Jesus is there with us.

But look where the actual home of this verse is.

It's right here.

And that has power to it.

What Jesus is saying, he's saying that when a church does this painful work, when the church does the hard work of confronting people, of pursuing people and seeking restoration, because that is hard and painful work.

But when we do that work, we're not acting alone and we're not improvising.

When we're doing this hard, difficult work, heaven stands behind us and Christ Himself is present in the room with us.

Now, churches tend to fail in one of two ways when it comes to doing this hard and painful work.

Now, some churches they confront constantly and they never seek restoration.

I don't know if you've ever been in a church like that that always notices when you're doing something wrong, right?

But they never seek to actually correct you.

Or they never seek to disciple you, inform you.

And then some other churches are so allergic to conflict that they will watch a person walk off a cliff in slow motion and say nothing.

Now, when churches do this and they watch someone stumble over and over again and they say nothing, they often call this silence grace.

Like, oh, we're just we'll just give them another chance.

But this isn't grace.

This is abandonment with better manners.

This is abandonment dressed up as grace.

And here, Jesus, he's offering neither one of these two solutions.

Instead, what he's offering is pursuit.

So here's here's the uncomfortable question that Jesus is calling all of us to ask honestly with ourselves, myself included.

Who has drifted out of this church in the last three years since we've planted?

And who went after them?

Who is Jesus calling us to pursue?

Who is Jesus calling you to pursue?

And we all have that one person in our head.

So this week I want you to take a moment, just pray about it, think about it.

It, who is Jesus calling you to go after, to pursue, to reconcile with, to bring back into the fold?

And now this leads us to our final point.

When we see Peter, he's sitting and he's been listening to all this, just as just as Peter always does.

But then he brings up a question and he does, he does this math in his head, and he starts thinking to himself, how often and how long do I have to keep forgiving someone who hurts me?

And he wants to know where that line in the sand is of saying, like, ah man, I've done this enough, right?

I've tried my best, gonna dust off my sandals and move on to the next person.

And this leads us to knowing that sinners in a loving community get forgiven without limit.

Look at verse 21.

Peter says, Lord, how often should I forgive my brother?

Seven times?

Now this may seem cheap.

This may seem like classic Peter, right?

It may seem really cheap, but actually Peter's being really generous here.

In Jesus' time, rabbis would encourage people to forgive people up to three times.

And after the third time, you're like, ah, I've tried my best.

Peter here, he doubles it, goes to six, and even rounds it up to a holy number, seven.

And he looks to Jesus like a kid in a classroom looking for some extra credit.

But Jesus, in his way, turns back and replies, not seven, but seventy-seven times.

Now the number seventy seven Jesus uses here, it's not, it's not random.

There's no, I believe that there's no superfluous words in scripture.

There's nothing in there that's not there for a reason.

So the number 77 is important.

Now back in Genesis chapter 4, a man named Lamech, which is an awesome name, stands in front of his wives and boasts, if Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech will be avenged 77fold.

Genesis 4 · chapter mention

Now this is the first escalation of vengeance that we see in Scripture.

The moment a man decides that his revenge should have no limit at all.

And Jesus, what he does here, and why this is so amazing, is that he takes this number and he turns it inside out.

The old world, under the old testament, under the old covenant, it multiplied revenge without any limit.

Now the kingdom, where we live under the new covenant of Christ, it multiplies mercy without limit.

It means the real answer to Peter's question here of how often I should forgive, it's not even a number at all.

It's this.

It's anybody who is still counting has missed the point altogether.

Right?

Then Jesus provides an example in a story that is on close inspection, deliberately absurd.

In Jesus' time, one talent was roughly 20 years labor for a day laborer.

Now a Herod in his kingdom, all the taxes he collected would be a few hundred talents.

So 10,000 talents is absolutely ridiculous.

The debt that the servant and the parable owes, it's not just huge, it is comically obscene.

It cannot be paid ever by anyone.

Which makes verse 26, when the servant says, I will repay you everything, so heartbreaking.

You see, what the service thinks, he thinks in his mind, like, oh man, this is this is a cash flow problem, right?

I just need more time.

What he receives instead of more time is something that he never even requested.

The master moved with compassion, and the word here for compassion, it's actually the same word that's used for compassion when Jesus looked out over crowds of thousands of hungry people.

