Chris Carrier of Coral Gables, Florida, was abducted when he was 10 years old. His kidnapper, angry with the boy’s family, burned him with cigarettes, stabbed him numerous times with an ice pick, then shot him in the head and left him to die in the Everglades. Remarkably, the boy survived, though he lost sight in one eye. No one was ever arrested.
Recently, a man confessed to the crime. Carrier, now a youth pastor, went to see him. He found David McAllister, a 77 year-old ex-convict, frail and blind living in a North Miami Beach nursing home. Carrier began visiting often, reading to McAllister from the Bible and praying with him. His ministry opened a door for McAllister to make a profession of faith.
Carrier said, “While many people can’t understand how I could forgive David McAllister, from my point of view I couldn’t not forgive him. If I’d chosen to hate him all these years, or spent my life looking for revenge, then I wouldn’t be the man I am today, the man my wife and children love, the man God has made me to be.”
We come to a difficult section of Scripture in this model prayer. A section that perhaps many people have mouthed but never meant. “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” is this difficult section. But if we are going to really live up to the key idea of this passage we are going to have to know what it means to do so.
Remember the key idea of Matthew 6:5-13 is we must avoid entertaining false ideas of praying that are ineffective and diligently cling to the kind of prayer that is a vital link between ourselves and God. And this section describes a reception of forgiveness according to our rejection of bitterness. And this aspect of our prayer calls us to recognize three things
D. A reception of forgiveness according to our rejection of bitterness
1. Our Sin
The first thing that “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” calls us to recognize is our sin. When Jesus tells us to pray forgive us our debts we are acknowledging that we have sinned. 1 John 1:8 makes it clear that none of us are without sin. John says, “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
Before we talk about how this affects us I want to discuss a difficult issue in the Scripture. And I suppose that I could introduce it most easily by introducing it as a question. The question would be, “If I have already been forgiven of all my sin through receiving Christ as Savior then why does the Scripture say that I must continue to confess my sin?” Why does this passage of Scripture tell us to ask God to forgive us our debts (our sin)?
Let me give you one bad conclusion before I give you what I believe to be the answer that best deals with all the Scriptural data. This first response would deny the protasis (the introduction) of the question. It would say that we have not been forgiven of all our sin. What I would consider as a bad answer to this question would be that Christ forgives all our sin up until the time that we trust Christ as Savior. But after that time our sin is only washed away through the blood of Christ when we confess it. The problem with this solution is that those who hold this view have two distinct ways of receiving forgiveness. And the second way is based on our effort and memory. If you sin and do not confess it then you will not be forgiven. You then will have sin on your record that Christ has not removed. And since God requires absolute righteousness for our entrance into heaven we will not go.
What happens if you overlook even one sin? You will be eternally condemned. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be judged that way. And since the Bible says that we have hidden sins and there are times when our heart deceives us I think this kind of salvation becomes merely another attempt at works in which our forgiveness is never secure but rests on our effort to confess our sin.
Well then if this is not the case, we still have our question, “If I have already been forgiven of all my sin through receiving Christ as Savior then why does the Scripture say I must continue to confess my sin?” I think that the most satisfying answer to this question is to recognize that God does differentiate forgiveness in two ways. But I would say that this forgiveness is the difference between, what I would call (and these are only my categories), judicial forgiveness and familial forgiveness.
I would define judicial forgiveness as that forgiveness that God bestows upon us when we trust Christ as our Savior. As a judge that acquits an individual of sin so God declares us to be not guilty of sin when we are justified by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Listen to some of these passages of Scripture. Romans 5:1 says, “Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here Paul says that God justifies us by our faith. If we are declared not guilty, how then can God lay guilt upon us? In Romans 8, Paul goes on to say that no one can bring an accusation against those who are believers in Christ.”
Listen to Colossians 2:13-14, “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” Notice that the verse says He forgave us all our transgressions. Not some of them. He has canceled out the certificate of debt. If this regarded merely the time up to our conversion then God would again have to write countless certificates of debt and then only wipe the sin out one by one as we confess them. This is not an acceptable way to look at what God says has taken place. We are being dishonest with what the text is saying if we fail to recognize the complete action God has made on our behalf.
See also 2 Corinthians 5:21. “God made Christ who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” God substituted Christ’s righteousness for our sin. This isn’t a partial substitution but a complete one. It is a substitution of our complete sinfulness for Christ’s complete righteousness.
These are all examples of judicial forgiveness. OK. So we see that God has given us his forgiveness and complete righteousness as an act of judicial declaration. We still have to ask, if God has completely forgiven our sin judicially, why then must we continue to confess our sin and be cleansed from unrighteousness? I believe the answer lies in the fact of our judicial forgiveness. It is this judicial forgiveness that causes us to be born into the family of God. When we have been forgiven of all our sin we are given Christ’s righteousness that makes us children of God. Now we enter into a new relationship with God. This is the importance of the new birth. Apart from this new birth experience we are not God’s children. But when we trust Christ as our Savior, God becomes our father and we no longer are enemies with Him but part of His family.
