This Scripture here speaks about “debt.” Being in debt is a heavy and painful burden.

And truly, most of us probably have some form of debt, don’t we? In today’s world, it is very difficult to live without being in debt. Only a few people manage to live completely debt-free. And this situation has not been around for very long. I know a family who hated being in debt so much that when they once owed about fourteen thousand dollars, the anxiety was so great that they sold their three-story home. They moved into a rental house, and since then, they have gone from one rental place to another. This is how our modern society functions. Businesses operate with debt, people buy homes with debt—almost everything runs on borrowing. After the IMF crisis, this became the norm throughout society. Even using a credit card is, in reality, taking on debt.

There were people in the past who simply could not bear the idea of being in debt because it was so distressing. And I am not talking about the kind of debt we think lightly of today, but the kind of debt that comes with relentless demands for repayment. You sometimes hear of families whose businesses failed, don’t you? Some are pushed by creditors to the point of making extreme decisions. Their families fall apart, and each person ends up living separately. The burden on their hearts must be enormous. I even have a relative who struggled in business and spent more than a year running away. In the end, he was caught and punished. Of course, he later recovered and started his business again, but such things can happen unintentionally when someone is running a business. If you were carrying that kind of debt, the weight of it would be overwhelming.

I also had my first real experience with debt. When I got married, my wife had a kind of debt she was carrying. It was nothing serious. Of course, taking out a loan to secure a rental deposit is understandable, but this was different. Long ago, when she first entered college, she was leaving the main gate after a freshman welcome event, and some people doing a survey pulled her aside and got her to sign a contract. After that, a set of TOEFL books was delivered to her. They demanded about three hundred dollars. My father-in-law, who knew how these things worked, told her, “Send it back!” So she sent it back to the address. A little while later, the books came again. She sent them back again. They came again. Eventually she said, “Forget it!” and just kept them. Ten years passed. Suddenly, a company sent a notice demanding payment, threatening to take legal action if she did not pay. How much? About seven hundred dollars. That three hundred dollars had more than doubled. The company had already sold the claim to another collection agency, and that is where the notices came from. They were demanding this for something that had been forced on her ten years earlier. Did we pay it? Of course not—we ignored it. By then we were married, so the letters were coming to our new home. As the head of the household, I had to take responsibility. It weighed on me. I thought it would end with a few notices, but a few months later another one came—this time about eight hundred dollars. After some more time, another came for nearly one thousand dollars. It kept increasing. Little by little, it became something I could no longer simply ignore. “What if this reaches about seven thousand dollars?” I wondered. Later, they even came to my workplace. It was extremely upsetting. And then, they even went to the workplace where my father used to work, mentioning my wife’s name. My father, who knew nothing about any of this, was shocked. At that point, I realized this could trouble our whole family, so I changed my approach. “I’ll pay it. Please bring it down.” So we reached a compromise, lowered the amount, and that finally ended it.

Even though it was only about a year, the pressure it put on us was enormous. On top of that, these people kept threatening to take the matter to court. The letters they sent were written in such frightening language that they looked as if they had come from some legal authority. Since it was my first time dealing with anything like this, I was extremely tense. Through this, I came to understand very well how a debtor feels. “Ah, someone in debt really has no choice but to live like a slave.” That is what I felt strongly. If even an amount of about seven hundred dollars can crush a person like that, then what about someone who owes about seven thousand dollars—or seventy thousand dollars—or even something like seven hundred thousand dollars, a debt that feels impossible to repay in a lifetime? What would become of such a person? That kind of debt would enslave a person for life. Their lives must be unbearably difficult. And you have heard stories of people who take their own lives because they cannot repay their debts, haven’t you? I recently heard of someone who did so. I wondered, “How much debt did he have?” It was about two thousand dollars. I thought, “For some people, even two thousand dollars feels impossible—and it can push them to the brink.” So debt is difficult because of the actual amount owed, but the psychological pressure it puts on a person is enormous.

