Before We Get Started

For our discussion today, we will be using the sermon series discussion guides. If you would like to follow along you can access this discussion guide on the website at mosaicchurchaustin.com and then select “community group resources” in the menu options.

Prayer

Because the primary goal of our time together is to establish relationships and learn how to walk with one another in all that God has called us to be and do, we’d like to begin by praying for one another. So, does anyone have anything you’d like us to pray for or anything to share regarding how you’ve seen God moving in your life that we can celebrate together?

This Week’s Topic

The Gospel of the Kingdom

Jesus’s Kingdom, as He himself taught, is not of this world. While His Kingdom influences and transforms people and structures, fundamentally, it does not belong to an individual or ideology. His is the kingdom and the power and the glory, as he taught us to remember in prayer.

Today’s Topic

When You Forgive Someone

Discussion Questions

Matthew 18:21-35

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. “But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Not Othering

Susan Waters

The pressure to blindly forgive, particularly within church teaching, can keep people stuck and unsafe. I believe this easy grace can allow abuse to thrive within families and institutions.

Miroslav Volf

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.

How much debt did the servant in Matthew 18 owe his king?

Why are we often tempted to see people who have hurt us as one-dimensional characters, defined only by their sin or lack of character?

How does the theology of forgiveness require a more robust view of others and ourselves?

Releasing

Proverbs 24:29 

Do not say, ‘I will do to him as he has done to me: I’ll pay them back for what they did.”

Alan Jacobs, Vengeance

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic, but far more so, because it retains [a partial] sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness.

The great moral crisis of our time it not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors.

 

What motivated the king in Matthew 18 to release his servant and cancel his debt?

How did the servant then treat his debtors?

Why is vengeance sometimes easier for us to understand than forgiveness?

Justice

Rachael Denhollander, Justice

The cross stands in stark opposition to the behavior of an abuser…in the Incarnation, [Jesus] sets aside his divine prerogatives—the strong becomes the weak.

At the cross, God acts for others—to overcome evil, uphold justice, free the enslaved, and restore creation. God himself perfectly identifies with the victim because he has willingly subjected himself to injustice. 

The cross is the ultimate repudiation of the idea that power is to be wielded to the benefit and pleasure of those who possess it.

 

Rachel Denhollander, What Is a Girl Worth? 

<To her abuser, Larry Nassar> I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so that you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me, though I extend that to you as well. 

How does the gospel reveal that God  is merciful?

How does the gospel reveal that God is just?

How does our willingness to forgive leave room for God to be both merciful and just?

Closing Thought

Mary DeMuth

Our task shouldn’t be punishing the villains in our lives, but enlarging the God who heals us from all wounds.

In your final moments together, take some time to pray for God to enlarge your understanding of his mercy and justice. Ask him to heal the hearts of those who have been wounded and help them to rest in his mercy, and to convict the hearts of those who have not yet asked for forgiveness for their sin and wrongdoing so that they, too, might find their rest in him.