Sermon: "How Do I Forgive Others?"

3rd in the "Forgiveness: A Close Up" series.
Delivered June 20, 2010 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Sermon Text: Matthew 18:21-35

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Well, happy Father's Day once again to all to whom it applies. I think fathers have one of the toughest jobs in the whole world, one of the most rewarding jobs in the whole world, and I thank each of you who are dads for all that you do in your families. We did not plan to have Father's Day coincide with the third sermon in our series, "How Do I Forgive Others?" We did not do that, even though I know that in some cases dads may be both the person who needs to receive our forgiveness and dads need to do a lot of forgiving as well. But it was just a coincidence.

So I want to, again, just thank you all for being good dads, and then for some of you, it's quite possible in a group this size that you're facing your first Father's Day without your dad. He's absent, you know, gone. So if that's the case with you, then we just pray, our heart-felt concern would just go out to you and that your wounds would be healed.

Listen to this phrase, very familiar phrase from the Lord's Prayer, "Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." You have probably heard that many times before. It is so hard to do. It is just so hard to do. Two weeks ago, we talked about the foundation of forgiveness, that until we know God's forgiveness it's impossible really to forgive others. Last week we talked about, "How do I forgive myself," because many times we can beat ourselves up rather easily. But today we're talking about one of the most difficult issues of forgiveness, and that is, "How do I forgive others who have hurt me?"

On the drive in today, I was praying and just asking the Lord to... First of all, I just started thanking the Lord for all the blessings, my three beautiful children, my wonderful wife, just the way God has blessed me, grandchildren. And then I started thinking about my dad. He is gone. He is with the Lord. And then my mom, she is gone, and stepmom, and I'm thinking about that. I'm starting to get a little choked up, and thinking about my own life story.

Then I thought to myself how much hurt and how much pain that can exist in a group like ours here, that there is so much pain from past hurts. And it was almost like the Lord was kind of emphasizing that in my mind. So I just prayed that I would preach this with compassion, not just with, not just (you know) just theory, but just with compassion. So I pray your hurts would be healed.

But it's hard to forgive those who have hurt us. I want to show you something that stood out to me in the Lord's Prayer. Maybe you've seen this before, but in Matthew 6:9-13 is the Lord's Prayer. Have you ever really thought about 14? I'm not going to take the time to say the whole Lord's Prayer. We're fairly familiar with it, a lot of us, if we've been around church at all. But if you see 14, there is a space, and then there is verse 14. Of all the things that Jesus could point out in the Lord's Prayer, you know, daily bread, everything, immediately after look. It's like Jesus takes a highlighter, and says, "I'm going to give a highlighter to the Lord's Prayer. Here you go." And he highlights, "For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you."

Why? I think because it's so crucial to our spiritual health and wellbeing. It's almost like the core of our lives. It's not easy. Nobody said it's easy. It's hard to do under certain circumstances. That's what we've been talking about. One of the reasons we have this set up here is because we're talking about close-ups of forgiveness, real stories. And later, at the end of this, towards the end of this sermon, you're going to hear another real story, a video testimony of someone in our congregation who is struggling for what it means, or has struggled with what it means to forgive others. So that's why we're emphasizing this.

And maybe we have a hard time forgiving others because we really misunderstand what forgiveness is about. It does not necessarily mean that forgiving an offense means you have to engage a person that you've forgiven. It doesn't mean that you have to forget completely the hurt that you've experienced. It doesn't mean any of those things. Let me repeat for those of you who weren't here, week one definition of what we're using as the definition for forgiveness. The literal Hebrew word means, "To lift." So forgiveness means that I choose to withdraw the right to penalize another for their offense. I'm withdrawing it or I'm lifting that right because I might have that right having been hurt.

In today's Scripture, we're going to read about an unforgiving servant that really had no interest in withdrawing the right to penalize. And in looking at an example to avoid, we can see what I'm calling "Five R's of Forgiveness," five areas to think about so that we won't be like the person that Jesus is pointing out in this parable from Matthew 18:21-35. I'd like to invite you to take the Bible out that can be found right in front of you under the chair in front of you, and on page 897, you'll find Matthew 18, and we'll begin with verse 21 and go to 35, and before we do, let's (as we always do) ask God's Spirit to guide us.

