The Country Church Bourbon Indiana

Introduction:

When you hear the word “Gospel” do you tend to think something like: “that is for people who are not yet Christians? I have already believed it myself, so I don’t need to focus on that anymore. I should focus on learning new things.”
Or have you heard the Gospel and thought: “That is useful for the life to come because believing it gives me eternal life. But I want to hear something that is useful to me in this life now.”
When hearing a sermon or an invitation and the preacher begins to talk about the Gospel, do you tend to tune him out a bit because you have already heard that message many times?

It was not very long after becoming a Christian that I developed that kind of attitude toward the Gospel. “Okay, I know the Gospel already. Just tell me what to do now.” Or “I know the Gospel. I want to learn about the end times.” When the preacher would give the Gospel or give an invitation, I would pray that if there were anyone there who hadn’t believed it yet, that they would do so now. But I would spend little time thinking about what it meant for me as a Christian.

In my mind, I had already believed the Gospel and so I already had eternal life, which was the entire point. That was my major application of the Gospel – I now get to go to heaven. I had little concept of other applications.

Maybe you have thought something like that. Maybe you think that way now.
I’m planning to spend the next approximately 5 weeks talking about the Gospel. Does that sound exciting to you or does it sound like you aren’t going to get much out of it?

The truth is the Gospel has many more applications for the Christian’s life than can even be talked about in 5 weeks. There is no part of our lives that the Gospel doesn’t touch. The Gospel, most obviously, is how we get into heaven – but it doesn’t just get us into heaven. Believing the Gospel assures us that God now sees us as His friends, He sees us as righteous, and He works all things together for our good. So the Gospel doesn’t just affect our eternal destination, it affects our relationship with God now.

• The Gospel gives us powerful motivation to love and worship God.
• The Gospel allows me to relate to God as a child of God, rather than someone He is angry with.
• The Gospel frees us from the tyranny of Satan, and sin, and guilt.
• The Gospel helps us to live godly lives.
• The Gospel brings to nothing the things that we are anxious about.
• The Gospel changes the way we relate to others.
• The Gospel demands that we forgive others, and show mercy to others, and extend grace to them.
• The Gospel makes us humble. It puts pride to death.
• The Gospel frees us from looking for salvation in ourselves, or in our family, or in our friends, or in our government, or in any other deity.
• The Gospel helps us not only to be content, but to rejoice.
• The Gospel helps us to have deepening love for those around us as we understand they share our flaws and are creatures like us, yet God loves them deeply.
• The Gospel gives a grand mission and purpose to our lives – a reason to wake up every morning, no matter how bad your circumstances might be.
• The Gospel makes sense out of a life that would otherwise be senseless.
• The Gospel helps us to not expect people to fulfill our every need.

Link: I’ve lost count. I think we have more than enough for 5 weeks, though!
In a book called A Gospel Primer for Christians by Milton Vincent – one of my favorite books, which I reread from time to time – Milton Vincent lists 35 major reasons to rehearse the Gospel to yourself daily. And each of those 35 reasons contains about a page of explanations and related reasons, so the number is actually much higher.
Let me just say, if you think, like I once thought, that the Gospel is useful for non-Christians and not for you, then you are making a very big mistake and missing out on a lot of growth and blessing!

My most significant times of growth as a Christian came after I first believed the Gospel. *share a bit about radical life changes* I bet it did for you too! And then again after I discovered how much more it means for my life than a heavenly home.
So then, hopefully I’ve gotten your interest a bit with that. Let’s now take a look at one particular area that the Gospel will deeply impact your relationships with other people, if you let it.
Link: Here it is: The forgiveness granted through the Gospel obligates us to forgive other people. X2

Text: Matthew 18:21-35
Link: So we talked about thinking that the only application of the Gospel is for salvation.
Now let me ask you this: Do you have trouble forgiving other people? When someone wrongs you, do you remember it for a long time? When someone wrongs you, do you look for opportunities to show them up, or want them to jump through many hurdles to make things right again? Do wrongs committed by others frequently keep you up at night?

