This last week we’ve heard a lot of rhetoric in light of September 11th’s terrorist attack on our nation. We’ve heard our president use words like "dead or alive" and punishing evil doers. We’ve heard the military’s phrase "infinite justice." We’ve been bombarded with words like hate crimes, justice, vengeance, action, outrage, patriotism, and even war. But there’s one word we haven’t heard much these days. It’s a word I almost hesitate to use in these times, but it’s a word I believe is important. That word is the word forgiveness.
Frankly, forgiveness is not the topic I would’ve chosen to talk about this morning if it were up to me. I would’ve much preferred to talk about God’s final judgment against those who hurt innocent people. But we’ve been in a series on the Lord’s Prayer called "Teach Us to Pray" and today we come to that part of the Lord’s Prayer that deals with forgiveness. So whether we’re ready to hear about it or not, today we’re going to talk about forgiveness in our prayer lives. We’re going to examine this part of the Lord’s prayer and then talk in depth about what it means to receive God’s forgiveness and what it means to extend our forgiveness to others.
1. Forgiveness In Prayer (Matt 6:12; Luke 11:4)
We begin by actually looking at this part of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:12. When Jesus talks about forgiveness of our debts here, he’s not talking about canceling our Visa bill. This prayer reflects a Jewish concept that all our lives are on loan from God. Every time we act in a way that violates the creator’s principles for how to live, that puts us in debt before God, because we’ve violated the principles God created us to live by. So this word refers to "the moral debt incurred because of our sins" (Louw and Nida 88.299). It refers to our actions and our inactions, the things we should have done but didn’t do, as well as the things we did do but shouldn’t have done.
Now notice what this prayer is really saying. It doesn’t say, "Forgive us our debts as we promise to forgive our debtors" or, "Forgive us our debts as we will someday forgive our debtors." It’s past tense, to forgive us as we have already forgiven our debtors. That’s an amazing statement, that we’re asking God to treat our sins the same way we have treated those who have sinned against us. So whenever we pray this prayer with an unforgiving heart, we’re really asking God not to forgive our sins. We’re asking God to treat us the exact same way we’re treating those who’ve sinned against us.
Now I mentioned the first week of this series in the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught this prayer on at least two separate occasions. In addition to teaching it on the sermon on the mount, here in Matthew, he also taught about prayer privately to his closest followers. That conversation is recorded in the 11th chapter of Luke, and the version of the Lord’s Prayer we find in Luke is a little different. There Jesus taught us to pray, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who sins against us" (Luke 11:4 NIV).
There are no exceptions given in this prayer. It doesn’t say, "As we forgive those who are truly sorry for what they’ve done." Jesus doesn’t say, "As we forgive those who have a good excuse for their sins against us." He says "everyone."
Now this part of the Lord’s prayer deals with both receiving God’s forgiveness and extending forgiveness to others. So in our remaining time together, let’s talk about this.
2. Receiving God’s Forgiveness (Romans 5:1; 1 John 1:9)
Now the Bible talks about two different kinds of forgiveness we receive from God. Most Christians fail to understand these two distinct aspects of forgiveness, and this lack of understanding leads to all sorts of problems and misunderstandings in the spiritual life. It’s vitally important to understand these two distinct kinds of forgiveness.
The first kind of forgiveness the Bible talks about is a forgiven status, which is what the Bible calls justification Romans 5:1 is an example of this kind of forgiveness, which says, "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."
The word "justified" or "justification" doesn’t get used much in our world today, at least not positively. We think of someone who tries to justify themselves by making excuses for what they’ve done. That certainly is not what the Bible is talking about here.
The Greek word here is a legal term that means to be made right with someone. This word pictures a person standing in a law court accused of some crime and the evidence is presented. If the judge determines that the person is not guilty of the crime, the judge acquits the person, declaring the person "not guilty." That action justifies the person, because the person is declared innocent of the accusation and therefore free to live their life.
