In nineteen sixty six, Michael Kahn, a clinical psychology student at Harvard University, did what has now become a very well-known and famous study. He posed as a medical student and offered college Harvard undergrad students twenty dollars to take their blood pressure as a medical student, twenty dollars back in nineteen sixty six was actual money back then. These people agreed. And while he was taking their blood pressure, posing as a medical student, he would insult them, call them ugly, make fun of their moms, etc. afterwards he would leave and for half of the students, the experiment was over. For the other half, the supervisor would come in and ask them to rate the bedside manner of the person who was here before you who took your blood pressure. Because it's important to us as medical students to understand that thing. And of course, he got, you know, zero stars. It was before Yelp, but zero stars. That wasn't the experiment, though. Three months later, they regathered those students for round two. Only this time it was a different person taking their blood pressure. And as part of the taking the blood pressure, they would be asked questions like, what was your experience like last time? How did that guy do three months ago? And this was a surprising finding of the study for those people that complained three months ago, they had the chance to talk to the supervisor. They got angry all over again. Their blood pressure would spike. They would start sweating. Their face would get red. They would become visibly angry. Recalling how they were treated last time, for those that did not speak to the supervisor, they would say things like, oh yeah, that guy was kind of weird and left it at that. They weren't experiencing anger. They weren't exaggerating what happened? They just thought it was weird, almost dismissive. And this was the case universally through his experiment. There's a lesson in that that the researcher, uh, took away from, which is when you complain about something, you get angrier about it. The article he wrote goes on to describe the need for self-justification. Once you complain about something, you're committed to that course of action, so you have to defend yourself. The people went away, perhaps feeling guilty about ruining that medical student's career, although he obviously deserved it. They felt guilty about it, so they felt the need to make themselves more confident. That guy was mean. He deserved what I said about him and in the case of the study, he actually did. But the other interesting thing is that over the course of the months, what the guy said supposedly got greater and greater and greater in the retelling of it. There's a warning in that for us, when you get angry about something, you begin to distort it. You begin to present it differently than it really happened. When you complain about something, it gets ingrained in your heart. Just the act of complaining makes you into an angry and an unforgiving person. The main point of the message this morning is the main point of the text in front of us, that in the kingdom of heaven, forgiven people forgive. In the kingdom of heaven, forgiven people forgive, and a refusal to forgive demonstrates a heart that is likely never grasped the gospel to begin with. Now, forgiveness is most certainly a virtue that is overlooked and undervalued in our world's. Forgiveness is an attribute of of God. In some sense, he is a forgiving God. Now God never sins against himself, and so forgiveness is an expression of God as he creates the world. As he creates the world, he enters into a relationship. He enters into an a state of being with people that he created. It follows, then, that God is going to be and show himself to be a forgiving God to those people. We sin against him. He doesn't sin against us. And so God requires, in a sense, forgiveness in order to maintain a relationship with us. Our actions against God condemn us and make us deserving of hell. God does not respond to them by sending all of us to hell, but he responds to our sin by making a way to have forgiveness. He kills the animals to cover Adam and Eve in their sin. He develops a sacrificial system so that atonement can demonstrate that the wages of sin is death, and yet God still forgives. God through forgiving demonstrates that he can be both just and the justifier. He is righteous in how he forgives, because he pours out the penalty of sin on someone else. And so God forgives because sin is paid for in Christ. But the notion of forgiveness tears at the very fabric of our modern society. Our society elevates self, not forgiveness. Whole books have been written on how our society through. You can blame social media. You can blame politics. You can blame your parents for all I care. But the point is that our society has gotten overly narcissistic and self-centered. Because of that, we do not value forgiveness anymore. Our society values pride. It's almost a common statement that everybody accepts in our society. People say things like, oh, you know, I'm a forgiving person, but not if you mess with me in my family. Like that's a line too far. It's my job to defend me and my family. There's that attitude that our society accepts as true and almost virtuous. Because of that, it's a sign of weakness to say I forgive someone for messing with me in my family. Pride in the human heart pushes self forward and minimizes forgiveness. Our world tells people that they're justified in being angry with others. Anger and self-righteousness makes you blind to your own sin, especially as you try to justify it. You get angry at the person who insulted you. You get angry