Our Lord, we thank you for bringing us to this place today. There is not anyone who is here by accident. And so we pray that you would speak to each of our minds and hearts as we look at the Scriptures, as we understand the text, and that you would use it by your Spirit to guide us, to help us, to heal us, and to be your faithful disciples, in Christ's name, Amen.

Matthew 18:21, "Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, 'Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?'"

Peter thought he was being very spiritual at this point because the rabbi said, "Three and then you know you didn't have to anymore," so Peter is going, "Hey, how about seven, Lord, don't you think I'm pretty spiritual?"

Listen to what the Lord says. Kind of pops his balloon.

"Jesus answered, 'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.'"

Some translations say, "Seventy times seven." Then he went on to tell a parable.

"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 bags of gold 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."

If you look down into the margin or down into the footnote at the bottom, it says that ten thousand talents, a talent was worth about 20 years of a day's laborer's wages. That's a lot of money, half a billion maybe.

"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.'"

I don't know how he thought he could pay back everything.

"The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins."

If you look down in the footnotes down at the bottom of page 898, it says 100 denarri. Denarius was the daily wage, so 100 day's wages versus hundreds and hundreds of years of wages.

"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 will 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."

Another translation says, "They were very grieved." Just like if somebody died; they were grieved.

"and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled 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 handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive a brother or sister from your heart."

Examples to avoid... The opposite of the forgiving servant is to see what forgiveness in God's kingdom looks like, and here is the first of five R's that tries to paint that picture.

1. Remember how much that I have been forgiven. The servant obviously, the wicked servant forgot how much he had been forgiven. Really we should probably say it this way, remember how much I've been forgiven. The first step is always an understanding how God has forgiven us. That was the whole focus of the first week of this series. Only forgiven people can understand how to forgive others.

We saw from the parable how much money was owed and then the person who was forgiven all that debt saw his fellow servant, and this was legal in those days. You could actually go up and grab the person and try to get them to pay. I was thinking about credit card companies today. If credit card companies could do that with us, a lot of us would be going around looking like this, if people could shake us out for what we owe, right?

So he goes up and he says, "Look, be patient with me. I'll pay it back,' but he wouldn't hear about it. And that word got back to the king. Then in 35, the story ends, "You wicked servant. I cancelled all of that debt." What's wrong with you, is basically the paraphrase. And in anger, his master handed him over to the jailers.

Jesus continues to comment on the text when he says, "That's what my Heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your hearts." That's strong language. And it says, "from your hearts," because it's not intended to be just theory. This is supposed to be part of life in the kingdom of God. Understand the story. Understand how much you've been forgiven. I bet, my guess is that when we just started this sermon many of you probably thought of somebody, and somebody came to mind perhaps that has hurt you, or maybe somebody that you know who has had a hard time forgiving other people. Personalize this story.

Maybe somebody committed an infidelity toward you. Maybe a lover or a spouse has hurt you. Maybe a parent or another authority figure has abused you or molested you or neglected you. Perhaps it was a friend who betrayed you, someone at work who ruined your reputation. See what we're talking about here is very personal. The title of the sermon is, "How Do I Forgive Others?" This is something that each of us has to do. Every single person needs to learn what it means to be forgiven and how to forgive.

The first step in the process is to remember how much we have been forgiven by God. The second R is...

2. To release, to release your offender. I would say this is probably the hardest thing. This is the crux of the matter. The person that you're thinking about in your mind to release them means to set them free, and in setting them free, you set yourself free. Actually human forgiveness, I'm not talking about God's forgiveness of us, but our forgiving others is really a form of self-control. If the fruit of the Spirit, one of the things God's Spirit does in us is to provide us with the ability to have self-control, then part of that expression of self-control is to forgive somebody else. It means to no longer hold onto bitterness or resentment, to stop playing tapes in our mind of what has happened.

Again, it doesn't mean that you have to necessarily reconcile with this person. It doesn't mean you have to confront this person. It means that something inside of you has to happen to release this person, and it's always a choice, not an emotion, a choice. In this step of the process, you make a choice to forgive them.

