Today I want to talk to you about something that is heavy and difficult. Yet I know even in talking about it that most of you will give your assent to it, agree with it, and be thankful for it. Yet deep down, I do wonder if that is true. I wonder what you truly think about this. Whether or not you really believe this, and are willing to put this into practice. The topic of the text before us today is forgiveness. I have found this to be something most Christians are eager and glad to receive, but slow and unsure about extending to others. Why is this so? Perhaps C.S. Lewis said it best, “Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”[1]
For those of you who don’t know, we’re currently in a mini sermon series or sorts. The big passage around us is the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve been working through it passage by passage, but we’ve come to one of the most famous sections in it, the Lord’s Prayer. This is such a rich and wonderful passage that we’re taking our time, trying to savor every word of it. Today we come to the fifth request in the prayer, found in Matthew 6:12, “…forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
Our Neediness on Display
As we now come to focus on this fifth request in the Lord‘s Prayer, we need to remember where we’ve been. I know I’ve said this a lot over the past few weeks, but the order of these requests really matters. The first three are all about the glory of God, about high and lofty things far beyond us and it’s these things things that ought to take the priority in all our praying. So we begin our praying to our Father in heaven, asking that His name would be hallowed, that His kingdom would come, and that His will would be done on earth as in heaven. Then we see a transition with the final three requests. We go from the heights of glory down into our needs here below. And the first need that we pray for in the fourth request is for daily bread. As we lingered on this request last week, we came to see that this phrase “our daily bread” covers everything we need for life in this world, both all the physical necessities we have as well as all the spiritual necessities we have.
Then the very next request is where we are today, and it’s all about the forgiveness of sins. This is no coincidence that it comes next. The very mention of our needs in the previous request for daily bread prompts us to think of our greatest need, the need to be saved from our sins. That great need that rises above all else.
So I think we can say the following as we come v12 and this fifth request. As much as we prefer to show others a strong front, presenting ourselves as if we got our stuff together, and as much as we hate neediness, believing it to be a sign of weakness and insecurity, we are needy by nature. This is who we are. God is Creator, we are created, God is independent, we are dependent beings, and God is holy and pure, we are sinful and corrupt beings. All of this put together displays our neediness. This is not something to deny, or ignore, or suppress down, it’s something to embrace! Because praise God (!), in our great need, God shows Himself to be a great Savior! For in Christ and in His gospel there is redemption and forgiveness from sin.
Towards Understanding
Now that we’ve seen something of the wonder of this fifth request, let’s move on toward defining these terms more closely so we understand what Jesus is teaching us.
v12, “…forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
Though there is much to linger on here we can separate it all into two broad categories. First, receiving forgiveness. And second, giving forgiveness.[2]
First, receiving forgiveness. Right off the bat as v12 begins we see the word forgive. This word carries a lot of meaning. Remember the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer to the Lord, to God, and implied here in the word forgive is that sinning puts us in the wrong with God and that only He can forgive, or pardon, cleanse us from our many sins.[3] Moreso, that the word debts is present here too backs this up. There are many ways the Bible speaks about sin. Sin is a defilement, a corruption, a dishonor, a violation, a crime, and a great injury to ourselves and others. But another way the Bible speaks of our sin is to call our sin a debt to God. Meaning, sinning not only puts us in the wrong with God, sinning makes us indebted to God. So, when we ask Him to forgive us our sins we’re asking for Him to forgive this debt.
We generally understand debt to be a monetary term.[4] Imagine yourself at an ice cream shop and you see a little boy in line in front of you. He orders his ice cream and is so excited to get at it, but then to his utter dismay he doesn’t have enough money to pay for it. As they stand there, the boy with his insufficient funds and the worker with the ice cream, it is clear that the boy has incurred a debt which he cannot pay, and so he can’t get the ice cream. Sad story. I can only guess that most of you would tell the clerk to not worry about it and just add the boys ice cream to your tab. In this small way, you paid the boys debt for him and now he can have his ice cream. That’s a small example of debt, surely, but something of this captures the spirit of this text.
