The Ancients Were Told #2

So last week we started this new section in the Sermon on the Mount, and the sermon series title is The Ancients Were Told. We're going to go through a number of different things where Jesus has a structure, and that structure is basically, you have heard that it was said, but I say to you. And he's taking some law or some prophecy, and he's saying, you thought this is what it means, but I'm telling you, no, it means this other thing. And last week we started out with the first one, which had to do with murder. And my goal last week, it was very sophisticated and complex, was simply to get all of us to see that we violate daily this commandment, the sixth commandment, and that we are murderers. And that the sin of murder is not simply causing someone's heart to stop beating and their lungs to stop filling, but that there's actually a lot of other things that we do that are of a fabric.

that sin, even if we haven't gone to that extent. That was my whole point, to get you to go away thinking, I'm a murderer. At my small group last week, I was talking with the people there, and one of the men, we were talking with the kids, what did you understand and say? And one of the guys said, well, I was an usher, so I didn't hear the whole sermon, but I got the part about me being a murderer. I thought, mission accomplished. Good. That was the point. And at the end of the sermon last week, I said, you know, what we would like, having had this tension, created or exposed in us as we would like for the pressure to be released and for someone to say, but it's okay, or don't worry, or God takes care of that sort of thing, or you're not as bad as you think, or some sort of lessening of the stakes. And I said, you know, it's interesting that Jesus himself doesn't do that. Actually, the structure of this passage is for him to say, you're a murderer,

if you don't repent, you will go to hell. If we had to summarize this, you've heard that it was said, but I say to you, that would be the one sentence summary. You commit sins, the sin of murder, and if you don't repent from it soon, now, you'll go to hell. Which is a pretty shocking thing to hear. So last week we got as far as saying we're the murderers, and this week we're going to be talking about the exhortation that he gives. which is that we need to repent soon, now. That's the point of this sermon. If I were to come and ask you, what did I preach about today? You would say, you told me that if I don't repent very quickly of my sins, that I'm going to end up in hell. And I'd say, you were listening, good job. So my goal over the next 30, 40 minutes or so is to help open that up and help us to see why we don't repent, how we don't repent, and what it would look like for us to repent.

Our text is again Matthew chapter 5, verses 21 to 26. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. You have heard that the ancients were told, you shall not commit murder. And whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court. And whoever says to his brother, you good for nothing, shall be guilty before the supreme court. And whoever says you fool, shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell. Therefore, if you are presenting your offering at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother and then come and present your offering. Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you be thrown into prison. Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. You know how when you start thinking about something, you get something on your mind and all of a sudden you see bunches of connections at all kinds of other places? Well, that was happening to me today when Timothy was just now reading the Scripture lesson. With what he drew attention to, he says, you know, is it better to obey than to sacrifice? And I wonder if, I'm thinking about this and about repentance and thinking, well, Is repentance really that big of a deal? Is that really what we need to do, or is it something we can delay and put off? And there were really steep consequences for Saul and his sins. God says, I'm sorry I made you the king, and I'm tearing the kingdom away from you, and I'm giving it to your neighbor who what? Remember what it says? Who is better than you. Now that's offensive. That's really offensive.

The other part of that passage that's really offensive, just thinking about murder and killing, the command is, go kill. Go kill who? Go kill the Amalekites. Who are the Amalekites? All them and everything. The order is, you are my eraser. You are to go to that land and you are to erase those people and all their stuff as though they were never there. It's awful. And the part that's hard for me and very offensive is when I look at where the people... what type of sins they committed. The sin was they brought back the spoils. Huh? The good things, yeah. It says the good things. But what I was left there reading is, like, if I was going to spare something, wouldn't you spare the children and the infants and the women? But it doesn't say that's what they did. And you're like, man, these people are really, really sinful. Like, the thing that they, all they could think of was, what can we get out of this? What is in this for me? I'll take the wealth.

but I'll kill the children. Now, God told them to, and I'm sitting here going, how's that work? And then Samuel redefines all those people, those Amalekites, and he says, you were to go and to kill the sinners. And Agag was a wicked man who had killed women and children, and that's why he had to be killed. And so we don't know all of the mind of God. We don't know exactly all the details that led up to this destruction that he's pouring out on them. But we trust by faith that God... does all things well, that what he's doing, what he says is right and true. And that when we find a place where we're like, yeah, I don't think it's that big of a deal, or I think I might have another way. I've got a system update. I can tweak this a little bit. We should realize we have a real big problem. We shouldn't tinker with and toy with and trim off the things that God says or the things that God does. And so I'm looking at this passage and going, repentance needs to be very quick, swift.

