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Chapter 19, we'll begin reading
at verse 24. No, excuse me, we're going to
begin reading at verse 18, right in the middle of verse 18. Now
Shimei, the son of Gerah, fell down before the king when he
had crossed the Jordan. Then he said to the king, do
not let my lord impute iniquity to me, or remember what wrong
your servant did on the day that my lord the king left Jerusalem,
that the king should take it to heart. for I, your servant,
know that I have sinned. Therefore, here I am, the first
to come today of all the house of Joseph to go down to meet
my Lord, the King. But Abishai, the son of Zeruiah,
answered and said, shall not Shimei be put to death for this,
because he cursed the Lord's anointed? And David said, what
have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah, that you should be
adversaries to me today? Shall any man be put to death
today in Israel? For do I not know that today
I am king over Israel? Therefore the king said to Shimei,
you shall not die. And the king swore to him. Father,
we thank you for your word, and it is our desire to conform our
lives to it. It is our desire to grow in sanctification,
and so we come into agreement with Jesus' prayer. Sanctify
them through your truth. Your word is truth. Father, we
want to be a sanctified people, holy, living our lives entirely
to you. So we pray for your anointing
during this time, both for the preaching and for the hearing
of your word. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, last week we got
kind of a big picture of reconciliation, and today we're going to be looking
at this small snapshot of how difficult that reconciliation
can sometimes be. It would have been extremely
hard for Shimei to engage in this repentance, and it would
have been extremely hard for David to grant this forgiveness. In fact, apart from God's grace,
it's impossible to have genuine repentance and genuine forgiveness. This is why Acts 11, verse 18
says that unless God, by His grace, grants people repentance,
they will never come to faith. They will never get saved. They
can produce a counterfeit repentance like Judas did, but not a genuine
repentance that comes from heaven. And it's not just unbelievers.
2 Timothy 2 verse 25 says that God must grant repentance to
Christians before they will turn back from their backsliding.
I mean, it's all of grace. Only His grace can produce it.
And so, If there are people here who need help on the repentance
side, or if you're those who need help on the side of granting
forgiveness to those who have engaged in repentance, this is
a passage where we need to call out to God and say, Lord, We
are totally dependent upon you. We need you to grant repentance. I would like to see our church
engage in a day of fasting and prayer for Josiah and for some
of the other young people over the past years that have kind
of fallen away. and just ask God for his mercies,
that he would grant repentance. It's not something we can produce
in our own flesh. It's something that comes from
the throne of God. Now, the same is true of the giving of forgiveness
to those who have repented. It's a work of God's grace. So
again, no matter which side of the coin you're on, whether it's
asking for forgiveness or whether it's granting for forgiveness,
it's my prayer that as we look at the scriptures this morning,
it would cause your hearts to yearn for a deeper work of God's
grace within you. Now, let's look first at what
made Shimei's repentance a difficult thing to do. And to see that,
let's turn back again to 2 Samuel chapter 16. And I'm just going
to highlight a few things, but we're going to begin reading
at verse 5. Now when King David came to Bahurin,
there was a man from the family of the house of Saul whose name
was Shimei, the son of Gerah, coming from there. He came out
cursing continuously as he came. And he threw stones at David
and at all the servants of King David, and all the people and
all the mighty men were on his right hand and on his left. Also
Shimei said thus when he cursed, come out, come out, you bloodthirsty
man, you rogue. The Lord has brought upon you
all the blood of the house of Saul in whose place you have
reigned, and the Lord has delivered the kingdom into the hand of
Absalom, your son. So now you are caught in your
own evil because you are a bloodthirsty man. Then Abishai, the son of
Zeruiah, said to the king, why should this dead dog curse my
lord the king? Please let me go over and take
off his head. But the king said, What have
I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah? So let him curse because
the Lord has said to him, curse David, who then shall say, why
have you done so? And David said to Abishai and
all his servants, see how my son who came from my own body
seeks my life. How much more now may this Benjamite,
let him alone, let him curse for the look. So the Lord has
ordered him. It may be that the Lord will look on my affliction
and that the Lord will repay me with good for His cursing
this day. And as David and his men went
along the road, Shimei went along the hillside opposite him and
cursed as he went, threw stones at him and kicked up dust. Now
the king and all the people who were with him became weary, so
they refreshed themselves there." Now from that brief reading,
we can see at least some reasons why it would have been very hard
for Shimei to repent. The first is that from Shimei's
perspective, David deserved his wrath, deserved these words of
anger, deserved to be deposed. And we saw, actually, it is so.
It is true that he did deserve that. David engaged in murder.
David deserved to be deposed. And yet we saw that Shimei had
false accusations mixed in with true accusations, and the way
he went about this was certainly not right. But it is hard to
confess your own sins when you can see the other person's sins
so much more clearly than you can see your own. Secondly, it
is shameful to confess your own sins if they are flagrant. Shimei
was so angry at this point that he was doing things that were
kind of irrational. And I'm sure when he looked back
on that occasion, he was kind of cringing. It was something
that maybe mortified him. Third, it's hard to confess your
sins when you have bitterness and anger, and he had plenty
of both. Now, the bitterness and anger
to a large degree was based actually on misinformation about David.
He wasn't cursing him because of the murder of Uriah. He was
cursing him because he thought that David had killed Saul, which
he had not done. But in any case, it caused him
to be extremely bitter against David. The fourth, pride keeps
many people from a full-hearted confession of sin. And yet, interestingly,
Shimei did not allow any of those things to keep him from repenting.
