We Can Never Fulfill The Law of Forgiveness

Dear Old Friend,

When we got together last week, you mentioned listening to and being troubled by a recent sermon given by a guest speaker at a church we have come to look to as the place where we can always count on hearing the Gospel. The sermon was about the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant found in Matthew 18:21-35.  You asked me some questions about the sermon because it confused you and made you fearful; but since I had not yet heard the sermon, I felt that I could not respond until I had.  I just finished listening, and want to offer my thoughts.

 I will include the passage of scripture here for convenience:

²¹ Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” ²² Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.

²³ “Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. ²⁴ When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents.  And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. ²⁶ So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ ²⁷ And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. ²⁸ But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ ²⁹ So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ ³⁰ He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. ³¹ When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. ³² Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. ³³ And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ ³⁴ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. ³⁵ So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

For me, the key to understanding this passage is looking at the context in which Jesus told the story, which includes the question he was answering, the person to whom he was speaking and the point in history during which he spoke.

In the preceding verses, (Matthew 18:15-20) Jesus had given the steps which should be followed when a brother sins against you.  Jesus’ discourse prompted Peter to go up to him afterward and ask the question in verse 21, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” At the heart of it, Peter was asking Jesus to quantify, or actually codify, forgiveness.  In other words, he wanted Jesus to give him The Law of Forgiveness, so that he could follow it. 

Those of us who are living after Christ’s death and resurrection, and after the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and began to illuminate, apply and interpret for us who Jesus was, what he did and why he did it, want to read this parable as if it was being told to us, with all of our knowledge of those things; but, it was being told to Peter during a time before Jesus died, while he knew only the Law, and was still laboring under the belief that he must obey and was capable of obeying it in order to please God.

Because Peter was asking Jesus to give him The Law of Forgiveness, thinking he could then obey it, Jesus did exactly what he did in the Sermon on the Mount, he broadened and deepened the concept of forgiveness to show Peter the impossibility of what he was thinking.

He began by telling Peter that his estimate of how many times he should be expected to forgive, which I’m sure Peter thought was generous, was actually pitiful.  Jesus told him the number wasn’t seven times, it was seventy-seven times, which didn’t really mean that at seventy-eight Peter could cut his brother off, it represented the idea of infinite forgiveness; forgiveness without limit.

Then he illustrated what he said by telling the parable to Peter; prior to his death and resurrection, prior to the illumination of the Holy Spirit regarding that death and resurrection.  He told the parable to Peter, who was trying to learn the rules so that he could keep them.  He told the story to Peter so that after Jesus’ death and resurrection, after Peter’s denial of Jesus, after the Holy Spirit interpreted the parable to him, he would remember and understand.

Because our minds are, by nature, as saturated by Law as Peter’s, when we read this parable we will always initially see it from that perspective. The King forgave this man an unimaginably vast debt.  It was obvious to everyone listening that the servant’s response to that amazing gift of mercy and forgiveness should have been to go out and do likewise; but, instead, against everything the listener knew to be right, the man went out and hunted down someone who owed him a few bucks, strangled him and threw him in prison until he could pay the debt.  The ungrateful servant is clearly a villain, and everyone listening to the parable then, and reading it now, understands the justice of what the King did in the end, when he withdrew his mercy and handed the servant over to the jailers, or, in the original Greek, the torturers, until his debt could be paid.  Then, after the parable, when Jesus says that God will do the same to all of us if we don’t forgive our brother from the heart, we are terrified, but there is nothing any of us can say.

We who know the story of salvation have nothing to say because anyone with a shred of self-awareness recognizes themselves as the unworthy servant.  We see that the story simply describes us. We are all capable of being grateful for the tremendous miracle of forgiveness which we have been given and being simultaneously unforgiving toward others; and we are so dim-witted we often don’t even recognize the incongruity of it at the time.  Through this parable we recognize our guilt and know that we deserve the same fate as the servant.  We see that, standing before the God who sent his Son to pay our monumental debt, we are without excuse.

That is what the law does, it diagnoses us; it strips us bare and exposes our sin so that our mouths are silenced.

That is what Jesus is intentionally doing to Peter and his desire to know the parameters of what was expected from him as far as forgiveness, because he thought he could do it.  Did Peter recognize himself in the story at that point? Probably not; because he did not know the Gospel yet.  But, after his denial of Jesus; after Jesus’ death and resurrection; after He was forgiven his own monumental debt; after Jesus’ ascension into heaven and after the Holy Spirit explained all that Jesus said and did, I’m sure that Peter finally understood.

