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Jesus says, pay attention to yourself. If your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, what matters most is not what you think, but what God thinks. What matters most is not what you think about God, but what God thinks about you. And what matters most is not what you think about your neighbor or what you think about yourself but what God thinks about your neighbor and what God thinks about you. So we want to come to church and consider this first: What does God think?
I always wonder, you know when you’re watching the Olympics or something and the gymnast gets off the gymnast thing and the rings or whatever and they’re being interviewed. The person says, well, how do you think you did? And I always want the gymnast to say, well, it doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the judge thinks. Ask him what he thought. That’s what matters, and it’s true also for us. When we go to stand before the judge of all flesh on the last day, he’s not going to ask us, how do you think you did? How did you live? How did you rank yourself? You think you deserve in or out? No.
Gospel, God is the judge. And in fact, we know from the Word of God how He judges us. We know from the law how He should consider us as sinners, deserving of His wrath and anger and condemnation, but we know through the gospel how He does think of us: as His own dear children, as His forgiven, beloved Christians, His own family.
He judges us to be holy and innocent and perfect and righteous in Christ by His blood, His suffering and death, so that we know this most important thing of all. We know, can you imagine it? We know what God thinks about us, that He loves you, that He delights in you, that He treasures you.
Here’s Isaiah 12. This is a great verse. Isaiah 12, verse 1, you will say in that day, I give thanks to the Lord for though you were angry with me, your anger is turned away so that you might comfort me. The Lord ought to be angry with you, but He’s not. He’s not angry. He delights in you. He loves you. He forgives you all your sins.
Now this is what we have to know first of all, what God thinks about us. And then, after we get this down, we can start to think about how we’re supposed to think about others, and even how we’re supposed to think about ourselves. Now that, by the way, is the business of our Gospel lesson from Luke chapter 17 today. Jesus is teaching us how we ought to consider others and how we ought to consider ourselves.
In fact, we can divide the text up into three parts—maybe four parts, maybe two parts; I’m not sure. But the first big chunk is Jesus teaching us how we ought to consider our neighbor, and then He teaches us about faith, and then He teaches us how we ought to think of ourselves. So let’s take a look.
First, how are we to consider our neighbor? And Jesus actually talks about this in two distinct ways: how we’re supposed to think of our neighbor and the children and those that we’re around who are not sinning, and then how are we supposed to think of the people who are sinning against us?
So first, how do we consider our neighbor and their sin? Jesus says, verse 1, temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that if he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Well, Jesus is apparently pretty serious about this. A millstone, that’s what the mafia used to call the concrete shoes, remember that? A millstone is this huge big stone; the way that it would work, you’d have two stones and one would be kind of a flat stone and the other is a round stone and it would have a hole in the center, and it would sit on an axis.
Then they would carve this kind of funnel into the stone itself so you could dump the wheat on top of the stone and it would go down through the hole and it would be ground up between these two stones. So the bigger the stone, the more finely the flour would be ground. These stones were often so big that it would take two or three people to push, or on the town grindstone, they would have an ox or a donkey that would pull the stone around like this.
Now Jesus says, can you imagine? It would be better for you to have one of these millstones tied around your neck and you were tossed into the sea rather than to cause one of the children to stumble into sin. So Jesus says that we need to be careful about how we affect the people around us, and we need to be careful most especially about how we affect their conscience.
Now, a couple of things on this. The first is that we know that there’s a lot of things that affect our own conscience and the way that our conscience is operating, but the thing that most affects the conscience—the things that most affect what you feel to be right or feel to be wrong—is your peers and the people who are around you. It’s one of the reasons why it’s becoming more and more difficult to be a Christian in our day, because we come here and we’re surrounded by Christians, by those who love the Lord Jesus and are called according to His name, and so we don’t have any problem boldly confessing our faith, “I believe in God the Father Almighty and in His Son Jesus Christ.”
We boldly confess that together, but then when we go to work and we’re surrounded by peers who don’t believe in Jesus, who don’t trust in the Lord, who look down on us for our faith in Christ, now it’s harder to make that confession, is it not? It just affects us; it affects our conscience, it affects our boldness, it affects the things that we say.
Now, we talk about this—that our peers affect the conscience—a lot when we’re talking to the kids. We talk about peer pressure, right? About how your peers will pressure you into understanding what’s right or what’s wrong, but it’s not just for the children; it is for all of us. For all of us, where we are and who is around us and who our peers are affects the things that we think are right and wrong.
And now we’ve got to know that and understand it, but even more importantly, we have to understand that this is a two-way street. Now here’s an odd thing. I think I’ll say it and you’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s true,” but it’s hard for us to understand it. And that is that peer pressure goes both ways, but we only feel it when it’s being exerted on us and not when we’re exerting it on other people.
