Our Forgiven Debt

The source from which we draw the grace to forgive others is the redemption we’ve received through Christ.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Well, here we are again entering that time we call advent. The word advent means arrival, usually referring to the arrival of an important person or an important event, sometimes the dawning of a new age. And all of those references fit what we mean by calling this the season of advent. We are celebrating the arrival of Christ, an event we call Christmas that began a new era in world history. Our Western calendars are centered on the coming of Christ. Everything before Christ is BC. Everything after the arrival of Christ is Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. For 2000 years, the worldwide Christian movement that began with advent has has had an impact on every civilization, both ancient and modern. Here in the United States, there is not a single societal structure or value that has not been touched and shaped in some way by Christianity. I reflect on what aspect of the gospel. I was trying to think about the aspect of the gospel that I wanted to reflect on here in the season that we’re arriving in, and it occurred to me that right at the very heart of the gospel, there is a virtue that is sorely missing in our society today. And that virtue is forgiveness. Forgiveness. The ability and willingness to release someone from the debt that they owe you. To forgive someone is to say, I’m willing to bear the cost of the debt that you owe me, and I release you from any future consequences because I have paid the debt myself.

That is forgiveness. Did you know that in the ancient world prior to the coming of Christ, forgiveness was not considered a virtue? Do you know that? It’s not considered a virtue. They knew about it. They had language for it. They. They understood what forgiveness was. The ancient Greeks, for example, had those that language, they had the concept, but they also had a very low view of it. Forgiveness was a sign of vulnerability in their society. So, according to Aristotle, a perfect man, a complete man, would never forgive someone, because that would indicate that the other person could have some effect on you. And if you if you forgave them, you’d be saying you’ve had an impact on me. And a perfect man would never allow someone else to have an impact. Forgiveness would be an admission that some lowly person would have the power to alter your life. So the proper response, according to Aristotle, is not to forgive people, but to disregard people. That’s what that’s what he said we ought to do. The other side, by the way, of that is true as well. To admit that you’ve done something wrong and to receive forgiveness would also obviously be a very weak position and a very vulnerable position, and no one should put themselves in that sort of position. I mean, if your goal is to be the perfect human being, forgiveness just won’t do at all, will it? It only works if you’re weak and vulnerable and willing to see just how imperfect you actually are.

How lame would that be? How Socratic would that be? By the way, that view of forgiveness isn’t just some ancient Greek thing that we outgrew eventually. That’s not how that worked. That just 150 years ago or so. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a truly strong person would never take the misdeeds of other people seriously. Just don’t take them seriously. To forgive someone requires a moral code that we would just need to throw out all together. Nietzsche said. In fact, he said that that the only time you’d ever entertain the idea of forgiving someone is when revenge is impossible. So that’s when I guess I forgive you. There’s no way I can take revenge on you. So of course, that’s not really forgiveness at all. He says to forgive your enemy and to to love your neighbor. Does he sound familiar? To love your neighbor is, quote, contemptible. To a strong and noble culture or person, that would be contemptible. And that’s because forgiveness takes away from self esteem, and a truly strong and a truly noble person would never put another person first. I share this with you this morning. Not because we’re going to study ancient Greek or late 19th century philosophy, but because those ideas are the root that has blossomed into the bitter plant of the world around us today.

If you want to know why people won’t ask forgiveness, if you want to know why people struggle to ask for forgiveness, or why people struggle with giving forgiveness to other people, it’s because for thousands of years, we’ve been told that strong people don’t do it and they don’t give it and they don’t need it. Forgiveness requires humility, and humility looks weak. Forgiveness requires admitting that you were wrong. And admission is for suckers. Also, we’ve been told forgiveness means that there is no justice. And if you forgive someone, then then what happened to the consequences? There are no consequences anymore. And how will wrongdoers ever learn the error of their ways? If we just go around forgiving them all the time, they won’t learn. They won’t learn what they need to learn. And besides, isn’t vengeance right? And fun, isn’t it? Isn’t it more fun? Right? I mean, how many movies do we have where vengeance is the thing in the. I mean, if you. How many would we ruin if you took vengeance out and put forgiveness into them? How many? How many movies would we have left if we only went with the ones where forgiveness was in the center? We’d have Les Miserables. That’s it. We’d have Les Miserables. That’s it. That’s the only. That’s the only one left. Now what I care about far more than movies, or whether or not other countries get along or righting the wrongs of the past, is is how this idea of forgiveness affects you.

