We'll read from verse 15, the Gospel according to Matthew chapter 18, and reading from verse
15.
If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault just between the two of you.
If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.
But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be
established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.
And if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever
you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will
be done for you by my Father in heaven, for, where two or three come together in my name,
there am I with thee.
When Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother
when he sins against me?
Up to seven times?
Jesus answered, I tell you not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his
servants.
As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.
Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and
all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
The servant fell on his knees before him, be patient with me, he begged, and I will
pay back everything.
The servant's master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go.
But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred
denarii.
He grabbed him and began to choke him, pay back what you owe me, he demanded.
His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, be patient with me and I'll pay you back.
But he refused.
Instead he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and
told their master everything that had happened.
Then the master called the servant in.
You wicked servant, he said, I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?
In anger his master turned him over to the jailers until he should pay back all he owed.
This is how my Heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother
from your heart.
Now the subject for our thinking this evening is the whole matter of Christian forgiveness.
And I think that you will agree with me that when you read through the New Testament, you
easily and quickly come to the conclusion that this happens to be one of the most important
doctrines in the New Testament.
In fact, let's include the Old Testament as well.
If you take away the doctrine of Christian forgiveness, then the cross of Jesus Christ
loses its significance.
For the very purpose for his coming and dying in the place of sinners is that he might pronounce
forgiveness in the Gospel, when the Apostle Paul was writing to the Ephesians.
And when, from that position of imprisonment, he told them about the things that brought
joy to his heart.
The doctrine of predestination, the doctrine of adoption, the doctrine of redemption.
Lying in the very heart of chapter 1, you will find the crisp and glorious phrase, even
the forgiveness of sins.
He felt it.
He'd been through it.
He knew what it was for God to cancel out all the debt he ever owed to God for the vile
sins which he had committed and of which he was guilty.
But where do we begin when we talk about Christian forgiveness?
And as we have learned to do in our Christian lives and in our Christian ministry, we begin
with God.
All theology begins with God.
And when you consider the glorious attributes of God, you discover that this is one of his
wonderful, most wonderful perfections, that he a just, inflexibly just and holy God forgives
sinners.
And when he forgives them, he forgives them indeed and cancels out all the debt in total.
He forgives the very people who deserve the worst imaginable judgment.
They have committed treason against a most holy and eternal God.
They have broken his holy and just laws.
They have offended him more than they will ever know this side of eternity.
And yet, not withstanding their transgressions, they are forgiven at the cost of the blood
of Jesus Christ.
Forgiven at cost to God himself.
And it is his delight to forgive sins.
Now my brothers, pause and think.
We who sit here tonight are forgiven men.
I am moved when I say that.
And I'm sure you are as well, pardoned, daily being pardoned, pardoned to the point that
our sins will never be held against us in the day of judgment.
You are a forgiven man.
You could not be more forgiven than you are.
I could not be more forgiven than I am.
And whatever men may have forgiven or not forgiven, in so far as my sins against others
are concerned, the sins that I have committed against God are entirely, totally, completely
forgiven.
The slate has been wiped clean.
And pause and think for a moment about the extent of our sins.
You have sinned quantitatively, frequently.
We are drawing to the end of another day.
You sinned today, whether you realized it or not, consciously and unconsciously.
And your sins require atonement.
The secret ones and the ones known.
And yet God has continued to be merciful to you.
Mercy has been repeated again and again and again.
God has canceled your sins because of the blood of Christ.
This is not only so quantitatively, but think of it qualitatively.
Your sins are treasonable against God.
A God who is of purer eyes than to behold evil has been grieved by the things that you
ought not to have said and done and yet said and did, and things that you ought to have
done and said and which you never did, and you ought to have known better, but you didn't.
Pause for a moment and think that there are others who have not been forgiven, millions.
The spirits who are lost in hell, trapped in an eternal prison from which they will
never ever be released have not been forgiven.
They were not, nor ever shall be.
And yet God has forgiven you and He has forgiven me and He will continue to do so.
And when one day you come to your last dying moments and you are about to bid adieu to
earth's fading scenes and enter into the glorious presence of God, you will leave this
world and go into the next, pardon, into the embrace of Christ to be with Him forever precisely
because you were forgiven.
He forgave you for Christ's sake.
He forgave you particularly and personally.
He took your sins and He cast them into the deepest sea.
You were justified, justified, accepted in the Beloved.
