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Redeemer Community Church is located in the historic Avondale neighborhood of Birmingham, AL. Our church family exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
For more information on who we are, what we believe, or how to join us, please visit our website at rccbirmingham.org.
Good evening everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you. Tonight, my name is Connor Koskre and I am the youth pastor here at Redeemer. If I haven't met you, I'd love to meet you but I'm so excited to be with you here this evening as we continue our series, follow me, which is a long introduction into the book of first Peter which we're gonna study in the months ahead. But during this time, we're looking at the gospel through the life of Peter the disciple.
Connor Coskery:In our passage this evening, we're gonna be in Matthew chapter 18. Matthew chapter 18. Our main focus is gonna be on verses 21 through 35, but I'm gonna read the whole the whole section from starting in the at verse 15, and and yeah, we're gonna Let let's jump on in. So if you have your Bibles, turn with me, and we're gonna be starting in verse 15. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.
Connor Coskery:If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if it if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen to even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you lose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Connor Coskery:Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything, they ask, it will be done for them by my father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. Then Peter came up and said to him, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times.
Connor Coskery:Therefore, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold with his wife and children and all that he had and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees imploring him, have patience with me and I will pay you everything. And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.
Connor Coskery:That when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a 100 denarii. And seizing him, he began to choke him saying, pay what you owe. So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, have patience with me and I will pay you. He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place.
Connor Coskery:Then his master summoned him and said to him, you wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you? And in anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt. So also, my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together.
Connor Coskery:Father, we have gathered this evening to pay attention. Lord, there's many things we could be doing right now, but we have gathered under this roof in these walls and opened this book to hear from you. And so, Lord, we pray that you would show up and speak to us through your word. Lord, our passage tonight, it it talks about some really difficult things. And I know that there are many of us here who whose hearts might be hard not want to hear that we should forgive our brothers and sisters.
Connor Coskery:And so Lord, would you move in a mighty way? Would you soften our hearts and remind us of the incredible forgiveness that we have received from you? And so, we pray that you would speak for we are listening. In the name of Christ, our king, we pray. Amen.
Connor Coskery:When I first started following Jesus, had a lot of questions. I was a freshman at Ole Miss and an older brother in my fraternity, he asked me to coffee. I had shown some interest in Christianity, he asked me to coffee, so we went to coffee at the Starbucks in the student union and he sat me down and he shared the gospel with me. And the Lord had been sowing seeds up to that point, but I can I can That is a definitive, a defining moment for me where I feel like the scales they fell from my eyes and I believed in the gospel? And contrary to what I expected in that time as an IU freshman, all of my questions weren't answered.
Connor Coskery:In fact, it opened up a whole new set of them. How can Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit, like what what what is this relationship? What about all these other religions? How do I trust the bible? And by God's grace, that same friend and many other wise mentors, they walked with me through that season.
Connor Coskery:But looking back, I can tell that as some of those questions might have been answered, a whole new set of questions were introduced. My questions moved from what does this mean to, okay, so how does this change the way that I live? And that movement from understanding things about Jesus to following Jesus, that's a natural current of discipleship. And eventually, every disciple reaches a moment where Jesus' teachings stop becoming or stop being theoretical and become uncomfortably practical. Matthew 18, it shows us a moment when Peter, he isn't asking a theology question, he's asking a discipleship question.
Connor Coskery:Peter isn't a curious outsider, he's a committed insider. He's followed Jesus for close to two years. He has a real history with Jesus which makes this question sincere. To this point, Peter had left his vocation as a fisherman. He'd left all of his livelihood.
Connor Coskery:He traveled town to town with Jesus. He'd witnessed numerous healings and exorcisms. He'd walked on water and sunk. He'd confessed Jesus as a messiah. He had witnessed the transfiguration.
Connor Coskery:Peter is no longer in the days of being a early, just started to follow Jesus disciple. And he's beginning to wrestle with what does it mean to follow Jesus and how does that impact the way that I live? And as we read in verses 15 through 20, Jesus told the disciples how they have a responsibility to one another and how we as God's people have a responsibility to each other to call out sin, to encourage repentance, and to live as a unified community. And it appears that as Jesus is saying this, it stirs something up in Peter. And so he pulls Jesus aside and he asks him a question.
Connor Coskery:Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times? Peter isn't being cynical, he's asking an honest question. What does it look like to follow you in real life messy community where relationships are hard? And Jesus responds as he often did with a parable about how forgiveness is the way of life in the kingdom of God.
