The Act of Forgiveness Matthew 18:15-35

"This is how my heavenly Father will treat you unless you forgive your brother from the heart." Did that last line in our passage send a shiver up your spine." It ought to Charles Williams wrote of a similar expression the phrase "as we forgive our debtors" as the most terrifying phrase in the English language for the same reason. God expects Christiasn to evidence the fact that they are forgiven by the demonstration of forgiveness. We are to be a community of people who are forgiven and forgiving. And yet there is a real problem. An inability to forgive keeps people who ought to be close to one another from being close and makes people who were made for freedom to live as though they were prisoners of the past.

We are like a little boy who was saying his prayers. As he went down the list of his family, asking God to bless them, he omitted his brother's name. His mother said to him, "Why didn't you pray for Cliff?" He said, "I'm not going to ask God to bless Cliff because he hit me." And his mother said, "Don't you remember Jesus said to forgive your enemies?" But the little boy said, "That's just the trouble. He's not my enemy; he's my brother!"

Sometimes the problem in our experience of forgiveness is that we think that we have forgiven someone when we truly haven't. We have pretended to ourselves that we have moved on. We have pretended to ourselves that there is no need to do anything in particular about this situation. But we are not being honest with the situation. We have simply submerged the resentment. And because we have refused to deal with the resentment we feel it is still preventing the healing of a relationship.

This morning we are going to look at the very practical issue of how we forgive. The act of forgiveness. But first we are going to remind ourselves of the aim in forgiving and then at some of the difficulties involved.

1. The Aim in Forgiveness

We are called as Christiasn to nothing less than imitating the grace of God shown to us in our relationships with others. That is precisely what the line in the Lord's Prayer we quoted means, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." God's forgiveness of us is to be the measure of our forgiveness of others."

How does God forgive us? Well we saw some Sundays back that when God forgoes us he separates us from our sin. Our sin is loosed from us. God's forgiveness works a surgical operation of grace on us, which removes our sin and makes us acceptable in his sight.

Not only so but my sin is banished from God's presence. It does not lie there as a reminder to God of my failure. He casts it into the depth of the sea. He blots it out like cloud. And thirdly God's forgiveness works reconciliation. He does not allow my sins to affect the way that he relates to me. We begin again as friends.

2. The Difficulty of Forgiveness

Peter's question to Jesus comes after Jesus teaching about how his disciples should handle offences against them. They were to bring it to the attention of the one who had wronged them and offer forgiveness. But Peter has a problem, "Lord how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" it is interesting to speculate that peter might have been referring to hi flesh and blood brother Andrew.

You can imagine that in the confinement of life on the road with Jesus the things that had always irritated the one about the other would be magnified. Perhaps Peter had been niggled by the way that Andrew kicked off his sandals at night when he was just abbot falling off to sleep. Or about the way he borrowed that favourite tunic of his without asking or some other deadly sin that brothers perpetrate against one another. Whatever it was peter has a difficulty about forgiving.

Why do we find forgiveness so difficult? For a start we feel as though to forgive is inconsistent with justice. We feel that to forgive is to let someone off the hook as it were. We feel that if they have wronged me then they deserve to suffer, to sweat a bit at least. We want to feel justified in our revenge by arguing that it is setting the situation to right. What we forget is that we are never in the position to enact justice. That is either the prerogative of God or the prerogative of the state who have been delegated the power of the sword in other words they have a delegated authority from God.

What we forget as well is that returning a hurt never evens things out. If you don't forgive someone who has hurt you will do one of two things. You will either return the hurt or so set the escalator of hurts moving or you will bury the hurt deep within you so that its corrosive juices eat away at your inner soul. Refusing to forgive is never right.

The other reason that we find it difficult to forgive is that we are conditioned in our day to think that it is healthy to let off steam. We want to blow our top. We want to let someone have it when they have hurt us. We speak of getting it off our chest. But once again there is no healing in letting off steam.

Or we can tell that the other person is not fully sorry. If they were really sorry they would not do it again. But here they are they have done it for the fourth time. T makes the repentance look pretty flimsy.