The master moved with compassion releases him and forgives him of his debt.

But then the servant, he does something weird.

He walks outside, finds a man who owes him a hundred denarii, which is about three months' work's worth of labor, and seizes him by the throat.

And as he does this, and this is really amazing because again, there's no superfluous words in scripture, and as he does this, the second man says, Have patience with me, and I will repay you.

Do you recognize the words here that that second servant is using?

This is nearly word for word what the first servant said to the master when he pleaded for forgiveness on his knees.

He is hearing his own prayer said back to him, and he doesn't recognize it, and therefore he's thrown in jail.

Now, this this is a perfect picture of what unforgiveness is.

It's the inability to hear your own voice and the person asking you for mercy.

The inability to hear your own voice and the person asking you for mercy.

And finally, we arrive at verse 35.

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

Now it's it is important here that we hear what Jesus is saying correctly.

Now, Jesus, he's not saying that we are forgiven because we forgive others.

He's not saying that we earn forgiveness by forgiving other people.

That's actually like totally contradictory to what the gospel says.

He's teaching us that mercy, which produces no mercy, was never actually received.

The forgiveness, the forgiven servant's cruelty reveals that nothing had happened in his heart at the moment of his release.

He was unchanged.

The servant, he treated his forgiveness as a lucky escape rather than a gift that should reorder his life entirely.

Grace and forgiveness that leaves you unchanged is a grace that you have not yet fully understood.

Right?

The amazing grace of the gospel and the love and forgiveness that Jesus offers us, it should intrinsically change us, cause us to become different people.

Now, before we close this morning, I want you to hear one thing.

Because some of you are most likely or almost definitely sitting here with wounds, deep wounds that I know absolutely nothing about.

And for you, forgiveness, the forgiveness that we're called to here, it's not pretending that the debt or the wrong that was done against us was small.

It's not pretending that the hurt is small.

Right?

In the parable that Jesus says here, in the example he gives, the story he tells, the debt is never pretended away.

It's named in full and then released.

Right?

Forgiveness is not the erasure of consequence.

It's not going back into a room with someone who isn't safe.

And it's not a feeling you can summon on command just by trying hard enough.

When Jesus says from your heart, he's describing a destination.

For deep wounds, for real hurt that goes much deeper than just the surface, that is a road walked slowly, usually with help, and sometimes over the course of years.

If you are slowly walking the road of forgiveness this morning, please hear me when I say this.

You are not the unforgiving man in the story.

You are faithfully heading down the road towards the destination that Jesus is calling you to.

So we started this morning with 12 men talking about who is the greatest and ended with a parable about a man who is attacking another man over a debt.

So, what does this all mean for us?

What is Jesus teaching us about living in community together throughout chapter 18 of Matthew's gospel?

So Matthew 18 shows us that creating a loving community centered on Christ, it requires a change of position.

It's walking into a room the way a child walks into a room, with nothing to offer, no rank to defend, and entirely welcomed anyway.

It's being the sheep that the shepherd went out into the dark to find, when nobody even else noticed you were gone.

A church full of people who know that they were carried in can do the hard things that are mentioned in this chapter.

It can guard the little ones, it can go after the ones who wandered, it can tell the truth in love to the brother who's quietly destroying himself.

And it can forgive not seven times, not 77 times, but it can forgive simply as a people who stopped counting long ago.

And doing these things, if we can do these things together as a church, if we can do this hard and sometimes painful work with the knowledge that heaven is behind us and Jesus is in the room, if we can do these things, we'll see people come to faith in our community.

We'll see miracles happen in our midst.

It's how we'll see more and more people in our community have their lives completely changed by Jesus.

And with that in mind, let's close in prayer this morning.

Lord God, you are so gracious to us.

Lord, I pray that we can become a people who are confident that they were carried into your presence.

That we didn't climb in, we didn't even walk in.

Lord God, that we were picked up by you and we were carried in.

Lord, I pray that we can we can become a community who lovingly confronts each other, but in order to bring us back into the full.

God, I pray that we can become a community who seeks the lost just as you sought the lost.

And Lord, I pray that we can be that forgives who forgets for God, we might see revival and love you.

Lord, I pray that