Connor Coskery:It's not optional but to be a disciple of Jesus, it's more than just leaving your old ways behind and believing the right things. Now it's learning to forgive and to reconcile with other broken followers. Now before we dive in and start unpacking this text, I do, I want to acknowledge that forgiveness is really hard. Some of you and I'm I'm sure, carry wounds where, you know, forgiveness language was used to minimize real harm that you experienced or rush your healing process or silence the pain that is inside? And if that's you, I just want to assure you that this is a safe place, that you are seen and that we love you.
Connor Coskery:We see all throughout Jesus' ministry how serious he is about confronting sin, naming wrong and protecting those who are vulnerable. Jesus doesn't tell this story to gloss over pain, to to tell you to toughen up, to forgive and forget. No. He wants, he tells us a story, he wants our calloused hearts to know how deeply we have been forgiven and how understanding that incredible reality, it necessarily transforms us into people who can actually forgive when our brother and sister sins against us. So as we look at this parable, I believe that Jesus teaches us three ways that for how we can become gracious and forgiving disciples.
Connor Coskery:Three ways which will also serve as our three points. And the first is this, stop counting. Second, remember your debt. And third, pass it on. So we stop counting, we remember our debt and we pass it on.
Connor Coskery:So let's begin and let's look at verse 21 where Jesus tells us if we are going to become forgiving people, then we have to stop counting. Verse 21 says, then Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times? Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times. When I first read this, I I couldn't help but think that Peter was just challenging Jesus, but as I studied it more, I learned that Peter, when he asked this question, he actually would have thought he was being extremely generous.
Connor Coskery:In Peter's day, the Torah was the foundation for the Jewish the Jewish community. It it was God's written law. Think the first five books of the bible in our bibles. It was given by God to Moses. It contained God's commands, his stories and his promises.
Connor Coskery:It carried ultimate authority in that community, but it was general and it was brief. Think the 10 commandments, thou shall not blank. And so, given the Torah's brevity, over time, Jewish rabbis created an oral Torah called the Talmud, which served as their the rabbi's interpretation for what they believed God's law said. It was meant to guide followers on how to faithfully live out the Torah in everyday life. In reality though, it became a set of extra very specific rules for the people to follow.
Connor Coskery:We see this in numerous examples across the gospels, know, one in in Matthew, in Matthew chapter 12 when, if you remember when the disciples were going along and they were picking grain from the field and the pharisees just jump on them, They're like, hey, you can't do that, it's on the Sabbath and all these things, and then Jesus delicately, but forcefully, he describes them, hey, you've missed the point about the Sabbath. And so that was one of those examples of how the Talmud had set this, had created this extra very specific set of rules. And within this, they even had a rule about forgiveness. And it was that a person must forgive the same person three times. They didn't pull this out of nowhere, there were places in the old testament specifically Amos where God talks about how he repeat he repeatedly forgave the people for their offenses.
Connor Coskery:The core issue was that over time, mercy became a measurable obligation. They turned something that was supposed to be extraordinary into something that was measurable. And so, Peter approaches Jesus with in his mind a really generous offer. Lord, when my brother sins against me, am I forgiven seven times? He offers the number seven, which is the biblical number for completeness and it's more than double what the Talmud, the oral tradition would have required.
Connor Coskery:And Jesus answers with not seven but 77. And Jesus isn't focused on the specific figure, he's speaking intentionally in hyperbole, effectively taking the complete number seven and putting another complete number seven right next to it. And he's communicating that forgiveness isn't something you calculate. When Peter suggests a limit, even a gracious limit, Jesus shows him that he's missed the point. If we're focused on counting, then we're not actually forgiving.
Connor Coskery:And before we move forward, I think that it's really important for us to sit with the uncomfortable truth that we are far more like Peter than we would like to admit. So often, I forgive but only with strings attached. I forgive but it's it's cautious, it's guarded, I wanna protect myself. I don't want to get hurt again. Ask yourself, where where is my forgiveness threshold today?
Connor Coskery:Where's the place where my forgiveness it runs out? We've we've we've crossed the line. Is it easy to forgive your friend but hard to forgive your spouse, your coworker, or even yourself? Does your forgiveness run out when the apology it doesn't sound sincere enough? What about when the same sin or the same hurt it happens again and again and again.
