How Often Should We Forgive?, Part 1

We live in divisive days. Two terms describe our current cultural state, polarized and binary.

These words accurately depict the us-and-them posture that so often pushes people onto opposing sides. Well today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll will assert that our conflict-ridden times vitally need two virtues celebrated in the Bible, humility and forgiveness. So in a spirit of contrition, to what extent should we go to relinquish our right to get even? In our study of Matthew's Gospel, we're in chapter 18, and Chuck titled today's message, How Often Should We Forgive? We're opening God's Word today to Matthew chapter 18.

We'll complete the chapter, but the message of the chapter will go with you, I believe, for the rest of your life. Not because of what I say, but because of the truth that is uncovered as it is applied from these verses. We're looking at Matthew 18, 21 through 35.

I'll be reading from the New Living Translation. Then Peter came to him and asked, Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?

No, not seven times, Jesus replied, but 70 times seven. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn't pay, so his master ordered that he be sold along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned to pay the debt. But the man fell down before his master and begged him, please be patient with me and I will repay it all. Then his master was filled with pity for him and he released him and forgave his debt. But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars.

He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment. His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time, be patient with me and I will pay it, he pleaded, but his creditor wouldn't wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full. When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, you evil servant, I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn't you have mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you?

Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt. That's what my Heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart. Not only is the application penetrating, the question that the whole story revolves around is a question of quantity. How often should we forgive another? And behind that question is a deeper one.

Why forgive at all? The answer may surprise you. It also may explain something that's been going on in your life for a long time, but not until today have you been able to identify the reason. You're listening to Insight for Living.

To study the book of Matthew with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures Studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. And now the message from Chuck that he titled with a question, how often should we forgive? I have a question that you will not be able to answer, but it is such a haunting question.

You will never forget it. The breadth of it is too wide and the significance of it is too broad, but it must nevertheless be asked. But first a story. Back in 1997 when Philip Yancey first wrote What's So Amazing About Grace, he was nice enough to send me a signed copy and as soon as I received it, as I recall in almost one sitting, I read it through. I was intrigued by the question because I loved the subject. The deeper I got into it, the more I appreciated the journey he was taking us on. I found myself especially intrigued with the chapter titled Why Forgive?

and then the following ninth chapter, Getting Even. That one really stuck with me because it included the story of Simon Wiesenthal. Did you know much about the World War II Nazis and the years that followed where the Nazis were hunted? You'll remember that Simon Wiesenthal was the foremost hunter of Nazis and a relentless public voice against hate crimes. But things in Simon's life earlier were much different and that takes us back to 1944 when Wiesenthal was a young Polish prisoner of the Nazis. He had looked on helpless as Nazi soldiers killed his grandmother on the stairway of her home and as they forced his mother into a freight car crammed with elderly Jewish women. Altogether, 89 of his Jewish relatives would die at the hands of the Nazis. Wiesenthal himself tried without success to commit suicide when he was first captured. One bright sunny day as Wiesenthal's prison detail was cleaning rubbish out of a hospital for German casualties. A nurse approached him.

Are you a Jew? she asked hesitatingly. Then signaled him to accompany her. Apprehensive, Wiesenthal followed her up a stairway and down a hallway until they reached a dark musty room where a lone soldier lay swathed in bandages. White gauze covered the man's face with openings cut out for mouth, nose, and ears.

The nurse disappeared, closing the door behind her to leave the young prisoner alone with this figure. The wounded man was an SS officer and he had summoned Wiesenthal for a deathbed confession. His name, as he put it, my name is Carl.

So the raspy voice that came from somewhere within the bandages. I must tell you of this horrible deed, tell you because you are a Jew. Carl began his story by reminiscing about his Catholic upbringing and his childhood faith, which he had lost while in the Hitler Youth Corps. He later volunteered for the SS and served with distinction and had only recently returned badly wounded from the Russian front. Three times as Carl tried to tell his story, Wiesenthal pulled away as if to leave.

