So now in Mark's Gospel we are
just four days away from the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus.
He's come to Jerusalem proclaiming himself as God's Messiah. proclaiming himself to be God,
proclaiming himself to be King of Israel, proclaiming that temple
that was there to be his temple, his father's temple, to be the
place where he has the right to exercise authority, as he
has the right to exercise authority over all things. But again, in
these verses, as he's spending this precious time with his disciples,
he's reminding them again that God's kingdom is not an earthly
kingdom. That doesn't mean that God does
not rule. with absolute sovereignty and
absolute ease at all things that happen in this universe. There's
not an electron moving in this universe now outside of God's
sovereign eternal decree. But God's kingdom is a spiritual
kingdom. God's purposes in the lives of
his people are spiritual purposes. So this kingdom is not of this
world. It seeks no approval from men. It takes no notice of their status,
their religious attainments, their political power. God's
kingdom works by faith, the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus, and the faith
that he brings to his own, and the faith that he grows in them.
A faith which looks away from ourselves, and looks to Him to
provide. It's a spiritual kingdom and
therefore it is not recognized through worldly eyes, but it
is only seen through God-given eyes, with God-given light and
with God-given sight. It looks to rewards from heaven,
the greatest reward, His closeness of relationship and fellowship
with God. God indwelling His people by
His Spirit and His people remarkably indwelling Him. Nothing that
this world offers as pleasure and reward compares with communion,
to communion with God. In this kingdom, the glory of
the one who is called Abba Father is what God's children delight
in. And this relationship, this kingdom
in the lives of His people is manifested by this blessed Holy
Spirit who is our Comforter and takes what the Lord Jesus has
won and takes What is His own and reveals, makes it known,
makes God's reality a living reality in the lives of God's
redeemed children. And so the Lord Jesus, when He's
pictured the destruction of Jerusalem and the whole Jewish nation,
to be defeated and crushed and never to rise again, never to
have a place as the place where God dwells with His people. He says to these disciples these
remarkable words that we've looked at this last little while in
verse 22. Having seen all this and had
it pictured for them, He says in verse 22, Have faith in God. As we saw a couple of weeks ago,
what God commands, God provides. God's commands in the New Testament
are God's promises of grace in the lives of his people. He's
saying to his apostles, no matter what you see in this next few
days, no matter how horrific it seems, You have faith in God. Don't let any of these things
that you see around you distract you from trusting God. He assures these disciples that
faith removes mountains, mountains of doubt, mountains of difficulties,
mountains which these men will see before them in these next
few days as their Lord is taken away from them and cruelly mocked
by men, flogged by the Romans, crucified. And as he was crucified
they walked by him, mocking him, spitting on him, mocking his
pain. Mountains of doubt and unbelief.
would have flooded into their lives. Faith removes mountains
in God's time. And faith also receives promises. Faith receives the promises and
the fruit of the promises that God makes, spiritual fruit. And in this text before us today,
in these verses 25 and 26, God's faith, working in the lives
of His people, calls His people to be praying people, and causes
His people to be praying people who are forgiving people. As I said, these apostles were
about to go through the most extraordinary trials. We have
seen them exposed as we have seen ourselves exposed before
God. When the Lord Jesus presents
himself in his glory to them, they become self-seeking and
doubting again and again. And there is resentment. There
is a claim from John and James to positions of authority. And
there is resentment from the others. And therefore, the Lord
Jesus enjoins them as he does us, that three things are just
incredibly important to this fellowship which was going to
be the vehicle by which God spreads his gospel. Faith, prayer and
forgiveness. Things that we don't need in
heaven, but things that we need desperately here. These men were
entrusted with the everlasting gospel. They needed these lessons. Resentment that they could have
had for each other in all of what uncertainty lay around them
is now, by God's grace, turned to fellowship. And so we, like
the apostles, are a small band in a world which will welcome
our message as it did the Lord and his servants. It will treat
us as it did him. It will treat us as it did his
messengers and has done so throughout the ages. From Abel to the last
witnessing Christian will be treated the way the Lord and
his apostles were. So these are vital lessons. Vital lessons for the apostles
2000 years ago, vital lessons for us today, gathered by our
Lord, created by Him, gathered by Him, to be a place where we
proclaim the glory and the deity and the wonder of the finished
work of the Lord Jesus. We delight in proclaiming that
our Lord Jesus sits on a throne in heaven and rules this universe. We delight to proclaim with our