or we're going to be in trouble, bad trouble, eternal trouble. And I think the thing that's most striking about this passage is what the people are told to stop doing to go repent. What were they doing? Well, we'll read it again. Therefore, starting off there in the middle, therefore, if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, Leave your offering there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother and then come and present your offering. So what was the person doing? Well, they were worshiping. They were worshiping. They were doing what you're doing right now. And you're left thinking, I'm left thinking, we're really twisted. Like how screwed up does your head have to be to think, you know what, I can have.

hatred, murder in my heart with somebody else. And what I'm going to do is just not worry about that. I'm going to come worship. How offensive that is to God. How offensive that is to God. Does the Lord require, does he prefer sacrifice or obedience? Well, 1 Samuel says he requires obedience. They say, oh, we were going to come back and worship. We're going to offer these things up to you. And he says, that's not what I told you to do. You lie. You lie to yourself. You lie to me. And you do it to cover up the fact that you refuse to do what I said. And we can look at them and say, man, bad people, stupid people, sinful people. Have you ever come into the house of the Lord to worship with anger in your heart? Are you here this morning with anger in your heart, frustrated, angry at somebody? You go, we're just going to time out for that. We're here to worship. This is exactly what is being addressed in this passage.

that you would have committed some sort of sins, that you would come into the presence of God and act like those sins don't matter because we're here to worship now. As though you can worship and offer anything up to God that's acceptable to him when your life is full of wickedness. It's a really strange thing here. It says that they come and they're presenting their offering at the altar. And you're like, well, what kind of offering were they offering? And it doesn't really say. Some other translations would translate the word as gift. Some might translate it as sacrifice. But offering or gift are the things. So you're like, well, is this a guilt offering or is this a sin offering or is this a free will offering or is this a love offering? And we don't really know. And what I contend is it doesn't really matter what type of offering they were offering up. The fact is the greater context of offering things up to God on the altar, which means taking some sort of animal or incense or food or something and either killing it if it's an animal or cooking it, burning it if it's incense or oil or bread or whatever, is that you're giving something to God. There's a transaction going on between the sacrifice or the one offering and God, the one who's receiving that offering. There's some transaction going on here. Why does there need to be

sacrifice at all. Why did the Israelites have to come and bring their animals and bring their oil and bring their incense and bring their flour and their all that? Why'd they have to bring any of that stuff to God? Wasn't it because of their sins? Here we are offering an animal to be slaughtered. And the whole reason they're doing that, the whole reason God says to do that is to teach them, you sin. And your sins need to be paid for. And death is what's required. Blood is what's required. So you're to bring the best of your flock in here and kill it and burn it and give it away because you sinned. Maybe it wasn't a guilt offering. Maybe they weren't bringing an animal. Maybe they were bringing a free will offering or a love offering, something that's just to express their gratitude for God. Why were they thankful?

What was the root of their gratitude? God's provision? God's mercy? His kindness? His acceptance of them? Here Jesus says, if that's what you're doing, if you've come in, if you're worshiping, if you're having a transaction with God, and there you remember that there's a problem. And the problem, he says, is that your brother has something against you, which is worth noting. He doesn't say that you remember that someone sinned against you, but rather that you sinned against someone else. He says, if you come to present your offering and dare you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering, go before the altar, go be reconciled. Then come back and present your offering. So he's telling us what's important here. We would think coming and worshiping is like, well, all that other stuff just...

It's inconsequential. It's not as important. What we need to do is we need to come and we need to worship. And Jesus says, no, you can't. You're not. It's not acceptable or pleasing to me for you to do that. Go, if you remember, at that time, go and be reconciled to your brother. It's interesting, this phrase, that your brother has something against you. It's sort of like it's a judgment that gets at our hearts. Have you ever been in an argument with someone or a fight? And you're fighting with them. And maybe at the beginning of the fight or maybe at some time during the fight, you realize they're right. Which is to realize you're wrong. You turn on a dime and admit it, right? You don't. You don't. You don't do it in the moment. You don't do it later that day. You don't do it tomorrow. Maybe, maybe we get a few days out, you get convicted and you're like, you know, I was wrong. And they're like, yeah, I know. Right?

