Are You Angered by the Forgiveness of God?

Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City. This is a servant of God. As a matter of fact, this is a prophet of God. This is a man sent on a special mission. This is a man who was used of God to bring an entire city to its knees before a holy God. This is a man who just had an incredible spiritual victory, but three times he wants to die because he says this is not what my plan was.

Welcome this week to A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon. As Christians we are all ambassadors of Christ and His Kingdom, which is forever and will not fade away. And it's a Kingdom built on the cornerstone of forgiveness of God. We are ambassadors of this wonderful Kingdom that God established when He chose to forgive us through the death of His Son, Jesus Christ. But sometimes we can get angered at the forgiveness of God.

Here's Carter to explain more. We're going to start in Matthew chapter 18 and we're going to finish in the book of Jonah chapter 4. You might want to take a look and find those so that we can all be in the Word of God together. Matthew chapter 18 verse 21, Then Peter came to him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me? And I forgive him up to seven times. But Jesus said to him, I did not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. Now keep in mind, Jesus is still answering the question, how many times shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? And when he had begun verse 24 to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents.

That's a huge amount of money in our currency of today. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold and his wife and his children and all that he had and that payment be made. And I don't know about you, but I just think of my own life and the debt that I owed to God that I couldn't repay. It says the servant fell down before him.

Say, master, have patience with me and I will pay you all. Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him and forgave him the debt. And I thank God to this day with all my heart of the day in 1978 that I pulled over on the side of the road and I prayed a simple prayer. Lord Jesus, if this is true, what my friend has told me, another police officer told me about this freedom and salvation I could have in Christ. If it's true, then I opened my heart to you to be my Lord and my savior. And that day Christ received me, that day he forgave my debt, that day the curse which would have come on my home.

And not only would I be sold as a slave to sin, but it would affect my wife and my children and all that I had. And so God forgave me this incredible debt that I owed. Then the master of that servant, verse 27, was moved with compassion, released him and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him 100 denarii. Now, in other words, this other man owed him in comparison to what he owed God, may I put it this way, was so insignificant it was almost not even worth considering. The debt that anybody owes me is so small compared to what I owed God. That's the contrast that's being made here. And he laid hands on him and took him by the throat and saying, pay me what you owe me.

In other words, so we see an anger in this man. And this is the problem I think that all of us face from time to time. We're betrayed as Jesus was on the cross. We're lied about, we're abused and bruised and taken for granted, all kinds of things. Somebody borrows money, doesn't pay it back.

All kinds of things happen to us. Our human tendency is to reach out and take that man, even if it's not physically so, we do it in spirit. We take them by the throat and we exact payment, say I will not release you of the debt you owe me and what you've done to me until you pay me all.

And the fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him saying, have patience with me and I will pay you all. And he would not, but went and threw him into prison until he should pay the debt. And don't we do that now? Don't we lock people out of our lives? Don't we lock them away? We put them away and say, I'll not forgive you.

And you can't come anywhere near me. My door is locked to you and you don't exist anymore. And we go out of our way to share the story with others because that's the proof that we still have that person by the throat. And keep in mind, I opened by saying tonight, we are ambassadors of a kingdom of forgiveness. Some ambassador we are when this kind of a spirit gets ahold of us. And it does get ahold of us from time to time. It's only by the spirit of Christ within us, the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit inside of our lives that we have the power now to subdue this other nature.

They will always want to rise and always want to take the preeminence in our dealings with other people. Verse 31 says, so when his fellow servant saw what had been done, they were very grieved and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master after he had called him, said to him, you wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?

And his master was angry and delivered him to the torturers. In the King James original it says to the tormentors, to torment and delivered him to torment until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly father will also do to you if each of you from his heart does not forgive his brother his trespasses.

How do we get beyond that? How do we as God's people put that away and think that somehow it's not going to affect us. You see there are choices that we have to make when it comes to forgiveness. We have so many people today battling in the kingdom of God to forgive.

Now we are to be the opposite spirit to the people of this world in our time who don't want to forgive. They want to hurt. They want to vilify. They want to marginalize. They want vengeance and we know they'll never be happy.

Nobody will. Only God can bring that healing into the heart that can enable us to forgive one another. In the book of Jonah in the Old Testament there was a man who was sent by God for a specific reason, a specific ministry that God had given to him.