Lord Jesus that His work is a finished work. For His children, sin is
gone. For His bride is robed with a
glorious robe. A robe that she could never have
woven for herself. but a robe that God causes her
to wear. And so these are vital lessons,
vital lessons about forgiveness, about forgiving spirits, forgiving
hearts. And one of the lessons that we
need to see at the beginning and continue to see is that real
Christianity is a matter of hearts. Real Christianity is something
that happens internally. Something that happens between
God and us. And it is not something that
can be seen by men with any clarity. The ordinances the Lord has left
us with. It's a wonderful thing to be
praying, knowing that the Lord, the representation of the Lord's
body is in me. The representation of the Lord's
blood. is in me and on my mouth as I
speak to you. But there is nothing to be seen.
The blessed ordinance of the Lord left of baptism. A half
an hour later you would never know that that person had been
baptized. It's a beautiful picture that
real religion is heart religion. And as we'll see, real prayer
is heart prayer. Real faith is a heart activity. And real forgiveness is a heart
activity. It's between you and God. And
one of the things we keep saying to people over and over again,
don't play games with God. You can play games with people.
I beg of you, I beg of anyone I get a chance to speak to, Don't
play games with God. Treat God with the seriousness
that eternity deserves. So in verse 25 we have this interesting
statement by the Lord. Whenever you stand praying. Now in Jesus' day people stood
to pray. And it was an honorable thing
to do. The Pharisees did it to be seen
by men. And the Lord Jesus says of the
Pharisees, they stand praying on the street corners. And the
Lord says this remarkable thing about those whose religion is
external to be seen by men. He says they have received their
reward. They sought the reward of the
praise of men. They got the reward of the praise
of men. End of story. But there are people
like the sinner, the publican, who stood at the temple a long
way off while the Pharisee prayed about his self-righteousness.
The tax collector stood a long way off and he stood to pray. But in the scriptures, people
are spoken of in praying in lots of different postures. Often
kneeling, sometimes lying down, sometimes lying on their bed,
sometimes flat on their faces, sometimes sitting. True prayer
is a spiritual exercise. And so the only thing that matters
in true prayer is that it is a private matter between you
and God. It is never done to please men
or to be more highly thought of. And I wonder sometimes, I'm
no expert on prayer, but I wonder sometimes if so many of us would
agree with Simon as he sat in that hospital last week and Matty
was at a stage where things looked very, very grim indeed. And he
was deeply, deeply troubled. And he said to me earlier this
week, he wonders if That was just the first time that he prayed. I wonder how many of us have
said lots of words in prayer. But true prayer comes through
broken hearts. Often true prayer is just a tear. So true prayer is a spiritual
exercise. In Matthew's Gospel, the Lord
Jesus gives us some very clear instructions about prayer. In
Matthew chapter 6, we have some really interesting descriptions. And in this passage, of course,
is what's called the Lord's Prayer. It's not really the Lord's Prayer. It's the disciples' prayer. It's
a prayer the disciples would have prayed. The best Lord's
Prayer in the Scriptures. is John chapter 17, a wonderful
prayer. And he said, when you pray you
shall not be like the hypocrites, verse 5 of chapter 6, for they
love to stand praying in the synagogues and on the corner
of the streets that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I
say to you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your
room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father
who is in the secret place, and your Father who sees in secret
will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use
vain repetitions as the heathens do, for they think that they
will be heard for their many words. Therefore do not be like
them, for your Father knows the things you have need of before
you ask Him. In this manner therefore pray,
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, give us today
our daily breads and forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors. And do not lead us into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom
and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so prayer is a secret
thing. Prayer is a private thing. Prayer
is between you and God. But there's another matter that
the Lord raises for these disciples in Mark's Gospel as he does in
the next verses in Matthew's Gospel. And these are challenging,
challenging words. And may God the Holy Spirit Write
these words of our Saviour on our hearts and continue to remind
us of them while we walk on this earth. In Matthew's Gospel, Chapter
6, verse 14. For if you forgive men their
trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if
you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your
Father forgive your trespasses. In Mark's Gospel, verse 25, whenever you stand
praying, forgive. If you have anything against
anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive
you your transgressions. But if you do not forgive, neither
will your Father who is in heaven forgive your transgressions."
