Forgiveness

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. It's good to have you here at Thrive today. And like right after the service, we're going to set up for a potluck. Please stay. There's plenty, let me tell you, and it's going to be good, right? It always is. But we love to have you here today. We started a sermon series last week called The Big Relief. It actually comes from a book with that title. David Zoll wrote it just recently. And it's the idea of the urgency that we have of grace in a worn-out world. Do you think the world feels a little worn out? Do you feel worn out once in a while? Do you just get weary from all the bad news and difficulties and struggles and conflicts? Well, there's a lot of ways that the gospel of Jesus Christ comes in and gives us a relief in a variety of ways. Last week we looked at how it brought relief, just the grace itself and the big relief that that is. Today we're looking at an area called forgiveness. And how Jesus talked about forgiveness was not in the abstract. It's not just a concept. It's not a value. Values don't forgive you. Values can only judge you, whether you meet them or not. Jesus actually forgave, and it was some of the most controversial things that he ever did. When he directly forgave people, it's like, who are you? Do you think you're God? Well, yeah. But the way he forgave, whom he forgave, how he forgave, how forgiveness impacts us. So, forgiveness is not forgiveness if it's in the abstract. It's always in, like, it's either, it's not G, it's not PG. It's got to at least be an R-rated event. What I mean by that, it's names, dates, places, situations, specifics. And, boy, it can be very graphic and difficult when it becomes that way. And Elizabeth Brunig saw that forgiveness itself can be very controversial. Just the idea of it. She wrote in a New York Times op-ed a few years ago, I see in American culture how offended people seem to be by the very idea of forgiveness itself. They seem to find it immoral. And you go, like, how is forgiveness immoral? Well, you're letting somebody off the hook. They don't have to pay the consequences. They've got it too easy. You're making it. We'll find out that that's not the case, actually. The only way to really have any improvement in the morality of this world is if forgiveness and grace is involved in it. If it's just strict justice, it doesn't work. Have you noticed? Have you ever tried to seek justice for a situation? Can you actually get it in this world? Full, exact justice. Especially for the most heinous situations. It's impossible, unless you can raise the dead and reverse the clock. Okay? So, anyways, we still need it. It's amazing, also, what we're going to see in the New Testament and in Jesus himself. He connects our forgiveness from God with how we forgive to others. In a way that might puzzle you, but I think it's very profound, because he wants to free you, not only in your relationship with God, but free you in your relations to others to actually have good relationships with others through the work of forgiveness. The passage we're going to be looking at today is a parable, again, like we had last week. This parable is a bit controversial. Most are, by the way. I was taught as a child that parables are earthly stories with a heavenly meaning. That is such hogwash. I don't know who came up with that. Because, yes, they are earthly stories, but they are subversive, radical, in-breaking of gospel into a world that doesn't like it in a lot of ways. This parable is probably similar to that. It's in the circumstance of Peter thinking he's being magnanimous. Peter, who himself, at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, when Peter was called by Jesus, he says, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, and Jesus would not do that. But he would stay right there, and he forgave him. He knew he needed it, but somehow he thought, Well, there's got to be a limit. I'm going to make it a big limit. Seven. Seven times. That might be a good, you know, that's a lot more than, you know, it's not just forgiving once or twice or three times. Seven. And Jesus says, No. You're putting a limit on forgiveness means it ain't forgiveness. Wow. All right. Therefore, then Peter came up and said to him, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him as many as seven times? Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times. Don't take that as a limit, okay? It's not like, okay, you're at 76 right now. You got one more. And some people don't know that the reading in the Greek could either be seven times 70, which would be 490, or 77 times. We're not sure where the times should fit in between, but the point is, it's just trying to say much greater than you ever thought. Okay. So then Jesus says this. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished ...