Worshipping and forgiving

Geoff Thomas

And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins (Mark 11:25). How often does Jesus speak of the need of his people to forgive those who have sinned against them? Very often. Always he mentions it in the context of our assurance that God has forgiven us. If we're not forgiving people then we've no reason to believe that God has forgiven us. We are still in our guilt. We are lost men if we are not forgiving men. Jesus teaches in the Lord's Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6 that we should pray saying, ‘Forgive us as we forgive those who sin against us’. The Lord makes the peril spectacularly clear, that if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you don't forgive men their sins your Father won't forgive you your sins.

A man in Georgia said to John Wesley, ‘I never forgive.’ Wesley said to him, ‘I hope you never sin.’ The Lord Jesus in Matthew 18 told the parable of a man with a huge debt which was all kindly dismissed by his master, but that same man, leaving that scene of forgiveness, bumped into someone who owed him a small sum of money, and he had the culprit thrown into prison. Jesus said that when his master heard this he sent his soldiers to arrest that man and he handed him over to the tormentors until he had paid the whole of the vast sum. Jesus brings the threat of eternal punishment to bear on his disciples in order to move them to forgive other people.

How many times are we to forgive our brother? Seven times? No, limitlessly, said Jesus - seventy times seven. That is the spirit of the true temple of God. That is most challenging teaching isn't it?

A man came to Spurgeon knowing that the great preacher suffered with gout, but this man claimed that his rheumatism was more painful than Spurgeon's gout. Spurgeon disdained the claim; ‘I'll tell you the difference between rheumatism and gout: put your finger into a vice and turn it until you can't stand the pain. That's rheumatism. Now, give it three more turns; that's gout!’ It is so hard for the natural man - the man without Christ - to forgive someone who has hurt him. You need all the power of God to do that. But having access to that power you are able to forgive someone their worst sins. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. You understand that to forgive someone is to make a certain commitment; ‘I will never hold your sins against you again.’ Forgiveness is not a feeling; forgiveness is a promise. ‘I refuse to remember your sins to charge you with them.’

The Lord Jesus shows this in one of his parables in Luke 17:7-10: Suppose one of you had a servant ploughing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? Would he not rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' This is the perfect reply to Christians who plead, ‘But I feel I can't forgive him, so I don't forgive him.’

There's a former New York policeman, Steven McDonald, who was working in New York in 1986. He was questioning three teenagers in Central Park when one of them pulled a gun on him and shot him, paralysing him from the neck down. Steven had been married less than a year, and his wife Patti was two months pregnant. He was 29 years of age. Today he moves in a wheelchair and relies on a tracheotomy to breathe. The teenager who shot him, Shavod Jones, was quickly arrested and convicted and sent to prison. Even when Steven was in hospital he found he couldn't hate the young man. He hated the circumstances that had brought the boy to Central Park that afternoon, and hated the handgun in his pocket, but not the lad himself. So he began to write letters to Shavod Jones, and at first the boy didn't reply, but then he began to write back to Steven. Those letters stopped only because Shavod Jones wanted parole and Steven wouldn't help him to get out of jail quickly. The boy served nine years and then was released but three weeks later he was killed in a motorcycle accident. You wanted me to tell you that he'd been converted. I don't know what the state of his heart was before God, but I know that he often heard of the grace of God through Steven McDonald.

Today Steven McDonald has a ten year-old son he is never able to hug, but there is no bitterness. He is always having to fight back discouragement and there have been black times when he has battled with thoughts of suicide. He has a gentle demeanour and sparkling eyes. To begin with this forgiveness was a way of moving on. If you ask him if forgiveness was hard he would say, ‘No, it's a gift of God.’ He has himself been forgiven for his sins by God through the work of Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Christ in him has been his great enabler. Then Steve began to visit schools and speak to them about his experience, and now wherever he goes he teaches about these words of the Saviour, And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins (v25). That is his great contribution to spreading the kingdom of Jesus Christ. He tells people as they pray at the end of
every day and ask God to forgive their own sins that they should add, ‘And I forgive that woman for saying that, and that man for doing that . . .’. We live in a forgiving atmosphere.