Matthew chapter 18 continues the story of the kingdom ministry of our Savior and King and God, Jesus, as he makes his way through the Promised Land, preaching and teaching the truth about who God is and what God is like and what God wants for us and from us.
As he goes proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom, breaking God’s rule and God’s reign into our fallen world, and as he seeks and saves the lost, he finds the lost and the hurting and the broken and the struggling, and he introduces them to the God who wants to redeem them and restore them.
In all of this, he is making his way to the climax where he will be arrested and he will be crucified, and then he will rise again to save us.
This is Matthew’s Gospel, and we are continuing on in that story.
The Disciples Have an Identity Problem
The disciples of Jesus have now been following Jesus for maybe a year and a half, maybe two years, maybe two and a half years.
We’re not 100% clear on the timeline, but at this point, they have been with Jesus for a couple of years, and they’re starting to understand more deeply.
They are starting to grasp who Jesus truly is and what Jesus is truly here for.
He is not just a teacher.
He is not just a prophet.
He is not just a rabbi.
He is not just any of those things.
Jesus is the God of the universe.
Jesus is the God of the Old Testament.
Jesus is the Son of Man that Daniel 7 talks about.
Jesus will be coming on the clouds with God’s angel armies one day to crush the forces of darkness, take this world back for himself, take up the throne of this world once again, judge this world with justice and righteousness and goodness, fix everything that is broken, heal everything that is sick and distorted, make everything right that we put wrong, turn this world right-side up again, and make everything exactly the way that it was meant to be in the beginning once again.
He is going to redeem and restore humanity because he is the Son of Man, and at the same time, he is the Son of God.
He is the one who bears God’s divine kingly authority on earth.
So they say, “You are the Son of God. You are the Son of Man. You are the Savior, the Messiah we have been waiting for. We are throwing ourselves at your mercy to be saved. We are submitting ourselves to you as our King. We are worshiping you as our God.”
That is what it means to place your faith in Jesus, to come to him in repentance and faith.
So the disciples are starting to understand, and yet still they have this roadblock.
They have this obstacle within themselves.
They still have this fleshly desire to pursue their goals, their desires, their dreams, rather than God’s goals and desires and dreams.
They have this worldly fixation, this worldly obsession with their own goals and purposes and desires rather than God’s kingdom goals and purposes and desires.
And as a result, they keep arguing over who the greatest is.
They keep arguing over who’s going to be on top in the kingdom of God.
They keep arguing over who’s the most important, who’s the most prestigious, who’s the top dog, whatever you want to say, however you want to put it.
The disciples are arguing over who’s the greatest, and they come to Jesus and they say, “Okay, hey, who’s the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Which one of us is it? Is it Peter? Is it James? Is it John? Is it Andrew? Is it one of the other guys? Who’s the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Tell us, please.”
And Jesus says, “Okay, um, that question in itself is a sign that I have a lot that I need to teach you.”
He says, “Okay, sit down. We are going to have another lesson. I am going to radically reorder the way you see yourselves, the way you see the world, the way you see God’s kingdom, the way you see everything else.”
He says, “Okay, sit down. We’re going to talk about this.”
The disciples are fixated on their own goals, their own desires, and most importantly, their own glory.
The disciples have actually fallen into the same temptation that the Pharisees and the Sadducees exemplify.
They have fallen into this prideful desire for self-glorification, this prideful desire to lift themselves up, this prideful desire to be on the top in terms of this world.
They want to be above other people.
Each of these disciples wants to be above the other disciples.
Peter wants to be above the other 11.
The others, they want to be above the rest of the disciples.
The people in the 12, they want to be above the 72 other disciples that Jesus is investing in.
Those 72, they want to be above the other roughly 500 people who followed Jesus around at various points throughout his ministry.
So there is this fundamental problem.
There’s this heart problem in the disciples.
There is this problem in the way the disciples see themselves.
