'They had nothing to pay.' Well, if there is no money, 'no effects'
in the bank, no cash in the till, nothing to distrain upon, it does
not matter very much what the amount of the debt is, seeing that
there is nothing to meet it, and whether it is fifty or five hundred
the man is equally unable to pay. And that is precisely our
position.
I admit, of course, that men without any recognition of God's
pardoning mercy, or any of the joyful impulse that comes from the
sense of Christ's redemption, or any of the help that is given by
the indwelling of the Spirit who sanctifies may do a great deal in
the way of mending their characters and making themselves purer and
nobler. But that is not the point which my text contemplates,
because it deals with a past. And the fact that lies under the
metaphor of my text is this, that none of us can in any degree
diminish our sin, considered as a debt to God. What can you and I do
to lighten our souls of the burden of guilt? What we have written we
have written. Tears will not wash it out, and amendment will not
alter the past, which stands frowning and irrevocable. If there be a
God at all, then our consciences, which speak to us of demerit,
proclaim guilt in its two elements--the sense of having done wrong,
and the foreboding of punishment therefor. Guilt cannot be dealt
with by the guilty one: it must be Some One else who deals with it.
He, and only He against whom we have sinned, can touch the great
burden that we have piled upon us.
Brother! we have nothing to pay. We may mend our ways; but that does
not touch the past. We may hate the evil; that will help to keep us
from doing it in the future, but it does not affect our
responsibility for what is done. We cannot touch it; there it stands
irrevocable, with this solemn sentence written over the black pile,
'Every transgression and disobedience shall receive its just
recompense of reward.' We have nothing to pay.
But my text suggests, further, that a condition precedent to
forgiveness is the recognition by us of our penniless insolvency.
Though it is not distinctly stated, it is clearly and necessarily
implied in the narrative, that the two debtors are to be supposed as
having come and held out a couple of pairs of empty hands, and sued
in _formâ pauperis_. You must recognise your insolvency if you
expect to be forgiven. God does not accept dividends, so much in the
pound, and let you off the rest on consideration thereof. If you are
going to pay, you have to pay all; if He is going to forgive, you
have to let Him forgive all. It must be one thing or the other, and
you and I have to elect which of the two we shall stand by, and
which of the two shall be applied to us.
Oh, dear friends! may we all come and say,
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy Cross I cling.
III. And so, lastly, notice the love, which varies with the
forgiveness.
'Tell Me which of them will love him most.' Simon does not penetrate
Christ's design, and there is a dash of supercilious contempt for the
story and the question, as it seems to me, in the languid, half-courteous
answer:--'I suppose, if it were worth my while to think about such a
thing, that he to whom he forgave the most.' He did not know what a
battery was going to be unmasked. Jesus says, 'Thou hast rightly judged.'
The man that is most forgiven is the man that will love most. Well,
that answer is true if all other things about the two debtors are
equal. If they are the same sort of men, with the same openness to
sentiments of gratitude and generosity, the man who is let off the
smaller debt will generally be less obliged than the man who is let
off the larger. But it is, alas! not always the case that we can
measure benefits conferred by gratitude shown. Another element comes
in--namely, the consciousness of the benefit received--which
measures the gratitude far more accurately than the actual benefit
bestowed. And so we must take both these things, the actual amount
of forgiveness, so to speak, which is conferred, and the depth of
the sense of the forgiveness received, in order to get the measure
of the love which answers it. So that this principle breaks up into
two thoughts, of which I have only just a word or two to say.
First, it is very often true that the greatest sinners make the
greatest saints. There have been plenty of instances all down the
history of the world, and there are plenty of instances, thank God,
cropping up every day still in which some poor, wretched outcast,
away out in the darkness, living on the husks that the swine do eat,
and liking to be in the pigstye, is brought back into the Father's
house, and turns out a far more loving son and a far better servant
than the man that had never wandered away from it. 'The publicans
and the harlots' do often yet 'go into the Kingdom of God before'
the respectable people.
And there are plenty of people in Manchester that you would not
touch with a pair of tongs who, if they could be got hold of, would
make far more earnest and devoted Christians than you are. The very
strength of passion and feeling which has swept them wrong, rightly
directed, would make grand saints of them, just as the very same
conditions of climate which, at tropics, bring tornadoes and
cyclones and dreadful thunder-storms, do also bring abundant
fertility. The river which devastates a nation, dammed up within
banks, may fertilise half a continent. And if a man is brought out
of the darkness, and looks back upon the years that are wasted, that
may help him to a more intense consecration. And if he remembers the
filth out of which Jesus Christ picked him, it will bind him to that
Lord with a bond deep and sacred.
So let no outcast man or woman listening to me now despair. You can
come back from the furthest darkness, and whatever ugly things you
have in your memories and your consciences, you may make them
stepping-stones on which to climb to the very throne of God. Let no
respectable people despise the outcasts; there may be the making in
them of far better Christians than we are.
But, on the other hand, let no man think lightly of sin. Though it
can be forgiven and swept away, and the gross sinner may become the
great saint, there will be scars and bitter memories and habits
surging up again after we thought they were dead; and the old ague
and fever that we caught in the pestilential land will hang by us
when we have migrated into a more wholesome climate. It is never
good for a man to have sinned, even though, through his sin, God may
have taken occasion to bring him near to Himself.
But the second form of this principle is always true--namely, that
those who are most conscious of forgiveness will be most fruitful of
love. The depth and fervour of our individual Christianity depends
more largely on the clearness of our consciousness of our own
personal guilt and the firmness of our grasp of forgiveness than
upon anything else.
Why is it that such multitudes of you professing Christians are such
icebergs in your Christianity? Mainly for this reason--that you have
never found out, in anything like an adequate measure, how great a
sinner you are, and how sure and sweet and sufficient Christ's
pardoning mercy is. And so you are like Simon--you will ask Jesus to
dinner, but you will not give Him any water for His feet or ointment
for His head. You will do the conventional and necessary pieces of
politeness, but not one act of impulse from the heart ever comes
from you. You discharge 'the duties of religion.' What a phrase! You
discharge the duties of religion. Ah! My brother, if you had been
down into the horrible pit and the miry clay, and had seen a hand
and a face looking down, and an arm outstretched to lift you; and if
you had ever known what the rapture was after that subterraneous
experience of having your feet set upon a rock and your goings
established, you would come to Him and you would say, 'Take me all,
O Lord! for I am all redeemed by Thee.' 'To whom little is forgiven
the same loveth little.' Does not that explain the imperfect
Christianity of thousands of us?
Fifty pence and five hundred pence are both small sums. Our Lord had
nothing to do here with the absolute amount of debt, but only with the
comparative amount of the two debts. But when He wanted to tell the
people what the absolute amount of the debt was, he did it in that
other story of the Unfaithful Servant. He owed his lord, not fifty
pence (fifty eightpences or thereabouts), not five hundred pence, but
'ten thousand talents,' which comes to near two and a half millions
of English money. And that is the picture of our indebtedness to God.
'We have nothing to pay.' Here is the payment--that Cross, that dying
Christ. Turn your faith there, my brother, and then you will get ample
forgiveness, and that will kindle love, and that will overflow in
service. For the aperture in the heart at which forgiveness enters in
is precisely of the same width as the one at which love goes out.
Christ has loved us all, and perfectly. Let us love Him back again,
who has died that we might live, and borne our sins in His own body.