Word of Salvation – Vol.49 No.20 – May 2004

 

Praying for Forgiveness and a Forgiving Attitude

Sermon by Rev M P Geluk

on Lord’s Day 51 (Q/A 126 Heid.Cat.)

 

Scripture Readings:  Matthew 6:12, 14-15; 18:21-35

Suggested Hymns:  BoW 186:1,2; 373; 411:1,2,3,4; 454:6,8

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We should realise right from the beginning that this fifth petition in the Lord’s prayer is not merely a straightforward asking for forgiveness of our sins. There is an addition and it puts praying for forgiveness into quite a different category. In fact, this addition can make praying for forgiveness difficult.

You see, it’s one thing to be sorry for one’s sins and to ask our heavenly Father for forgiveness. But it’s quite another thing that we must first have forgiven others who have sinned against us. And if we don’t have that forgiving attitude, then our praying to God for forgiveness won’t help us one little bit. The Lord Jesus made that quite clear. He said: “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Mt 6:14,15).

This prayer, then, is not only about forgiveness of sins but it is also about our willingness to forgive others. And let’s face it, most of us have natures that do not forgive others so easily. It may well be one of the most difficult things to do. We really need the Holy Spirit to work a forgiving attitude in us. Hence we are really asking the Lord to do two things for us: to forgive us our sins, and to help us forgive others.

1. The place of forgiveness in a person’s life

What happens is this. Through His Word and Spirit God draws a sinner to Himself with His irresistible grace. That process may go on for a while. The sinner may resist that grace by stubbornly holding on to a sinful lifestyle. Although the sinner is not glorifying God, the Lord continues to love the sinner by proceeding with his rescue from his lost condition. No sinner, who is elected by God to salvation, can hold out indefinitely against God. As God continues to call the sinner to faith and repentance, the sinner becomes increasingly aware of God’s holiness and his or her own ugly sinfulness.

We of course do not know who the elect are among sinners. We know the saved are God’s elect, but before sinners are saved we don’t know who will respond to God’s call. The church must bring the gospel to all. Those who continue to resist God and harden their hearts face eternal condemnation, unless they repent and believe.

But let’s say that in His electing grace God has called you and you have come to faith and repentance. In that process you finally humbled yourself completely before God and confessed that you needed God in order to break with sin. You were aware of God’s judgment, but with the faith you received from God, you looked to the cross of Christ and believed that in Jesus’ death all your sins are forgiven. Being saved means you are now cleansed and pardoned. And because Christ arose from the dead, you, the believer, received a new life in which you belong to Christ.

That’s the way it happened with the tax collector who prayed for forgiveness in the temple and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Lk 18:13). And the same with Lydia in Philippi, whose heart the Lord opened and He enabled her to respond to the preaching of the Word by Paul (Acts 16:14). And also the Philippian jailer who was prevented in the nick of time from killing himself, when he thought all his prisoners had escaped. He said, “What must I do to be saved?” To which Paul and Silas replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved – you and your household” (Acts 16:30,31).

Forgiveness in a person’s life is beautifully taught in Jesus’ parable about the son who had run away but came home again, and said, “Father, I have sinned…” (Lk 15:21). And so it is with everyone who comes to Christ in repentance and faith. They all receive forgiveness of all their sins.

But now we have to go a step further. In the Lord’s prayer there is that addition, this preparedness to forgive others who sin against us. You see, when the tax collector, Lydia, the jailer, and the lost son, repented of their sin and believed, then life and living did not stop for them. They all continued to live and work and interact with other people. Which meant, of course, that there would have been situations in which they sinned again, and others against them.

This is the same for all Christians. It’s wonderful to be drawn to Christ through the grace of God and receive a full pardon. But unless you’re like the thief on the cross who was converted to Christ in the dying moments of his life, you and I, as new people in Christ, have to do our Christian living right there where we have been all the time. Which is with the same people at home, work, and church, as always. And it is these people, with whom we spent most of our time, against whom we sin the most and they against us.

The Catechism has placed the Lord’s prayer in the gratitude section of the Catechism. It’s not in the first section where the doctrine of sin is dealt with. Nor in the middle section where deliverance through Christ is explained, but right here in the end section, which deals with the Christian’s life of thankfulness. And when Lord’s Day 51 explains the meaning of this fifth petition, then it is directing its teaching to those who are already believers.