I don't know about you, but sometimes when I've had to struggle with holding a grudge, it just eats me up inside. I lose sleep. I think about the whole problem. I go over it in my head. I ruminate about it. That happened to me last summer. I was really struggling. I had to pray for months it seemed like before I could really sit down and talk to somebody and kind of have things ironed out. And it really worked. But I was thinking about the time before you know finding strength to go and talk to them, how difficult it was.

I mean I know there are folks in either side of our families that I'm thinking of right now that I think, "Boy, I just wish they would learn to forgive because I can see what it's doing to them." Holding a grudge... you know one person said, "Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person gets sick." That's kind of crazy, isn't it? If you want to walk out of here free today, or at least take another step to freedom, notice how the servant was choking this guy and grabbing him? You have to release your mental chokehold on whomever it is that is the object of the offense, or the subject of it.

Now here is way that you can work through it. I mean this is not a biblical way. It's not necessarily a non-biblical way, but one way that psychologists help us to think about this is to write a letter to the person. The person doesn't have to be alive. The person can be somebody you may or may not see. Write a letter and just pour your heart out in that letter just exactly what you would want to say to them, what you think of them, how you felt, what they did, how it hurt you. But then at the end of the letter, you, one line, "I release you. I set you free." Then put that letter in an envelope, stick it in a drawer, or better yet, burn it in the fireplace, toss it into the ocean, whatever. Let it go.

Now here is the real truth about that letter. That letter is your release papers. It's not the other person's release, it's your release papers. As paradoxical as that sounds, it's the key to freedom. And here's what you're releasing your offender from. The reason Presbyterians changed trespasses to debts is that when somebody sins against us, we think that they owe us, they owe us something. When you release somebody, you're saying, "I release you from any debt, to any payment that you think that I need to get from you." You're also not only releasing them from repaying us for the wrong they've done, you're releasing them from your right to revenge.

We know if we're read the Scripture that revenge is not our job. Look at Romans 12. Most of us really want to let people have it when they've hurt us, of course, but look at what Paul says to the Romans. "Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: 'It is mine to avenge; I will repay,' says the Lord."

When it comes to this issue of release, you'll either release them, or you will be bound. You will either be freed, or you will be bound, and you'll keep rehearsing. It's release or rehearse, that's the choice. It's always a choice. And then if you can do those things by God's help, remember how much he has forgiven you, release your offender, then thirdly, the third R is...

3. To recognize God's purpose in this process, recognize God's purpose in this event even occurring. Now it's hard to get our heads around that. We don't understand why certain pain comes our way. Many times we can't recognize God's purpose in it, but notice we have to release a person before we ever will recognize it. Some people go around and say, "Lord, show me the purpose and then maybe I'll think about whether I'm going to release them." God says, "It doesn't work that way. You have to trust me because that's what I've done for you." So we release them and then we get to understand God's purpose, perhaps.

God is then able to say, "Look, this is a rotten situation, but I know how to bring good out of rotten situations." Many of you are wearing a t-shirt that says, "Egypt," on it because you're going to help out with VBS from July 12-16, 9:30-noon. We expect 250 children on this campus to be learning about how God can take a rotten situation and turn it into a good situation. Even the title of the VBS, the subtitle is, "From Prison to Palace." That gives us a hint that God can take prison experiences and turn them into palace experiences, if we'll just trust him, if we'll look to him to recognize his purpose in it all.

I know that many of you have gone through some tremendously tough stuff. I mean I'm amazed as a pastor to hear some of the traumatic situations that people go through. People have harmed you. I don't know what the purpose is, but God can bring good out of it. I mean actually it's my life story. I'm not sharing my story today about my mom and my dad and stepmom because we're going to have another story at the end of the sermon of somebody else who has gone through this journey. But I can tell you that from the difficultly of seeing a divorce, an infidelity, and forgiveness and reconciliation that God can bring ministry out of misery if we'll trust him and we'll walk with him.

Now these first three steps are essential. You can't really skip them, I don't think. The fourth is maybe. The fourth is this, it's conditional.

4. Maybe reestablish. Look at Romans 12:18 again. Notice the conditional nature.

"If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."

Sometimes we're not able to reconcile. Sometime the pain is way too deep, or again, it could leave us exposed to even more hurt. God gives us the wisdom to decide whether or not we are going to try to reestablish or address some of the things.

