Lord's Prayer Forgiveness

Corrie ten Boom was a prisoner in one of Germany’s concentration camps in World War 2. After she was freed following the war, she told the stories of losing her family members in the war and how she had to release the bitterness and anger toward those who harmed them. She is quoted as saying, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still,” and “God will give us the love to be able to forgive our enemies” Later in life, Corrie met one of the concentration camp guards when he attended one of her meetings. After initially struggling, she graciously forgave, embraced, and wept with him. “‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart.’ For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely, as I did then. But even so, I realized it was not my love. I had tried, and did not have the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit”

As we make our way through our series in the Lord’s Prayer where Christ is teaching us how to pray, we make our way to a topic that many people have difficulty with and that is the subject of forgiveness. Now, we’ve all done something wrong and we’ve all felt our consciences eating us alive and calling us to approach that person we’ve hurt to say, “I’m sorry.” In hopes that they’ll forgive you and if that hasn’t happened to you, you may have some apologizing to do to some people. However, even though we have hurt people in our lives, I’d venture to say that you have also faced your fair amount of hurt too. And if that’s the case, you’ve been confronted in your heart with the issue of forgiveness. You see, when someone hurts or betrays us, our initial response is to want pay back, to cause them to feel what we felt, or to make it even. Take a moment to consider something that someone did that hurt you and how that made you feel. Have you ever experienced that bitterness before? Or are you maybe still holding onto that bitterness today? Well, as we look here at the Lord’s Prayer, He has something for each of us to carry with us into our daily lives and that is that “Forgiven people are forgiving people.”

Now, before I get started I want to go ahead and say that I want you to know that forgiveness does not mean that what that person did wasn’t wrong, or that God won’t judge them for that, or that you need to get over it because it’s not a big deal. Kevin DeYoung says, “You’re saying that God is bigger, the cross is bigger, and hell is bigger. Do not focus on what they owe. Focus on what God has already given you.” So, if you’re struggling with forgiveness I want you to remind yourself of 1. The loving forgiveness of our Heavenly Father and 2. The life of God’s forgiven children.

The Loving Forgiveness of our Heavenly Father

As we read this passage, Jesus says that we are to pray to our Father, “Forgive us our debts.” Now, that word “debts” isn’t a term that we use often today to refer to sin. But the word really works well here. To be in debt means that you are in a position where you owe something to someone else and here in this prayer, we are admitting that we are debtors to God. We are people who are supposed to love Him, adore Him, praise Him, and serve Him but we don’t do that perfectly and we actually fall in sin and rebel against Him daily. However, it is this God that we sin against that says this in Isaiah 43:25, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” This passage in Isaiah beforehand shows that these people forsook God and He was weary and burdened by their sin, but He still presented Himself as the only one who could give forgiveness of their sins and how does this loving God do that? Paul tells us in Colossians 2:13-14,

“And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

So, it is our God, who sent His only Son to Earth to be nailed to a tree to die so that our sins might be forgiven. But that’s not all, we have been forgiven once and for all because of what Jesus Christ did for us, and if that’s the case, why do you guys think He wants us to pray If we are fully forgiven by the sacrifice of Christ, why does He teach us to pray for our debts to be forgiven? Because, when we were saved, we were declared righteous by a holy Judge. But, as His now adopted children, we are to daily ask forgiveness to our holy Father as we sin every day. What was initially transactional is now intimately relational. You see, we can’t see God as only this big heavenly Judge because once Christ died for us, His wrath as righteous judge is satisfied, and now we are His children and He is our Heavenly Father. Kevin DeYoung said,

“So if I sin as a Christian, I should not fear condemnation, for there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, but I should still feel pricked in my conscience. I should not despair, but I should feel guilty when I do things that deserve to be punished. I have disrupted the Father-son relationship that I enjoy with God. That’s why I should ask for forgiveness, not to be justified all over again, but because I have made a mess of the most important relationship in my life.”

In John 13:5-11, Jesus begins washing the disciples' feet which gives a wonderful illusion to the Christian life. Yes, we are cleansed by the blood of Christ fully, but in this daily life we live, there is the dirt of sin that gets upon us as we sin and it is in fellowship with Christ that we are cleansed as we pursue holiness.

So, with this said, we are to pray every day for God’s forgiveness of our sins so we can enjoy deep, rich, and unhindered fellowship with Him. What we learn here are three things for our lives. First, God, who we once hated as an enemy, has saved us and made Himself our loving Father. Second, we are encouraged to strive to be aware of sin in our lives and third, we can run to our loving Father to confess our sins. If you were freed by the Judge and went out and ran a red light, you wouldn’t turn around to go tell the Judge. But if you accidentally dented your dad’s truck when he told you not to drive it and you did anyway, you would go to him to ask for forgiveness. But Jesus doesn’t end here, He tells us to pray, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” which brings me to the last point which is:

The Life of God’s Forgiven Children

In Matthew 18, Jesus tells us this story about a servant who owed his master 10,000 talents, which according to once source is worth over 6 billion in today’s money, and the master sees this man begging him for more time and the master has pity on him and tells him that the debt is forgiven fully. So this guy stands up and walks off scott free only to find a guy who owed him 100 denarii, which is maybe $12,000 today, and he chokes him and tells him that he better give him his money and when this poor guy begs for more time, he has him throne in prison. And when the master finds out about this he says, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you had pleaded with me. And should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” The point of this story is that God has forgiven us of more than we could ever possibly repay and although people may have done significant things to you, it will never be close to the amount that God has forgiven you of.

Thomas Manton once said, “There is none so tinder to others as they which have received mercy themselves, for they know how gently God has dealt with them.”

In the movie, Braveheart, William Wallace kneels down before his father-in-law after his daughter was killed for being married to William. The father stands there and struggle for a moment but then puts his hand on the head of William Wallace as though to say you are forgiven even though his daughter would still be alive if she would not have ran off to marry William in secret. And that is how forgiveness works. Forgiveness is no longer holding something over their heads, it is no longer demanding they work to make things right. It is telling them “What you should give me to make up for my loss, I know longer ask of you. (K.Dy) And it is here that Jesus is essentially asking us to pray, “God, treat me as I treat those who have wronged me.” Now, that’s a big ask, isn’t it? And that certainly causes us to look in our hearts to see how we treat those who have wronged us.

Paul tells us, in Colossians 3:12-13 “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”

Guys, there is nothing as important as a right relationship with God, and nothing as hard as forgiving those who have wronged you, but this is what Jesus commands of us who are His followers. In closing, I want to ask you to consider three things this week.

Do you know the forgiveness of God in Christ Jesus?

Are you aware of the sin in your life and do you ask God to forgive you and strengthen you as you fight your sin?

Pray to be forgiving as you are a forgiven person.