There are some things that are probably buried inside of you that you don't even realize are part of you that you don't even realize have played a role in so many interactions in your life, or have maybe held you back from good things that you should have been walking in that you weren't able to do. So if you need to close your eyes and imagine it, that's fine. But I wonder if you've ever been crippled in some way by some kind of anger or hurt feelings that somebody has caused you. I think the answer to that clearly is yes. We've all been there.

We've all had that at some point. We've all had something that another person did to us that somehow held us down or held us back in some way, that we've all had something that is. That has maybe attached itself to us and we haven't been able to let go of that, and we've carried that. Even if you didn't intend to, even if you felt like maybe enough time has passed that you've let it go, it's still been there as part of you. I wonder what's the worst thing?

And I don't want you to say it unless you feel like sharing it later at some point, but what's the worst thing that someone has ever done to you? Think of it maybe that way, the worst thing another person has done to injure you or to harm you. And then I want you to think about what has that done? How much of your life has been eaten up by that? How many good years have been taken because of that thing?

And then I wonder if you'd like to be free of that burden today.

It could have been a person that was close to you. In fact, it usually has been. It could have been a parent, a sibling, a relative, a spouse, an ex spouse, a former best friend, a neighbor, a boss, a coworker. Sometimes it seems to come from the people you least expect it, and yet people will do things that hurt you. And it's up to us to let that go, is up to us to get beyond that.

But now think about this. Think about the triggers, the things that can happen that recall, that hurt to your mind, the things that might happen that you hear or see that bring up old feelings, and all of a sudden you're back in that. It might be a missed opportunity or the way things might have been. And all of a sudden you get to thinking about that and you're wondering, what would it have been like if that never happened? Today we can be free of those things by the time we leave here today, today and for the next two weeks, we're going to talk about forgiveness.

We're going to talk about today specifically two different people and the two different things, or they're two different stories and how that might apply to our lives today. The first one is a guy named Peter. He was a follower of Jesus. Many of you are quite familiar with him, even if you haven't spent much time in the Bible. You might have heard about this guy named Peter.

Peter was a guy that started out, his kind of, his identity was a fisherman. He was just a guy. That's what he did. Until Jesus got a hold of him and he said, you know what? I want to turn you into somebody that fishes for people.

You're going to catch people instead of fish. Now, Peter, he changed his name. Well, our scripture in this is from Matthew 18, and it's up on our screen. Peter comes to Jesus and says, lord, how many times must I forgive a brother who sins against me? As many as seven times.

And Jesus said to him, not seven times, but 77 times. So as we look at forgiveness today, as we look at what forgiveness is, and we look about how Jesus taught about it and what he wants for us in this area, we're going to look at a few different things over the next couple weeks. But I want to think for a minute about Peter's question, like, why did he ask this? And he actually proposed his own answer. Have you ever done that?

You ask a question and then just start answering it yourself. Okay, so Peter, he asked this question. He's like, Jesus. Jesus was his teacher. He was following him as a disciple of Jesus.

So of course he asked him questions. And he says, jesus, how many times should I forgive someone, a brother, somebody close to me? How many times should I forgive him? Actually, I believe what Peter was questioning about was when somebody does the same sin towards us seven times or multiple times, he wasn't just saying, like, throughout the day, continually as one thing after another, he's saying, they keep coming back over and over and over with the same thing. How many times do I have to forgive that?

Like, can't we just, like, can I just be done with him? Can I just be done with her and say, jesus, I've forgiven it enough times. They haven't changed. Can I just move on? Jesus actually, later on in his answer says, if they do it seven times in the same day, forgive him.

Now, I promise you that each of us have a problem with this. Each of us have a problem both being the one who committed those wrongs against another person. But worse than that, we have a problem with forgiveness. We have a problem letting it go. And I can tell you that because I've lived it and I've seen it in other people's lives, and I know that this is a common struggle with being a human being.

All right? So, okay, here's the fun thing about this. Jesus says to Peter, when Peter gives his answer, and he says, I think seven is a good number. Seven is this jewish number. That means completion is full count.

Like, you know, seven is not a perfect number. It's a complete number. It means, if I've forgiven somebody for this thing seven times, then I've done my job. Seven times is a good number. And Jesus says, no, no, no, 77 times.