The difference here is that God is the judge, and in God’s courtroom we really are guilty. According to the Bible, all humans--every single one--has spurned God’s laws, ignored God’s direction, and rejected God’s role in their life. The entire human race has rebelled against the creator. So we stand in our creator’s courtroom guilty as charged, deserving judgment, which in this case is death, both spiritual death and physical death. But this judge does something unimaginable, because this judge sends his own son to live a perfect life. Then his innocent son of the judge comes into the courtroom, sits in the chair for us, and takes upon himself our penalty. He experiences death in our place, as his innocent status is transferred to us. So the judge bangs the gavel and pronounces us "not guilty"--or justified--even though we are guilty because someone else has taken upon himself the penalty of our sins.
This is what it means to be justified before God. It means to be made right with God, that God’s son Jesus Christ has taken upon himself the penalty of all our sins. Through Jesus’ perfect life, sacrificial death and resurrection we’re declared right with God. That’s why Romans 5:1 calls this peace with God.
Now when we’re justified by faith in Jesus, that’s for all of our sins, past, present and even future. Jesus didn’t die to pay the penalty just for our sins up to this point in our lives, but he died for all sin for all time. So Christ’s death even covers the sins I’ll commit tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. Regardless of tomorrow’s failures, my status before God is secure, because Christ’s death was sufficient for all my sins.
This means once we’re justified through our faith in Jesus Christ, we never need to be justified before God again. We will never again stand guilty in God’s courtroom. Our status before God has been permanently altered. If you’ve trusted in Christ, you’ll never be more justified before God than you are right now.
But the key of course is trusting in the merits of Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection, which is why Romans 5:1 calls it "being justified through faith." There are many people who intellectually believe that Jesus died human sin, but they’ve never personally received the benefits of Christ’s death in their own lives by faith. They believe it’s true, but they haven’t trusted in it by personally inviting Jesus to come into their lives and to justify them before God. Perhaps some of you here this morning have never taken that step.
So there’s a forgiven status described in the Bible. But there’s also a forgiven experience talked about in the Bible. We might call this forgiven experience cleansing.
This is the kind of forgiveness described in 1 John 1:9, where it says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purity from all unrighteousness." Why would John encourage people who are already justified to still confess their sins? After all, haven’t they already been delivered from the penalty of those sins through Christ’s death on the cross? So why would we need forgiveness if we still have peace with God through our faith in Christ? Well the answer is because this is talking about a different kind of forgiveness.
When we sin as Christians our status before God is unchanged, but suddenly in our experience we feel distant from God. Sin has breeched our closeness with God, placing a barrier between us and God. So when we confess our sins as justified Christians, we’re not asking to be justified again, but we need to be cleansed. We need to once again experience the forgiveness that is already ours through justification.
Let me give you an analogy that might help you understand the difference between our forgiven status and our forgiven experience. When I was about 9 years old I was adopted by my mom’s new husband, and my birth certificate was changed by a Los Angeles county judge from Timothy Brown to Timothy Peck. But when I was about 13 years old my parents divorced and my relationship with my adoptive dad got really bad. I started running away from home, ditching school, stealing money from him, and then things bottomed out when I burned down my room because I’d been smoking in bed. So at age 13 I moved out of the house, and I didn’t speak to my adoptive dad for five years. Was I still his legal son during those five years? Absolutely. Did my behavior alter my legal status? Not at all. My birth certificate didn’t change during those years, because I was still Timothy Peck. But my relationship with my dad was practically nonexistent. It stayed that way until I picked up the phone and said, "I’m sorry."
That’s what it’s like when we sin, that our spiritual birth certificate doesn’t change, but we’re distant in our relationship with God. So John tells us to confess our sins regularly in prayer. He means to name our failures before God in prayer. We confess our sins by actually naming our sins to God in prayer, agreeing with God that they were wrong, and asking for cleansing. When we do this, we experience forgiveness, because our conscience is cleansed of the stain of sin.
I believe it’s this experiential aspect of forgiveness that Jesus is talking about in the Lord’s Prayer. Through prayer we experience God’s forgiveness of our failures.
This shows us why the connection between our forgiveness of others is linked to God’s forgiveness of us. God is not saying, "If you don’t forgive people, you’ll lose your justification and cease to be a Christian." He’s saying, "If you don’t forgive, you won’t experience my forgiveness." Our status before God will remain justified, but our experience will lack God’s forgiveness.
