Word of Salvation – Vol. 37 No. 01 – January 1992

 

Praying For Forgiveness And A Forgiving Attitude

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 51

Reading Matthew 18:21-35 Matthew 6:12,14,15

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,

If right now I were not in the pulpit but in the pew as you are, and look at this fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer without the benefits of many hours of preparation, then two things would probably come to mind straightaway.

The first of these would have to do with the words ‘debts’ and ‘debtors’.  They seem unusual because most of us are more familiar with ‘trespass’ and ‘trespasses.’  And if you were to look up Luke 2 where you find the Lukan version of the Lord’s Prayer, then you will see that the word ‘sins’ is used there.

Fortunately, we do not have to become very technical about this.  All the three words, debts, trespasses and sins, point to the wrong we do over against God and for which we need forgiveness.  Strictly speaking ‘debts’ are what we owe to God and to others.  And if we do not or cannot pay these ‘debts’, then, unless we are forgiven, we must be punished for them.  But a ‘trespass’ (or ‘transgression’) is what we do when we go against the law or step over the line.  Since we owe God perfect obedience we are in debt to Him through our disobedience.  And since in our disobedience we have gone against His law, we are a people who trespass.  The different words used in this petition do have slightly different meanings, it all amounts to sin.

That’s one thing then that I probably would wonder about if I were to look at this particular request in the Lord’s Prayer without having had the opportunity of further study.  But the second thing that is striking, and a more important one at that, is the fact that this fifth petition is not merely a straightforward asking for forgiveness of our sins.  There is this addition and it puts praying for forgiveness into quite a different category.  It can, in fact, make it quite difficult.

You see, it’s one thing to be sorry for our sins and to come before our heavenly Father and ask for His forgiveness.  But it’s quite another thing when the rest of this petition makes it clear to us that we must have forgiven those who have sinned against us.  And if we don’t have that forgiving attitude in us, then our praying to God for forgiveness won’t help us one little bit.

So that is the second thing about this fifth petition that must have struck us – no forgiveness unless we are willing to forgive others.  The Lord Jesus made that quite clear in verses 14 and 15:

‘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.’

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 the most difficult thing 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 own sins, and to help us forgive others.

As we deal with all of that, we ought to say something about the place of forgiveness of sins in a Christian’s life.  You know, of course, what took place when you first came to Christ, when you first believed.  Well, among other blessings, you also received forgiveness from God for all your sins; Through His Word and Spirit God drew you to Himself with His irresistible grace.  Quite frequently sinners resist that grace and stubbornly hold on to a life-style that does not glorify God.  But the Bible teaches that God loves sinners so much that He goes out of His way and finds the sinner in his lost condition.  The sinner cannot hold out against God and becomes increasingly aware of God’s holiness and his own sinful state.  Some, of course, continue to resist God and harden their hearts.  They face eternal condemnation unless they repent and believe.  But in His electing grace God causes others to come to that point of repentance and they finally humble themselves completely before God and confess that they need God in order to break with sin.  They know of God’s judgement, but with the faith they receive from God they look to the cross of Christ and believe that in Jesus’ death all their sins are forgiven.

They are now cleansed and pardoned.  And because Christ arose from the dead the believer receives a new life in which he belongs 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.’ (Luke 18:13)  And the same with Lydia in Philippi whose heart the Lord opened and enabled her to respond to the preaching of the Word by Paul (Acts 15:14).  And 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?’  And Paul and Silas replied, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved – you and your household.’ (Acts 15:30)  So also the lost son who ran away and came back home again and said, ‘Father, I have sinned…’ (Luke 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 did not stop for them.  They all continued to live and work and interact with other people.  Which means, of course, that there would be situations in which they sinned again.

This is the same for all Christian believers.  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 probably right there where we have been all the time; with the same people at home, work and church, as always.  And it is these people with whom we spend most of our time, against whom we sin the most and they sin against us.

The Catechism is well aware of this too.  It has placed this section on prayer in the part where the Christian’s gratitude to God for salvation received is discussed.  It’s not where the doctrine of sin is dealt with, which is right at the beginning of the Catechism, nor in the middle where deliverance through Christ is explained, but right here in the end section which deals with the Christian’s life of thankfulness.  And when this Lord’s Day 51 explains the meaning of the fifth petition then it is directing its teaching to those who are already believers.