Now, I know that some of your translations say 70 times seven or might have a little footnote there or something like that. That's fine. It's probably wrong, and we'll get to that later. Why? But it doesn't matter, you know, either.

There's a point being that Jesus is saying, no, it's a lot larger number than what you had in mind, Peter, or Jesus means something else. Peter, of course, had asked this question because it made sense for him to question about forgiving others. Peter had been a student of the Old Testament, or what they called the Torah. He had been aware of these things, and they were in the Bible, in the Old Testament. And so he wanted to ask Jesus about this.

He asked him because there was things like Leviticus 1918, that told them not to take vengeance or revenge on someone who had done something wrong to him. Or proverbs 1911 that says, you should be slow to speak and slow to become angry. So Peter's got on his mind forgiveness. Of course, there's probably more to it than that. There's a whole context behind it.

This context behind it is what we have called church discipline. That seems like a bad name for it. It's not really practiced too much anyway. But really what it meant is Jesus said, if somebody does something wrong to you and what you're supposed to do, there's a proper way to deal with that. You go up to that person one on one, and you say, hey, here's what you did to me.

Like, I don't want that to become a thing between us. And instead of that, what ends up happening is so many times we just ignore it. We hold a grudge that festers and that grows, and we never really move beyond that hurt. We might move beyond it in time. And just kind of allow time to fix it.

But we don't really deal with what had happened. So what Jesus says is you just take you and that one person and you talk about it. But if that person won't listen to you, there's an escalation that happens. You go from there and you get two or three witnesses, two or three fellow believers in Christ, and you confront that person now about the sin that they have done towards you. Now, there's a possibility that Jesus was actually talking about a sin generally.

So, like a sin towards God and not towards another person. But I don't think that's what he meant here. I think he was saying, when somebody wrongs you, you deal with that. But if they won't listen to those two or three other people, and by the way, this is where we get that verse. A lot of times we say, you know, where two or three are gathered, I am there with them.

So if there's only two people at church, Jesus is there in our midst. Yeah, that's true, but that's not what he meant. What he was actually talking about was there in the midst of it. When you're trying to bring healing and restoration and reconciliation, I'm there working in that. But if somebody's heart is so hard and so stubborn that they won't even listen to the two or three people bring it before the entire church, now, I almost guarantee that none of us have seen this before.

None of us have ever seen, like. And if you have, it's scary because, like, maybe. Maybe it was done wrong. I don't know. We usually like to either, like, do none of it or jump to the extreme and like, okay, we're gonna have a church meeting and talk about what this person did.

And it's usually like a pastor, a board member, a deacon, something like that. And it's like, oh, my goodness, we didn't go through this right. You know, the goal is always reconciliation, not separation. When Jesus says, I'm in the middle of that, what he's saying is, I'm in the middle of restoring people. I'm not in the middle of separating them and breaking them up and harming relationships.

I'm in the middle of fixing them. And so here Jesus, he says, the final thing is, if they won't listen to the church, you just kind of treat them like a pagan or an unbeliever. In other words, a tax collector. Like somebody that's not a believer, you just kind of treat them as an outsider. That doesn't mean you don't have fellowship with them anymore.

But that means you say, okay, this person clearly didn't understand the message of discipleship, of Jesus Christ, and they need to start over from square one. Treat them like somebody who's an outsider to the faith and needs to be led back in. And so Peter had heard Jesus say this, and he's dwelling on it. He's thinking about it, and he's saying, okay, Jesus, but so how many times do I need to forgive someone, even if they won't accept what they've done, how many times should I still offer them forgiveness? Seven times.

And Jesus says, no, 77 times. Basically, our ability to reconcile with other people, it affects our ability to accept reconciliation from God. Jesus had said, if you won't forgive a brother who sins against you, you can't be forgiven by your heavenly father. Now, that makes it sound like God's forgiveness depends on something I or you do. And that's not exactly true.

He already did it. He's already forgiven you. But you can't accept it if you haven't been able, if you haven't learned how to give it, if you haven't learned how to give forgiveness to others, how can you accept it from God? And so when we see this throughout the New Testament, we see it when Jesus prayed, when the disciples said, teach us to pray, one of his lines was, forgive us our debts, trespasses sins. Whichever version you use, forgive us the things that we've done wrong as we forgive those who have wronged us.

You see, Jesus is teaching this. At the core of his teaching is this idea of being reconciled to God and to others. And if we don't do that, then we can't understand our reconciliation with God. Let me put it really practically. Forgiving others is doing more for you than it is for them.

How many times have you actually gone to someone and said, you know, that thing you said really hurt me? And they're thinking, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't remember saying anything hurtful or offensive. What are you talking about? And so we begin to realize sometimes our words might have come across more carelessly than we planned or we might have had more attitude in them than we planned, but somebody took hurt from our words or from our actions, and we still are responsible for those things.

But they need to forgive for what we did, because that does more for them than it does for us. So how do we walk in these shoes? Like, how do we do that? How do we walk in this kind of freedom? You know, the little video that had the eagle soaring.

How can you be free like that? How can we walk in that life? There's a book that's really helpful that I've read a couple times. It's called forgive instantly and live free by Terry Stewart. I don't know how to pronounce his name, but anyway, it's got some consonants in there, some vowels.

That's the guy, stueck. And this is a great book. It's not too big, it's easy enough to read, and it's super helpful. But this idea of as soon as you're wronged. And for me, he uses an example of a time where he was in traffic and this guy kept cutting him off, and he just ends up ramming the guy because he had a big old cadillac with that v shaped bumper on the front of it.

Like, it could take a pretty good hit, you know? And he bumped into the guy at a stoplight or something, like, just to teach him a lesson. And his family's in the car, like, what's going to happen next? I'm like, I've never ran someone, but how many times I've thought about it, I'm like, okay, what's the deductible? You know?

Like, is it worth it? No, it's not worth it. That's always my. Like, that's the thing that gets me. Not like, jesus wouldn't like me carrying his name.

No. It's like, the deductible cost too much on my insurance. I don't need the points on my license. That's what stops me, you know? Like, I'm just confessing this here.

So this guy in the book, though, he says he had to learn, like, not waiting a year or a month or not even 2 hours. He says the shorter amount of time that he got it between the incident and the forgiveness, the better his own life was, the more he lived freely. He talks a lot in there about what it means to give up ownership of yourself. You see, this microphone is weird today. When Adam and Eve, whenever they sinned against God, they actually assumed ownership of their own lives.

They decided that they wanted to be in charge of their selves rather than obeying God and listening to him. And so they assumed their ownership of their own lives, took control of something they weren't allowed to take control of, and it had a long range effect on the way they lived. What ends up happening when we take ownership in areas of our lives that isn't ours to take? We end up dwelling in, having control issues, stress, anger, bitterness, all these different things. Sometimes it manifests itself in rage or anger.

Sometimes it manifests itself in being just stressed out to no end because you feel like you've lost control of something that was never yours to control, whatever it might be. When we decide that we're going to forgive instantly and live free, not only are we walking in the way Jesus taught to walk, but we're also just simply walking in a way. Like, even if you took all Christianity, all religion out of it and just said, if you want to live free, forgive people the moment they wrong you now, you might say, well, Pastor Nick, you don't know what they've done to me, okay? I don't. I mean, I know some of it, like some of you have shared some deep hurts with me that you've lived through.

I understand that. I might not have walked in your shoes, but I understand the depth or the gravity of the bondage that that can cause. And yet, if you hold on to it, you're the one who suffers. This man in the book, he told a story, something that his father had done to him and how that had caused a long range hurt in his life. It was only years after his father had died that he realized he needed to forgive him.

That. That thing that his father had done over and over just. And it wasn't anything physical he had done. It was his words that he had used, but that had caused this bondage in the author's life, and he had to get rid of that. When we learn to forgive instantly, we see a decrease in our sinful pride, our anger, our rage.

You see your heart begin to heal. There's a hardness that builds up around our heart that begins to soften and to go away. Your relationships with others begin to be repaired. Remember those things I asked you at the beginning? What's the worst thing anybody's ever done to you?

What's some of the biggest hurts you've ever carried in your life? Just in a group this size, I guarantee there's hundreds of things that right now, if we wrote them all in a book, it would be hard to read through that book. It'd be hard to read those words without just breaking down in tears, knowing the hurt and the pain just represented in this room. And yet, the longer we hold on to that, the more we allow that to define us, to eat at us, to weight us down, the more it's killing us and keeping us from living the life God designed for us.