You were sanctified and set apart for God and it was His Father's delight to do that.
Never to reckon your sins against you.
And when you think of your sins, and I'm only doing this so that we might appreciate God's
forgiveness as an introduction, but when you think of your sins, you begin to think
of all the sins that you committed before your conversion, those sins which Paul refers
to as things of which you are now ashamed, things which often come up on the screen of
your mind.
And when you think back of them all, you wish you could obliterate them from your thinking
and your imagination, but they do crop up.
And have you not often done what Luther did when he told Satan where to get off?
Because he was only appearing as the accuser and you had one answer, only one.
God justified, Christ died and ever lives to make intercession for us.
And then the sins that you committed after your conversion, after your conversion.
When since the day the light of the eternal gospel of Christ shone into your heart by
sovereign grace, you were far from free from sin and here you were sinning against the
light you had been given and so many of those sins were deliberate.
And how often you had to kneel and repeat the prayer sincerely, forgive me my sins today.
And God has never withheld from you for one split second the pardon that he freely gave
you, not once.
And then when you think of the sins of the ministry, there are surely times when you
are terrified as I have been.
When you think that here you are one of God's called servants, set apart by the body of
Christian people where you serve and exercise the ministry, so privileged as to be able
to sit each day for hours on end poring over the pages of scripture, learning and being
taught by God the Holy Spirit who so faithfully teaches you and leads you into truth, teaches
you what to do and what not to do and in spite of all that you have sinned.
There were times when your better judgment told you you ought to be praying but you didn't.
You chose to do something else which for the moment you preferred to do.
There were times when you ought to have known better than to think that you have a moral
and yes indeed a duty before God to love your wife as Christ loved the church.
But you spoke to her in a way that is quite unbecoming of a Christian let alone a Christian
minister and you let God down again.
And then do you remember how often you have complained about your lot?
And when you've done so for a considerable period of time you have suddenly been seized
with a thought that I have been doing exactly what the Israelites did, murmuring.
Here is the man who teaches the people about the providence of God and the sovereignty
of God, the very man who acts as eloquent in the pulpit and expounds the glories of
God's arrangement of your affairs, both good and bad, both prosperous and those in adversity
and you have on more than one occasion been found memory.
Did God deal with you as he dealt with the Israelites?
No he didn't.
He forgave you.
He forgave you again.
And those unchecked lusts.
The times you let them ride for too long and you grieved the Holy Spirit by whom you are
sealed until the day of redemption.
And then when pride has got the better of you and you have fed as a vulture does on
rotten meat, you have fed on human compliments and loved it and have perhaps even used techniques
to get a little bit more from the people who were on backslapping terms with you.
And God who resists the proud still forgave you.
And then, alas, all of us so guilty of the wasted hours, one of God's greatest gifts
to mankind, the gift of time, meant to be redeemed by Christians in general and ministers
in particular and we have thrown away minutes and, alas, even hours to the wind and we can
never get them back and they might have been spent more profitably in God's service, in
God's work, in God's work and we didn't do it.
I'm not despising the need for recreation.
Of course I'm not.
I've overtired the minister who doesn't have his Sabbath regularly, but I am speaking about
the times innumerable when we have wasted God's gift of time and at the end of the day
the cutting edge of our ministry has been lost.
And what about the improper use of the tongue?
And how often we hesitate to preach through the letter of James because we know that when
it comes to the passage that deals with the tongue, we all too often as ministers have
to hang our heads in shame because if anyone is guilty, we are.
For all that, God still forgives us and we're still there.
Are you surprised that you're still in the ministry?
I think we all are, aren't we?
Do you find yourself sometimes saying to God, it is a distinguishing mercy, Lord, that after
all that I have done, given the light you have given, the privileges you have given,
I am still where I am.
When you had every right to make me a castaway and in view of the fact that I'm not indispensable
and when you had every right to appoint someone else in my place, I marvel at your pardoning
grace and I'm still in the Christian ministry.
Why?
Because of superior, glorious, incomprehensible, indescribable mercy and grace and precisely
because God has demonstrated the fact that he is so forgiving, so forgiving and repeatedly
so.
The meaning of the word is to put away.
Doesn't that ring like music in your ears?
To put away permanently.
What a history.
Time forbids us to go extensively into the history of the meaning of the word, go to
the Book of Leviticus, see the pious Israelite, see him go and offer his lamb as a sacrifice.