Now again, this whole discussion only really applies to the person who has become a follower of Jesus. None of this will work or make any sense until you’ve received God’s justification, a forgiven status, before God by trusting in Jesus Christ. Until we open our hearts and invite Jesus to come into our lives and bring God’s forgiveness of our sins, we won’t be able to even talk about forgiven experience.
3. Extending Forgiveness To Others (Matthew 18:21-35)
But we move from talking about receiving God’s forgiveness to extending forgiveness to other people. This prayer Jesus taught teaches us that there’s an important connection between experiencing God’s forgiveness and extending forgiveness to other people. We can’t ignore this connection because it’s so strong. Whenever we pray for forgiveness as Christians, we’re also praying, "as we forgive those who sin against us."
Here’s what we learn: Through prayer we express forgiveness of those who hurt us.
Now obviously there’s a difference between a person who’s sorry for what they’ve done to us and a person who’s not. How forgiveness is lived differs depending on the nature of the sin against us and whether the person is truly sorry. But in either case forgiveness is still necessary, whether the person is repentant for their sin or whether they are not. How its expressed will differ, but ultimately Jesus calls us to forgive everyone who sins against us, not just those who are sorry.
Now let’s talk more about why forgiveness is so necessary in our spiritual lives and what it’s like. In Matthew 18:21, one of Jesus’ followers named Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive someone who had sinned against him. Now the Jewish teaching of the rabbis at this time required devout Jewish people to forgive three times (Blomberg 281). So Peter figured he was going the second mile when he asked, "Up to seven times?" But Jesus’ answer was staggering, because he said, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." In other words, forgive people as many times as it takes. There is no limit, because seventy-seven simply means as many times as it takes.
But then Jesus told a story to illustrate what he means in vv. 23-35. In this story, a king decides to settle accounts with all his servants. So he calls a servant into his office who owes the king ten thousand talents. Now this is a staggering amount of money, millions and millions of dollars. It’s hard to even imagine anyone from this time period accumulating that much debt. Now there was no bankruptcy back then, so if you couldn’t pay your bills, you and your family were sold into slavery to pay off the debts. But the servant begged for patience, and instead of giving him more time to pay off the debt, the king does a most uncharacteristic thing by forgiving the debt completely. Now that servant has a clean slate, no debt at all.
Then that servant finds a second fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii. Now this is the equivalent of just a few dollars, a tiny, tiny amount in comparison to the millions and millions of dollars the first servant owed the king. And this second servant uses the exact same words in begging for patience that the first servant used with the king. But instead of offering forgiveness, the first servant has his fellow servant thrown into debtors prison. The king of course is furious, because after showing such incredible grace to the first servant, it makes no sense that the would refuse to demonstrate the same grace toward a fellow servant. So the king has the first servant thrown out of the household and placed in jail to be tortured until he can pay back his original debt.
This is an incredible story. The king of course stands for God, and the first servant stands for any of us who stand guilty before God. God forgives us even though we could never repay the debt. The second servant stands for anyone who sins against us. This story is not teaching that Christians lose their salvation if they refuse to forgive, but it is teaching us that misery and suffering awaits those who refuse to forgive.
From this story we can learn what forgiveness is and is not. Let’s start with what forgiveness of others truly is.
Forgiveness is a response to God’s grace in our lives. The king forgiving a several billion dollar debt represents God’s gracious forgiveness of our sins. Every sin you and I commit in our lifetime is ultimately an offense against God, so God has more sin committed against him than you or I ever will have committed against us as individual people. So the comparison between the amount of sin committed against us with what’s committed against God is like a few dollars against several million dollars.
Sometimes people use the phrase, "find it in your heart to forgive." If you look for the resources to forgive in your heart, you’re going to be looking for a very long time. There is no forgiveness in my heart unless its placed there by God’s grace. Until you truly realize the extent of your sin against God and the incredible grace he’s shown through Jesus, you’ll find it very difficult to forgive other people. This is why non-Christians find it so difficult to forgive, because they haven’t yet experienced God’s forgiveness of their own sins in their own lives.
