The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Announcements

I am here to invite you to come on Wednesday if you’re interested in learning about the prophetic and growing in the gift that God’s given us. Think of it as a place to go to polish your gift. I believe it’s once a month, so it will be announced every time. I just welcome you to come. I’m here because my friend is away this weekend, and when you have friends, they sometimes get you to do things that you don’t always want to do. But anyway, I’m here to invite you on Wednesday, 7 o’clock till 9. Show up and we will polish our gifts together.

Just to be clear about the Fatherheart weekend: this is interesting, in that the leadership team all got together and we were praying about what God wanted us to do in the fall, what we should be speaking on, and the direction things should be going. We were all spending some time in the Father’s heart, asking God what we should do, and every single person on the leadership team got the word that we should do a Fatherheart weekend soon. So this is our obedience to that. It’s something God has put on us, and it is not insignificant that every single one of us was impressed that we needed to do this. This is not a school specifically. You may know the Fatherheart ministry out of New Zealand. They run schools, and a lot of our leadership team has been to those. Those are structured, week-long, and excellent. If you ever get the opportunity to go, they’re super cool. What we’re doing is just our church sharing what we know and what we hold and what we steward, as ambassadors of the Father’s heart for this community and for this time. So we encourage you to come and be part of that. Again, we need you to sign up online so we can prepare accordingly.

With all of that said, I would like to invite all of you to take five minutes to use the washroom, get a coffee, and say hi to your friends. The kids are released to go with their parents, who will sign them in.

Welcome Back and Prayer

All right, the timer is down. Let’s everybody come back and gather and grab a seat. Thank you. It’s good.

We have Jonathan Boettcher from our leadership team. I’m referred to as third John. The guy who led worship today, his name is John Miller, and we call him second John. And this here is first John, Jonathan Boettcher.

Father, I just thank you for what you’re doing in this place, and I thank you for what you’re doing in Jonathan’s heart. I pray that you open up all of our hearts to receive what you’re pouring out today, and that you speak through Jonathan right now and fill him with your Spirit, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Peter’s Question

Good morning. How many of you have been wronged before? I expect every hand to go up, right? How many of you love forgiving when that happens to you? All right. I’m sure we’re all in different parts of the spectrum on that. But this morning we’re going to be looking at the parable of the unforgiving servant, out of Matthew 18.

Before we get into the parable, the reason Jesus shared it with his disciples was in response to a question that Peter asked. He said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Now, we’ve got a few numbers in this parable, and those of you who know me know that I enjoy looking at the biblical meaning of numbers. So we’re going to do that a little today, because I think it sheds some light on it. The number seven is the number of spiritual perfection. So you could think of Peter saying, “Lord, surely I shouldn’t have to forgive more than spiritual perfection. What more could be required of me?” And yet Jesus returns and blows his mind. He says, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.” We’re going to get into that a little more as well.

The Parable

Let’s go through this. You’re going to get Jonathan’s transliterated version this morning. We have a couple of slides to help us through the story.

“Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents.” You can see here the guy’s got his list of debts, and it just goes on and on. It’s funny, because I looked up some commentaries on what the 70 times 7 means, and they say, “Oh, it’s just a big number.” And I’m thinking, yes, but Jesus just used 10,000 in the next line. Surely there’s some meaning to it. Well, the word for 10,000 is actually the biggest single word in the Greek for a number. It’s the biggest number that has a single word. So in today’s dollars, if you wanted to think of it that way, this would be billions of dollars.

You can imagine this guy. I’m going to call the servant Tom. I hope nobody here is a Tom. Because we’ve got a few servants, it helps to identify them by name. So Tom owed the king billions of dollars, a debt he could not pay back. “But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.'” Now, I don’t know about you, but this guy seems pretty optimistic, because if I owed someone billions of dollars, I don’t know that more time would help.

“Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, and he released him and forgave him the debt.” He tore it up. “But that servant, Tom, went out and found one of his fellow servants, Jerry, who owed him a hundred denarii.” Think of it like Tom bought Jerry lunch last week at the Keg, so it’s about a hundred bucks. Tom says, “Jerry, you owe me for lunch last week.” “And he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.'” Do you remember that line? It’s exactly the same words Tom just said to the king. “And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt.” The lunch money.

“So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and they came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.”

It’s a bit of a preposterous story in the beginning, a bit comical, and then it takes a very serious twist at the end.

Offense and the Trap

I want to talk about a word that’s actually not in this parable, and that word is offense. Who knows what it is to be offended? We’re all familiar with that feeling. When you’re offended, you get that feeling inside that I’m right, or I have been wronged, or I am owed something, or they did something they shouldn’t have done. There’s a little bit of a self-righteous, self-justifying quality to it. It feels a little bit good, because you think, I deserve to feel like this.

Years ago I read a book called The Bait of Satan by John Bevere. Some of you have read it. It’s a very good book. He talks about how the Greek word for offense is scandalon, and that actually describes the trigger of a trap. Can you put up that slide? That gold bit there is the scandalon, the offense. And yes, there’s a little cupcake on top. It feels good sometimes to be offended, because we feel right. But you step on that trap, take the offense, and then boom, all of a sudden something much bigger slams shut around you. You can be right and yet still be terribly wrong.

Tom was right. Did Jerry owe him lunch money? Yes, he did. That was legitimate, so Tom was right in that narrow little view of the story. But zooming out to the king’s perspective, Tom was terribly wrong. That’s what offense does to us. We get locked into a very narrow little interpretation of the story. We can be wronged legitimately, as many of us have been. And then sometimes we only perceive that we’ve been wronged. We misunderstand something, and maybe nothing actually happened. Internally, we respond the exact same way.

The Tormentors

Let’s talk about being delivered to the tormentors. The word translated “tormentor” is the word they used for a jailer at that time. Tom’s family was sold too. That’s crazy, right? That tells me there’s a corporate dynamic to unforgiveness. Tom’s family perhaps didn’t know anything about what was going on, and yet they were sold along with him. Not only that, the broader community of servants was grieved. So there are multiple layers of community affected by what seemed like a purely personal offense. We’re going to talk a little more about the corporate side later.

I believe it was Joyce Meyer who said that unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. That is a vivid picture. You’re going for that cupcake, thinking, “Oh yeah, this is great,” and then boom. You think it’s going against the other person, but it all comes back at you.

I like learning about how the brain works. There’s a place in our brain called the cerebral cortex. Think of it as your command center, where you go about your daily life. You have a nice big control panel in front of you, with things like logic and reason and talking it through, and forgiveness, and peace and rest. All your good options are available when your consciousness is in the cerebral cortex. But when a threat comes along, your consciousness says, “Now it’s time to go to the emergency command center,” and it goes over to a place called the amygdala. It’s a powerful place that God gave us, but your only options there are two buttons: fight or flight. You’ve left behind all your good options in the main control room, and now you’re in the fight-or-flight room, and everything that comes across that control panel gets evaluated through one lens: am I going to die? Should I run? Should I fight? That’s how your amygdala processes things. It’s important. If you’re being chased by a bear, you need that to deal with the situation. But we jump into that part when we feel offense, because offense registers as a threat.

When you move into that emergency command center and hang out there for a long time, it isn’t how your body was designed. You begin releasing adrenaline and cortisol and all kinds of hormones. Adrenaline is great for helping you run away from a bear. But if you’re going through life carrying offense, it adds so much stress and anxiety into your body, and if you look into it, there’s a lot of science showing this leads to long-term health problems. So I believe some of the tormentor Jesus is talking about is our own physical body. When we’re locked in unforgiveness and offense, we’re treating it as an emergency, as a threat, and your body torments you.

If you stay in that long enough, it sends up a bit of a smoke signal in the spiritual world, and it can attract things you don’t want around your life. The demonic can start agreeing with you. Pretty soon you can find yourself with a stronghold in your thinking that’s anchored in offense and unforgiveness, and all of a sudden you find yourself in jail, being tormented.

