Forgiving others for hurting you

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 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 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 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" (Matthew 18:21-35).

How many times have you been lied to? How many times has someone spread false rumors about you? How many times have you been yelled at for no good reason? How many times have people cheated you or stolen from you? How many times has someone you loved betrayed your trust in some way?

How often have other people sinned against you?

If you took the time to add them up, I’m confident that you would end up with a very large number of wrongs that you have been victim of. Now, let me ask you for another number: how many times have you forgiven someone? How many times have you said the words out loud—"I forgive you." How many times have you let something go, rather than carry a grudge?

Have you forgiven as many sins as have been committed against you?

Forgiveness is hard. Consider Peter’s attitude towards forgiveness. Peter had been trained by the religious teachers to believe that he was only obligated to forgive another Jew a maximum of three times—he need not forgive again if the same man sinned against him a fourth time. But Peter had been Jesus’ disciple for many months now, and Peter had been taught that followers of Jesus must be forgiving of others. So Peter, thinking himself quite generous, asks Jesus, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"

Jesus corrects Peter by saying, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." Shocking! Compelled to use this standard, how could a man keep track of how many times his brother had sinned against him? But the point that Jesus makes is that Peter should not be trying to keep track of how many times he’s been sinned against. If Peter is keeping track of the wrongs that he has suffered, he is not truly forgiving them. In 1st Corinthians 13:4-5 we are told "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs." Jesus illustrates this point with a parable.

Jesus describes a king who decides to settle accounts with those who have been acting as administrators in his kingdom. The first man to come before him has messed up big time—he has incurred the astronomical debt of 10,000 talents. In our present economy, he was in debt to the tune of two and a half billion dollars! And as the man appointed by the king to be in charge, he was now being held personally responsible for the money that he had lost.

Talk about an impossible situation! In a panic, the man pleads for time to repay, but both he and the king know how ridiculous this offer is—there is absolutely no way that the man could ever repay the money that he owes his king. But the man’s desperate plea for mercy touch the king’s heart, and the servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

Canceled the debt. Imagine what the servant must have felt at that moment. No book of payment coupons. No second loan on the house. The debt was canceled, gone, forgotten, never to be mentioned again. All the fear of the king’s coming wrath—gone, just like that. All the worrying about how to make things right—ended. The money was still mismanaged, the government checkbook still showed a loss, but the servant was no longer held accountable for it—the king stood the loss. The servant’s debt was forgiven.

This describes our forgiveness before God so wonderfully. We have run up an immense number of sins in our lives. Pretend, if you will, that you only sin once every waking hour, every day. That sin could include telling a white lie, listening to a bit of gossip, or talking to a friend on the phone while your baby’s diaper needs changing. Those hourly sins could include making a nasty comment to someone that you are mad at, trying to get a child to do what you want by making them feel guilty, or wasting time feeling sorry for yourself. Your list of sins might include every pound that you are overweight, every cigarette that you smoke, or every minute that you are drunk, because your body is God’s temple and you are mistreating that temple by abusing its health. And let us not forget the time spent living together outside of marriage, time spent breaking the law by speeding, or time spent watching television instead of telling an unbeliever about Jesus Christ. Let’s add them up, shall we? If you only sin once an hour for 16 hours a day, by the time you start high school you have sinned at least 70,000 times! By the time you reach 30, the number rises to 175,000. By the time you retire, your load of sins exceeds 409,000.

Of course, such numbers are meaningless. We are sinners by nature—every moment that we are alive, we exist in a state of sin. Numbering them is impossible. I only gave you the numbers I did to show you how immense a load of sin we incur as we live our mistake-filled lives. That is why Jesus’ forgiveness is such a wonderful gift! We have accumulated a debt before God that is just as hopeless as the debt of the servant in the parable. We make mistakes constantly, and we worry about how we can set things right. We can’t. Only Jesus can set things right. Jesus allowed Himself to be beaten, humiliated and brought to the brink of death itself, so that He could settle our debt for us. In His suffering and voluntary death, Jesus paid off our moral bankruptcy. Now, when we come to Him burdened by guilt over all our sins, Jesus forgives us, truly forgives us. He cancels all our debt, and forgets it completely. Our God promises "I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more" (Jeremiah 31:34).

What a relief! What a tremendous load has been lifted from our shoulders! No more worrying. No more fearing the future. When we come to Jesus and ask for mercy, He takes all our guilt away. The sins still happened, but because of Jesus, God the Father does not hold us accountable for them any longer. Even though we are corrupt sinners, because of Jesus’ mercy, God sees us as pure, holy, and acceptable to be His children. This is the gift of grace that we only receive through faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior.

But Jesus’ parable does not stop there. What response arises from a man whose impossible debt has been completely forgiven? Jesus illustrates one possibility. The servant of the parable tracks down one of his peers, a man who owes him about five thousand dollars. He tries to intimidate the man into immediately paying off his debt, and when he can’t get his money, the servant has the man thrown into debtor’s prison. Word quickly gets back to the king, and the servant soon finds himself worse off than before. `You wicked servant,' the king 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 turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This man, who had received such a tremendous gift of grace, now found himself not a slave, but tortured until he could pay off a debt that was forever beyond his means.

I want you to notice something. The first time that the servant was called to account, the king had no special words of condemnation for him. But later, after misusing the king’s charity, the servant was now called "wicked". The application to us is plain: we who have been forgiven much, dare not refuse to forgive each other our much smaller debts. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught us to say "and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." The Kingdom of God is built on forgiveness; no human being would be a citizen in the Kingdom if it were not so. For us to refuse to forgive is to renounce what the Kingdom of God is all about.

It is easy to withhold forgiveness. Sometimes we just bite our tongue, but we hold the hurt in. Years go by where we never forgive the sin that was committed against us, but we give no clue that we still harbor a grudge, and the other person mistakenly thinks that all is well between us. Other times, we say that we forgive, but we don’t really mean it—we just say the words to make everyone happy. But the proof of our buried anger comes out when, in the middle of an argument, we dredge up old hurts as if they had just happened yesterday. And sometimes we say that we forgive and we even think that we mean it—but when we are reluctant to trust the person who hurt us as we used to trust them, we show by our actions that we have not truly forgiven them, because we have kept a record of wrongs in our heart.

True forgiveness only comes from Jesus; only He can help us to forgive as He has first forgiven us. Only Jesus can give us the genuine heart of love to say "I forgive you", even when the person who has hurt us doesn’t want our forgiveness. Only Jesus can help us resist the temptation to keep dredging up old hurts when we argue, old hurts that we want to use to hurt others as we’ve been hurt. Only Jesus can give us the courage to trust someone we’ve forgiven, trust them as if they had never betrayed us. Only Jesus can help us to forget the hurts of the past.

Forgiveness is not easy. Forgiveness means accepting hurt, and refusing to return that hurt in kind. It hurt Jesus tremendously to forgive us—it hurt Him to the very point of death. But Jesus was willing to bear that hurt so that our huge debt of sin could be canceled. That is what the Kingdom of God is all about—the forgiveness that is the proof of perfect love. Jesus stands ready to show you mercy. Jesus waits you to come to Him and ask that your debt be canceled. Jesus is even willing to forgive your reluctance to forgive those who’ve wronged you. All He asks is that you trust in His mercy, and trust that His way of forgiveness is the way to our Father who art in Heaven.