Jesus is talking to the disciples and His first comment is, “Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but. 2 It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. 3 So watch yourselves. “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. 4 If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” 5 The apostles said to the LORD, “Increase our faith!.”
The key to what Jesus is teaching centers around verse 3, “So watch yourselves.” Jesus tells the disciples that they are bound to sin; more specifically, everyone is bound to sin. This is a message the disciples would have understood. The world is such where there are so many pressures on people to “go their way” or to do something that is in opposition to what God would have them do that it is impossible to live in this world within sinning. Praise God that through Jesus Christ we can ask for forgiveness, and if we ask with a sincere heart, God will forgive us every time. We are constantly in this state of leaving God and returning to God.
Then Jesus adds an additional statement just for the disciples, “woe to that person through whom they come.” The disciples are or will be leaders in the faith. It is very important that the leaders of the church be an example for those that are struggling. Jesus calls those struggling, “little ones.” This is the Lords first pressure put upon the disciples that they have a greater responsibility that the “little ones.” Jesus said the same thing to Pontius Pilate when he said that those that brought him to Pilate had the greater sin.
As if this was not enough, Jesus’ next statement really places the disciples in an almost untenable position. He tells the disciples that if a person asks them to be forgiven that they must forgive the person. He says that even if they sin against you all day many, many times, where you come to understand that there request for forgiveness is insincere, you still are to forgive them. Jesus is telling us that we are not to judge a person’s sincerity and that judgment is for God alone. At this point the disciples are understandably perplexed.
After hearing this message of always forgiving anyone that asks you to forgive them, as a group they ask Jesus to “increase our faith.” From their point of view, Jesus is just asking too much from them. Then the Lord adds pressure that is almost crushing in its requirement.
Already they tell the Lord they cannot forgive as He has asked, then Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could tell this mulberry tree to uproot itself and plant itself into the sea and it would obey you.” To the disciples this would have been a final crushing blow. Jesus is telling them that even if they could forgive as he has asked, they still would not have faith even as large as a mustard seed.
What grace are we to take from this passage?
1, As Christian leaders we need to know that people with less to no faith are watching us to see how we behave. We are bound to sin, but we are to humbly ask for forgiveness every time. We should be people with clean slates, no guilt, joyful and brave to follow God’s will.
2. Even though God knows we will sin again, for He knows the end as well as the beginning, He will forgive us every time when we ask sincerely. He knows our heart and knows if we are sincere or not. This gives credence to the statement, even while we live in a world where we will always be sinners, God sent His only son as atonement for our sins.
3. Our faith in God’s world cannot even come close to the reality of that faith. We all have faith in the promises of Christ. This faith tells us how beautiful the world of heaven must be, but the faith we have now is not even as large as a mustard seed. Just think what a world must be like when our tiny faith becomes a reality. If you were to believe a star would be better over there versus here, it would obey you and move. We just cannot imagine.
God has something in store for us that even when we do our best to imagine it, we have not even thought of it in detail enough to be the size of a mustard seed. Amen
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