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Morning. Good to be with you this morning. We are going to spend quite a bit of time in the book of Philemon over the next few days. But this morning, in the class hour, we're gonna spend some time in three other texts. So we're gonna set the stage for what we're gonna do throughout the next few days till Wednesday, and you can see the schedule there behind me on the screen.

We'll we'll revisit that from time to time. But I just wanted to start with the overall concept of unity and particularly forgiveness. And to do that, I wanna cover some probably pretty well known passages to most of you, if not all of you, in working through this idea, the concept, the importance of fellowship and preserving fellowship. Conflict is inevitable wherever people live closely together, and the church is no exception to that. We come from different families and backgrounds, and we have different personalities and experiences and perspectives.

And sometimes those are gonna clash. Sometimes we'll misunderstand each other or we'll disappoint one another for various reasons. Unfortunately, sometimes we sin against each other, and that has to be dealt with and confronted. And the question is not whether those things are going to happen. It's what will we do when they happen?

What kind of person am I going to be when one of these situations arises? I think this is a particularly good time to talk about this for a variety of reasons, but in talking to Reagan a good bit, he and I are good friends. We text weekly, if not daily at times. One of the things we talked about is that you don't have any big problems or issues going on right now, which makes that a great time to talk about something like this. No one feels pinpointed.

No one feels like I'm aiming at them or I have some kind of inside knowledge. I don't. I don't have any inside knowledge of anything. And so if there is some kind of conflict or minor squabble going on between members, I don't know about it. But the principles and the ideas that we're gonna see in scripture and particularly in Philemon are helpful in understanding the right way to go about this.

The story in Philemon, is unique because it's their story, but it raises a lot of the same questions that we have when we go through difficulties and we have problems, particularly personal problems with one another. And in this situation, these two men are now brothers as Paul highlights in the letter. Christ has brought them into fellowship with one another. And the reality is and what Paul wants them to see, and we'll spend a lot of time talking about Paul here in a couple days, what Paul wants them to really see is that their relationship says something their relationship with each other says something about their relationship individually with Christ, and that's an important message. And, essentially, that's where we're gonna start this morning, this reality that our unity, the fact that we are one, which is what Jesus wants, actually bears witness to something.

And the opposite of that also is a testimony. It's a sad testimony. It's a false testimony, you could say, when people who were supposed to be followers of Jesus are his people, but they are in division. They're being ugly to each other. They're being hateful or they're exhibiting anger or whatever it might be.

This is the wrong kind of testimony. But I'll turn your attention to John 17, particularly the latter part of that chapter. Jesus here is is giving a prayer, and a lot of the first part of this chapter has to do specifically with his disciples. So and some of the wording is similarity. He's praying for their unity and unity and fellowship and the work that they're going to be doing, specifically the ones who had been with him.

But when you get to verse 20 in particular, this transitions to something that is broader than just his disciples. Right? He's already prayed that they would be one and that their word, the word he had given them would be powerful, and they would be unified, and they would be sanctified by the truth, all all of these great phrases in the first 19 verses. But then Jesus says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one just as you, father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one.

I in them and you in me that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and love them even as you love me. Part of what's happening here is Jesus is understanding the mission of the disciples he's going to send out, that they're going to go into the world and they're gonna speak this word that he has given them. And by doing so, others are going to believe in this word, and he's praying that these people have unity as well. And he says their unity says something. There is a message in their unity.

There is a testimony that's taking place when the world looks at God's people. They're learning something or they should be learning something about God the father, about the son, about the spirit, that they're they are in one, that that we're to That we're day may be one. Right? This is the idea that the world may believe that you have sent me. He's saying there's a testimony being given.

When other when outsiders, they look at us and they see the way that we interact with each other, they see the love that we have for each other, the unity that we have sometimes despite the fact that we have very different backgrounds, that our perspectives maybe have been very different in life. But through Jesus Christ, we are brought into one. And keep in mind what's going to happen through Jesus, particularly particularly in their time frame where you have Jew and Gentile, extremely different types of people coming together into one. That is remarkable. That's the kind of god we serve.

