Hey everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Hello. What do we got? We got Wednesday or midweek, so hopefully your week's gone. Okay. So far the weather's cooling off out here in Texas, which is a welcome exchange. And yeah, we've got we had baptisms this past weekend, which we're awesome. Yeah, the church showed up, thank you for staying and staying afterwards. We had quite a good showing of people that remained afterwards to, to witness the baptisms. And I know that meant a lot to those being baptized, but also just, it was really cool to see our church family there together. That was a great weekend. Certainly a weekend of celebration for sure. What are we supposed to feel about these Nigerian Christians that are getting slaughtered halfway across the world? It's so hard because we're reading headlines. Or maybe you're listening and somebody's talking about it on a podcast or something like that, but yeah, one person that I follow said, if your pastor's not talking about Nigerian Christians. He's probably not being faithful or something. Something like that. That was the implication anyway. Wow. Like what is your pastor saying about this? People need to be, people need to be talking about this. Why aren't your pastors talking more about it? Why? And what they're trying to do. I think giving the most charitable read here is to get it on people's radars For sure. So things can be talked about. Yeah. And it's a horrific. Awful tragic development. It's not new. By and stretching the imagination the numbers are staggering. And part of it is, and you and I have talked about this before living in the 24 7 social media news world we're aware of so much more than we ever have been aware of before. Yeah. And the loss of life for faith it, I'd say two things. Three things maybe. First it should grieve us. These are our people. And so as much as we don't have names and faces to associate with them it should grieve us. This should be something that breaks our heart, that people are dying because their faith, the families are being slaughtered, that the children are being killed. This is evil. This is wicked and we should condemn it as such. First, second. You need to be praying. You need to be praying for those that are. Going through this for those that are surviving, for those that are on the run, for those that are fearful, for those that, don't have the peace to be able to sleep through the night because they're worried that they might be next. Pray for those Christians. Pray for their faith to remain intact. Pray for them to be strengthened in their faith. Pray for their witness to be strong and for God to bring an end to this evil and this wickedness. And third let it be sobering to you and we're gonna be even talking about this Sunday. The idea of the Christian's relationship to government. And we just spent some time as pastors and leaders talking about this here in preparation for next week, we have a unique place in this country where we have a lot of privileges, a lot of rights, a lot of freedoms. We don't fear for these things, but this should be a sobering reminder to us of the cost of following Christ that is being born by. Other brothers and sisters throughout the world, right? And so it should make us grateful for the freedoms that we have. It should also cause us to say, what am I doing? How am I stewarding the freedom that I have to be a Christian right now? That it doesn't cost me the fear of losing my life? And so how am I living in light of that right now? Those are just some initial thoughts to what's going on there and how we should be thinking about it and reacting to it. Amen to that. The more you see this stuff, the more you should be praying. I know we talked about prayer recently. Semi-recently, and we never wanna look down on that. It feels so impotent. I know. I can often feel like, man, I wanna do more. But never discount the impact and the power of your prayers. Pray for these people. If you have any ability to do something about it, then great. Do something as your soul allows, as your conscience. Conscience dictates. But never look down on prayer. Please pray for your fellow brothers and sisters across the world who are Christians and what we assume as much. We don't know what kind of Christian they are, if they're Presbyterian, Baptist or whatever else, really doesn't matter. What matters is that the Lord knows and we can do something in our prayers on their behalf. Yeah. Matthew 18. That's right. Matthew 18 is our DBR for today. Familiar text to those of you in the church. But it, before we get to the part that's probably most well known from this it opens with something that we've read before, and that is the argument about who the greatest is. And again, Jesus is gonna take this child and say, Hey, you need to become like this child. In fact, he says, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And I just think about the nature of childlike faith. We talked about it briefly last time. Dependence that we need to have. The total surrender, the recognition that a child has that, apart from those that they depend on, they're really helpless. They can't, provide for