I did not have the most of a sports career as a child in my life. It was funny enough, as the sports I probably cared about the least amount was the one I played the most. But I spent a lot of time in my life playing basketball either in some of my carport or in church league basketball. That's where my career began and the only crowning achievement was my junior year of high school.
When my coach realized how bad of a basketball player I was, he taught me how to set a pick. And then I spent the entire season being a preacher's kid who technicaled out of every single game because I thought setting picks was really, really fun. It's like the one job for a fat guy on a basketball team. But when you're playing when you're a kid and you're playing like pick up basketball and I feel like growing up in the late 80s, early 90s, you played a lot of carport basketball.
Every kid had that basketball goal, the dad had to concrete in the ground. You didn't have those removable plastic things yet. So when you moved, you had to leave your basketball goal there. This is also back before.
Remember how you used to have to raise them by those two bolts? You couldn't pick it up. So raising the basketball goal took like four people. But you played a lot of like carport basketball and in carport basketball there's always like a one kid in the neighborhood is really good at basketball.
But there's also that one kid in neighborhood who's like really bad at basketball but is also kind of a punk and he'll call fouls all the time. And basketball is kind of a unique game because fouls actually matter because you can shoot free throws. And only enough that kid who was always the one calling too many fouls, it was also a punk, was also the kid who had beef with everybody in the neighborhood. And then he was also the kid that practiced free throws a lot at his house because he could be, he wasn't a team player.
They never were team players. I mean we were playing carport basketball like you're on teams of two or three. Team dynamics are kind of important here. But like he'd always like getting fights, starts to have to call a foul but he realized if that kid could get to the free throw line he became a valuable asset.
The free throw allowed him to find value as a player without depending whatsoever at all on his team. He could do what he needed to do without depending on other people. I came across this article last week, I'm going to show up just one single image from it. There was about seven things the church needs to be more aware of in our current culture.
The number one thing is that we're becoming more aggressive and more sensitive. What has in the blue is this, the people most likely to insult others are the first to be offended by even the smallest expressions of opposition. We've got a disagreement problem in our culture. Now when anybody say that we don't have a disagreement problem, and many times we get into this, the issue is we think the best place we can get to is to simply agree to disagree.
How many times have you used that phrase? We'll just agree to disagree. But what kind of world is it where agreeing to disagree is the best option? What actually happens if the best thing you can hope for is simply to agree to disagree?
We've got a disagreement problem and we rarely have the ability to know what a disagreement without leading to an argument is like. It's becoming rare and rare that we know what a disagreement with that leads to a positive outcome is like in our life. Because everything in our culture is hurtling exactly against that. But what would happen if the typical reaction to a disagreement was a better relationship?
To some of us, and sometimes in my own life that seems so outlandish, I don't even believe it to be true. But what would the world be like if disagreements typically led to stronger relationships? Today we're going to look in Scripture Matthew 18, and we're going to look at just a portion of this, and we're going to talk about disagreements. But before we read this, I want you just to think about one thing.
I want you to listen to this, I want you to ponder who sounds more important in this. The person or the larger whole? And just to think about that as I read this, Matthew 18, verse 15 through 18, that's what Scripture tells us. If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense.
If the other person listens and confesses it, you have one that person back. But if you're unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses. If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church and if he or she won't accept the church's decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector. I tell you the truth, whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven.
I also tell you this, if two or three agree here on earth concerning anything you ask, my father in heaven will do it for you. For we're two or three gathered together as my followers. I'm there among them. So you are better than a disagreement.
This passage at first, it sounds kind of like a thing in the middle that we're just going to circle around today, when one person sins against another. That immediately makes us think about what's actually going on here. Is this just like your typical personal beef or is this something more serious? Now what Jesus is outlining here is a common practice in the synagogue 2000 years ago.
Synagogue was the center of Jewish life. Every town had at least one synagogue if not more synagogues. In many ways, when we think of churches now, so much of that early example comes from the synagogue. You remember of a synagogue, you had a place there, you belonged there.
So Jesus just outlining what disagreements look like. Everything he just said would have been familiar to the people who heard it. They're like, oh yeah, we know this pattern, Jesus. It takes us and expands.
And then the first thing, it talks with a believer sins against you. This word believer, it's not talking about face it here in some membership. It's talking about the bond that you have with another person. The exact word comes from someone of the same womb.
If you grew up in church or you've watched TV and stuff, you know, there's the kind of cliché brother sister that you hear in church, it comes from this understanding. The people that you're in spiritual relationship with should be close to you as kin. That's the relationship you see here. And the second thing Jesus is talking about the church.
When I first started reading this a few weeks ago, I was like, what's he talking about church for? Okay, we don't hear him talk about church that much. But what he's referring here to this spiritual community is people that you're in relationship with for the purpose of growing closer to God and growing as a person. These are the people that you've willfully placed yourself in a spiritual relationship alongside us.