That whole thing that's going on there where you know that they're right is what Jesus is getting. If they have something against you, meaning if you said, let's go talk to a stranger. Let's go talk to our small group leader or one of the elders or something. Let's let them judge. You know you'd lose. That's what he's getting at here. They have something against you, meaning they've got a legitimate claim. You failed. And you know you failed. If you're worshiping God and you remember, you know what? I failed. I failed. I did wrong. Stop what you're doing. Go to the person and say so. There are temptations that go along with this, though. You sin against your spouse, sin against your children, sin against your parents, siblings. I think there's a real temptation to take those sins that we commit against people and say, well, I will sort that out with God.

and not with the people I sinned against. Have you never sinned against somebody and then decided, well, I'm going to go confess my sin to the Lord? But the idea of going to the person you sinned against, you're like, oh, no, no, no, we're not doing that. When you sin against someone else, have you sinned against God? Yes. Is every sin that you commit against someone else? No. Sometimes you sin directly against God. But I think a lot of the time the sins we commit are not just against God. but against someone else as well. So the example we've got of this sort of thing being teased out, and it's actually, bear with me, is David with Bathsheba, right? He goes, commits adultery. They have a child. She's pregnant, and he says, oh, now we have to cover that up. And he tries really hard to get Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, to come home from war, go home to your wife. Well, Uriah won't because Uriah is faithful.

Uriah sleeps on the floor, and he tries to get Uriah drunk and says, surely if I get him drunk, he'll go home and he won't remember, and there will be plausible deniability. Surely he went home and had relations with his wife. That's where the baby came from. Well, Uriah won't do it. Even when he's drunk, he won't do it. David's got a problem. So David's solution is to add murder to his adultery. Now, there's some sense in which David doesn't realize what he's doing. He doesn't recognize the way he's... What he's done to Uriah is awful. You get the impression he's a hard heart about it. He's like, well, it's just what needs to be done. Now, maybe that's because he's a king and he's just used to being able to do things the way he wants. He can just push his weight around. And if someone dies, well, then that's just the cost of doing business in my kingdom. At any rate, David's not convicted of what he did toward Uriah or that really what he did was a sin against God. Now, it is true that David, through all of this,

was a man after God's own heart and did want to serve God. He cared about serving God well. And if you read the testimony of his life, both before and after this, you see him doing things that you're like, the only explanation is that dude loves God. But in this instance, you don't see that coming through. And what we can conclude is he didn't see this as a sin against God. He's like, this is just like what happens. David had plenty of wives. He was not a pure man, a faithful man. His life was not marked by fidelity to his wife. And so at some point, Nathan the prophet comes to David and says, David, I want to tell you a story. A story about a man who's got a lamb, just one of them, and another man who's got a bunch of them. Well, the man with a bunch of them, a bunch of lambs, he decides that those aren't good enough. He wants the lamb from the guy who only has one. And so he takes it, steals it. David gets really angry. I'm really paraphrasing Nathan's thing here.

David gets angry and he says, that man's awful. What he did was terrible. He should be put to death. And Nathan then says to him, you're that man. That's what you did. Now in David's sight, that's not what he had done until he hears it in a parable. And was David concerned that primarily that the master that had many lambs had sinned against the man with one? No. He was concerned that what that man had done was a sin against God. Because in his lament, his own confession of his behavior in Psalm 51, he says, Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. And he says that to who? Well, to the Lord, right? So our sins that we commit against each other are sins against God. And I think that this verse gets twisted and taken out of context to justify not repenting to the people that we sin against. My sins were against God. No, they weren't only against God.

And I think that we can read this passage, this psalm, and be like, well, there it is, chapter and verse. Psalm 51.4 says, I didn't sin against anyone else, just you and you alone, O Lord. And I think not everything is as literal as you read it. Are you really willing to stand and make the argument and say that you can commit adultery and then murder and say you've not sinned against anyone but God? Do you think David was that foolish? I don't think David was as concerned about his sin against Bathsheba or against Uriah. Because he didn't see it as a sin against God. But once he recognized it was a sin not against just them, but against God, all of a sudden it recast the whole situation. You have really screwed up. Death has been the consequence. Here's an interesting thing. David commands for Uriah to be put to death. And he tells his commander of his army, don't worry about it, just do what I said. And the guy knows what he's doing is wrong. And then they get the news back. He's dead. And David sends word again and he says,