themselves. They can't drive over to the grocery store to get food. They can't prepare the food when they get at home. They don't know how to do these things. They're completely dependent upon those that are their care takers, those that have been put in authority over them, and God is calling us as Christians to that level of dependence upon him. That we have to recognize our need for him. It's not as though we are contributing something as I believe that the Mormons would say. In fact, I think it's in the Book of Mormon, that it says, salvation is by grace alone after all I've done. And so this call to childlike faith is a call to say I bring nothing. I need God for everything. It's a full surrender on him to provide the salvation we need. So again, that opening there of calling to childlike faith. From here, he speaks to the the danger in leading the children into sin. He says, woe to those to the world for temptations to sin for it's necessary that temptations should come, but woe to the one by whom temptation comes. And so he is talking more generally there. Other times he's talking about the danger of causing a child to stumble. And it says, better to have a millstone tied around his neck. That's not this necessarily, but when he says it's necessary that temptations come. That's an. Odd saying and we might say, well, why is it necessary? And I think that what he's driving at here is based on the fact that the world is broken, the world's fallen. You are going to face temptations. You just need to be sure that you're not the one that is doing the tempting that you're not the source of temptation in someone else's life. And then he goes on to talk about the radical amputation of sin in our lives. We need to make sure that we're dealing with sin seriously. That any place we see it, we're getting rid of it, cutting off the hand, gouging out the eye so forth and so on, as we've seen previously. Verse 10, he gets into a parable, he says, again, speaking of the children, do not despise the little ones. I tell you that they're angels in heaven. That's an interesting phrase. We all have guardian angels. It seems to imply, come on, that there are angels that are, what's my angels name assigned to us? Can I ask them to review themselves? You can go for it. How tall are they? I don't know. How many dance on the head of a pin? How many can dance on the head of a pin? People wanna know these things. I'm comfortable. Especially when we consider the Ephesians six spiritual warfare idea. And even what we saw in the Book of Daniel where there was an angel dispatch to Daniel who was opposed and couldn't get to Daniel in time because he had to fight against Satan At that point I'm comfortable. With there being angels that are assigned to us and what does that look like? Do I have a guardian angel touched by an angel of that show and everything else like that? Mm-hmm. That interaction between us and them. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how much power God imbues in them to watch over us and to even affect change in our circumstances. I don't know. I don't know if they've been given that much authority, but I'm comfortable with the idea that there are angels that are assigned to us. And we should also say too, God doesn't need, angels, not like God is saying, please help me, that I'm just so overwhelmed with all these kids. What do do with them? Can you babysit them for a second? Yeah. He does not need angels, but he uses agents to accomplish his purposes and all I have to do is point to you and me. God could preach the gospel without you, but he chooses to use you and in a similar sense, he can minister to us apart from any other being. He chooses to use angels. And so whether or not you have a personal angel that's been following you since you've been Christian or since you've been born we don't know, right? This is too ambiguous to say yes or no. What we can say is that there is some kind of evidence to see that they're watching and they're engaging in some way, and maybe they're reporting to the Lord about what they're seeing. Does God need this? No, he doesn't. But God uses agents and this is one of the ways that he does how they interact, what they do for you, what they don't do for you. Those are all questions well beyond our pay grade and we can't say, but what we can say is that God has always taken care of us in one way or another. Yeah. Well, let's get into the text that is kind of the. Meat of Matthew chapter 18 where a lot of people go in their minds when they think about this chapter. And that is the issue of church discipline. Now, this is interesting because the church was not in existence at this time, and yet we refer to this as dealing with church discipline and. It's instructive to know that Jesus was well aware of what was gonna happen. In fact, we read recently that Jesus told Peter, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. So he's already referenced the existence of church and church in the Greek literally just means called out once. And so here, when he is talking about how this should take place, he's going to use the word church and he's talking about the called out