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Hidden Treasure | Part 7 · Rewind

Rock Point Church

Pastor Pat McCalla · Jul 16, 2019 · 69 min watch · 2 min read

Hidden Treasure | Part 7

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In this message

Big Idea
Key points
Application

Scripture in this message

Exodus 34
Exodus 34:6
Matthew 18
Matthew 18:21
Matthew 18:22
Matthew 18:23

Big Idea Key points Application

Big Idea

Because God's first foot forward is forgiveness toward us, forgiven people must be forgiving people.

Drawing on God's self-description in Exodus 34 and Jesus' parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, Pastor Pat McCalla argues that every human being carries a moral debt to God that can never be repaid — yet God's first impulse is love, grace, and forgiveness. Because that enormous debt has been cancelled through Christ, followers of Jesus are not merely encouraged but required to extend the same radical, ongoing forgiveness to those who have wronged them, releasing bitterness and entrusting justice to God.

Key points

1
1God's defining self-description — His 'first foot forward' — is compassion, mercy, unfailing love, and forgiveness, not judgment.
2
2How you understand God shapes how you respond to Him; people who see God rightly run to Him when they fail, not away from Him.
3
3In the parable of the unmerciful servant, Jesus reveals that every person holds an unpayable debt to God that has been fully cancelled — and that forgiven people must therefore be forgiving people.
4
4Forgiveness is not condoning, pardoning, forgetting, a feeling, or necessarily reconciliation — it is a process of giving the debt owed to you over to God.
5
5Scripture declares that God has removed our sins completely — as far as the East is from the West, never to be counted against us — which is the foundation and motivation for forgiving others.
6
6Unforgiveness chains us to the past and destroys us; choosing forgiveness releases us into freedom — physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.
7
7Jesus modeled the ultimate act of forgiveness from the cross, proving that forgiving is never easy but is always required of His followers.

Application

Pastor McCalla calls every listener to honestly ask, 'When I fail, do I run to God or away from Him?' — and to let the staggering reality of their own forgiven debt reshape how they treat those who have hurt them. Forgiveness is not a feeling to wait for; it is a daily, sometimes agonizing process of handing the accounting sheet of every wound over to God and saying, 'You take it.' For those carrying long-held bitterness, he invites a concrete act of release — naming the person, naming the pain, and choosing to let go — not because what was done was right, but because clinging to it is poisoning you and chaining you to your past. Because Christ paid what we could never repay, His followers are freed — and called — to forgive without limit.

Take it into your week

Made by Rewind AI from the sermon transcript. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI

Scripture in this message

From the transcript
“So if you have your Bibles open to Exodus chapter 34, it's the second book of the Bible. Just go to the very beginning. You'll get the book of Genesis. Turn to your right”
From the transcript
“Oh this is good, you gotta get this. Exodus 34 starting in verse six. The Lord passed in front of Moses calling out Yahweh the Lord. In case Moses forgot who was walking by him”
From the transcript
“And so Matthew chapter 18, turn your Bibles there now. So you're gonna go to your right. You were in Exodus. You're gonna go about two thirds of the way through the Bible”
From the transcript
“Matthew chapter 18, we're gonna start looking at it in verse 21. It starts with Peter asking Jesus the question. I love Peter. If I was alive two thousand years ago, he would have been my bud”
From the transcript
“But Jesus isn't impressed. Look at verse 22. No, not seven times Jesus replied but 70 times seven”
From the transcript
“and then he tells this parable a story. It's a great story. Look at it starting in verse 23. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date”
From the transcript
“Verse 24, in the process one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars”
From the transcript
“He goes on verse 25. He couldn't pay. They all know that. So his master ordered that he be sold along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned to pay the debt”
From the transcript
“So look what happens next. Verse 26, but the man fell down before his master and begged him, please be patient with me and I will pay it all”
From the transcript
“So so look what's next. Verse 27, then his master was filled with pity for him and he released him and forgave his debt”
From the transcript
“Look at verse 28 in Jesus' story, but when the man left the king, it shows the immediacy. This wasn't weeks later or months later, but when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars”
From the transcript
“Verse 29, his fellow servant fell down before him begged for a little more time. Notice he's gonna give the same request. Be patient with me and I will pay it, he pleaded”
From the transcript
“Verse 30, but his creditor would not wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full”
From the transcript
“Verse 31, when some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. So they went to the king and told him everything that had happened”
From the transcript
“Verse 32, then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, you evil servant, I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me”
From the transcript
“Verse 33, shouldn't you have mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you? Shouldn't you forgive the way I forgave you”
From the transcript
“Look how Jesus finishes this then. Verse 34, then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt”
From the transcript
“Look at this. So so when I'm done reading, celebrate, clap, whatever you wanna do. Isaiah one eighteen, one of my favorite verses. Come now, let's settle this, says the Lord”
From the transcript
“Oh look at this next one. This is even better. Okay, said the last one was my favorite, this is my favorite. Isaiah forty two twenty five. I, yes, I alone will blot out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again”
From the transcript
“was wrong. This is my favorite verse. Psalm 103 verse 12. Okay? I love this one. Look at this one. He has removed our sins as far from us as the East is from the West”
From the transcript
“Okay, I got one more. I got one more. This one's even better. This is my favorite. I'm serious this time. Second Corinthians chapter five, Paul is writing this to these Jesus followers in Corinth”
From the transcript
“This means, I'm starting in verse 17, this means that anyone, Patrick, this means that Patrick, put your name there, who belongs to Christ has become a new person”

Made by Rewind AI from the sermon transcript. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI

7-day devotional

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Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7

If someone asked you to describe God in one sentence, what would you say? Pastor Pat pointed out something that should stop us in our tracks: when God chose to describe Himself — His own first foot forward — He led with compassion, mercy, and unfailing love, not with a list of rules or a gavel. Exodus 34:6-7 records the moment God passed before Moses and declared His own name: 'The Lord! The Lord! The compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.' That is not a polished PR statement. That is God telling us who He actually is. It matters enormously, because the picture of God we carry inside us shapes everything — how we pray, how we confess, and whether we run toward Him or away from Him when we've fallen short. If your gut image of God is mostly judge and scorekeeper, failure feels like a reason to hide. But if you let this text rewrite that picture, failure becomes a reason to draw closer. The God who spoke these words over Moses is the same God who meets you today. He is not waiting to catch you in a mistake. His first impulse — His defining character — is love. Let that sink in before the week goes any further.

For reflection

What is the gut-level picture of God you carry into your hardest moments — and how does Exodus 34:6-7 challenge or confirm that picture?

Pray

Pray for an honest look at the image of God you have been living with, and ask Him to replace any distortion with the truth of who He says He is.

Peter thought he was being generous. 'How many times should I forgive someone — seven times?' In the culture of the day, seven was already a stretch beyond what was expected. Jesus answered with a number so large it stops being math: seventy times seven. Then, instead of leaving it as a rule, He told a story. A servant owed a king ten thousand talents — a figure so staggering it would have made the crowd laugh at the absurdity. No working person could accumulate that debt in a hundred lifetimes. When the servant begged for patience, the king did something even more absurd: he cancelled the entire thing. Gone. Not deferred. Cancelled. Pastor Pat pressed hard on this image because Jesus intended it to be jarring. The debt is the point. Every human being carries a moral debt to God — accumulated failures, broken trust, willful rebellion — that no amount of good behavior can balance. And the first movement of the story is not the servant groveling his way to a zero balance; it is the king, moved by compassion, wiping the ledger clean. That is grace. Not earned, not negotiated. Given. The rest of the parable hinges entirely on whether that gift changes the person who receives it.

For reflection

When you try to picture the size of the debt Jesus described, what comes up for you — relief, discomfort, skepticism? What does your reaction tell you about how deeply you've received grace?