In fact, if you turn back to chapter 19 and verse 16, You'll see that he came as quickly
as he could. And Shimei, the son of Gerah,
a Benjamite, who was from Behurim, hurried and came down with the
men of Judah to meet King David. He hurried. There are so many
things that can keep us from reprinting, and procrastination
because of fear can be one of those. Some time ago, I told
you about how I spent two long, miserable years fighting the
Holy Spirit. prompting me to confess two sins
that I had engaged in in high school. One was stealing potatoes
when I was hungry and the other one was cheating on a math exam.
And I was just so embarrassed and thinking I'd have to repeat
that grade that I just could not do it. I said, Lord, I've
confessed to you. And anyway, two whole long years and finally
the Holy Spirit, he just wiped away every rationalization. I
had a hundred rationalizations as to why I didn't need to do
this. But once I repented and I wrote letters and did restitution,
I looked at it and I wondered, why did I hold off for so long? It didn't make any sense. And
from that moment on, I resolved, I'm going to be as quick as I
can possibly be any time that I sin. I don't want to wait.
This misery is definitely not worth it. And yet, there are
so many things that can make it hard. Another thing that made
this a difficult confession was that it was made publicly, and
he even brought a thousand of his own friends to witness this
confession. This is really remarkable. Look
at verse 17. There were a thousand men of Benjamin with him. and
Ziba the servant of the house of Saul, and his 15 sons and
his 20 servants with him, and they went over the Jordan before
the king." It's much more humiliating to repent publicly than it is
to repent one-on-one. The last phrase of verse 17 indicates
he was willing to endure inconvenience. He swam over the river to the
east side of the Jordan to meet David and repent rather than
waiting for David to come over to him. In fact, when we get
down to verse 19, we're going to be seeing he wanted to be
the first one there. If you have to be prodded and
coaxed into confessing your sins, you really need to ask God for
grace to do so quickly and eagerly. There's an old proverb from my
grandma's generation that says, many people use mighty thin thread
when mending their ways. Many people use mighty thin thread
when mending their ways. In other words, they do just
enough mending to get by, but their repentance is not thorough.
What we're seeing here is a much more thorough repentance than
most people go through. The next thing that made this
a tough repentance was that Shimei was willing to face huge risk
when repenting. The second part of verse 18 says,
now, Shimei the son of Gerah fell down before the king when
he had crossed the Jordan. He wasn't crying out from the
west side of the Jordan, hoping David would forgive him, but
still safe from any arrows and spears and any sword. No, he
swam across and he fell down at the feet of King David, knowing
full well that he could be speared, he could be having his head cut
off. And there was a huge risk in
confessing his sins. Does confessing our sin to other
people sometimes come back to bite us? Yes, it does. Sometimes it does. We think,
wow, is that really worth it? Does confession of sin cause
other people that we've confessed to to sometimes take advantage
of us and to abuse us? Yes, it sometimes does. But you
know, having the favor of God upon us is well worth that risk. And the risks we face, maybe
shame or rejection or misunderstanding, or maybe the risk that we've
confessed our part of the sin and the other person puts the
whole blame on us then, so he confessed, he's at error. And
we know full well they've got 60% of the problem on their side
too. So there's a lot of risks that
can be involved. But when God's grace is at work
in our hearts, we are more concerned with being right with God than
we are with being safe with man. The next thing that made this
a tough confession was that it was self-abasing, not sin-minimizing
or self-justifying. And we know from chapter 16 that
he was a proud man and that he threw stones at David, that he
cursed him from afar, but here he prostrates his wet body on
the ground before David and he speaks with loathing of what
he had done. He hates what he had done. James
and Phyllis Olsdorf have worked for years dealing with domestic
abuse. where spouses are battered and
abused. And while they do deal with the need of the abused person
to forgive their batterers, they point out that nothing positive
can happen until the abuser has a repentance that does not justify
his or her actions in any way or minimize in any way the sin.
They say it starts when the batterer spiritually and psychologically
faces the awfulness of his actions. There must come that loathing
of oneself for one's sins as Ezekiel exhorts, then you will
remember your evil ways and wicked deeds and you will loathe yourselves
for your sins and detestable practices. Ezekiel 36 verse 31. The horrors of the past must
be named, not left vague and undefined. Here, sin and sickness
move from the abstract to the concrete. And most importantly,
the batterer takes responsibility for what he has done. And while
I don't agree with their psychological approach to this subject, I 100%
agree with their application of Ezekiel 36. And I just want
to read that again. It indicates that when God gives
genuine repentance, there will be self-loathing and self-abasing
rather than making ourselves look better than we really are.
To quote Ezekiel again, then you will remember your evil ways
and wicked deeds and you will loathe yourselves for your sins
and detestable practices. Ezekiel 36 verse 31. That's so
contrary to the self-esteem movement where we've got to build ourselves
up. No. Repentance makes us loathe ourselves and find our esteem
in Christ, our position in Christ, our security in Christ, our righteousness
in Christ, okay? Point G highlights the remarkable
change in his speech that can be seen in the first part of
verse 19. Then he said to the king, do not let my Lord impute
iniquity to me. He calls him Lord. Now, this
is strikingly different from the kind of speech that he had
in chapter 16. There he was arrogant, unsubmissive,
refusing to recognize him as king, was rebellious, quarrelsome. He was abusive. I mean, he was
so angry. He didn't care if he got killed
from the things that he was saying to David. He was taking that
risk that, you know, Abishai and Joab would come and whack
his head off. He didn't care. He was so angry that he spoke
utterly disrespectfully of David. But here he shows humility and
he is willing to submit to whatever the king decides to do. He recognizes
the king could have his head. So there's no trace of arrogance
or blaming in his voice. He takes the blame for what he
has done. His speech is humble. And I want you to also notice
this is not simply an apology. Apologies are a thin substitute
for genuine repentance. When you say, I apologize, or
when you say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry is an okay thing to say
as far as it goes, because I'm sorry means I feel bad. Well,
you should feel bad when you have sinned, but that does not
go far enough. There's no reconciliation. There's
no asking of the other person to promise anything to you. You're still holding the ball
of your guilt in your hands, and it's burning your hands,
okay? So apologies typically bypass the need for grace. Biblical
repentance not only describes this inaccurately, but it asks
for forgiveness from the offended party, and forgiveness means
that the offended party will no longer hold that guilt over
your head and will relinquish their resentment against you.
