Forgiving Grace

Announcer: Welcome to Gospel in Life Radio. We often assume that being kind, generous, and forgiving is all that matters. But in his writings to the early church, the Apostle Paul offers a challenging truth. Even the greatest acts of love and sacrifice are empty if they’re ultimately done out of self-interest. Today, Tim Keller explores how the gospel transforms us completely, even our motivations, making us people who love and serve others in response to God’s grace for us.
Guest (Male): Then 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 to 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, 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 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 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 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 the 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 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 your brother from your heart. Love is patient. It does not keep a record of wrongs. This is the word of the Lord.
Tim Keller: We’ve started a series that could be called a series on character or virtue. At least a lot of people would use those words out in our culture for what we're going to be talking about, but those are not adequate terms. We saw last week Paul, in the famous love chapter, First Corinthians 13, says that we must remember that morally virtuous behavior can arise out of a heart filled with deep spiritual emptiness. In other words, people can be loyal to their families, they can be generous to the poor, they can be deeply committed to moral principles and to biblical principles as well. The heart motive for that, the force for that, the dynamic for that, can be one of self-centeredness, self-absorption, self-interest, self-righteousness. Morally virtuous behavior can arise out of a heart that hasn't actually been supernaturally changed. How do we, in traditional moral training, teach people and encourage them to be honest? How do we encourage them not to lie? It goes something like this. We say, "Don't lie or you'll get caught." "Don't lie or society won't work." That's a more humanistic approach. The more religious approach is, "Don't lie or God will punish you." "Don't be a liar. Liars are terrible. You don't want to be a terrible liar." All right, so that's how we train people. What's the motivation? What's the heart motive then that we're using to get people to be honest? The answer is the heart motive is the deep insecurity and fear that the heart has got. We're playing on the fears. We're saying, "You don't want to be rejected. You don't want to be caught. You don't want other people to think of you as a terrible liar, do you?" Now there's a pretty big problem with this. Of course, out of fear, you can harness the insecurity and fear of the heart to make people honest. But what makes people dishonest? Why do people ever lie? They lie because of fear. You lie because you're afraid of losing approval, or afraid of losing control, or afraid of losing power or something like that. Therefore, in traditional moral training, you've only restrained the heart, not fundamentally changed the heart. You haven't changed its character. The roots of dishonesty, which is the deep fear and insecurity, instead of dealing with it, you've just jerry-rigged it so that it makes people honest. But it's artificial and therefore temporary. Only for a heart that feels absolutely loved is a lie unnecessary and therefore unnatural. Only for a heart that feels at that moment absolutely loved, so it's not afraid of anything, disapproval or anything, is a lie always unnecessary and therefore utterly unnatural. Therefore, it's only an experience of grace of God through Jesus Christ that changes the heart rather than restrains the heart. Each week we're not therefore going to be looking at a list of virtues or list of characters, though sometimes that's what it looks like. We're looking at the marks of a supernaturally changed heart, which you find in a number of places in the Bible. We're looking at one each week and we're going to be looking at how each one is cultivated in Christ. The first one, Paul makes a list of these marks of a supernaturally changed heart. It was in the text that we looked at last week in First Corinthians 13. He says love, and the very first one is patient. This word shows up again in Galatians 5, another very important list of the marks of a supernaturally changed heart, which is the fruit of the spirit. Patience is there. You find it in other lists, especially in Colossians 3. Why do we need it? What is it? How do we get it? First, why do we need it? In the very heart of this parable, which starts at verse 23 that Jesus told, is this word patience. It's right in the heart of it. If we want to understand what patience is, we have to understand the parable. The key to getting the parable, the exegetical key as it were, is the magnitude of the debt. A king had some servants and he was settling accounts with the servants. Right away, what do you and I think of when you see the word servant? You think immediately of household servants or people around the palace. But no, that's not what we mean by the word servants. Here's the key. It says he found one servant that owed him ten thousand talents. It's always a little difficult to translate sums. If somebody gives me a sum of money in the 1850s in Southern France and I say, "How much would that be today?" That's subjective. It's not that easy. However, you've got to keep this in mind. In those