Free To ForgiveSample

Day 3

Jesus loved to teach His deepest spiritual truths through stories. A parable is a fictional story that teaches an important truth. This parable is often titled, “The Unmerciful Servant.”

In Matthew 18:21, Peter asked the question that sparked Jesus’ revelation about unforgiveness: “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?”

I’m sure Peter and the others present assumed the rhetorical question was a good one—and it was. He probably also figured his suggested answer contained a stroke of genius too. After all, seven is God’s number of perfection, right? Not this time.

Jesus’ answer stunned them all: “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (v. 22).

There it is. Jesus’ brilliant idea.

Forgive your brother or sister seventy times seven times.

Or to put it another way:

God wants and expects you and me to forgive everyone for everything every time.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the point of this passage. I had missed it for years. For the first time, I saw why Jesus was emphasizing this kind of radical forgiveness.

You see, unforgiveness is always accompanied by suffering of some kind—it is a universal reality.

Jesus gave His disciple Peter a seemingly impossible number—“seventy times seven.” He could have left the issue at that. But Jesus then told a story that revealed why Peter should choose to forgive without exception, without limit.

The story begins in a king’s business chambers. The fiscal business year is ending and it is time to close the financial books. It is time for the king to be paid the money that his servants owe him.

Person by person the king calls his staff to settle accounts. But one servant is in deep trouble. He owes the king a massive fortune—ten thousand talents was more than a lifetime’s income for many of Jesus’ hearers. And the servant knows that he can never repay that debt.

Knowing this, the king orders that the servant, his wife, his children, and all that he owns be sold to help offset the debt. When the servant hears this judgment—his life and family to be dismantled and auctioned away—it hits him like a punch to the gut. His knees buckle. He falls to the floor. He begs the king for mercy, pleading for time, for patience, for anything but that harsh sentence.

Out of his deep compassion, the king forgives him the debt he could never repay.

Jesus used this story to drive home the main reason why we should forgive those who have hurt us. And that reason is not what we might think. In the next days of this study, we’ll learn the shocking secret behind Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness.

This is an excerpt from The Freedom Factor: Finding Peace by Forgiving Others… and Yourself, by Dr. Bruce Wilkinson with Mark E. Strong. Used by permission.