Those two things, okay? There's always those two parts,
remittal of guilt, relinquishing of resentment. So look at verse
19 and you'll see both. Then he said to the king, do
not let my lord impute iniquity to me. Okay, that would be holding
him guilty, bringing charges against him, charging his guilt
against him. He goes on, remember what wrong
your servant did on the day that my lord the king left Jerusalem,
that the king should take it to heart. Now that part deals
with holding a grudge in his heart against against Shimei. And when we ask for forgiveness,
we are asking that the guiltiness be no longer held against us
and that the offended party no longer harbor their bad feelings
against us. Now already you're seeing that
just defining the repentance, you see, it's making the forgiveness
itself a very difficult thing. But it also makes it a very difficult
confession because you're confessing, yes, I am guilty. and that it's
caused David great pain. I've always found it easier to
say, I'm sorry. than to say, I've sinned against
you. That was a wicked thing. I should
not have done that. Here's what I should have done.
Please forgive me. Much harder to say the latter.
And that brings us to point I. Shimei calls sin, sin. He does not minimize it. He does
not blame his actions on his emotions, on his health, on having
a bad hair day or anything else. And the first part of verse 20,
he says, for I, your servant, know I have sinned. The hardest
words to come out of any person's mouth are the three words, I
have sinned. Pride does not like that. It
does not like to admit unless we can share the blame. I've
sinned, but I wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for your
jerkiness. We've always got to extend something
to the other. But just to say, I have sinned. Wow, those are hard words to
say. And this is actually, this acknowledgement
of our sins is what separates the sheep from the goats and
the wheat from the tares within the church. And I would like
you to turn with me to Luke chapter 18 to see a vivid, vivid illustration
that Jesus uses to speak about this. Luke 18 and beginning to
read at verse nine. And he spoke this parable to
some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and
despised others. This is the natural state of
the human heart to think well of ourselves and to think poorly
of others. When we are graceless, we are
blind to all but the most obvious sins that are within us, But
we can see the sins of others with 20-20 vision. Wow, it's
so clear that those other people are sinners. Grace always reverses
that. Now, this is going to seem like
a mystery to you, but grace always reverses that process. The more
grace we have, the more we see our own sins as being greater
than the sins of others. God's grace was so at work near
the end of Paul's life that he called himself, present tense,
the chief of sinners. How in the world could he say
that? He was an incredibly godly man, a self-sacrificing man,
a man totally devoted to the Lord, but he saw himself as the
chief of sinners. Why? It was because the closer he
got to the spotlight of God's holiness, the more wretched his
heart appeared. And by the way, by inspiration,
Paul says, this ought to be the testimony of every Christian.
Let me read that verse for you. He said, this is a faithful saying
and worthy of all acceptance. In other words, every one of
you ought to accept the saying that Jesus Christ came into the
world to save sinners of whom I am chief. Every one of us ought
to be able to say that whole sentence that I just said there,
that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom
I am chief. If you spend more time thinking
about the sins of others than you do of your own sins, it's
an evidence that God's grace is not very much at work in your
life. It is graceless people who trust
in themselves that they are righteous and despise others. It is graceless
people who see others as being the chief of sinners. You read
through the Puritan literature and you will see this was the
universal viewpoint of the Puritans despite the fact that from my
perspective that was probably one of the godliest generations
that has existed on planet Earth, and yet throughout their writings,
they saw themselves as incredibly sinful before the Lord. They
saw themselves as the chief of sinners. The closer they got
to God's light, the more filthy they saw their hearts. Anyway,
continuing to read, Luke 18, verse 10, two men went up to
the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. God, I thank
you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers,
or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes
of all that I possess. I think you get the idea. There
is no point in even arguing with this person about his sins, because
he doesn't see his sins. And even if you successfully
point out this person's sins, like Jesus did, you're far more
likely to be crucified than you are for this person to actually
repent of his sins and say, yes, I am a dirty, rotten sinner.
Such Pharisees will hit the roof when you point out their sins.
Why? Because repentance is a work
of grace. And you can see God's grace at
work in this tax collector here because he agrees with the Pharisee's
assessment of him. You know, the Pharisee's looking
down on him and it doesn't bother him at all because he's looking
down on himself. He sees himself as being the
chief of sinners. Verses 13 through 14. And the
tax collector standing afar off would not so much as raise his
eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful
to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down
to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone
who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will
be exalted. So can you see how genuine repentance
really is a difficult thing? It is not hard to to to fake
repentance, to have the remorse that Judas did. Judas felt bad
because no one thought well of him anymore. Of course he's going
to have remorse. Pride is going to guarantee he
will have remorse. That's not hard, but it's exceedingly
hard to have genuine repentance. Now, the last characteristic
of genuine repentance that we see in Shimei is that he doesn't
confess his sins and then walk away. He wants reconciliation,
and we see that in the rest of verse 20. for I your servant
know that I have sinned therefore here I am the first to come today
of all the house of Joseph to go down to meet my Lord the King."
He initiates reconciliation. He's not being drug into this.
Now he could have escaped from Israel just like David did. He
didn't have to come to David. There are a number of countries
around there that would have given him asylum and said, yeah, we'd
love to give any Israelite asylum. They didn't like Israel. So that
would have been an easy thing for him to do. But Shimei, for
some strange reason, wants reconciliation even at great personal risk.
