Luke 23:34
Pastor Allan Kircher
Shell Point Baptist Church
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Our Lord was at that moment enduring the first pains of crucifixion;
--the executioners had just driven the nails through His hands and feet.
He must have been, moreover, greatly depressed, and brought into a condition of extreme weakness by the agony of the night in Gethsemane.
And by the scourging and cruel mocking He endured through the morning from Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, and the Praetorian guards.
Yet neither the weakness of the past, nor the pain of the present, could prevent Him from continuing in prayer.
The Lamb of God was silent to men, but He was not silent to God.
He had not a word to say to His own defense to man, but He continues in His heart crying unto His Father.
No pain and no weakness can silence His holy supplications.
What an example our Lord presents to us!
Let us continue in prayer so long as our heart beats;
Let no excess of suffering drive us away from the throne of grace, but rather let it drive us closer to it.
Today we use our crucified Savior in this example.
Our blessed Redeemer was persevered in prayer even when the cruel iron pierced His tender nerves.
Blow after blow of the hammer jarred His whole frame with anguish
His perseverance may be accounted for by the fact that He was so much in habit of prayer that He could not cease from it.
He had acquired a mighty velocity of intercession which prevented Him to pause.
Those long nights upon the cold mountain side, those many days which had been spent in solitude, those perpetual prayers which He darted up to heaven,
All these had formed in Him a habit so powerful, so intense, so cleansing that it would prepare Him for the severest torments that could not shake Him.
Yet is was more than habit, our Lord was baptized in the spirit of prayer;
He lived it; it lived in Him, it had come to be an element of His nature.
Prayer enwrapped His very soul as with a garment, and His heart went forth in such array.
I repeat it, let this be our example—never, under any circumstances, however severe the trial, or depressing the difficulty, let us cease to prayer.
In Gethsemane, when His bloody sweat fell fast upon the ground,
His bitterest cry commenced with, “My Father,” asking that if it were possible the chalice pass from him;
He pleaded His Father, over and over again on that dark night.
O that the Spirit that makes us cry, “Abba, Father,” never cease His activity in our soul!
May we never be brought into spiritual bondage by the suggestion, “If thou be the Son of God”;
Or if the tempter should assail us, may we triumph as Jesus did in the hungry wilderness.
May the Spirit which cries, “Abba, Father,” repel each unbelieving fear.
When we are chastened, as we must be, may we be in loving subjection to the Father and live;
may we never become captives to the spirit of bondage, so that we doubt the love of our gracious Father.
More remarkable, however, is the fact that our Lord’s prayer to His Father was not for himself,
He continued on the cross to pray for himself, it is true, and His lamentable cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” shows the personality of His prayer.
But the first of the seven great cries on the cross was hardly even an indirect reference to himself.
It is, “Father, forgive them.”
The petition is altogether for others.
He does not say, “I forgive them—that is taken for granted.
Jesus seems to lose sight of the fact that they were doing any wrong to Him.
It is the wrong which they were doing to the Father that is on His mind, the insult which they are paying to the Father, in the person of the Son.
He thinks not of himself at all.
The cry, “Father, forgive them,” is altogether unselfish.
What a soul of compassion was in the Crucified!
How Godlike the divine!
Was there ever such a one before him, who, even in the very pangs of death, offers as His first prayer an intercession for others?
Let this unselfish spirit be in you also brothers and sisters.
Love your neighbors as yourselves, just as Christ has set before you this epitome of unselfishness, seek to follow him, treading in His steps.
There is a crowning jewel in this diadem of glorious love.
As the Righteousness of the Sun set upon Calvary that evening in its wondrous splendor,
As the bright colors which glorify His departure gleamed,
His prayer was not alone for others, but it was for His cruelest of enemies.
Yes, His enemies
It was not a prayer just for His enemies who had done Him an wrong years before this,
But for those who were there and then murdering him.
While the first red drops of blood were still spurting on the hands which drove the nails;
While the hammer was just stained with crimson gore, His blessed mouth poured out the fresh warm prayer,
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Not that is was confined to His immediate executioners,
I believe that is was a far-reaching prayer, which included the Scribes and Pharisees, Pilate and Herod, Jews and Gentiles.
Yes, the whole human race in a certain sense, since we were all concerned in that murder.
I feel as though I could better kneel before my Lord’s cross at this moment than stand in this pulpit to talk to you.
I want to adore him; I worship Him in heart for that prayer.
If I know nothing else of Him but this one prayer, I must adore Him,
If you know nothing else of Him but this one prayer, you must adore Him,
for that one matchless plea for mercy convinces me most overwhelmingly of the deity of Him who offered it,
and fills my heart with reverent affection.
I have introduced to you our Lord’s first vocal prayer upon the cross.
Now, if we are helped by God’s Holy Spirit, let us make some use of it.
First, let us look at this very wonderful text as an illustrative of our Lord’s intercession.
He prayed for His enemies then, He is praying for His enemies now;
The past on the cross was an earnest of the present on the throne.
He is in a higher place, and in a nobler condition, but His occupation is the same;
He continues still before the eternal throne to present pleas on the behalf of guilty men, crying. “Father, O forgive them.”
