In our last lesson we talked a little about the Greek silver coin, which the lady lost. The parables that we will cover in this lesson are all related because they all contain another coin as a main part of the story. This time the coin is the denarius which was a Roman silver coin that represented a fair wage for a full day's work in those times. It was sort of like "minimum wage" today. The Jewish work day was from sun up until the 12th hour or from about 6 am until 6 pm. If you take the current minimum wage and multiply it times 12 and then that is what the denarius is equivalent to in today's terms.

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The word in the Greek for "penny" is actually denarius as we have discussed.

From a careful study of scripture, it becomes obvious that the "householder" that hired laborers is Jesus Christ and the day of work represents the Dispensation of Grace. We know this because the hours mentioned and groups hired correspond perfectly to the groups of people who received the Holy Ghost in the Apostolic Church. There were four groups, the first hired, those who came on at the third hour, those who came on the sixth hour, the ninth hour, and finally those who came on at the eleventh hour (that is one hour before night came).

The first people to receive the Holy Ghost were the 120 on the Day of Pentecost. They were the first "hired laborers." They received the Holy Ghost when the "Day of Pentecost" had fully come. The Jewish day of the week started at sundown with night first and then the day. In other words the Holy Ghost fell early that morning right at sunrise or in the "first hour of the day." After people began to hear about what was going on, Peter preached to the crowd that gathered themselves together. Some of the crowd, seeing the people falling out in the streets and speaking with other tongues and praising God thought that they were drunk. To which Peter replied:

When you keep on reading, you will find that after Peter's sermon, three thousand people received the Holy Ghost (verse 41). They were all Jewish people and so the first hour laborers represent the disciples of Jesus who received the Holy Ghost and the third hour laborers represent the 3,000 Jewish converts who received the Holy Ghost.

In John 4, Jesus surprised His disciples by choosing to go through Samaria which was where those who were half Jewish/half Gentile lived. He sat down at a well to await a woman with whom He would talk about the Holy Ghost as being "living water." The scriptures say that He sat down and had the conversation with her at the SIXTH hour (John 4:6)

The lady and the Samaritan people did not receive the Holy Ghost until after Calvary. It is no coincident that the next new race of people to receive the Holy Ghost after the Day of Pentecost were the Samaritans in Acts chapter 8. That marked the first time someone who was not completely Jewish had received the Holy Ghost. The Samaritans were the "sixth hour" laborers.

The Gentiles did not receive the Holy Ghost until Acts chapter 10 when the Holy Ghost fell upon Cornelius' household. God appeared unto Cornelius one day when he was praying for all that God had for him and directed him to send for Peter, even giving the exact location of the preacher. The scriptures say that the angel of the Lord appeared and direction came at the "NINTH hour" (Acts 10:3)!

That means that the "eleventh hour" laborers are us who have received the Holy Ghost today! We are the ones who have entered into the kingdom of God at the last possible minute before the work stops! Jesus said:

The Dispensation of Grace will not last forever! If we are the eleventh hour laborers, then we are getting close to the end of this time period. Now is the time to work harder, praise more sincerely, and pray more fervently than ever before!

And the key is: we may not have had to go through the drama of the death of Jesus Christ as did the first hour laborers. We may not have had to endure the persecution of the church by the Jewish leaders as did the third hour and sixth hour laborers. We may not have had to face the crushing persecution of Nero that the ninth hour, Gentile laborers had to face, but we must be faithful in our time, because in the end at judgment, we will receive the same reward as Peter and John and Cornelius and the others! We will receive the full sum of a days laborer even though we got in on this thing in the last days! We will receive eternal life on the same magnitude and blessings as the original Apostles!

Don't think that if you spent most of your life living for the world, that God doesn't love you. You will receive the same reward as someone who has lived for God all their life. Eternal life will be the same! God has no grandchildren. And while your life down on earth may have been better had you lived for God in your youth, at the end of the day, when the night cometh, if you have been faithful from the time of your hiring, you will receive eternal life just like everyone else!