Now you might question his sincerity in that he came after David had
won the war rather than before, but he came. That's the whole
point. And in that, he is at least a picture of grace, whatever
else you might think of his person. If there's one thing that the
Sermon on the Mount teaches us very, very clearly is it's that
God asks us to do difficult things. Well, actually, it asks us to
do impossible things apart from God's grace. And so this passage
shows us difficult repentance. It shows us difficult forgiveness. But before we look at the difficult
forgiveness of David, I want us to look at the very easy response
of Shimei that sandwiched in between those two. Verse 21, but Abishai the son
of Zeruiah answered and said, shall not Shimei be put to death
for this because he cursed the Lord's anointed? No forgiveness
there. There's no acknowledgement of
Shimei's repentance. But I would say that this angry
response is perfectly understandable. Perfectly understandable. It
just doesn't seem right to give a slime ball like Shimei, who's
thrown stones at them, who has cursed them, who has kicked them
when they are down. I mean, he's the lowest of the
low. Just let him off the hook because he's asked for forgiveness.
It just doesn't seem right. If you're not familiar with grace,
it seems like you ought not to let an offense like this go so
easily. Surely he's got to pay in some
way. The natural thing is to allow anger to fester rather
than casting it off as an enemy. The natural thing is to nurse
our grudges, okay, to brood over our grudges, to pet them rather
than blowing them up. and burying them. The natural
thing to do is to want mercy for ourselves and to want justice
with others. The only way that Joab and Abishai
were willing to forgive was when they were forced to forgive,
but that's not really genuine forgiveness, is it? I want to
read you a story that shows this kind of horizontal forgiveness
that results from peer pressure that's really not the God-directed
real thing. I read a story from John Wesley,
I think perfectly illustrates this. He was one of the evangelists
in the first great awakening. And when Wesley was traveling
by ship to America, he heard a noise. in the cabin of General
Oglethorpe, who was the governor of Georgia. And so he stepped
into the room to inquire, and there on the floor sat Grimaldi,
the governor's servant, skunk drunk. I mean, he had consumed
every bottle of the governor's favorite wine, and it was extremely
expensive wine. And when the governor came in,
he was furious. And he shouted at the top of
his lungs, I will be avenged. And he ordered the man to be
tied up hand and foot, and he was going to be flogged, maybe
even flogged to death, who knows, because the guy was so angry.
And on passing Wesley, he must have thought he needed to explain
himself to Wesley. He said, for you know, Mr. Wesley,
I never forgive. Well, Wesley simply gave the
quiet reply, in that case, sir, I hope you never sin. And that's
all he said, but that so threw the governor for a loop. He was
just confounded for a few months. He didn't know what to say. He
just stood there. And after a while, he reached
into his pocket, got the ring of keys, threw it to Grimaldi
and said, there, villain, take my keys and behave better in
the future. Now, at least he forgave, but
it was really due to peer pressure. Now my point with Abishai is
that this response is the easy one. It takes no grace whatsoever
to appeal to the law of God and beat people over the head with
it. It takes no grace whatsoever for Governor Oglethorpe to want
vengeance. That's the easy way. That's the
fleshly way. The second reason why this was
an easy response can be seen in two phrases. In verse 21,
the author makes clear that God does not approve of what Abishai
is saying when he uses the code phrase, Abishai, the son of Zeruiah. And David did not approve of
what Abishai was saying with the same phrase of both Abishai
and Joab, what have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah, in
verse 21. And when we did a brief biography of Zeruiah, we saw
that she was the sister of David, the mother of Joab and Abishai,
so they were nephews to David. And she had the reputation of
being sharp with her mouth, angry, vindictive, ready to take people's
heads off, very hard to get along with. And used here, it indicates
that just like these two had learned their other bad habits
from their mother, they had learned this inability to forgive from
their mother as well. That made it the easy thing to
do is the learned response. It was just a habit. OK, grace
takes us out of the easy into the difficult and makes the difficult
eventually become the new easy normal habit. But initially,
it feels like murder trying to overcome those old bad habits.
That's why Paul talks in Romans 7, which is describing a believer.
How in the world am I going to overcome these things that I
hate? I keep wanting, I keep doing them. Why? Because they're
habits. They're just part of our system. We do it without
even thinking, but we can conquer those old habits and put on new
habits, that's Romans 8, to become just as easy as the old sinful
habits used to be. So there's hope. You can move
on any given sin from Romans 7 to Romans 8. The third thing
that made Abishai's response the easy response is that Shimei
really deserved Abishai's wrath and anger. The law of God did
say that no one should curse the king, Now the law didn't
give that penalty. There was no penalty actually
for it. Abishai just added that penalty on, but Shimei clearly
deserved Abishai's wrath. But again, God does not call
us to give people what they deserve when they ask for forgiveness.
That's the easy way. That's the natural way. That's
the graceless way. Chuck Swindoll once said, the
proud have a hard time forgiving. Those who have never recognized
their own failures have a tough time tolerating, understanding,
and forgiving the failures of others. And it is so true. When
people deserve a different response than forgiveness and reconciliation,
which is really all of us, right? It takes grace to forgive. It's
also true that those who are not daily experiencing God's
grace in their lives have no grace to give to others. It doesn't
take grace to appeal to God's law in verse 21. I mean, even
Satan can quote scripture. It doesn't take any grace whatsoever
to use the scripture. Why is it that people who can
dish it out, you know what I mean, to others, have the thinnest
skin when other people dish it out to them? They cannot respond
graciously. I've just found this to be almost
a universal phenomenon. Maybe it's not universal, but
it seems to be the rule that the people who really dish it
out and are harsh with others, if you give even the slightest
criticism of them, they just blow up. Why do they blow up?
