Sermon About Forgiveness

Mercy Received, Mercy Released

There is a debt you cannot pay. And there is a debt someone else owes you that you may be tempted to collect forever. The tension between those two realities sits at the heart of what Jesus teaches in Matthew 18, and it sits at the heart of what it means to follow him.

Forgiveness is one of the most talked-about subjects in the Christian life, and also one of the most misunderstood. People confuse it with excusing wrong behavior, with pretending that pain never happened, or with a feeling that arrives automatically once you say the right prayer. None of those descriptions match what Scripture actually teaches. What the Bible describes is harder than any of those options, and more beautiful than any of them as well.

Let us open the text and let it speak.

The Question Behind The Question

Matthew 18:21-22 in the Christian Standard Bible reads: "Then Peter approached him and asked, 'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? As many as seven times?' 'I tell you, not as many as seven times,' Jesus answered, 'but seventy times seven.'"

Peter's question sounds generous. In the rabbinic tradition of his day, forgiving someone three times was considered the full measure of mercy. Peter doubles that number and adds one for good measure. He is probably expecting a commendation. Instead, Jesus multiplies his number beyond any reasonable accounting. Seventy times seven is not a new limit. It is the end of limits. Jesus is saying that when you are keeping count, you have already missed the point.

But Jesus does not stop with a number. He tells a story, because the truth he wants to land is not primarily mathematical. It is relational and theological.

The Parable And What It Reveals

In Matthew 18:23-35, Jesus describes a king who decides to settle accounts with his servants. One servant is brought forward who owes ten thousand talents. In the ancient world, a single talent represented years of wages for a common laborer. Ten thousand talents was a sum so astronomically large that no individual servant could ever repay it in a hundred lifetimes. The number is meant to be absurd. It is meant to take your breath away.

The servant falls on his knees and begs for patience. He promises to repay everything, which is itself a sign that he does not grasp the size of what he owes. The king does something far greater than extend the deadline. He cancels the debt entirely. He absorbs the loss. He releases the man from an obligation that had no realistic end.

Then the story turns. That same servant goes out and finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii, roughly a few months' wages. A real debt, but nothing compared to what had just been forgiven. He grabs the man by the throat and demands payment. When the man cannot pay, he throws him into prison.

When the king hears what has happened, he summons the first servant and says in verse 32 and 33: "You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn't you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?"

The parable ends with the unforgiving servant handed over to the jailers until he can repay the full original debt, which means forever. And Jesus closes with this warning in verse 35: "So also my heavenly Father will do to you unless every one of you forgives his brother or sister from your heart."

That is a sobering conclusion, and we need to sit with it honestly before we rush past it.

The Central Claim

Here is what this passage is teaching: The forgiveness we extend to others is meant to flow from the forgiveness we have received from God. Not as a transaction, not as a technique, but as a response. When we truly understand the scale of our own debt before a holy God, and when we truly receive the mercy that cancels it through Jesus Christ, something changes in us. Or it should. The person who hoards unforgiveness while claiming to have received God's grace is living in a contradiction that Jesus says cannot stand.

This is not a call to earn your forgiveness by forgiving others. The king forgave the servant before the servant had done anything to deserve it. Grace always moves first. But grace that is genuinely received produces a person who is capable of extending grace. If there is no movement toward mercy in our hearts at all, it raises a serious question about whether we have truly encountered the mercy of God.

What Paul Adds To The Picture

The apostle Paul gives us both the motivation and the method in Ephesians 4:31-32. He writes: "Let all bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ."

Notice the structure. Paul does not begin with a command to forgive and then tell you to figure out how. He begins with a list of things to put away, and that list reads like a portrait of what an unforgiving heart produces over time. Bitterness. Anger that has curdled into wrath. Words that wound. Malice, which is the settled desire to see someone suffer.

These are not just bad habits. They are the fruit of a heart that has not yet released what it is holding. And Paul says they must be removed. Not managed. Not carefully maintained at a safe distance. Removed.