Connor Coskery:Jesus isn't telling us to ignore the pain, forgiveness doesn't mean pretending like the sin or that hurt didn't actually happen. And it doesn't mean immediate reconciliation or the removal of boundaries, obviously not putting yourself back into harm's way. Jesus is calling us to extend grace, to extend that forgiveness beyond what feels comfortable. To recognize that forgiveness, it isn't about calculating, but reflecting the limitless mercy that we've received in Christ. And so following this question to illustrate this astonishing truth, Jesus tells Peter a story.
Connor Coskery:In order to forgive, we must stop counting, we must remember our debt, how much we have been forgiven. Look with me at verses 23 to twenty twenty seven. Verse 23 says, therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold with his wife and children and all that he had payment to be made.
Connor Coskery:So the servant fell on his knees imploring him, have patience with me and I will repay you. And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. I want you to imagine this moment with me. The servant, he isn't standing in front of the king confidently, no, he's on his knees. His family, his children, they're behind him.
Connor Coskery:His future is gone, he has no bargaining power left. For context here, an ordinary man at this time could expect to earn around a single talent in a year. If we translate that into today's terms, assuming an average annual income for a working class job is around $40,000, this servant's debt would be something like hundreds of billions of dollars. And all scholars point out that the debt owed is deliberately unrealistic. Similar to when Jesus says that we are to forgive 77 times, he doesn't want us to get stuck on the number.
Connor Coskery:The talent, it was the greatest currency denomination in the Roman empire and 10,000 was the greatest number in the Greek language. Jesus wants us to see that the servant owed the king an infinite immeasurable amount of money. But notice the king's response. He doesn't interrupt the servant as he pleads for mercy. He doesn't scoff.
Connor Coskery:He doesn't say that's impossible. Jesus says that the king looked at him and took pity on him. And the word pity here, it carries the sense of compassion and patience that moves someone to action. As we see that before the servant can even finish begging, the king does the unthinkable. He tears up the ledger.
Connor Coskery:He absorbs the loss. He lets the servant walk free. If you zoom out and you think about the story in context and connection to Jesus and God's kingdom, the the elements become a little bit more clear. God is the king and the servant is God's people. The 10,000 talents, they represent our sin, the infinite debt that we owe God.
Connor Coskery:Not merely for occasional missteps, but for a lifetime of misplaced love, trust and obedience. And in the story, see God's grace and his mercy at work. By definition, grace is when God gives us good gifts that we don't deserve, but God's mercy is when he withholds from us what we do deserve. Jesus, he wants his disciples, he wants us to feel the emotional shock of God's grace and mercy. Because of sin, your debt is infinitely large and yet, the king of the universe, he forgives you.
Connor Coskery:Not because you clean up or persuade his forgiveness, it's absolutely free. It's an overflow of his patience and his compassion. If we just if we just stopped right there, if the parable just ended right there, it would be an incredibly beautiful picture of how a holy God graciously saves wicked sinners. But Jesus doesn't stop at forgiveness received. Now, keeps going because when you truly experience God's grace and mercy, it never stays contained.
Connor Coskery:The same servant who walks away with his impossible debt erased, he now steps back into the world. He's carrying that forgiveness with him and the question that Jesus wants us to consider, that he places before us is, what happens next? What's he gonna do with this? And this brings us to the second movement in the parable and our third point. If we're going to become gracious and forgiving to disciples, we have to receive forgiveness and then we have to pass it on.
Connor Coskery:Look with me at verse 28. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a 100 denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him saying, pay what you owe. So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, have patience with me and I'll pay you. He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed.
Connor Coskery:And they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, you wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you? And in anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt. So also, my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.
Connor Coskery:So Jesus shifts the scene now, and now the forgiven servant, he meets one of his fellow servants and this second man, he owes the forgiven servant a 100 denarii, which amounts to roughly three months wages. Still a significant amount, but trivial compared to the debt that he owed the king. In contrast to the grace and mercy of the king in part one, the forgiving forgiven servant, he attacks his fellow servant. He demands that he be thrown in prison immediately when he can't produce the money. And when the king hears this, he summons and confronts the first servant saying in effect, you stood before me with an impossible debt and I let you go free.
Connor Coskery:How could you leave that moment and deny mercy to somebody else? And then he throws him into prison. And Jesus finishes with that that chilling line. It's that moment where you can tell he's telling the story and he looks each of his disciples in the eye and he says, so also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. This is sobering.
Connor Coskery:Jesus is saying or Jesus isn't saying, he's not saying forgive others so that God will forgive you. He's saying that if you have been truly forgiven by God, it must reshape the way that you treat others. It has to. And refusal to forgive reveals that a heart it reveals a heart that hasn't truly received God's forgiveness. Which gets to the central question of this parable.