ones, those that are gonna be his followers. Jesus has already forecast that that's going to be a group that is going to exist after his ascension is going to happen here. So he's talking here about how we deal with matters of sin within the group. That is his called out ones, the church as we know it today. And the pattern is if somebody is in sin, as we talked about recently on the podcast, you go to that person you show them their sin and hopefully you're gonna win the brother. In that instance. Hopefully in that instance, that person is going to be shown that they are in error and they're gonna repent from their sin and they're gonna wanna be restored. If not, he says, you need to bring somebody with you, two or three witnesses with you, and that way, hopefully they're gonna be soft then to the voice of others. Maybe they don't see it when it's just you, but maybe they're gonna be humble enough to say, okay if multiple people see this in me, yeah, I need to repent if they're still resistant, he says, you. It to the elders. You bring it to the church. The church then meets with them, and again, it's imploring for restoration. This whole thing is about restoration. And if they're still resistant at that point, then they're gonna be put out of the church. They're going to be the determined is, has been hijacked by the Catholic church, but excommunicated, so to speak, they're put out. Mm-hmm. They're treated as somebody that is not a believer. And that's the point here again, because we want them to be. Aware of their need for repentance. And so that's kinda what's going on here in this process, in Matthew 18. Yeah. This is one of the things that should be happening in the regular, at any church that's doing good Gospel ministry, we care about each other. And so what this requires is you to be able to go to your brother or your sister and say, Hey, can I point something out to you? Do you wanna see something that I see? And you might be wrong, I should say that you're not gonna do this nilly willy with anybody that you see, but there is such a care for somebody that if you see them sinning, you should be. Gracious enough, kind enough, bold enough even to go to them and say, here's what I see. And if they listen to you, you've gained your brother. Yeah. You have gained somebody and you have a friend now that's going to listen to you in ways that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise. 'cause you gain trust with that. Right? You gain credibility. This is something that even though it's about church discipline, you think about the big scary thing where the pastors are doing things. They're bringing you up on the stage perhaps, and putting stuff in front of others we're not talking about that. Right? We're talking about level one, right? You go to your brother or your sister, you bring up sin, you help them confront it. You help them deal with it, and then you move on. What a great blessing it would be for every church to have people doing this. Yeah. 'cause then it would keep the church clean and pure in God's side. Yeah. From here, Peter comes up and says, Hey I've got a question about forgiveness, Lord, how many times do I have to forgive my brother? Because this all seems pretty, pretty messy. All of this sinning against and everything else that we've been talking about right now. And Jesus says so you need to forgive him 70 times seven. And that's just, you need to never not forgive is essentially the call there. Forgive to the fullness of completion that number seven. When it's combined with 70 there it's emphasizing that number of completion there that Jesus is referring to here. And so then he goes on and tells the story about two people. One had accrued a debt that was insurmountable. If this guy worked every day of his life and paid every penny that he ever made to the king, he would never get outta this debt. And the king calls him in calls for the debt to be paid. The man begs and pleads for forgiveness, and the king forgives his debt, sends him out, the man goes and finds his. Buddy who owes him still a significant amount of money, not a small amount, still something significant. And yet the friend can't pay it just like he couldn't pay the king and he begs and pleads for more time. But this man who had just been forgiven so much by the king demands that he be paid and throws him in jail. The king gets word of it. And the king comes back to the man that didn't forgive and grabs him and throws him in jail instead. This is one of those parables that I think is man, sometimes it's the necessity of forgiveness is underplayed. I think in the church, I think we allow a spirit of unforgiveness to exist and look for reasons why I don't have to forgive far more than we wrestle with texts like this, which seem to imply, man, if I don't forgive, how can I expect? To be forgiven by the Lord. Amen to that man. That's a scary passage to work with. And I think one of the challenges for any of us is that we've all been hurt. People hurt us in different ways. They say things about us, they say things to us and we naturally say, well then forget you. Right? You're toxic. I want nothing to do with you. But the