We certainly shouldn't do it or try to do it if we're looking to gain an apology because again, we go with an agenda. We're looking for somebody to pay us back something. Romans 12:21 says,

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

What does that mean? It means that even if you can't establish the relationship, or reestablish it, you can still act in a good way toward that person. You might have to do that privately. You might have to do this just in your heart. You might have to begin to change the way you think about that person.

I know in my own life whether it has been someone who has hurt me in ministry, or in life, the only thing that helps me is to pray and ask God to bless them. When it says, "Don't be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," the first good we can do is pray for a person and pray God would do good to them. This is a teaching of Jesus. Pray for those who abuse you. Pray for your enemies, and so we pray and ask God to do good to them. We can begin to look for ways to act positively toward that person.

I read about a family of four: mom, dad, and two sons. They all became Christians around the same time. They never cracked their Bible. They never read their Bible. So one day they're reading in Romans, chapter 12 in this section, and in this context of Romans 12, it talks about, "If your enemy is hungry, feed them." So the kids and the mom and dad are sitting around, and the mom and dad say to the two boys, "Do you have any enemies?" And the fourth grader says, "Yeah, I have an enemy, sits behind me in class every day; his name is Billy. He hits me in the back of the head every day all the time when the teacher is not looking."

Well you know this is Father's Day, but you know how moms can get, too? So Mom wanted to go down and choke the teacher, right? How do you let this happen? I'm going to choke Billy too while I'm at it, right? Then they started reading the Bible. Wait a minute. It says we're supposed to pray. We're supposed to give our enemies something to eat. So Dad says, "Well, what does he like to eat?" He thought, "Well jelly beans. I think Billy's favorite is jellybeans." Let's go get some jellybeans. I mean they're taking this literally, right?

Get jellybeans, they send Billy out the next day. They don't know what's going to happen. He comes off the bus and they run and say, "How did it go?" It went great. He said, "What happened?" He said, "He hit me in the back of the head in the morning. I turned around. I plopped the jellybeans on his desk, and he sat there with his mouth opened and he never hit me the rest of the day." He said, "This stuff works! Feed your enemy."

Maybe it won't turn out so nicely for you if you try to release or even try to reestablish, but what you can do in your heart is you can decide to stop talking about the situation, not to yourself as well as to others. You might say, "I'm going to let go now. I've assassinated this person's character long enough. I'm not going to say anything anymore." And you just drop it. It's okay not to restore the relationship.

I mean let's say your best friend has an affair with your spouse. I don't expect the injured parties to be best friends after that, but you do have to forgive, according to what Jesus is teaching us, but reconciliation only if possible.

The fifth thing to do is:

5. Repeat. Do you ever read the back of the shampoo bottle? Well, unless you've lived a very sheltered life, you probably aren't going to be needing to forgive somebody just once. You might have to forgive them over and over and over again, and not just one person, but a lot of people. Perhaps you're thinking of that one person that you need to forgive, or that you need to keep forgiving.

As we leave today, one of the exercises we're going to do, or as part of the worship service, these walls of forgiveness, these portraits of forgiveness on either side, last week in forgiving ourselves the exercise was to put your thumb print in some paint and put it up there if you're forgiving yourself. Well today there are markers in those baskets, and if there is someone that you're thinking of that you need to forgive, I want to invite you to take those markers and then on the board either write their initials, or if you even want to be more secretive than that, write their initials in reverse, or write one initial over the top of the other, whatever you want to do, but if it's a person that you need to deal with, then that's what I'm going to ask you to do. But that's just one person. You might have to do this again and again.

Notice how this parable starts with a question from Peter, "How many times?" I mean aren't you glad, aren't you glad that Jesus said, "Seven-seven times, or seventy times seven?" The engineers here are saying, "Okay, 490 is the limit. That's great." What's Jesus saying in terms of how many times? I think he reverses the question almost and he says, "Well let's see. How many times do you want God to forgive you? That's how many times. Whatever that is, that's how many times."

There are things in my life I've done wrong thousands of times. I'm so glad I go to God and I say, "God, please forgive me." "Oh sorry, that was 491." Seventy times seven in God's math is not 490, it's every time. I know this is a challenge. It's very difficult. What it comes down to is that we have to choose to forgive.