He ran from that ministry. Now I want you to consider maybe forgiveness is your ministry at this present point. You see because you can't be an ambassador of forgiveness until you forgive. So maybe, just maybe God is asking you to forgive somebody that has wounded you, that has hurt you, that has brought difficulty into your life. Maybe just maybe some of the physical afflictions that people are suffering, some of the mental torment that they're going through, some of the addictions. People are praying for online or submitting prayer requests for. Have you ever thought that they might be just linked to unforgiveness?

You can go online and research it yourself. Doctors will tell you, psychiatrists will tell you that there are all kinds of afflictions released not only into the human mind but into the human body because of bitterness and unforgiveness. The Bible in the book of Hebrews calls unforgiveness a root sin that goes down deep into the character in the body of the person and defiles the whole body.

There are secretions that are released in the body that cause disease because of bitterness and unforgiveness. I remember years ago I was transferred into an office in the police department. There was a gentleman, another officer on the desk, he was only 32 years old and he had a terminal illness and he was put there really to answer the phone until he became incapacitated. At a certain point he asked me about what I believed. I was able to share Christ with him and in the office I led him to Jesus Christ. He received Christ as his savior and about a week or two later he went to the doctor and the doctor, he just went for his weekly checkup because his illness was terminal and the doctor said, I don't know how to explain this to you. He said, but you're completely healed. There is no longer any disease in your body. He says, I have no explanation for it. This was not a recent diagnosis.

This thing had gone on in his life for quite some time. He said, you have no more disease in your body. I remember he came and he told me, he says, I'm healed. I'm healed. And listen, I never prayed for him. We never even talked about healing. I led him to Christ.

I said, how do you think the healing happened in your body? Here's what he told me. When I was a boy, my father was a cruel man and he would stand me in the bathtub of ice cold water and beat me with his belt until there were welts all over my body. He said, I hated that man and I lived to see him die in pain. When Jesus came into my life, he said, I forgave my father and with the forgiveness, with the bitterness, out went the disease. That was his testimony to me. He'd never taken a course on this. He never read a book on it. He said to me, with the forgiveness of my father, with the bitterness, when the bitterness left my life, the disease went with it. Isn't that amazing?

I'm not suggesting that's going to happen in every case, but it does happen in some cases. So look at this man, Jonah now, just for a couple of minutes. He himself, he abdicated his ministry and he ended up going in the opposite direction. The scripture says in Jonah chapter two, verses two, he said, I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction. And he answered me out of the belly of Sheol or the place of the dead, I cried and you heard my voice. So he cried in his distress and he cried out in his rebellion to God and his indifference and everything else he had done. And God heard him and God forgave him and God restored him and God sent him to do the thing that he was called to do. And he went into the city called Nineveh and he preached judgment, no mercy in it.

He just preached judgment, 40 days and it's all over. You know, this is kind of the beginning of what God called him to do because God had something in mind and Jonah wasn't at this point really a partaker of the heart of God. As a matter of fact, he was angered. He was about to be angered by what God was going to do.

So what happened is he preached that message all through this particular city, the city of Assyria, as the city of people who had a history of violence against his own people, this city of gross betrayal and immorality and conquest and all kinds of evil, this thing that he would find loathsome. So God ends up forgiving the Ninevites. He talks to them about judgment. They end up dressing in sackcloth and ashes.

They end up turning from wrong, asking God for mercy, humbling themselves in the sight of God. Now Jonah goes to a mountain top and he sits there and he waits for the city to burn and God didn't burn it. He actually forgave the people. And in chapter 4, verse 1, it says, it displeased Jonah exceedingly and he became angry.

That's amazing. You know, some people get angered by the forgiveness of God, get angered when God forgives somebody that hurt you. God forgives somebody that hurt your family. God forgives somebody that maybe hurt your people. God forgives them.

Now something starts happening to him. His prayer now starts becoming a complaint against the ways of God. Hard to imagine that, you know, that God could actually forgive a people and he starts to complain in his prayer against the way God has dealt with his enemies. And in verse 3 of chapter 4, he says, therefore now, O Lord, now this is a prayer. Okay, please take my life from me for it is better for me to die than to live. He is so offended that God would forgive the enemies of his people that he loses now the will to go on.

And he asks the Lord, he's so mad at God, he says, take my life. If this is the way you're going to do things, then kill me. Kill me. If this is the way you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to be kind to my enemies, then you might as well just execute your wrath on me. Take my life.