at somebody who's mean to you, who lies about you, who wrongs you in some way. You get angry at them, and just by virtue of getting angry at them, you start to ingrain their sin against you in your own heart even more. You start telling other people how wronged you were. And of course, in the telling of it, you get further and further from the truth, don't you? You would say, I'm not going to gossip about what that person did to me. I'm not going to tell anyone other than my twenty prayer partners. Like, they just need to know how my husband wronged me. Like they need to know so they can pray for me and know what I'm going through. Then you tell one of them, then you call the second one. Of course, this is for prayer. You haven't had time to pray because you're calling twenty people in a row. By the time you're telling the story to the third person, you've gotten so far away from what actually happens, I doubt either you or your spouse would recognize the truth of it. And as the weeks and months go by, you get more and more ingrained in how wrong you were. You're justifying yourself more and more. You get further and further from the truth, which means you're getting further and further from being like God. You're more and more like the devil as you withhold forgiveness, as you get angry, as you distort the truth. That's what the devil does. God doesn't distort the truth. He exposes. He doesn't foster anger, but he offers forgiveness. It's often said that you're never more like the devil when you get angry at someone, or when you lie about somebody. And you're never more like God than when you forgive someone who wronged you. As people dig into their own grievances, they become cold, sad, bitter, and self-righteous. In that sense, anger is like a prison that you find yourself in. It's a prison of your own making. You almost prefer your life in your prison of anger than you would back in restored relationships. This is very common in marriage scenarios where a spouse is wronged their spouse through lying or gossiping or slander or anger, belittling or whatever, making the home life miserable. There might be distance or separation then. And then the spouse who is wrong might come back and ask for forgiveness and say, I'm sorry. I was wrong to do that. How often it is that the spouse who initially was wronged withholds forgiveness and says, no, I can't forgive you because it hurt so much. I can't forgive you because of how much harm you, cause I could never forgive you. I could never go back to our life together. I can't forgive you for what you've done. The fact that you even ask for forgiveness shows that you don't appreciate what you've done. It's a very common response. Refusal to forgive puts that person in, as I said, a prison of their own making. And they become cold and they become bitter, and they become needing to justify their actions to anyone who will listen. Of course, I wouldn't forgive him. Don't you know what he did? And again, the story gets rehearsed and recycled and magnified, and also further and further from what actually happened. It's not a happy life to be the unforgiving person. You feel compelled at every corner to justify your lack of forgiveness, to justify your anger, to make sure everybody who knows you knows how right you really are. It's cold and Pilgrim's Progress, Pilgrim, if you recall, got fell into Doubting Castle and was put in prison there. He almost died of starvation in Doubting Castle. There's not a lot of food there. He was surrounded by bones of others who had died of doubt as well. And as Pilgrim neared death, do you remember how he escaped? He discovered in his pocket the key to the door that had been there the whole time. That's the image of forgiveness, isn't it? That the Lord has a better way for you to live than anger, forgiving those who have sinned against you. Refusal to do that ends up poisoning your family. I mean, think of how many families you know, where the kids won't talk to the parents because of how they voted, or the parents won't talk to the kids because of how they voted. It seems silly and trivial until it gets magnified, exaggerated, and your life becomes one of anger, where any communication within your own family is divisive and explosive. You know you doomscroll on social media before you go to bed looking at everything that's wrong with the world and with all those idiots and the other side of the political aisle. And you go to bed so angry you can't sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night and said, help yourself, go to sleep. You pick up your phone again and go scrolling more, seeing all those wrong people. And of course, you're twisting reality. Everybody who's on the other side of you. All their mistakes are exaggerated and magnified and evidence that they are the devil incarnate. And everybody who's on your side, all their mistakes are minimized. And then you get angry at everybody else who doesn't see it the way you do. Your wife tells you, why are you so angry all of a sudden? And you say, I'm not angry. Shut up. It just makes your life so toxic. So toxic. There's a better way, of course. The way that's laid out in Matthew eighteen, which is that of forgiveness. Now, forgiveness is not foreign to the context here. I've been trying to make the case for a couple months now, that forgiveness is what is being argued for in Matthew eighteen. It begins with Jesus putting forward who the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is and grabbing a toddler. And of course, the toddler represents humility here. And you know, if you know a toddler, you don't think of humility. But toddlers