And as we’re going to find out, it’s a problem that we have too.
Because how many Christians have a superiority complex?
How many Christians see themselves as superior?
Superior to non-Christians.
Superior to certain kinds of sinners.
Superior to people who struggle in this way.
Superior to people who are flawed in this way.
Superior to people who have that sin problem instead of this sin problem.
We have this heart issue where we see our sin as being minor and everybody else’s sin as being major.
We see our sin as being not that big of a deal, but we see other people’s sin as condemnation-worthy, rejection-worthy, abandonment-worthy.
The disciples had the same problem.
They have this desire to see themselves as superior to everybody outside the group, and they have this desire, each of them, to see themselves as superior to the others in the group.
And if you’ve spent any amount of time in a church setting, you know we have that exact same struggle.
And Jesus tackles that struggle in the disciples and in us today because it is desperately important that, as God’s kingdom people, we see ourselves not as superior to everybody else, but instead as recipients of a radical grace that has lifted us up from our hopelessness and desperation.
We need to see ourselves not as people who are better than nonbelievers, better than people who sin in these ways and those ways.
We need to see ourselves as people in exactly the same boat as every other person on planet Earth, but who have been radically rescued from ourselves by the amazing grace of God.
And Jesus uses three metaphors to help us understand this.
He says, as God’s kingdom people, we have to learn to see ourselves as helpless children.
We need to learn to see ourselves as lost sheep.
And we need to learn to see ourselves as debtors, beggars, as people suffocated and drowning under the weight of radical debt that we cannot possibly pay.
1. We Are Helpless Children
Number one, he tells the disciples, “You need to learn to see yourself as helpless children.”
He says, “Who’s the greatest in the kingdom of God? Not you. Do not see yourself as great in the kingdom of God. Do not see yourself as the top, the highest, the best in the kingdom of God. See yourself as helpless children, because that is what you were. You are helpless children.”
To understand why this is significant, you need to understand that at this point in time, in the first century in Israel, children had no power whatsoever.
Children had no status.
Children had no rights.
Children were radically dependent on the mercy of their parents.
They were radically dependent on the whims of their parents.
They were completely at the mercy of the adults in their life.
They had no power, no strength, nothing.
Children couldn’t do anything.
They couldn’t accomplish anything.
As a child, you were 100% dependent on the adults who were in charge of you.
And in the same way, Jesus says we are like helpless children.
We are completely at the mercy of the Lord.
We are completely at the mercy of the God who created us, and we are completely dependent on God.
We have no power in ourselves to do anything for God.
We have no power in ourselves to do anything to impress God.
We have no power in ourselves to do anything to please God, to do anything to get on God’s Employee of the Month list, to do anything at all to get God’s attention or earn God’s favor.
We are completely helpless.
We are completely at his mercy.
We are completely dependent on God alone to look down at us and say, “I am going to show my mercy to that one. I am going to give my help to that one. I am going to provide for that one.”
He says we are helpless children before God.
And one helpless child is no better than any other helpless child, right?
They’re all in the same boat.
They’re all equally helpless.
You and I are helpless children, and the prostitute who is addicted to meth over on Louisburg Road, just walking up and down the street, is a helpless child.
We are not better than that person.
We are equally helpless and dependent on the Lord.
But Jesus says, as helpless children, you have a Father in heaven who relates to you as a loving Father and a protective Father.
He says:
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him that a huge millstone should be hung around his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depths of the sea.”
—Matthew 18:6, WEB
That is the vicious, intense protectiveness that the Lord has towards you and I as his children.
One of my favorite metaphors in all of Scripture, it comes in, I think, the book of Nahum.
But in the book of Nahum, God describes himself like a mother bear defending her cubs.
His people are his cubs.
He is like the mother bear.
I don’t know much about nature, but I know that if you stumble upon a mother bear and her cubs, your life is over.
It’s done.
The mother bear is going to protect her cubs from you whether you mean any harm or not.