Let me suggest that if you have trouble forgiving others and you tend to tune out when you hear the Gospel, that those two things are certainly related to each other.

Peter comes to Jesus. At this point in time, Peter does not yet believe in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection as a substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. When Jesus preached the Gospel to Peter earlier, Peter rebuked Him about it. Peter will, but does not yet, believe the Gospel.

Peter comes to Jesus with a question about forgiveness. How many times must I forgive a brother who sins against me? Seven times? Notice, an enemy is not being considered. This is a spiritual brother we are talking about. I don’t know what was in Peter’s mind about forgiving enemies, probably that you don’t need to forgive them at all.

Peter picks what he probably believes to be a generous number – seven. Should I forgive as many as seven times? Seven was also an auspicious number. It was seen as the number of completion. God created the work in seven days and rested on the seventh, after all. Seemed like a good number.

But the problem with Peter’s question, the problem with the number seven, is that Peter is not thinking about the debt that he owes to God and God’s rich forgiveness of that debt. Peter isn’t thinking about the Gospel. If he had been, he would have realized that seven actually is not very many times.

Jesus responds with a number that blows Peter’s out of the water and is intended to represent an unlimited amount of forgiveness. He says not seven, but seventy seven. Peter’s eyes probably bulged.

By the way, some translations have seventy times seven here and some have seventy seven. This is the only time in the New Testament that this Greek word appears. Εβδομηκοντακις. Sounds like I’m trying to cast a spell saying that. It means seventy times. The translation discrepancy is that the word seven appears afterwards. It’s Εβδομηκοντακις one word, followed by επτα. So the Greek literally says “seventy times seven,” but is that seventy times multiplied by seven or seventy times with an extra seven?

I prefer seventy times seven, so 490. But I’ll make it real easy. The point Jesus is making isn’t literally that you should only forgive up to 77 times or only forgive up to 490 times. The point is you should continually be forgiving. Don’t stop at seven, Peter. Keep on forgiving people. That’s the point.

Link: So Jesus shares a story with Peter to explain, and this story points very strongly to the Gospel.
In the story that Jesus shares with Peter, we see a man with a disconnect between the forgiveness that he has been given and the forgiveness that he gives to others. He who has been forgiven many lifetimes worth of debt fails to forgive another of a few thousand dollars’ worth of debt.

Many kingdoms would struggle to pay 10,000 talents. A talent weighed around 70 pounds. 700k pounds of, probably, gold. Hardly matters if it’s silver or copper, 700k pounds. That would represent the entire national wealth of many small kingdoms of that day. When Assyria defeated ancient Judah, Assyria only required the nation to pay 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold. The entire nation, just 300 talents silver, 30 gold. And yet, Hezekiah had to strip the gold and silver off their Holy Temple to be able to pay 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold. God was upset about that, as you can well imagine.

Seeing those desperate measures taken to pay a little over 300 talents, then you can see that 10,000 is enormous and is intended to represent an unpayable debt. A nation can’t pay it. You certainly never will.

And yet, despite this clearly impossible debt, the man is forgiven. Not because he can or will pay the debt off, because he certainly can’t, but because of pity. The king has pity and forgives. Amazing mercy.
Link: But then –
The man walks away from that encounter of amazing, inconceivable, matchless mercy and grace and then runs into someone who owes him some money. Its 100 denarii. Most jobs back then you got 1 denarii a day, so that’s 100 days of labor. And he aggressively goes after this individual who owes him 100 denarii saying “Pay what you owe!” He even chokes him.
And yet, despite what the king has done for this servant, and despite the fact that this debt actually could realistically be paid off, he chooses to have no patience, no pity, no mercy, and no grace. And we say “what’s wrong with this guy? How can you be that way? He should be jumping up and down shouting for joy about his own forgiveness and telling the other servant – hey man, don’t worry about it. I’ve been forgiven. Now I forgive you.”