Pray

Pray for a fresh, unhurried sense of just how much has already been forgiven in your own life, and what it cost to make that possible.

The parable does not end with the cancelled debt. It ends with a man who walked out of the throne room forgiven of millions and then grabbed a fellow servant by the throat over a few dollars. It is almost cartoonishly awful — until you realize Jesus told this story to a mirror, and we are the ones looking into it. Pastor Pat did not let the listener off easy here. The unmerciful servant is not a villain in some ancient cautionary tale; he is the portrait of what a forgiven person looks like when they refuse to let the forgiveness they received travel outward to others. The king's response is severe, and Jesus closes the story without softening it: 'That is what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters.' This is not a passage that invites nuance or negotiation. Forgiveness received and forgiveness withheld cannot comfortably coexist in the same heart. That is not a guilt trip — it is a description of a spiritual contradiction that will eventually tear a person apart. The good news hiding inside the hard ending is this: the king cancelled the enormous debt first. The call to forgive others is always a response to grace already given, never a transaction to earn it.

For reflection

Is there someone in your life toward whom you have been acting like the unmerciful servant — holding a smaller debt tightly after your own enormous debt was cancelled?

Pray

Pray for the courage to name, honestly before God, any place where received grace has not yet become extended grace.

East and West never meet. No matter how far you travel in either direction, the distance between the two never closes — it is not like North and South, which converge at the poles. That is the image the psalmist chose: 'He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.' Pastor Pat pointed to this verse as the foundation for everything the parable is asking of us. Before you can genuinely release someone else's debt, you have to believe that yours is actually gone — not reduced, not under review, not filed away where God might retrieve it on a bad day. Gone. The theological weight of that word is immense, and it is meant to produce something in us: not just relief, but a kind of spaciousness — a freedom from the constant inner accounting of our own failures. When you no longer have to manage your own ledger because Christ has already settled it, you are actually free to stop managing everyone else's. Forgiveness of others becomes less of a heroic act of willpower and more of a natural outflow from a heart that has truly received what Psalm 103 is describing. The question worth sitting with today is not 'can I forgive?' but 'do I actually believe my own debt is this completely gone?'

For reflection

In what area of your life do you still act as though God is keeping a running score on you — and what would change if you truly believed Psalm 103:12?

Pray

Pray for a deep, settled confidence in the completeness of your own forgiveness, and ask God to show you where you are still trying to earn what He has already given.

Pastor Pat cited Isaiah 1:18 in the same breath as the cancelled debt — God's sweeping, almost startling willingness to wipe the record clean. 'Come now, let's settle this,' says the Lord. 'Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow.' There is an invitation in this verse before there is ever a command. God is not issuing a summons to a courtroom; He is extending a seat at a table. The language is relational — 'let's settle this' — and the outcome He is offering is transformation, not just pardon. Scarlet does not fade on its own. It is one of the most stubborn dyes known in the ancient world. The image is not of sins being minimized or overlooked but of something only God can do: making what was deeply stained completely clean. This matters for forgiveness in a practical way. When you are trying to release bitterness toward someone, your own history of being cleaned — thoroughly, at real cost — is the well you draw from. You are not being asked to manufacture grace from nothing. You are being asked to pass along what has already been poured into you. That is a very different assignment.

For reflection

Think of a wound you have been carrying. Can you identify one specific way that remembering your own 'scarlet made white' experience could shift how you hold that wound today?

Pray

Pray for a vivid, personal sense of what your own slate being wiped clean actually means, and ask God to let that reality soften any hardness you are aware of toward someone else.

Pastor Pat referenced 2 Corinthians 5 as part of the larger frame: the God who cancelled the debt is the same God who is in the business of making things new. 'Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!' But the passage does not stop at personal renewal. Paul immediately connects it to a ministry — a calling. 'God has given us this task of reconciling people to Him.' This is why forgiveness is never just a private transaction between you and your wound. When you release bitterness and choose to hand the accounting sheet to God, you are not just healing yourself; you are living out the same ministry of reconciliation that God has been working in the world since the cross. Note what Paul says God did: He did not count people's sins against them, and He committed to us the message of that grace. That is the shape of forgiveness Pastor Pat described — not condoning what happened, not pretending the pain is not real, but refusing to be the one who keeps the final count. Entrusting justice to God is an act of trust in His character, and it is also, quietly, an act of witness.