I really don't care. It's better for me right now to die than to live. And in verse 8, from that point onward, he gets some temporary comfort and shade that grows around him. And so he finds a little bit of comfort and God in his mercy tries to reason with him by removing those temporary comforts. You know, when we're not living for God, when we're not doing things God's way, he does have a way of getting a hold of us.

He does have a way of, as we often say, turning the screws so we will start to consider his ways and turn away from ours. Remember that the sin nature of fallen humanity is to be as God is and to become a judge of what is good and what is evil. That's the sin nature. And that nature will come to the surface and start telling us that something evil is good and something good is evil.

Only the Spirit of God and the Word of God can bring us back into line again. And for God to do that, he will trouble us. Again, in verse 8, he says, it's better for me to die than to live. He wants to die when God tries to reason with him by removing temporary comforts. He's so angered at the forgiveness of God and God is still trying to reach him.

And it's the second time now that he asks God really to take his life. I don't know about you, but I'm thankful that sometimes our prayers are not answered right on the spot. Thankful that God is a God of mercy and in spite of our folly, he still is a God who forgives.

Thank God for that. Then lastly, he is so entrenched in his own worldview that he starts declaring the ways of God to be wrong. I want you to think about this in the context of what we are experiencing in our culture today. And as the people of God, we are to be ambassadors of forgiveness. We can end up like David once did on the wrong side of the battle, standing with the Philistines, preparing to fight against the army of God. I often wonder what was in his mind at that point.

How did I get to where I am? And if you're not careful, you can end up fighting on the wrong side, fighting for the wrong kingdom, standing for what you think is just, but in the sight of God, it isn't. It's really just unforgiveness. He holds to his own worldview and declares the ways of God to be wrong. Then God said to Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about the plant? Now he had a plant that died that was giving him shade. And he said, it is right for me to be angry even to death.

Think this through. This is a servant of God. As a matter of fact, this is a prophet of God.

This is a man sent on a special mission. This is a man who was used of God to bring an entire city to its knees before a holy God. This is a man who just had an incredible spiritual victory, but three times he wants to die because he says, this is not what my plan was. This is not what was in my heart.

This is why I didn't want to go. In verse two, he says, oh Lord, is this not what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarsus for I know you're a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abundant in loving kindness and one who relents from doing harm.

This is, didn't I tell you this is what's going to happen? That I was going to go to my enemies. I was going to go to my people's enemies. I was going to talk to them about judgment and you were going to forgive them if they repented. I knew this was going to happen. And so for the third time, he says, I am, I am so angry that you forgave these people that I would rather die than live.

Hard to think that somebody can get that way, but they can. Hard to think that that kind of a spirit could get ahold of a servant of God, but it can. If we let the lower nature begin to reign in situations of crisis and betrayal and difficulty, then we become ambassadors of a much lower kingdom than the one that we are called to represent. The last two verses of chapter four, and then we'll close. The Lord said, you've had pity on the plant for which you have not labored nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than 120,000 persons who cannot discern between the right hand and their left and much livestock. The Lord says, you cared because you lost your own comfort. Should I not care for those created in my image, 120,000 people who live in spiritual ignorance, 120,000 people who have lived violent lives, 120,000 people who have conquered. The Assyrians were known for their forced marches.

They would conquer cities and put rings of iron in people's noses and chains on their hands and take them on forced marches and many of them would die. The hardship on that march, the avowed enemies of the people of God. And the Lord says, should I not have pity?

Should I not say one more time, Father, forgive them? They don't know what they do. See, they don't know the right hand from their left hand. They have no idea. They don't know what right and wrong is.

They live in spiritual ignorance. But Jonah, you don't live in ignorance. That should not be your testimony. You knew that I'm long suffering. You knew that I'm kind. You knew that I forgive. Why were you so unwilling to be an ambassador of that forgiveness? So in strict, just in obedience to God, forgive them, whether it has to be a letter, a card, a phone call, or just in your heart. Maybe the person you need to forgive has already gone on. They've already died, but you still need to forgive them. And you just simply do it by faith. Say, Lord, I just released the debt. And then if that person is still alive, one of the ways of getting out of the trap of bitterness is start praying for them every day. You can't hate a person you're praying for. I'll tell you right now.

