Sermon | Matthew 18:21-35 | "Living Into Grace" given by Rev. Joseph Sanford
There’s a framework where people keep count—where keep score.
Framework #1 people are adding up, tracking, and maintaining a ledger that they work to keep balanced.
Balancing a financial account is being responsible…
but when it comes to people and how we live side by side…
keeping balance takes a lot of work.
Keeping balance and settling personal accounts is the opposite of relationship
It’s the opposite of love.
Relationships should be a place where we find freedom to be ourselves and nurture our connection so that we can more freely live into who we are.
Forgiveness is freeing.
It removes the burden…it cancels the debt from the equation.
If you’re keeping track…it’s not a feeling of freedom at all; It’s a chore.
It’s not just a burden on us to keep track, but it burdens our relationships with other people and can starve the relationship of anything real and lasting.
And then there’s a framework where people forgive and show grace.
The second is what it means to truly be free.
You’re never measuring and calculating and even trying to balance things out.
You invest no time and energy to trying to ensure things are as you suppose they should be.
Instead, you live into Grace because your framework is built upon the foundation of all the forgiveness and grace YOU have received.
You’ve received it from God in Jesus Christ…
You’ve come to know it—or you will come to know it—through the Holy Spirit…
So often we see the work of the Holy Spirit through those who live in cooperation with the Spirit. People living into grace don’t treat us from the framework of ledgers.
Rather, they show us grace and peace in their very being, and it stands out.
—there was no condition or deal made. The reality was just granted to him out of the king’s compassion.
To God, the freedom of grace was worth more than the 100 talents.
Because that’s how our God thinks.
That’s who God is.
We know this because we saw it in Jesus—God in flesh.
Never once does Jesus make sure people believe something certain…
Not once does Jesus make people earn it…
Jesus doesn’t operate from a ledger framework—or a works contract—where we have to do or something correctly to be worthy of forgiveness.
Friends…that was grace is.
A gift.
The man left in the framework of grace.
He didn’t walk away thinking, “I owe 200,000 years worth of wages and I will pay that back.”
He accepted the new grace reality.
UNTIL…it meant offering it to someone else.
When he was in the king’s seat, he refused to live into the framework of grace.
He couldn’t live into the grace.
He preferred the framework of the chains of ledgers and debts.
And so…seeing that he refused to accept grace…the king honored his choice and gave him the reality of justice.
The king responded to the man exactly as the man chose to live.
God honors your choice in how you live and forgive.
The framework of Grace…this economy of forgiveness…was too much for the man.
“And that’s how it is, Peter.”
If you keep count and put a limit on forgiveness…then God will honor your decision and hold you to the same account.