Summary
Pastor David preaches out of Luke 17:3–10, calling the church to be a community of “forgiven forgivers” who live out their identity by lovingly confronting sin, extending real forgiveness, and walking together in grace. He reminds us that forgiveness is not optional or dependent on merit, but a duty rooted in the lavish mercy we have received from Christ.
Transcript
Good morning, Soli. It's wonderful to see you all. Please open your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke and to the 17th chapter. I asked the elders if I could preach a Soli sermon today and the Soli sermon is where we left off in Luke, where I left off in Luke. So we're just gonna let that roll that way and trust God that that's the case for Soli at six years old today. Luke chapter 17, I'm gonna read verses three and four, even though our whole text is three through 10. Hear the word of God. - Amen. - Pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in the day and turns to you seven times saying, I repent, you must forgive him. That is the word of the Lord. You may be seated, let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we pray this morning that you would remind us who we are before you. We are beggars. Beggars in need of bread and beggars in need of forgiveness. And Lord, we haven't even begged because our hearts would have been hard to even beg. But you took our hearts and you turned our hearts towards you and you filled our hands with bread and you filled our lives with Christ and you have transformed us. And so we are now justified in your sight. We are being conformed to the image of Jesus and yet we remain sinful in every way. And so today as we come to your word and as we are six years old as a community and we are reminded how it is that the body of Christ lives, it's life together with other sinners, with others who will continue to fall short of the glory of God right in our face and right in our lives and right in our community and right in our church. I pray that you'd help us to have the heart of God, a heart for forgiveness and a heart for restoration, a heart for one another as a community that shows the world what the new humanity looks like while the world is destroying one another and killing one another with words and social media posts and everything it can to dehumanize and destroy the other because of flaws found. We are not so confused Lord as to think that we are beyond the continued need for repentance and forgiveness in our lives. Humble us today before you we pray in Jesus name and amen. All of life together that is healthy lives from forgiveness to forgiveness. It's just that simple. All life together that is healthy simply moves from forgiveness to forgiveness. And what makes the church such an appropriate scandal before the world is that we believe as the church and we practice as the church forgiving the inexcusable in others because God in Christ has forgiven the inexcusable in us. We are as a church the forgiven forgivers. That's who we are and that's what we do. C.S. Lewis said in "Mere Christianity of Christians" everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive. Forgiveness is great as long as it's down the street. Forgiveness is great as long as it's over there. Forgiveness is a great idea if I'm being forgiven but not so much if I'm having to do the forgiving. But I remind you of the first word of Jesus from the cross. The first word that comes from our Savior as he's hanging from the cross in Luke chapter 23, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. The last word of Jesus in the gospel of Luke to his disciples and forgiveness of sins shall be proclaimed in his name to all nations. So the first word from Christ on the cross is Father forgive them. The last word to the disciples is that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed to all nations and right at the heart of the prayer that Jesus taught us in Luke 11 says this, and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. So whether it's the first word from the cross, the last word of the church or the center of our prayer life forgiveness appears to be important to Jesus. Forgiveness lies at the heart of the church. The church is the outpost on earth where heavens repeated forgiveness is found and practiced. The church is the outpost on earth where heavens repeated forgiveness is found and practiced, but we don't like that. I have news for you, tough. That's why Jesus begins verse three with this, pay attention to yourselves. Be on guard. Why? Because it's easy to go wrong here. It's easy to go wrong when you are sinned against. It's easy to go wrong when you see sin. This is an area that is a minefield for going wrong. And yet the clarity with which Jesus speaks is basic arithmetic. It's basic arithmetic. What Jesus says here in Luke 17 is two plus two equals four. It's just that straight forward. We are the ones who complicate it because complicated things we think lets us off the hook. But Jesus doesn't complicate things here. It is simple, it is straightforward. And this is how our life together as a church must always work and never ever do we leave this off ever. So let's look at it. First word, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins. If, that if is a third class conditional in the Greek and it means this, let there be no surprise when it happens. Okay? Let there be no surprise when your brother sins. Okay? And sins against you. The church is a frictive place. It's a place where friction happens. It's frictive. Lives rub up against each other. Personalities rub up against each other. Traditions rub up against each