As a Christian believer you have been fully forgiven of all your sins through the blood of Christ, but in your daily living with other people you still sin against God, against them, and they against you. You are unhappy about the wrong that has happened and you dearly wish to have it cleared up between you and God and between you and others. Now in that situation, isn’t this wording here in Lord’s Day 51 just the right kind of prayer you want to pray? You are talking to God and you can say, just as you have it here: “Because of Christ’s blood, do not hold against us, poor sinners that we are, any of the sins we do or the evil that continually clings to us. Forgive us just as we are fully determined, as evidence of your grace in us, to forgive our neighbour.”

2. This prayer assumes that we want to be right with God again and again

Indeed, when the Spirit of the holy God has come to live in us, and directs us to do those things that please and glorify God, then we will remain unhappy with sinful situations. And God is so concerned about our staying in touch with Him that He makes us spiritually hungry for true and right relationships.

We know that hunger for food is a powerful drive. People will almost do anything in order to eat and stay alive. But the hunger for forgiveness, for peace with God and others, is more powerful still with those who believe in God.

What is it that drives us to God? Well, it is God drawing us in His grace, but He uses our conscience. A conscience becomes a guilty conscience when it knows of wrongs not being put right. The psalmist knew of this terrible burden of guilt when he said to God, “When I kept guilty silence, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer” (Ps 32:3,4).

How often have we tried to ignore sins which we committed against God and other people? A painful insult, a heated argument, a sarcastic attitude, a bitter fight, a not wanting to say anything more than what is absolutely necessary. We pretend there is nothing the matter, and to others we are the nicest people around, but all the time the atmosphere is poison with those against whom we are sinning.

“Confess your sins to each and pray for each other…” says the Bible (Jam 5:16), but we avoid each other. “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry” says the Word (Eph 4:26), but many times a day has ended and we are still mad at each other. Like the Catechism says, we are poor and miserable sinners indeed. We are in need of forgiveness of the sins we do and of the evil that clings to us constantly.

Now it is possible that you might think that not having a right relationship with God and our neighbour is not all that important. After all, you can’t be on a good footing with everybody. It’s an imperfect world and even the church is imperfect. Besides, haven’t we been forgiven of all our sins?

But that kind of reasoning is really a smokescreen. Every Christian will admit deep in his heart that such excuses are not the way the Word and the Spirit speak. Broken relationships, as a result of brothers and sisters in Christ sinning against each other, can never be smoothed over by saying that nobody is perfect. God says, “Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many” (Heb 12:14,15).

Then also, the child of God who sins must not try to get rid of his guilt by looking for all kinds of excuses that seem to lessen his guilt. In other words, we must not try and justify ourselves, which most of us are very good at. Nor should we try and sweep the wrong under the carpet and hope that eventually it will be forgotten. There is only one thing to do. It’s the way of repentance and forgiveness. We must go back to God and say, “Father, I have sinned… be merciful to me…”

But someone may genuinely wonder as to why we need to go on praying for forgiveness after we have already received from Christ forgiveness for all our sins, past, present and even future. Well, this illustration borrowed from William Hendriksen might be helpful.

“A father may have bequeathed a large inheritance to his son. It now very definitely belongs to the son. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the latter is immediately allowed to withdraw the entire huge amount from the bank and spend it all within one week. Very wisely the father included a stipulation limiting the withdrawal privilege to a certain generous amount each month.” (Commentary on Matthew, p 334)

 

It is the same with God and the sinner who is converted to Christ. Yes, he may believe on the basis of God’s Word that all his sins are forgiven, past, present and future. However, he will not experience all God’s grace in one hit. He knows that God will not allow even future sins to cause him to be lost again. But today he is not experiencing God’s forgiving grace for some sin he may commit in the future. The Lord will have him experience only what he needs in the present. But when he sins again, and those times will come sadly enough, then he must repent of such sins and pray for forgiveness, and God, out of the riches of His grace stored up for His people, will give the repentant believer a new and fresh experience of God’s forgiveness.

But no mercy will come from heaven unless we forgive others from the heart – that is, genuinely and sincerely. Or, as the Catechism says, “Forgive us just as we are fully determined, as evidence of your grace in us, to forgive our neighbours.”

Now it is very obvious that in Jesus’ parable the unmerciful servant came to a terrible end. It happened because he refused to forgive someone else after he himself had received forgiveness. The cancellation of the debt he owed was withdrawn and he was thrown into prison where he would stay until the full debt was paid.

3. The lesson in the parable about the unmerciful servant

The Lord Jesus had been speaking about brothers and sisters in the church sinning against each other. And Peter gave that some thought. He wondered how often he ought to forgive another who sinned against him. Peter suggested to the Lord that perhaps seven times was quite generous. The number seven is used in the Bible as pointing to fullness or completeness. There wouldn’t be too many people with that kind of patience and willingness to forgive. Peter must have been really shocked and surprised when the Lord said seventy times seven. That obviously meant that the willingness to forgive must know no limits. The Christian has to have that willingness all the time. Not just a willingness to forgive different sinners who sin against you at different times, but a willingness to forgive the same sinner who time and again sins against you.

