The Healing Word

Pastor Jack Morris: I can't pay my debt of ignoring him year after year. Some have ignored him a lifetime. We can't pay our debt of ingratitude, but Jesus pays it all. Can you say, "Praise the Lord"?

Guest (Male): Jesus paid it all. Welcome to The Healing Word, a radio ministry of the Largo Community Church. Here's Pastor Jack Morris with today's message that will grow your faith in God and lead you to a closer walk with Jesus.

Pastor Jack Morris: The past is forgiven. The other day I started thinking about the great gift of forgiveness, a gift that God gives. As I thought about it and dwelt on it, my heart rejoiced because of God's mercy and grace. Pretty soon I found myself writing down some thoughts and some notes, and it became a message.

But it started, as I can remember, as just a devotional thought that God did something great for me and for you who know Him as Lord and Savior. I turned to this seventh chapter of Luke and found one of the most precious passages on forgiveness. It's a parable: Jesus is in the parable, a Pharisee, two debtors, a creditor, and a woman.

Point A in your outline, you're going to see it on the screen and also in your bulletin: two debtors. I want you to look at the screen and read Luke 7:41 in unison. "Two men owed money to a certain lender. One owed him 500 denarii and the other 50."

These men had borrowed a lot of money and the time had come for them to pay the money back. That's the bad part about borrowing; you have to pay it back. Like one man said one time, "Pay with your credit card; that way you don't have to pay." Well, there weren't many dollar bills on the counter, but the credit card was there. But that bill is going to come. These men had borrowed to the max.

The time came for them to pay back and they couldn't pay back. The time lapsed and went on and on, and still they didn't have the money to pay back the creditor. Money is a root of many evils, and borrowing can be one of those evil roots. Many a family has been torn apart. Many marriages have gone on the rocks over money matters, over indebtedness, over spending habits.

It has been a devastating thing to see what has happened. There's an obsession with spending, buying, accumulating, gathering the new and the latest. One young lady from another church came to me. Her marriage is in real serious trouble. She told me, she was very honest and very open, "It's my fault. I'm at home with the two little children. I only work in the home; I don't work outside the home.

I get bored and then I become depressed. Instead of turning to alcohol or drugs or illicit pleasure, I take that credit card and I go to the department stores. The bigger the price tag, the better it makes me feel. When I give them that credit card and I pick up that package, it gives me a rush. It gives me a high."

A few times, Karin has... She's the best manager of money I know. I'm not going to go home and get in trouble this afternoon because I'm going to preface it: she's the best manager of money that I know. She's better than I am. But there have been maybe some times, I just can't remember right now. But she came home with one of these high-ticketed items and I'm the one that got the rush. It wasn't a high rush; it was a low rush. But those things happen, don't they? People go into debt.

Now look at these two fellows. You'll notice it said in verse 42—we sometimes talk about women and their spending habits, but these were two men. Two men owed the money. They're the ones that went out with their good credit and then ruined it by overspending and then not paying back, not fulfilling the contract that they kept.

I'm going to give you one point of difference between these two fellows, but I'm going to give you three points of similarity between them. The point of difference is one owed 50 denarii, the other owed 500 denarii. The one that owed 50 couldn't pay no more than the fellow that owed 500 denarii. Neither of them could pay. So the point of difference is just the amount that they owed. A denarius is approximately one day's wages, so you can calculate how much money these men were in debt and how much they owed.

But now I'm going to give you the three points of similarity between these two men. The first point of similarity was that they both were in debt, weren't they? No doubt about it. The creditor had knocked at their door and said, "It's past time. This state of affairs cannot continue. Something has to be done. You have to pay back. You can't borrow and not pay back; you have to pay back."

So both of them were in debt. The second point of similarity was neither of them had any money to pay back. So both were in debt, both of them were bankrupt, neither of them had any money to pay back. That's the two similarities. But here's the third similarity: both were forgiven.

That says something to me about the grace of God and the blessing of Jesus Christ. I sinned. I broke the law of God. For the life of me, I could not make it right and pay back. I couldn't do it. So Jesus just wrote it off and forgave me. He paid the price. It wasn't free; it was free to me, but it cost Him His broken body and His shed blood.

He forgave me. I began to think about that the other day. How blessed I am. How could you or I or anyone pay for what God has given for our sins without receiving the blessing of God? That's the only way we can pay. God has given us everything. Everything we have, God has given to us. That's why when I held up the offering plate just a moment ago... I mean, the oil that we use for gasoline, God put it in the soil before you were born.

It was here before you got here. The fish you catch in the river, it was already here; God had put it here. The air that you breathe, it was already here waiting on you. Everything you have, you haven't created or done anything but what God has already done. God put all the ingredients and the minerals in the soil for the corn to grow. It was all here.