If you’re a Christian and you’re having difficulty forgiving someone, I want to suggest that you do something very daring. I want to suggest that you spend time in prayer before God, and ask God, "Show me how my sins look to you." Ask God to help you see the extent of your own failures, and how your own sins were carried by Jesus in his suffering on the cross. You see, we have a tendency to think we just needed a little jump start, that our sins were just a minor obstacle between us and God. But when we begin to see the real extent of our own sins, then we begin to appreciate God’s grace more fully, and that enables us to forgive. Forgiveness is a response to God’s grace in our lives.
Forgiveness is also for our own ultimate good. When people hurt us and we refuse to forgive, that person’s sin continues to victimize us, day after day, week after week, year after year. We find ourselves obsessed with hurt and anguish, overcome with feelings of bitterness and vengeance. The story Jesus told spoke of the unforgiving servant being "tortured" in prison, and I think that’s an apt description of the unforgiving Christian.
Bitterness is like a toxic waste that seeps into our lives and contaminates everything it touches, until all our thoughts, all our relationships, all our emotions are contaminated by bitterness. Our lives revolve around the obsession to get the person back, and soon we’re unable to invest ourselves in life and move on with life because we’re paralyzed with bitterness and unforgiveness. In fact, medical studies have been done on the physical effects of unforgiveness and they’ve found that unforgiveness even cuts our lives short and causes our health to fail. So its in our best interests to forgive those who hurt us.
Forgiveness is also both a choice and a process. It begins as a choice to not hold that person’s sin against them, but then it’s a process of reminding myself of that decision again and again. It means that if I make the choice to forgive, then my emotions will eventually follow. So we say, "I choose to forgive, and when negative emotions crop up, I’ll choose to submit those feelings to God and my decision to forgive." It’s both a choice and a process.
Finally, forgiveness is personal, not structural. What I mean by that is only individual people can forgive sins committed against them.
Nowhere in the Bible are structures like governments or courts commanded to forgive crimes and evil. In fact, the Bible calls human government an agent of God’s judgment against those who do evil in our world, and that the government’s use of force--so long as its use of force is justified and ethical--the government’s action is an expression of God’s judgment against evil. This applies to our court system, to our military, and so forth. Nowhere are government structures commanded to forgive, because forgiveness is a personal issue, not a structural issue.
This means its possible to forgive, and to also want to see that person face the consequences of their sin. For instance, imagine a woman held at gunpoint during a bank robbery. That bank robber sinned against her, and she will ultimately need to come to a point of forgiveness, of letting it go to move on. But that does not mean the court that the bank robber stands before is bound to let her go, because it’s the court’s role in God’s plan to punish that act. So the woman can choose to forgive and also be relieved that the court sentences him to prison for his action.
This is what forgiveness is
Now let’s talk about what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not pretending something evil is actually good. Sometimes in the face of evil we try to find the good in it. We saw this in the fundraising telethon on Friday night, as stories of heroes and courage were retold by celebrities as they sought to raise money for the victims. But sometimes when we do that that can appear to be calling something evil good. One of my students at Biola this last week said he thought God wanted the trade center blown up because of all the people who would come to Christ as a result. I was sickened by that line of reasoning because my God doesn’t employ terrorists to accomplish his plan. His plan isn’t thwarted by terrorists, and he can even use evil things to accomplish good things, but let’s not call something evil good. Forgiveness does not mean we minimize the evil in sins against us.
Forgiveness is also not incompatible with justice. When we forgive, we release people into the hands of God for him to deal with them. We know that as wounded people, our thoughts about justice are probably clouded and unclear. So we trust them into the hands of the perfect judge, the creator of heaven and earth and source of every good gift.
We know that people’s sins set into motion certain consequences that no one can stop. Our forgiveness means we choose to absorb the effects of their sin against us in our lives, but it doesn’t mean those consequences are stopped. They will still have to deal with broken trust with people, perhaps life changing circumstances due to their sin. All we can do is not hold it over their head anymore.
Finally, forgiveness is not a way to earn our forgiveness before God. Forgiveness is not a meritorious work where we somehow earn brownie points before God. Instead it is something that grows out of our own experience with God’s grace as it flows out of our lives and onto other people.
Conclusion
Forgiveness is an important part of prayer, both receiving forgiveness and extending it to others. In prayer we both receive the experience of forgiveness and we express our forgiveness of those who hurt us. To pray, "Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors" is a radical, radical prayer.