That's what that says. That's the testimony that gives. Right? So he's saying your your unity, the fact that you are one just as I am one with you, Jesus saying to the father, there's a message being sent in this. Our fellowship makes a subtle statement about divine unity and about divine fellowship.

Division disrupts kingdom work. Division stands in the way of this bearing witness to God and who he is and what he does. God and his plan through Jesus Christ, as Paul talks about in the book of Ephesians, it makes peace. It brings people together. That's what God does.

And if our testimony is demonstrating that, that we are being brought together, we are saying the right things about Jesus Christ and about god. But if people look at us and they see division and they see anger and frustration and hate and backbiting and gossip, we are testifying something that is false about the god we serve. That he's okay with that. That that's the kind of god he is, and as we're gonna see, he's not that kind of god. And so we're in the wrong, but what's happening here and what Jesus is saying in this prayer, he wants us to be one so that others will see this and they will believe that god sent me.

I mean, just think about that for a moment. You have two followers of Jesus Christ. Maybe imagine I'm teaching Exodus right now, so it's fresh in my mind. You got two followers of Jesus, a little bit like that Moses scene, right, where he goes out and his two brothers are fighting. What is the world gonna think about the god they serve?

Two brothers being hateful and ugly to each other. That's the way followers of Jesus act? What kind of message does that send to the world? And so twice here, the idea is your unity has a message in it. It says something so the world will believe that you sent me, that God sent the son.

He has a purpose and a plan for what he's doing through Jesus, and that plan is to make peace, to bring people together, not just people, but to bring us into harmony with God. This is the whole idea in Ephesians one. Everything is being summed up. It's being brought together into a head through Christ Jesus. Everything's being brought together into one.

That's the idea. And the mystery of Christ, the book of Ephesians specifically, is about unity. Each time that this the mystery is mentioned in that book, the concept is one of unity and oneness. That's really the concept, even the example of marriage. Later in chapter five, the ideas are being brought together into one.

And so the whole plan that God is enacting through Christ Jesus involves oneness, and Jesus understands this. And this is the prayer he's uttering just before his death that his people will be one and they will have this message they're sending to the world. He's already told his disciples this. A few chapters earlier in John 13, he says, by this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. The opposite of this then is true.

Division testifies the wrong message. It says the wrong things about god, the wrong things about his people, and the wrong things about his love. That's why it's so important to have this discussion. It is part of our witness to the world, and we're gonna cycle through some of these ideas again as we get into some of the later sermons. But I want us to understand the kind of people we are does send a message to the world.

We cannot claim to care deeply about the work of Jesus while actively damaging something Jesus specifically prayed for. Paul says it this way in first Corinthians three seventeen. If you destroy God's temple, God will destroy you. It's a warning. If I'm the kind of person who causes division, God is not pleased with that.

That's going to bring problems. But we have to understand as well that unity doesn't mean that Christians will never disagree, that we will always see eye to eye all the time. The critical question then is, how am I going am I going to react when these differences arise? And that's why we have books like Philemon that show us how this takes place, and there's other parts of scripture that deal with this as well. But I'm convinced that people who are committed to godly character can work through serious differences without bringing shame and embarrassment to the church, without marring the testimony that Jesus is getting at here in John 17, and that's why Paul tells us to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace in Ephesians chapter four.

So I wanna transition here for moving from John 17 over to Ephesians chapter four and look at this text for for just a minute. And I want us to get this concept because it's extremely important with a lot of the places we're gonna go throughout the week. And that is having fellowship with one another. The unity that Jesus prayed for and what he wants, it pivots on the reality of godly character. If I do not have godly character, nothing else I do is really going to matter.

Godly character is the center point of this going the way it's supposed to. Unity requires that I develop the character and the attributes that God has given us in scripture that make us like Jesus, that that recreate us in the image of his son. The one god has created one people to be eager to maintain, not just to do it, but to be eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. God creates us for unity. We don't create the unity.