This parable of Law did not end with the relief of the Gospel because Jesus himself had not yet fulfilled the Law and become the Good News.  But we who know the Good News can now see that the point of this parable is that no matter how well we are treated by anyone up to and including God, we will never be able to parlay that into a motivation strong enough to enable us to perfectly forgive our brother from the heart.  Despite all of the grace given to us, we will still dim-wittedly hunt down our debtors and hound them, even while we are yet within the shadow of the palace in which we received our forgiveness, because that is who we are.  If we are counting on ourselves to finally get it right and fulfill the Law of Forgiveness, we will fail and receive the only fate our efforts have earned and deserve.

Our only hope is to recognize our utter helplessness and total dependency on the forgiveness which God has given us because Christ was handed over to the torturers until our debt was paid in full.  Should we offer others the same mercy and forgiveness we have been given? Of course! Will we? Sometimes; hopefully increasingly. But, regardless, we can rest securely in the knowledge that God will not revoke his mercy and forgiveness to us in the face of our unfaithfulness because it is forever based solely on the faithfulness of his Son on our behalf.

Don’t be afraid, my dear friend, take comfort in this:  Because we are in Christ, “If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.” 2 Timothy 2:13.

Love Always,

Bonnie

Color Imbalance

Dear Old Friend,

I’ve had some very strange thoughts going on in my head this week!  They began when I re-posted one of my old blogs on Twitter.  The blog was entitled The Law of Love, loosely taken from James 2:8, and was basically about how Jesus has done everything necessary for our salvation; that it was secured for us at the cross by Christ alone, and that his desire for us now is to live a life of love for others; love that resembles the love we have been given.  I used the example of a teacher giving a student an A in their worst class.  The grade could not be changed, so the fear of failure was completely removed, but the teacher still wanted the student to learn the material, at their own speed, in their own way, and offered whatever help was needed to facilitate the process.  The blog ends with a list of scriptures about love.

The problem was, even though I believe what I wrote, I suddenly felt awkward about posting it because I was worried it could be perceived that I was saying we had to somehow add to what Jesus had done for us; that I didn’t believe it was finished when Jesus said it was finished.

I think I felt that way because all of us “Gospel Freaks” have similar stories. We were all raised in churches which taught that it wasn’t finished, and that we had to finish it.  In many cases there was the implied “or else” at the end of that sentence.  I have become so protective of the good news of grace which has set me free that I am extremely gun shy about anything which even hints of works righteousness.

This got me to thinking about a colorful analogy.  Let’s say that the ideal state is a correct balance of Law and Gospel, and its corresponding color is purple; and let’s say that Law is red and Gospel is blue.  You and I, and many I know, were fed a steady diet of red for many years, with possibly a dash of blue on rare occasions.  As a result, we are starved for blue; we crave it.  We grow nauseous at the very thought of red, fearfully and adamantly pushing away anything which might have even a hint of it.

This led me to think that what we were fed wasn’t actually genuine red; it was more like red dye #2, a phony and toxic red, which wasn’t the correct use of the Law at all, but a twisted version.  This led me to wonder if there could be such a thing as toxic blue, or whether unbalanced blue can itself become toxic.

That question brought to mind the Church in Corinth.  Paul called them “sanctified in Christ” and said that Christ would sustain them to the end, guiltless.  There was no hint, in his mind, that their salvation was in question; but, he wrote to them because they were basically running amok; possibly due to unbalanced blue. I’ve heard it said that there is no such thing as a person who is truly in Christ that would ever abuse grace; but, if Paul says in Romans 7 that sin can take something as holy, righteous and good as the Law and use it to produce sin in us, couldn’t grace be used in the same way?

It seems to me that perhaps what occurred in Corinth was that they took the concept, that nothing they could do or say would ever separate them from the love of God, and followed it to a distorted point where it became a mark of faith to boldly accept and even boast about behavior which made even pagans blush. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5 that these Christian brothers were arrogant about something over which they should instead be mourning. His entire letter seems to be about balancing blue with true red, to bring them closer to a state of purple.

Martin Luther in his treatise Concerning Christian Liberty says, “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.”  No good work, including love, gains us any merit as far as God is concerned.  All righteousness has been fulfilled on our behalf by his Son, once and for all.  The love that we aim to live out is for our neighbor, but I think it is also to keep us in balance. 

The life of grace, as I see it, is cyclical.  We are convicted of our sinfulness by the Law.  We are driven by our guilt to the cross.  We receive mercy and forgiveness for our sins.  We are compelled by grace to give to others the same love which we have been given.  We are convicted by the shallowness and imperfection of our love. We are driven by our need back to the cross. We receive mercy and assurance of our forgiveness.  Humbled and grateful, we are again compelled to give to others the love we have been given, and on and on….

It seems to me that both unbalanced Law and unbalanced Gospel will cause us to follow our natural tendency to turn inward on ourselves. Love, both the receiving and the giving, is the agent which keeps correcting our color imbalance.

On this earth I won’t ever be truly purple, but I’m leaving that process in God’s hands. I pray that God will help me grasp his love more fully every day and that his love will more truly flow through me to others.