Now we have a new way to interact with Him. We relate to God as a child does his father (or should). Judicially all has been forgiven which, once for all, brings us into this relationship with God by faith. But in this family relationship we must confess our sin because this sin breaks our fellowship with God. When we did wrong, growing up, we knew that things were no longer right with our parents. We felt tension. We experienced discipline. We understood that we dishonored the family name and it caused things not to be right at home. If we handled things biblically there was a confession that needed to be made in order to restore the fellowship. There may still be consequences from our wrong doing (paying for damage or returning something) but the fellowship in our family can be restored. This is the idea of familial forgiveness. When we sin we are not put out of the family but merely lose the joy of the fellowship in that family. Like King David when he had sinned didn’t say, “Restore to me my salvation” but, “Restore to me the joy of my salvation.” In John 8, Jesus said that a son remains in the house forever. There is no casting out of the son, only the slave. If we are children of God our sin will not cast us out but will affect our fellowship with God.
If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if you have placed you confidence in His saving work on the cross only then you are God’s child. When you sin, you break your sweet fellowship with Him. You lose the joy of your salvation. This should be an impetus for us to confess our sin to God. For without Him we can do nothing. And if we remain, as believers, in an unrestored state we are merely spinning our wheels spiritually. With unconfessed sin we miss the joy of our salvation. With unconfessed sin we miss the power that God gives to us to live for Him.
What this says to us is that we need to recognize our sin. We need to admit and confess our sin regularly so that we may have fellowship with God. The idea that we should confess our sin weekly or monthly is unfounded in Scripture. When we recognize that we have sinned we must come before God and confess to Him. Our record with Him must be short or we will never experience the joy and leading of the Spirit of God that we can have.
So when Jesus says we must pray, “Forgive us our debts” He is calling us to consistently recognize our sin and confess it. It is a call to recognize the far reaching effects of sin in our walk as a believer and to admit that this is not the direction in which we want to proceed. We ought to have an ongoing consciousness of sin that we pray, “Forgive us our debts.” When we sin, we must not call it, “our personality,” “our shortcomings,” or “our weaknesses.” We must call them what God calls them and treat them as such.
We have been totally forgiven by God judicially. But as His children we must confess when we have sinned that we may partake of the familial forgiveness and revel in the joy of His fellowship.
2. The Nature of Forgiveness
The second thing that “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” calls us to recognize is the nature of forgiveness. If Jesus is telling to pray for the forgiveness of our sins before our heavenly Father then He expects us to recognize the nature of forgiveness. So let us look into what the Scripture says is the basis of our forgiveness.
Romans 5:8&9 come in the context of the judicial forgiveness we looked at in Romans 5:1. And in these verses Paul describes the nature (or the basis) of our forgiveness. Romans 5:8-9 reads, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.” This tells us a lot about the nature of our forgiveness and justification before God. First, these verses tell us we are not saved on the basis of our own goodness. Paul says that it is while we were still sinner that Christ died on our behalf. There wasn’t any spark of goodness that God saw in us that moved Him to die for us. It was just completely the opposite. There was absolutely nothing good in us. And it was for this purpose that God sent Christ to die. So what is the basis of our forgiveness? It is the death of Christ that brings us forgiveness.
Secondly, these verses tell us we are saved on the basis of God’s love. God’s love is what sent Christ to die for us. Again it was not our inherent goodness. We had none. It was His great love for us that brought us to Himself. John says in His first epistle, “We love God because He first loved us.” And God demonstrated His love toward us in sending His Son. God’s love sent His Son so that we may be saved through His death and resurrection.
To see a third basis for this forgiveness we must turn to Ephesians 2, verses 8&9. These verses say, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, not of yourselves it is the gift of God. Not of works lest any man should boast.” Thirdly, we see that this forgiveness is based on receiving it as a gift. It is not based on works so that no one could boast. It is the gift of God. And to have this forgiveness we must receive it.
In Steven Spielberg’s move, “Saving Private Ryan” an Army Captain named John Miller is ordered to find a solitary private among thousands of displaced soldiers and return him home to his mother whose three other sons have just been killed in action. Miller and his men find Ryan but then are forced to defend a bridge against the enemy. Captain Miller is fatally wounded. In his dying moments, he reaches out to Private Ryan and says, “Earn This!” Many years later as an old man, James Ryan stands in a veteran’s cemetery looking at the tombstone of the man who saved his life. He wonders aloud if he has indeed earned the great gift he received.