We're just responsible for maintaining. And then and then it goes into all the ones that you know about here in the text. Right? There's one body and one spirit. This is your called and one hope that belongs to your call, one lord, one faith, one baptism, one god and father of all, which is overall and through all and in all.

Again, the focus on being together, on one, on unity. But that's not where the text starts. If we go back to verse one, this is a book that's very much describing god's grace. The first three chapters are all about how amazing god's grace is. And then in chapter four, he's then calling us to respond to that grace.

There's a certain way to live when you have been blessed so greatly by god. And so this is what he says in verse one. I, therefore, a prisoner for the lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling, worthy of the calling to which you have been called. With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another, and love eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. Notice where he begins.

Character must govern procedure. Now we're gonna talk about procedure in a minute, and we're gonna talk about some procedures throughout that sounds real fun, doesn't it? Procedure. Don't we like procedures? It's really the interesting note.

That we do them because we have to, and they work. And Jesus is gonna give us some procedures, and we'll see that here in a minute. But the reality is if godly character doesn't stand behind the procedure, it is not going to function the way it's supposed to. And so our pride, our ego sometimes stand in the way of the proper things happening because this point is missed. Character is critical to the procedure going the way it's supposed to.

Paul wants us to maintain the unity of the spirit, to be eager to do that, but he prefaces it with this. You do it with humility and with gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. All of this comes before the idea of going through the right procedures to fix a problem. If I enter a problem and I'm not humble enough to self evaluate, to have some introspection, this is not gonna go well. If I if I go into a procedure, but I'm impatient, And sometimes we just want the problem solved, and any number of bad things can happen when we just want the uncomfortable situation to be over with.

Sometimes we just ignore it and dismiss it, push it to the side even though it actually needs to be dealt with. Sometimes in our impatience, we've already decided what we think is right. All all sorts of things can happen and go wrong when we don't follow this order of things that we focus on godly character first, being gentle, being careful. He says in Galatians six one, you who are spiritual, restore the one who's transgressed. Looking to yourselves first so that you also are not tempted.

If it's always the other person and it's always their fault and everything is on them and they've made all the mistakes, I probably haven't gone through this process correctly. Understanding that it is character that needs to proceed the procedures that we have even even though the procedures are important and they're good and they're needful. You can go through them and do it all the wrong way. I do wanna take a minute just to say there are times that sin needs to be confronted. Right?

And so the message, whether it's this morning or the subsequent lessons, is not that we just are patient and forbearing and we never say anything. That's hopefully, you will not get that at all from what we're gonna talk about. But the idea of being gentle and loving is that we do it in a in a good way with the right purpose in mind, trying to accomplish godly goals, not just to prove I'm right, not just to show that my opinion is correct and the other person is wrong. These are not godly missions and godly goals. What god wants from us is to go about this in a way that brings people together, that helps maintain the unity that we have created through Jesus Christ, through the fact that we have been crucified with Christ, and now his blood is with us.

We've been forgiven. And now we are back in harmony with God, and when we have fellowship with the fathers, and we have fellowship with one another, that stands behind everything that we are trying to accomplish. And sometimes, unfortunately, right procedure can mask ungodly character. I can follow the right steps, but do it with pride or anger and patience, a desire to win, or just, frankly, to just go through the motions to say I've done it. Well, I went and talked to him.

I had the discussion, and now I can go out and tell everybody else what I wanna say because I did the procedure right. The problem is the heart was never right. It was going through the motions just to be able to say, I've followed Matthew 18 or whatever text we were looking at. We're gonna look at Matthew 18 in a minute, but it is the heart of the matter that we have to start with. Shaping our character after Christ, thinking about who god is and what god wants to accomplish through us.

And so this is where I really want us to spend the rest of our time in the class hour this morning working our way back to Matthew 18. And from that, what I want us to do actually, we're gonna work backwards through the text. I'm gonna mention Jonathan Banning more than once this morning. He and I did this series together at Deco Prairie. He was there for just a summer doing a practicum for counseling, and now he's in Louisville.

