09.18.2022 - Making Disciples - Faithful Forgiveness

What sold you one Jesus? Some years ago, I sat down with an older woman who desperately wanted to know the scriptures. She had been born and raised in another country and sold from one man to another for many years. There, alone in a community where she struggled to understand English, she felt alone all the time. She had no friends, and her few family relationships were strained. She only had two desires in life - to experience freedom from sin and to see her son and his family saved. She fasted and prayed more than doctors would say was healthy. She wanted to live out every bit of the Word of God in her life. I went to visit her, and she told me that she did not understand the Bible. She had a translation of the words, yes, but she took everything seriously and literally, and it got her into trouble. She told me she read about Jesus teaching that if your hand causes you to sin, you should cut it off (from Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount), and she went looking for a knife because she knew she was a sinner. She knew something was off in her attempts to follow Jesus. Please don’t hurt yourself because of something you read in scripture. Her problem was that she struggled to understand how to take Jesus seriously enough to actually do what He commands us to do without getting tripped up in some of the details and heading down the wrong path. There are many days I wish I took God’s Word as seriously as she did. She had been bought and sold her whole life until she finally sold out to Jesus and experienced true freedom. Are you that sold out to Jesus? Do you yearn not just to know and believe His word but to live it out in your life, no matter how big or small? God can accomplish great things through us when we are faithful in the small things.

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Fired!

After telling the crowds the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus turned to his disciples and tells them the Parable of the Guy who got fired. This is one of the teachings we have from Jesus that are really challenging to apply to our lives. Most of us skip the story and go right to verse 10 and move on with our lives. We prefer spiritual shortcuts, not the whole truth. Surely C.S. Lewis or Max Lucado has made this into a one-liner somewhere. There was a wealthy man who had a manager who took care of all his wealth. Think of him as a private banker or investor. If money was missing or business went bad, he was ultimately responsible. One day, someone accused his manager of being dishonest. He was ripping people off, taking money for himself, and not telling his boss. That was a fireable offense. Clean off your desk. Pack your things. Get out. That is what the master told this manager. He said I want you to write out an inventory of everything I have and all the transactions you have made and give it to me. That document would be handed over to the next person hired for the job. The fired manager was too old to get work as an indentured servant digging and too proud to beg, so he made a plan. While he wrote out the list of who owed what to his master, he went and visited those clients, and he told them to change the numbers in their records so they owed less. These clients came to his master’s estate at some point looking for a loan. They were given a certain amount of oil or grain with a promise to pay it back with interest. So, what were the interest rates back then? For oil, it was not uncommon to have up to 100% interest rates, so you buy 50 and pay back 100. For grain, it was usually closer to a 50% interest rate. In this story, he has the grain client drop the interest to perhaps a quarter or a third, buying 60 and paying back 80 instead of 100. The math is not meant to be exact since this is a parable, but the main point of this is something that market people would understand. Were these incredibly high-interest rates the reason the rich stayed rich, and the poor stayed in debt? No. The unwritten rule in this story is that part of the interest went to the manager as a commission for his services. In fact, if such a manager was dishonest, he might charge extra interest on behalf of his master but not report the extra income and keep it for himself. If the master did not pay attention, he would have no idea what his servant was charging others in his name. This is a story of a dishonest money-lender who made his life ripping off clients, and when he lost his job, he went back to those clients and changed what they owed so that it came in line with more ethical business practices. He repented. And even more, the money that was forgiven was the money that the manager would probably have put quietly into his own pocket. The master commends him for his shrewdness. He would never work there again, but this manager has won the friendship of the master’s clients because he dealt fairly, even generously, with them in the end. The manager, who lived his life trying to make money off people, finally came to the conclusion that people are more important than money.

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What We Owe

That is the bottom line: people are more important than money. In fact, if I were to take the Gospel of Luke as a whole, from some of the best Christmas passages all the way through the resurrection and ascension. Even if we threw the Acts of the Apostles, the book after the gospels, into the mix, I believe there are two underlying beliefs and themes that have to do with how we treat one another. People are more important than money.We owe each other forgiveness. Jesus taught and showed both of these throughout His whole life. We may believe Jesus is Lord, the only way to Heaven, but if we live as if money is more important than people and refuse to forgive others, we won’t be following Him there. Jesus addresses the problem of unforgiveness among believers in other places in the gospels because it really is a unique kind of sin. To claim that I can sin against you because I am a Christian, I know Jesus loves me, and that He died for me is like the dishonest manager using his Master’s wealth to rip off other people and line his own pockets. That is why I think Jesus turned to his disciples when he told this parable. He wanted them to know that they would be tempted to use their relationship with Jesus as leverage to get what they wanted out of others. No, Jesus does not pay us in dollars and cents, He pays us in grace and forgiveness, and we always have more than we need of that. You have probably heard that we are commanded to forgive others for our sake, not their own. It is true that unforgiveness becomes a character sickness that can ruin our lives. However, we don’t do what we do as Christians simply out of self-preservation. We do it because Jesus asks us to do it, and that is enough. Are you giving it away for Jesus’s sake, or are you holding on and only sharing it with those who you think deserve it or from whom you think you can gain a benefit? When we claim Jesus as our Lord, we are no longer masters ourselves, we are managers of His kingdom, and we have His standards to follow. That is how Jesus ends this lesson to the disciples: Standards. God has standards for all of us. And Jesus was teaching this parable to His disciples because it involved how they lived their daily lives, and it also involved how they worked for Jesus. You cannot pray the Lord’s prayer without asking God to use the same measure of forgiveness on us as we use on those around us. If you pray the Lord’s prayer and refuse to forgive others, you are condemning yourself before God. Relationships are the riches of heaven, and they thrive on forgiveness. God is in the business of forgiveness. Are you working for Him or against Him?

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Start Small and Start Here

None of us get it right the first time. Or the second. I think Jesus gave us this teaching because He knows we will mess up. This lesson is for those of us who are trying to work our jobs, raise our children, care for our spouses, volunteer in service, and just share our faith with our neighbors around us. We are going to mess up. We are going to think we should be fired for some of those mistakes. And the truth is: We will lose some of those relationships. Life may change because of the consequences of our choices. But we can only move forward if we are willing to repent of our sins and forgive those around us. Jesus doesn’t teach “fake it til you make it.” However, it is just as faithless to be so overcome by our own sin and weakness that we don’t do anything. Jesus taught that the lesson in this strange story is to be faithful in the small things. If you are ripping your small clients off, you can bet that you will someday try to rip your boss off as well. Big lies are just as easy to tell as small ones. The reverse is true as well. If you can bring yourself to be faithful in the small things, it will be much easier when faced with the bigger challenges in life. So start small, and start here. Who do you need to forgive? Who do you need to ask forgiveness from? Can you do it simply and honestly, without making excuses, but just admitting that you were in the wrong and you want to do better? In the end, we will lose everything. The only thing we will have left is Jesus and each other. Nothing else will matter. Will you take the first step to living for that day by being faithful in forgiving those around you, just as Jesus has forgiven you?

Sunday school starts in just a few moments. Come back this evening at 6 pm to hear Richard share with us at our Sunday evening service.

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