The first point in which we may see the character of His intercession is this—it is most gracious.
Those, for whom our Lord prayed, according to the text, did not deserve His prayer.
They had done nothing which could call forth from Him a benediction as a reward for their endeavors in His service;
On the contrary, they were most undeserving persons, who had conspired to put Him to death.
They had crucified him, crucified him wantonly and malignantly;
They were even then taking away His innocent life.
They certainly never asked Him to pray for them—it was the last thought in their minds to say, “Intercede for us, thou dying King!”
“Offer petitions on our behalf, thou Son of God!”
Yet our Savior prayed for persons who did not deserve the prayer, but, on the contrary, merited a curse to those who scoffed at His prayers.
There are none on Earth that deserve His intercession
He pleads for none on the assumption that they do deserve it.
His elect, while dead in trespasses and sins, are the objects of His compassionate intercessions,
His heart of love is lifting the favor of Heaven on our behalf.
Some of you, with many tears and much earnestness, have been pleading the Savior to be your advocate?
Will He refuse you? Stands to reason that He can.
He pleads for those who reject His pleadings!
Remember, if nothing good lives in you and everything is conceivably malignant and bad,
These cannot be any barrier to prevent Christ’s exercising the office of Intercessor for you.
Come, put your being into His hands; for you will find ways you cannot discover for yourselves,
And He will put your case to God for you as He did for His murderers, “Father, forgive them.”
A second quality of His intercession is this—its careful spirit.
Christ is no careless advocate for His people.
He knows your precise condition at this very moment,
And the exact state of your heart with regard to the temptation through which you are passing.
More than that, He foresees the temptation which is awaiting you,
and in His intercessions He takes note of the future event which His clairvoyant eye beholds,
“Satan has a desire to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for you that your faith fail not.”
Oh, the condescending tenderness of our great High Priest!
He knows us better than we know ourselves.
He understands every secret grief and groaning.
You need not trouble yourself about the wording of prayer,
He will put the wording right.
And if you fail in your understanding of the exact petition in your life,
He cannot, for He knows the mind of God, and He knows what is in your mind also.
Jesus can spy out some reason for mercy in you which you cannot detect in yourselves.
And when it is so dark and cloudy with your soul that you cannot discern a foothold of that plea to lift up to heaven,
The Lord Jesus all ready has them framed for you. He has already drawn up the plans for you.
And He is ready to present them acceptable before the mercy-seat of God.
The third interesting note is that the prayer offered here helps us to see His intercession in Heaven as to its continuance.
Hey listen, if our Lord had even considered pausing from intercessory prayer it would have been when He was nailed to the tree.
At that moment when they were guilty of direct acts of deadly violence to His divine person,
He might have ceased at that moment on their behalf.
But our crucified Lord did not and prayed for us.
Sin cannot tie the tongue of our interceding friend.
Oh what comfort is here!
You have sinned, believer, you have grieved His Spirit, but you have not stopped that potent tongue which pleads for forgiveness.
You have been unfruitful my brothers and sisters like a barren tree, you deserve to be cut down.
But your want for fruitfulness has not withdrawn the Intercessor from His place.
He intercedes at this moment, crying, “Spare it yet another year.”
Sinner, you have provoked God by long rejecting His mercy and going from bad to worse,
But neither blasphemy nor unrighteousness, nor infidelity, shall stay with Christ on the cross.
He lives, and while He lives He pleads.
And while there is a sinner upon Earth to be saved, there shall be an intercessor in Heaven to plead for him.
These are but fragments of thought, but they will help you , I hope, to realize the intercession, the great High Priest lives today.
This prayer of our Lord on Earth is like His prayer in Heaven, because of its wisdom.
He seeks the best thing, and that which His clients need most, “Father, forgive them.”
He does not say, “Father, enlighten them, for they know not what they do.”
For enlightenment would have just created torture of conscience and hastened on their Hell;
But He cried, “Father, forgive.”
The precious drops of blood now distilling from the nail wounds were pleading too, and God heard.
Go to the mercy-seat of Christ and pour out your desires to Him.
When you allow Christ to be your mediator to God, the mercy-seat will be molded according to the mind of God himself, and He is sure to grant such prayers.
Once more, this memorable prayer of our crucified Lord was His universal intercession in the matter of its commonness.
Do you remember the charge to His disciples for them to preach, “Beginning at Jerusalem”
And on that day when Peter stood up with the eleven,
And charged the people that, with wicked hands they had crucified and slain the Savior,
The result was 3.000 of these persons who were justly accused of His crucifixion became believers in Him.
That was an answer to Jesus’ prayer.
The priests were at the bottom of our Lord’s murder, they were the guiltiest; but it is said, “A great company also of the priests believed.”
Here was another answer to prayer.
The gospel was soon preached to the Jews, and within a short time to the Gentiles.
Was not this prayer, “Father, forgive them,” like a stone cast into a lake, forming that first a narrow circle, and then a wider ring,
And soon a larger sphere, until the whole lake is covered with circling waves?
Such a prayer as this, cast into the whole world, first created a little ring of Jewish converts and priests,
and then a wider circle of the Roman empire, and today its circumference is wide as the globe itself.
