Matthew 18 Devotional
by Pastor Lawrence Bowlin
Spending more time at home with our family can be a great blessing, but it can also be a great challenge, for while we are trying to keep a certain type of physical sickness out of our homes, we can’t quite keep the spiritual sickness out of our hearts. The problem is: all of us are already sick with sin, and when sick sinners gather together for any lengthy period of time, we have a tendency to share our sickness with each other. With others, in public settings, we may be able to mask our sickness, somewhat, but at home, our family members hear us coughing up evil words; they smell our foul, sinful breath and they see our sick hypocrisy for what it really is. And we see the same sickness in our family members as well, and it appears so vile and rank to us. To us their sin is so obvious, petty and ridiculous, while ours seems so sophisticated, acceptable and even justified.
It is in close quarters, though, that we begin to get a clearer perspective of just how dirty we really are as sinners. In our text this morning, Peter asks Jesus a simple question in v.21, saying, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” But Jesus says to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.’ Now, if that seems like a lot, you should consider the parable that Jesus shares afterward to prove his point. In the story Jesus shares how one man owed the king 10,000 talents and how the king was going to sell him and his family into slavery because he could not pay the debt. But the man pleaded with the king to give him some time to repay the debt. And out of pity for him, the king releases him and forgives him of his debt entirely. But that same servant then went out and found a fellow servant who owed him 100 denari and demanded that he pay him what he owed. But when the second servant pleaded with the first for more time, the latter refused to have pity upon him, and threw him into prison until he could pay back every penny.
This acts seems even more outrageous to us when we understand the difference between a talent and a denarius. A denarius was equal to one day’s labor for an average workman, so the second debt in the story was worth about 100 days labor that the servant could easily have worked off in a little over three months. But a talent is worth a whole lot more than a denarius. A talent was worth about twenty years of wages as a laborer. And in the story, the servant owes ten thousand talents or about 200,000 years of labor to the king, a number he can never really repay, but the king freely forgives him of all his debt.
Oh, if we only saw our sin rightly, what a difference it would make in how we treat our fellow believers and our family members. Yes, they may owe us a great deal of love that they have defaulted on in numerous ways, but their debt is nothing in comparison to the debt that we owe to a holy God, who has loved us with an everlasting love. How could we possibly hold on to grudges against others, when the Lord so freely forgives us for a much greater debt, that we can never repay Him? This is what Jesus meant when he taught his disciples to pray, “Lord, forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The Lord will not forgive us the multitude of our sins, if we are not willing to forgive our brother for his sins that are a lot less. May we remember this parable whenever we are tempted to call in the loan on our neighbor’s debt. It is foolishness to think this way, when we don’t see our sin aright and understand just how much we really owe to God.