know their place. They don't confuse themselves with adults. That's the point. But toddlers are also exceptionally forgiving, aren't they? They get in a fight, they pull each other's hairs, poke each other's eyes, and the parents say, stop it. Say you're sorry. And they cry. And they hug each other and they're best friends right away. Right away they're best friends. They'll fight again in five minutes, of course, and they'll forgive each other again. What a wonderful picture. Well, that goes from there to if you cause a weak believer to sin, you deserve God's judgment from there to the weak believer who stuck in sin. The Shepherd goes to get them from there. You know somebody who sins against you. You have to go get them, go find them, rescue them from their sin, confront them in their sin if they repent. Great. You've rescued that weaker brother. You've rescued that sheep stuck in the mud. You've rescued your brother. If they don't repent, bring witnesses to the confrontation. If they don't repent, tell it to the church. The goal of this is that they would repent. But I'm telling you, I have seen. It's so easy as the church discipline process gets going. It's so easy for it to become more judicial than restorative, for it to become a process where a person wants to be proved to have been right all along, rather than a process that is targeting reconciliation and restoration. The very next account that we'll look at next week is about marriage. Jesus is bracketing this church discipline with children and marriage because he understands this is where this takes place. Most often it takes place in marriages. And if you want to think again, The kind of sin that somebody does against you first, you see, can love cover the sin. All right. Love's not covering it. It's hurting me. You confront the person, they don't repent. You bring witnesses, they don't repent. You tell it to the church. They don't repent. More often than not, that's going to be a marriage situation. Because every other situation you would repent. But follow Jesus's logic along here. Your spouse sins against you, gossips, slanders, undercuts, divides. The house is toxic because of their conduct. You confront them. They don't repent. Your friends confront them. They don't repent. You get the church involved. Okay, now the guy. The guy. Let's make it. The guy says, I repent, I repent. I'm sorry. Because of separation over the last few months, it's likely the the other spouse in this scenario is happier without that guy at home. Honestly. And they said, you may repent, but that doesn't mean I'm forgiving you. I'm actually happier without you here. The very fact you're asking for forgiveness shows me you don't understand what you did, that create this logical knot that there's no way out of. But let's pretend this person is godly and they say, okay, it's hard and it hurts, but I forgive you. And the relationship is restored. How many times is a person supposed to go through that? How many times? You know, when you first read in, Peter says, seven times. You think, oh, that's classic Peter. You know, he doesn't know what he's talking about. No. When you understand the kind of grief and wounding that takes place in these kind of scenarios, seven is a very generous number, isn't it? You would go through that hurt seven times. But Jesus says no, not seven times. Seventy times seven. The idea here is an infinite number of times. To demonstrate that he tells this parable in verse twenty three, the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. This is a classic parable like you see all throughout Matthew's Gospel. We've spent a lot of time with parables already. I won't rehash all of it, but the point is, it's a story about salvation. All the parables in Matthew's Gospels are exactly that. They're stories about salvation designed to teach Christians what life in the church will be like while blinding those outside of the church from their truth. That's why Jesus speaks in parables. The story is exactly like that. It demonstrates to you what life in the church is like, in a way that will not make sense to those who are not believers. They won't get this. So the king here obviously represents God, and Jesus makes that clear in verse twenty three, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a king. So the kingdom of heaven is compared to a king. You don't have to go to seminary to understand who the king of the kingdom of Heaven is. He wishes to settle accounts with his servants. The Greek word is doulos, his slaves. This king has slaves in the story here. Lots of slaves. Here's where. Here's why the ESV does those servants. Because in the American context, slaves didn't have positions of authority. Most of them did not are power. They wouldn't have the capacity to do what this narrative implies. the Greek world was very different, and the Greek world slaves had all kinds of authority and power. You could have slaves as doctors. Some places even had slaves as mayors or fire chiefs. There's examples of of that. There's some politicians could even be slaves. The idea is that your labor and your output is owned by somebody else. You're bringing your return to them, and then you'll likely step into their position when they die or when you hit a certain age. That was the normal custom. So here you have a king who has lots of slaves, and they're doing stuff. These slaves are going around doing things on behalf of the king, and one of them runs up debt. Probably lots of them ran up debt. Servants is plural. They're in verse twenty three, but the king is trying to bring all of his servants or slaves on board with him. He's