I want to look at our close up now. I want you to look at the close up of a testimony of a person many of us know. In my list of people who are spiritual giants, known in Navigator's circles around the world, John Sackett. He has a story to tell both past and present, so listen to it.

[Video]

John Sackett: Good morning. I'm John Sackett, an elder here at Central Church. And I'd like to tell you a story about my life. About two years ago, about 15 years after my father had died, I finally learned the cause for my mother's death when I was only 14 months old. It was on the heels of the Great Depression. My dad didn't know how to manage one more child in the family. I was number three, four was coming, and he chose to arrange privately someone to come to try and perform an abortion in our home, which was illegal back then.

And it all went wrong. I lost my mother. I lost my sibling. I was put in an orphanage for a couple of years, and I never even to this day have gotten to know anybody on my mother's side of the family. Later on, my dad remarried and over time my stepmom became jealous of dad's first family and she did her best to try and push us out of the home so she could have it for herself with her two kids.

My dad's work took him on the road for weeks at a time, and during that time, I'd often get locked out of the house, or if I could get in, the food would be locked up so I couldn't find it. And I suppose I could have gone to my friends and stayed overnight with them, but I felt I'd have to share what was going on in the family, and I didn't want to do that because Scripture told me to honor my father and mother, and I felt there was no way I could share what was going on without dishonoring my stepmother.

So I learned to handle difficulties. I got a job in a grocery store. I learned how to keep warm at night by sleeping on a flat garage roof, or the polished granite stones in the park, so I learned to accept disappointments and hardships early in life, but what I hadn't learned is how to forgive my stepmom, not until college, and while I was there, God's Word began to speak to my heart and I realized that I could not change her. God wanted me to change.

I expected her to be different. God wanted me to be different. And one of the Scriptures that just hit me like a brick was Ephesians 4:31-32. It says:

""Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you with all malice: Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ's sake has forgiven you."

I wrote her a letter and asked God to help me write that letter. I included in the letter, I don't know what all I said anymore, but I included in there a bunch of foreign stamps and picture postcards because my two half-brothers had collections, and I thought that might help win her heart, which it did. And bit by bit, the bridge kind of began to narrow. And then when we moved here in 1974, Joyce and I were able to have my dad and my stepmother several times come visit us for a week or two at a time, and we could kind of love on them and continue to build that relationship.

I was able, by God's grace, to forgive my dad in my heart and before God. But Dad went to his grave with that secret. He never got the chance to share that with anybody else and gain their forgiveness.

There was another area of my life that I'm still working on with less success and that's how to forgive my ex-son-in-law who, after being married to my youngest daughter for 10 years, just on the heels of her third child, walked out, abandoned her, and eventually a couple of years later, divorced her. And it's here, carrying this load, that I need God's grace daily. Whenever I feel resentment building up, I'm learning to take it to the Lord and ask for his grace, to hold him up in prayer and not resent what has gone on.

So when I choose to forgive another person, it restores my fellowship with God, but also with them. And it builds both relationships stronger. I see this matter of forgiving as choosing to either live bitter or to live blessed, and I choose to live blessed.

[End of video]

Those are two huge issues that he just talked about in the space of five minutes, but I love the way he put it, bitter or blessed. We know what the bitterness side will do. It will just tear us up. The blessed side is like asking God to take us to a higher level of life. So I invite you to release that mental chokehold, to take the action that's necessary, to hear again Ephesians 4:32 in a new way, "Be kind and loving to each other and forgive others just as God forgave you in Christ." You know the ultimate proof of knowing whether or not this has happened is when we can honestly pray to God and say, "God, thank you for helping me release this person to you. Thank you for helping me to forgive."

I want to lead us in prayer in just a minute, but again, I want to remind you of the exercise after pray and as the team leads us in a song that we'll just listen to. But if you're ready to forgive another person right now, then I want to invite you to just pray silently in your heart after me, just follow my lead, and offer this prayer to God as we close.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for how much you have forgiven me. Today, I forgive (and just say in your heart that person's name, the person you're forgiving). God, I'm forgiving them for (and just tell God what it is; He already knows, but just tell God what the offense is). God, show me the action I need to take toward reestablishing a relationship. Free me from guilt about not doing that, and help me to forgive others as much as you have forgiven me, in Jesus' name, Amen.

© 2010, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org