This, however, is not God’s way. He doesn’t hold out forgiveness and say, “Earn this!” He doesn’t say, “I don’t think you’ve done enough yet.” Forgiveness, salvation is a gift. It must be received on the basis of Christ’s payment. I ask people if they know they have a home in heaven. Some say, “I think so, I hope so.” If they do not know it may very well be because they have never understood that forgiveness is merely a gift and that to receive it they need to merely ask God on the basis of His Son’s work on the cross. There is nothing to be paid because the gift has already been bought. Jesus purchased our forgiveness on the cross. And if you haven’t yet received it you can today. And you can know that have forgiveness.
This is the basis for our forgiveness. God’s love intervened on our behalf in sending His Son. Christ’s death paid the penalty for our sin. And its status as a gift allows us to receive it by asking. Jesus says that we can ask for forgiveness for our debt against God but only because the debt has already been paid. We merely need to ask God to apply the payment toward our sin.
3. Our Responsibility to Forgive
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” shows that we have a responsibility to forgive. The fact that we have been forgiven shows us that we, as believers in Christ, are to forgive one another. Our responsibility to forgive is based on two truths well illustrated by Matthew 18. Let’s read the entire section from 18:21-35.
a. No one else has sinned against us greater than we have sinned against God.
What is Jesus saying by this parable? Obviously it has to be related to Peter’s question concerning how often he should forgive his brother who sins against him. The first truth expressed by this passage is that no one else has sinned against us greater than we have sinned against God. And as I explain this parable I think it will be clear to you why it concerns how often we should forgive each other.
We see a man that owes a remarkable sum of money to a great king. In being unable to pay the debt the man pleads with the king to give him more time to repay. Here the king releases the man from the debt. The man had lost the money in some investment somehow and was unable to pay it back. Now we have to notice the size of this debt. Ten thousand talents was approximately 60,000,000 days’ wages. That means if the man worked as a common laborer for the next 164,000 years and used all the money to pay back the king he could do it. Obviously stalling for a little more time wasn’t going to do the trick.
After the man is released he immediately finds someone who owes him 100 denarii. He threatens him and when he is unable to repay, the man throws him in jail. Understand the contrast here. The first man owed the king 600,000 times more than this man owed the king. And yet the text is clear that this man mercilessly seeks out the one who owed him very little money.
What does this have to do with forgiving someone who continues to sin against you? Jesus is telling us through this parable that no one else has sinned against us greater than we have sinned against God. This man could have owed the other 70 times 7 more and still it wouldn’t have equaled what he owed the king. As a matter of fact his debt wasn’t just 490 times greater than the other man but it was 600,000 times greater than the other man’s debt.
And we can see clearly that this debt about which Jesus is speaking is sin. It is our sin against God our king and other people’s sin against us. What happens to us is that we tend to minimize the sin that we have committed against God and magnify the sin that others have committed against us. We say things like if they do that one more time I will never speak to them again. We create barriers between ourselves and other people because we fail to accurately assess the real cost of our sin against God.
You have seen it working in your life. Someone sins against you and you react violently. And you sit there and justify your action and your resentment and unforgiveness because you fail to add up all the damaging sin that you have done. When we recognize that everything we do apart from faith is sin in God’s sight then we have a huge debt.
You stand there thinking, “I deserve to be treated better than this” when in reality you deserve nothing better than eternal punishment in hell. You have set yourself up with some kind of false scale that because you are not as bad as someone else you should get better, as if you deserved better.
Is it surprising that this man forgets that he owed the king 134,000 years of wages when we do the very same thing? We do the very same thing when someone doesn’t treat us with the respect we think we deserve or doesn’t love us the way we think we should be loved or doesn’t speak to us in a way in which we think we should be spoken to. We do the same thing. We immediately go out and seek this person. We shake them and order them to pay back what they owe and we lock them up in a debtor’s prison until we think that they have been sufficiently punished for their debt against us.
This response to others shows a lack of true humility because we forget who we really are apart from the riches of Christ’s forgiveness. And this is what it is all about. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as better than others. And stop minimizing our own sin and magnifying the sin of others.
I think that we would be much quicker to forgive and forgive often (70 x 7) if we only recognized how great our debt that God forgave really was. The debt that we owed put Christ on the cross. He suffered not 134,000 years of sin against us but an eternity of sin. The bottom line to this is that no one, no matter how grievous the sin that they sin against us, can ever come close to how grievously we have offended God. And it should cause us to reflect on how we handle those who sin against us.
Shouldn’t we, as our gracious king has done, have mercy upon them and release them from their debt against us. If we, instead, pile it up to their account, we are merely acting like that man who immediately, upon being released from his debt, goes to find the one who owed him a pittance in comparison.
Let’s be willing to focus on how great a debt from which we have been released and then we will begin to have compassion upon those who sin against us. And people might really begin to believe that we are Christians.