That is the way our Father in heaven relates to us.
He is a protective Father.
He is like a vicious mother bear for his children.
He says, as kingdom people, you need to see yourself as a helpless child who’s been adopted by a loving and protective Father who will look out for you, protect and preserve you with the same intensity as a mother bear protecting her cubs.
That is who you are.
2. We Are Lost Sheep
Number two, Jesus says, as kingdom people, we need to learn to see ourselves as lost sheep who went from the fold, who wandered into danger, who wandered into death, who wandered away from the Lord and were wandering off the edge of a cliff.
You and I were lost sheep.
That is who we are.
That is who we were born as.
That is who we are by our fallen and sinful nature.
You and I are absolutely no different from the drug dealer over there in that bad part of town.
You and I are lost sheep exactly the same way that he is.
You and I are lost sheep exactly the way that all of the Hollywood celebrities who keep getting in trouble, who can’t seem to hold a relationship together, who keep losing custody of their kids.
We are exactly like that.
We are lost sheep just like they are lost sheep.
You are not better than those people.
We are exactly the same as the most sinful people we know.
We have wandered from the Lord, rebelled against the Lord, rejected the Lord in exactly the same way.
And yet the Lord is like that Good Shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep who didn’t wander so that he can go and find the one who did.
And he came and he found you.
He sought you out.
He chased you.
He pursued you.
He tackled you to the ground.
He threw you over his shoulders, and he marched you back to the fold where you were safe and protected and cared for again.
You and I are lost sheep who were sought and saved by the Shepherd.
That is who you are.
3. We Are Debtors Whose Debt Was Paid
And number three, he says, as kingdom people, we need to learn to see ourselves as debtors.
We are people who were radically in debt.
Jesus tells this story of a king or a moneylender who had a man in his debt, and this man owed 10,000 talents, or 10,000 denarii.
This is the equivalent of billions of dollars.
This is Jeff Bezos money.
This is Elon Musk money.
This is the kind of money you and I will never see in our entire lifetime.
This is the kind of debt that could never actually be repaid.
This is the kind of debt that, to get in this level of debt, you would have to have been so foolish, so irresponsible, so reckless, frankly, so stupid, that you deserve whatever happens to you as a result of this insane and unpayable debt.
Jesus says that is the situation you were in.
You and I had this debt of condemnation.
We had this debt of death.
Our sin put us into radical and extreme debt we could never possibly repay.
And the wages of that debt is eternal destruction.
The wages of that debt is eternal condemnation.
The wages of that debt is eternal separation from God.
The wages of our debt is hell.
That is what we earned.
That is the debt we racked up, and we could not pay it.
We could not do enough good to counterbalance the scales.
We could not do enough good to make that debt go away.
We could not do enough good to put ourselves back in the good graces of the king and the debt collector again.
We were doomed.
He says that is what we were like.
But he says God is like the king or the debt collector in this story who saw that his debtor couldn’t pay and had compassion on him and canceled his debt.
He paid his debt.
Like, we need to be clear on this.
Somebody’s going to pay the debt.
If you owe me $10,000, which is way less than 10,000 talents or 10,000 denarii, but if you owe me $10,000, if I loaned you $10,000, one of two things is going to happen.
Either you are going to pay the debt by giving me $10,000, or I am going to pay the debt.
If you don’t give me that $10,000, I am out $10,000.
I have effectively paid your debt.
That’s how forgiveness works.
In forgiveness, you’re not just saying, “I’m not going to hold it against you anymore.”
In forgiveness, you’re saying, “I am going to eat the punishment. I am going to eat the consequences. I’m going to eat my own wrath for what you’ve done.”
We owed an unpayable debt, but God himself paid that debt for us.
He canceled that debt by coming down from heaven, going to the cross in our place, and then dying for us.
He paid the debt in our place for our sin so that now we can be redeemed and restored.