Hence Peter's question. How many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?" Peter was erring on the side of big heartedness for the rabbis of his day suggested that the maximum number of times one might be expected to forgive was three. Surely, thought Peter seven repeats proves that the repentance was pretty faulty. But Jesus will not accept such calculations. " Not seven times, but seventy seven times," replied Jesus straightaway. Some manuscripts have seventy times seven," but it hardly matters whether Jesus said 77 times or 490 times; he is saying that forgiveness is not the kind of thing you count up on a calculator. The question of whether or not someone's repentance is adequate is not an issue. If someone says that they are sorry then you are to forgive them.

Forgiveness can be difficult because of that creeping sense of failure that so often follows on from the act of forgiveness. We experience a sense of release followed by a sense of failure as the bitterness comes back. We felt that we genuinely tried to forgive but the resentment came faltering back and we feel like failures. Let us take together Jesus advice on how to handle forgiveness, Peter's protest and Jesus response to build a picture of the act of forgiveness.

3. The Act of Forgiveness

1 If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault just between the two of you. If he listens to you have won your brother over." Now we saw before that the question of forgiveness only arises when you have really been hurt. The kind of person who goes around bringing up trivial matters and offering forgiveness for inconsequential things simply makes things worse.

But where there has been a real hurt the proper response is to address the situation. Forgiveness is not the same as excusing something as though it was of no importance. Forgiveness is not the same as smoothing over something- politicians are great at smoothing over things that matter so as not to rock the boat. Forgiveness must involve addressing the situation.

If your brother sins against you go and show him his fault." If someone has hurt you go and deal straightforwardly with him.

And do it straightway. Jesus always laid great store on quick action when it came to forgiving other people. Jesus said that if a person was offering a gift in the temple and he remembered that he had offended his brother in some matter he had to go straightway. Leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother. Then come and offer your gift." Notice that seeking forgiveness is more urgent even than an act of religious worship. Again Jesus said, " Don't let the sun go down while you are still angry." Don't go to bed seething with resentment against someone. Deal with it with urgency.

Seek to verbalise forgiveness. Where Jesus speaks of someone forgiving another he usually pictures him as speaking the forgiveness. Speaking the words can help to seal the act of forgiveness in our hearts. Of course it may be possible to express forgiveness to someone else in a number of different ways. It may be a wordless hug speaks more eloquently than any words could ever. It may be that an arm over the shoulder or a firm ly grasped handshake will speak volumes. What is important is that there is something definitively done. Often we struggle with recurring bitterness because we have never made our forgiveness definitive.

It may be that we have to forgive hurts done to us by someone who is no longer living or whom we have no way of contacting. There can still be help in making our forgiveness definitive. Some have found help in writing down the hurts they have caused on paper and then tearing up the paper into tiny pieces or watching it burn in the fire. The Bible is full of examples of enacted ceremonies that sealed the resolve of God's people to do what God wanted.

We need to remember also that forgiveness may take time. Some people forgive instantly and they are blessed. But for others it may take time.

CS Lewis had a monster for a teacher when he was a boy. He hated that scholarly sadist for most of his life but towards the end of his life a break through came. He wrote in his book, "letters to Malcolm", last week while at prayer I suddenly discovered _ or at least felt that I did- that I had forgiven someone I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying and praying that I might. When the thing actually happened ? sudden as the longed for cessation of one's neighbour's radio- my feeling was "but its so easy. Why didn't you do it ages ago?" So many things are done easily the moment you can do them at all. But till then, sheerly impossible, like learning to swim?it also seemed to me that forgiving (that man's cruelty) and being forgiven (my resentment) were the very same thing?. Finally, and best of all I believed anew what is taught in the parable of the unjust judge. No evil habit is so ingrained nor so long prayed against (as it seemed) in vain, that it cannot, even in dry old age, be whisked away.