These are very sobering words. They could be taken as words
about work's righteousness and work's activities. We know better
than that. These are words of grace, signs
of fruit. So let's look carefully at these
words briefly. Whenever you stand praying, forgive.
The next words are very sobering, aren't they? He says, he does not say, forgive
if anyone has anything against you, but forgive if you have
anything against anyone. In all the Lord's instructions,
when people were raising issues about what was happening in the
lives of other people, He immediately and invariably says to them,
don't worry about what's happening with other people, what's happening
in your life. Other people are in my sovereign
care. You concern yourself with them. When people came to him in Luke
13 asking about people who had been brutally murdered by Pilate,
and an industrial accident when the tower of Siloam fell, the
Lord said to them, the question was, are these great sinners?
Because all this has happened to them. And he says to them,
unless you repent, you too will perish. And so we are here all
as sinners. And as much as it grieves us,
we will continue to be here as sinners. Sins in our deeds and
sins in our thoughts. The reality of sin does not provide
an excuse to sin. No matter what the sin or who
it is against, it's always a grievous thing. Sin is a horrible thing. Against you and you only, says
David, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. As we read in Psalm 130, O Lord,
if you should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? Because of sin, we will always
be in one of two states. We will always be in need of
forgiveness from God and our brothers and sisters, and we'll
always be needing to be forgiven. The question for us is that real
prayer, for real prayer to happen when we come before God, if we
have anything against They're the Lord Jesus' words, they're
not mine. If we have anything, anything,
big, small, what has been missed by the world, if we have anything
against anyone, The big issue, of course, in these verses is
one of our faith relationship with God, who knows our hearts. When we are dealing with God,
and He calls on us to pray continually, if we are reminded of anything
we have against anyone, we just forgive. We just forgive. Why? I've titled this message Forgiving
Faith because true faith is forgiving faith. Saving faith comes from
a relationship with God. Knowing Him and being known by
Him. A God who has revealed Himself
in the Lord Jesus as the great forgiver. and The Great Healer. In a few days time on that cross,
as He hung there naked, bleeding, dying, mocked by men, He says,
Father forgive them. What remarkable words in the
circumstance. The very character of God. When people meet God, It leaves
those people who have met Him awestruck by His holiness. And they see themselves as Isaiah
did when he met the Lord Jesus. Woe is me for I am undone. It means I am unraveled. All
that I had as my being, all that I had as I thought about myself
is now just unwound and unraveled. I'm undone. Because I'm a man
of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean
lips. What a great description of our
world. For my eyes have seen the King,
the Lord of hosts. Simon has been taking us through
the story of Exodus and the people meeting God at Mount Sinai. And he reveals his character
in his name, the Lord of hosts. The Lord God, merciful and gracious,
long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth. Isaiah
met with God, and he met with himself, and he knows God's forgiveness. It comes from God's throne, at
God's appointed time. Then one of the seraphim flew
to me having a live coal which he had taken with the tongs from
the altar. And he touched my mouth with
it and said, Behold, this has touched your lips. Your iniquity
is taken away and your sin purged. What great words from God to
a sinner like Isaiah. What great words that God has
spoken to many people here. Your sin is purged. Your iniquity is taken away. As Romans 8.1 says, now, right
now, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So to know forgiveness is to
know both God and His true character and you yourself as both a sinner
but also a redeemed sinner. The reason the Lord Jesus can
say anything against anyone is that redeemed sinners are rescued
out of the kingdom of darkness and brought into a new kingdom,
a kingdom of light in the Lord Jesus. And they see light in
this world through new eyes. Yes, we will be hurt by the sins
of others, and we will hurt them, but one thing matters for God's
children above all else, the glory of God and the honour of
His name in a world which is opposed to Him and everything
He stands for. God's children are forgiving
people because they have met the Lord. God's children are forgiving
people because forgiveness is the fruit of faith. We have been forgiven so much. God's children have seen something