I care very deeply about how it affects you in your in your family and in your relationships. I care about those relationships at work where you’ve decided that it is easier to avoid the other person than to go to them and address the elephant that’s in the room. I care about the the long standing hurts between you and your adult sons and daughters. And your parents, your other relatives, where the anger long ago turned into bitterness. And now he’s just become kind of a slow moving cancer in your family. I want us all to see that true forgiveness is not only a sign of great strength. It’s the vital medicine that will cure every relationship. And we know this because it’s the medicine that cured the sickest and most severed and most irreconcilable of all relationships. And that’s the relationship between our perfect, holy Creator God and a creation that rebelled and turned away and rejected him. So for the next four weeks, we’re going to explore the forgiveness of Christmas three times on Sunday morning. And then at our special Christmas Eve weekend service. I do hope that you have made plans or will make plans to come see with your friends and family. Come see forgiven A Christmas Parable. You are going to want to reserve your spots for that online very soon. If you have not done that yet, you need to get on there and do that because they are filling up very quickly.

We projected that about 1200 people would come see the show. We surpassed that number a couple of days ago. And so we’re, we’re there’s very few spots left. So please get online and sign up to come see that with your family. This series and that show will lay a solid foundation for transformative forgiveness. And I’ll tell you, church, as we have been preparing for this Christmas, it has been my my prayer that the Lord would bring about dramatic forgiveness, dramatic reconciliation in your homes and with your friends as you will hear it sung in our musical. Why does the hate fight against the love? Why are families divided? How do our hearts get so misguided? And then the refrain Jesus Christ is the truth in life. He’s the source of our redemption. He is the answer to the questions. That’s where we’re going to go this morning. That’s where we’re going to begin. The source of our redemption, the source from which we draw the grace to forgive others, is the redemption that we’ve received through Christ. When your heart has been made new by the debt cancelling love of Christ. Canceling the debt of others in your life becomes not not just your duty, but your joy. In fact, it just makes sense. So before we look at what forgiveness looks like between people, we need to first understand how it is that God has forgiven our debt.

And that’s where we’re going to start this morning. Colossians chapter two, verses 13 and 14 are two short verses, but they’re packed with the reality of God’s forgiveness, and we’re going to unpack them with a series of questions. I’m going to ask five questions from our perspective this morning, almost as if we are interviewing God about his forgiveness. And the questions are these what’s our problem? What is God done? How did he do it? What was required and where did our debt go? I know I said this quickly. We’re going to look at each one of them more in depth. Those five questions will make a lot more sense as we work through them. So let’s start with our problem. What’s our problem? And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh? The starting place for our understanding of God’s gracious forgiveness has to be an honest assessment of the problem. God’s word tells us the place to start is with our spiritual deadness. You’ve got to start there. That were not spiritually alive at all prior to God’s solution, prior to what God will do. We are in a state of spiritual deadness, and that’s due to. Two realities. The first is because of our trespasses, which is a way of saying our rebellious sin. You know what trespassing is, right? It’s crossing over a boundary, over a border, going into a place where you’re not supposed to go.

Sin is us disregarding God’s good boundaries and deciding that we can go anywhere we want. We have trespassed God’s law. And we do that because of the second reality, our state. Here, it’s referred to as the uncircumcision of the flesh of our flesh. I’m not going to get into all the imagery here this morning, but this is a reference to the fact that our hearts have not been made new by God. So what Paul is saying here to the Colossian church is that before God’s solution, prior to God’s solution, they were sinners with hard hearts, turned away from God because they were in a state of being spiritually dead. In fact, apart from God’s intervention, this is the state that all people are in. No one pleases God. If you have a friend who’s not a Christian, this is the state that they are in. If you do not follow Jesus, this is the state you are in. No one pleases God because no one is able to please God. We are convicted and condemned by our trespasses. Now, you may feel that that is too harsh an assessment. You might. You might feel that when you look around the world, you think people are basically good and decent. Sure, people make mistakes. Sure, sure, sometimes people have problems. Sometimes there are misunderstandings. People may make poor choices.