days, the ordinary working man made a talent to a talent and a half in a whole year. Therefore, if you want to get a kind of cultural analogy for us, take the average person who makes thirty thousand dollars a year and multiply by ten thousand times. It's three hundred billion. This servant, therefore, is not the cook. These are, under an emperor, people who are out there ruling over regions or provinces or whole countries. What this man has done is either through gross mismanagement or corruption, somehow has squandered an enormous sum. The reason it would have such a dire effect on the king or the emperor is because in those days, you didn't exactly have public monies. When Jesus pulled out of his pocket a coin with Caesar's picture on it and says, "Whose is this?" and everybody says, "This is Caesar's," they were literally right. Because the gold or the silver, the actual metal, the coinage, was Caesar's. The way it worked out was the emperor's actual money, his own wealth, went out to the provinces and it was used to build bridges and to build roads and to pay for police and to pay for military and so on. Then, of course, there were very heavy taxes and the money came back in through taxes to the places that were using his money for all these improvements and so forth. What this man, Jesus has deliberately put a sum up there that was so big, he made this up, this isn't any particular historical character. But he puts in an amount that even if this was the Emperor of Rome, to lose this kind of amount of money could bring his very kingship into jeopardy. His ability to pay his army and so forth. It could bring his very kingdom into jeopardy. But in spite of the fact that this servant has removed all this money and in spite of the fact this servant has basically put his very kingdom into jeopardy, one thing the servant has not taken away is the man's inner composure. Because the servant looks up at him and says, "Be patient." And the king forgives him. What does this word patience mean? It's a Greek word. It's a compound word. It's the word makrothumia. Unfortunately, the word patience in English is not compound and I don't think therefore really gets across as well as the old English word. The old English translation of this word was always in the Bible long-suffering. The word literally, makro, which does mean long, makrothumia means literally to be long-tempered, long-temperate, as opposed to short-tempered. The word thumia has to do with a boiling feeling and that introduces this metaphor. Mercury at room temperature loses its composure, right? It loses its composure. That's one way to put it. It's just running all over the place. With most metals, you have to put more heat on them before they just run all over the place and lose all their composure and lose their shape and so forth. Therefore, makrothumia, which is saying long-temperate, means this. Spiritual patience is the inner power to bear injuries without meltdown. Spiritual patience, the mark of patience, love is patient, is the inner power to bear injuries without meltdown. In other words, things happen to you but they do not destroy your inner poise. They don't destroy your inner joy. They don't control you. You are not made and controlled and affected and shaped by what is being done to you. Heat comes on, heat comes on, but you do not melt down. Now, why is this so important? Luke chapter 21:16 in the old King James Bible says, "In patience possess ye your souls." And that's why this is so important. To be suffering is to be a victim. I mean, you don't have to do anything to be suffering. Suffering comes to you. Suffering happens to you without a choice, without your own personal choice. To be suffering takes no choice. But to be long-suffering takes a very deliberate active bold choice. To decide to be long-suffering is to say, "I'm going to bear my injuries without meltdown." And what that means is you make a choice to bear the things that are happening to you. Bear your sufferings, bear your troubles. And to bear is a complex choice because to bear your sufferings means on the one hand to accept them. You don't bear the sufferings if you're running from them or if you're denying that they're there. You accept them. But on the other hand, you resist. You're not bearing them if you're letting them make you fall apart or if you're letting them make you do things that you know are wrong, if you're letting them destroy your joy. In other words, to be suffering takes no choice but to be long-suffering takes a deep choice. To be suffering is to be passive but to be long-suffering is to be active and therefore to take your life back, to possess your souls in patience. It's a way of freedom. I want you to know that in a life, in a world in which suffering is basically a law of life, there is no more important trait than the ability to be long-suffering. To bear under injuries and sufferings without meltdown. However, in this particular parable, we have a certain aspect of long-suffering, a certain kind of spiritual patience which is an aspect of the bigger and more general. Because the word thumia can mean boiling passion in general, but it usually in the Bible means anger. And that is the context in which Jesus is using it. Therefore, what we're learning about here is a particular kind of patience. And what is that patience? There's a kind of patience that we're looking at and that is the ability, the inner power to bear injuries from other people. To bear mistreatment and abuse and snubbing of other people without melting down into