Jesus said to forgive from the heart. Many of us have probably experienced forgiving from the head versus the heart. It’s a difference. Oftentimes the head comes first, as the decision: “Okay, I choose to.” Then, with maturity and with God, it settles down and grows until our heart can truly say yes and truly release.

What 70 Times 7 Means

All right, let’s look at the numbers. What does 70 mean? In the Bible, when you take numbers and multiply them together, the new number gains the meaning of both of the numbers that make it up. We’ve got seven, which I mentioned is spiritual perfection, times 10, which is divine order. So this is math class today: 7 times 10 is 70. It’s not just a lot. Seventy is the number of nations God had at the Tower of Babel. God split the nations, and they went all over the earth into 70 nations. So 70 speaks of all the people of the earth. There were also 70 elders of Israel in Moses’ time, which again represents all of the people.

Seven is also closely connected to the idea of forgiveness in the Bible. In Leviticus, God mandated a rest for the land, the Sabbath year rest. Every seven years the Israelites were meant not to plant anything and to give the land rest. God thought that was important, and they didn’t have a good track record of doing it. And every seven times seven, God said, we need to have a Jubilee. That was a big deal. It was a release of debt. It was forgiveness. It was the release of slaves. If you had sold land out of your family, it was returned. It was a huge reset: debts were forgiven, wrongs were forgiven, slaves were released. Slavery back then was quite different from how we think of it today. If you owed somebody money, you could basically sell yourself to them as a slave, and it was meant to be limited and to pay off your debt. So when Jesus is talking about slavery, this is something they were familiar with. The Jubilee would be announced on the Day of Atonement. Do you know what today is? It’s the Day of Atonement. That kind of blew my mind.

So when Jesus answered Peter, “seventy times seven,” it’s the same as that seven times seven Jubilee. They were familiar with seven times seven as Jubilee, a big release of debt. Jesus is scaling it up to the whole earth: 70 times 7, all the peoples of the earth. Isn’t that cool?

The nation of Judah almost pulled off a Jubilee one time. They released their slaves, and then they pulled them back. You can’t do that. This was just before they got sent off to Babylon. Maybe they should have thought that one through. They were in Babylon for 70 years, and 2 Chronicles says they were there for one year for every year they didn’t give the land its rest. God was paying attention. They might not have thought it was important, but God did. When they came back, there was a decree from Artaxerxes to rebuild Jerusalem. If you go from the year of that decree forward 70 times 7 years, which is 490, do you know what you get to? You get to Jesus on the cross. So 70 times 7 is meant to be the ultimate expression of forgiveness, and when you go forward in the timeline you land on Jesus on the cross, which is the ultimate expression of forgiveness, forgiving all the nations of the earth. Unfortunately, Israel didn’t enter into that forgiveness at that time. They didn’t receive his sacrifice, and Jerusalem was destroyed 40 years later. That is a mirror of what’s happening in our parable.

The Character of the King

What does this tell us about the character of the one who is doing the forgiving? Jesus says, “So my heavenly Father,” which makes it very clear that the king in the parable is our heavenly Father. A lot of us have wrong ideas about who God is. We might think he’s sitting there with a huge list of offenses, just waiting for some opportunity to smack us. This parable paints a very different story. When Tom cried out for mercy, what did he ask for? He asked for more time. How did the king respond? He tore up the debt. That’s responding on a different dimension altogether. It says he was moved with compassion. The heart of the king was moved with compassion, and he responded with this excessive, over-the-top forgiveness of the debt. That’s our heavenly Father.