Well, they blow up because they do not see themselves as the
chief of sinners. It is a superficial, band-aid-level
grace that they have tasted, not a grace that plows deep beneath
the soil of their lives. When David tells these brothers,
what have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah, that you should
be adversaries to me today? They don't get it. Okay, they
think they're doing the biblical thing. They think they're defending
David. They're adversaries. What are you talking about? We're
doing this because we're protecting you, David. We like you, David.
We're your friends. What are you talking about? We're
adversaries. But you see, David's heart desires and their heart
desires were totally different. They're on different orbits,
and their bitterness is trying to infect David. David's trying
hard to do the right thing. What Abishai's suggesting sure
seems tempting to David. He feels like doing exactly what
Abishai's doing. And so his heart desire is being
resisted by Abishai. That's what he's talking about.
They're being adversaries to him today. He's in effect saying,
why do you always make it difficult for me to do the right thing?
Now that same phrase indicates that Abishai was being shut off
from more grace from God. Jesus was quite clear that those
who are not forgiving will not be forgiven. One of the scariest
parables that Jesus gives to describe Christians who refuse
to forgive is in Matthew chapter 18. I'd like you to turn there
with me because I'd like you to see this with your own eyes. This is the parable of the servant,
the unforgiving servant, He's asked for forgiveness of his
master for having been forgiven for a million dollars, let's
say, worth of debt. And the master graciously forgave
him of that million dollars worth of debt. Then he goes and he
finds a fellow servant who owes him a few hundred bucks, still
a lot of money, but it's a few hundred bucks, and grabs him
by the neck and he says, pay me. And the guy says, please
forgive me, help me. And he says, no, I'm not going
to. He throws him into jail. And so he really is the chief
of sinners, a million dollars worth of sin, but he sees the
hundred dollars worth of sin guy as being the chief of sinners.
Okay, that's the dynamic that's going on. And Jesus ends the
parable by describing how miserable such a Christian will be. He
has opened himself up to demonic tormentors. And I'm just going
to look at the conclusion beginning at verse 34. and his master was angry and
delivered him to the torturers or tormentors until he should
pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly father also will
do to you if each of you from his heart does not forgive his
brother his trespasses here." He's talking to Christians about
Christians here and he indicates that when we are unforgiving
The Father is going to give us over to tormentors. Now, some
people think that it's demons that they're being given over.
Others think it's your inward conscious, the inward torment. Some people think it's providences.
I personally take it that the Father allows demons to have
legal ground in your lives to do whatever they want to do.
You will not successfully be able to resist them as long as
you have an unforgiving heart. And whatever the way you take
it, it's clear they're going to be miserable if they're unforgiving.
It's sad to me when people do not realize how serious failure
to forgive really is. And people say, man, you would
be more sympathetic if you had to live with the person that
I live with. Now, just keep in mind, this parable was an answer
to Christ's question Lord, how often shall my brother sin against
me and I forgive him? Up to seven times? And Jesus
said to him, I do not say up to seven times, but up to 70
times seven. And then he gives the parable
of the million dollars worth of sin. And apart from grace,
people say, no, that's asking too much. There's no way I can
forgive that much to the other person. but that's how much God
forgave you. Robertson McWilkin says, the
sin of unforgiveness is a cancer that destroys relationships,
eats away at one's own psyche, and worst of all, shuts us off
from God's grace. And it really does shut us off
from God's grace. Jesus is quite clear that if
we are not willing to forgive, We will not be forgiven. He's
going to keep holding those things against us even though we are
sons and daughters. James is quite clear that God
resists the proud but gives more grace to the humble. And cutting
off that brother or that sister in life actually makes the torment
permanent. makes the torment permanent.
Dr. Paul Brandt told the story on his medical school administrator,
a man by the name of Mr. Barwick. The man had some kind
of a serious circulatory problem in his leg that gave him extreme
pain. He resisted getting amputation
But it was such agonizing pain day and night that finally he
asked the surgeons to go ahead and cut off his leg. But he made
a strange request to the surgeons. He said, when you cut my leg
off, would you hang on to it and pickle it, put it into a
jar? And he said this, I will install
it on my mantle shelf. Then I shall sit in my armchair.
I will taunt that leg. Ha, you can't hurt me anymore.
He was a strange fellow. But the weird thing about it
is after he had his leg amputated, he had phantom limb pain of the
worst degree. It was just the weirdest thing.
He thought he would get rid of his pain, but where his leg used
to be, it felt like there was pain and there was nothing. He
couldn't even touch it, but there was pain there. Phantom limb
pain. And that's the way it is when
we get rid of a brother because of bitterness. Bitterness ensures
that the pain will stay forever. And some Christians think, no
way, I'll do much better if I'm not around that person anymore.
But Jesus says otherwise in the last two verses of Matthew 18. In effect, you'll have that phantom
limb pain. And so my admonition to you from
the life of Abishai is, don't go the easy way. because it will
eventually become a very hard way. And Abishai and Joab certainly
discovered that. It was a hard way indeed. But let's look at David's difficult
forgiveness. He recognizes, first of all,
what lack of forgiveness does to you. And we've already looked
at that. David's remonstrance with Abishai shows that he recognizes
where bitterness and lack of forgiveness leads. He didn't
want any part with that. There's an old saying, he that
doth not forgive burns the bridge over which he himself must needs
pass. If you don't forgive, you're
burning the very bridge you're gonna be needing in the future.