He's a great friend and a really good thinker. A lot of this idea this was his his series. It was his idea to do the series, and we worked together through it. And so I have a lot of gratitude for Jonathan and his work and part of this. And we kind of brainstormed together even the sermon to kind of lead the way into the content.

And one of the things he thought through was this concept of just working through Matthew 18 backwards. That's what I wanna do with you for a few minutes this morning. Jesus gives instructions for conflict. He tells us the right mentality and the way to think through this. He does it though with very vivid illustrations.

He talks about children and millstones and wandering sheep and tells a story about an unforgiving servant. And so through both instruction and illustration, Jesus himself reveals the heart of god, how god feels about these situations, how god feels about people. And so what what what I want us to think about here is that conflict resolution, which is essentially what we're talking about. That's kind of the, you know, corporate terminology for what this is. You know, in the business world, you're gonna do some conflict resolution.

Make sure you work all of this out. But, you know, it's in purse interpersonal as well in the church. It hinges on whether people are willing, particularly within the church, to reflect god's heart and their thoughts and their actions. I think this even theologically, when we think about god and who he is and what he wants us to be is critical. Everything about what he's trying to accomplish through Jesus Christ is, as I said earlier, to recreate us after his image.

That's the goal. We're to become a new person. We're putting off the old man, and we're putting on the new. We see this type of language all over scripture. We're dying to self, and we're alive to God.

And the whole concept there is I'm getting rid of me. Right? That's what should be happening through this, and I'm trying to put on him. I'm trying to be more like him. Jesus' illustrations and his teaching all have that focus and that aim.

That's what he's trying to accomplish. It's amazing to hear the back and forth in these kinds of stories, right, with his disciples. Here, we have Peter asking a question. Jesus is answering, and he's giving an answer that would have been profound to them. Peter asked, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him as many as seven times?

Now I know forgiveness is important, Jesus, but how much do we have to do this? Now we have the benefit of being able to look back at these stories and these texts, and you're you're probably very familiar with these stories, and you already know the answer, essentially. But just think about being Peter in that moment and you're learning from Jesus, and you don't have all these stories in these texts yet. You're living them. And Jesus, as he's had to do it various other times, we have Simon as well in Luke seven.

That's another good story that illustrates this purpose. Right? We like to look at others and think, boy, they're in bad shape. And we don't consider how bad of shape we're in. I don't consider how bad of shape I'm in when it comes to where I am and where god is.

At times, Jesus has to let that sink in a little bit to the way he tells stories. Peter, no doubt, thanks for giving seven times is a lot. Just, again, I want you to kinda think about his shoes. A situation I hate to do this, but I think it'll help the illustration. Think about a situation that was not good that you've been in.

A family member that's done you wrong or someone at work, and they come to you seven times and say, I'm sorry. Will you forgive me? Is that a lot? I think so. I think after two or three, a lot of us will probably be pretty tired of that situation.

So Peter's statement is not that outrageous when we think about it. Seven times is a lot of times for someone to come and say, I'm sorry. I did this again. Jesus tells this famous story. The servant who is in massive debt.

We don't know all the details. We're not gonna know all the details of the Philemon story either. That's sort of besides the point. We can get enough out of it to help us understand how to deal with problems and difficulties, But the scriptures don't always give us every single detail of the scenario that's going on, and Jesus' story doesn't do that. What we know is he has this insurmountable debt, 10,000 talents.

To put that in today's terms conservatively, so if I just take working days, that is sixty two point four million days wages. Think you can pay that back over a lifetime? The wealthiest person in this room this morning, can you pay that back over a lifetime? Maybe you can. Maybe there's somewhere out someone out there that could do that.

But 99.9% of us would never ever be able to pay that back, and that is part of Jesus' point. Sixty two million days wages. And now it's time to settle accounts. The king says, hey. You need to pay me what you owe.

Of course, you can't do that. And it's a pretty brutal scene. He's gonna take this man and his wife and his children and sell them as slaves, and the guy falls at his feet and begs him and says, unrealistically, I'll pay you everything. And the king has mercy. He has compassion.

