Uncommon Forgiveness

In this series I want to bring to light the ways in which Jesus was different from the rest of the prophets, the religious leaders, the Jewish faithful, actually how He was different from every other person in the world

In doing so it is my aim to show us the standard set for us so that we can better learn how to be like Jesus, not just in the big theological issues like eschatology but rather in the regular everyday moments of our lives

Last week we discovered that the way that Jesus loved was different, that it was uncommon and we looked at the cross of Calvary as the best example and explanation of His love

I didn’t think of it at the time but later Sunday night something struck me that I wish I had thought of when writing the sermon

says,

Luke 9:23 NIV

Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.

Taking up my cross had always meant to me to be crucified with Christ and die to self but in light of what John said about the cross being Christ’s definition of love () I now see it differently

I now see it as the call of Christ to live each and every day in the kind of love with which He loved

Likewise it gives a whole new meaning to what Paul said in

Galatians 2:20 NIV

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Just as in last week’s message we began with a scriptural command to love others like Christ loved us, this week we begin with a similar passage about today’s topic, uncommon Forgiveness

Open up your Bible to Colossians the third chapter and I am going to begin reading at verse 12

Colossians 3:12-14

Colossians 3:12–14 NIV

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Now there is a lot in these verses that we could spend our time on

In fact there’s many weeks worth of material in these 3 verses not the least of which is last week’s topic, the importance of love

But as you may have guessed it is a small portion in verse 13 that I want to focus my attention on today, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

Just like the command to love, the idea of forgiving others was something that had always been a part of the Judaic religion

In fact the concept of forgiveness begins back in the book of Genesis and carries on throughout the entire Old Testament

Although there is no specific word for “forgiveness” within the Hebrew language, they instead use a series of images to describe the concept depending on the context

In his paper, Forgiveness In the Old Testament, David Montgomery writes, “That God is in the business of forgiveness and that it is central to his very nature can be seen from the fact that he is almost always the subject of the various verbs for ‘forgive’‚ which we find in the Hebrew Scriptures.”

So if we are command to forgive others just as Christ forgives us we had better learn how Christ forgives us

To do that this morning I want to look at 3 individual examples of the forgiveness of Jesus in action showing us the uncommon aspect of it that we need to learn to apply in our lives

The first of these aspects is that the forgiveness of Jesus was often unwanted

To show you what I mean flip over in your bible to the story of the paralytic found in Mark chapter 2

Mark 2:1–5 NIV

A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Let me ask you a question this morning, ‘Why had this man come to see Jesus?’

That’s right, he had come to Jesus for one thing and one thing only, to be healed

Actually from the way that Mark records the story we can’t even be certain that this man wanted healing but was brought to Jesus by a group of men who were intent on seeing Jesus do some sort of miracle

If you go back to chapter 1 of Mark you’ll see that Jesus was doing a lot of miracles, He was healing people of every sort of malady and was casting out demons everywhere He went

So for all we know this poor paralytic man was just a pawn in the plan of these other men to see some sort of miracle in their midst

Regardless, I think that it was just as clear to Jesus as it was to everyone else in that place what that man was there for, He wasn’t just trying to get a front seat or be first in line, he wanted and he needed to be healed and so you can almost hear the collective gasp as everyone present waited to see what Jesus would do

But instead of healing this man, Jesus forgave him

Wait! What?

Setting aside for a moment the religious scholars there who objected that only God could forgive sins, NOBODY HAD ASKED FOR FORGIVENESS HERE!

Nowhere in any of the 3 synoptic gospels that record this story does it say that anyone at any time asked Jesus for forgiveness

It was probably the farthest thing from this man’s mind to be honest

I’m sure that he had more pressing matters on his mind, like, o I don’t know, the fact that he was a paralytic

Now if you continue on in the story you will see that Jesus does heal this man but we are not talking about uncommon healing today, we are talking about uncommon forgiveness and we need to realize that Jesus forgave even when it wasn’t asked for or even wanted

How do we apply this?