Link: Here’s what’s wrong with this person.
To the person who is not thinking about the Gospel — and sometimes that’s you and me — 100 days of labor sounds like a lot. It sounds like a lot, but only when you are not stacking it up against the debt we owe to God. When you stack 100 days of labor up against all that we have done to offend our Creator, and the absolutely incredible price that God Himself paid to be able to forgive us of that, then it is completely out of line to not forgive someone who owes you 100 days of labor.

Oh yeah, but well they did X, they did this. How can I forgive that? Hey, that’s not right that they did that, but that’s 100 days of labor and God’s forgiven us an unpayable debt. We gotta forgive.

And we know from this parable that God takes it very seriously when we don’t forgive. The king in this parable is representing God – that’s clear because Jesus says “So also my heavenly Father will do.” God will do to you as this king does to his servant.

And what happens to the servant is bad, no matter how you slice it. The king says “time to go to jail till you pay off that debt.” Oh dear. That’s a problem. Got to pay off 10,000 talents? That kind of debt he’s never going to pay off. He will be in jail till the day he dies. He will suffer serious consequences for not being willing to forgive.

Link: So what are those consequences specifically?
Now, you might be quick to say this represents hell but consider this – earlier, in this same parable, when the man couldn’t pay off his debt, the king ordered that everything he had would be sold – including his wife and children, meaning sold into slavery, in order to pay off that debt.

If jailer is meant to have the direct analogy of hell – then what is the direct analogy of the wife and kids getting sold? Does that mean that God is going to make your wife and kids slaves to pay off your sins? No. Heavens no. Every man must pay for his own sins, that’s the teaching of the Bible. Is God going to send your wife and kids to hell for your sin debt? Certainly it does not mean that. Certainly not.
What about “choke?” What is the direct analogy of that? Also consider, “jailers” means prison right – is prison hell? Then think of this – when the wicked servant has a fellow servant ask him for debt forgiveness, the wicked servant has the fellow servant sent to prison – does that mean the wicked servant has sent the fellow servant to hell? A Christian can’t send another Christian to hell. We know that. Prison is obviously a story element here, and not intended to be interpreted allegorically.

Here’s the deal. Parables are like illustrations. Parable literally means “a story alongside.” A lot of preachers do that. They share a story alongside their message to help you understand it better. That’s what a parable is – an illustration to help teach spiritual truth. Some parts of the story might have direct analogues to the teaching point; some might just be elements of the story.

Certain elements of this story Jesus does give a direct correlation. Those are in verse 35. He correlates the king with the heavenly father. The unforgiving servant with His disciples who are listening. And the brother therefore would be their fellow disciples. The jailers, the prison, the selling of wife and kids for debt, the choking, the talents – he gives no correlation for these. These are best seen as story elements of the illustration. If we overanalyze the illustration and try to assign meaning to every single object in it, we’re gonna get confused, probably accidentally teach something false, and miss the point of the illustration.
Application:
The point of the illustration is simply this – God has forgiven us a debt we cannot repay, and so He will bring severe consequences to the believer who does not forgive other believers.
Unforgiving Christians do bear consequences for their actions. Certainly that will include not walking in the Spirit and so not getting to enjoy the fruit of the Spirit like love, and joy, and peace. It could mean loss of health. Could mean your sins are revealed. Could mean you lose fellowship with other believers. The Bible talks about certain sins leading to death – could be persistent unforgiveness results in an early grave.
I believe that for as long as we harbor unforgiveness in our hearts towards a brother, God will be disciplining us in some way because He sees it as very offensive that we should accept His forgiveness without extending forgiveness towards others.
Like the king who brought harsh consequences to the unforgiving servant, so too will our Father bring hard consequences to us if we do not forgive.
Forgiving others can be hard, but there is a truth we can focus on that makes it not only necessary to forgive others, but also much, much, easier – and that is the Gospel.
*Explain, Encourage Meditation on Gospel, and Pray*