We can be fully and freely and forever forgiven.
Our debt has been wiped away because it’s been paid in full.
That’s you.
You are a debtor whose debt has been paid.
You are someone who was in radical debt whose entire bill of debt has been canceled through the cross.
That means that you and I are in exactly the same position as all of the most sinful people we can think of, with one exception.
It is not that we earned our way out of it.
It is not that we were better than them in this one way that made God have favor on us.
It is that our debt was taken onto the shoulders of Jesus and paid in full on the cross.
That is the only difference between you and the gay man over there.
That is the only difference between you and that person over there who lives this other lifestyle that you don’t approve of.
That is the only difference between you and that member of your family that you refuse to talk to because of the way that they treated you and so on and so forth.
That is who we are as kingdom people, as followers of Jesus, as members of the true Israel, the remnant, the ekklesia, the church.
We are helpless children who were adopted by a loving and protective Father.
We are lost sheep who were sought and rescued by the Good Shepherd.
We are hopeless debtors whose debt was paid in full and forgiven by the debt collector.
That is who we are as kingdom people.
Our Identity Should Make Us Radically Humble
And because that is who we are, that should drive us to four things.
That should drive us to do four things.
Number one, our identity as helpless children who’ve been adopted by a loving and protective Father, lost sheep who’ve been sought and rescued by the Good Shepherd, and hopeless debtors whose debt has been paid in full by the debt collector should make us radically humble, not prideful.
That should cause us no longer to see other people as inferior to us.
That should cause us to no longer see ourselves as superior to other people, better than other people, above other people.
That should cure us of our self-righteousness.
We shouldn’t be self-righteous pricks.
We just shouldn’t.
We have no business being self-righteous.
We have no business being snobbish.
We have no business looking down on other people.
We should be the humblest people in the world because we know the radical depths God descended to to save us.
Your sin is bad enough that God had to be tortured and killed to redeem you.
Why on earth would you look down on somebody else?
Our identity should make us the humblest people in the world.
Our Identity Should Make Us Mission-Minded
That’s number one.
Number two, our identity as helpless children, lost sheep, and radical debtors should make us mission-minded.
We were lost sheep, and now we want to rescue other lost sheep.
We were helpless children, and now we want to see other helpless children adopted like us.
We were hopeless debtors.
Now we want to see other people’s debts be paid in full and forgiven.
So our identity as lost sheep and helpless children and radical debtors should propel us out into the world to go find all the other lost sheep and helpless children and radical debtors and introduce them to the Father who wants to adopt them, and the Shepherd who wants to rescue them, and the debt collector who wants to forgive their debts.
It should make us radically mission-minded.
Our Identity Should Make Us Radically Forgiving
And number three, this identity should make us extremely patient and forgiving.
The fact that we are radical debtors whose debt was paid in full and forgiven by the debt collector should make us unbelievably patient with the people who fail, who mess up, who fall short, who wrong us.
The fact that we are hopeless debtors whose debt was paid by the collector should make us supernaturally forgiving towards people who don’t treat us the way that we deserve.
Jesus lays out these two things.
Peter says, “How many times should I forgive somebody?”
Now, at that point in time, in first-century Israel, the rabbis said you should forgive somebody three times.
If somebody wrongs you three times, three strikes, you’re out.
If someone wrongs you three times, you should just cut them off.
If somebody falls short three times, you should just get rid of them.
You should push them out of your life.
So Peter says, “How many times should I be willing to forgive somebody?”
He’s hearing these stories, and he says, “I think I get it. We need to be more forgiving than other people.”
He’s like, “What about seven? I’m going to multiply three times by two, and then I’m going to add one. That’s pretty good, right?”
And Jesus says, “You are on the right track, but try 77 times.”
Now, the point here is not literally that you should give people 77 chances, and then once they’ve broken 77 chances, you should stop forgiving them.
I mean, think about it for a second.
How many times have you sinned against the Lord?