And he lets this man go. He forgives his debt. And through a certain amount of time, we're not told really, but he goes out and he finds a fellow servant and strangles this man. This guy just owns a hundred days wages. Any of us owe a hundred days wages?

I mean, probably for something small we bought. We owe a hundred days your car. You probably have a hundred days wages on your car loan or more. This is small potatoes compared to what the other guy owed. He goes out and he strangles this guy.

Pay me what you owe. And he's equally unrealistic. Right? Isn't this how this go when when emotions begin to flare and we get angry and Jesus is kinda pulling this out even in the illustration? Throws the man in prison.

Well, how is he gonna pay the 100 denarii back while he's sitting in prison? That doesn't make any sense. But we don't care, do we? We just want justice. We wanna make sure that person gets what they deserve.

And Jesus' story wants to open our eyes to the problem with that kind of attitude. What I see in Matthew 18 is it's teaching us a lot of things about god in reality. The story and the elements of the story are helpful and we see how incongruous all of this is. Right? The guy's forgiven this huge debt and then he goes out and he's strangling this guy.

I mean, of course, that's horrible and wrong. But what we're really learning in this story that Jesus is telling is that God is abundantly merciful. He is amazingly gracious. And the debt that I can never repay, he has written it off. He has freed me from that debt.

And when I go out and I am unforgiving and I'm unmerciful remember the testimony we talked about earlier, John 17? I am saying the wrong thing about God. I have missed it. I've begged for God's mercy and forgiveness. I've asked him to forgive my debt, and now I say, I just can't forgive him.

I can't forgive her. How out of line is that? I'm not saying and I don't think scripture is that you have to be best friends with every single person in the congregation. There there's gonna be people that we identify close more closely with, that we share things with, and all of that, and that we have as confidants, and we have normal human relationships. That's the way it is.

That's how God created us. But if we are at odds with a brother, we do not understand the story in Matthew 18. If we think it's okay to look down on a brother in Christ and to treat them unkindly, then we've missed the real point of this story. We are supposed to mimic god and who he is. God is merciful, and I need to be the kind of person who is merciful.

So others see this, of course. The world around us, they see. We're bearing witness, and they say, this isn't right. These people who say they follow Jesus, look at how they treat each other. Something's wrong here.

If that's who Jesus is, I don't want that. Or they say, that's not what Jesus is like. These people aren't really followers of Jesus. There's some kind of message being sent in this behavior. And here, Jesus tells the story that the fellow servant see this and they go to the master and the master says, no.

That's not who I am. That's not what I like. Particularly in their time, you should be doing things like your master does, and he forgave him massive debt. He should now be the kind of person who forgives others their debt. And yet he wasn't willing to do that, and this is important.

We'll come back to this later. When the master sees this, notice what happens. He brings the wicked servant back in verses 32 to 35 and says, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me, and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant? I had mercy on you. In anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt, which is never.

So also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother, not with the right procedure, that's important, but from your heart. Having the heart of God. See what Jesus is trying to convey here in the story? It's not seven times. It's 70 times seven.

Can't even put a number on how forgiving god has been to us. How much grace he has demonstrated, how much mercy he has shown. This is what Jesus wants them to understand. It's the message he's conveying. Consider how merciful god is.

And then go and do likewise. God is merciful. There's a lot more to that story, and we'll come back to it later in the series, but I wanna move backwards now to the procedure. The part that people wanna talk about and then is rarely followed from what I've witnessed in life. Jesus does actually say what we're supposed to do if our brother sins or if he sins against you.

Go and tell him his fault. This is verse 15. Between you and him alone. If he listens to you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

Evidence. Pretty important here. That's interesting. Sometimes that gets skipped over for emotions in our culture. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the congregation.

And if he refuses to listen even to the congregation, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. So there's some real consequences here if things don't go the way they're supposed to. Again, it's not that we go through this process and there's we're just all nice and never have any sort of consequence, never do anything. You say, oh, you know, I think you did wrong. I hope you get better.

Let's move on. No. There can be some real consequences. But this has to be done the correct way with the right heart. God desires restoration.