forgiving them their debts for his own motivations. Well, as he's doing this in verse twenty four, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. Now that's the stunning part of the story. We don't use talents in our vernacular, but a talent is a thousand pounds of gold. It's a comical amount of money. A thousand pounds of gold. In the Old Testament, David built the whole temple for three thousand talents of gold, seven thousand talents of silver. He got that from all the nations around them that wanted to partner in the building of the temple. It's the single most expensive thing in Israel's history. And it was three thousand talents of gold. This servant here has run up a debt of ten thousand talents. The idea is that it's an infinite amount of money. It would miss the point to do the math, to tell you what it would be in American dollars today. However. If a talent of gold is a hundred pounds or one pound of gold, today is thirty six thousand dollars as of this morning. Ten thousand or one talent would then be three point six million. Ten thousand talents would be thirty six billion dollars. So this slave ran up a debt to the king of thirty six billion dollars. You see why it misses the point to actually do the math. The king entrusted the slave with some capacity to negotiate a treaty or whatever, and he comes back owing the entire gross domestic product of his country. That's a bad negotiating move right there. Where would you even start to pay that back? Where would you even start? He thinks he's going to get away with it, but then he's called in front of the master. Verse twenty five, he couldn't 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 average price of a slave during Jesus's lifetime in the Roman world was about a half of a talent, you know. So twenty grand or whatever in American dollars today, that's not going to help this guy. He would have to sell twenty thousand relatives into slavery to get out of debt. Twenty thousand. I mean, the idea is that it is an impossible situation that even saying I'll sell my kids into slavery doesn't help you. Saying garnish my wages a thousand dollars a paycheck is not going to help you. But he's begging. He doesn't want to go to prison. Verse twenty six, verse twenty five begs him, don't sell my wife. Don't sell my kids. I'll do something. Verse twenty six, he's imploring him, have patience with me and I'll pay you everything. Now that's ridiculous. That's letting you know this servant does not understand the mess that he's in. I remember when my kids were learning math at a younger age. One of them told me, you know, the little kid, you know, second grade math or whatever. They have to write thousands and millions and billions and trillions, all the zeros. That's what they're learning to put the commas and the numbers. And I remember one of my kids telling me I get confused between the trillions and the thousands because they both start with T. You may not know, go and negotiate my next new car purchase. That's the slave right here. He has thirty six billion dollars and he says, can you give me five days and I'll take care of this? Are you out of your mind? He doesn't understand the trouble he's in. He doesn't get it. But he begs the king. Verse twenty seven, out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. The king says, you know what? Because I'm merciful. Because you're begging me. I have pity on you. Sympathy. The same word, by the way, is used for Jesus with the. The blind man has pity on him. It's the same word again. This parable is not designed to be tricky for you if you're familiar with God and with Jesus, it's designed to be pretty obvious to those who know the Lord. The King says, because I have sympathy, pity, sorrow on you, I'm going to forgive you. Now you know from the passage we looked at last week that forgiveness is costly, that forgiveness requires payment. Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness of sins. To use our more modern political parlance. Do you understand? There's no such thing as free health care. Like the money comes from somewhere. When the king says, I'm absorbing thirty six billion dollars, where's that money coming from? It's from his own treasury. It's his own tax money. It's his own agenda. He is. He is absorbing the cost. It's not the debtors. It's not the other nations that are having their their debt forgiven. No, it's his nation that is paying the debt to others that this guy ran up. There is payment. It's just that the king is doing it out of his own treasury. What kindness. It's inexpressible. How generous this would be. I mean, if your bank contacted you and said we're forgiving your home mortgage, that would be the most extreme gift you could imagine. It would change the rest of your life. That's not even barely a percentage of what this guy experiences. It's incalculable how generous this king is. And here's where you have to get to. Does this guy understand how much he owes the king? If the answer is no, he's not going to understand the generosity he's received. If he has a small view of his debt, he has a small view of the king's generosity. If he confuses trillions and thousands here, he doesn't think much of the king's gift. But it's a remarkable kindness. He goes away forgiven. However, verse twenty eight, that same servant leaves. He finds one of his fellow slaves who owed him one hundred denarii. Seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, pay what you owe. this story very well known. It also suffers, though, from the same kind of misunderstanding that Peter's comment had earlier. Should we forgive him seven times? If you don't