So the first step is to recognize the dangers of lack of forgiveness,
and we've already dealt with that. Second, Shimei's words,
I have sinned, probably struck a chord with David and reminded
him of his serious sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah. After all,
Nathan had prophesied that exactly these events that he's just been
going through would result because of that sin. It was the bitter
fruits of that sin. He was thinking about it. In
fact, some of the Psalms written during this period showed that
God was impressing upon David's mind that he should not get angry. He should not fret, he should
not take revenge into his own hands, and he must forgive others
as God had forgiven him. He actually did a lot worse to
Bathsheba and Uriah than Shimei had done to him. When David had
just written Psalm 39 that week and said, deliver me from all
my transgressions, do not make me the reproach of the foolish,
he was not in a state of mind to withhold forgiveness from
others. He knew he needed it badly. When Psalm 141 shows David
thinking words that are much to the effect, there but for
the grace of God go I, he was willing to be much more sympathetic
with Shimei. When the same psalm says, let
the righteous strike me. It shall be a kindness and let
him rebuke me. It shall be as excellent oil.
Let my head not refuse it. He is in a humble state of mind
to learn from his afflictions and to be merciful rather than
vindictive. Now, let me hasten to say that David is not telling
Abishai to ignore sin. Far from it. Forgiveness is much
higher than that. Even pagans recognize that indifference
to sin is utterly different than forgiveness of sin. For example,
George Bernard Shaw once said, the worst sin toward our fellow
creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.
That's the essence of inhumanity. What Shimei had done was heinous. It was wicked. David was not
indifferent to the sin. Forgiveness never minimizes the
heinousness of sin. And so David has to resist the
wisdom of the world on two fronts. First of all, he has to resist
this idea that in order to forgive, we've got to lower the standards
of God's law and make sin not really that bad of a thing. No,
that slanders God's grace. But the other extreme slanders
grace as well. It's to want to take revenge
into our own hands, just like Abishai and Joab did. I don't
know where I got this quote, but someone once said, doing
an injury puts you below your enemy. Revenging one makes you
even with him. Forgiving him sets you above
him. Now Shimei is perfectly described
in the first part. Doing an injury sets you below
your enemy. In chapter 16, Wow, anybody who
saw the behavior Shimei was engaging, it was shaking his head at that
man. It reflected so poorly upon him. Abishai is described by the second
part, revenging one makes you even with him. Okay, so if Abishai
could do this, he would be even with the bad Shimei. That's not
a great compliment, is it? No, he was stooping to the level
of Abishai. It shows gracelessness, at least
on this particular point. And David is described by the
third part of that saying, forgiving him sets you above him. So David's forgiveness had to
resist the wisdom, the thinking of the world on those two points.
And I would say that too many Christians have imbibed Too much
psychology when it comes to thinking about repentance and forgiveness. And if you want a good book that
gives the biblical perspective, get J. Adams' book, From Forgiven
to Forgiving. The fourth thing that made David's
forgiveness difficult was that he gave his forgiveness before
he could see any fruits of repentance. David didn't say, if you prove
yourself over the course of the next year, I'll forgive you.
That's the easy way to do it. But how many times do we do exactly
that thing when people ask us for forgiveness? Forgiveness
is conditional. And I immediately know what comes
into your minds. Your minds are saying, yeah,
but if I forgive him unconditionally, what if he hurts me again, right?
That's exactly what goes through our minds. I can't forgive him
until he changes. Well, I want you to turn with
me this time to Luke chapter 17, And Jesus clearly, clearly, clearly
gives the answer here. Now this, what I'm gonna be reading
is in the middle of a chapter, four chapters actually, dealing
with forgiveness. And if you struggle in this area
of forgiveness, I would urge you to read Luke chapters 15
through 18. All of them deal with different
facets of forgiveness. But look at chapter 17, and let's
see here, beginning at verse one. Then he said to the disciples,
it is impossible that no offenses should come. Let's just stop
there. Christ wants you to forever get it out of your mind that
brothers and sisters will miraculously stop sinning against you after
you've forgiven them. He says it's impossible that
offenses will not come. You should be committed to the
forgiveness process knowing full well that you will likely be
hurt by that person again. And people immediately object.
That can't be. That's not taking sin very seriously. You must be an antinomian. You're
not taking seriously the law of God. But take a look at the
whole verse. Jesus takes both sides seriously.
Then he said to the disciples, it is impossible that no offenses
should come, but woe to him through whom they do come. It'd be better
for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown
into the sea than that he should offend one of these little ones.
So Jesus is saying that the sin that the other person has sinned
against you is serious. It should be taken seriously.
God is going to discipline that person. The church should discipline
that person. OK, we shouldn't ignore the sin. But he goes on
to say, it doesn't matter that it's serious. It's still no excuse
for your lack of forgiveness. That's what he is saying. Continuing
to read in verse three. Take heed to yourselves. Literally, that means watch out,
be on guard. Jesus knows what he's been saying
in these chapters is so radical that our flesh is going to rebel
against it. Our minds are going to rationalize.
