Date: February 23-24, 2013
Series: Fearless Generosity
Message: A Scandalous Generosity
Passage: Luke 17:1-10
INTRODUCTION – 5 MINUTES
When was a time you received some unexpected money (or generous gift) “just in the nick of time”?
Leader note: The objective here is to get your group to start identifying what it means to either be forgiven a debt, have a debt paid – but in a surprising way, or to receive an extravagant gift (like a vacation, or retreat, or even material gift that saved them from having to buy it themselves).
OBSERVATION – 20 MINUTES
Read Luke 17:1-10. What do you learn about fearless forgiver?
Leader note: Have your group talk about who is asking the question, the response, the parable Jesus tells, the whole situation, not just the parable as it will give insight to a bigger picture than just forgiving a certain number of times.
Commentary:
- It’s something we’re supposed to do (in the parable we are compared to the servant)
- Something we should do out of gratitude
- Forgiveness no matter how many times
- 7 times a day
- 7 x 70
- The stakes get bigger each time they come back for forgiveness, it gets harder, and we forgive less
- Requires faith – big faith for forgiving big offense
- Great forgiveness requires great faith
- Forgiveness is for me
- If we don’t forgive we cause others to stumble – Watch out!
- We can rebuke them
- Calling out the truth, the offense, the hurt, the pain (don’t dismiss, but don’t take them out and shoot them.)
There is a scale of rebuking that goes from severe (taking them out and shooting them) and pretending it never happened, or dismissing it all together.
- Rebuke, have to have both truth and grace
- Basis is love – isn’t to be right, find justice, not “we need to agree on the facts”– want loving relationship, heart of reconciliation
What are things people do that requires us to forgive?
- Lie, deceive, steal
- Abuse – take away innocence, dignity, name, value
- Take away relationships
- Disappoint
Why should we forgive?
- Ends the cycle of retribution – change the world
- Intimacy with God
- Radically different way of doing things
- If you don’t you die, bitter root that grows, becomes a cancer
- Doesn’t take fearless generosity to be on either side of the scale
- Releasing the person from the hurt that they’ve caused you
- I relieve my hurt and can release the person from the hurt they’ve caused
UNDERSTANDING – 20 MINUTES
What obstacles keep people from forgiving?
- Been burned before
- Want to be right, vindication, proved right, what’s fair
- Want justice
- There’s pain, sometimes it’s hard to let it go, if I was understood
- Holding forgiveness as a protection
- Sense of power by holding onto forgiveness, lose power when you forgive
- Have to own up to something if you forgive, have to admit your part, be vulnerable,
- Before you forgive you get to be “right”, better than all others,
- already feel small, I have to “admit” they are bigger than me, I will cease to be
APPLICATION – 20 MINUTES
Which one of the obstacles do you struggle with?
Leader note: Look at the list you created in the previous question and talk about one or more than stand between you and forgiving someone who wronged you. The previous question may actually have been a tip off to you on people’s obstacles – they may talk about them in the third person when they are really struggling with it themselves.
What would it look like for you to let go of it?
Leader note: One way to think about this would be to consider both parties in the situation. What would the relief to the offender look like? Does it matter? What do you carry around because you can’t, or won’t forgive?
LIVE IT OUT
What would it look like if we said the cycle of not forgiving stops here?