Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
0.19UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.52LIKELY
Fear
0.14UNLIKELY
Joy
0.14UNLIKELY
Sadness
0.54LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.59LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.59LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.85LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.62LIKELY
Extraversion
0.16UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.89LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.61LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
| *printed* |
Being a Person of Forgiveness in a Culture of Grudge-Holding
!!! Matthew 18:21-35 Countercultural Faith Series # 4
We are coming to understand that everyone is in someone’s mold.
Someone is molding all of us into something else.
But the good news of that is that we can choose our mold.
We can either choose to be molded by the culture around us, or we can be molded by the Word of God.
We began talking about this matter of how can we become the people that God had envisioned when He rescued us, and the idea that we need to work intentionally to be molded by God.
It doesn’t happen accidentally or automatically.
Unless I put energy into the process of being molded, Romans 12:1-2, I will be automatically molded by the culture around me.
The first time we talked about the issue of being a person of integrity in a culture of duplicity.
In other words, being one person, Saturday night or Sunday morning, if someone is watching or if no one will ever know, being one person with my family and the same person in public.
Then we talked last time about the issue of being a person of compassion in a culture of callousness.
We discussed the fact that we live in a very callous culture.
We have developed a language of callousness.
We have an entertainment industry that is full of callousness.
We are very much molded into being callous people, if we are not careful.
We looked at John chapter 4 and how Jesus was extremely compassionate to a Samaritan woman, a woman with three strikes against her.
He had terrific concern for her.
It mattered to Jesus what happened to this woman.
She was a down and outer.
The disciples wouldn’t even have spoken to her.
It mattered to Jesus what happened to her.
And He demonstrated to her the ultimate act of compassion by explaining to her and offering to her eternal life in relationship with Him.
We ended the message with the application of saying that if we are people of compassion, if we really want to imitate Jesus Christ, that we need to work to share the Gospel message with our friends.
I want to encourage you today to think with me about the matter of being a person of forgiveness in a culture of grudge-holders.
We’re looking at Matthew 18, and the message from Jesus Christ that we are called to be forgivers.
There is the story of a woman, who was the neighbor of a pastor.
This woman was around 60 years old and she had been nursing a grudge for around 29 years.
She came from Mexico, and she related the story of when she came from Mexico, she had started a bus company.
Her bus company took tourists to see various ruins in the area of southern Mexico.
This bus company was going great guns, it was doing wonderfully.
She was so excited.
She was hiring more drivers, she was hiring workers.
And she hired her sister to be her bookkeeper.
This went along for three years.
The company was doing wonderfully.
One morning she comes to work and her sister comes into her office and says to her, “You don’t own this company any more.
I do.”
Her sister, on the sly, had gotten her to sign some forms, and she didn’t know what she was signing, and she had literally, without a dime changing hands, had stolen the bus company.
Then she fired her sister after she stole the bus company.
This woman came to the United States, and ended up being the neighbor of a pastor.
As she told him this story about her sister stealing a company from her, there was incredible bitterness in her voice.
There was terrific anger and hatred in her heart.
There was great energy in her story.
She was extremely embittered.
She had been nursing the grudge for 29 years.
I don’t know of a single person, myself included, who doesn’t have at some point in their lives, one story or twenty stories about how someone harmed them, how someone hurt them.
And it is extremely easy for us to keep a grudge.
Living in the world that we live in, having the nature that we have, it is very easy to hold a grudge, and very hard to forgive people.
On top of that, there is something very miserably enjoyably sick about holding a grudge.
If you have ever gotten into it for a long time, you may have experienced this sort of enjoyable misery of hating someone.
It can go on for a long time, and actually is addicting.
I want to ask you, given that context, to think of this issue of God’s standard for forgiveness.
How do we as sinful people, living among other sinful people, learn to be forgivers?
How do we give up our grudges?
Even if someone has done something very bitter against us.
How do we escape that?
I want to begin by talking about the various standards of forgiveness.
The American standard for forgiveness is usually zero times.
In other words, if you violate me once, you have used up your quota, and from here on out, I am justified in holding a grudge.
It’s the idea that you have one chance, and when you have blown that chance, you are done.
The New Testament rabbis at the time of Christ used to teach that you have three chances.
You violate me once, I will forgive you.
Violate me a second time, I will forgive you.
Violate me a third time, I will forgive you.
Violate me a fourth time, Katie bar the door!
You’ve got it coming!
The apostle Peter, in the passage we’ll be looking at in just a moment, Matthew 18:21, asks Jesus Christ if he should be forgiving people up to seven times.
He took the rabbis standard, he doubled it and added one for good measure.
He thought seven times would be an extremely magnanimous thing to do.
In other words, the eighth time they violate me, Lord, would it be OK to hold a grudge?
I don’t know if one of the other apostles was grating on him, or what was his problem.
But he was thinking, well, seven times is pretty generous.
The Lord Jesus followed it up in verse 22 and said, No, I don’t say to you seven times, but I say to you seven times seventy.
490 times.
Which means, continually.
The Lord Jesus was not saying, keep a ledger book and say, OK, Bill is up to 394 on me.
Probably sometime next year, he’s going to cross the boundary!
No, the Lord Jesus was really saying to them, forgive continually, forgive to the uttermost.
Forgiveness is not measured in number of times.
It’s like having someone come up to their pastor and say, how many times should I love my child?
You can’t measure love in times.
You can’t measure forgiveness in times.
You can measure apples that way, maybe oranges.
But forgiveness is a different commodity.
And Jesus’ message to His disciples is, that’s not the way you measure forgiveness.
It’s not measured in gallons or times.
It’s a whole different commodity.
It’s measured differently.
Matthew chapter 18, verse 21, please.
I’d like us to look at this passage together and think about this question of, how does God measure forgiveness, and how would He want us to measure forgiveness?
Matthew 18:21 is a very familiar story to many of you.
It goes on to verse 35.
Follow, please as I read.
“Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?
till seven times? 22 Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”
Then He goes on to explain what He just said with this story, verse 23.
“Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants.
24 And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9