See the blood flowing.
Think of the man, the Israelite, who understood what was happening and saw first of all the
enormity of his sin, the seriousness of his transgression against a holy and a sin-avenging
God.
And yet think of that man given the understanding that he had at that time as he considered
this is God's provision, God's provision for the cleansing of my mind and of my heart from
sin.
And think of that Israelite who had a little bit of an idea of what this all meant in terms
of prophecy that one day the Lamb of God would come, the great anti-type of this type who
would take away the sin of the world, but even then the poor man, the Israelite, might
know with deep conviction that God had forgiven him and would forgive him provided he understood
that without remission, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins and
therefore by the shedding of blood there is and ever shall be.
And then at the dedication of the temple, it is to me a wonderful thing to see how much
Solomon made of it all.
He prays.
And did you notice when last you read that dedicatory prayer how repeatedly he comes
back to the wonder of forgiveness?
1 Kings 8 verse 30, hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel
when they pray towards this place.
Hear from heaven your dwelling place and when you hear, forgive, forgive.
And verse 33, and when your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they
have sinned against you, when they turn back to you and confess your name, praying and
making supplication to you in this temple, then hear from heaven and forgive the sin
of your people Israel and bring them back to the land you gave to their fathers.
And when the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because your people have sinned
against you and when they pray towards this place and confess your name and turn from
their sin because you have afflicted them, then hear from heaven and forgive the sin
of your servants, your people Israel.
And when Solomon prayed like that, God heard because it was his pleasure to forgive people
who had a broken heart, a contrite heart and a broken spirit.
And David, what shall we say of this man after God's own heart?
Not hoping the world of a man like that when he had so miserably failed God and sinned
if ever an Old Testament person sinned against the light, it was David, given all that he
knew about the law, all that he knew about God's dealings with him from childhood to
the time when it all happened.
But the day came when he heard the voice of God, the Holy Spirit through his servant,
the prophet and David could write, blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose
sins are covered.
Blessed is the man who sinned, the law does not count against him in whose spirit is no
deceit.
When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night
your hand was heavy upon me.
My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Blessed words, immortalized on the pages of Holy Scripture, forgiven.
And he's been forgiven ever since.
And that wonderful evangelical prophet Isaiah, what would his prophecy be if it had not been
for verses like this?
Against the backdrop of a sinning nation and a sinning people, Isaiah may still say to
those who are broken because of their sins, as he did in verse 25 of chapter 43, I, says
God, even I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake.
And then Jesus comes and he comes meeting people day by day, week in, week out, month
in, month out, year in, year out.
And in the time of his public ministry, it was his pleasure and delight to forgive those
who needed it, wanted it, cried out for it.
Be of good cheer.
Your sins are forgiven you.
And the apostles carried on the great message.
As Peter did in Acts chapter 3 in verse 19, repent then and turn to God so that your sins
may be wiped out, the times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.
And when you come into the new covenant, you're coming into something so comfortable, so wonderful,
so glorious, so exhilarating, so powerful.
Because when you come into the new covenant and when you sit down in the shade of all
that Jesus Christ came to do and did do, and you see your sins opened up before you
and you consider it in this light, you see that crimes committed against God are obliterated
from the divine record.
And just think of the clarity and the finality of verses such as these from the letter to
the Hebrews chapter 10 and verse 16 and 17.
This is the covenant I will make with them after that time says the Lord.
I will put my laws into their hearts and I will write them on their minds.
And then he adds, the sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.
Haven't we all had moving experiences in our pastoral ministry?
Haven't you perhaps sometimes heard as I did once, here a man who had lived such a loose
and sordid life up to almost the point of his death when like the repentant thief, he
too found mercy and a gracious God forgave him his sins.
And on the eve of his death, he could only tell me, I'm clutching onto these words, pastor,
I will remember your sins no more.
And you had to respond in your heart by thinking of your own clean record.
Think of the commissioning words of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Think of how he incorporated into that commission, into the very heart of the commission, the
importance of forgiveness when he told his disciples, this is what he's written.
The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and repentance and forgiveness
of sins will be preached in his name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem.
And it is for that reason that no believer need fear the day of judgment.
I'm concerned when Christians are sometimes given the impression that on the day of judgment,
all these sins are going to be hung up like dirty washing just one last time.
May I take issue with that?
That I and that you will look back with shame to think of all that we have ever done.