Tens of thousands are saved through the incidence of this one intercession: “Father, forgive them,”
O trembling believers, trust Him with your concerns!
Come all you who are guilty, and ask Him to plead for you.
For if you cannot pray, ask Him to intercede for you.
Broken hearts, weary heads, and melancholy souls, come to Him who into the golden censer will put His merits.
And then place your prayers with Him, that He may lift them up to the presence of the Almighty God.
Secondly, the text is instructive of the church’s work.
As Christ was, so His church is to be in this world.
Christ came into this world not be ministered to, but to minister.
Not to be honored, but to save others.
His church, when she understands her work, will perceive that she is not here to gather to herself wealth and honor,
Or to seek any temporal extravaganza and position, she is here to unselfishly live, and if need be,
Unselfishly die for the deliverance of the lost sheep, the salvation of the lost.
Christ’s prayer on the cross I told you was altogether an unselfish one.
He does not remember Himself in it!
Such ought to be the church’s prayer life; she ought not to live for her pastors or for herself, but ever for the lost.
Churches are not made that men of ready speech may stand up on Sundays and talk.
No, there is another end and aim from this.
Shell Point was not built so that you may sit here comfortably, and hear something that shall make you pass away your Sundays with pleasure.
Shell Point does not exist to reclaim heathenism, to fight with evil, to destroy error, to put down falsehood.
A church that does not exist to take the side of the poor, to denounce injustice and to hold up righteousness, is a church that has no right to be.
Shell point, do we exist anymore than Christ existed for himself?
His glory is that He laid aside His glory.
And the glory of Shell Point is when we lay aside our respectability and our dignity, and count it to be shell points glory to gather together the outcasts,
To rescue souls from Hell and lead to God, to hope, to Heaven, this is Shell Point’s heavenly occupation.
O that we would always feel this!
May we always do things for Christ’s sake.
Let our end be to looking upon the conversion of the wandering, the teaching of the ignorant, the help of the poor,
the maintenance of the right, the putting down of the wrong,
and the upholding of the crown and kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now the prayer of Christ had a great spirituality of aim.
You notice that nothing is sought for these people but that which concerns their souls, “Father, forgive them.”
I believe that the more the church of God strains after, before God, the forgiveness of sinners,
and the more the church seeks in her prayer life to teach sinners what sin is, and what the blood of Christ is,
and that Hell must follow if sin is not washed out,
and that Heaven is ensured to all those who are cleansed from sin, then the church will be in unity with her bridegroom.
Let us continue to press forward to the root of the matter in the forgiveness of sinners.
As to all the evils that afflict humanity--by all means take your share in battling with them.
Let temperance be maintained, let education be supported,
Let reforms, political and ecclesiastical, be pushed forward as far as you have the time and effort to spare.
But our first business for every Christian brother and sister is with the hearts and consciences of men as they stand before the everlasting God.
O let nothing turn you aside from your divine errand of mercy to undying souls.
This is your one business.
Tell to sinners that sin will damn them, that Christ alone on that cross can take away sin, and make this the one passion of your souls.
“Father, forgive them! Let them know how to be forgiven.
Let them be actually forgiven.
Let us never rest of bringing sinners to be forgiven, even the guiltiest of them.
Our Savior’s prayer on that cross teaches Shell Point we should be unselfish, and our aim should be spiritual.
Our mission is not to the respectable few who gather in this house, is not to the elite and the eclectic,
Nor to the intelligent who will criticize your words and pass judgment upon every syllable or our teaching,
It is not to those who treat you kindly, generously, affectionately.
But our great errand is to the harlot, to the thief, to the drunkard, to the most depraved and corrupt.
If no one else cares for these, the church must always.
Just as Jesus did on that cross 2,000 years ago.
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
The gospel is meant for those who persecute religion.
It aims it’s arrows of love against the hearts of its foes.
Well as time fails me, the last point is a word to the unconverted.
Listen attentively; some of you here are not saved.
Perhaps you have been ignorant and when you sinned you did not know what you did.
You knew you were sinners, you knew that, but you did not know the far-reaching guilt of sin.
You haven’t been attending church like you should, or haven’t been reading the Bible.
Now you are being anxious about your souls.
Remember your ignorance does not excuse you, or else Christ would not say, “Forgive them;” they must be forgiven, even those that know not what they do.”
The times of your ignorance God winked at, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.
The God whom you forgotten is willing to pardon and ready to forgive.
Trust Jesus who died for the guilty, and you shall be saved.
And there are some here for whom even Christ himself could not pray this prayer in the widest sense, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
For you have known what you did, and every sermon you hear, and every impression made upon your understanding and conscience by the gospel adds to your responsibility,
And takes away from you the excuse of not knowing what you do.
You know there is the world and Christ, and that you cannot have both.
You know that there is sin and God, and that you cannot serve both.
You know that there are the pleasures of evil and the pleasures of Heaven, and that you cannot have both.
In the light that God has given you, may His Spirit also come and help you to choose that which true wisdom would make you choose.
Decide today for God, for Christ, for Heaven.