Even when Jesus was dying, he said of the people that were killing him, the roman soldiers, the Jews who had asked for him to be killed. He looks around at all of them, and he prays to his father in heaven. He says, father, forgive them, for they don't understand what they're doing as he's being killed by them. It wasn't a pain free death. He felt it.

He felt it in his flesh and he felt it in his soul. And he says, father, forgive these people. Now, it's easy for us to say, oh, well, that's Jesus. He's so much better than me. Yes, he is.

But if you call yourself a follower of his, a Christian, you've been born again with new life, and he offers that to you. And so he's making you whole and making you new. And so what he's doing is he's saying, you, you know what? I want to restore that which was lost by those hurts and those pains. But you have to forgive them first.

If you don't forgive them, it's going to kill you. Jesus also says, if you don't forgive others, you yourself cannot be forgiven by his father in heaven. It's not that God doesn't want to. He just can't. He can't do it.

Not because it's impossible for him. We teach that to the kids. Nothing's impossible for God, but it's impossible in the sense of he hasn't ordered it that way. He set it up where, if you want to receive forgiveness, you have to offer it as well. Jesus tells a story about this right after Peter had asked and answered his own question.

He tells a story about two people that owed a lot of money. There's one guy that owes a fortune of money to. To a moneylender or to a king, and he goes up to him and the guy says, pay me what you owe me. And he's like, I don't have it. I mean, we're talking probably what would be billions of dollars today.

It was such an astronomical sum of money. And he says, pay it back. And he says, I can't. He says, you know what? I'll forgive you.

He just forgave that money. And then that guy that was forgiven that money, he goes out and he finds someone that he had loaned money to, and that guy owed him about three months worth of daily pay wages, three months worth of day labor wages. And he goes to that guy and he starts choking him. It says, can you imagine that? Finding somebody that you loaned $20 to and choking them until they gave you the $20 back?

We wouldn't do that, would we? Especially after we've been forgiven a billion dollars. I got a joke that I tell Amy sometimes about some of these billionaires, you know, like, you see some of them that, you know, like, Jeff Bezos, who was 20 years ago, was, like, super nerdy, and now all of a sudden, he's got, like, I don't know. He's like, got jet planes and spaceships and supermodel, like, wife or girlfriend. Like, you know what helps to attract a lady like that?

A billion dollars. You know, like, a billion dollars is so much money. I can't even imagine how that changes your life. But I really can't imagine how carrying around the debt of a billion dollars being forgiven changes your life. Can you imagine?

You. I think you might float just a little bit between every step. And yet he goes out and he can't forgive a guy that owes him three months worth of income. Now, everybody else that had seen this going on, they're like, that's not right. And they go and they tell the guy that had forgiven the big debt.

They're like, do you know what this dude just did? And he's like, uh, nope, I'm un canceling the canceled debt. He put him in jail, put his family in jail, and said, you're going to be tortured until you pay it back. That's like, whoa, okay. I guess you can do that if you're the king or something.

But anyway, you know, it also helps to have that kind of power. A billion dollars, anyway, it changes a lot of things. We can't receive that heavenly forgiveness if we haven't been able to offer it to others, it ends up harming us. It ends up imprisoning us, is what Jesus was trying to teach us. And if you want to hold on to those hurts, that's.

You can do that, but you will carry them around. It will affect every relationship that you're part of. And until you unshackle yourself from those hurts, from those things that you haven't forgiven, you'll be brought down by it. Now, there's one other guy that I wanted to talk about, and this is going almost all the way back to the very beginning of the scripture. There's this guy named Lamech.

I always spell it with capital letters on the first four. I didn't on the slide, but his name has lame in it. This is a really lame guy. Okay? Like.

Like the insult lame. Like, ah, that's lame. You know, never mind. Okay? You guys never used that.

We did a lot my age. So Lamech, he says to his two wives? Yeah, he took two wives. He thought he was pretty good stuff. Ada and Zilla, listen to me, you wise of Lamech.

Hear my words. I picture this guy wearing, like, a bear skin, you know, like, he's just a real bombastic big man. He says, I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for hurting me. Now, if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech. 77 times.

Does this sound familiar? Peter said, how much should I forgive? Seven times. And Jesus says, no, 77 times. Jesus was calling their attention back to this Old Testament.