Connor Coskery:How could the forgiven servant fail to be softened and transformed by the king's mercy? If we imagine that first scene and we see this incredible display of mercy, how did that servant then go out into the world and do this to a fellow brother? If we look in the mirror and we know that Jesus is clear that forgiven people must forgive and again, if we look at the the context of the story and we are the unforgiving servant in this story, how do we avoid being like him? How do we actually live a life of forgiveness the way that Jesus is commanding here, the the way that Jesus is commanding us? I actually believe that the answer lies in the parable itself.
Connor Coskery:When we look closely, we see that the king models for us what forgiveness and practice looks like. And so, I wanna take another just like brief glance over the parable. Look with me at verse 24. We see at the very beginning that the king brought the servant to him, and it was there in his presence that the actual debt was named. And in a way, this this illustrates what Jesus taught his disciples in verses 15 through 20.
Connor Coskery:There was an issue, the servant was at fault, he owed him a debt, so the king confronted him face to face. He didn't gossip about the servant to his advisors or simply decree him to prison. No, he exposed the truth and that is where forgiveness begins. I think this is an important lesson for each of us. The question isn't if, you will be sinned against.
Connor Coskery:That's a guarantee since we live in a world that's been affected by the fall. And when you are sinned against, Jesus tells you that the first step is to resolve that issue one on one in person. There's no step zero where we first talk the person or talk about the person to our friends, then we're told to go directly to the person to expose the truth. And if they're resistant, then we include another person. And this isn't tactics for an ambush to ambush our brother or sister who's like really getting on our nerves.
Connor Coskery:Now, look at the look at the posture of the king. He took pity on the servant. Unlike the servant who later in the story attacked his fellow servant, we see that the king sought to understand the man's situation before jumping to conclusion. The king's patient. He sees the servant as a person not as a villain.
Connor Coskery:And I think that's important for us to hear, we we we must engage what is going to be uncomfortable in these uncomfortable moments, we must engage them with humility, with patience, with compassion. So if we're moved, being moved by a heart of forgiveness, we'll we'll confront our brothers and sisters with the goal of repentance and restoration, not for revenge or retaliation. And so we see after the king exposes the truth, takes pity on the servant, he does something remarkable, he cancels the debt. And here is perhaps the hardest part about forgiveness. It's costly.
Connor Coskery:It's not easy, it's costly. When he forgave, when the king forgave the servant's debt, it didn't disappear. The king absorbed the loss himself. If I loan you money and you come back to me and say, hey Conor, I can't repay you, and I say, no problem, then I'm still out the money. Forgiveness doesn't erase the cost, instead it decides who will bear it.
Connor Coskery:If you're anything like me, when when you've been wronged, you really just wanna sit and dwell on it in your heart thinking that it's gonna make you better, but what you think's soothing that pain is actually allowing it to hurt you over and over and over again. The debt will be collected either through endless resentment and bitterness or that debt can be absorbed through mercy. This means for us when a friend repents, we forgive. We extend what's been given to us and we choose, we keep choosing to forgive even when we don't feel it. Trusting that the spirit enables us to live this way as he continuously applies the healing balm of the gospel to our hearts.
Connor Coskery:That truth that we are forgiven even though we don't deserve any of it. And we see that the king releases the servant. The problem isn't a race, but it is, it's a movement towards a restored relationship. This is forgiveness in real life. We don't minimize the trespass, we name it honestly.
Connor Coskery:We acknowledge the real debt, yet we also see the other person as a fellow sinner in need of mercy. And therefore, rather than seeking repayment or revenge, we release them. We forgive not patting ourselves on the back for being the bigger person but to encourage our friend to repent which begins the hard work of reconciling what has been broken. This is the gospel way. When we put this on, this this is this is evidence that we are growing as a disciple.
Connor Coskery:It shows that we are grasping the fundamental lesson of this parable which is that our capacity to forgive, it cannot come from within us. No. It must flow first from receiving and being transformed by the forgiveness that God has shown us. When you look at this story, the whole thing is quite ironic. You have a servant who's alive and free only by the mercy of the king.
Connor Coskery:He then goes and he starts acting like a king himself. And like all parables, every element is intentional. Jesus wants us to look in the mirror. He wants this to instruct our hearts. When we who live only by God's daily mercies, sit in judgment of others, we're doing exactly what the servant did.