We're gonna think of every excuse in the book as to why we, in
our particular circumstances, can ignore the advice that Jesus
is giving here. And he is saying, watch out,
be careful. Continuing to read. Take heed to yourselves. If your
brother sins against you, and that's a big if, If your brother
sins against you, do not confess sins that you have not committed
just to get reconciled. That's what some people do just
to create peace. Okay, they ask, I'm sorry, and
they confess to things that they hadn't done. The point that Jesus
is giving here is we need to take sin seriously. And if you're
confessing to sins that you did not commit, you are not taking
sin seriously. It actually slanders, it blasphemes
the process of grace. Take heed to yourselves, if your
brother sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive
him. Notice that he doesn't say, if
he shows the fruits of repentance for a given period of time, then
you can forgive him. No, it says, if he repents, forgive
him. But that also implies there is
no need for forgiveness if there is no repentance, right? No need for forgiveness if there's
no repentance. Now, our heart should be forgiving
and ready to forgive, but outwardly saying, I'm not going to hold
that against you if the person has not repented, you do need
to hold it against them. David could have treated Shimei
as an enemy if Shimei had not repented. It would have been
perfectly just. But he did repent. That's the
point. Continuing to read in verse 4, and if he sins against
you seven times in a day, wow. There's no time for the fruits
of repentance to be proved here. This is a pretty radical call
to forgiveness. Now keep in mind, he's not saying
you have to forgive a person if he's not repented. Repentance
is a commitment, a verbal commitment to turn around, to begin working
on this problem. But Jesus reminds us that there
can be failures initially, and people can fall down quite a
number of times in the early steps of recovery. So let's read
that again. And if he sins against you seven
times in a day and seven times in a day returns to you saying,
I repent, you shall forgive him. Did David do the right thing
in forgiving Shimei? There are some people who say
absolutely no. I believe he was bound by God's
grace to forgive Shimei. He did do the right thing. Had
he been abused by Shimei? Well, yeah, he had been abused.
Probably some of the rocks that Shimei had been throwing connected
with him. He probably still had the bruises on his body from
the abuse that he was getting from Shimei. And so it was a
radical forgiveness. And if Jesus wasn't calling for
a radical forgiveness, you would not have, verse 5. But Jesus
didn't say to forgive if he proves his repentance. It says, if seven
times in a day he returns to you saying, I repent, You shall
forgive him. Now the apostles are stunned.
They are flabbergasted. They just don't think this is
fair. Surely Christ cannot mean what he is saying. Verse five.
And the apostle said to the Lord, increase our faith. Sounds pretty
spiritual, doesn't it? Lord, that's a good thing. If
you would increase our faith, but I don't have the faith to
do that right now. Maybe in the future I can forgive
like that, but right now you gotta understand my situation
and my faith's pretty weak. I think I can be excused on this.
And Jesus is basically saying, no, I'm not gonna have any of
that. I don't care how immature your faith is and how much of
a newbie Christian you are, you can do what I am calling you
to do right now. Verse six. So the Lord said,
if you have faith as a mustard seed, That's pretty small, baby
like faith. If you have faith as a mustard
seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be pulled up by the roots
and be planted in the sea, and it would obey you. So it's not
the size of your faith, but whether you are exercising your faith.
If God commanded you right now to say, speak against that wall
and it throws down, doesn't matter how small your faith is, you
could do it. If he said to you, pluck up a mulberry tree or move
that mountain, just the exercise of the smallest faith, God's
power would come through. Now thankfully, and this is a
point that so many people miss, thankfully there is not a place
anywhere in the Bible where God commands every one of you to
pluck up mulberry trees or to move mountains. Can you imagine
what a topsy-turvy world this would be if If you said, OK,
the mountain's got to move over there, and I say the mountain's
going to move over there, and we've got all these mulberry trees
flashing everywhere, it would be a topsy-turvy world. God has
not commanded us to do that. That's not His point. His point
is, I'm commanding you to do something just as impossible,
to give radical forgiveness And if you have the smallest faith,
you can forgive because my power will come through to you. That's
what he is telling us. I have commanded you to forgive. And so your immature faith is
not a legitimate excuse. He next tackles the excuse that
I'm an emotional wreck. I can't do that. I don't feel
like it. My emotions will not cooperate with me on this. And
Jesus basically says, hey, it's not about your feelings. It's
about whether you're a servant of God or a servant of Satan.
Let's keep reading. And which of you having a servant
plowing or tending sheep will say to him when he has come in
from the field, come at once and sit down to eat? But will
he not rather say to him, prepare something for my supper, and
gird yourself, and serve me till I have eaten and drunk, and afterward
you will eat and drink? Does he thank that servant because
he did the things that were commanded him? I think not. So likewise
you, when you have done all those things which you were commanded,
say, we are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty
to do. Now that servant was just as hungry As the master and he's
cooking this food and it smells delicious And he sure does not
feel like waiting till after the master has eaten to eat.
He wants to snitch food right now but the point is He's got
a duty to serve his master and he withholds those feelings out
of duty and he serves his master It's about obedience. And Christ's
point here is that Christianity is not about feeling. It's about
obeying by faith. And you might think, well, I
just do not have it in me to forgive. And with that, I can
agree. That's the whole point of the
sermon. We don't have it within us to do these things that God
has commanded us to do. But what are we to do? The Sermon
on the Mount says we are to be living in the realm of the supernatural.
We are to be asking for the Spirit to give us the ability to do
that. Christianity is not living by
sight and what's reasonable. It's living by faith in what
God has commanded us to do. Just as Corrie ten Boom asked
God for help to do the impossible, and you all know that story,
and she reached out her hand to forgive the Nazi soldier who
had abused her and her sister, you too can do the impossible
and forgive those who have hurt you. and watch God's supernatural
love and His supernatural forgiveness come through you. So it is difficult
forgiveness that God calls us to. And part of that difficulty
is that we forgive even before we see the fruits of forgiveness. Now, what does David mean by
the phrase, if you go back to chapter 19, what does David mean
by the phrase in the second half of verse 22, When he asks, shall
any man be put to death today in Israel, he's refusing to be
vindictive. He's refusing to give the other
person a taste of his own medicine. He's refusing to return tit for
tat. He's refusing to operate in the
natural. When he says, for do I not know
that today I am king over Israel, he is saying that his security
in his position as king is dependent on God. It's not dependent on
risks like forgiving or not forgiving a person. And there were risks. In chapter 20, we're going to
be seeing that 10 tribes, not Shimei, but 10 tribes abused
this forgiveness. See, this is the fear that people
have. If I give forgiveness, I'm going to be abused. Well,
10 tribes did abuse that forgiveness, and they engaged in a rebellion.