But, but, but you don’t think these things are such a big deal. And and how could God think otherwise? Well, if you feel that way, the reason you feel that way is that you haven’t fully grasped what sin is. You’ve misdiagnosed the sickness. You haven’t really seen sin for what it actually is. You’ve mistaken cancer for a cold. The late R.C. Sproul famously referred to sin as cosmic treason. Cosmic treason. What he meant was that every violation of God’s law, every trespass of his law, is an act of governmental treason against God that we are usurping God’s authority. When you when you lie, you’re not just telling a little fib. Like we say, you’re telling the God of the universe that you don’t care what he says about misleading people, that you’ll obey your own laws, that you have your own sense of right and wrong, your own sense of when lying is appropriate and when it’s not, and you’ve set it up your way. You have your own standard. You have your own laws, you have your own definition of what constitutes a trespass. And therefore God is not king. You are king. And you might say, well, I don’t think God should take my sins this seriously. Well, okay. Well, let’s see if you can see it from a different angle. I’m going to assume that everyone here at some point in your life has had somebody do terrible things to you.

At some point in your life, someone has done something that was just awful, just terrible to you. Someone has hurt you, someone’s stolen from you, someone’s embarrassed you, cut you down, and perhaps you’ve been carrying around. This hurt for a long time. Maybe even for years. You’ve been just you’ve been carrying this hurt around. Now imagine that this afternoon you were at a Christmas party, and you come and there’s that person. You see them at this party, this person that hurt you. And there you are. You’re gathered around the eggnog and and you you start to have a talk with this person, and, and this person starts talking to you like, like none of that’s true. Like, like everything is normal. Like everything is fine. And you muster then up enough courage to to say something, you say, I’m going to I’m going to say something. I’m going to say something. I’m going to it’s going to be hard, but I’m going to address this issue. I’m going to tell this person what they’ve done to me. And you do it, and you tell this person what they’ve done and their response is, oh, hey, sorry about that. Everyone makes mistakes. You don’t really understand where I was coming from though. No big deal, right? Does that cover it? That take care of it for you. Is that sufficient? Of course not. What’s wrong here is that this other person doesn’t understand the weight of his sin.

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand the consequences. He doesn’t understand the hurt that has come because of his sin and what he’s done. How much greater then the blindness to the weight of our own sin before our holy God? How much greater I invite you to pause and to consider. Just because you lightly dismiss your sin does not mean you should be let. Your sin should be lightly dismissed. Right. Just because you decide it’s not that big a deal doesn’t make it not a big deal. God’s Word diagnoses our problem as it really is, not as we think it ought to be. And apart from God’s solution, we sit in a state of spiritual deadness because of our sins. So what has God done? God made alive together with him. Now there is a surprising change of subject here. If you came to me and told me that you were in a bad situation, my next question to you probably is going to be something like, well, what are you going to do about it? Oh, you’re in a bad situation. What do you plan to do about it? Paul just said that we are in a bad situation, dead in our sins because of the state of our unchanged hearts. All of the the religions and secular worldviews in the world apart from Christianity would start with in that case. So what are you going to do about it? Most of them offer some kind of a plan where you do your best, or you honor the god enough, or you.

You make up for the error of your ways, or you, you live a clean life and eventually you get accepted. And in other words, you do something about it. But here we have a change in subject that that no other worldview makes. No other, no other religion makes. Instead of you stepping up to do something. God does something. God makes us alive. God makes our spirits come alive together with him and join him. And this, by the way, is why it’s so important to start with the right understanding of the problem that we are dead in our sins. We’re not impaired in our sins. We’re not hindered by our sins. We are dead in them. When was the last time you saw something that was dead? Bring itself back to life? Literally never. That doesn’t happen. Dead things can’t make themselves alive again. Death doesn’t undo itself. There’s isn’t advice or instruction we can give to someone to reverse their spiritual deadness. God is the one who has to give life. And that’s Paul says that’s exactly what happened. God made us alive. God did the work. Well, how? How then did he do it? Having forgiven us all our trespasses. The simplest answer to the question how does God bring our dead spirits back to life? Is that he forgives the trespasses that made us dead in the first place? God doesn’t doesn’t do what you and I often do when someone sins against us.