The will of God's been done. He's just pouring water on the guy's conscience. Don't worry about it, man. You're just doing what you're told. Then the news comes, and of course Bathsheba has to be told. And so Bathsheba's told, your husband died at war. And do you know what it says that David did after that? It says that he took Bathsheba and he comforted her. And he laid with her when they got married. So he took her as his wife. Right after she found out that Uriah had been killed, after her days of mourning. There was a time where she went to mourning, and then it says David.

comforted her, laid with her, took her as his wife. Now the question is, and Scripture doesn't answer this question, did David ever tell Bathsheba that he killed her husband? The Bible doesn't tell us if he did. You might be inclined to say, well, he said there in Psalm 51 that he hadn't sinned against anyone but God. And I'm like, if that's how you think, you're not a Christian. It's just not a Christian way to think. To think that David didn't know that he had sinned against Bathsheba. To think that he would live having killed her husband and never tell her what he did is unbelievable to me. From the reading that I did and the studying, I think the people seem to believe, the commentators and stuff, seem to think that she knew. How she knew, we're not told in Scripture, so we can't say, and this is what happened. But everyone seems to think, just like because they have a brain in their head, that she found out she knew.

what David did. What I hope is that David went to her and said to her, I killed your husband because of what we did. And it's only right that I would take you and provide for you and care for you because I've ruined your life. We're not told what he did. However you might interpret Psalm 51.4, against you and you only have I sinned. You have to hold it up and reconcile it somehow with what Jesus says here, which is that if you're worshiping God and if you're serving God and you recognize that you've sinned not against God but against your brother, you're supposed to go confess to them. That's clearly what Jesus tells us to do. And why, I think, we stand on good ground in thinking that David did tell Bathsheba that he did what he did. It's imperative from our text that we confess our sins and seek the forgiveness that we need, not only from God but also from the people that we sin against.

So much as it depends on you, be at peace with all men, you do realize that the way you have peace with someone else many times is through confessing your own sins and saying, I failed you. I sinned against you. And then you stop and you don't go on and say, but here's why. And then turn it into being their fault or someone else's fault. You see the same sort of thing happening in the trouble of... Unconfessed sin in your relationship with God. If you have unconfessed sin in your life, it damages, it mars your relationship with God. This is applied to husbands and wives. In 1 Peter 3.7, it says, You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way as with someone weaker, since she is a woman. And show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life. So these are instructions to husbands that they need, right? And it's presumed that husbands fail at this. And that's why Peter instructs us.

to do these things. And then the final phrase is this, do these things so that your prayers will not be hindered. What does it mean to have your prayers hindered? Like what would hinder your prayer? You could interpret it as you won't want to pray, but I don't think that's actually it. I think that the way that your prayers are hindered is that they're hindered in that God doesn't accept them, hear them, or receive them because of what you've done with your wife. And so Peter's instruction here to husbands is to treat their wives well. Show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life. And if you don't, your prayers will be hindered. God won't hear them. He won't receive them. And so the implicit exhortation from Peter is, husbands, if you failed in this way, go to your wives and confess your sins to your wives so that God will receive your prayers. Same sort of thing going on here in Matthew 5.

If you're presenting your offering at the altar and you remember that your brother has something against you, stop what you're doing, go be reconciled, then come back. If you won't, whatever it is you think you're doing in worshiping God is unacceptable to him. Now that's a hard line and a hard thing for me to say because I'd bet a dime to a dollar that there is more than one couple in here this morning that have fought and are not resolved. And we're about to have the Lord's Supper and there's this like mounting pressure. of like, are we going to get it straightened out? And am I going to forgive? And is he going to confess? And is it going to be okay? Or are we just going to fall right back into it this afternoon? And it's like, you know, and here I am putting my finger on it. But in me putting my finger on it, all I'm trying to do is tell you what Jesus has said here. I remember being exhorted early on in my marriage not to miss worship because I was fighting with my wife. The pastor came and said, stop fighting with your wife. You're here to worship God. Yeah, seems to be the opposite of this, right?

He's like, just stop that. What he was saying was not actually stop it. What he was saying was repent. Fix it. Fix it now. And that is exactly what Jesus says. Go first, be reconciled to your brother. Later on, he says, make friends quickly. How often are the fights and the conflicts that we end up with in other people, why are they so extended? Why do they take so long? Isn't it often just because you won't admit you failed? You won't say, I did it. You're right. We defend ourselves. We make excuses for ourselves. We justify in all kinds of ways. Not my fault. I was tired. They were sick. You did this thing first. Or you did this thing in the past. Or I was worried you were going to do this thing again. Or that pastor who exhorted me in that way was exhorting me to do exactly what Jesus was saying here, which is resolve the problem now.