Connor Coskery:We're putting ourselves in the seat of the king. The moment that sin entered the world, humanity has been trying to get into the king's chair where we have ultimate authority to exercise judgment and determine how life ought to be. By our nature, we are all servants acting like kings. And the only thing that can change a servant from acting like a king is a king coming down to be a servant to save his people. In the weeks ahead, this parable, it's gonna take on a whole new painful meaning for Peter.
Connor Coskery:Jesus is on the way to the cross where he's gonna be betrayed and abandoned and Peter, his closest friend will deny him three times. Jesus will look at him in the eye and Peter will be completely undone. On the cross, the judge of the universe, he will be judged. The king punished for his people who deserve punishment. What was theoretical for Peter soon became deeply personal and uncomfortably practical.
Connor Coskery:He will be confronted with how much he needs forgiveness before he can truly learn to forgive others. But it's the cross that enables forgiveness to become practical even if it's uncomfortable for us. Because at the cross, we're humbled out of our pride and bitterness. Who are we to judge our brothers and sisters? We're sinners saved by grace, entirely dependent on the mercy of God.
Connor Coskery:Because of the cross, we can actually freely forgive. We can release our brothers and sisters because it's there that we are set free. Our great debt was paid for by the blood of Christ and our new identity is secured. We're forever God's children. The cross brings hope and it opens up the reality where we can actually live as gracious and forgiving disciples.
Connor Coskery:And so, for you today, for all of us who are gathered here this evening, we're living in real messy community. And when we're when we're thinking about how this applies into our lives today, it's probably not gonna look that dramatic. There's probably gonna be friction. There's a lot of work that's hidden, but all of it's vital. For some of you, just a just a few things that this might practically look like.
Connor Coskery:It might look like addressing the way that your friend, your roommate, your spouse is hurting you. Have a direct conversation. Invite them to coffee. Seek restoration instead of sitting and living in that bitterness that we think feels good, but actually, again, it to allows keep hurting us over and over and over again. It might look like admitting where you're wrong, but then handing it to the Lord and receiving his love and forgiveness instead of replaying that conversation or that thing that you did wrong a 100 times over in your head.
Connor Coskery:It might look like praying for someone that you still don't want to talk to or saying, I forgive you, while acknowledging that trust is still gonna take a whole lot of time. Wherever you are, my prayer is that the incalculable riches of God's grace would move you to repent more quickly, to trust more deeply and to forgive more fully. That's the community we wanna be. Amen? And that leads us to this table where the king as an overflow of his grace, he's given us a feast.
Connor Coskery:This meal, it reminds us that we are sinners saved by grace through the finished and victorious work of Jesus. This meal is given to us to nourish our faith, where the holy spirit, he promises to show up in these ordinary elements, to apply that forgiveness that we have to our hearts, and in doing so enables us to leave these doors and to go out and be gracious and forgiving disciples. The Lord's table, it's also an occasion for us to pause and to examine our own hearts. The apostle Paul, he encourages the church at Corinth to repent and to reconcile before partaking of this bread and wine. And so before you come forward, I want you to ask yourself, is there sin in my heart that I need to repent of?
Connor Coskery:If so, hand it over to the Lord, return to him where joy and life and pleasure forevermore is found. Also, is there an unresolved conflict between you and a brother or sister? If so, at the very least, pray for them. Better yet, go to them. Don't wait for a more convenient time, but practice forgiveness today.
Connor Coskery:So on the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, and after giving thanks, he broke it. And he said, this is my body given for you. And in the same way, after giving thanks, he took the cup. He said, this cup is a new covenant poured out in my blood for the forgiveness of sins. Do do this in remembrance of me.
Connor Coskery:The apostle Paul would later say that as often as you eat of this bread and drink of this wine, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again. And friends, he will come again. So this evening, here's how we're going to partake. We'll have four stations up here. The balcony will begin, you'll come forward and you're gonna hear, this is the body of Christ given for you.
Connor Coskery:And then you can take the bread and you dip it in the wine, you'll hear, it's the blood of Christ shed for you. Then return via the outer outer aisles, and we'll just go back to front. Let me pray, and then our servers can come forward. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to share this meal. Lord, we pray that you would you would meet us in this ordinary bread and ordinary wine to nourish our faith, to to humble us and remind us of the salvation that we have in Jesus and to to enable us to empower us by the spirit, to take this good news to the world.
Connor Coskery:And Lord, I pray that where there is brokenness, you would bring life, that you would restore, and that Lord, this would be an occasion to to empower us to go and do that work by the power of the spirit. So Lord, would you bless this time? In your name I pray. Amen. If our servers would come forward.