Tag Archives: Matthew 18

Recitation and Relationships

April 28, 2025 Tom Vander Well 1 Comment

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Matthew 18:35 (NIV)

Every week our local gathering of Jesus’ followers says The Lord’s Prayer together. As we do, Wendy and I tend to paraphrase the traditional language a bit on our own. I think it’s funny and fascinating that the institutional church chooses to update the wording of certain things (music, translation of the Bible, the wording of the Apostle’s Creed, and etc.) but not others. Please don’t read what I’m not writing. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong or right. It’s the kind of ecclesiastical hair-splitting that have, for too long, gotten people’s undies in a bunch and caused more harm than good.

I see both sides of traditional words and phrasing for well-worn passages. Sometimes the traditional, yet out-of-date, wording is like a comfy old sweatshirt that wraps you in the warmth and comfort of something familiar which has been with you and seen you through long stretches of life’s journey. On the other hand, I have often found that as I press into new and unfamiliar stretches of life’s journey, I am challenged to address new and extraordinary circumstances that require me to find new layers of wisdom in traditional thoughts and meditations.

And, as the Bard famously said, “there’s the rub.”

I know, personally, that when I recite the same words over and over and over again, they begin to lose their potency. I’m just going through the motions. So, I tend to do what I was taught as I studied acting. You take the memorized line of a script and play with it, emphasizing a different word or phrase with increased inflection with each subsequent recitation. As I am fond of saying, metaphors are layered with meaning, and often as I emphasize and change my inflection with different words in the oft repeated sentence, it makes me consider different ways of considering the same words or phrases.

One of the phrases of The Lord’s Prayer that has taken on increased meaning for me as I have practiced this is: “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” This is a request with a stated acknowledgement of reciprocal relational responsibility. I’m asking God to forgive my sins, while acknowledging that I can only expect to be forgiven to the degree I am willing to forgive those who have wronged me.

In today’s chapter, Jesus unpacks this uncomfortable spiritual principle in a parable. A king has a servant who owes him a thousand dollars he has never been able to pay. Upon the pleading of the indebted servant, the king mercifully forgives the debt. This same man exits the kings chamber and runs into a fellow servant who owes him ten bucks. He goes postal on the dude, demanding the ten-spot without even considering the weight of debt from which he’d just been graciously and mercifully freed. The king finds out about the hypocrisy, hauls the ungrateful servant into his court and had him tortured until he paid every cent he was owed.

Now comes the intense and uncomfortable part. Jesus follows up this parable by stating quite directly: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat you, Tom, unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Ouch. Hello, sobering Monday morning meditation. When I recited those famous words with my fellow followers yesterday, there’s potent spiritual punch lurking behind the well-worn words. Forgive me God, just as I have forgiven those who’ve sinned against me. Wait a minute. Maybe there are some heart and relationship matters I should have addressed before I showed up in my Sunday best to go through the religious motions.

In the quiet this morning, I find myself entering another work week thinking about my relational realities in light of my religious recitations. If there’s a disconnect between the two, then the latter was an impotent ritual. That’s the thing about a cozy old sweatshirt. If it becomes threadbare and filled with holes, it has lost its ability to accomplish the original purpose.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

These chapter-a-day blog posts are also available via podcast on all major podcast platforms including Apple, Google, and Spotify! Simply go to your podcast platform and search for “Wayfarer Tom Vander Well.” If it’s not on your platform, please let me know!

Chapter-a-Day

The Debt

February 3, 2022 Tom Vander Well 1 Comment

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Matthew 18:35 (NIV)

He was a big man. He was not a person I would want angry with me, and he had a natural bent toward anger. As we chatted, he shared stories of just how hot his anger burned and the difficult situations he’d found himself in because of it. He’d been brought up with religion. In fact, there was a lot of religion. From the cradle, he’d been raised with rules, rituals, and regulations out the wazoo, but by his own admission, religion did nothing to curb his anger or modify the spiteful way he treated anyone who crossed him. And his rage led him to some nasty places. Then, through a series of unfortunate events, he found himself in the darkest, seething rage of his life. It was there he met Jesus.

This man came to mind this morning as I read the parable Jesus told His disciples in today’s chapter. If you didn’t read the chapter yourself, I encourage you to take 60 seconds and read it (Matthew 18:23-35). It’s a simple story of a servant who owes the king 10,000 bags of gold. When the king calls the loan, which will bankrupt the servant and ruin his life, the servant pleads for more time to pay it back. The king has compassion and forgives the entire debt. No sooner had this servant left the king’s presence that he runs into a fellow servant that owes him 100 silver coins from a wager they’d made on the Jerusalem Jackals game. The servant chokes his friend, demands payment, and has him tossed into debtor’s prison until he could pay the small sum.

Along my spiritual journey, I’ve both experienced and observed that there are common circumstances in which individuals struggle to actually “forgive those who sin against us” as Jesus famously told us to pray.

I’m simply a religious person going through the ritual motions. This lesson can be applied to so many circumstances, but in this case, it has everything to do with my ability to forgive and withhold judgment. Being a member of a church, or adhering to the tenets of religious rules and rituals only modifies my public behavior. It does nothing to change my heart. I’ve only seen a heart and life transformed and changed when a person has experienced a relationship with Jesus. My religion will never transform my heart and life, but a heart and life transformed by Jesus will definitely transform my religion.