other. Likes and dislikes rub up against each other. Okay? That's just life together in community. Life together in community is always going to have a friction to it, a frictiveness to it. That is life together. We just need to own that. We need to be honest about it. And we need to say if it's going to happen meaning it's going to happen. There's no surprise here. Okay? Let's expect that we're going to fall short when it comes to loving one another, treating one another, honoring one another the way that we should. It's just going to happen. If your brother, this is a church gig here. This is your brother or your sister in Christ. This is the church. If your brother sins. So listen church. If your brother, the church. There are those in this room who are on occasion. They're going to need rescue. Okay? They're going to need rescue. They're going to need rescue from sin. They're going to need rescue from self. And they're going to need rescue from self deception. Okay? I am shooting straight this morning. All right? I'm not holding back. Shooting straight this morning. Okay? Sin makes you stupid. Okay? Sin makes you a fool. Okay? Sin makes you not see things rightly, not feel things rightly, and not do things rightly. And so you can't be trusted on your own to not be dumb, to not be foolish, to not at times misstep. That is why you need people that love you enough when they see it to engage their lives into your life, to rescue you from the mess that you're making of your life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, "Life Together," I love this, said this. He said, "The final breakthrough to fellowship "does not occur because though they have fellowship "with one another as believers and as devout people, "they do not have fellowship as the undevout as sinners." Listen, the pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. Right? The pious fellowship will not allow anybody in the church to struggle or to sin. So what happens to that person if they go to a church or they're involved in a church, and it's a church that has this level of self-righteousness that you just can't be found struggling? Listen to what Bonhoeffer says, "So everyone must conceal his sin." And listen to this, how terrible this is. Everyone must conceal his sin from himself, like act like he's not, and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner shows up among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is, we are sinners in the church. So let's not be confused. If a brother sins, he needs rescue sometime, and we shouldn't be shocked or surprised when sinners sin and struggle in the church with sin. This should be the welcome place for those who are simultaneously justified and yet remain sinful. This should be the place for them, or where they get the help that they need if they find themselves stumbling into sin. If your brother sins, Jesus sins. The Greek word there is ha-martai. It's the general word for sin in the Bible. What does it mean? It means to miss the mark on something. It means to miss the mark on something. If your brother is missing the mark on something, which means there is a mark, by the way, and we'll talk about that in a minute. If your brother's missing the mark on something, we're supposed to respond to it. But I want you to think about this for a moment. You're like, yeah, well, the Bible tells us that love covers a multitude of sins. It does. And by the way, if you don't find yourself just covering a multitude of sins with love, you are a miserable human being. Because the opposite of covering a multitude of sins with love is keeping a record of wrongs with everything. And you're the miserable one. Okay? You're the miserable one. But listen. When our brother or sister is struggling in sin or they're missing the mark, it is simply cruel to leave a brother or sister in that place. You're not being kind. Oh, I'm just, I'm a hands-off Christian. Well, then you're a foolish Christian. There's no place for hands-off Christians or heart-off Christians in the church. If your brother sins against you or sins and you know it, you see it, and they're stuck in it or they're stumbling into it and they can't seem to get out of it or it's just, whatever that is, it's simply cruel to leave them there in that destructive situation, in that sin situation. James five tells us that straight up. In James five versus 19 and 20, James said this, I want you to hear these words and we've read them in this church before. It says, "My brothers, if anyone among you "wanders from the truth, it's sin, "and someone brings him back." Okay? So we got a brother or sister's wandering from the truth and you're the one that goes and brings him back. Let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering, you hear that? Whoever goes and brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. You see that we're implicated in this according to the scriptures. If your brother sins, it is the merciful thing to do to be implicated in that situation if the Lord implicates you and puts you in that situation and may have to do with the saving of this brother or sister's soul and a covering of a multitude of sins that they might have found themselves in if you hadn't gone in early. You see, if you hadn't gone in when you saw it, there are so many times that so many people could be saved from going further down the road if we had just called it when we saw it, but we didn't wanna risk it. So we backed off and we lived as if we're not tied together in community and the next thing we know, this person's doing things that they never thought they would wake up doing and they're doing