Lewis suggests elsewhere that peter in this passage is not referring to seven different occasions when his brother offended. What he may have meant says Lewis is forgiving over and over again the same offence. In other words, "How often do I have to struggle to forgive this one deep seated resentment? If I try to forgive seven times, is that enough? " Be that as it may it is certainly true that forgiveness may have to be worked through again and again. You may have been hurt so deeply that the matter of forgiveness is something that is not easily obtained. Remember that God often takes time with a lot of things. We should expect to take time too with such a thing as a miracle of this kind.

Then there is the matter of forgetting. You will hear people say sometimes, " I will forgive but I cannot forget." That won't do. True forgiveness must include a willingness to seek to forget.

Joseph could have wasted his life dwelling on the injustices he had suffered. As a youth his brothers sold him into slavery, and he was forced to live in a hostile land. He had to spend his teenage and adult years away from his beloved father. He spent time in prison. In spite of all he endured he bore no resentment and he won through to the point where he was able to forget. In fact he named hi firstborn son Manasseh explaining, "For God has made me forget."

Once again we shouldn't expect it to be easy to forget wrongs done to us. But we can stop stirring up the memories. Think of a church tower with a bell rung by a rope. After the bell ringer lets go of the rope the bell keeps on ringing. First ding, then dong slower and slower until the final dong and then it stops. The same is true of forgiveness. When we forgive we take our hand off the rope. But we mustn't be surprised if bad memories and old resentments keep coming for a while. But they are just the ringing of the old bell slowing down. The important this is unwillingness to stop giving the bell a good old tug. If we do the memories will come back less frequently until we can say with Joseph, "God has made me forget."

The act of forgiveness is very much an act of the will. We decide to release some one from what they have done to us and we decide to forget it and no longer hold the offence against them. It is not an easy act. Indeed it is something we can do only by the grace of God. And it is reflecting on the grace of God and our indebtedness to the grace of God that will enable us to obey and do as we are taught to do.

In Jesus parable the servant who had a colossal debt represents us. Ten thousand talents is an enormous sum. It is a king's ransom- far more than anyone world have been able to pay.

We must see ourselves in this if we are going to be helped by this word of Jesus. We must see that the sum of our offences against God through the years constitutes this kind of a debt, an absolutely impossible amount. Our rebellions, our selfish acts and thoughts, our wilful choices, our lovelessness toward one another, and the hurt we have caused others, our pride, our anger, our lusts, our bitterness, our hates, and our lies; all these add up through the years to a staggering debt we owe God and which we cannot pay. But then there comes the good news, the wonderful good news of the gospel. There came a day when we stood in the presence of God and heard him pronounce those word, "Forgiven, in Christ's name." The debt was wiped away. In one moment it was gone.

Jesus places in contrast to this great debt a debt that was due to the servant. It was much less- the equivalent of a few pounds. But despite the fact that he had been forgiven so much he immediately demands to be paid to the last penny. And why not he argues- its what I m owed. Do you see the point? All of us as Christiasn must see that no matter how someone has hurt us, no matter how deep they stuck in the knife and twisted it their offence against us is like a debt of a few pounds contrasted to the debt of millions we owed God. And there is not a day goes by but we run up more debts as we fail God and yet he goes on forgiving and forgiving and forgiving. If we really appreciated the debt of sin we have been forgiven we would realise our folly when we think or say, "treat me like I deserve," Give me my rights." Give me the apology I am due." Grace puts our relationships in perspective.

The alternative to forgiveness is too awful to contemplate. Being handed over to the torturers is a reminder that failure to forgive may mark us as people who have never really been forgiven. It points to future punishment. But it also points to present misery. To refuse to forgive is to be It is an accurate description of gnawing resentment and bitterness, the awful gall of hate or envy. It is a terrible feeling.

We feel strongly this separation from another, and, every time we think of them, we feel within the acid of resentment and hate eating away at our peace and calmness. There is a videotape of the past painful scene playing over and over again and each time it plays you feel the pain.

Forgiveness changes everything. It turns off the video. It stops the escalator of resentment. It releases you from prison to move forward with God to a new future.