Yes, indeed, that is a probability, but I simply ask myself and I ask you, how then
do you pronounce this benediction with feeling and conviction when you think of God's justifying
grace and when you think of his sanctifying grace, which is but one step to glorification
and you announce to the people as you come to the end of the service and they face another
week of conflict, another week of potential stumbling and falling and you pronounce to
them these words to him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before
his glorious presence without fault and with great joy.
To the only God our Saviour be glory and majesty and power and authority through Jesus Christ
our Lord before all ages now and forevermore in his presence with great joy.
Why?
Because you will be able to say, as Horatio Spafford did, my sin not in part but the whole
is nailed to the tree and I bear it no more, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.
We hide behind the great pulpitiers of the past and say things like this, Spurgeon said,
well he did say something about this and I share it with you.
All our transgressions are swept away at once, carried off us by a flood and so completely
removed from us that no guilty trace of them remains.
They are all gone.
O you believers, think of this, for the all is no little thing, sins against the holy
God, sins against his loving Son, sins against the gospel as well as against the law, sins
against man as well as against God, sins of the body as well as sins of the mind, sins
as numerous as the sands of the seashore and as great as the sea itself, all, all are removed
from us as far as the east is from the west, all this evil is rolled into one great mass
and laid upon Jesus having borne it all, he has made an end of it forever.
Jesus took the handwriting which was against us and nailed it to his cross to show before
the entire universe that its power to condemn us has ceased forever.
We have in him a full forgiveness, it is an eternal forgiveness, still Spurgeon, he will
never rake up our past offences and a second time impute them.
The Lord lets bygones be bygones.
Was God serious when he said, who is a God like you, in the words of Micah, who pardons
sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance, you do not stay
angry forever but delight to show mercy, you will again have compassion on us, you will
tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
There is an incredible finality about these verses, when God forgives he really does.
Well then, if that is so, it ought to be one of your greatest joys and delights, to be
like that, to be like that.
Forgiving makes you more like God than when you are forgiving.
John Calvin commented, and I quote, by the command of our Lord, the saints daily repeat
this prayer, forgive us our debts, they confess that they are debtors, nor do they ask in
vain for the Lord has only enjoined them to ask what he will give, no, while he has declared
that the whole prayer will be heard by his Father, he has sealed this absolution with
peculiar promise, what more do we wish?
The Lord requires of his saints confessions of sins during their whole lives, and that
without ceasing, and promises pardon.
How presumptuous then!
To exempt them from sin, or when they have stumbled, to exclude them altogether from
grace, then whom does he enjoin us to pardon seventy times seven, is it not our brethren?
And why has he so enjoined, but that we may imitate his clemency, he therefore pardons
not once or twice only, but as often as under a sense of our faults, we feel alarmed and
sighing call upon him.
Did you notice what Calvin calls an imitation of his clemency?
An imitation of his clemency.
My brothers, it seems to me that we have come to a time in the period of church history,
in this twentieth century, where an experience of interpersonal forgiveness is tragically
wanting, and it is as true of the Christian ministry as anywhere else.
Ministers sin, they sin against each other, they cause each other great grievance, as
they tear down one another's reputations, they are guilty of verbal injury, sometimes
of the worst kind.
Interpersonal jealousies are often rife, envy, rancor, malice prevail, and if these were
confessed and put away once and for all, it would be well, but then they continue indefinitely,
and when that happens, it bodes evil for the Christian church, which desperately needs
a heaven-sent revival, desperately, as we have already heard.
Now revival, to be sure, is an act of God, but revival is preceded, not only by prayer,
but by heartfelt confession of sin.
Thomas Watson once said, you don't have to go to heaven to find out whether your name
is written down in the Lamb's Book of Life.
You need only look into your own heart.
And if you find a forgiving spirit, then you may know, your name is there.
It was Jesus himself who taught something that we often tend to overlook.
In Matthew chapter 6 and verse 14 and 15, the only comment he passed about the Lord's
Prey, nothing else, only this, nothing less, nothing more, only this.
If you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you,
but if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
And our Lord is in effect saying that God's forgiveness of your sins becomes the basis
of your forgiveness of others.
If God is a forgiving God, then you must be a forgiving man.
Then you must be a forgiving pastor.
If Jesus paid the highest price for the forgiveness of sins which he did, what's wrong with us
if we withhold it when we ought to give it?
You mustn't think that I'm soft peddling the whole issue of church discipline.