of their sins. God in His mercy hides most of
our sin from us. If we could really see sin and
see the sin of this world, as we will on that great day of
judgment, we will see people who have lived their lives in
rebellion against God and refused His Gospel. We will see them
exposed as they really are. We will see their sin. for what
it really is. We will see their pretended righteousness,
as God sees it, as an abomination. And we, with all of the angels,
all of the redeemed, and all of those who go to the pit of
hell, will say, God's judgments on this person are right and
just. We have been forgiven so, so
much. O Israel, says Hosea 39, you
have destroyed yourself. We are sinners who have plunged
ourselves into a pit of defilement. That heart that Mark 7 speaks
of, the heart which is the root of the sins that we see on the
surface. We have destroyed ourselves. Faith calls on God to give us
what He's promised, a forgiving heart. Faith acknowledges that
there will be a day when there will be perfect justice. The
hurts that God's people have suffered because of the Gospel
will be seen to be perfectly dealt with, with justice that
all will see. Faith waits. Faith prays. Faith proclaims. Faith also acknowledges
that God is sovereign. When he says he's working all
things for the good of those who love him and be called according
to his purpose, he means that nothing is left out. The sins
that cause hurts and hurt are 100% the responsibility of fallen
man and 100% controlled by Almighty God for His glory
and the good of His people. He sets limits on them. He does
overrule them for His glory. Faith waits for that judge who
must do right to exercise His justice. It's mine to avenge,
says the Lord. I will repay. It's not our job
to repay. It is God's job. Also, we don't
know what motivates the actions of others. We think we do, but
we are so, so prone to being wrong. Last week Simon was troubled
about the way I looked. In the services he was preaching,
and I thought he was preaching wonderfully, but beside me was
my wife who was in terrible, terrible pain, and I knew how
much she was struggling to restrain the pain she felt. And Simon
rang me up and said, were you displeased with some things I
said? I wasn't displeased with the things he said. I was really,
really troubled for my dear wife. We don't know what motivates
others' actions. We need to be careful. What we
perceive to be hurtful to us may not have originated from
wicked motives. The heart of man, says Jeremiah,
is desperately wicked and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
The answer is none of us can. And so much of our idle speculation
about what motivates other people is just wasteful and faithless. And when another sins, faith
says, their fall and their sin is just an example laid before
me by God of my fall and my sin. We all stood before God in the
garden, in our father Adam, we all stood there as one, all of
humanity, and said to God, we will not have you rule over us. We will not have your word as
our guide. We will take Satan's advice and
we will receive Satan's promised rewards. The mess that is the
result of sin and what we see in others' lives is our mess. When we see other's sin, we need
to first say, there I am. And if it wasn't for God's grace,
I would do that and much, much worse. And sin is very entangling
and it grows like a cancer. Hurts just grow and become part
of the bitterness in which we live our lives. And to forgive
and to forget is one sure way to bring that cancerous growth
to a stop. With our brothers and sisters,
we have no right to bring up before them sins the Lord God
himself has forgotten. Sins that he placed on his dear
son from before the foundation of the world. Sins that were
punished by God's holy justice until justice itself said enough. He is just and the justifier
of those who have faith in Him. And faith causes us to see that
we have never gained anything, nothing of spiritual good and
nothing of temporal good from bitterness and being unforgiving,
nothing. For God's children, God's honour,
is more important than my perceived rights. God's children have been
taken out of the families of this earth and gathered together
into a new family, a place of peace, a place of comfort, a
place of hope, a place of rest. I don't want to diminish the
fact that people have been hurt incredibly badly. All of us here
stand before each other and before God as people who are damaged. We are damaged people. As much
as we try and rear our kids without hurt, we hurt them. As much as
we try and love our husbands and our wives, with honesty and
sincerity, we hurt them. The hurt are real. But for God's
children, there is something better. There is something better
than bitterness. There is something better than living on the throne of
our own lives. It's our relationship with God.
