Discipleship Challenges: Forgiveness and Relationships

Anthony W. Franklin

After Pentecost • Sermon • Submitted 3 years ago

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10.03.2021

Scripture: Matthew 18:21-22

Matthew 18:21–22 NRSV

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

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Disciples and Disciple-makers

How much is a life worth?

That is a hard question to answer, and as much as we sometimes want to treat all lives equally, we don't. And not without reason. Because we do not know what tomorrow brings, each individual life has limitless potential. Sometimes the further away they are from that potential, the more possibility we see in them, and the more we want to protect them. Other times, we measure the value of a life based on how much work needs to be invested to bring out that potential. We learn to make these judgments so fast we don't always realize we are doing it.

The value of life is not an objective value either. What we have to offer, how we can personally invest in that life, raises or lowers its value to us. Again, those decisions are made lightning-fast because they determine who we seek relationships with and who we do not. The implications vary from who you choose to marry to which cashier you choose to stand in line for at the grocery store. More importantly to us today, these decisions are the true business of the church.

Jesus called it making disciples and it only happens through relationships. It is our purpose, our mission, and our product. After people have spent time with us, we want them to be disciples of Jesus with us. It seems that every generation of every church gets lost or stuck in this work. The story often goes like this:

Someone gets excited about a new way to make disciples of Jesus. There is a new study group, a sermon series, maybe some service projects involved, and we gather a crowd of people. Everyone shares about how much they are learning, how much their lives are changing, and they invite more friends. After several months, or perhaps even a few years, the season ends. We reach the end of the study. The sermon series is over. The service work is completed. Now what? You have double or triple the amount of people who want to get back to the same experience and the two or three disciple-makers who started this project who are exhausted and out of ideas. They ask for help, and the crowd says, "We don't know enough to make disciples. We are still working on being disciples." So the crowd begins to dwindle as people leave and everyone feels like they are back to square one again, looking for the next new thing. Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 of ministry that we see Jesus Himself handle in the gospels.

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I have become convinced that we can last for one harvest season if we set our goal as making disciples. But if we want our family to grow in strength and numbers, because both are important, we need to learn how to make disciple-makers. There are many examples of what that might look like, but simply put, it is the difference between coaches and players. You need both, but if you don’t train up coaches to lead teams, you will eventually stop getting new players trained and the games will end.

This is a huge topic and today we are just going to focus on the very beginning of it. My aim today is to take the subject of forgiveness, a word sometimes used interchangeably with the word grace, and make it something practical and practice-able for you.

Thesis: Forgiveness paves the way and is the fuel for relationships.

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Paving the Way

The Old Testament Law has a kind of mystery to us because we do not practice it. I'm not saying that it is not valuable, or that we should not practice it. I'm saying the reality is, we don't. When you take out the single Temple location for all people to worship, stop offering animal sacrifices for sin, you have really removed about 75% of the Hebrew religion. What you have left really is, love God and love your neighbor as yourself as ethical rules, rather than religious traditions. The same could apply to us if we stopped gathering for worship music, prayer, preaching, and left everyone to figure out how to love God and each other on their own. It doesn't work for very long.

One of the unspoken reasons we do not practice the Old Testament law is that there are many unforgivable sins in the Old Testament. There are many things you can do to be cut off from God's Kingdom forever. Does that surprise you? Some people worry about the one unforgivable sin that Jesus commented about, but for the Hebrew people, it was a much longer list. In fact, any sin was considered unforgivable under two conditions.

1) If you knew it was a sin when you did it.

2) If you did not repent and pay back restitution for whatever harm you caused (usually with interest).

The best example of how an unforgivable sinner found forgiveness is the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector. He had sinned by extorting or stealing money from his own people, and he did it on purpose. When Jesus offered him a relationship, a chance to come back to God's people, he agreed to pay back four times what he owed to anyone. We may be amazed at this generosity, but according to God's law, this repentance and restitution were required in order to receive forgiveness.

The sin-debt that he owed would have been so overwhelming that I'm sure Zacchaeus woke up each day thinking he could never be forgiven. He was lost forever. There was no hope. Because Jesus came to him first, asking him to come to his house, offering that first step of forgiveness, Zacchaeus was given the hope and the courage to step out in faith and seek forgiveness from all he had wronged. That was the beginning of discipleship.

So when Peter asked Jesus about how many times he should forgive his brother, up to 7 times, Peter was looking for a limit. He wanted to know when he could cut people off. Jesus took that number and let Peter know that He needed to multiply that number by 11 to get started, because when we refuse to forgive we are refusing to do the work of disciple-making. When we forgive those who sin against us, we pave the way for them to come into relationship with us and with God.

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Fueling the Engine

Peter's question is not without merit. He was willing to forgive everyone once. He was willing to forgive everyone seven times for the same sin committed against him. Our traditional saying is "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Peter was willing to go up to seven times.

Wouldn't it be easier if we all stopped sinning against each other after we received forgiveness? If the gospel was somehow a one-and-done cure for sin. It is not though. Life does not come from following rules, it comes from being in a relationship with God and each other, and that means forgiveness needs to be applied constantly. Not once every 3,000 miles, or once a day. The best disciple-makers share forgiveness with every breath they take.

Luke's gospel placed an even greater focus on forgiving others where he multiplied the number of times we are commanded to forgive (70 times 7 = 490) and then added two words that knock this commandment into a realm that goes beyond the difficult commands of the Old Testament. He says we are to forgive each person 490 times PER DAY. That's where I start to understand that Jesus is saying that we never stop forgiving. And yes, part of that forgiveness is about you, because unforgiveness becomes a festering wound that does not heal. But part of that is for Jesus because your unforgiveness can prevent others from becoming a disciple of Jesus. If you want to see how that works, read the story of Jonah. One man refused to forgive an entire nation of people and would have caused them all to suffer terribly for their sins. But God would not let Jonah, or us, stand in the way of His work saving and redeeming people. Jesus taught parables that showed the God forgives us in the same way that we forgive others, and when we stop giving forgiveness, we stop receiving it. We even pray that in the Lord's Prayer together "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us".

Forgiveness is the fuel that runs the engine of the church. It is not the only thing we have to do to make disciples, but when we run out of forgiveness, our engine stops running, and we are stuck in place until we choose to forgive and receive more grace.

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How do you use forgiveness as a disciple of Jesus?

Stephen was the first person to give their life for the work of Jesus. As he died, he prayed that God would forgive those who were killing him. Saul, overheard that as he watched him die, and I think that haunted him until he met Jesus. Stephen's forgiveness paved the way for Saul to become the apostle Paul. Peter and the other disciples also forgave him for hunting them down and trying to put them in prison. That allowed Paul to grow and extend that same forgiveness to the many people who would imprison and attempt to kill Paul. In Philippi, Paul would offer forgiveness to the jailor who had him in chains, and within days God turned that prison into the first church in Philippi, with the jailor's family some of the first Christians. It was to them that Paul would write these words:

Philippians 3:10–17 NRSV

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. Only let us hold fast to what we have attained. Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.

Paul wanted to offer forgiveness for anyone who hurt him, because he saw Stephen do it for him, paving Paul's way into God's kingdom, and Stephen was able to do that because Stephen saw Jesus do it for him, when, on the cross, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing."

Who paves your way to becoming and growing as a disciple of Jesus with their forgiveness?

How do you use forgiveness as a disciple of Jesus to make more disciples for Him?

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