Why did Jesus use the number seventy times seven? Well, that number was also used a long time ago by Lamech, a descendant of Cain. The power of sin came out very strongly in Cain. He had murdered his brother but did not want to admit guilt because he felt he wasn’t his brother’s keeper. Cain’s evil attitude passed on to his children. In fact, it got worse with the passing of the generations. Lamech’s terrible cry for vengeance is recorded in Scripture. “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times” (Gen 4: 23,24). For a minor hurt done to him, Lamech pledged that he would inflict a retribution more than ten times worse. And now the Lord, who can remove a heart of vengeance and replace it with a heart of mercy, says to us that the believer’s willingness to forgive must be at least as determined as the unbeliever’s hatred that leads to revenge.

The unmerciful servant in Jesus’ parable could not bring himself to show pity to the person who owed him a small debt, whilst he himself had just been let of the hook for a huge debt. The point Jesus made could not be clearer. The sins other people commit against us are really quite small in comparison to the sins we have committed against God. One of our biggest shortcomings over against God is that we are more bothered by and preoccupied with the wrongs of other people against us, than we are with our many sins against God.

For example, you might complain that you can’t stand the other person. In fact, in your anger you’ve said that you ‘hate his guts’ or something similar. And no doubt you have a long list of all the wrongs the other person did against you. But it will still be a small debt in comparison with the huge debt each of us has over against God. Frequently we are blind to it. But an illustration used in some evangelism material is helpful here.

Suppose you sin against God three times a day. I’m sure it’s more with most of us, but let’s just keep it to just three. It could be pride, or lust, envy maybe, perhaps a lie, an unkind word about another, maybe you swore. Now three sins a day is about twenty a week and about one thousand sins a year. If you live to be seventy years of age, then you will have amassed a total debt of seventy thousand sins against God. In reality, it will be many times more. The purpose of the illustration in adding up one’s sins is to make an unbeliever see his sinfulness. For the Christian the illustration is also useful to make us realise that even as Christians we sin against God an awful lot. In fact, it may make us a little more humble over against others who sin against us a number of times. Have they been as terrible to us as we have been to God in a lifetime?

Now if God is willing to so love us that He will have Christ die a cruel death for us, in order to forgive us our sins, can we now not love our neighbours enough in order to be willing to forgive them their sins against us?

But should those who sin against us not be sorry first? Well, it would be great if the other person is sorry, but our willingness to forgive must not wait for it. Was God only willing to show mercy when we repented? No, God was willing to be merciful long before we humbled ourselves and said sorry. It was this willingness God’s character to love and forgive that made Him sacrifice His own Son in order to save sinners like us.

Now Christians have been re-made in God’s likeness and He has given us His Spirit to enable us to also be merciful and gracious. That forgiving attitude does far more to bring about in others a willingness to repent than a stand-off attitude that says, “Unless you’re sorry, I am keeping my distance.”

Every wrongdoer always has an obligation to repent and make amends, but with this fifth petition we are to also pray for a forgiving attitude on our part. And when that is there, then we will try to do all we can to open wide the gate that leads to reconciliation and peace.

We should stop concentrating, therefore, on all those times that the other person made your life miserable, when they walked all over you, when they caused you so much pain and injustice. Wrongdoers also killed the prophets, and they stoned Stephen, and murdered James and many more Christians. But we’ve all nailed Jesus to the cross with our sins. But what did Jesus say, and Stephen, who followed His example? “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Lk 23:34). Let’s not be under any illusion. Jesus did say, “… if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Perhaps all of us have had experiences with echoes. It’s the repeat of whatever sound you make when you make a noise against a curved barrier. If we say, “I am sorry, but I can’t forgive you,” then those words will come back to us from heaven, “I am sorry, I can’t forgive you.” A remark in this life, “He is not coming in my house,” will have God echoing back to us, “He (meaning you or me) is not coming into My house.” And if we say in deep anger about someone, “He can go to hell,” then a terrible echo will come back to us, “He (meaning you or me) can go to hell.”

Yes, Jesus said, “…in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Mt 7:2). How necessary, therefore, is this prayer for forgiveness and a forgiving attitude!

“Our Father in heaven, forgive us our sins, as we have also forgiven those who sin against us.” Unless we are willing to forgive, we ourselves cannot pray for forgiveness.

Amen.