You know, in the jewish tradition, they had this idea of stringing pearls along. Jesus said, for instance, don't cast your pearls before swine. In other words, what stringing pearls was, was they would quote part of a verse or part of a passage, but then they would leave it to the person hearing them to remember the rest of it and to kind of meditate on the rest of that scripture. And so Jesus here, he says, when he answers not seven times to Peter, but 77 times, he's calling him to remember the story of Lamech. Now, Lamech had not only did he decide to take two wives, because one, I guess, wasn't good enough for him.

He's like, lamech, I get two wives. He also had some sons, and his sons were very. They were leaders in the day. One of them was the first guy, it says, the father of those who were nomadic herders. He had animals, but he lived in tents and moved around.

Apparently that was a new concept to do that for this, you know. And this guy was the one that started that trend. Another one of his sons was good at. He played, like, musical instruments. So he was a musician.

He was an artsy guy, I guess, with that stuff, and musical, and he had talent. And it says he was the father of all those who play those instruments. And then the other one was the father of those who worked with, like, bronze and iron, a blacksmith, if you will. These were very trend setting men that came from Lamech. And Lamech had his own thing, too.

I guess he's really proud about, you know, what his family's doing and proud of the fact that he decided to take two wives. He's one of Cain's great, great. I think he's like, the 6th or 7th generation from Cain. And Cain was famous for doing what? Killing his brother.

He killed his brother, who had done no wrong to him, but he killed his brother and got him out of the way. And then when God confronts Cain, Cain says, oh, my sin is more than I can bear. And anyone who finds me is gonna kill me. They're gonna take vengeance on me for killing my brother. And God put a mark on him and said, not so.

Anyone who kills you, you will be avenged seven times over. Now, I don't know how you can do that. I don't know if you have to kill the person that killed him seven times. Like, I don't know how that works. Or if you have to do it really slowly so that it hurts seven times as much.

I don't know how you avenge somebody seven times over. But God told. Promised Cain that nobody would kill him or otherwise they would suffer worse consequences. But this guy, Lamech, wearing. I don't know, I picture a big bear skin like this.

He's just a big, burly guy, and he has a big staff, and he just. He is a commanding presence. And he says, if Cain was avenged seven times, then they'll avenge me 77 times. Where does he get the right. First of all, this was just like, this is an interaction where it says, a young man for injuring me.

I just picture him bumping into a guy on the street and not being able to back down, and he just beat him to death with his fists. That's how I picture it. It could be something totally different. Maybe the young man had it coming. I don't know.

Lamech doesn't give the whole story. He doesn't give a defense for what he did. He just says, a young man hurt me, but here I am. I'm lamech. I'm older than him, you know, I'm an old guy, but I could still throw down better than I took, and I gave better than I got.

I killed the man, and you can't touch me for it now. Jesus, he has a reason for bringing this guy up, at least in my opinion. This is what he did. He brought this guy up. He's trying to teach Peter and the other disciples.

You need to forgive not just seven times, but 77 times, if that's what it takes. Don't be like Lamech. Don't be like Lamech. Don't just take vengeance upon yourself. Don't just assume that you get to make your own rules.

You must live a life of forgiveness. You see, Lamech lived in anger. Apparently, there's no other explanation for why you would do that, unless it's just street cred or something like that. Lamech lived in anger, and he decided to let that anger spill out into murder. Anger will take everything you love.

It'll hurt everyone you love. And that anger stems from unforgiveness and if you can't let go of that, then you'll continue walking, bearing that hurt and that pain. So today is simply this. Forgive instantly and live free. If you can't do that, or if you refuse to do that, if you refuse to learn how to do that, then you're going to find out just how much that pain will fester and grow and spread throughout every part of your body.

So I called you at the beginning to think of what's the worst thing anyone's done to you? What does it look like to be free of that? Sure, they might not deserve forgiveness. That's not what it's about, is it? We didn't deserve the forgiveness God offered to us, but he gave it freely, and we receive it freely.

And we're called in return to give that forgiveness back to others freely. So today, whatever it takes, spend some time. It might take some time quietly later this afternoon. I like to take Sunday afternoon naps. But sometimes God will get ahold of me and he'll just start talking to me and I'll say, okay, no nap today.

Sometimes my daughter has something she wants to do, and then I still don't get a nap. But that's beside the point. The idea is, whatever it takes today, spend some time and say, okay, God, who do I need to forgive? What do I need to be freed from? And how can I live in that forgiveness?

So today, God wants to heal you and he wants to bring you freedom.