things we never thought they could, we would ever see them doing. But if we had got it at the beginning, maybe we would have saved them from that, you see. But let's make sure, listen, if your brother sins, let's make sure it's sin. Let's make sure it's sin against God's standard and not your list of petty things, okay? Because oftentimes some of you, like the Pharisees, you carry a list of things that you believe are sins that Jesus would go, huh? Jesus wouldn't recognize that as a sin. So it's not about your pettiness or not about your uncomfortability. It's if your brother sins, okay? And there's a standard for sin and it's called the word of God, okay? You should be able to go to your brother who sins and say, "Brother or sister, you are doing this." Okay? And it can't be the color of the carpet, the length of their hair or anything like that. It can't be nonsensical list stuff, okay? If your brother sins, Jesus says, "Rebuke him." That's fun. We all enjoy that. We all enjoy doing the rebuking and we all enjoy being rebuked, right? Well, guess what? It's risky. It's risky. But here, Jesus is pretty clear. Our calling in our life together, when we see a brother missing the mark, is to get up in his grill and love the knucklehead enough to tell him. That's what it is. You love the knucklehead enough to say, "I love you. I gotta tell you this, you're going the wrong way. This is going to end badly if you stay in this direction. This is foolish." And so you go to rebuke, you go to warn, you go to reprove, you go to bring an end to the sin and the sinner's relationship, okay? You understand that? You go to bring them to the end of that. Like, "Hey brother, this has got to stop now. Hey sister, this has got to stop now. This is dishonoring to God and you're hurting this person or these group of people." Okay? It's very straightforward. You're after the end of the sin. You're not going there to shame the person, okay? Jesus doesn't say if your brother sins, go humiliate him, that's not what he says. Go shame him, right? That's not what Jesus says. He says your brother sins, rebuk him. So you're not going there to shame him. You're not going there to humble him. Listen, you're not going there to win some competition. You're not going there to defeat the person, okay? I have been confronted by people before whose sole purpose was my forgiveness. And I've been confronted by people before whose sole purpose was my destruction, okay? If you're coming to destroy somebody or to humiliate somebody or to defeat somebody, somebody should be coming to you, okay? That's not why you're going. The purpose of the rebuke is not to shame the individual, it's to lead them to the pool of forgiveness. It's to lead them to Jesus is why. You want them to be forgiven. You want them to be reconciled and you want them to listen to experience freedom from the sin. You want them to be free, okay? We get self deceived when we're stuck in our own sins and we don't know that that's the case. George, what was that TV show I love so much? Falling Skies, I think it was. Okay, Falling Skies, great sci-fi show. These aliens came down. If it's aliens and earth and no wily, it's good, okay? And so in this TV show that was on, these demons, they probably were demons. These aliens would attach themselves to your back and to your spine and then up into your cerebral cortex. You remember that? Yeah, so, yeah, so in other words, that particular alien would basically act through you, okay? You carried it around on your back and it would act through you, okay? That's what sin does. It attaches itself to us and it acts through us, you see. And we need someone to love us enough to try to come and pull that thing off of us, you see, all right? And in order to do that, you want them to be free from that. You want them to be free from that, not to remain in it. That's why you're going to rebuke them. You're going to rebuke them because the damage done to self, if they remain in this condition, you see. So you name it to them, right? You go to that person, you rebuke them, you name the sin to them. If you can't name it, you better figure out whether or not you should go, okay? You can't name it, again, it might be your list and not God's, but you name it to them and you call them to own it. And by the way, you call them to own it without excuse or extenuating circumstances. It took Adam less than a day to figure out he could blame his wife for the fall. And it took Eve less than a day to figure out she could blame the serpent for the fall, okay? Extinuating circumstances and excuses were the first thing we ran to at the beginning in the Garden of Eden, that and covering ourselves with fig leaves. So we don't like to be exposed, okay? We don't like to own our sin. And we like to make excuses for it. But guess what? Jesus doesn't forgive excuses. He forgives sin. So while you're fumbling around trying to make excuses, Jesus is waiting for a sin to be confessed so he can actually forgive you. So while you're wallowing around your excuses, you're actually staying in your sin. So just rebuke a person, name it, call them to own it without excuse and to turn from it because Jesus delights to forgive and your reason for going to that person must be forgiveness, okay? If you don't go because you're pursuing the forgiveness for that person that you're going to, you're compounding the sin with your own. You're simply adding to the sin, okay? So if your brother sins, rebuke him. And then it says this, and if he repents, forgive him if he repents, okay? Now listen, repentance is important. It's an important part of this. But we have to