Proverbs 19:11 says, “The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, and his glory is to overlook a transgression.” The NLT says they earn respect by overlooking wrongs. Tom thought he was being a big man when he grabbed Jerry by the throat and said, “You owe me my lunch money. I’m going to extract every last penny I am owed.” That’s what the world tells us is being a strong person: getting what you deserve. And they never look at getting what you deserve on the bad side. They say, “No, no, just give me the good stuff that I deserve.” The world says forgiveness is weakness. The Bible paints a completely different story. It says it is to his glory to overlook a transgression, and that one earns respect by forgiving. Father God has forgiven more than any being that has ever existed. He has forgiven all of humanity through time and eternity. Therefore no one has more glory than the Father, and no one has more respect than the Father, because he has forgiven the most. The biggest man in the room, if you will, is the one who has forgiven the most. God sets the standard for his kingdom by the measure of his own forgiveness.

Now, when the issue of forgiveness comes up, people are always saying, “But if I forgive, they’re just going to get away with it.” Well, yes, kind of, from your perspective, because forgiveness is releasing your claim to dictate the outcome. We still have a God, and he says, “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord. He is a righteous judge, he does care for us, and he looks out for us. That’s something we have to leave to God. As far as our part goes, we have to release our claim on what it looks like.

Let me ask you this: why do you love God? It’s because he first loved us. While we were still sinners, while we were still his enemies, he sent Jesus, his Son, to die on the cross, and he forgave us of our sins while we were still fighting against him. The law doesn’t lead to heart change. The law highlights the need for mercy. And forgiving doesn’t lead to lawlessness. It doesn’t mean that if I let him off the hook, the world is going to run amok. Romans 2 says the goodness of God leads us to repentance. Holding someone to account doesn’t turn their heart. It might make us feel good inside, but it isn’t going to change the person. What changes a person is undeserved goodness extended to them. It’s giving them a gift they don’t deserve. We’ve probably heard that phrase a lot, and it’s true: we were given a gift we didn’t deserve, forgiveness for our sins. Jesus is saying, “Now extend that gift to other people who don’t deserve it.”

Sons Who Carry the Father’s Character

We see this pattern in the Bible. Abraham interceded with God for whom? For Sodom and Gomorrah, the wickedest cities on the planet at that time. When you read the Bible you get only a tiny bit of what they were doing there, and I guarantee you Abraham had heard all the stories. They were a wicked people, and Abraham says, “God, have mercy on them.” That’s crazy, right? It’s the total opposite of what the world says.

Moses, if you remember the story, had the Israelites off again in depravity or wickedness or something. God says, “Hey, Moses, I’m just going to wipe that lot off, and I’ll start over with you, and we’ll do this thing better.” And Moses says, “No, have mercy on these wicked people.”

Stephen is out there being stoned. How does he respond? “Father, forgive them.” And Jesus, the ultimate example, on the cross as they’re literally killing him: “Father, forgive them.” That is the character of God. All the examples I just gave are of sons who had matured into the character of their father.

Authority and character walk together. There’s a lot of talk in different circles about authority, and that’s great, because we do have authority in Christ. But if we can’t enter into the character of the one who grants that authority, it’s not going to work. Authority and character have to be paired together, and character is forgiveness lived out. So I believe that if you look at the meaning of the numbers rightly, 70 times 7 is the rightly ordered authority that mature sons govern with. That’s what it looks like to be a mature son in the kingdom of God: to forgive 70 times 7.

“Love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For he is kind to the unthankful and the evil.” That’s our Father’s nature. He’s not playing sides and choosing favorites and doing all kinds of shenanigans like that. He loves all the nations of the earth, and everybody has sinned against him, and his heart is massive forgiveness. That is the heart of our Father.

Scripture says, “For the earnest expectation of creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.” It’s not waiting for a bunch of squabbling children. It’s waiting for those who, like Abraham and Moses and Stephen and Jesus, are willing to walk in the character and authority of their Father. That is what creation is screaming for.

The Corporate Dynamic of Unforgiveness

I mentioned earlier that there’s a corporate dynamic to unforgiveness. It’s easy to think that when we hold a grudge or hold unforgiveness, it’s just a me thing. Nobody else needs to know about it, and nobody else is affected by it. But let me ask you this: how many of you have been in a room with somebody who has not said a word but is clearly stewing? Everybody can relate to this. They haven’t said a word. Maybe they haven’t even moved, so there’s no visible external indication, and yet you know, because our hearts actually transmit a field, and we’re a community, and we pick up on that. We’re also receivers, antennas. So you affect those around you even without your words. There are probably more dynamics that we don’t understand, but the point is that if you’re carrying something, it affects those around you.