And if you think that it has to take this big bunch of time, you're wrong. Sometimes it does take a long time because we just want to be angry at each other. I've asked you before and I'll ask you again, has anyone ever confessed their sins to you and you didn't want to forgive them? They said, will you forgive me? And you said, nothing. That can make a conflict take longer than it should do. That's the sort of offer that if it's made in faith, doesn't last very long before, you know, it doesn't have a very long half-life before all of a sudden they're angry again.

Because now you won't forgive them. And they're like, what else do you want me to do? I'm not fighting you. I see what I've done. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Will you forgive me? In your heart, you're going, no, I won't. Stop what you're doing. Hurry and go to the one you sinned against and satisfy their grievance against you before it's too late. That's what's going on when Jesus says, make friend quickly with your opponent at law. It's interesting, the person you fight with has different titles in this passage. They're your brother. They're your friend. They're also your opponent at law. And he tells us they're going to win if you get to the law. If you get to the judge, they're going to be the one who wins. You're going to lose. So stop what you're doing. Hurry, go to them and satisfy their grievance. Don't let the fact that you've sinned against someone lay. Don't let it lay. Don't say, oh, we'll get to it. Oh, it'll be okay. Oh, they'll forgive me. They should forgive me. I think sometimes we justify our own

unwillingness to repent because we're like, well, they sinned first or they sinned too. Or whenever I confess my sins to them, they never confess their sins to me. And we have those and other reasons in our head for why we don't have to do what Jesus says to do right here. You remember last week, I gave an example of children and I said, you know, it's possible for a father to come into the room where two kids are fighting and they both are saying, I'm innocent and they're guilty. And the father comes in and he says, no, you're both guilty. Because you're both responsible for your own actions. And the thing that the other person does doesn't make it okay for you to do what you did. And you really do, as Christians, have to learn to examine yourself and look at yourself apart from what has been done to you. In this life, you'll have trouble. People will sin against you. And you wouldn't be surprised for me to say to you, many times they won't apologize. Take yourself as an example.

Don't use somebody else's sin as a justification for not obeying Jesus at this point. If you've become angry, if you've committed murder or any other sin, go quickly and be reconciled to them. Don't try to hide behind the excuse that, well, I'll sort it out with God. You didn't just sin against God. You didn't. When you find in your heart that you don't want to go to the person you sinned against and say, I screwed up again, ask. the question why and answer it honestly and thoroughly why don't you want to go i don't want to hurt them uh the repentance is not what hurts them the thing you need to repent of is what hurt them it's really a bad bad like i mean if you guys who like logic and all these neat everything tied up with square corners and nice bows the repentance isn't what hurts them it's just happy we think it is because that's when they find out that we at what we actually did

And we think, oh, I wouldn't want to tell them and hurt them. And it's like, well, it's too late. Do you want out and free? Do you want to be forgiven? Or would you rather have that thing you won't confess to them brought before the judge and to go to hell? These are your choices. There's not other choices. These are your choices. Will you stand before the judge of heaven and earth, the one who created it all, and defend yourself? Many times in this life, we become the judges of our own behavior and we decide what's okay and what's not. And we do that also for the people around us, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our church, in our neighborhood, wherever. We make these judgments about whether they're right or wrong or what they did is okay or not okay. But in the end, our judgments don't matter. Because when we stand before God, the justifications and the judgments that we formed, we don't get to submit those like an amicus brief and say, I'd like you to consider these things as you're making your judgment, Lord. He will judge according to his standards. And so it would be very good for us in this life to realize that there is a standard that we didn't set that we are going to be held up against. And the standard is not simply, did you fail to meet the standard? The answer to that question is a resounding yes. You failed to meet the standard.

So the question then becomes, did you repent when you saw that you didn't meet the standard? Did you turn away from the sin? Or did you say, there's a song that I really like by Johnny Cash called The Mercy Seat. It's quite an intense song. And it's the song of a man on death row. And it's him telling, saying that he never did what he was accused of. He maintained his innocence the whole time. I never did it. I never did it. I'm not afraid of doing it, but I never did it. And the imagery of the song is that they're hooking up the electrodes, and he's feeling the electricity pulsing through him, and it's getting more intense and more intense. And at the very end of it, he goes, basically, I never did what they said, but I think I might have told a lie. And you're like, what lie did he tell? What lie did he tell? Well, I think the most obvious lie that he told was that he had told himself he was innocent when, in fact, he was guilty. And he didn't realize it until they turned the electricity up high enough to kill him, and he couldn't get away from it.