understand that repentance, listen, is non-meritorious. Do you all understand that? God does not look at your repentance and then forgive you based upon your repentance. Please hear me, church. Many of you have grown up questioning and looking at your repentance to see if it's enough to see if Jesus would forgive you, okay? That is, God does not look at your repentance because repentance is non-meritorious. It's a non-meritorious confession of the sin, turning from the sin to the only place where forgiveness is found and that is Jesus. The whole purpose of repentance is that you're turning from the sin to the only one who can forgive you and that's Jesus. But if you're looking at the sin, you're not looking at Jesus. So repentance is having a change of mind whereby you turn from the sin and you look to Jesus and that's where the Father wants you to be looking because that's where he's going to forgive you. He's gonna forgive you with your look to Jesus, not forgive you with the quality of your repentance. And we know that because seven times a day is on the horizon of you returning to that same sin, again you see. And so please don't live under the weight of thinking that your repentance somehow earns forgiveness. There is no earning of forgiveness. There's no meriting of forgiveness. There's no wage of forgiveness, right? The wage of sin is death. You wanna wage? Live under that ball and chain. But the gift of God, not wage. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. So the issue of repentance is who you're turning to. Not that it earns forgiveness, it turns to the one who alone can forgive you. But repentance does mean something. You're not looking at Jesus so that you can turn back to the sin and that's not what you're doing. You're not waffling. In repentance you confess the sin, you own the sin, you agree that it's sin, you agree that it deserves judgment and you turn to the one who took ownership of your sin and judgment for you. You see, you own it and you say that this sin should be judged. And then you turn to Jesus and you realize that he has owned it and he's been judged for it. So don't hold back in your, it doesn't help you to confess around the edges. You wanna just be forgiven around the edges? When I sin, I wanna be forgiven for the thing done and all of it's ugly. Therefore confess it in all of it's ugly. Right, right, confess it for what it is. Confess it in it's ugly, be forgiven for it in it's ugly. Part of the problem and I recognize this. We live in a world in which people are massively, massively stingy with forgiveness. How dare you? How dare you be stingy with something that's not yours? Forgiveness comes from the Lord. You're simply passing on to someone else what's been given to you. And he has lavished forgiveness upon you, right? It's like an uncle who's got a wad of hundreds in his left pocket and pennies in his right pocket. And you come up and ask for some money and he reaches in his right pocket where the pennies are instead of his left pocket where the hundreds are. We have hundreds in the left pocket because that's the forgiveness we've received. That's the pocket we should be reaching into to hand out hundreds when it comes to forgiveness and not reaching in and grabbing it. Here, I got a hundred from the Lord for my forgiveness here but I'll give you a penny of forgiveness. No, no, we forgive as we've been forgiven, you see. And there's something so destructive about being miserly with forgiveness. I forgive you, but, I forgive you, but, qualifications that lead to no forgiveness and no freedom for the person being forgiven and leading to no freedom and no forgiveness for you who are doing the forgiving, you see. You have to be willing to be a full forgiver and you have to be willing to pass on to another the full forgiveness. And that's what Jesus says. If your brother sins, rebuke him and if he repents, forgive him, okay? Forgive him. Now this is a very interesting word in the Greek. This word, office, does not normally mean forgiveness. But the word is more actually more powerful. You are not what the word first means and is first used in the New Testament. It's a word divorce. It's a word divorce. When your brother repents, divorce him from the sin. This is the divorce that God loves. Divorce that person from the sin. What a powerful, I mean, think about that imagery, right? What we do when we don't forgive people is we keep them married to the sin. Think about that image. We view them as the sin that they are, one flesh with the sin. And Jesus is saying when you forgive somebody of a sin, divorce them from it and send the sin away and let them stand as the forgiven sinner. Such a powerful, powerful word. No longer see the person and the sin together, release them and free them, you see. So they can walk into the future. Release them and free them so they can walk into the future. Right, I always tell my wife, 'cause in our marriage, most of the sin is done on the husband side. And so it's great because I have a problem with sin and then Teresa has a problem with forgiveness. And so God has ordered the world perfectly in our home. I sin a lot, she needs to forgive a lot. The Lord is at work, all right? So I'm often telling her as we're working our way through these wonderful things that I offer to her for forgiveness, which I'm gonna have to do for this event right now, right? Later on, it's my birthday tomorrow, so let me live through the birthday. But it's like, I'm often telling her like, look, you can't forgive around this, you have to forgive the thing. Okay, you gotta forgive the whole thing. It's hard to forgive