I say that last sentence because I heard of a missionary who had been bitter against the local people to whom he was ministering because they continued to steal his pineapples. When he finally stopped getting angry at the people for stealing his pineapples, the people came to him and said, “Too-wan, you have become a Christian, haven’t you?” He said, “’I was ready to react and say, “Look here, I have been a Christian for twenty years.’ But instead I asked, ‘Why do you say that?’ They said, ‘Because you don’t get angry anymore when we steal your pineapples.’”
As long as this man had been standing up for his rights and not forgiving, the people weren’t able to see that he was any different from them. But as soon as he began to forgive them they recognized that he was finally acting like a Christian. And this is what is taking place in the parable. The man who would not forgive the individual that owed him a small amount was acting like the debt he owed was still upon him. In other words he wasn’t thinking like a Christian. He was still trying to avenge what he saw as his right instead of seeing it in light of the release of his own debt.
We too need to give up our rights that we so long to hold onto and forgive so that we might act like the believers we claim to be. In this way others will see Christ truly makes a difference in our lives.
b. Our forgiveness must be made from the heart
The second truth that parable conveys concerning our responsibility to forgive is that our forgiveness must be made from the heart. This is what Jesus says in verses 34&35. “And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed to him. My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.”
You have perhaps seen children made to forgive one another. One looks at the other with a scowl and says, “You forgive me?” The other with clenched teeth says, “Yes, I forgive you.” But in that there is no real reaching out for forgiveness nor is there any imparting of forgiveness. You can see when the children actually grant forgiveness. It is when they leave behind the bitterness and begin to play together again.
Jesus says here in this parable on forgiveness that our responsibility to forgive encompasses our inner being. We cannot merely say, “I forgive you” on the outside but inwardly continue to steam and plot and run the scenario through your head again and again. Forgiveness must be a releasing, a letting go of the debt against you even as Christ has forgiven you. It must be from the heart.
4. A Necessary Warning
I close this message with a necessary warning. This is so important because truly deals with the issue of eternity. It concerns whether someone has been forgiven or not. Jesus’ addition to this section of the prayer in vv.14-15 are a serious reminder of the importance of forgiveness. In case you’ve forgotten He says, “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.”
Now so that you don’t miss the import of Jesus’ words here, He is not saying that our forgiveness is based on the forgiveness we grant to others. We know that this is not true because we have already seen the concurrence of biblical data shows that forgiveness is not based on our actions or deeds but only on the grace of God through the death and resurrection of Christ. And we have that forgiveness when we receive it as a gift by trusting in the sufficiency of Christ’s work alone.
What this passage teaches (and this is why it is so serious) is that if your life is characterized by rampant unforgiveness and bitterness, if you have no capacity to forgive or show mercy or compassion on those who have wronged you (or continue to wrong you) you have never received God’s forgiveness. You don’t know what God’s forgiveness is all about. Jesus is not speaking about someone who is struggling to forgive someone over a particular issue. We have all dealt with situations like this but the fact that we struggle with it and seek to do what’s right and try to forgive is an indication that we have received God’s forgiveness and know that on the basis of His forgiveness we should likewise forgive.
Corrie ten Boom, the Christian holocaust survivor, imprisoned because she hid Jews in her home, was giving a talk about forgiveness after the war in Munich. A man came up to her whom she remembered as one of the cruelest guards in the prison camp in which she had been. She tensed up. He asked her to forgive him, as he had now become a Christian. And though he knew God had forgiven him, he also knew that he should ask her forgiveness for his treatment of her. She wrestled with this forgiveness in what she described as what seemed like hours. She said that she knew forgiveness was not an emotion but an act of the will. Silently she cried out, “Jesus help me! I can shake this man’s hand. You supply the feeling.” She said, “As I reached out my hand an incredible thing took place a healing warmth began to flood my whole being bringing tears to my eyes. ‘I forgive you brother! With all my heart.’ I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then. But even so, I realized that it was not my love. It was the love of the Holy Spirit spread abroad in my heart.” I am sure that we who have believed in Christ too have all struggled with forgiveness. But this is not what Jesus is saying.
Jesus is saying that those who continue in unforgiveness without any desire to forgive, without any desire to follow God’s plan of forgiveness, those who grow in their bitterness toward others and continue to plot and scheme and even pray for their downfall have never known the love of Christ and His forgiveness.
And so I say to you today. If you are struggling with forgiving someone then look to the only place from which forgiveness comes. And continue in the grace of forgiving others through God’s love and mercy poured out in your heart.
The choice is yours today. You can hold on to bitterness and refuse to forgive. You can hold yourself captive to the torturers by refusing to forgive until you think someone has paid up. Or you can forgive as God has forgiven you. You can show mercy and compassion as God has shown mercy and compassion toward you. Don’t miss the blessing of obeying God by forgiving those around you.