The scriptures doesn't say all the details, but it does tell us that some of the earlier hired laborers were a little aggravated about the new people getting hired on late and still getting a full day's wages. I wonder if, maybe just maybe, that one of them walked away in disgust and left before quitting time. You see, to God it's not about your past, but whether or not you are being faithful to Him now! If He found you in the first hour of your life, then to get your reward, you've still got to be faithfully serving and working for Him at quitting time! If He found you in the third or sixth hours, then you've got to make it to quitting time to get the reward! Paul told the Galatians:

A lot of people start out good living for God, but that's not what counts. What counts is how you finish! You can have a bad start but finish well and get the prize! You must stay faithful until the end of this race we call life! Paul said right before his death:

Jesus put it like this:

In other words, not everybody who starts to run will finish, but what counts is how you end! Don't tell me what you did for God last year or didn't do. Are you planning on finishing! Paul said that he ran "his course." Your trials and your obstacles and your race will be a little different than mine. You may have a down time when I'm having a good time and vice versa. It's "your course." But keep running. Don't get down if you seem to be going through a down time. Everything will even up in the end. Run your course. Run your race. And make sure that you never entertain thoughts of quitting. Plan to finish this thing! When you do you will find that the reward will be more than enough to satisfy your needs for eternity.

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This is another parable that uses the denarius to illustrate it's truth. Jesus was eating at a Pharisee's house named Simon. This is the first time that a woman came and washed Jesus' feet with the ointment from an alabaster box. There are two examples of this in scripture and we know that they were different situations because of circumstantial evidence. the woman that came and anointed Jesus' feet was a woman of ill report and secretly Simon the Pharisee criticized Jesus:

Jesus, of course, knew what Simon was thinking and so responded with a parable or story in the form of a question to him:

The meaning of this parable is very clear. God is the master to whom the debt is owed and the Pharisee and the sinner woman are the two creditors. The Pharisee is the one who owed "50" and the woman is the one who owed "500." There are many basic yet profound truths found in this parable and story:

1. God is willing to forgive any debt of sin no matter how large or small that it may be. The scriptures say that the master "frankly forgave them" when they couldn't pay. Both could not pay. It doesn't matter if you've been a "good little person" or a "hellion" all of your life, you have a debt of sin that you cannot pay yourself. Of course, God did one step further and paid them for us. The scripture say:

Because of our sin, we all deserved to die both physically and spiritually in the lake of fire, but God died for us so that we could escape! He not only forgave us but paid our debt!

2. Some people are worse sinners than others. The scriptures tell us "ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). But there are some who commit more open sin than others and there are those who delve more deeply in sin than others. Notice that God forgave both. There are a lot of people who view the church house as a bunch of people who are a little better than most people therefore God would forgive them, but that not the case! God doesn't care if you owe 50, 500, or 5000 He can forgive you and save you and make something out of you!

Some sins are more easily counted by men than others. Some people sell out to sin deeper than others. But the scriptures were not saying that we all need to go out and sin a bunch so we can love God more. It is not saying that someone who has lived a long life in drugs or whatever and has been forgiven loves God more than someone who has been raised in church. That's not the point. When you realize that the denarius represented a day's worth of labor, then it becomes obvious that the woman had spent more time "getting into debt" or sinning. She was in a deeper hole than the Pharisee in her own eyes. She would not argue the point that she was not a sinner, she knew of her need for Him!

To God both were debtors and owed Him; it did not make much difference what they owed. The problem was that the Pharisee viewed himself as better than the woman because to his eyes he had not sinned as much, therefore he let his pride and piety cause him to not be as hungry for Jesus. He didn't give Jesus the normal greeting that every other guest got. He didn't even greet Jesus in the manner that guests were normally greeted:

What Jesus was saying is that there is a danger in thinking that we are better than we are because it can effect our response to Jesus Christ! The Pharisee felt secure in his religion. Everyone thought that He was religious. So he didn't really feel as if he had to go overboard just because Jesus was in the house!

How many times have I met people who felt they were secure in their relationship with God. They were "mature Christians" and felt like they had it all figured out. Heart-felt worship was "beneath" them. That was for the new people to do. After all everybody knows that "I'm a Christian" and "I've been that way for a long time." But in their bravado and religious piety, they fail to worship Jesus and welcome Him in their lives as they should!