Here’s the cool part. Unforgiveness affects those around you, and I propose to you that forgiveness also affects those around you. It’s a two-way street. You can go that way or you can go this way, and you can impact those around you for good.

A Personal Story

I want to tell you a short story about something that happened to me years ago. I was part of a very small church, on the worship team, and we were always in each other’s business. I don’t know what started it, but one day everything went sideways. Worship was rocky, words were spoken, and it was not a good scene. Afterwards I overheard a little tidbit of gossip. I was not part of the conversation, and to this day I don’t remember the details. I just remember what happened. That little morsel of gossip found a landing pad in my heart. I was part of the community in that sense. I wasn’t directly wronged, but it bugged me.

For a full week, seven days, every day, I was saying, “God, I’m forgiving.” He was showing me things in my own heart where I had been in pride or idolatry or whatever it was, and he was breaking down that landing pad. But I was still doing the head thing. I choose to forgive, but it wasn’t getting into the heart. You choose, and then half an hour later you still feel it. This was really bothering me, and I couldn’t shake it.

Fast forward one week. I had been working this through for a full week. The next Sunday morning I was up early, spending time with God, still working through it. Then faith rose up in me. I was listening to the song “Break Every Chain,” and I began to break all these things and come against them, because I saw that the unforgiveness was bigger than just me. It was a bigger issue. I began standing and forgiving in the authority of a son. God released joy, and I knew something had shifted.

We went to church that morning and had worship, and we had more freedom in worship that day than we had had in probably years. It was remarkable. Afterwards the pastor said, “Somebody must have been praying.” I didn’t say anything. I don’t say anything now to gain brownie points either. I share the story because I learned something.

We don’t know, when we hold an offense, when we hold a grudge, when we hold unforgiveness, how it’s affecting those around us. And we don’t know how it’s affecting our own heart. But I guarantee you that if you step on that scandalon, that offense, you can’t escape the trap. It produces effects in our body and has all those consequences, and it is poison to us. But if we choose to step into the character of our Father and grow into it, he’s inviting us to mature. If we choose to give a gift that is not deserved, you don’t know what freedom you can release in those around you. So that’s your invitation. Will you choose to grow in the character of your Father? Amen.

Prayer and Response

Thank you, Jonathan. We have a few minutes before the kids need to get picked up, and as we often do here, we’re going to invite people to come and respond to this word. Forgiveness is such a huge thing, and a lot of people struggle with it. Let’s everybody stand, and I’m going to invite the prayer team to come up and get ready. Our prayer team always wears tags, so you can get prayer from somebody we’ve approved to pray with you. If you’re struggling with forgiveness, or you’re struggling with how to walk out this character of the Father’s heart that Jonathan was just talking about, I’m going to invite you to come and ask for some prayer. I’m going to join the prayer team today, if that’s okay.

I had an experience in my life, and I believe God wants to do this more and more. Jonathan talked at the beginning about forgiving with your head but having a hard time forgiving with your heart. I know that if you can forgive with your heart, God can take care of the head part. He can do the heavy lifting for you. There are some people here who struggle with forgiveness, and God has done that for me once in my life. It’s a long testimony, and I’m not going to preach on top of Jonathan’s preaching. But if you’re struggling with forgiving from your head into your heart, come up and see me as well. I want to pray for that.

Let’s pray. Father, thank you very much for this word. Thank you for this encouragement, and thank you for what you’re doing in the body of Christ today, here in Abbotsford and across the world. Father, you’re pouring out your love into the church right now. I pray that as we go from here, we keep our hearts steady and right and true before you, and that we are quick to forgive, quick to walk in your character, and quick to find how we can be your sons and daughters the way you intended and the way you want to relate with us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.