A lot of times we will fail to resolve the problem because somebody will come to us and ask for our forgiveness, and we’ll say something like, oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Right. Please forgive me. I don’t worry about it. Nothing. No big deal. Or we’ll do the opposite of that. We’ll say, yes, I forgive you, but it’s just empty words and we’re actually holding on to the hurt and we’ll carry it forward. Bring it up again some other time. Both of those are not forgiveness, but both are not forgiveness. Neither approach gets to the problem. Neither neither of them will resolve the problem. God resolves our problem by addressing the problem directly with his forgiveness. And the problem, as you can see in the verse, is all of our trespasses. So the word all is very important here to make us alive. No sin can go unforgiven. God’s forgiveness is applied to the full catalogue of every way that we’ve sinned against him, every trespass of his law. God goes straight to the cause of our spiritual deadness, and he applies comprehensive, all encompassing forgiveness. Forgiveness that covers every sin that we have committed. And by the way. Every sin that we will commit. Remember, Paul is talking to the people who. Were currently living in Colossae. Paul knows that that these people are currently struggling with temptations.

He knows that that struggle will continue for the rest of their lives. And he says that God’s forgiveness covers all of their trespasses. How can that forgiveness be? How can that be? What is required to give such a gracious, all encompassing forgiveness? What was required? By canceling the debt or by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. The word by here tells us that this was the act that was required for forgiveness. This is the method that God used to forgive. He forgives by canceling the record of the debt that stood against us because of our sins. Every month in the mail, I get a piece of paper. I know that makes me sound very old fashioned, but I get a I get a piece of paper, and mostly I go paperless, but I, I want this one piece of paper to come. I’ve not allowed them to to take it away. I want this one piece of paper to come. And on it it says how much I still owe on my house. It is a number much larger than I like. The legal demand is that I pay the amount that I agreed to pay when I signed the mortgage contract. Now the payment gets made automatically. But I look at this paper because it provides a spark of motivation to to keep me being a good steward, to work hard to meet the legal demands of of of paying down that debt so that someday it will say $0 and they will stop sending me that paper, which is what I ultimately want.

If God were to send us a sheet of paper each month with a record of our debt, it would be a list so innumerable, it would be such a long list. It would be a huge list of laws that we have violated. It would be an astronomical sum far more than we generally like to admit, by the way, that’s why we use words like misunderstanding and mistake when we actually mean sin. We don’t want to face the record of our debt. We don’t want to look at it. But for those who do, for those who are willing to look plainly at that debt against the Lord and to call it what it is, this is sin. This is my sin against a holy God. For those who are willing to look at square and say, that’s what it is. The next question then becomes the legal demand. What is required to pay this off. And this, by the way, is where too many of us go wrong. We get confused. We think that the legal demand is to pay sin with good works. We make sense. You do a wrong thing. You do a right thing. It balances out, right. That’s that’s what we think. But Scripture says that’s the wrong currency.

Try to use the wrong currency. Only death pays for sin. Death is the legal demand for sin, the state of spiritual deadness. Continues on into eternity. For those who don’t have God’s divinely given forgiveness. God must cancel the record of the debt that stands against you, along with the legally demanded repayment of that debt. But by by love motivated forgiveness, what you need is for God to send you a piece of paper that says that your debt is zero, with all of the legal demands having been met. But, but, but where does the debt go? When God sets it aside. You see, debts can’t just disappear. It’s impossible. It’s impossible for a debt simply to go away. Someone has to pay every single debt there is. If. If my paper shows up next month and there’s a zero on it, either I paid it, which I know I didn’t do, that I paid it, or someone else paid it, or the bank absorbed it. Or there was an error and the debt remains. But the debt didn’t just go away. If that. If that’s what I’m thinking, I’m wrong. And here’s the other thing. Legal demands cannot go unmet. Otherwise, they were never actually demands. Or there’s been injustice. Something illegal. When it comes to God’s gracious forgiveness. All of our sin debt has been paid. But where did it go? Where did that debt go? This he set aside.