Each time the officer reached out to grab his arm with a white, nearly bloodless hand, he begged him to listen to what he had just experienced in the Ukraine. In a small town abandoned by the retreating Russians, Carl's unit stumbled onto booby traps that killed 30 of the SS soldiers. As an act of revenge, the SS rounded up 300 Jews, herded them into a three-story house, dashed it with gasoline, and fired grenades at it. Carl and his men encircled the house, their guns drawn to shoot anyone who tried to escape.

The screams from the house were horrible, he said, reliving the moments. I saw a man with a small child in his arms. His clothing was aflame. By his side stood a woman, doubtless the mother of the child. With his free hand, the man covered the child's eyes, then jumped into the street. Seconds later, the mother followed. Then from the other windows fell burning bodies. We shot. Oh, God. All this time, Simon Wiesenthal sat in silence, letting the German soldiers speak.

Carl went on to describe other atrocities, but he kept circling back to the scene of that young boy with black hair and dark eyes falling from a building, target practice for SS rifles. I'm left here with my guilt, he concluded at last. In the last hours of my life, you were here with me. I do not know who you are. I know only that you are a Jew and that is enough.

I know that what I've told you was terrible. In the long nights while I have been waiting for death time and time again, I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn't know whether there were any Jews left.

I know what I'm asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer, I cannot die in peace. Simon Wiesenthal, an architect in his early 20s, now a prisoner dressed in a shabby uniform marked with a yellow Star of David felt the immense crushing burden of his race bearing down on him. He stared out the window at the sunlit courtyard. He looked at the eyeless heap of bandages lying in the bed. He watched a blue bottle fly, buzzing the dying man's body, attracted by the smell. At last I made up my mind, Wiesenthal writes, and without a word, I left the room. The SS officer Carl soon died, unforgiven by the Jew, but Simon Wiesenthal lived on to be liberated from a death camp by American troops.

The scene in the hospital room haunted him like a ghost. Over the years, Wiesenthal asked many rabbis and priests what he should have done. Finally, more than 20 years after the war had ended, he wrote down the story and sent it to the brightest ethical minds he knew, Jew and Gentile, Catholic, Protestant, and irreligious. He asked them, what would you have done in my place? And that is what I ask you today. What would you have done?

Had you been Simon Wiesenthal back in 1944? It's almost too much. It is too much. First, we're not there.

This is now. Second, most of us are not Jewish. And because we're not Jewish, we cannot possibly enter fully, fully into the emotion of that. We've not lost our grandmother shot on a stairway, or our mother crushed into a cattle car, or 89 of our relatives. We're not Simon Wiesenthal.

So how could we answer? So we leave the question for you to live with, and talk about, and think about. Because my real concern today is you who are living your life in a prison. Not a death camp like Wiesenthal, but your own self-made prison. Where the walls are high, and the bars are thick, and foreboding, and intimidating. And where the torturing that goes on inside the prison is known only to you. For it is done in the secret chambers of your own life. The prison is named Unforgiveness. You have your own quarrel.

It may not be nearly as dramatic as what we have just heard, and certainly would not be. But you find that you cannot escape the misery of where your lack of forgiveness has brought you. For deep within there, there is blame, resentment, bitterness, the bearing of a grudge. And just the thought of that person's face, as you close your eyes and see that face on the back of your eyelids, or the memory of what was done, thrust you back into the prison of Unforgiveness. Listen to the words of Louis Smeeds, the first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness. When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free, and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us. So in light of that insightful statement, I want to speak to you today who are living in that prison.

I don't know who you are. It's best that way. You may have formed the habit as you've been growing up to do this with those who really harm you. You have long since forgotten about forgiving. You think more often about getting even. Unforgiveness doesn't get better.