I have no idea how great a debt I owe. If the servant in Jesus’ parable had been ignorant of just how much he owed the king, his behavior toward the fellow servant would not seem like such huge hypocrisy. As humans, I’ve observed that we have a penchant for keeping score with our mental scales. We know we’ve done this bad thing so I’ll throw that on one side of the scales. But, the person who injured me has done this and that so I’ll throw them both on the other side. See that! They’re worse than me so they deserve my wrath! James 2:10 points out that God’s economy doesn’t work like ours. If I keep all the rules and trip up on just one, I stand condemned and guilty of all of it. From God’s perspective, keeping score is a fool’s errand. We’re kidding ourselves to think or believe that we’re “not that bad.”

I haven’t truly experienced the power of grace myself. In the parable, the servant had experienced grace at an unbelievable level. 10,000 bags of gold was an incalculable sum to Jesus’ listeners. It’s like Elon Musk’s net worth in today’s standard. As I just mentioned, in God’s economy we all spiritually owe 100 billion dollars. It’s the contrast between the sum the servant had been forgiven and the paltry pittance the servant was owed that powers the moral of the story. When I know and have experienced how great a debt I’ve been forgiven by Jesus, it transforms the way I perceive and respond to those who offend and injure me.

In the quiet this morning, this brings me back to my big, angry friend. After meeting Jesus amidst his dark, seething rage had shared with me how his life began to change. It transformed his religion, his relationships, and the entire direction of his life. He’s still prone to anger, and he’s still not someone I’d want to see angry, but I wasn’t really worried about it as I listened to his story. After meeting Jesus and experiencing true grace, the fuse on his anger began to grow increasingly longer. The explosions of anger were more tempered, and he began to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess when it occasionally went off.

The words to an old, old hymn have been resonating in me the past month or two:

How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure!
That He would send His only Son,
To make this wretch His treasure.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

The Enduring Power of a Simple Story

April 4, 2017 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’”
Matthew 18:32-33 (NIV)

I have been training groups and individuals in the art of Customer Service for almost a quarter century. Along that journey I’ve learned that students rarely remember all of the bullet points and service principles I teach them. They remember the stories. Just a year or so ago a woman came up to me prior to one of my classes. She had been in my class before and I asked her if she thought the content was beneficial.

“Oh yeah, it was good,” she said dismissively. “But just make sure to keep telling all the stories. You tell the best stories!”

She reminded me of a couple of front-line supervisors from another client who regularly showed up at the new hire service training class I did at their company each quarter. I asked them why they kept coming back. “We just want to hear you tell those stories again,” they would say with a laugh. “They never get old.”

If you haven’t noticed it, our culture has been recapturing the power of story in recent years. There are books, conferences, and entire consulting practices around story. This isn’t new. It’s eternal. The power of story is woven into the fabric of life. We were created in the image of The Great Story Teller. Story, metaphor, and word pictures communicate concepts in profound and emotional ways.

This is why Jesus told parables. They are powerful in their simplicity, profound in their impact.

In today’s chapter, Jesus tells an amazingly simple parable. A servant begs his master to forgive his deep indebtedness, which the master does. The servant then immediately goes out and rakes his own servant over the coals for some small debt. I have read this parable countless times, and it still resonates with each reading. How many times have I confessed my many failings and shortcomings to God and begged His forgiveness. How great a debt God has graciously forgiven. How then can I refuse to choose to forgive the injuries, slights, betrayals, insults, and inconsiderations of others?

This morning I’m doing a Google search of my heart, mind, life and relationships for anyone I’m holding something against, or anything I’ve refused to forgive.

All because of a simple story I read again.

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day Matthew 18

April 13, 2011 Tom Vander Well 1 Comment

NTN Trivia Action — Image by MPR529 via Flickr

At about the same time, the disciples came to Jesus asking, “Who gets the highest rank in God’s kingdom?” Matthew 18:1 (MSG)

Wendy and I ate lunch out yesterday. The restaurant where we ate participated in a national trivia network, so I grabbed one of the controllers and we played as we ate lunch. I’m proud to say we finished number one at the local restaurant where we ate (we were the only ones playing). They even showed that we ranked 19th in the nation for that particular game. I was feeling pretty good about that.

There’s something in our pride at wanting to be number one. It’s especially obvious in men, though I think its just as present in women – it just masks itself in different ways. It starts on the playground, continues onto the court or ball field, then on to our educational system (What was your class rank?), and even into the corporate world. My friend, who has been interviewing incessantly for new jobs, was told by others that he should lie about his sales numbers and rankings on his resume because that was all that employers cared about. Maybe it is. Even fellow believers admitted to him that they lied about their “rank” to get a job and seemed unapologetically non-chalant about their deception.

This desire to be the best runs so deep inside us. I sometimes wonder how much it affects us in ways we don’t even notice. Is it so ingrained in my nature that I am blind to its negative effect on my life, my character, and my spirit?

Today, I want to be on the lookout for the existence of pride in my heart and life. If Jesus teaches me to root out the things that pollute my spirit, then I have to be willing to look for it.