I did nothing but receive, and then instead of giving thanks, I ignore God. I live my own life, I do my own thing, I go my own way. I don't give Him thanks. I eat the food; I don't give Him thanks. I drive the car and burn up the oil; I don't give Him thanks. I'm not talking about you or me as Christians necessarily, but I'm thinking about the multitudes—over six billion people on this planet.

There are very few people that recognize God as the source. Most of the people today are not here in this church or any other church. They care very little about God and they do not recognize God. I hear men saying, "I'm a self-made man." Mister, if God didn't give you the ability and the brain power and the IQ, you could have been born inferior mentally.

But God did all of this and gave all of this to us, and then I broke His law. But when I come to Jesus and confess my sin to Him, He has mercy on me. I can't pay my debt of ignoring Him year after year. Some have ignored him a lifetime. We can't pay our debt of ingratitude, but Jesus pays it all. Can you say, "Praise the Lord"? Jesus paid it all.

Now look at our debts, point B in your outline. The past can generate much guilt. There are several emotional guilts that come to us. One of the guilts that come to us is a legal guilt. Guilt is a terrible thing in some respects, but it is a wonderful thing if it convicts us and brings us to God. Then there's theological guilt. That's the guilt that we receive when we break God's law.

There's the guilt of legally breaking society's law, but when we break God's law, there's theological guilt. The Apostle Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:15 that he was the chief or the worst of all sinners. Somehow he knew and he felt the guilt. Francis of Assisi said, "There is nowhere a more wretched and more miserable sinner than I am." He recognized it, and I thank God when God makes us miserable in our sin because that can lead to repentance and bring us away, and we can confess and move on in our life.

Then there's that personal guilt. A lot of us were feeling guilty when we look over our back over our past life. Some of us feel guilty because we weren't as good a parent as we thought we should have been, and we feel guilty over that, but our children are grown; we can't do much about it. Or we feel guilty over a breakup of a marriage and we think back and we think, "If I had been just a little more mature and done things just a little bit differently, that marriage could have been saved."

So we start heaping this personal guilt. That's the kind of guilt that we can't assuage; we can't do anything about it. Then some of us feel guilty sometimes because of something we said—we wish we hadn't said it—or an action that we shouldn't have done, or a behavior we shouldn't have done, or a thought and we disappoint ourselves. We say, "Why would I think that way? Why would I say what I said?"

All these personal guilts... so there's legal guilts, there's theological guilts, there's personal guilts. What are we going to do with it? Live miserably? That's the only thing that we can do unless we find a way to move beyond it, and Jesus is the way to move beyond it.

I'm going to go back to Luke chapter 7 and I want you to read Luke chapter 7, verses 37 and 38 with me. Would you do that? Look at the screen and read these two verses in unison. "When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume. And as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured perfume on them."

Now here's a person redeemed. Here's a person who knows she's forgiven. There is a worship that comes from her like she's never felt before. She has experienced Jesus and she has experienced forgiveness of sins. Friend, this was the thing that came to me just a few days ago. Forgiveness is no light thing. Forgiveness is a wonderful gift. Forgiveness will move me to worship the Lord more sincerely than before.

Now here's an unnamed woman. This is what provoked this story of these two debtors. An unnamed woman who had a guilty past filled with condemnation, a scarred life, a troubling conscience. Her past—the Scripture says very little about it, only in that it was a bad experience all her life long. It may have been because of her living in prostitution.

It may have been that as a child, she was a victim of being sexually molested. It was a sad, sad situation. She wanted to move beyond the past. How do you move beyond the past? Society sometimes won't allow you. Sometimes the family keeps reminding you, or your friends, but very often your own memory keeps reminding you of your past. So here was this guilty woman who was shunned by the community and looked upon with scorn.

She gets into Simon's house. I wonder how she ever got in his house because he detested this woman. But she got in. But then in looking at the climate in that part of the world and in the custom in that part of the world, when a person had a party, they would have it out in a courtyard, like you'd have a barbecue in the backyard. In the custom at that time, the uninvited guest would stand on the periphery and look in. It's like somebody standing on the outside of a restaurant looking in and watching you eat. It's not a good feeling, is it? You feel like, "Go on, move on." But that was the custom.

They didn't have entertainment back then, so that was one of the very few ways of entertaining yourself: to watch somebody else have a party. So it was outside in a courtyard. The way they would eat was there would be a table in the middle of the courtyard with all the food on it, and then there would be couches that would come out. The head of the couch would be at the table.

A couch would come out, and it would almost appear like a star if you were up above and looking down. The way they would eat would be they would recline. I thought about lying down on the floor here, but I think maybe I can demonstrate it without going quite that far; it might take me a little longer to get up. They would lie normally—right-handed person on their left side.