In their place, he calls for kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. And the standard he sets is breathtaking: forgive one another just as God forgave you in Christ. The measure of Christian forgiveness is not what feels reasonable or what the other person deserves. It is what God did for us in Jesus, who bore our sin on the cross and declared it paid.

What Forgiveness Is Not

Before we talk about how to live this out, we need to name a few things that forgiveness is not, because confusion here causes real harm.

Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Reconciliation requires two willing parties. Forgiveness can happen in your own heart before the other person ever acknowledges the wrong, or even if they never do. You can forgive someone who is not sorry. You may not be able to restore the relationship to what it was, and in some cases involving ongoing harm or abuse, restoration of close contact may not be wise or safe. Forgiveness does not require you to place yourself back in a harmful situation.

Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting. The phrase "forgive and forget" is not in Scripture. God's declaration that he will remember our sins no more is a statement about his judicial record, not about divine amnesia. For human beings, the memory of a wound does not disappear when forgiveness is extended. What changes is what you do with the memory. You stop using it as a weapon. You stop building your identity around it. You release your claim to repayment.

Forgiveness is not a feeling that arrives fully formed the moment you decide to forgive. It is often a decision you make before the feeling catches up. You choose to release the debt, and then you keep choosing it, sometimes many times, as the old anger tries to reassert itself. This is why Jesus says seventy times seven. The practice of forgiveness is ongoing.

The Cost And The Grace

We should be honest about something. Forgiveness is costly. When you forgive someone, you are absorbing a loss. You are choosing not to collect what you are owed. That is not a small thing. The king in the parable absorbed an enormous loss when he cancelled that debt. It cost him something real.

The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate picture of what forgiveness costs. God did not simply wave away human sin as though it were nothing. He sent his Son to bear it, to carry it, to be condemned in our place so that we could be released. Forgiveness always costs the one who gives it. That is what makes it grace rather than mere tolerance.

And yet, here is the other side of that truth. The person who refuses to forgive also pays a price. The unforgiving servant in the parable ends up in prison. Not because the king is cruel, but because the servant's own refusal to extend what he had received placed him back under the weight he had been freed from. Bitterness is a prison. It keeps you locked in the past, rehearsing the wrong, feeding the wound. Forgiveness is not primarily a gift to the person who wronged you. It is a release for your own soul.

Living It Out

So what does this look like in practice? A few honest words.

If you are carrying unforgiveness toward someone right now, the first step is not to manufacture a feeling you do not have. The first step is to go back to the cross. Spend time with the reality of your own debt before God, and the reality that it has been cancelled through Jesus Christ. Let the scale of what you have received become real to you again. That is the soil in which the willingness to forgive can grow.

Then make the choice. Name the debt the other person owes you. Name the wrong. And then release your claim to it. You may need to do this more than once. You may need to bring it back to God in prayer repeatedly. That is not failure. That is faithfulness.

If you are someone who has not yet received God's forgiveness for yourself, that is the place to begin. Not with your effort to forgive others, but with your own need for mercy. Jesus Christ died for sinners. He rose from the dead. He offers forgiveness freely to all who come to him in repentance and faith. You do not have to earn it. You cannot earn it. You can only receive it.

And when you receive it, you will find that you have been given not only peace with God, but the only real resource from which genuine forgiveness of others can flow.

A Closing Charge

Go this week as people who have been forgiven much. Let that truth be larger in your heart than the wrongs done against you. Release what you have been holding. Not because the other person deserves it. Not because it will be easy. But because you have been shown a mercy so vast that it changes everything, and because the God who forgave you is asking you to pass it on.

May the grace that found you become the grace that flows through you.

Sources Consulted

Blomberg, Craig L. Matthew. New American Commentary, vol. 22. Broadman and Holman, 1992.

Carson, D. A. "Matthew." In The Expositor's Bible Commentary, vol. 8. Zondervan, 1984.

Thielman, Frank. Ephesians. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Baker Academic, 2010.

France, R. T. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2007.

Stott, John R. W. The Message of Ephesians. The Bible Speaks Today series. InterVarsity Press, 1979.