Love Always,

Bonnie

 

 

Grace for Clown Hair

Dear Old Friend,

I'd like to say I have naturally curly hair.  The reality is that I have thin, frizzy, wavy hair which, when exposed to humidity, blows up into clown hair.  Just give me a red bulb nose and some white face paint and I’m set for the children’s party circuit.

As long as you’ve known me I’ve had this hair.  I was born with this hair.  Over the years I have tried many ways to appear as if I had sleek manageable tresses.  I’ve cut my hair so short that there wasn’t enough of it to poof out uncontrollably.  I’ve used endless hair products which promised to tame the frizz.  I’ve tried various electrical gadgets in an attempt to calm the waves. I’ve even ironed my hair! Some of the methods seemed to work, but only temporarily, and by the end of the day my hair has always begun to revert to its natural state.

I’m not sure which branch of the family to blame, but I feel certain that I inherited my unruly locks from one of my ancestors.  I had no say in the matter and, to my knowledge, there isn’t even a hair transplant which could give me a different head of hair; one which I would not have to fight every single day.

It occurs to me that our human nature, which the Apostle Paul refers to as our flesh, is a lot like my hair.  We work hard each day to tame it enough that we will not be too embarrassed in public; but, no matter how hard we try or what programs we follow, certainly by the time we go to bed at night we find that we have reverted to our natural state, to one degree or another.

We not only blame our ancestors for our tendencies, we blame any and everything else: society, culture, our dysfunctional upbringing, our educational system, the Democrats, the Republicans.  But, in reality, while some of those outside influences may compound our problems, the underlying issue remains our default fallen natures.

We have a This-For-That mentality; a sense of entitlement: If I do this I should get that. It is the part of us which craves recognition and power; which doesn’t just want to win; it secretly wants the satisfaction of knowing someone else loses.  It is that thing in us which compares and competes, judges and condemns, uses and discards; that wants credit for earning what we have and despises dependence as weakness while valuing independence as strength.

Conversely, it is also the part of us that fears we don’t measure up and drives us to outrun the feelings of unworthiness; the voice that taunts us, telling us that, whatever we do, it will never be enough. 

This nature is universal. We are born with it and we keep it until we leave this earth.  Biblically speaking it is the reason Paul says in Ephesians 2:5 and Colossians 2:13 that we all are dead in our sins.  No matter what we do, we don’t  get a new nature in this world; we can’t even successfully tame it; we daily try and revert; try and revert.

So, if this is true of the entire human race, what are the implications for Christians; those to whom the Holy Spirit has delivered the counterintuitive good news of our resurrection from the death which was our condition due to our This-For-That natures; What about those of us who have come to love the glorious truth that Jesus Christ came to earth with no sense of entitlement, no craving for recognition or power and took upon himself all of the judgment and condemnation which we deserved; and, through his life, death and resurrection, gave us his perfect record in place of our despicable one? Will we be empowered now to overcome our natures?

Despite the fact that we long with all of our hearts to be able to respond to his incomprehensible gift by rendering perfect obedience in return, we cannot.  Our hair will still frizz and our waves will escape.  We will still crave recognition and power, we will still compare and compete, judge and condemn; we will still fear that we don’t measure up and that nothing we do will ever be enough.  What value, then, is there in being a Christian?

Those who believe in the Grace of Christ have been given a new way of thinking which is the only effective weapon we can use in combat against our flesh. It is the Everything-For-Nothing way of thinking, which comes from outside of us. We cannot conjure it up on our own; it is the Way of the Spirit: The voice of the Holy Spirit testifying of Christ, telling us day by day, minute by minute, that we are forgiven, that we are not condemned, that we are loved, that we cannot and do not have to earn or deserve God’s love, that everything has been done for us, that everything has been paid for in full, that it is finished.

The Spirit's voice of assurance, that Jesus gave us Everything for Nothing, speaks to us in Scripture, in seasons of prayer, in sermons, in the sacraments, in songs of worship and praise, in the grace-filled words of other believers; in community.  

Through the Spirit, we, as believers, are given the privilege of being that voice for each other: that voice which drowns out the cacophony of our natures and encourages us to look to our Savior, rather than at our failures. Changes for the better will only occur in us as we focus on his unconditional love for us and not on ourselves.

We need to be reminded that his mercies are new every morning, because every morning our hair is a mess.

I’m so thankful that you and I keep giving that assurance to each other!

Love Always,

Bonnie

Let's Talk About Being Good

Dear Old Friend,

I've just spent the past nine glorious days primarily playing with my three year old grandson. What a joy! He has such a delightful imagination. He invented games like Mama Tiger and Baby Tiger and Ghost Chasing Lion (and then the reverse). We built many towers with blocks, but the blocks all had to be carried into the closet because we had to hide in there while we constructed our masterpieces.