truth of the matter is the church doesn't have that privilege. Not that it's a privilege to. Exercise in the first place. We just don't have that. If you truly are in a relationship with another Christian who's also been bought with the same blood that you've been bought with, you have an obligation through Christ to do what you can to reconcile with them. Mm-hmm. Paul says that you're to live that peace with everyone and so far as it's possible for you to do that. Paul knows that there are times that you can't reconcile a relationship, but most of the time you can't. Most of the time you can if you're willing to put in the sweat equity, and Christ expects that of us. So this is a really heavy text. And I think for most of us, we're gonna hear it and say, oh, but what about this situation? What about that situation? I know that there's a lot of us that would say, there's people that I really struggle to forgive people that I don't wanna forgive. But we're obligated to. And even though that doesn't mean that you will always transact forgiveness, that does mean that you have to have the. Attitude of forgiveness. So someone might be dead long gone, that ascend against you, or you send against them and now you say, oh, Christ has saved me. I wanna change that. Can I reconcile with them? Well, you can't because they're gone. They're not in the picture. You don't have their phone number anymore. There's no way to contact them or they're off the planet entirely. Whatever it is. Christ doesn't necessarily expect that forgiveness be transacted, but it must have an action in the heart. There must be an attitude of forgiveness, and if there's a possibility for the transaction of forgiveness to take place, then great, we should do that. Yeah, and I think part of our misunderstanding is we wait for forgiveness to become easy or we wait for somebody to come to us and. Seek our forgiveness. Yeah. And so then it feels like, okay, now it doesn't cost me as much to forgive you because you've humbled yourself and you've come to me and you've sought my forgiveness. Right. But forgiveness isn't easy. Forgiveness costs all the time. Even when somebody comes to us and says, will you forgive me? There's gonna be times that you're not gonna feel like forgiving them. Yeah. Forgiveness is costly to us, just like it was costly to the father. And yet it's to your point, something that we. Are called, we are obligated to do to the point that Jesus says my Heavenly Father will do this to every one of you. If you do not forgive your brother from your heart. Our forgiveness in the eyes of God is connected to our willingness to forgive other people, which is. Very sobering when it comes to whether or not we want to hold grudges and harbor bitterness against people. Yeah. So resentment and bitterness are all evidence that you did not forgive. And Christ does not hold that lightly. He wants us to feel the weight of what he's saying here. He calls us to have the attitude of forgiveness and man, what we need to heed that warning. What he's saying here is not meant to be RIFed with, we're called to be a people of forgiveness because we've been forgiven of our debts. How dare we hold the debts against others? Against them? Yeah. Yeah. Amen. Well, let's pray and then we'll down with this episode. Well, it's a heavy passage that we just read and yet one that is for us and for the church and we are wanted to be obedient to it. We wanna be a church. That deals with sin in, a radical way, even as we talked about cutting off our hand and gouging out our eye. We wanna be a church that doesn't trifle with sin, that doesn't treat it lightly. And part of that comes with this church discipline process that we talked about. We wanna be a church that loves one another well enough to care about the godliness of our brothers and sisters in Christ, to be willing to have the hard conversation. God though we don't want to have too many where we would have to take it to the full extent. We wanna be ready to do that. And if we do that, Lord, we wanna do that well and do that in obedience to what your word calls us to. And that would help us also to be a forgiving church would help us to remember how much we've been forgiven even as earlier Jesus. Had had the woman of ill repute wash his feet with her tears and her hair. And the Pharisee thought if he only knew, and she said he loves much because she's been forgiven much. Lord, may we have that awareness of our ourselves and how much we've been forgiven, such that that would overflow into a spirit of forgiveness towards other people as well, regardless against the church of bitterness and division and holding grudges against each other and help us Lord, to forgive. Even though it, it costs us Lord to forgive joyfully because we know it's an expression of our understanding of the gospel, and it's only possible because of the gospel that we can have that mindset in the first place. So we pray this all in Jesus name, amen. Keep your new Bibles. Tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See you. Bye bye.

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Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said