This was the way the Romans did it and the Jewish people picked up this custom. They would hold their head and they'd reach over the table, get the food, and put it in their mouth. Their feet were out that way. That's how the woman could come up behind him without him seeing her approaching. So she slipped in from the crowd.

There was so much love in her heart for Jesus. Somehow Jesus was ministering to her, even perhaps from afar. She so loved him. You know, sometimes love is blind. I wish that God's people would get their heart so filled with love that we would do some extraordinary, some risky, some ridiculous things for Jesus, just overcome by love. We're too cautious of what we give Him, what we do for Him, how much time we put in. We're just too conservative. But this woman just gave everything that she had.

She comes up behind Jesus—look at this passage again with me—she comes up behind Jesus and she touched Him. Now in the culture at that time, women were inferior. If anybody should be a Christian, it ought to be a woman, really. Should be men too, but Jesus lifted womanhood to the level of a man. Not that there is a difference in the role in the home; there is a difference in the role everybody plays in the home.

But a woman is in no way inferior, but she plays a different role. The husband plays a different role in the home. But Jesus is the one that lifted womanhood. God sent Jesus into the world to be born of a woman; that's where it all started right there. And He elevated womanhood. But in that society back then, women were inferior, or looked upon—they weren't inferior, but they were looked upon as inferior.

But she came in and there's where she broke the first custom: she touched him. Then she begins to weep over him. Friend, I'll tell you, I don't know how we can come to the Lord sometimes and not maybe weep over our sin, cry over our past failure, the things that we have failed to do for Jesus, and to worship Him.

She broke down and she began to cry. She knew that this was her one last and only hope. Friend, your one last and only hope to get rid of your past, and my one last and only hope to get rid of my past, is Jesus. She knew it; some of us still don't know it. You see, this woman knew she was a sinner. This woman knew she needed help. This woman knew she needed a Savior.

She knew! But Simon didn't know he needed help just as much as she needed help, just as much. His sin may not have been 500 denarii; it may have only been 50 denarii, but he couldn't pay for his sin no more than she could pay for her sin. Sin is sin, and it must be confessed and repented of. When it is, there's a cleansing that comes, and a renewal, and a peace of mind, and joy in the heart.

All he could see—this is what Jesus said to Simon in Luke 7:44, look up at the screen and read it—then He, Jesus, turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? Do you..."

Simon: "Yeah, a prostitute, a culture breaker, a person that is disdained, and society will have absolutely nothing to do with her, and I want my men to come and throw her out of my courtyard. I see her trespassing, of course I see her."

Jesus says, "Do you see this woman?" Simon didn't see somebody that was seeking after Jesus. But God saw her heart, and her heart was seeking after the Lord. The Holy Spirit was seeking to her. The Savior, the Redeemer, the one who values you and the one who holds you in high esteem, who gives you worth—the world will not give you value and the world will not give you worth, but Jesus will.

Jesus will, you're worth something to Him. You're valuable to Him. You're not an outcast to Him. He wants to forgive your past. But like this woman, you've got to break through and get to Him. Right now in your faith, in your heart, you can break through every barrier, every past sin. You don't have to condemn yourself anymore.

He can clean your memory up, clean up your past, make you a wonderful person, the wonderful person that He wants you to be, that you want to be. He'll do that for you. Now what is Jesus seeing today? He is looking at your needs because He knows He can help you. That's what He sees. Do you see this woman?

Do you see Him? Yes, He sees you. Your hurts, your pains, your needs, and He yearns to do something beautiful. Do you see this woman? He sees more in you and me than sometimes we see in ourselves, and He loves us even more than we love ourselves. He sees our brokenness with a desire to heal our brokenness. He sees our sorrow and our sadness, knowing that He can take that sadness and sorrow away and put peace there. He sees our troubled hearts. He sees our past wrongs. He sees us through and through—you and I are completely transparent—and He sees us and He comes to help us and to bless us. Now all we need to do is to come to Him.

Guest (Male): We hope that today's message has been a blessing and has strengthened your faith in God. But before we go, here's Pastor Jack Morris with a special invitation.

Pastor Jack Morris: Have you ever asked God why? Why this sickness? Why this divorce, this disappointment? Why these troubles and problems? Why, God? Friend, I've just completed an ebook entitled *From Asking Why God to Trusting Him*. It's a faith journey. I'll be glad to send it to you free of charge simply for asking.

Some of the life situations addressed in the ebook are God's timing in answering prayer, a journey of faith through suffering, reasons for unanswered prayer, and more. For your free copy, go to thehealingword.com and sign up. That's thehealingword.com, and I'll send you a free copy of *From Asking Why God to Trusting Him*. I'm Pastor Jack Morris.

Guest (Male): Join us tomorrow for another Healing Word message. Until then, blessings on you.