One of his favorite games of all was Being Bad. The rules of that game varied, but the idea was that at least one of us (usually both) had to "be bad", which consisted mainly of our being generally disagreeable. One of us would (usually  loudly) tell the other to do something and the other would refuse to do it and then would tell the first person to do something. The more pouty and obstinate we were, the more he loved it! 

After a few minutes of trying to "out bad" each other, I would suggest that, perhaps, now we should be good; but, his typical response was, "No, be bad, Grammie!" So, I would briefly comply and then bring up the idea again. He would always vigorously shake his head and say, "No. Just bad."

It occurred to me that, no matter the age, there is just something so tantalizing about being bad. We want to dabble in the forbidden, which seems to sparkle in comparison to the boring "good". The fact of the matter is that Romans 3:12 tells us no one is good, not even one. Our fatal attraction to evil is a part of our very natures.

Verse 11 tells us that no one seeks for God. There is nothing innate which will prompt a desire within us to turn to God. That desire must come from outside; and is prompted solely  by the Spirit of God, calling us to turn from all of the dazzling emptiness and shiny broken promises of this world's order, to the only One who loved the Good and unwaveringly chose it every time, because we could not.

Jesus took all of our badness as his own, and credits us with his goodness; and, as that glorious truth sinks deeply into our souls it becomes the most attractive thing we have encountered in our lives! Its dazzling beauty fills us with continuous wonder, and we can't seem to get our fill. It never grows old or boring. It never ceases to amaze us and to cause us to bow in humble, grateful adoration.

No amount of encouragements to Be Good, or warnings about Being Bad can do that! Only the Holy Spirit telling us, day after day, the good news of what God has done for us through his son has the ability to help us see badness for what it really is, remove the allure, and turn us to the only One who has ever been Good.

I still need to hear that every day!

Love Always,

Bonnie 

Just Grateful

 

Dear Old Friend,

In a way, for me, Easter Week is more like the end of the old year and the beginning of the new one than New Years. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus are what everything else in my world revolves around. That sounds so holy of me, doesn’t it? It’s really not.  I recently told another friend that the reason I am so consumed by grace is because I know how utterly hopeless I am without it.  I think you can probably measure the depth of one’s perceived guilt by the degree of his or her desperation for grace. Anyway, that’s true enough for me.

Since my life in retail has kept me from ever being able to spend the actual New Year’s holiday with family outside of my local area, it has been such a blessing for me to spend this special week with my daughter and son-in-law, getting acquainted with my brand new baby grandson and having lots of time to play with my three year old grandson; a Grammie’s dream! I have no proufound thoughts to share this week. It’s just that having this time to reflect has made me grateful.

I’m grateful for this Grace Pilgrimage on which God has led me for about 35 years.  I went from thinking I was so slow that I must be the last person on the planet to grasp the concept of grace, to thinking that Steve Brown was the only other person who saw what I saw in scripture and that maybe we were both crazy; and then he was taken off the radio in my area!  Thankfully, God gave me beacons of grace along the way; pastors whose light shone on my path just long enough to keep me heading in the right direction, and who then moved on.

I’m grateful that God opened the door for a ministry to the teens in my church, and that I was allowed to use scripture as my “curriculum”, which motivated me to study in order to teach what I found.  Those precious kids went on my pilgrimage with me, and I can only hope that I blessed their lives even a fraction as much as I was blessed by every single one of them over the years!

I’m grateful that God kept my own children from being completely driven away from him by my terribly imperfect parenting. I sometimes fear that the only thing I modeled well was a parent’s desperate need for grace in the face of failures; I’m still modeling that and praying that God will use it somehow, even now.

I’m grateful for the precious friends, like you, which God has placed in my life, who know me, warts and all, and who will drop everything to pray for me and encourage me when I am side-tracked by fear and doubt, and for whom I can do the same.

I’m also grateful for the new and growing group of friends I am discovering through social media, who share my same passion for the Good News: That when God said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”, he feels the same way about me, because I am in Christ; and, that when Jesus said “It is Finished” he meant it! What a blessing to not feel alone anymore and to have access to the constant banquet of their new insights and understandings which they excitedly share throughout each day. Such encouragement!

But, most of all, of course, I’m grateful for my Lord and Savior, who saw my hopeless plight, the plight of us all, and came to do everything for us because we could not do anything for ourselves. He became for us our righteousness, holiness and redemption (1 Cor.1:30).  He became sin for us so that we could become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:21).  He lifted me out of my 'This for That' world into his economy of 'Everything for Nothing'. He does not demand anything from me in return for his priceless gift; and, because of that, I want to give him every frail and feeble part of me to use as he sees fit.

Hallelujah, what a Savior! Happy Easter!

Love Always,

Bonnie