It is not the will of God for us to come into even one service and not worship God with our whole heart and mind and soul and passion. Jesus is here because He inhabits His praises and were "two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them." Ask yourself: did you really welcome Him in here like He deserves? Have you really worshipped Him as if you would if He were here in person. He is. He's here just as real as if He had walked in the front door. It doesn't matter how long I've been delivered and how good I'm doing in God, I can't forget where He found me and all that He's done for me! I refuse to be out-worshipped by any of you that have had the Holy Ghost less years than I have!

I never find Jesus ever going back to Simon's house again! He is never mentioned in scripture again. It doesn't matter how much or little a sinner I have been in my own eyes, I want to always make Jesus welcome! We can become so religious and seem "good" to everybody else and yet in our "religiosity" fail to welcome Jesus and respond to Him as we should!

How can you tell when you have reached a place like Simon did where you have allowed your "goodness" to hurt your relationship with Jesus Christ? The answer is obvious from our story: When it begins to bother you to see "sinners" worship God. When you become critical of somebody's praise because they don't seem "good enough" or "holy enough" for you. Whenever those thoughts begin to come into your mind, there ought to be warning bells going off! You are becoming self-righteous. You are beginning to try to approve or disapprove someone to worship Jesus Christ. To the critic, this woman of easy virtue's worship offended, but Jesus did not view her worship in light of her past but rather in view of her sincerity and heart. Be careful about judging people's lives by what you know or in light of their past mistakes. Because when you begin to do so, then you have ceased worshipping yourself and are neglecting Jesus!

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One day Peter asked how many times he should forgive someone who was doing the same thing over and over again. In response, Jesus taught this parable:

We do not emphasize the great differences of the two debts that were owed in this story. The first man owed the king "ten thousand talents" and the second man owed 100 denarius. "Ten thousand talents" is equivalent to 50,000,000 denarius coins! Some scholars put it in the modern day equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars! There was no way for a man to have such a debt through his actions alone, it is obvious that at least some of this debt was inherited or passed on.

When the king called in this man who owed this whopping debt, he begged for mercy and was granted an erasing of the debt! In other words, not only did the creditor not throw him in jail, but forgave him of the entire sum that he owed!

This man then in turn remembered a man that owed him a little over three month's wages and literally got him by the throat and threatened him! He then had the man cast into jail over not paying his debt. When the king found out about it, he was so livid that he brought back the humongous debt that had been owed and had him captured and given to the "tormentors" until he paid the debt!

It is very obvious that the king in the story is God and that we are the one who have such a huge debt. Our debt of sin is so great in God's eyes that He knows that we will never be able to pay it. When we are born, we are "born into sin" and all of the sins of our descendants are stacked up against us! Between fighting generational curses and dealing with our own mistakes, there is no way that we can ever get things right with God on our own, so He willingly forgives us when we ask Him! If you have repented of your sins and been washed in blood of the Lamb by having been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, then realize that God has taken a humongous debt and forgiven it!

The second man is someone in our lives that repeatedly wrongs us. Remember that the denarius was equal to about one day's wages by an ordinary laborer. So for at least 100 days, the second man had done the first wrong. The first man's reaction is exactly what some of us feel like when somebody keeps doing the same thing to us over and over again!

But remember something: view it as God sees it. He forgave us a much greater debt than whatever it is that is offending us in somebody's else actions. We must forgive, and forgive and never stop forgiving! If we do not forgive, then God will return our debt that was erased to us and hold us responsible!

This story emphasizes the importance of forgiveness when others have wronged you. The scriptures say:

You cannot separate your love for others from your love for God! If you hold a grudge against someone else, then it hurts and kills your relationship with God! Unforgiveness is one of the most damaging sins! It is the ONLY sin that can bring back our past out from under the blood of Jesus Christ!

God is willing to forgive our sins on one condition: that we forgive others! Jesus taught us to pray:

God's forgiveness is tied to and hinges upon us being willing to forgive others. Even if they repeat the same mistake 100 days in a row. Even if it happens 490 times a day. Guard your heart from bitterness and unforgiveness. God has forgiven you of too great a debt for you to not to be merciful!