I believe in church discipline.
I've been party to a body of leaders who has practiced church discipline more than once.
But the whole intention of church discipline is to lead an offending person and professing
believer to the place where there may be a frank and open confession of sin in order
that there may be forgiveness, both vertical and horizontal.
And when you study the passages that relate to church discipline, you have to come to
the conclusion that brotherly love is still the essence of Christian courtesy.
The Corinthian case does not exclude the prospect of forgiveness.
It was there in the mind of the apostle Paul.
And when you come to the second letter, the apostle Paul appeals to the church in Corinth
now to be a front in forgiving a man in whom discipline had been effect.
It's not the same as demanding an apology.
Guiding apologies are based on pride.
You want to establish that you were right after all, and you're looking for proof that
you were not wrong, and you demand it.
We're talking about forgiveness, like God's forgiveness.
This is refusing to retaliate, and yet we've said it, we've heard it, and there will continue
to be brothers who will not forgive.
What will happen when you are not forgiving?
I'm taking these thoughts from someone to whom I'm indebted for what I consider to be
an excellent summing up of the consequences of an unforgiving spirit.
First of all, he says that failure to forgive will imprison you.
It'll imprison you because it'll keep the pain alive.
You will go through your life feeding on an open sore.
Anger will accumulate, and so will bad feelings.
And you will only make life uncomfortable and unpleasant for yourself.
Secondly, it will produce bitterness, because the longer you remember the offense, the more
you accumulate data on it, and then it becomes an infection.
Forgiveness on the other hand, dispels bitterness.
Thirdly, an unforgiving spirit gives Satan an open door.
Ephesians chapter 4 verse 26, in your anger do not sin, do not let the sun go down while
you are angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.
And in 2 Corinthians chapter 2 and verse 10 and 11, if you forgive anyone, I also forgive
him.
And what I have forgiven, if there is anything to forgive, I have forgiven in the sight of
Christ for your sake, in order that Satan might not outwit us, for we are not unaware
of his schemes.
Most of the ground Satan gains in our lives is due to unforgiveness.
Fourthly, it hinders fellowship with God.
Why would you do anything to keep yourself from a maximum experience of forgiveness with
God and fellowship?
Why?
It's interesting that when Peter enjoins husbands to love their wives with understanding,
he gives one good reason why, lest your praise be hindered.
It seems to me that there may very well be a suggestion there that because in marriages
there does tend to be an unforgiving spirit.
The Apostle Peter is warning that this may hinder a victorious prayer life.
And a very good principle to be followed in marriage is, of course, the very one that
many of you have ever since you got married, if you are married.
Let not the sun go down on your eyes.
But there's a fifth one, which I must add.
If you do not forgive, you are putting yourself in a position where you will be chastised
by God severely.
Isn't that what our Lord is giving at in the parable of the unjust steward, a man who
refused to forgive a triviality compared to the enormity of the debt overlooked and forgiven
by the king?
And when the king hears about the man's unforgiving spirit in the light of so much more that had
been forgiven him, our Lord makes the point very powerfully, all that he can expect is
trouble.
Now, my brothers, let me get to the point.
I don't have to know anything more about you than that I know that you call to the ministry
and that having come to a banner conference, you were here because of your love for the
brethren and your love for the word of God.
But I also happen to know in the little bit of experience that I've picked up in my life,
that if you are an average assembly of Christian ministers, unless Australia is something very
exceptional, then some of you have been hurt.
What's part of your calling?
Paulness.
Your name and your character has been smeared.
And there may have been times when you had to go to the throne of grace and admit to
the fact that you deserved it.
You put a foot out of step.
You shouldn't have done what you did and you were only getting what you deserved.
But there have been other times when for all your imperfections, for simply pursuing your
calling and being a faithful steward, people have spoken out of turn.
And behind your back, cast aspersions at your character.
And to say that he didn't hurt would be dishonest.
Forward or reverse.
And what sometimes makes it worse is that these things are often not rectified for years.
And even when you have been defrauded, it must have happened to some of you.
And I'll tell you something else.
It has probably also happened to some of you that because of the cruelty inflicted upon
you by others, you have suffered financial loss.
It really hurts when your wife is caught in a crossfire.
And when she picks up the wounds that somehow come about because of this kind of thing,
you tend to become very quickly angered, furious in fact, that she wasn't left out of it all.