sin, right? Because we wanna think better of the person. And so it's like, oh, I'll feel better about you if I don't think you're that bad. No, I'm actually that bad. Spursion said this, "I am far worse than you'll ever think that I actually am." Okay, so when you come to confront me with my sin or I come to confront you, two assumptions should be made. I love you enough to come and confront you, but you're far worse than the sin I'm confronting you about. I just don't know about it. And when you come and I'm coming to confront you, I'm a far worse sinner in confronting you that I should be in confronting you. I'm carrying with my own things. So if we all just live that way, we all just understand like we're all sinners saved by grace. We all stumble in many ways and sin needs to be forgiven. It's sin that needs to be forgiven, okay? So don't marry that person to the sin, free them from it. And in doing that, you're freeing yourself from the bitterness against that person. There's two freedoms going on at the same time. But let me say this to you, okay? In our home, and Jordan was raised this way, we're never allowed to say it's okay. That was okay, it's okay. We're not allowed to say that. In our home, sin is not okay. And if it was okay, it wasn't a sin. So in our home, it goes this way, I was wrong, will you forgive me? Yes, I forgive you so that there's actual forgiveness and actual confession takes place, okay? This is important, but the person has to hear that, right? They have to hear the forgiveness. So I have to say to my wife, my wife has to say to me, I forgive you audibly, okay? Why? Because in part, because guilt is hard to release on your own. It's hard to pronounce self-absolution, okay? It's really hard to do that. Bonhoeffer in life together said it this way, and this is so good. Listen, he said self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin. Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin. This can only be accomplished by the judging and pardoning word of God. Who can give us the certainty that in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves, but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. That's so good, right? 'Cause I can confess my sin to the Lord and I can be thinking, well, maybe I confessed it to myself, and maybe I'm absolving myself and I feel just as guilty as I did before. But if I hear a word from the outside, right? If I hear a word from the outside, say I forgive you, or as Pastor Jeremy said this morning, you are forgiven. Faith comes from hearing, hearing the word, you see. And so it needs to be audibly done. So if your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. Tell him he's forgiven. Tell her she's forgiven and let him walk free into the future. Yeah, but Mr. Deutsch, Pastor Deutsch, Pastor David, what about all these people? They just can't get it right, man. They just keep stumbling over and over and over again. Oh yeah, Jesus knows. Verse four, Jesus gets a little bit more up in our grill now. Watch this, watch the change in the language. And if he sins against you, Jesus just said in verse three, if your brother sins, if your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. Now in verse four, and if he sins against you, okay, seven times in a day. And turns seven times saying, not ask you to test his repentance, but saying I repent, you must forgive him. This is hard for us. We don't like repeats, right? Some of you live by the three strike rule. Three strikes and you're forever in sin prison and you can never get out. That's not what Jesus says. Jesus says that there's going to be repeat offenders and that we are all repeat offenders, okay? Sins against you seven times. I love this in a day, right? I actually don't need a day to do it. I can do it in a 30 minute span easy, but nevertheless you get the point, right? What is Jesus saying? He says we don't get to call the shots and say, well, your cup is empty, your forgiveness cup, it's empty, no more, no more. Your 70 times seven has run out. Sorry, you had your chance, you blew it. Jesus says no. We don't get to lose our cool. We don't get to lose heart. And if you're struggling with the person who struggles seven times a day, you might want to remember your own seven times a day. If they return to you and say, I repent, now watch the language of Jesus, you must forgive him, Jesus says. You must forgive him. So this person who is struggling with this sin seven times a day, clearly needs seven fresh starts. And you're the one who's gonna give them that seven fresh starts because it's not about you. It's about the restoration and forgiveness of the struggling sinner. Now let me say this because this is important. There's a difference between forgiveness and trust. Trust is rebuilt over time. Forgiveness is granted immediately. Just remember that. If I hand you a BB gun and you shoot me three times in a row, I am going to forgive you, but I'm probably not gonna give you the BB gun back at that point. You're gonna have to earn the BB gun back. But you're saying, well then you haven't truly forgiven me. No, I've forgiven you. I'm not holding it against you or marrying it to you anymore. You've just shown that you can't be trusted with the BB gun right now. And this is, by the way, this is not a loophole. Cool, you're like, oh, I got a loophole. This is not a loophole. You can truly forgive someone and allow trust to be rebuilt over time. But guess what? Trust is never rebuilt whether it's unforgiveness. Trust is never rebuilt whether it's no forgiveness. In order for trust to be rebuilt, you've got to create the space for the rebuilding