When we sin, we incur a debt to God. Not a financial debt, but a moral debt, a spiritual debt.[5] A debt so enormous we could never pay. How so? God is holy. Infinitely, perfectly, wondrously holy. And God has commanded we be holy too, as He is. He has commanded there be a family resemblance between Himself and us His people. Yet, it only takes one sin to fall short of God’s standard, only one. How grievous is our debt to God then?! How many of you have only sinned one time in your life? None of us! We all have sinned just today far more than we know we have. And so if you add up all our days, all our months, all our years, all the many sins we’ve committed, our debt to God is truly insurmountable. And yet even if we only ever sinned one time, our debt would still be insurmountable, because one single sin is against the holy and eternal God, so our punishment for that one sin must also be eternal. Herman Witsius, a Dutch reformed theologian who lived in the late 17th century, once expressed the same idea like this, “Had we contracted by one debt of this kind, would not the thought of it have been enough to fill our mind with indescribable horror? But we are chargeable with debts…debts of every description: original, imputed, inherent, actual, debts of omission and commission, of ignorance, infirmity, and deliberate wickedness, without limits and without number.”[6]
What hope do we have in the face of such an impossible and insurmountable debt?
We only have hope in the gospel. We who have this insurmountable debt can truly have hope in Christ. Because He, who had no debt of His own, took on our debts willingly and paid it all for us. He didn’t merely pay a few extra dollars like in that ice cream shop, He paid with His very life. Why? Because the penalty of sin is death, so only a death would satisfy our debt. By dying in our place, as our substitute, He paid our debt, and we go free. This is the good news of the gospel! How glorious are Paul’s words in 2 Cor. 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.”
So full forgiveness is ours in Christ. So we can truly pray v12 to “Our Father in heaven” confessing our sins, and asking for His forgiveness and grace. And from being so forgiven and free, we now live as debtors to mercy. That’s who we are as Christians now.
But another question arises at this point. After we ask for forgiveness the first time and we are saved from our sins and become Christians, do we still keep on asking for forgiveness?[7] Some would say no, insisting that to keep on asking for forgiveness after you’ve been forgiven is to wallow in sins you need to forget, to keep looking back at our shame rather than looking forward to where God has brought us. I disagree, for a few simple reasons. We need to keep on asking for forgiveness for our sins because that’s the pattern Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer. Clearly, as we see here in this fifth request, daily confession is necessary to pray in accord with Jesus’ instruction. And more so, we need to keep on asking for forgiveness for our sins because after we become Christians we keep on sinning. Though our sinning will not cause us to lose our salvation or get us kicked out of the Father’s house, our sinning as Christians should grieve us deeply because our sinning as Christians grieves our Father in heaven. We know better, and we still choose to stray? We are warned time and time again, and we still choose the wrong roads? When a Christian sins we ought to feel the weight of our disobedience press down on us, the guilt, the shame, the disgrace, and these things should cause us run home to God and confess, not to be saved all over again, but to ask for forgiveness and help and rescue and grace to be delivered from such snares.
So v12 shows us the forgiveness we receive, the first time and all the times after. But there is more to v12, isn’t there? Yes there is.