The relationship with the Lord Jesus is the most important thing
in all of the world. One day very soon He will gather
His Bride together and His Bride will be a Bride who has tears
in her eyes because of what has happened in this world. And He
will take that bride and to each and every one of them He will
take them and He will wipe every tear from their eyes. And He
will be their God. They will be His people. All
of that is so much more important than clinging on to bitterness. If God is going to nurture our
fellowship and grow us together, then forgiveness of the sins
that we will commit against each other, not just the trivial ones
that I'm talking about with Simon, but big ones sometimes. The one
thing we need to see with our brothers and sisters is that
God has forgiven them. God has forgotten them. God forgives immediately. God forgives fully. The work of the Lord Jesus is
to take a bunch of sinners like us and present us before the
Father, wholly spotless and free from accusation, beyond blame. Why bring blame into the lives
of others while we're here? God forgives immediately. God
forgives fully. God forgives with a passion. As Octavius Winslow says, God
forgives us in a hearty way. God forgives sincerely and heartily. And God forgets. It's remarkable,
isn't it? God, whose knowledge is infinite,
says that he forgets. As Willis forgives, he forgets. I have blotted out your transgressions
as a cloud and your iniquities as a thick cloud. You have cast
all my sins behind your back. He's hidden them and buried them
in the depths of divine oblivion. And so God is gracious in forgiving and
He's gracious in forgetting. And the other reason in this
passage that forgiveness is so important is that forgiveness
is essential for prayers. The effective and fervent prayer
of a righteous man avails much. God's children to be praying
people are to be forgiving people. The grace of salvation and the
grace of faith brings the grace of forgiveness and the wonderful
grace that prayer brings. The grace of prayer that grows
our relationship with God and allows us, sinners like us, to
call Him Abba, Father. So the people the Lord saves
are not good, they're not righteous, they're not morally upright men
and women. They are just sinners. The Son
of Man came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, sinners
to be forgiving people, sinners to be joined together. It's an amazing, surprising forgiveness. And the only way God can forgive
sinners is that He must take their sins and He must give them
fully to the Lord Jesus. And the Lord Jesus, as Simon
said earlier, the willing servant takes those sins and calls them
His own, and He pays for them. He pays God's price for them. He honors the law of God, the
justice of God. The sinner is punished in the
Lord Jesus. And when God says it's finished,
God means that it's finished. May God grant us the grace to
be people of faith. The grace to be forgiving people. The grace to overlook the hurts. The grace to take them to our
God and leave them with Him. The grace to trust His sovereign
hand in everything that comes into our lives. It's come from
God, a Father who loves and loves and loves, and loves as much
as He forgives and forgives and forgives. Let's pray. Now Heavenly Father we do thank
you that we can call you our Father. We pray Heavenly Father
that you would work in our hearts, that we would be people of faith.
Father we want to have an honest relationship with you where we
acknowledge our hurts and we acknowledge our sins and that
we give them to you. And we trust Heavenly Father
in what You have done. Please help us to be a praying
people. Please help us to be a forgiving
people. Please help us, Our Father, to
be a faithful people. Please help us, Our Father, to
honour Your dear Son, who took all the sins of all of His people
and said they were His, and has put them away forever and ever,
never to be remembered again. We just praise you for the wonder
of saving and redeeming love, our Father. And we thank you
in Jesus' name. Amen.