In the New Testament—the Word of God we read—the word “debt” and the word “sin” are used in the same way. There is the Lord’s Prayer that believers in Jesus often pray. In it we say, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” In the Greek, it truly is the word “debt” as well. So we are praying, “Just as we have forgiven those indebted to us, forgive our debts as well” In this way, someone who has sinned is described in a way very similar to someone who owes a debt.

The passage unfolds like this. In the past, there were landowners, and there were tenant farmers who worked under them. These farmers could sometimes fall into debt to their master. Among them was a servant who owed his master a very large amount—so large that he could not repay it. The master waited, but when he could wait no longer, he said, “Pay it back quickly! If you don’t, I will put you in prison.” The amount was roughly seventy thousand dollars. How could the servant possibly repay such a debt? So he thought, “This is the end for me.” And he pleaded with his master, saying, “Please have mercy on me! I will repay it. Please have patience with me!” The master felt compassion and said, “All right, forget it. You don’t have to pay it back. I will cancel the debt.” You can imagine how joyful the servant must have been. He was now free. He no longer had anything tying him down.

As he was joyfully heading home, he met someone on the road. It was a man who owed him three hundred dollars. He himself had just been forgiven a debt of seventy thousand dollars. Yet the moment he saw the man who owed him three hundred dollars, he said, “Hey! Pay back what you owe! I gave you a chance, and you still haven’t paid? You’re avoiding me on purpose, aren’t you?” The man pleaded, “No, I’m not. I just don’t have the money. Please wait! I will surely pay you back!” But he replied, “No! I can’t give you any more time!” and he took him to court. As a result, that man was thrown into prison. When the other servants saw what happened, they reported it to the master. “The one you forgave—whose debt of seventy thousand dollars you canceled—has thrown someone into prison for not paying back three hundred dollars!” What do you think the master did?

The master called the servant in. “I forgave you a debt of seventy thousand dollars, and yet you threw a man into prison for owing you three hundred dollars? This cannot be!” And he said, “You must pay back what you owe!” Then he put him in prison and punished him so that he could not come out until he had repaid it.

Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is like this. So, “Since God has forgiven all your sins and has forgiven your debt, now you must also forgive one another’s debts. Forgive one another’s sins!” This is what Jesus taught us.

Why did Jesus tell this story? One of His disciples had asked Him a question: “When I forgive someone, is forgiving up to seven times enough? If I forgive seven times, wouldn’t that be doing very well?” In our culture, people often say, “I gave him three chances—now I can’t take it anymore!” But in those days, they considered even seven times to be quite generous. So the disciple was essentially asking, “If I forgive that much, isn’t that enough?” But Jesus replied, “Forgive up to seventy times seven.” Seventy times seven is four hundred ninety. That does not mean you must forgive exactly four hundred ninety times, but rather that even if it were four hundred ninety times, you should still forgive. In other words, forgive without limit. And with that, Jesus gave the teaching I just shared with you.

If we are people who have received God’s grace in this way, then just as we are thankful for the grace we have received, we also ought to cancel the debts of those who are indebted to us. And if we want to receive God’s forgiveness, we must think carefully about whether there is anyone we are still unable to forgive, and then forgive that person. Only then can we be forgiven. This is exactly what the Lord’s Prayer says: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” or, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” What we do comes first.

If you ever find yourself thinking, “I want to receive God’s grace, I want to meet God, but why am I not receiving His grace?” then ask yourself whether there is someone you have not been able to forgive, someone you still hate. If you have truly confessed before God, “I am a sinner, and that is why I want to meet the Son whom God has sent,” then you must also recognize that you are not the only sinner. The people you are in conflict with right now—your wife, your husband, your mother, your mother-in-law, your father-in-law, or others around you—they are sinners as well. They, too, can do wrong. So if you hope that God will forgive a sinner like you, you must also have compassion toward them. Otherwise, how can you receive the grace God gives? They are sinners too. There was a person who used to hate his mother deeply. But after he came to believe in Jesus, he no longer hated her. Instead, he felt compassion for her. He had hated her so much, but now he saw her with pity.