So what does David now do? Okay, this is a new rebellion.
They've not repented of it. He can fight against them, right?
You deal with each new sin as it comes along, but you don't
bring up all the plethora of sins that went before that. And
so he can hold them accountable. He can bring church discipline.
He can bring whatever needs to be brought. In his case, it was
warfare. But we saw last week that God
is in Christ reconciling all things to himself. And we are
a part of that cosmic goal of reconciliation. And Christians
of all people should be secure enough in our reconciliation
to God to be able to extend that reconciliation to others. Ephesians
4, 32 tells us that we are to forgive each other just as God
in Christ forgave us. Wow, it takes faith. to enter
into the walk of repentance and to enter into the walk of forgiveness
that God calls us to, but we should do it no matter what the
outcome or the risk. We should do it to please God,
not for pragmatic reasons. Finally, the difficulty of forgiveness
is that forgiveness is always a two-part promise made to two
people. We've looked at the two sides
under Shimei's asking of forgiveness, but look at verse 23. Therefore
the king said to Shimei, you shall not die. And the king swore
to him. So there was a promise being
made to Shimei. There was a promise being made to God. When you swear,
you're always invoking the name of God. So there's two people
there, but there's two sides. So there's two people, there's
two sides to this promise. The first, remember, we saw was
remitting guilt. The second side is relinquishing
resentment. The remitting of guilt is a promise
to not hold this against him. The relinquishing of resentment
is a willingness to drop the matter and to become friends,
and that's what's implied in swearing. They're in covenant
together now. Let me end with a story told by prison warden
Kenyon J. Scudder in the 1961 Reader's
Digest article. Because I've seen various iterations
of this story, I was kind of skeptical of it. You see these
stories that go all over the web, but I did some research
on it and it does seem that this is where it started anyway. Anyway,
the Reader's Digest story, the prison warden, Kenyon Scudder,
claims that his close friend was riding on a train and had
a fellow passenger sitting next to him that looked rather depressed.
And when he got into a conversation with this young man, it became
quickly apparent that he had just been paroled from prison
and was on his way home. And the young man had said, I
have hugely shamed my family and actually shamed my whole
town. And I don't even know if they
will receive me back. They've never visited me. They've
never written me a letter. Of course, he said, I'm hoping
it's because they're too poor to travel here. My parents are
very poor and neither one can write or read. But I wrote them
a letter and I'm hoping somebody read it to them. And in that
letter, what I did is I repented of my crime, I asked forgiveness
for the way that I've shamed them, and that I would understand
if they simply could not forgive me. And he said he was on his
way home that if they had forgiven him to hang a white ribbon or
a white cloth in the apple tree that was right next to the railroad
tracks, and if they didn't want to forgive him to just not put
anything up there and he would continue on his way. Well, as
the train neared his hometown, the suspense became so great
that he just couldn't look out the window. And he asked his
partner if he could change seats and if he would look for him.
The guy said, sure, I'll look out. And when they got near the
apple tree, the man said, I see the tree. I see not one white
ribbon, but many. There's a white ribbon on every
branch. Son, someone surely does love you. And brothers and sisters, I would
urge you to make it your goal in life to have this kind of
willingness to forgive, not halfway, but filling your tree with ribbons. Spread so many ribbons on your
apple tree, it'd be easy for your children to repent. It'd
be easy for your parents to repent, or your spouses to repent, or
your friends to repent. OK, those white ribbons are symbols
of the presence of grace in your life. And if you're the one who
needs to repent, what you need to do is, yes, write that letter
or speak it and say, I repent. I want to turn around, get on
the train and go home. But you've got to begin to reverse
your lifestyle. And it's my prayer that this
church would be a symbol of people meeting under the apple tree.
What better way of magnifying the grace of God than to be people
of grace? What better way of magnifying
the forgiveness of God than to be a forgiving people? Put off
the Abishai syndrome and put on the David syndrome. Amen. Father, your word sometimes has
pleasant subjects, sometimes has hard subjects like this.
Subjects that sometimes can make us despair and wonder if we can
even do what you have called us to do. Help us, Father, not
to look to our own right arm of strength, but to by faith
realize that it's not me, but Christ living in me and through
me who can do these things. And so, Lord Jesus, I pray that
you would be in us and that you would love the unlovable through
us. that you would, through us, forgive
those who have sinned grievously against us. And Holy Spirit,
that you would give to us the gift of repentance, the gift
of forgiveness, and enable us to walk in the realm of the supernatural. Help us not to excuse our lifestyles
by what we can and cannot do, but help us to step into the
realm of faith and to live our lives so fully to Your glory
that Your smile of approval rests upon us. We do not want to be
handed over to the tormentors. We want to be secure in your
love, your forgiveness. And it drinks so deeply of the
living waters that flow from your throne that we freely give
those living waters to those who are around us. Help us to
have the apple tree of our life so filled with ribbons that it
would be easy for those who are around us to repent and to seek
forgiveness. if they are filled by Your grace.
Help them to know, Father, that we love one another. You have
said that this is one of the marks of the church, that they
love one another. And Father, may this church exemplify
that mark to a high, high degree. And we pray it in the strong
name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.
When Repentance Is Hard; When Forgiveness Is Hard
Series Life of David
There are many things that can make it difficult for us to be willing to repent of our sins and there are equally many things that can make it difficult to forgive. This sermon not only examines those difficulties, but in the process gives a theology of repentance and forgiveness and distinguishes it from worldly counterfeits.
| Sermon ID | 9953162022590 |
| Duration | 1:02:32 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | 2 Samuel 19:18-23 |
| Language | English |
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