Oh, you might for a little while, but less and less and less every day. You just say, God, and ask the Lord to bless them. Ask the Lord to give them a prosperous journey. Ask the Lord that one day maybe when you meet them at the throne that you can rejoice together. Ask for the forgiveness of Christ to become their portion as well as yours. Don't live in a place that you're not called to live in. Don't end up like Jonah on a mountain angry and asking to die, to die, to die, angry with God saying, your ways are not right.

You're not just. You're not the person or you're not the God that I thought you were. And there's nothing here that says he ever changed his mind or ever changed his heart. I don't know the end of Jonah.

I just know he himself was shown great grace, but he did not want to show it to those who had hurt his family and hurt his people. Let that not be your testimony. Let it not be mine.

And tonight, here's my prayer for you and for me. I don't want, I don't want to go to my grave with unforgiveness towards a single person in my heart. I want my life to be clean. And I honestly want to die as an ambassador of the cross, an ambassador of grace. Now it's not always easy. There will always be a Judas.

It will happen in your life. There will always be people who say or do or unkind, unkind things. That's part of the cup of being a Christian, but I don't want to hold the grievance. I don't want to grab a single person by the throat. I just don't want to live there. It's simply not worth it.

Come too far to end up dying a fool now. And so I encourage you with all my heart, maybe, just maybe, we can ask the Holy Spirit for the courage and the strength to release the debt that somebody else might owe us. So thank God for what he does. And maybe as you choose to receive and to give the forgiveness of God, who knows what will leave your life. Even a sense of self-loathing might find its way out the door, an addiction of some sort, a mental addiction, a physical addiction, a substance abuse. Maybe your marriage is a mess because you've just never forgiven somebody you need to forgive.

It's that important right now. You see, as the body of Christ, we don't have to give the tormentors access to us. We can choose to lock the door on them by giving somebody forgiveness who needs it. I've had to go through this. Pastor Teresa's had to go through this. Pastor Tim has had to go through this. Pastor Patrick has had to do this. Everyone I know has had to release somebody from something that they did to them. And I've known a few people along the way who didn't.

I'll close with this. I was asked one time to go see a missionary. He had been a missionary for 28 years in a foreign nation. He was famous. He was decorated.

He was honored by the president of that country for his work. And yet in his 70s, he was locked in his basement in his house. And somebody called me and said, Pastor Carter, could you go visit him? He can't come out of the house and can't preach anymore. I went to visit this man.

And I went down into his basement and I talked with him. And all he could do is rehearse an old grievance that had happened to him many, many years before he even went to the mission field, if you can imagine. And even all those years of service on the mission field left him tormented at the end of his days because he refused to forgive some people who had harmed him. Oh, yes.

Oh, yes. There is power in the gospel to forgive. There's power to release.

And there's also a consequence when we don't. I could not reason that man out of his bitterness. With all his years of preaching the gospel, I could not reason him to a place where he could forgive those who had wronged him. He held to that like a, there's an old story of a bear who goes to a campfire and he grabs a cauldron that's been burning on the fire. And as it begins to burn his chest, his instinct is to squeeze it tighter. And so, and the more it burns him, the tighter he'll squeeze it, not realizing it's the squeezing of this burning cauldron that's actually going to take his life. And bitterness is like that.

It's grabbing a situation and squeezing it to your heart and refusing to let it go. The longer we hold onto it, the more it burns us and eventually takes away our life. May God grant you grace because we are going to have to be a people of forgiveness or we will not make it through the coming days. I'm warning you.

I'm warning you. You will not make it through the coming days if you don't forgive. Forgiveness is not an option.

It's a command. Forgiveness is something we fully realize that we have to do. It's not just an add on to all the Christian experience that we have. We have to forgive. And by God's grace we can forgive. By God's grace we can be given a new heart and a new mind and a new spirit that wants to be a partaker, not just receiving but also giving the forgiveness of God.

Lord, this is an opportunity for all of us who know you to be ambassadors of another kingdom. Give us the grace to forgive. Give us the grace to receive and give this great forgiveness that was won for us on the cross 2,000 years ago. We recognize, Lord, you're not asking us to do this in our own strength for we could not do it. But by the power of your indwelling Holy Spirit we have the ability to release every debt. Help us, Lord, not to be angry with your desire to want to forgive our enemies. We give you the praise and we give you the glory in Jesus' name.

Amen. The message today has been brought to you by Carter Conlon from Times Square Church. For more information, log on to tsc.nyc. That's tsc.nyc. And to be with us next week for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon.