Word of Salvation – Vol. 14 No.01 – January 1968

 

Trespassers Will Be Forgiven

 

Sermon by Rev. F. Channing on Matthew 6:12

Scripture Reading: Mark 11 vs 12-26

Psalter Hymnal: 118 vs 1,2,3; 21 vs 1,2,3; 424 vs 1,2,3.

 

Beloved in the Lord Jesus Christ,

I am sure you have all, at some time or other seen a notice posted up at some gate, or at the entrance to some private property which read:

“TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.”

That is a warning that if anyone climbs over the fence, onto the private property, or enters illegally through the gate onto the property, they will be brought before a court of law as a trespasser and prosecuted.  Men quite often so highly prize their own personal possessions that they don’t want others to use them.  Now that is not wrong, for the Bible does clearly speak of the right of personal ownership.  God says, for instance in His Law, “Thou shalt not steal”.  This has direct reference to the right of personal ownership.  If I own something, it is mine, and no one has a right to illegally take it from me.  Yet, for the Christian, the Bible also says, that they are to take cheerfully the spoiling of their goods.  This means that if someone does illegally take something away from us Christians, we should not make an unnecessary fuss about it.  They have taken away only that which will one day rust and decay but they can never take away that which will remain for eternity… the riches which the Christians have stored up for them in heaven at God’s right hand.  And that is why the Lord Jesus Christ said to His disciples, “If they take away thy cloak, give them thy coat also…. if they strike you on one cheek turn the other cheek also… if they demand of you to go one mile, go two for them”.  So there is the right of PERSONAL OWNERSHIP, but this right must be used only to serve Jesus Christ, and to advance His kingdom.

God also has right of PERSONAL OWNERSHIP.  His personal ownership includes all of creation.  He owns everything, because He made everything.

The Bible makes it very clear that the sad part of all this is, that man has TRESPASSED on God’s property.  To trespass means to “go over the limits”… to “go outside the bounds and the limits that have been set”, and man has done this, hasn’t he?

Oh, it is written on every page of history.  Man has taken the things of God… God’s possessions that God has so freely loaned to man, and the possessions that God had placed so freely under the stewardship of man… man has taken these things and man has said… “These are mine!  I’ll use these things as I think!  I’ll use these things for whatever I choose…!  I’ll use these things for my own glory!”

This is how man has trespassed against God.  In Matthew’s Gospel we read that the Lord Jesus Christ said, “Forgive us our debts.”  The Lord Jesus Christ used the word “debts”.  Now this is no contradiction, although men who love to find fault with God’s Word will try to say that it is a contradiction… but it is not!  The meaning is the same.  A “trespass” is to take what does not belong to us… and a “debt” is something that we owe as a penalty.  And so when Jesus Christ said, “Pray in this manner… forgive us our debts,” He was saying, “Ask God to forgive you the penalty that you owe to Him.”

You see, we have not only trespassed, by stepping over into God’s property and taking it for ourselves… but we have also created a DEBT by not being obedient and staying off God’s property.  Now this is what Jesus Christ tells His people to ask forgiveness for.  We have taken what is God’s property and at the same time we have failed to do what God commanded us to do.

This prayer for forgiveness, beloved, is the very crucial petition of this whole pattern of prayer.  Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, is commanding us to ask God the Father for His most precious and most costly favour.  If we drop this petition out of our prayers, we may as well stop praying, because God does not listen to unforgiven sinners!

And then furthermore, this prayer is not just asking God to wipe out a debt, or to overlook a debt, or even to just declare a debt “paid”.  It is asking God to forgive us our trespasses and our debts on the merit of Jesus’ death.

I think we have all heard the forgiveness of sins illustrated by the story of a man who owes a debt.  It was a very great debt.

The man could never hope to repay it.  Even if the man spent his whole lifetime working and labouring, he could never make restitution.  And so, the illustration tells us, that the man staggered along under his heavy debt.  But then one day, the man to whom he owed this great debt, came along and said, “Cheer up fellow!  I am not really in need of the payment of your debt.  I am a big hearted fellow…. so I will cancel your debt!”  That illustration has a happy ending.  The poor man goes free, and the rich man simply glows with generosity.  This is often used as an illustration of how God forgives sin!  But this is NOT an illustration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ beloved.  We do not just have to accept the “paid in full” receipt from God, after we have let Him cancel our debt!  Such talk is but dangerous half-truths!  Forgiveness does not mean just having a debt cancelled!  Forgiveness calls for a complete change of relationship between the person who forgives and the one to be forgiven.  Our debts are not just unpaid bills!  Our sins are not just debts too big for us to pay!  They are grievous offences against the majesty of the Most High God.

Our trespasses have not just been the slipping over the fence into forbidden country to pick the brightly coloured flowers!  They have been the deliberate and wilful taking of rights which never belonged to us!

Forgiveness of our sins is not just the matter of settling a legal matter between God and us, but also forgiveness of our sins is the settling of a personal matter between God and us.  We have incurred ETERNAL DEBTS, and we have trespassed against GOD…. His person… not just a law… but against HIM, and His Law.  We could liken it to the difference between owing another man some money, and the hurting of a person by our malicious evil and deliberate gossip about them.

We are so prone to look and see what sin does in OUR lives, and in the lives of others… How it ruins homes… destroys trust… murders innocent children… brings decay of body and mind… That is what sin does to US!  But what must it do to God?  We can read about it time and time again in Scripture.  “It repented the Lord that He had made man,” wrote Moses…  The Lord Jesus Christ said: “O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem!  Thou who stonest the prophets… How often would I have gathered thee as little chicks are gathered under the protecting wings of the hen… BUT YE WOULD NOT!”  And Scripture says our Lord wept!  God wept!  He wept for the sins of man!  That is what our sins did for God!

God is personally hurt by our trespasses.  Our debts and our sins are against Him.  The psalmist David recognised this, when he said, “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.”

But the Bible tells us, God didn’t remain hurt.  He did not remain hurt as we do when others hurt us.  God did something about this whole matter of our trespasses and debts and sins.  The hurt Father, provided a way out for the wilfully disobedient child.  He loved us!  He saw that we could not clear ourselves of the debt!  He saw that we could never meet the payments of disobedience that He demanded in His Holiness.  He saw that we would ever, in this life, be trespassers upon on His property.  And so God sent His Son to die on the Cross to pay the debt… every single debt of our disobedience, and to provide us with forgiveness.

TRESPASSERS ARE FORGIVEN !

This provision of forgiveness also was a provision of a complete change of relationship between God and the chosen sinner.  We appreciate this too little, beloved.  Too little do we enter experimentally into this.  If we are Christ’s… if we have indeed from our hearts prayed, “Lord, Forgive me my debts and trespasses and sins on the ground of the merit of Jesus’ life and death”… THEN our relationship to God has undergone a miraculous and wonderful change.  The Bible makes this very clear.  It says that we are no longer strangers and foreigners.  That is what we were as unredeemed sinners… strangers in God’s presence… foreigners… no right to be there.

We had no right to God’s promises.  We had no claim upon God at all.  But the Bible says that “in Christ” we have been brought nigh by God – that means brought close to the Lord – and we can come boldly into His presence, no longer being strangers and no longer being foreigners.  The Bible says that God has not even just called us servants… but friends… sons and daughters!  This is the change in the relationship.  We are citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven!  We have been translated out of the kingdom of darkness, and out of the domain of Satan, into the kingdom of light and the under the rule of God.  We are now in such a privileged position that we can ask… and we shall be answered.  We can knock and the door shall be opened by God’s Fatherly hand. We can seek, and we shall surely find, for the Lord our Tender Shepherd will lead us and go before us.

Now this change in our relationship to God is the result of God’s gracious work in us.  We must understand this very clearly.  God works by His Spirit and His Word changing us from what we were, to what He wants us to be.  It is at first an inward change.

Our hearts are changed.  God takes away the heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh on which are engraved His commandments.  This is no work of man.  This is no outward reformation, or outward action of becoming religious.  It is such a startling change in relationship, that it can only be described by the words of our Lord Jesus Christ to Nicodemus.  It is a NEW BIRTH!  Now this inward change of course also affects us outwardly.  Our Lord said to His disciples, and through them to us… “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, because you love one another.”  That was one of the results of this change in relationship.  Love between those who by God’s gracious work and mercy have received the same new relationship.  Paul the apostle writing to the Colossians said, “Put off such things as anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.  Don’t lie one to another seeing ye have put off the old nature with its deeds and have put on the new nature… (God has created the new nature within you..) which is renewed after the image of God.  Put on therefore,” wrote Paul , “mercy, kindness, humility of mind, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing one another, and forgiving one another (if any man have a quarrel against any) EVEN as Christ forgave you!”  The Christian’s relationship to others is also changed!  Their character is being conformed to the character of God Himself!  Now this is a fact, beloved!  God says it is true of every believer.  It is not something that we hope or wait for… it is happening now for the Christian.  The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “We all with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, ARE CHANGED..!” – not will be, but “ARE CHANGED into the same image from glory to glory by the same Spirit.”

Oh beloved, let us be very sure of this!  If we cannot see any such change in our relationship to God and to man, we should certainly question whether we have ever truly believed the Gospel of salvation in Christ!  The Bible is so clear…the seed that was sown on good ground sprang up, and produced fruit, some thirty, some sixty, some one hundred fold.  And our Lord Jesus Christ said, “If ye abide in Me, (if you live in Me) ye shall bring forth fruit.”

And these shall be the fruits … a changed relationship with God and man.

And one of these fruits shall be the willingness to forgive others, even as Christ has forgiven us.  Forgiving from the heart is a mark of having a changed heart.

There was an African native who was accompanying a missionary through a very dangerous part of the African countryside.  In the very place where this African’s brother had been murdered, the African stopped and said, “Oh that I could find the murderer who took away my brother’s life!”  Then the missionary said, “Well supposing you do find him, what will you do?”  “Do to him?!” exclaimed the African, “I would bring him under the sound of the Gospel that his soul might be converted to Jesus, and that he might have peace and forgiveness with God!”  And the story is also told of how a certain Rev. Miller was pastor of a little church in Pennsylvania, U.S.A.  And there was a certain man in the district who delighted in persecuting this servant of God.  And this persecutor was caught as a spy during the Revolutionary War in the U.S.A.  And this spy was going to be hung.  The Rev. Miller walked sixty miles to plead for the man’s life before General George Washington.  Washington received Miller kindly, but told him firmly, “I cannot grant your request for the life of your friend.”  “MY FRIEND!” exclaimed Miller, “I have not a worse enemy living than that man!”  “What?” shouted Washington “you have walked sixty miles to save the life of your enemy?  That in my judgment puts a different light upon the matter.  I will grant his pardon.  And so the servant of God hastened a further fifteen miles to the place of execution.  He arrived just as the very noose was being placed over the condemned man’s head.  And at that moment the condemned man saw him, and he shouted out, “There is old Peter Miller!  He has walked seventy-five miles to have his revenge and see me hung.”  But those words were hardly spoken when Miller gave the condemned man his pardon, and thus spared his life.  This is what the grace of God does in our hearts.

Put off therefore the unforgiving spirit of the old man… and put on therefore the blessed Spirit of forgiveness… the new man that is created after the image of God!  Forgive one another as Christ has forgiven you!

Do we believe that God forgives us like that?  Persecutors… blasphemers… trespassers on His property!  We read of His forgiveness of Saul who persecuted Jesus!  We read in the Bible of God’s gracious forgiveness of David the murderer and adulterer.

We read of the Lord’s forgiveness of Peter the denier… and we say, “Is it possible He will forgive me like that?  I know I am one of His children, but NOW look what I have done!  Now look at the terrible heap of debt; look at the terrible trespass I have committed!”

May God grant that we do see these things as terrible, and not just as little shortcomings that God can easily overlook.  He doesn’t overlook them!  He dealt with them with the blood of Christ.  That is what our forgiveness cost Him… That was what He was willing and prepared to pay in love to us!  He gave his only begotten Son!

But we doubt that God will forgive, don’t we?

But will God do less for us than He has enabled us by His grace to do for others?  Shall God be found less forgiving than I have become by His transforming grace?

That is the question!  That is the meaning of this prayer: “Forgive US, as WE have forgiven others.”  It does not mean, “Forgive us for the reason, or on the ground of our forgiving of others.”  The Gospel is the good news of GRACE… not of works, and if this prayer meant that, then we would have no Gospel at all!

This prayer means: “Forgive us Lord… We are encouraged to ask this, because by Thy grace we have been enabled from the heart to forgive others.  Shall You, O Lord, do less for us, than your grace has enabled us to do?”

Beloved, what a comfort it is that God enables us to forgive others.  Whatever they may have done to us, we can forgive them by the grace of God in Christ Jesus.  And then, God shows us that our little forgiving of others, is like a candle burning in the dazzling and blinding brightness of the light of the sun.  That is what our forgiving is like, when compared with God’s willingness to forgive us.

And so I urge you… don’t ever take this prayer lightly upon your lips. Don’t ever pray this prayer without trembling.  Yes!  Tremble!  Tremble, when you ask for such forgiveness.  Forgiveness that will forever outshine and outstrip your forgiving of others.  Tremble when you pray for such forgiveness, and remember the infinite sacrifice which God had to make in the person of Jesus Christ, in order to give you what you ask.  And be assured… WHEN you ask, you shall receive… filled up…  pressed down, shaken down, double measure!

Trespassers shall be forgiven their debts and trespasses for Jesus’ sake.

AMEN.