Well simply put don’t wait until someone comes to you looking for forgiveness before you forgive them

Forgive those people who have wronged you even when they don’t ask for it

Unforgiveness does nothing to the person who is not forgiving but it is a prison to the person that does not forgive,

In his book The Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela says, “Resentment is like drinking a poison and hoping it will kill your enemies

He continues in that book to say that when he was released after 27 years of imprisonment. “he refused to step out of the prison until he was so sure that he had forgiven the people that put him there because failure to do that will simply means that he was going to walk out into a higher prison, a prison without bars, a prison that will follow him wherever he goes for the rest of his life”

Often you may realize that the person whom you are forgiving didn’t even know that that they had wronged you

Take a lesson from Jesus who, while He was being crucified, prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

The second aspect of Christ’s form of forgiveness that we need to learn is that often not only was it unwanted but it was unwarranted

Flip over to John’s gospel chapter 8 and let’s read about the woman caught in adultry

John 8:2–11 NIV

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Again this is another story that you are probably familiar with so let me ask you a question about it, ‘Where in the story did this woman repent of her sins in order to be forgiven?’

The answer of course is ‘Nowhere!’

The truth is that it isn’t until after Jesus forgives her that He tells her to change her ways

We cannot afford to wait for others to make amends before we are willing to offer up forgiveness because the cost of the resentment and what the unforgiveness does to us physically, emotionally, and spiritually is far to great

I recently received a message from a great friend from Bible College who has begun a new speaking ministry

In her message she explained that as a young PK in Newfoundland, she was sexually abused by a member of one of the churches where her dad Pastored

It took 30 odd years for God to show her how important it was for her to forgive even though that person was not deserving of that forgiveness

It took another 10 or so years with a lot of support and professional help for her to be able to truly forgive and now she travels around telling others about the power of walking in forgiveness

I hope to have her come some time this spring to speak on a Sunday

Those who have wronged you may never be willing or perhaps able to make amends for what they have done, or as I mentioned earlier, they might not have even realized that they wronged you

Don’t wait for them to take the first step

Lewis B. Smedes once said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you”.

Remember that forgiveness is not approving of what has happened or pretending as though it never happened, forgiving is acknowledging what has taken place and not allow the resentment of those events to determine who you are or who you will be

In other words, it’s not allowing the past to negatively impact the present

Let’s move on to the third aspect of Christ’s forgiveness that made it uncommon and that is that it is unlimited

In Jesus is approached by Peter who has a question for the master

Matthew 18:21 NIV

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Now you need to understand that in Rabbinic tradition young Jews would have been taught that a fellow Jew ought to be forgiven for a repeated sin up to 3 times and that on the fourth time there was no expectation of farther forgiveness

When Peter ups that number to 7 times you might think that he is actually beginning to catch on to the ways of Jesus but don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions

Allow me to read for you

Luke 17:1–4 NIV

Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves. “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”

Now jump back to and I don’t know if one of the other disciples was getting on Peter’s nerves or if the apostle was just trying to get a few brownie points with the Messiah but whatever the reason Peter lays the question out there before Jesus and Jesus jumps on the opportunity to make a point about forgiveness

Matthew 18:22 NIV

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

Very good Peter, you were actually listening when I speaking but I think you only heard the words and not what I was saying so let me put it to you a different way, forget the Rabbinic tradition of 3, and forget what I said about 7 times, it’s about the principle and not the numbers

Expositor’s Commentary says this about verse 22, “In this context Jesus is not saying that seventy-seven times is the upper limit, nor that the forgiveness is so unqualified it vitiates the discipline and procedural steps just taught (). Rather he teaches that forgiveness of fellow members in his community of "little ones" (brothers) cannot possibly be limited by frequency or quantity; for, as the ensuing parable shows (vv. 23-35), all of them have been forgiven far more than they will ever forgive.”

Before we end allow me to show you two ways that this is important for us

The first way is that we must be able to apply this aspect of God’s forgiveness to our own lives

We must be able to accept that God’s forgiveness for me is unlimited, that it has no ceiling, and that,

1 John 1:9 NIV

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

And

Isaiah 1:18 NIV

“Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.

Isaiah 1:18

Only after we are able to accept this truth are we going to then be able to implement this type of forgiveness towards others which is the second way

Well once again I see that time has gotten away from me and although there is so much more that could be said, we are going to end it there for today

There is no doubting that the type of forgiveness that Christ offers, both while He was on this Earth and now through His Spirit was different, it was and is an uncommon forgiveness

And just as Paul encouraged the Colossians, so too are we encouraged to live our lives in that type of forgiveness