Sunday – April 28, 2019
Word On Worship – Sunday – April 28, 2019
Luke 17:3-5
“Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
How many times have you thought the reason why you could not obey a command of our Lord was you had too little faith? If our problem is one of insufficient faith, we seem to have only two options. First, if faith is only given by God, then faith is God’s problem. How can we be responsible until He provides it first? That almost seems to be the mindset of the apostles. The second possibility would be to try and conjure up the faith on our own. Nowhere does Jesus teach us how to build faith in the way we try to build our bodies. There is not a problem with the quantity of our faith, but a failure to grasp the nature of faith.
Jesus did not minimize the need for faith, but neither did He say a lack of faith was the disciple’s problem, and so granting more faith was not the solution. Jesus’ response in the parable of the slave and the one grateful Samaritan focus on obedience and gratitude. The slave of verses 7-10 is to faithfully obey his master, and not to expect him to show gratitude. The master has the right to expect obedience of a slave, but has no obligation to be thankful for it. In the same way, when the disciple is obedient to Christ, he does not see it as meriting anything from God, nor does he equate his worthiness with it. For all men, even the most obedient of them, are unworthy of divine favor.
If this is true, then what we do not need is a system of rules to keep, for in keeping them there is no reward. If we are unworthy even at our best—even when we keep all of God’s commandments—then what we need is not Law, but grace. Grace is God’s favor bestowed upon us because we are unworthy, not because we are worthy. Grace and mercy are always prompted by our unworthiness, while God’s gratitude cannot even be prompted by our best efforts.
It is the grace of God, poured out freely upon sinners, which produces gratitude. It is grace produced gratitude which serves to motivate the recipient of grace to also bestow it on others, not more faith. Just as God has forgiven us of our sins against Him, solely on the basis of our confession of sin and repentance, so we are to forgive others on the same basis. It is not a greater faith that is required for us to do this, but a better understanding of what faith is and how it works.