There is also a missionary I met on the mission field. He was raised by a single mother who brought up two sons. Both sons grew up well. Their mother attended church, served faithfully, and prayed earnestly. She raised her two sons by selling things at the market. Watching their mother struggle so much, the older son formed a dream in his heart. What was it? “I will take revenge on my father!” Why? Because his father had run off. He left home with a younger woman and lived with her. He abandoned his two sons and their mother. And he lived not far from them in Seoul. From a very young age, this missionary hated his father deeply. So everything in his mind became connected to taking revenge on him. He would think, “I’m going to make a lot of money just to get back at my father! If my father builds a building, I’ll build an even bigger one right in front of it!” Even after he believed in Jesus, he prayed this way. Later, he became a missionary, and I met him in China. He told me that he felt he must forgive his father. He said he knew that God was not pleased, and that he needed to forgive him. One day, when he returned to Korea, he went to find his father.

But later, he told me what happened. At first, forgiving his father was extremely difficult. His heart was full of hatred—to the point that he wanted to kill him. After all, his father had abandoned their mother and the two sons, and gone off to enjoy his own life. His heart was filled with revenge and resentment. So he prayed before God, “Lord, please give me the power to forgive. Give me the power to forgive!” Then he stood in front of his father’s house and knocked on the door. When his father opened it, he did not see the big, strong man who had hurt them long ago. Instead, an old, weary-looking man was standing there.

At that moment, the missionary tried to open his mouth to say, “I forgive you.” He said he had even practiced saying it many times. He intended to say, “Father, I forgive you!” But in that instant, something completely different came out of his mouth. What do you think he said?

He said, “Father… please forgive me!” He never expected those words to come out. But he suddenly burst into tears and said, “Father, please forgive me!” His father did not shed a single tear. He just stood there, expressionless. He showed no emotion. But this man had gone there and asked his father for forgiveness. It was completely unexpected. He had gone intending to say, “I forgive you,” but instead he said, “Please forgive me—for hating you, for speaking against you, for cursing you as your son.” After that, he changed a great deal. Even the expression on his face changed, and his anger disappeared. He used to be rather sharp-tempered, but that too was gone. Now he is serving the Lord faithfully as a missionary.

This is a power that comes from God. It was not that he forgave his father; rather, the very heart that allowed him to go and ask his father for forgiveness was given by God, and that power was given by God as well. Why is that? Because he himself had been forgiven. Whose forgiveness had he received? He had realized so deeply that God had forgiven a sinner like him. That is why he was able to do it.

All of us are people who need forgiveness before God. God has already paid the price for the sins of all humanity. This does not mean that He pays for your sins only when you believe. Rather, two thousand years ago—before we even knew Him—when He died on the cross, He paid the price for all our sins.

So what is the message that we believers now proclaim? It is this: “The price for your sins has already been paid. So do not pay that price again yourself! Do not take that curse upon yourself!” We are simply telling people to receive it. And the way to receive this is to repent in the name of Jesus and be baptized in His name. When you are baptized, you confess this: “Jesus died on the cross not because He had sinned and deserved punishment, but because He took the punishment we should have received. And God raised Him from the dead. In the same way, by being united with Jesus, even though I should have suffered eternal punishment and gone to hell when I die, I now live with Jesus. I will be raised with Him!” This is the confession of faith. To those who hold such faith, God reveals the evidence of it.