through the forgiveness, you see. And that's the only reason why anybody's gonna want to grow anyways. If you just turn around and lay law on somebody, they're never gonna want to grow. They're only gonna want to grow if you give them grace 'cause grace creates the space and the freedom to grow. Okay, now let me bring this around. All right, let me offer you some closing pastoral remarks. Number one, this is what love does. Love enters the mess. You are implicated in the fault of another that was no fault of your own, okay? You're implicated in the fault of another that is not the fault of your own by the word brother. If you're brother, you simply accept the responsibility for that even if it's not your own. Why? Because you've been delegated the priestly authority to rebuke and you've been delegated the priestly authority to forgive. God has granted that to you as a member of the body of Christ, okay? Your public ordination is your baptism. And because you are baptized into a priestly community, you have the authority to rebuke a brother and you have the authority to forgive a brother. It is a mutual shared authority. Everybody in the church has it. Everybody in the church should use it appropriately. Everybody should receive it if it comes to them. No man in the church is an island. It will be done imperfectly, but it must be done. It must be done. If there is to be sin, then there has to be a shared moral standard that we all receive and submit to. Sin has to be falling short of something that we all agree to. Sin has to mean something that can't mean nothing. And the canon for what tells us what sin is, is the Bible. Confession is the unvarnished truth about ourselves to the other. Remember, you are probably worse than the person you are confronting. And what you are confessing is probably not the worst about you. But what this means is no excuses, no extenuating circumstances, cop to the sin and all of its ugliness so that all of the deed and its ugliness can be forgiven. Lastly, forgiveness is forgiveness. If you're gonna forgive somebody, you're gonna look right at the sin in all of its ugliness, and you're gonna say you are forgiven. The sin goes this way, the person goes this way. Forgiveness is forgiveness. What do the disciples say in verse five? "Oh Lord, in order to do this, we need more faith." Jesus said, "No, that's a cop out." Look at verse five. "The apostle said to the Lord, increase our faith." Jesus said, "No, it's not about faith. It's not about faith." He says, "If you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, and a mulberry tree is deep rooted." It's deep rooted. He says, "If you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree be uprooted, planted in the sea, and it would obey you." In other words, the issue here is not faith. Give me more faith, and then I might be able to do this. No. What does Jesus say? Jesus says this, in verse seven. "Well, any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him, when he has come in from the field, come at once and recline at table. Will he not rather say to him, prepare supper for me and dress properly and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink?" Does he thank the servant because he was commanded? Watch this, verse 10. "So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, we are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty." We do not get to come to this passage and cop out and say, I need more faith. It's not for me. When we come to this passage here, it is simply this, do your duty. Do your duty. And you want to know what, as C.S. Lewis says in "Mere Christianity, you become what you do. You become what you do." And so the one who forgives becomes a forgiver. You become a forgiver by forgiving. You don't wait and say, okay, when I grew up and I become a forgiver, then I'll start forgiving. Oh no, no, no. You become a forgiver by repeatedly forgiving and then all of a sudden you know it, you're a forgiver because you have been forgiven. And that's what the church is. We are that community. Chad Bird, I'm gonna close you with this. Chad Bird, our favorite Lutheran, on the other side of the Reformation said this. Christ founded a church, even one in Newbury Park. Christ founded a church, Listen to Me Church, which is a little bit hospital. And in my case, a little bit mental ward. And a little bit weekly reunion of sinners who have made a mess of their lives. It is a place where self-proclaimed righteous people who have it all together will be bored because there's nothing for them there. Churches for real sinners who really sin with other sinners. For there they find the friend of sinners. Jesus Christ. And today we come to the table of the friend of sinners and we come doing life together as sinners. And when we pass the peace to one another, we really mean that we want that person to have peace with in their souls, but we are also saying, I am at peace with you. I am at peace with you. We are the forgiven community who forgives. Amen. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, thank you for the clarity, power and authority of your word. Thank you for loving us enough to let us get lost in our own sin. And thank you for brothers and sisters enough who love us enough to chase after us and seek to rescue us from our own foolishness to lead us to the pool and refreshment of forgiveness in Christ where it can only be found. Help us, solely church, six years in to be this kind of faithful community who loves each other enough to be implicated priests in the sins of others so that we might seek their rescue and glorify your name in Jesus' name and amen.