It gets worse. And because that's true, when Peter asks a question in the middle of an otherwise rather simple chapter of scripture, I think the answer Jesus gave him caught him completely off guard. I love it the way scripture, where I would like to build my case here, addresses the issue and leaves it for us to apply it, because the way Jesus handles things, there's always that penetrating application that doesn't let you squirm your way out. You find yourself cornered, and you feel the long index finger punching at your sternum, asking, what will you do about this?

But first, the story. Peter comes to Jesus and asks him off the cuff, chapter 18, verse 21 of Matthew, Lord, how often should I forgive someone? It's a fair question. At what point do I start looking foolish? How many times does a person harm me before I begin to be a human doormat? How much is too much?

At what point does additional hurt reach its limit? And then he brings a number to the surface. It may sound like he just tossed it out there, picked it out of thin air.

No, not in your life. Seven times, he asks. I think Peter expected to be commended.

Here's why I say that. In those days, the rabbis taught three times. You forgive an individual three times. From then on, no forgiveness. But seven times, Peter's doubled the number and added one for good measure.

I think he expected a smile, and in fact, what he got was a surprising answer. Jesus says, in effect, would you believe, 70 times seven. Now, when I teach this, I always have to remember there are engineers present who will multiply and say 490, huh? Like 491, and I can unload the truck on them, right? Wrong. Get the picture. An infinite number of times.

70 times seven times seven times 700 times 7,000. Every time, any time, always. Always.

That's the point. Jesus, the master teacher, never simply gave a quick answer and walked away. He often buttressed the answer with a story. Love stories.

You do too. We love them because they pique our curiosity. Where's this going? Furthermore, they leave us in our imagination to push away the limits, and we can go beyond the realm of reality as we take the story wherever, so it fits every one of us. Your name is in here, and mine is in here.

We're all over the story, and the best part is when you get to the application, it penetrates like a hot poker going through butter right into the heart. So he begins with a comparison. The kingdom of heaven can be compared. Stop. You hear kingdom of heaven, you think of a place.

Wrong. Think of a lifestyle. When you want to live the kingdom life, when you want to model the life of Jesus, our word is when you want to be Christ-like, which would be kingdom of heaven being lived in an earthly setting.

So it can be compared to this. So Peter, since you're a follower of mine, I suggest you learn from the story I tell you, and I say in turn that we all learn as Peter learns. It was the apostle Peter who came up with the title for today's message in the form of a question, How Often Should We Forgive? You're listening to the Bible teaching of pastor and author Chuck Swindoll, featured every day here on Insight for Living. And there's much more to learn from this 18th chapter of Matthew, so please keep listening.

To discover the resources available for today's topic, please visit us online at insightworld.org. Well, in this comprehensive series on the book of Matthew, you've likely seen a pattern in the way Chuck dissects every single word and every single verse. It's a discipline he learned in seminary, and one he's perfected through the decades of preparing for sermons like the one you heard today. He says that getting ready for a message is a lot like preparing a wonderful meal. The Bible gives us all the right ingredients, but cooking up healthy food for our souls takes some training.

And it's not easy. He shows you how in his book called Searching the Scriptures Find the Nourishment Your Soul Needs. You can purchase a copy right now by going to insight.org slash offer. And then when you give a donation that's above and beyond the price for books and resources, God will use your generosity to impact men and women in all walks of life and in all seasons of life. To give a donation today, go online to insight.org. Few people have more impact on this nonprofit ministry than those who agree to become a monthly companion. And if you're prepared to take this step, we invite you to do so by calling us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888. As a monthly companion, you're helping us reach single dads, businesswomen, teachers, and students, all of whom affirm their gratitude for these daily visits with Chuck.

And each one confirms that God is working through our monthly companions. To join the team right now, call us. If you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888 or go online to insight.org slash monthly companion. I'm Dave Spiker, inviting you to join us again tomorrow when Chuck Swindoll tackles the question, how often should we forgive, right here on Insight for Living. The preceding message, How Often Should We Forgive, was copyrighted in 2017 and 2021, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2021 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.