The God whom believers in Jesus meet is a God who forgives. That is why those who believe in Jesus show the character of forgiveness. Evil spirits do not forgive. They can never be forgiven. They no longer have any chance. Once a person leaves this world, there is no more opportunity to be forgiven. But while we are still on this earth, anyone—no matter what sin they have committed—can be forgiven. In some movies, you see people who end up committing murder even though they never intended to. Then they become terrified. To cover it up, they commit another crime, and even kill someone else. I remember seeing dramas and movies like this. When you try to put yourself in their place, you think, “How anxious and how tormented must they be?” Even if they hide the body and no one ever finds out, what must their heart be like? The guilt, the fear. And if such a person were to come to church and meet God—if they were to stand before God in worship—would they believe that their worship is accepted? They would be in unbearable distress. Yet even for such sinners, God is ready to receive them. Every sin—any sin—God has already paid for it. And even if that sin is exposed and society punishes them with death, God can still forgive their soul. No matter how serious their crime, God can receive that person. Our bodies will eventually leave this world, but our souls must be forgiven by God. A forgiven soul has peace. A forgiven soul has joy. And a forgiven soul receives eternal life. I bless you in the name of Jesus to receive God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness is power.

I once went to China with my wife. At that time, she could not speak the language at all. Suddenly, she said her stomach hurt and she began rolling on the ground in pain. She was in such agony that she could not stop rolling, and I was shocked. There was nothing I could do. I prayed for a long time, but it did no good. I even tried casting out a demon, but that did not help either. I kept asking, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” but my wife was crying. And the way she cried did not seem like it was only because of physical pain—there was a deep hurt in her heart. Then I remembered something I had said the night before. I realized I had said something that hurt her feelings. So I apologized. Then my wife began to tell me everything: “What you said made me so upset, it hurt my heart, how could you say that, and I was so angry.” If she were in Korea, she could have gone out somewhere, met a friend, or visited her family. But in China, she had nowhere to go. It was just the two of us, in a place where she could not speak the language and everything felt frightening. So she felt suffocated and distressed. I think that is why it appeared as sickness. She kept saying she was in pain. What would not go away even after deliverance prayer and prayer finally ended when my wife prayed, “God, please forgive him! I also forgive him!” I apologized again, and we both let everything go. And with that, the pain stopped. What prayer and deliverance could not resolve was settled the moment she completely laid down her heart and forgave.

But in reality, it was not that I forgave her. It was that she forgave, and she was the one who received healing. In the same way, even when someone is wounded by another person, the one who continues to suffer because of that wound is often the person himself. And when that person forgives, he becomes free. Forgiveness sets the soul free, and when the soul is forgiven, even our physical bodies can be released as well. This power to forgive is possible because we ourselves have been forgiven by God. The joy of truly being forgiven by God.

To be forgiven by God, in other words, is to be given another chance. Human forgiveness often sounds like this: “Fine, I’ll forgive you. But I can never give you another chance again!” Or, “How can I trust you? You’ve already deceived me three times…” That is not forgiveness. God’s forgiveness is that He gives us another chance. He gives us a chance again. He keeps giving us chances.

And what if He ends up being deceived? Even knowing full well that He will be deceived, He still gives us another chance. That is the love of God. This is why He tells us to forgive up to seventy times seven—because that is the kind of God He is. God forgives us up to seventy times seven. So if you think, “I repented before God, but I sinned again. I’m too ashamed to go to Him and say sorry, so I’ll just run away,” you don’t need to think like that. Even if you have committed the same sin again, go before God and ask for forgiveness once more. And He will give you another chance. People do not give chances, but God continually gives them. He lets us begin anew. So I bless you in the name of Jesus to start anew every day, to receive new opportunities again and again.

Father God, thank You for sending Your Son to us, for paying the full price of our sins, and for forgiving us sinners. Since we have received such great grace, grant us the power to forgive those who have sinned against us with the forgiveness You have given. Help all who forgive to also receive the Lord’s forgiveness, and allow them to be released from every oppression of the flesh. If there is anyone here suffering in their body, O God, please help them. Be with them, Lord. And if there is anyone who harbors hatred, give them the power to forgive, so that they may truly experience the power of God. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.