Self-deception is real. We can convince ourselves of our own innocence and be wrong. And that's a really scary thing. To live your life saying, there's no consequence for that, and then to get to the judgment seat of God for him to say, no, there is. You remember in Matthew where Jesus talks about the judgment. He says, we're going to gather you all together, all the sheep and the goats, and I'm going to separate you out, and I'm going to say to the sheep, these good things. And when you saw me, you clothed me and you visited me and you fed me and you did all these good things. And they say, when did we see you and do that? Those are the good ones. On the other side, there's the goats. And they come and he says, when you saw me, you never did these things. You didn't give me water. You didn't clothe me. You didn't visit me. You didn't care for me. You didn't cover up my wounds. You didn't do any of that stuff. And their response is, Lord, when did we see you and not do those things? They were deceived. And the consequences of their deception were, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.

for I never knew you. Depart into the outer darkness. And so our repentance really does matter. Whether we turn away from those things really does matter. It matters in this life, and it especially matters for the life to come. You don't want to get to the judgment seat of God and be handed over to him, by him, to be cast into hell. At the end of our passage, Jesus says, truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent. Roman Catholics say, see, there's purgatory. It really is. This is one of the passages they would use to justify purgatory, but I don't think that Jesus is speaking that literally here. What he's saying is you have a debt. If you understand the gospel and you understand the nature of sin and the way that it has to be paid for, you realize you don't have any more of that money. If you only needed one penny of it, you don't have it. And so Jesus says you won't get out of here until you ever, ever, until it's been paid for. And the only payment for it

is the blood of Christ, and you have forsaken it. So you'll never be free. That's his warning to us. Our own assessment of our situation and our sins won't matter on that day. It will not matter. So what is the application of this passage? What should we be compelled to do to repent quickly of our sins to the people that we've sinned against, as well as God? Do it quickly. Do it without excuse. Do it without this hidden transaction that if I say what I've done wrong, you'll do the same. If you're actually concerned about your own sins the way you should be, you won't be as concerned about the other people like you getting the repentance that you're owed. What you'll find in your own heart is that you're merciful toward those who sin against you and are even hard-hearted or don't see it clearly or blinded by it. You'll be like, you know, I'm like that. I get it. I pray for you.

I love you. I'll help you to see that hopefully in days and weeks and years to come, you'll see what you don't see now because I don't see what I should see about myself. That's what it would mean to take the log out of your own eye in this regard with repentance in view. The sins you've committed, the murder that you've committed, and all of the rest need repentance, need confession, need to be brought out into the light, need to be seen not just by God who does see them, but by those that you've committed them against. And the implicit thing in all of this that we'll come to later in the Sermon on the Mount is forgiveness. That you'd be quick to forgive. That when you find that someone comes to you and they actually do confess their sins by faith and it will not be perfect. They won't have the contrition you wish they did. They won't feel it the way you think they should feel it. But if they come and you refuse and you say it's not good enough. Your confession's not good enough.

The Bible tells you you'll be judged according to the same standard. The measure with which you judge, that's the measure you'll be judged by. So be quick to forgive. If someone comes and says, I'm sorry. I failed. I sinned against God and against you. Fill in the blank. Please forgive me. Discipline yourself to forgive them. And then stand in that forgiveness tomorrow and next week when it bubbles back up and you're like, well, but you did that thing. But you forgave me. You're right, I did do that thing. But you forgave me. Because God forgave you, so we're done with that now. We keep short accounts of the sins we commit and the sins that are committed against us. Confess your sins to God. Confess your sins to those that you sin against. Ask them to forgive you. Forgive those who do that towards you. That's what this passage teaches us. And you do this the rest of your life. The rest of your life.

And if you find that you get more and more angry at other people for the sins they commit against you, you falling into bitterness, I would bet you that the reason you're falling into bitterness is because you don't confess your own sins. It's very easy to get angry at other people for their sins when you cultivate ignorance about your own. Because all of a sudden, you've become very righteous and very, very obedient and very, very godly. And they're not. A big log in your eye. Let's pray.