Nailing it to the cross. There’s a moment in the Gospel of John chapter 19, when Pilate makes a sign and he writes on this sign, and it’s an inscription that is then nailed to Jesus cross, and it says, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Do you know why he did that? Do you know why he put that inscription on Jesus cross? The Romans would inscribe the crosses of criminals with descriptions of their crimes. So you could look up at that dying criminal and see not only a warning of what happens to law violators, but the very Roman law that they violated. The crime and the legally demanded punishment would both be on display. Friends if you have put your trust in Christ. What God has done with the record of your debt is he has nailed it to Jesus cross. So that so that the crime and the legally demanded punishment with both be on display. So Paul says that your crimes have been placed, but not on your cross, on Jesus cross. God doesn’t forgive us because he’s forgotten our debt. Yeah. He doesn’t. He doesn’t care. Or that because he doesn’t care about the legally demanded requirements to pay the debt. He just doesn’t care about those things anymore. That’s not the reason that God is able to forgive us. God forgives us because the debt has been paid in full through the legally demanded punishment of Christ on our behalf.

We were made alive to be with God forever because Jesus took our death sentence for us, canceling that debt. When I say that the virtue of forgiveness is right at the heart of the gospel, this is what I mean. And you say, well, Kyle, this sounds an awful lot like Easter. It doesn’t really sound like Christmas at all. I know what I’m going to get him for Christmas. I’m going to get him a calendar. That’s what I’m going to get him. Well, the truth is, nothing we’ve talked about this morning. Nothing. Nothing that has to do with forgiveness. Nothing we’ve discussed here this morning would be possible without Christmas. It would be impossible. Without Christmas, our debt would still be outstanding. And Paul makes that clear, right. In this very passage, just a few verses earlier, he writes, for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Without this, there would be no possibility of forgiveness that we’ve seen here. Let me explain. There are a lot of people who reject the gospel today because they say, I can’t believe in a God who would require a blood sacrifice for his punishment for sins. How barbaric, how barbaric. We’ve moved beyond such atrocious, outdated ways of thinking about God’s forgiveness. Or others would say, well, how come? God requires sacrifice for forgiveness at all. Why does he require anything? I forgive people all the time, and I don’t require anything to make up for that debt.

Do I forgive people better than God? Listen, friends. Every act of forgiveness requires someone to pay the debt. Every act of forgiveness requires someone to pay the debt. Someone has to absorb the cost. Someone has to shoulder the load. Someone has to endure the pain. Every person you have ever forgiven in your life, anybody that you’ve truly forgiven, you have said even if you didn’t use these words, you have said to them, I will take the debt myself. I’ll bear the cost. Now it’s easy to see if the if the debt is a physical debt, it’s a lot easier to see it. If it’s if it’s that when when your kid backs your car into your other car, okay, you’re going to forgive them, but you’re going to pay for both cars, right? You’re going to pay for both cars. They don’t have any money. The only money they have you gave them, right? You’re going to pay the debt. It’s easy to see if it’s physical. It’s harder to see when the harm is emotional. But. But there’s still a debt. It’s still a debt. If you’ve been verbally attacked or deceived, or your forgiveness still requires you to cancel that debt and that debt will be paid by you. As you absorb the hurt and you absolve the one who hurt you. In both cases, the one who has been sinned against says to the sinner, though you are indebted to me, I will forgive you by paying the debt for you.

Now back to the one who would say how barbaric. How who, who would ever. Require a blood sacrifice. I agree with you that it would be barbaric of God to require some innocent third party to be sacrificed as debt repayment for our sins. But what if God himself took the debt? What if God himself said? I will bear it for you. I will take it. What if God himself became exactly what we need to be the human replacement for our sin debt? What if. What if God himself said, I will forgive you by absorbing the debt of your death in my own human body? That is the forgiveness of Christmas. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Why? So that. So that the fullness of God could be the body. Who is nailed to the cross? The fullness of God in a human body. Nailed to a cross. This forgiveness through sacrifice on the cross. It’s not barbaric and unnecessary. It’s the only form of forgiveness that can cover the price of debt. And it was paid by the one to whom the debt is owed. All, forgiveness requires debt to be paid. If you reject the gospel because you can’t believe in a God who would require a sacrifice for forgiveness, what you’re really saying is, I can’t believe in a God who forgives. But you should. Will you? Will you receive the forgiveness paid for you by God Himself in Christ? Let’s pray.