Now how strange is that? We only feel the pressure that we’re receiving, and we can’t tell that we’re actually giving out peer pressure. That when we’re around people, we’re actually affecting the way that they think, the way that they live, the way that they understand right and wrong. Now I guess I have a little advantage because I get to see my effect on people’s peer pressure because I wear my collar around.
Whenever I walk into a place with my collar on, it’s like instant conscience activation. So like, I’ll walk onto the elevator at the hospital and the person says, “Hey, how’s it going?” I know I should go to church more often. Or this is the best: whenever I’m meeting new people and I’m not in my collar, they don’t know who I am, and they’re just talking normal, and then they say, like I was on the airplane coming home this week and was just talking to this guy. We were just chatting, and then he says, I asked him what he did. He told me, he says, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a pastor, Lutheran pastor.” And I can see him running through everything that he said to me, trying to figure out what he should be embarrassed about.
But this is the case for all of us. Now, this is the thing—that you exert pressure on the people that are around you for good or for ill. You, just by your presence and by your conversation and by the way you carry yourself, you affect the way people understand what’s right or what’s wrong. And Jesus, in this text, is telling us that we are to be good stewards of that peer pressure. So He wants us to ask the question: Is our presence with our friends and with our family and with the people that we meet, the people that we work with, is our presence and our conversation and our friendship—does it tempt people to sin or does it encourage them to do what is right?
Jesus says that if you are there tempting people to sin, it would be better for you to have a millstone around your neck and you would be tossed into the sea. So we want to recognize this and we want to cultivate this. We want to know that whenever we’re around people that we are affecting the way that they think about right and wrong, and we want to take advantage of that so that we encourage them to do what’s right and to not do what’s wrong.
Now not only this—this is how we consider other people—but Jesus goes on to say to teach us how we ought to consider the people that have sinned against us. So not only do we want to encourage people to do good, but then Jesus is telling us how we are to treat people who have sinned against us. This starts in verse 3. Jesus says this: pay attention to yourself. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in the day and he turns to you seven times saying, “I repent,” you must, you must forgive him.
So the Lord Jesus sets us to forgive each other and especially to forgive the people who sin against us. Now, ever since we’ve moved to Austin, I mentioned this in Bible class, ever since we’ve moved to Austin I’ve been meditating on this particular question: why has the Lord Jesus given to us the gift of such terrible traffic? And I have a number of theories, but perhaps this is one reason that we can count on, that we know is true, is that the Lord Jesus wants us to practice what He preaches in this text: that we forgive the people that sin against us.
So, your car is like a little petri dish for practicing forgiveness. That we every day consider those who hurt us and wound us and sin against us one way or another, and we forgive. Now this is important. I think the devil attacks us in three major ways. Kind of like if you imagine yourself being at battle, there’s the assault on the front, and then the assault from behind and then the assault from the flank and the assault from the back.
The assault from the front is the assault on faith, the assault on trust, the assault on the doctrine. But then there’s the assault that comes from behind, which is the assault of love. And this is how it works: When the devil’s assaulting you from the front, he’s tempting you to sin, but when he’s assaulting you from the back, he’s causing other people to sin against you. And what happens when we’re sinned against? And we know when we are sinned against, we become angry. When we become angry at someone, and then we don’t feel bad about not loving them.
In fact, let’s define anger this way: that anger is justified lovelessness. It’s saying I don’t have to love that person because look at what they’ve done to me. And that this goes in all sorts of different directions. Maybe I’m going to have vengeance on them. Maybe I’m going to ignore them and treat them indifferently. Maybe I’m going to talk bad about them or whatever. I mean anger shows up in all of these different ways. But here’s the problem: we don’t feel bad about this kind of anger; we don’t feel bad about our own sin because after all, they deserve it. They did it first. They sinned against me. They hurt me. They made me angry and they deserve my frustration. They deserve this false treatment. Doesn’t God care about what’s right or what’s wrong? Doesn’t God care about justice and getting even? Doesn’t God care about this?
And so we sin against people, and we don’t even recognize that we’re sinning against them. Now, look, all of us have people that have sinned against us and hurt us, and all of us have people that we’re angry with, upset with. Listen to what Jesus says: forgive them, and keep forgiving them. They sin against you, they sin against you again, they sin against you again, and again, again, and again, and again, all in the same day, and they come to you and say, “I’m sorry,” Jesus says, forgive. In fact, He says it in the most emphatic of terms. He says, you must forgive them, because your Father forgives you.
Now this gets us to Jesus talking about faith, because the disciples hear this command of Jesus and they say, it’s too much, Lord. How, how could we possibly be expected to have this much mercy and this much forgiveness? Verse 5, the apostles say to the Lord Jesus, increase our faith. In other words, if you expect us to keep these demands, you better give us a lot more faith than we have now.