That kind of then tightens it up so it's not just like an argument with a random stranger. It's now an argument with somebody you feel really close to that you intentionally place yourself in a relationship with. And then the last thing he talked about, they said they sin against each other. What does sin?
I mean, what does it say about this? I talked to a couple of people about this this last week and hey, what does this mean to you? And the kind of common denominator was, well, I guess that's my breaks of 10 commandments against you. Like if someone covets what I have or someone lies or someone steals or someone disrespects their father and mother, if you're younger here today, you hear that used a lot.
Or if you're older, you might use that on your own too to some. What does that mean? And if we really look at this though, if you kind of look at the way that Jesus was like, that God was like shaping these rules with the Jewish people in the Old Testament, but also more specifically the way Matthew talks about sin is that sin really is defined in terms of a broken relationship. It's a broken relationship that we have with God because of sin, that relationship is broken.
Jesus heals that relationship. It's also the broken relationship we can have with other people. So in that terms, when someone willfully does something to break a relationship, it is possible there. Okay, so this is how we can sin against each other.
It's this willful breaking of a relationship or doing something so deliberate that we're hidden from and we can't even see ourselves. The way Jesus talks about sin and Matthew is broken in relation to broken relationship with God and a broken relationship with other people. You either don't see how you're not following God or you don't see how you're hurting and hampering the life of someone else. Broken relationships lead to broken ability.
So what does this mean to us now? Okay, shall we understand this? But what does this mean to us now? What does this mean to us now?
What does this mean to us to think about our own actions? What does this mean to us to think about what this would look like in your life? What it means is we're realizing that spiritual behaviors can sometimes have huge consequences from a good perspective or from a bad perspective that we can... Let's just maybe hungry.
This is a spiritual behavior. Spiritual behavior can impact a bigger picture. No, without a doubt. Okay, sidebar, one time I was at a tiny church in Kentucky I worked at in the pastor's cell phone rang and it was the cops theme song and he answered it during the sermon and it was his granddaughter and it straight went like this.
Like bad boys, bad boys? He finally answered. I'm preaching a sermon right now. I'll call you back.
So it happens to everybody. Don't worry about that. Go away. We can see how our positive behavior can affect the bigger picture, right?
But what about when our negative behavior affects the bigger picture? Now just this morning I was thinking about this kind of doing my last run through and realizing, you know, if you spend time reading scripture, there's a couple behaviors we hear about a lot. This is my gossip is such a big deal. This is my being a hypocrite.
Like those sorts of things are such a big deal because we now see, hey, this is how relationships can be broken. This is how I can negatively affect the bigger picture of the people that I'm in a spiritual relationship with. This is not a personal beef that we might have. This is something that's dangerous to other people and dangerous to the mission at hand.
Sin is a relational issue. This whole passage is wrapped up in relationships. Think about it. Like if you're willing, if someone's going to come to you and say, hey, listen, we need to talk about something, would you not say that you would have a relationship with that person?
Like if you're going to follow this out to the tee, I imagine I'm honest with y'all. I'm only going to have that conversation with somebody. I know well. Like I'm not going to be, like even in my role now, I feel tremendously awkward going to somebody who I don't know well to have a conversation about a negative issue.
If we're going to have even a hope of this happening, understanding, then both of those people are going to be in relation. So the confrontation point has relationship. But then the restoration point has relationship. This whole thing is wrapped up in strong relationships.
This isn't, hey, I've got a problem with you. This is, hey, I really care about you and I'm worried about something. This whole thing is wrapped up in relationships. It seems a relational issue.
The restoration should be a relational issue. One of the things I've been reading a lot about right now is some sociologists talking, just about the danger points that we're in as a culture and what many of them talk about using different languages, but it's kind of the same idea is that this idea, if we have a couple of three buckets that run us as a culture and one of those buckets is our freedom bucket or our individual bucket or our individualism bucket. And they say that in Western culture, specifically in America, right now that bucket is overflowing. But then we also have this responsibility bucket, this social bucket, this relationship bucket.
And they say that we are in a drought with that bucket right now. Our individual bucket is overflowing while our relationship bucket hardly has anything in it right now. We've got a problem with individualism right now in our culture. And that happens here in the church too because the issue is we want to go edit alone.
How many of you have been self-described or have been described by others as I just take care of it myself? Friends, I'll take care of myself, type person and that threw me in a hospital three months ago. That kind of thing will kill you. We want to go edit alone, even in church.
And that's part of this broken life and broken world that we have to confront and talk about our spiritual behaviors. We have a natural disposition to go edit alone. And that's not how Jesus designed us to be. Jesus designed us to be working inside of relationships and working inside of community.
And we all want to matter. But we also struggle in allowing others to matter at the same time. Think about what kind of witness the church can give of allowing everyone to matter together at the same time. Allowing everyone to grow into the fullest picture of who they are at the same time.
So this changes the whole reason behind the confrontation, doesn't it? This used to be a passage description that I really didn't want to deal with. Because I've seen it abused and weaponized at times before. But this is a change of things when we realize that this is about the relationships that we have with people.