And when your children begin to misunderstand all the goings on, and even they begin to
have their mementory questions about Dad's integrity, when you know very well that you
can say before God, Father, you know, it pains.
And I'm sorry to tell you, worse may come.
We don't know what the future holds, I don't, you don't.
But as we sit here tonight, we have to admit to one thing in the light of our experience
in life, that it's not only the world out there that can be cruel.
The sad thing is that Christians can be so cruel.
What do you do?
You forgive.
You forgive.
When they were murdering the Lord Jesus, he forgave.
And Stephen, who had imbibed the spirit of his master to such an extent, a man filled
with the Holy Spirit, because he was at the same time filled with the Word of God and
with the thoughts of Christ, so much so that at his last he could just pour out the words
of God, was also sufficiently imbibed with the Spirit of Christ, that when they were
in the process of murdering him violently, he could say, Lord, lay not this thing to
their charge.
So he lived and so he died.
How do you forgive?
How do you do it?
You remember, as I have pointed out, that your offenses to God are greater than yours,
than any others have done to you.
Your sins against your Heavenly Father far, far outweigh anything and everything ever
done to you by whoever.
One of my church members a little while ago came running up to me very excited because
of what he had discovered in one of Goodwin's works.
And I was rather struck by the thought.
And according to him, Goodwin points out that one of the reasons why the Holy Spirit at
the end of the Bible says, come, is because the same Holy Spirit by whom we are sealed
until the day of redemption has been grieved so frequently, so regularly, so extensively,
not only by we ourselves, but by every member of the body of Christ.
But as Goodwin said, it's small wonder that even he cries out with a bride come.
And lest we fall prey to hypocrisy, let's immediately admit to the fact, Lord, yes,
I am one of those.
Until then, whatever anybody else does to me is trivial by comparison.
And that being the case, I, in the name of Jesus Christ, must and shall, by His grace
and by His mercy, readily and heartily forgive.
And secondly, forgive for Christ's sake.
He wants it.
He yearns for it.
He loves to see His people with a forgiving spirit.
And thirdly, consider God's providence.
Who allowed these things to happen?
Was it not God Himself?
And if Jesus in the day that He was betrayed by a man to whom He had done so much good
and for whom He had done so many favors, could say of that evil betrayal, shall I not drink
the cup which my Father has given me?
Who are we to say anything less, if and when the lines do not fall upon pleasant places
as we would like them to?
We cannot say, Lord, the cup that Jesus drank makes my little goblet like nothing.
And fourthly, if scores need to be settled, let's hear it again, leave them with God.
Your Father knows.
He knows the thing better than you do.
He knows the secrets of men's hearts and minds.
And He knows how to bring it all to an end in His time.
But for the time being, can you not take your medicine cheerfully and lovingly and with
a spirit of deep contrition and forgiveness?
And although I've said it, I say it again, imitate Christ.
There you have appearing in history the greatest forgiver of all, God in the flesh, coming
into a world facing the contradiction of sinners, coming to His own and His own did not receive
Him.
Coming in, as we are told in the Acts of the Apostles, where He went about doing good
and only doing good all the time, and they took Him and they slaughtered Him, and even
in the process, far from calling down the thunderbolts of God's wrath, as He could
have just begun, prayed Father, forgive Him.
Charles Hutton Spurgeon once said, when you bury a dead dog, don't leave its tail sticking
up above the ground, bury it.
Then again someone else said, there is no grace where there is no willingness to overlook
faults.
Another quotation, unless you have forgiven others, you read your own death warrant when
you repeat the Lord's prayer.
The greatest hindrance to forgiveness is too high a view of yourself.
The word of God in the letter to the Galatians is for us, my fellow ministers, if anyone
thinks himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
And when next time you come down from the pulpit, and you think so much of what you've
just done, and take far too much of the credit for yourself, remember that you need forgiveness
all over again, for pride deifies itself and dethrones God, and yet God forgives you.
And when he does that, don't forget the debt you owe to Him.
And part of the debt you owe to God is the debt of forgiving as God forgives.
I close again with this thought, you are never more like God than when you show forgiveness.
And I say to you, for the sake of Christ, for the glory of God, for the benefit of the
body of Christ, for the sake of a healthy ministry, I underline that, a healthy ministry,
an effective ministry, a fruitful ministry, a God-honoring ministry, forgive as long as
you have to, be for God and be for His people, Amen.