Right? He's merciful, and he's forgiving. He's gracious, but also there's a purpose to all of this. And there is a purpose to the procedure. The purpose isn't just so I can say I did the procedure.

The purpose is that I gain my brother. That is the focus of the text. Right? When he says, if your brother sins, you go to him and you tell him his fault and you do it in private. And if you list if he listens to you've gained your brother.

That's the entire goal. The goal is not to say, look. That's just the kind of guy he is. See? I tried to talk to him.

And now I'm telling all you, he wouldn't listen to me. That's not the goal. Even when we get to the next step, when we bring others with us, the goal there is restoration. And, actually, as we see through the words of the New Testament as a whole, even when you consider him as a Gentile and a tax collector, you hand his flesh over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh as Paul will say somewhere else in first Corinthians five. The actual goal there is that he'll be ashamed and that he will then come back.

It is still to gain the brother. That's the purpose. That's the goal. We confront. This is why character matters.

We confront with humility, with mercy, and graciousness just as god himself is with the purpose of winning this person to the right. Getting them back on the right path, that is the goal. The procedure serves toward the goal of restoration. Biblical confrontation isn't about winning. It's about recovering.

It's about bringing people back together. It's about maintaining the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. It's about seeing it as so vital and so important just as Jesus does in John 17, That we will go to great lengths and have the right heart and do it the right way because it matters that much. And then as we move our way back, we're not gonna read all 19 verses here. But here he talks about the importance of children and how horrible it is if you pull one of these little ones away.

And he says in verse 10, see that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven, their angels always see the face of my father who is in heaven. What do you think? If a man has a 100 sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the 99 that never went astray. So does not the will of my father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

The message here is not that god doesn't care about the 99. He does. The message is that he values every soul. God is omnipresent, and so this is just we can extend metaphors too far sometimes, and that's why I made the point that it's not that he's neglecting the 99 or doesn't care. The point of the message, the contrast that Jesus is pulling out in the illustration is to show a shepherd who loves even just one so much that he'll he'll take a risk.

He'll go to great lengths to save this one sheep. That person that you don't like so much that you think has wronged you or that you think is too critical and thinks you've wronged them, god loves them. He loves every single person he's created. Again, it doesn't mean there's never consequences. But from where I stand and from where you stand, we should understand the mercy of God, that he is a God of mercy, that he is a god of restoration.

He is a god that values every soul. Even the ones of those people sometimes you don't get along with so well. And it's going to be important as we work through some of the material this week to realize how damaging it is to make assumptions and to tell ourselves stories and to start building someone's character based on those assumptions and often lack of evidence and to the point where we justify the things we're doing and we condemn all the things they're doing, god values every soul. And that absolutely must stand behind the way we view conflict. Sometimes we're just not gonna like each other.

You know, that that happens in our marriages too. We love each other, but sometimes we're just not getting along. And scripture has plenty to say about that. And you'll find that a lot of what we're gonna talk about over the next few days actually applies even to marriage as well. Alright.

We do something or we aren't attentive. You know, I'm not observant of something my wife wanted me to do, and she's frustrated because she's been working hard. And maybe I just run right through whatever it is she's doing, and I'm not paying attention. Is that not gonna upset someone? Or maybe she does that to me.

Right? It's one of the things we're gonna learn and see through this is that we all do this. I love Ecclesiastes seven. I'll probably come back to this a little a little bit later on. But the wise man in Ecclesiastes, he addresses this.

We look at situations, and we have this feeling like, I can't believe that person would say this or do that to me. And he just reminds the reader, you've done the same thing. So as we think about entering conflict, let's keep these key ideas, The importance of unity that Jesus prayed for, it's what he wants from us. The development of godly character, we're gonna do things wrong, and there's gonna be times we have to apologize, and we need to speak restoration in the right way. And we do that by mimicking God's heart, by looking at text like Matthew 18 and seeing who God is and how he treats people and the love he has and the mercy he has and the expectations he has, and we bring all of those things to the table to work through this in the best way possible.

Thank you for your attention this morning.