And Jesus says back to them, it’s not about the strength of your faith or the size of your faith or the amount of your faith; don’t be confused. It’s about who your faith is in. In verse 6 the Lord says, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to the mulberry tree—in fact the text says you could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and the tree would obey you.
The disciples say give us more faith and Jesus says, you don’t need more faith, you don’t need stronger faith, you need faith in the right thing; and this is the point that we want to really be clear on. You can have very strong faith in an idol or a false god, and you will still be doomed, but if you have mustard seed size faith in the true God, you will be saved. Consider this example. Two men are rappelling off of a cliff, and one has great faith in the rope and the other doesn’t trust it at all, but both make it to the bottom. Why? Because the rope is strong.
When they go back the next week, the same guy with great faith jumps over the edge of the cliff and the other guy with very weak faith just inches his way over, and they both fall. Why? Because the rope was weak. So for faith, what matters is not the strength of your faith but who your faith is in, and Jesus is telling us that when our faith is in the God who took on our flesh and blood to bear our sins and die for us to set us free and forgive us all of our sins, then we can actually forgive our neighbor.
And then Jesus goes on to say how we should consider ourselves. We consider our neighbor to encourage them in good works; we consider our neighbor to forgive them their sins; and then Jesus teaches how we are supposed to teach or think or feel about ourselves. Now Jesus does it with this little parable of the master and the servant sitting down to dinner. But I think this is a really important question for us to consider, especially in our own time.
Now, dear saints, I want you to think about this. As far as I can tell, throughout the entire history of humanity, all of the people who thought about these things and taught about these things thought that it was dangerous for us to think too highly of ourselves. You can read the ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Hindus and Buddhists and any sort of wisdom from any sort of time in human history; there was always the danger of pride or hubris, that if I think too much of myself, I become dangerous to myself and I become dangerous to our neighbor.
And that has been true for all of human history until about fifty years ago, when we decided in our own culture that things should be the opposite. In fact, our culture considers low self-esteem to be the greatest danger to the individual and society. Now, isn’t that interesting? We consider low self-esteem, not high self-esteem, to be the dangerous thing, and so in our culture, we are taught every day that we are supposed to cultivate a positive self-image, that we are supposed to think highly of ourselves, that we’re supposed to have good self-esteem.
Now I think that that is wrong, but I think that both, in fact, are wrong. And here’s the danger that we have to face. Apart from the gospel, we really have only two choices about how to think about ourselves: that we think of ourselves either as pretty good or as pretty bad. Pride or despair. Apart from the gospel, we’re going to break in one of two directions. We’re going to break in the Pharisee direction, or we’re going to break in the Judas direction, or we’re going to go back and forth between the two.
And so we come back to this question: how should we think of ourselves? And we recognize before we answer that we have to know how God thinks of us. Does God value us? I remember when I was a kid I collected baseball cards, and we always used that. My brothers and I used to get these baseball card magazines, and it would have a list of all of the cards, and it would say how much the card was worth.
And I remember one day, very excitedly, I took the baseball card and I took the magazine to my dad and I said, “Look dad, this card is worth 30 bucks or 42 dollars or something like that.” I thought I was rich, you know. And my dad said to me, “Only if you can find someone who will pay that much for it.” He was never convinced that they had any value at all, in fact.
But this is the point: something is only worth what someone will pay for it. Something only has value if someone is willing to pay for it. And this is true also for you. Your value—now listen carefully—your value is based on what God is willing to pay for you. And look at what He’s paid. Look at the price—not gold, not silver, His holy precious blood, His innocent suffering and death. All of this has been given to you. Jesus has given His life for you so that you might be His own children, and He’s called you His children, the children of the King. But He has said as He gives you these gifts, don’t be too proud about it.
You know that you’re purchased, that you’re won, that you’re delivered, that you’re seated in the heavenly places, but Jesus says that you ought to consider yourself to be nothing more than a lowly servant and that you should get after the work of a lowly servant. Jesus wants you to know that He considers you to be His own dear child and friend, but He wants you to consider yourself to be nothing more than a servant of your neighbor.
So the forgiveness of sins, dear saints, the forgiveness of sins is an exaltation to humility. Here’s how Jesus says it: will any of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he comes in from the field, “Come at once and recline at the table”? Would he not rather say to him, “Make supper, get dressed, serve me while I eat and while I drink, and then afterwards you can eat and drink”? Does the master thank the servant because he did what he commanded? No.
So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, are to say, “We are unworthy servants. We have only done what is our duty.” This, dear saints, is how you are to think of yourself: lowly servants. Because in the gospel, there is no room for pride, and there is no room for despair. There is only faith and love and hope that looks to the day that the Lord Jesus will call us down to sit at the feast by Him and say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
When we consider ourselves, we consider ourselves with lowliness and with humility, rejoicing most of all that when God sees us, He sees His own forgiven holy children. May God grant us this clarity and this peace. Amen. And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