So you're bigger than a disagreement. There are two things that Jesus lifted up as important inside of this. And the first one is this, the community is paramount. It's interesting, like the second layer of this confrontation, Jesus says, take a couple of folks with you to go and talk to this person.
Then also at the end of this passage, he says, we're two or three or gathered, I am present. So the same group of people that manifest the presence of God is the same group of people they're called into on this. The community significantly matters as an entire part of the process. Disagreements get dangerous.
When is the last time you saw a disagreement get out of line and out of lack in a situation? That's one of the parts of adulthood they don't tell you about when you're a kid. When you see that happen. Among good people and good intention people sometimes.
This isn't about bad action. This isn't about a person having a beef with somebody else and saying, I don't like the way this really annoys me and aggravates me. But instead this is about us refusing to see our actions that might lead other people to brokenness. It might lead other people to danger situations.
It might cause a vision. This is also about us as the church though and us as people and those that we're in relationship with saying, okay, if we leave things unchecked, what if this causes further damage and further harm and then we allow that instead of saying we're going to follow this biblical pattern of restoration. Not a conflict, but of restoration. The community to Jesus is paramount.
The next thing is that forgiveness is key. The third part of this, Jesus says, if the whole church comes to them and they don't recognize it, then you should treat them as a pagan or a tax collector. The funny thing is this is the only time in all the gospels where Jesus talks negatively about tax collectors. Earlier this year I said I really think tax collectors are Jesus' favorite sinners.
They're the ones he's always with. They're the ones the Pharisees complaining about. I don't think Jesus is saying, hey, these are the people that I love, that I care about, that I'm going after more and more. What this doesn't mean is if someone continues to break a relationship, you should cast him out.
You should realize how important they are to bring back into the fold. How many times have we had a broken relationship where we seized contact with that person? Then you have that awkward dance of like you're in a restaurant and you see them and you get on this pillar real quick. We laughed because we've done it before.
What is it like to love people even in their bad decisions? Jesus brings up the people that he sends things to love the most almost inside of this. Peter, right after this passage, don't tell you if you have some time this afternoon, just go home and read all of chapter 18 because it puts this little section even more into realization. Right after this, Jesus, what if I forgive somebody seven times and they still don't start behaving?
Jesus's response says you need to forgive them 70 times, seven times. That's like first century Jewish math for infinite. You need to give them all the forgiveness. That's the way that you need to act.
Forgiveness is key. We've got the responsibility in our lives to create peaceable kingdom and all of our spheres of influence, all the places that we are, all the places that we can be. Jesus has given us the responsibility to be a people of forgiveness no matter what. If things are continually willfully broken, we've got the responsibility to enact forgiveness.
So what's at stake here? In this passage, there's a kind of a weird section. I think this is where Jesus tells us, one of this should matter to us personally, but also should matter to us as a church. Verse 18, 18, this is what it read.
It's kind of weird sounding. I tell you the truth, whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven. Now that's in the new living translation. If we go to kind of more of an older and more literal translation, it says this.
I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. In Jesus and other places in the gospels, whenever this binding and loosing language comes up, he's talking about exorcism. He's talking about what are the things that you realize that you have to tie down and control. And what are the things that you realize that you have to loose and unleash?
What are the bad things that you need to limit and what are the good things that you need to allow to expand? I think Jesus brings this up inside of a conversation about forgiveness because he needs for us to understand that we will have as much of God's kingdom as we are willing to experience. That if we allow broken and destructive behavior in our own life to flourish or in the lives of those that we are in a deeply committed relationship with, to allow it to happen then that we are limiting the ability that we can see Jesus and his kingdom on this earth. If we realize this is very dangerous to us, this is dangerous to that person and this is dangerous to what God is calling us to do.
The brokenness that we allow will limit our degree to experience and fully realize what forgiveness looks like. That forgiveness is that thing that we should unleash. So, Peter, we need to forgive at a level that is uncomfortable to us, to forgive to a level that seems limitless. So, let me ask you this now.
So, is it agreed to disagree enough? If that's our hope for outcome in tough situations, is that enough? Or is that limiting the amount that we can experience Jesus? So, what's more powerful witness?
What would attract other people? Think about this. If we as individuals have a history of broken relationships behind us, or we as people have a string of healthy, whole and healed relationships in spite of disagreements, in spite of seeing things differently, if we have a group of people around us that we are committed to living life with, then we realize we're different with it, we're together. So, we are only as strong as our weakest ability to forgive.
That's us as people, as individuals, and that's us as a church. Now, the greatest experience of forgiveness that we have is our personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and that will set the ceiling for what forgiveness looks like for us. If we struggle with understanding Jesus and how He forgives us, we will probably struggle with explaining and offering forgiveness to other people. Our relationship with Jesus and our understanding of His forgiveness will set our ceiling for forgiveness.
We are bigger than this disagreement. And if Jesus is big enough for forgiveness, then we should be big enough for forgiveness.