understand the dollar amount, you don't understand the gravity of what's happening. You think this guy's just being a fool? So it's helpful to know what one hundred Dinara is. Dinara is a day's wage for a day laborer. That's kind of how it's fixed. A talent is fixed in the price of gold. A denarius fixed is how much it costs you to hire a day laborer to spend the day doing your Leafs in Northern Virginia. Let's say two hundred and fifty bucks. Okay, two hundred and fifty bucks. How much does this slave owe? The other slave? That would be twenty five thousand dollars. That's what he owes him. So you missed the point of this? If you think, oh, this guy had a lot of money forgiven, and then somebody cut him off in traffic and he chokes him, or somebody called him ugly and he fights him. You think, oh, you're forgiven so much, you're not going to overlook the guy calling you ugly? That's not what this is. This is a slave that has sinned against the guy in a very serious way. Twenty five thousand dollars worth. It's not trivial. This is a scenario where the guy. How do you owe someone twenty five thousand dollars? I don't think I've ever been in debt. That kind of money to somebody, you know, in a personal relationship like this. But I've been in debt, smaller amounts, and I can think of examples, somebody who says, oh, I'm, I need this money for this surgery or whatever, and the insurance is going to pay it next month. It's just the surgery has to be now. And insurance money doesn't come in until next month. That's a very reasonable situation where you could imagine going, like, let's say, ten thousand dollars into debt to help somebody in your family out and they promise you up and down. Oh, the insurance is going to cover it. You know, here's a good deal on a car. Will you give me this money for the car? You know, I get my annual salary next month and I can cover it, but the car will be gone by then, so help me out. Now again. Very. There's lots of examples where you could imagine going, like ten thousand dollars in debt on something like this. This is even more extreme than that. It's twenty five thousand dollars. He promises he'll pay and you give him the money. Two months go by doesn't pay for months go by. He's like, oh, the insurance company lost the check in the mail. Six months go by twenty five thousand dollars. You're not just going to look the other way. It wouldn't be prudent for you to say, oh, you know what? I'm going to call this even. At some point, you have to tell your wife you lent your friend ten grand. Hopefully, that already happens. And I just. This becomes an issue. So this guy encounters a slave that owes him twenty five thousand bucks and fights him, chokes him, drags him off to jail. The guy's begging him in verse twenty nine, pleading with him, have patience with me. I'll pay you back. Verse thirty. He refused, threw him in prison until he should pay the debt. Now this is a possible example of where imprisonment would help. Maybe he will sell a family member to slavery that would cover it. Maybe he will take a thousand dollars a month for two years to get out of prison. Maybe that can happen. This is a scenario where throwing the guy in prison might actually produce payment, unlike the thirty six billion dollar claim earlier. This might work. But it's jarring, isn't it? The first man owed what he could never repay in ten lifetimes. The second man owes what could be paid with a payment plan. Honestly. The people watching this are astonished. Verse thirty one. The Fellowservants saw what took place. They were distressed. They went and reported it to the master. To the king what went down? So the guy gets ratted out. Everybody goes and tells the king. Now, what is so jarring about this? It's not the disparity. It's not even the guy's cruelty. That's not what's jarring. What's jarring about it is the guy's hypocrisy, his own self-righteousness. He does not consider himself to be the villain in the story. If you were to stop him while he's fighting and say, what are you doing? He would say, you don't understand. He's been telling me for two years he would pay me back. I can't afford a car. I'm supposed to buy a house next year. I can't have a down payment because this guy hasn't paid me back like you would justify yourself. He does not see that he is in the wrong. And listen, the main point of this story is the inability for us to see ourselves as the villain. This is Peter. This is every Christian. The shock isn't the cruelty of the story. It's the blindness in the story. We make out our own sins to be so little and we maximize the sins of others. Do you understand? This dude owed Thirty six billion dollars. Is the point a comical amount of money? I hope you see the parable revealing your own relationship to the Lord. Your sins against God are incalculable. You could not tally them up. God is an infinite person. No amount of time in hell will atone for your sins. This is why hell is eternal. One sin couldn't be paid for in hell, much less this kind of sin that we're talking about a lifetime of sins. This is why self-righteousness is so poisonous to the gospel. The person who says, you know, I'm honestly kind of a good person. I recognize I'm a Christian. I know we're all sinners. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, I believe that. That being said, I'm actually a pretty good person. They wouldn't articulate it quite like that, but they live and they communicate like that. that, you know, when all is said and done, I actually am pretty good to my wife, my family, and God's going to recognize that. He's going to know that generally speaking, I do a good job. I try my best. What more could God ask than me try my best? That kind of line that comes out of our mouths all the time. And you don't understand that kind of line condemns you. It doesn't liberate you. People think so small of their sins. This is why the concept of works righteous religion is comical when contrasted with the God of the Bible. The idea that your sins are so small that they could be confessed to somebody who would tell you, do these prayers or do these acts, and they can give you merit that offset your sin. What are you even talking about? You owe thirty six dollars billion. And somebody tells you set up some lemonade stands. What are you talking about? You're not getting the problem. The problem cannot be paid for by you trying really hard to be a good person for a few months, or a few years, or a few decades or a few lifetimes. That doesn't even come close to addressing the debt you owe God. So the idea that you could atone for your debt, or you could pay for your sin, or you could accumulate righteousness for yourself by doing this deed or that deed, or the other deed is like selling lemonade to pay off the national debt. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love he has for us in Christ Jesus, took our sins, our infinite debt, and cancelled them by nailing them to the cross of Christ, who himself is an infinite person and can pay an infinite debt. We make our sins to be so little and sins against us to be so much, but the truth is exactly on its head. This ungrateful, unforgiving steward did not see himself as the villain. And so Jesus says he's going to hell. He's the one who's grabbed. He yelled. The king yells at him. Verse thirty three, you should have had mercy on your fellow slave as I had on you. Verse thirty four in his anger the master delivered him to the jailer's anger. Here is God's anger. God's anger is righteous. Of course it's righteous. Nothing's happening. This unforgiving servant that is not just in verse thirty two. God calls him a wicked servant. In verse thirty four he says, you're going to jail until you can pay your debt, which of course would be forever. It's an eternal punishment, damnation for his sin. And unless the point is missed, Jesus says in verse thirty five, so my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. So Jesus says, if you don't forgive people who sin against you, you're on your way to hell also. This is not a new teaching. Matthew six, verse fifteen. Sermon on the Mount. If you don't forgive others their trespasses, neither will your father forgive you your trespasses. And I plead with you, do not confuse this. Do not flip the order of this, to say that by forgiving others I am forgiven. Not true at all. That's also comical. Again, put it back in the story and run it through that way. The guy as the king, thirty six billion dollars and somebody owes him twenty four thousand dollars. And so he forgives that guy the twenty four thousand dollars, and goes to the King and says, you can cancel my debt because I forgave that guy. His debt. That does not work. Of course not. You can't tell God overlook my sin because I overlooked that guy's sin against me. Who exactly do you think you are? That's offensive. So the idea that by forgiving others you get your sins forgiven is offensive to God and not what is taught here. What is taught here is the self-evident reality that if you understand your sin against God, you will be a forgiving person to other people. If you understand how much you've been forgiven, you will forgive others. We are the ten thousand talent debtor and the king does not cancel his debt arbitrarily. The king absorbs the debt in himself by giving it to his son. So when Jesus says, this is my body, this is my blood, what he's saying is this cup is the payment for your infinite sin. This bread represents the body of Christ who absorbed your payment, your debt. He absorbed it in himself. Communion represents the Christ pays our debt for us. So we in turn can forgive others who sinned in much smaller ways against us. Before you came here this morning, ask yourself who? This morning, forty five minutes ago. Do I have a hard time forgiving? Whose name is written in my ledger that owes me twenty five grand that I'm not willing to forgive. Then take a step back and ask yourself. Have you sinned against God more or less than that person sinned against you? It's a very basic question. Are you confused about the trillions in the thousands? Or do you understand it? If you're rehearsing some of the way somebody wronged you in your own head, let it go. If you're nursing somebody else's failures and sins against you, let them go. Bring that name to the cross and open up the door of your own anger. Not because the person didn't really wrong you. Of course not. Not because it didn't hurt you or offend you. Or of course not. But because the way you wronged and offended and hurt God is greater and he is forgiven us through Christ. Lord, we're thankful that forgiven people forgive. This table represents forgiveness opened up before us. Forgiveness at the cross. We're thankful that Jesus came. Spread his arms wide to forgive us of our sins through his own death and resurrection. How wonderful is the death of Christ in our behalf. We give you thanks for it in Jesus name. Amen. And now for parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, DC, please go to TMZ.com. Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C. area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now, may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly. Serve the Lord faithfully and share the gospel boldly.