Is it more than 77?
I’m going to guess it is.
You hope to God that he will forgive you more than 77 times, right?
So the point is not that you literally forgive somebody 77 times.
The point is that is a number so high you’re going to lose track.
You’re going to lose count.
That is a number so high that you are not going to be able to count up people’s infractions and people’s mistakes and people’s failures and people’s flaws.
Basically, what he’s saying is, “Stop keeping track of other people’s sins. Stop keeping track of other people’s screw-ups. Stop keeping track of all the ways and all the times that people have let you down and failed you.”
You should be radically forgiving.
How to Confront Serious Sin
He says, when someone sins gravely against you, right, we’re not talking about just, like, I don’t know, making a comment that was kind of rude.
We’re not talking about just, you know, something like that.
We’re talking about a grave, horrific sin against you.
He says, even when someone sins against you in a way that is totally unacceptable, still you should do your best to try to restore the relationship.
He says you should do your best to try to reconcile with them.
He says, “Here’s how you do that. Number one, you need to go confront them about the way that they sinned against you.”
He says, “Don’t just sit on it for the rest of your life and be, like, simmering. Don’t just quietly be mad and stop talking to them.”
He says, “When someone gravely sins against you, go confront them.”
We have to learn how to be a gently confrontational people, okay?
You shouldn’t constantly be dressing people down.
You shouldn’t constantly be poking holes in people.
You shouldn’t constantly be, you know, reading people the riot act.
We need to learn how to be gently confrontational.
Christlike confrontation.
When someone sins severely against you, you should go confront them about what they did.
You should say, “Hey, what you did to me was not okay. What you did to me was cruel. What you did to me was sinful. What you did to me was unacceptable. You cannot do that. That is not okay. I am not going to tolerate that.”
You need to draw a very hard line.
Go confront people about the way that they have sinned against you.
And if they hear your confrontation and they are struck to the heart and they repent, then great.
The relationship is fixed.
The relationship is restored.
But if they won’t listen to you, don’t give up.
Hold on a second.
Try two more things.
First, go find a couple of other people who are close to both of you.
Go find a couple of your other brothers and sisters in the faith, and go confront them together, right?
This is an intervention.
And this time, with others there as well, if they’re struck to the heart and they repent, then good.
The relationship is healed.
It’s restored.
But if they still won’t listen, he says, try one more thing.
Bring the issue before the entire church.
Bring the issue before your entire community of Jesus followers.
He’s talking specifically about situations that take place between brothers and sisters in the faith, between fellow believers, between fellow kingdom people.
He says, bring it to the rest of the church.
And if they see that this is serious enough that the entire church is involved, and they’re struck to the heart and they repent, then good.
The relationship is restored.
But if not, then it’s a good idea to separate yourself from them.
He says, “Treat them like a tax collector or a Gentile.”
Now, that’s important because even when you separate yourself from them, the goal is still restoration.
When you separate yourself from them, you need to be very clear.
Do not just ghost them.
Don’t just duck out.
You need to be extremely clear:
“I am not going to let you treat me like this. This is not acceptable, and you need to repent of the way that you are treating me. This is a genuine repentance issue, and I cannot be around you until you show me that you are genuinely repentant and sorry and that you are genuinely working to change.”
The goal in all of that is for your absence from their life to shake them so deeply to their core that they realize, “I really am wrong, and I really do need to repent, and I really do need to change my behavior. I really do need to change my ways. I really do need to stop treating people that way. I really do need to take that step and humble myself and do the work to learn how to change.”
So even when you separate yourself from them, you are still ultimately hoping and praying for their repentance and restoration so the relationship can be reconciled.
That’s number three.
Our identity as debtors who have had our debt paid should make us radically patient and forgiving.
We do everything we can to restore people instead of abandoning them or cutting them off.