resentment and anger. That's what Jesus is talking about. A forgiving spirit. Let me tell you why we need this so much. See, I know what's going to happen if I don't say what I'm about to say for the next 90 seconds and I go on and say, "Let me talk to you about how you can develop a forgiving spirit." The ability to bear injuries, mistreatment from other people without it letting you lose your inner poise, without it controlling you, without it carrying you along, without having you melt it down. Here's how to have a forgiving spirit. I know that an awful lot of you, maybe even most of the people in this room are going to say, "Well, that's really not a problem. Right now I'm not bitter with anybody. There's nobody I'm having trouble forgiving. Of course, I'm going to get this tape and give it to so-and-so, but I don't really need it." And I just want you to think of this. Don't be so sure. Listen carefully. Hebrews 12:15. "Take care lest any harbor a root of bitterness which springing up defiles many." Take care lest any harbor a root of bitterness. Now, that's an interesting metaphor. Why is anger called a root? There are two reasons. It's a metaphor. Imagine you have a tree out in your yard and you say, "I got to get rid of that tree." So you cut down the tree and you uproot the stump and you say, "It's gone. That's that." But the roots are there and they'll be springing up. Why is anger depicted as a root? Here's on the one hand, it's because you understand this. We can admit to others and ourselves, we can confess the sin of anxiety and of worry, lust, depression even, not that it's a sin necessarily, but we can admit anxiety, we can admit depression. But we cannot admit anger. We hide it from ourselves. We always minimize it. We never want to admit how angry we are. But the other thing about this root metaphor is that anger works in a subterranean way in your life. It works in a hidden way. It's down there and you don't know it. It's affecting you and you don't know it. See, that goes right along with this whole idea of long-suffering, which is the ability to not have what is being done to you affect you. Well, how does it affect you? See, we minimize it because we say, "Yes, I've been deeply disappointed in my parents and sometimes I've been very angry at them. But you know, that hasn't actually affected my approach to authority and other figures of authority. That hasn't affected my relationships with the opposite sex. That hasn't affected my attitude toward religion." Oh no? Say, "Yes, I was hurt by that person, but that hasn't really affected the way in which I relate to people." Oh no? Here's what we're being told. We always minimize just how mad we continue to be and how much when somebody really hurts us, unless there is an incredibly thorough gracious action of forgiveness that I'm about to describe. The anger from what happened to you passes into you and it twists you. It makes you cynical. It makes you hard. It fills you with all sorts of prejudices that you can't see. And most of all, it inflicts a kind of low-grade spiritual fever of self-pity that goes on and on and on and on. It all comes because of that mistreatment. It all comes because of the snub. "I'm over it. I'm over it." Yeah. Take care lest anyone harbor a root of bitterness which springing up defiles many. Look at the way this parable ends. One of the problems with parables is interpreting parables isn't the easiest thing in the world. And at the very end, we see the king, you know, Jesus tells us about the king. And the king comes and says, "Since you are not grateful for what I've done, since you have not forgiven your fellow servant, in the prison with you." And notice what it says. "To be tortured." Gee. I mean, as we're going to see, the king is a good guy and he's a good model for us. So why in the world does Jesus Christ create a parable in which at the very end, he's torturing the man? Well, you have to understand that you can't look at every single character in here as a real person. They're all there to teaching illustrations. But I think this is what Jesus is trying to say. If you do not forgive, if you do not learn how to do it, if you do not learn how to keep anger when you're mistreated from passing into you, acting and affecting you subterraneanly in a sense, in the subterranean way, passing on into you, if you don't learn how to stop that, it's going to be torment. It's going to be misery. You'll be like imprisoned. You won't be living a free life. You won't be possessing your souls in patience. Okay, so that's why it's so important. Now, what is it? What is a forgiving spirit? And there's three things that the king does to the servant that I think are pictures of the three things that you have got to do when you're wronged, when you're snubbed. And we're not talking just about the big things that happen every couple of years where somebody really hurts you. I'm talking about every day, the snubs and mistreatments and things like that. They're going to pass into your life too. They're going to pass in little roots of bitterness, little roots of anger, self-pity and cynicism and hardness toward other people. It's going to affect you unless you have this forgiving spirit. And here is what it is, three parts. Notice what he does to the servant. It says, "The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go." Took pity on him, canceled the debt, let him go. Let's look at those three things. Not quite in that order. The first thing is he canceled the debt. The first step, the first act of forgiveness.