Preparing for Worship - September 17, 2023

This week, again, many of the Scriptures are about the importance of forgiveness for us and a warning about the failure to forgive and be patient with others.

The Old Testament lesson is from Genesis 50:15-21. The brothers of Joseph are very worried, because their father, Jacob, had died, and now their brother, Joseph might “pay them back” for all the evil they had done to him in earlier days. Joseph tells them not to be afraid. They “had meant evil for him,” selling him as a slave into Egypt, but God “meant it for good,” helping them and “many people to stay alive,” through the wise policies that God led him to implement to help in a time of great famine in that part of the world. Instead of punishing his brothers, Joseph continued to “forgive” and “comfort and speak kindly” to his brothers and family, as God wished.

The psalm is Psalm 103:1-12, in which David speaks of how “merciful and gracious“ the Lord is, “not repaying us for our many sins,” but “removing our transgressions from us, as far as the East is from the West.” The Lord will “chide us” for our sins, but He also “forgives” us and “redeems our lives” and “renews” us and calls us to “fear” and trust in Him and His “steadfast love.”

In the Gospel lesson, Matthew 18: 21-35, Jesus teaches Peter to keep on forgiving others, again and again, 70 times 7 times, a perfect and complete number of time, as God has forgiven him. Jesus also tells a parable, showing that we are not to take for granted God’s amazing, overwhelming forgiveness for us, but to be willing to forgive others, from the heart, as God has first forgiven us. (The amount forgiven the “unforgiving“ servant, 10,000 talents, was an impossible amount. It is estimated that Herod, the rich, powerful King of the Jews, earned only 900 talents a years. Then the servant, forgiven so much, refuses to forgive a $20 debt someone else owes him. Do we remember how great and costly the forgiveness Jesus earned for us really was?)

Paul, in the Epistle lesson, Romans 14:1-12, calls upon believers not to “quarrel” with one another over “opinions,” where the Lord gives us freedom. He uses the examples of what people “eat and don’t eat,” and whether they “esteem one day as more important than others.” Paul clearly says that the person who has strict rules about such things is the “weaker” person, because under the New Covenant in Christ, there are not rules about such things. However, it is not evil to be a vegetarian or also eat meat, or to worship only on Sunday or on Saturday night or another day. Whatever we do, we are to it all to the glory of God (I Corinthians 10:31) and to be united in Christ, who “died and rose again” for us. Our “knees bow before Him,” and “we confess Him” as Lord.