Our Identity Gives Us the Privilege of Seeking God Together
And number four, finally, because of the fact that we are helpless children that God adopted as his own, and lost sheep that God came out as the Good Shepherd to seek and rescue, and hopeless debtors that God paid the debt for in full on the cross, because that is who we are, we have a very unique privilege.
When we come together and seek God’s will and listen for God’s voice and search for God’s guidance, and then start praying for the things he guides us to, he will listen.
He will carefully and eagerly listen to our prayers and our needs, and he will answer them.
Jesus says:
“Again, assuredly I tell you, that if two of you will agree on earth concerning anything that they will ask, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them.”
—Matthew 18:19–20, WEB
Now, this is often misinterpreted.
This is often misapplied, misexplained.
People say, essentially, if you get enough people to pray for something, God will give in and do it by popular demand.
That is not what he is saying here.
Look at the situation Jesus is describing.
He says two or more people are gathering together, and Jesus is among them.
Why does that matter?
It’s because Jesus is there.
He’s present.
And so what are they doing with Jesus present?
What are they doing when his Spirit is there with them?
They are listening.
They’re listening to the Spirit.
They are listening for his voice.
They are listening for his guidance.
They are asking, “Lord, what is your will? What is your purpose? What do you want?”
And when they ask that, he tells them.
He says, “My purpose is I want you guys to raise up a collection for the churches in Jerusalem because they just had that famine.”
He says, “My will is I want you to prepare to go to this town so that you can go and proclaim the good news about me.”
He says, “My will is I want you to go fix your relationship with this person. My will is I want you to go do this thing with your money. My will is I want you to go to this place, find this person. They need your help. It’s your responsibility to get them back on their feet.”
They’re listening to the presence of Jesus for the voice of Jesus so that the Spirit can guide them and show them what they need to be praying for and then investing in.
And so they’ve listened for the voice of the Lord, and now what are they doing?
Now they’re praying for it.
They’re saying:
“Lord, you have given us our marching orders. You’ve given us our next steps. You’ve given us the guidance on what we need to do next. Now we need your power to make it possible. We need you to work it out. We need you to empower us for this. We need you to work everything together in our favor for our good so that we can accomplish the thing you’ve sent us to do, so that we can accomplish the thing you’ve sent us out for.”
He says:
“If two of you will agree on earth concerning anything that they will ask, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven.”
—Matthew 18:19, WEB
We start praying together for the things the Lord has given us to do, and he will make it happen.
The act of gathering together, agreeing in our prayer, praying for those things, that is an act of submission, and it’s an act of preparation.
It is an act of humbling ourselves before the Lord and saying:
“I don’t have the power to accomplish this. I need your power. I don’t have the strength to do this. I need your strength. I don’t have the clarity to do this. I need your clarity. I need you to open every door. I need you to make every single thing work out and happen.”
That is why the disciples in Matthew 17 couldn’t cast out that demon.
They hadn’t sought the power of the Lord to do it.
They hadn’t sought the strength of the Lord to do it.
They weren’t relying on the Lord to empower them to be able to cast that demon out.
They were relying on themselves because they thought that because they were disciples of Jesus, they were better than everybody else.
They were exalted above everybody else.
But no, they weren’t.
They were sheep, children, and beggars just like everybody else, and they need the power of Jesus flowing through them to strengthen and empower them for the work that he’s given them.
Remember Who You Are
So here in Matthew 18, we are still on the same subject we were on in Matthew 17 and 16.
The disciples are having an identity crisis.
They’ve forgotten who they are, and the result is that their priorities are misaligned and their power has been disrupted.
But Jesus is teaching them who they are, where their power comes from, how to see themselves, and how to live in response.
We are helpless children who were adopted by a loving and protective Father.
We are lost sheep who were sought and rescued by the Good Shepherd.
We are hopeless debtors whose debt was paid in full and forgiven by the debt collector.
That is who we are as kingdom people.
Mount Zion Baptist Church - Louisburg, NC 
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