For reflection

How does seeing forgiveness as part of a larger ministry of reconciliation — not just a personal coping strategy — change the way you think about the hard forgiveness work in front of you?

Pray

Pray for a willingness to see your own forgiveness story as something God may want to use in the lives of people around you, and ask for the humility to let Him lead that.

You have spent a week sitting with one of the most demanding and most freeing truths in all of Scripture. The thread running through every day is the same: the size of what has been given to you is the measure of what you are freed to give to others. Pastor Pat's invitation was not vague. He asked for something concrete: name the person, name the pain, and — not because what they did was acceptable, but because clinging to it is costing you — say to God, 'You take it.' Forgiveness, as he described it, is not a feeling you wait for and not a single moment you get right once. It is a process. Some wounds require you to hand the sheet back to God fifty times before it starts to feel like anything. That is not failure; that is faithfulness. The parable ends with a warning because Jesus loved people too much to leave them comfortable in unforgiveness. But it begins with a king who ran toward an impossible debt and cancelled it entirely — because that is who God is. The same God who is your king has already settled your account. Today, and in the days ahead, let that reality be the ground you stand on when forgiveness feels too hard to choose on your own.

For reflection

Looking back over this week, what is the one thing God has been most persistently pressing on your heart — and what would it look like to take one concrete step on that today?

Pray

Pray through the full arc of the week — God's character, your own cancelled debt, and the person or pain you most need to release — and ask God to make forgiveness in you less of a one-time decision and more of a daily, grace-fueled way of living.

Made by Rewind AI from the sermon transcript. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI

Small-group discussion guide

For leading a group conversation about this message.

Open

Think about a time you received unexpected kindness from someone when you deserved the opposite — maybe even from a stranger. That kind of unearned grace is at the heart of what Pastor Pat McCalla unpacked in this message.

Discussion questions

1
In Exodus 34:6-7, God chooses to introduce Himself with compassion, mercy, and unfailing love before anything else. What does it tell us about God's character that this is His 'first foot forward' — the way He most wants to be known?
2
Pastor Pat pointed out that how we understand God directly shapes how we respond to Him when we fail — whether we run toward Him or away from Him. What might make it hard for people to run toward God in those moments, and what in this passage speaks to that?
3
In the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35, Jesus describes a debt so large it could never be repaid — and then has it cancelled entirely. What do you think Jesus wants His listeners to feel about their own standing before God, and how does that set up what He says next about forgiving others?
4
Pastor Pat was careful to say that forgiveness is not condoning what happened, forgetting it, or necessarily reconciling with someone — instead, he described it as a process of handing the debt over to God. How does that definition change the way we might think about what forgiveness actually asks of us?
5
Psalm 103:12 says God has removed our sins 'as far as the east is from the west.' How might sitting with that image — that our debt is completely gone, never to be counted against us — shape the way followers of Jesus approach someone who has genuinely hurt them?
6
Pastor Pat described unforgiveness as something that chains us to the past and does real damage — and he invited anyone carrying long-held bitterness to name the person, name the pain, and choose to release it to God. What would it look like, practically, for our community to take that kind of step together — not just as individuals but as people trying to live this out with one another?

Pray together

Ask God to make the reality of your own cancelled debt so vivid that it becomes the ground you stand on when forgiveness feels impossible

Made by Rewind AI from the sermon transcript. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI

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Hidden Treasure

Week 7 · 8 messages

Where these passages are preached

Exodus 34 Matthew 18 Isaiah 1 Isaiah 43

Explore related topics

Forgiveness God's Mercy Letting Go of Bitterness Moral Debt to God The Unmerciful Servant

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