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Three Angels Broadcasting Network (3ABN)

David Shin

Embracing Grace: The Power of Forgiveness

Our Father in Heaven, we thank you for the Sabbath.

We thank you for this reminder of creation and our recreation back to the image of God.

We thank you for this reminder that we can't make ourselves holy.

It is only God that can make us holy and help us to rest in that assurance on this Sabbath.

Bless us, we pray, as we tackle a difficult topic, forgiveness.

Help us, we pray, Hide me behind the cross.

May Jesus be uplifted and Christ be seen.

For we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus Christ.

Simon Wiesenthal was a Jew who lived through the Holocaust in Western Europe, and in his book entitled The Sunflower, he tells the story of how he was ushered into a hospital room by a nurse.

In the room, sitting on the bed, was a patient whose head was wrapped in bandages.

You could only see cutouts for his eyes, and his nose, and his mouth.

And the man said, I know that you are a Jew.

And I killed many Jews in cold-blooded genocide.

He told the story of how he commanded his men to surround this building filled with men, women, and children and they were told to torch the building.

And he had his soldiers stand around for any individual that would dare come out of that building to be gunned down in cold blood.

And as that man is sitting on the bed, he says, I feel guilty.

Can you forgive me for what I've done to your people?

He sat there in silence, and he made this decision.

He stood up without saying a word and walked out of the room.

And he asked multiple people, rabbis, people that he respected, did I do the right thing for walking out on that man?

And the majority of people told him, Simon, absolutely.

That man did not deserve your forgiveness.

Maybe they said things about you that were untrue, maybe they destroyed your reputation, maybe they have done things to you that have just hurt you so deeply and wounded you that you thought to yourself, this person does not warrant my forgiveness.

That's what we're going to be talking about tonight, and that's the words of Peter to Jesus in Matthew 18, verse 21.

Open your Bibles there to that relational chapter.

Anytime we're having a rift with somebody, we always say, go to Matthew 18, right?

So here it is, Matthew 18 and verse 21, Peter is asking Jesus this question about forgiveness.

Then Peter came to Him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

Now in Hebrew tradition, 7 was the number that you were to forgive your brother.

And here, Peter is following in that tradition and he thought he was being quite generous and look at Jesus' answer, And Jesus said to him, I do not say to you up to 7 times, but up to 70 times 7.

That's how long Jesus gave in the 70-week prophecy, 490 years.

Now, he's not giving a limit to 490, but you get the idea.

And then Jesus tells this story, and it's familiar.

A king and a servant, and the servant owes the king an exorbitant amount of money, an amount of money that he would never be able to repay.

Imagine if you owed someone a billion dollars.

And Finally, the king says, look, I'll forgive you.

The man goes from that experience and goes out and physically grabs someone by the throat that owes him $1 and says, look, pay me or else.

The king hears about it and says, you wicked servant, you should have forgiven your fellow servant.

Now, I'd like to unpack this with you because the Bible is indicating that the unforgiveness of the wicked servant results in the loss of his own forgiveness.

Also, something interesting in this story is that the Bible presents forgiveness in a triad.

Typically, we think of forgiveness in terms of a unit of 2, the person that hurts me and me.

But Jesus expands forgiveness to not just the person that has wounded you, but also God in the picture as well.

So anytime you think about forgiveness, it is not just you and the other person, it is God, me, and those who hurt me.

And according to this story, These entities are what we call interrelated or interconnected or interdependent.

In other words, The relationship of the 1 impacts the relationship of the other.

When you cut off forgiveness to your brother, it affects another relationship.

Now, back in the day, when we had these Christmas lights in what we called a series circuit, or a daisy chain.

And when 1 light went out, what happened?

So think of forgiveness as a series circuit.

In other words, forgiveness is to flow from God to me to those who hurt me.

An interesting thing about this relationship is that there is a clear hierarchy between the king and the servant.

The king is up here, the servant is down here.

But in the relationship with the servant, the Bible says this is a fellow servant.

So we have the vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationship with our brother and sister.

And the Bible is indicating that when we receive forgiveness from God, that forgiveness is to flow.

But if it doesn't flow, that forgiveness from God gets cut off and we lose our forgiveness.

Now, how do we do this, Especially when we've been cut so deeply.

You ever been hurt so deeply that you want to hang on to that?

I'm going to hold on to this to the day that I die.

Graciela Martinez watched her son be executed right in front of her.

Before they cut him down like a dog in front of her, they allowed her to embrace her son.

So as she hugged him, he whispered in her ear, he said, Mom, forgive them.

Forgive them or they will be the victors.

She said, he said, Mom, forgive them or they're going to win.

And he went off and was executed right before her.

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Embracing Grace: The Power of Forgiveness

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