Second, giving forgiveness. v12 says, “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” See also v14-15, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Many questions come at this point as we see this condition placed at the end of v12, and then see it repeated in v14-15. Questions like: does this teach a conditional forgiveness? Are we only forgiven if we forgive others? I thought we believe no work can earn us salvation? Does this teach a salvation by works, specifically the work of forgiveness? How does this mesh with salvation being by grace alone through faith alone? All these questions are natural to ask at this point, certainly. And I’m glad to tell you that there is no contradiction here to trip us up. This does not teach a conditional forgiveness or salvation by works, where we are only saved and forgiven if we forgive others, not at all. If that we’re true, if we had to forgive others in order to be finally and fully forgiven ourselves, none of us would have any hope at all. Because no work we do, even the work of forgiving, would ever be perfect enough. What then is this teaching? It’s a clear principle: forgiven people forgive.[8]
This shows us that there is a reciprocity to forgiveness, meaning, it is absurdly hypocritical to ask for forgiveness while refusing to forgive others.[9] Or to say it another way, forgiving others is part the proof that you and I are truly forgiven.[10] Or one more to say it, the act of forgiving doesn’t merit eternal life, rather it is the evidence that the grace of God has truly changed our lives.[11]
This is one way the gospel changes us. Before we become Christians we only ever have the sins of others in our view. We’re critical of others, judgmental of others, believing ourselves to be superior or better than others because of all sorts of reasons we convince ourselves of. And so, when others sin against us in anyway, whether it be generally wronging us, crossing us, hurting us, cutting us off in traffic, or getting snippy with us at a school function for the kids you better believe we’ll hold that grudge for a long time! Before we become Christians we always think the problem is other people and never ourselves. But when we come to Christ this changes. All of the sudden we know ourselves to be sinners in the sight of God. We know ourselves to be contributors to the mess that is this fallen world. And we know the shock of the grace of God, that He would welcome sinners like us home through the work of Christ! And we rejoice, that God saved us despite us, and is now working in us to change us and sanctify us. This transforms our view of others. No longer is the problem always other people. The Christian sees themselves as simultaneously saint and sinner, and so when someone wrongs us, we can be merciful and kind and loving and forgiving, how? Because in the gospel God was and remains to be merciful and kind and loving and forgiving to us. Bottom line: forgiven people forgive. And so too I think we can conclude the opposite, unforgiving people are unforgiven people. That’s what this second half of v12 and v14-15 show us, the forgiveness we must give to others.
Owning the Gospel
I really have meant the words I’ve used this morning, even though I know how weighty these things are. I’m aware that not all forgiving is easy or simple. Some forgiveness brings a great cost. Deep wounds and scars and pain are a real thing in life. Some of you have truly been hurt by others in irreversible ways. So let me clarify what forgiveness is not. To forgive is not to forget. To forgive is not never speaking of hurt again. To forgive is not saying sin is no big deal, not at all. Forgiveness and judgment and consequences aren’t the same thing. Forgiving another of their sin against you can truly be present while consequences for that sin still apply. What I really want you to see today is this: to forgive is to own the gospel. To forgive is to say that the gospel has the final word in your heart about what others have done to you. To forgive is to embrace the reality that we have sinned far more against God than anyone has sinned against us.
Conclusion:
Two quotes to end today. Thomas Watson, a Puritan, said this in his book A Body of Divinity, “…we strive against all thoughts of revenge; when we will not do our enemies mischief, but wish well to them, grieve at their calamities, pray for them, seek reconciliation with them and show ourselves ready on all occasions to relieve them.”[12] This quote really gets at all the ingredients necessary at play. Not bringing mischief to those who sin against us but wishing them well. Not rejoicing at their plight but grieving, praying for them, and being willing to bring them relief when needed.
Lastly here again from Herman Witsius, “When God forgives, He frees the sinner from everlasting punishment, and blesses him with His favor, which is the fountain of life and of all happiness. But when we forgive, we merely cease to indulge towards the offender our feeble, and perhaps impotent wrath, and bestow upon him our best wishes.”[13]
Church, God’s forgiveness of us is great, far greater than any forgiveness we can offer others. But God’s forgiveness changes us. Since God in the gospel hasn’t treated us as our sins deserve, we must because of the gospel not treat others as their sins deserve.
[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001) 115.
[2] Kevin DeYoung, The Lord’s Prayer: Learning from Jesus on What, Why, and How to Pray (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022) 72.
[3] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew – PNTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992) 147.
[4] R.C. Sproul, The Prayer of the Lord (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009) 76.
[5] Sproul, The Prayer of the Lord, 76-77.
[6] Herman Witsius, Sacred Dissertations on the Lord’s Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage, 2010) 313.
[7] Kevin DeYoung, The Lord’s Prayer, 74-75.
[8] Kevin DeYoung, The Lord’s Prayer, 75.
[9] R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew – NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007) 250.
[10] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grands Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971) 2:75.
[11] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, 149.
[12] Thomas Watson, quoted in DeYoung, The Lord’s Prayer, 77.
[13] Herman Witsius, Sacred Dissertations on the Lord’s Prayer, 323.