In fact, as with the other Lord’s Days on the Lord’s Prayer, the explanation of the Catechism is a prayer in itself.

Here you are as a Christian believer who has been fully forgiven of all your sins through the blood of Christ but in your daily living with other people you have sinned against God and 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 constantly clings to us.
Forgive us just as we are fully determined as evidence of your grace in us, to forgive our neighbours.’

This kind of praying presupposes that we want to be right with God 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 not be happy with sinful situations.  And God is so concerned about our staying in touch with Him, that He makes us spiritually hungry for relationships that are true and right.

So we have two petitions in the Lord’s Prayer that speak about hunger, the one asks for our physical needs to be supplied, and the other for our spiritual needs.  There is a body hunger and a soul hunger.  There is a prayer for daily bread and a prayer for forgiveness and a forgiving attitude.

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

What drives us to God is a guilty conscience.  Inside a sensitive conscience there is a real sense of guilt and shame.  The psalmist knew of this terrible burden of guilt when he said to God:

‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.  For day and night your hand was heavy upon 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 over against God and other people?  An insult here, an argument there, a sarcastic attitude, a fight, a not wanting to say anything more than what’s absolutely necessary.  We pretend there is nothing the matter whilst all the time the atmosphere is charged with tension.  ‘Confess your sins to each other and prayer for each other…!’ says the Bible (James 5:16) but we avoid each other instead.  ‘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.  As the Catechism says, we are poor 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 someone might think that not having right relationships is not all that important for, 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 that such excuses are not the way the Word and the Spirit speak.

Broken relationships 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).

But should someone genuinely wonder as to why we need to pray for forgiveness after we have already come to Christ, then this illustration borrowed from William Hendriksen might prove 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.  When the sinner repents and believes, all his sins are forgiven but he will not experience all of God’s grace immediately.  He will experience what he needs for the moment.  There is no sense in experiencing forgiveness for sins he might commit in the future.  But when he sins again, and those times will come unfortunately, then he must repent of them 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 forgiveness.

The child of God who sins must not try to get rid of his guilt by looking for all kinds of excuses that will seem to lessen his guilt.  Nor must we try to sweep the wrong under the carpet and hope that eventually it will be forgotten.  Neither must we pay the cost for making wrongs right, for try as we might to make up for it we can’t undo what has happened.

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 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 the man in the parable Jesus told about the unmerciful servant, came to a terrible end, precisely because he refused to forgive someone else after he himself had received forgiveness.  The cancellation of the debt he owed was itself cancelled and he was thrown into prison where he would stay until the debt was paid.

We should not overlook the reason why Jesus told this parable.  The Lord had been speaking about brothers and sisters in the church sinning against each other.  And Peter thinking about that wondered how often he should be prepared to forgive another who sinned against him.  Peter suggested seven times and probably felt that that was quite generous.  He must have been taken by surprise when Jesus said seventy-seven times.

The willingness to forgive knows no limit, that’s the obvious point Jesus wanted to make.  The numbers seven and seventy-seven have been used once before in history, in fact a long time ago.  Lamech, a descendant of Cain and even more evil than his forefather, had cried out in fearful vengeance:

‘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 small 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 our willingness to forgive must be as determined as the hatred that leads to revenge.

The unmerciful servant could not bring himself to show pity to the person who owed him a small debt whilst he himself had just been let off the hook for a huge debt.  The point for us cannot 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 and preoccupied with the wrongs of other people against us then we are with our many sins against God.

You say that you can’t stand the other person, in fact, you said that you can’t stand him.  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 we all have over against God.  Frequently we are blind to it.  There is an illustration in some evangelism material that can be used to help people see their sin over against God.  Suppose you sin against God three times a day.  I am sure it’s more with most of us, but let’s just say three.  It could be swearing, a sin of pride or lust, perhaps a lie.  Now three sins a day is about twenty a week and about one thousand a year.  If you live to be seventy years of age then you will have a total debt of 70,000 sins against God.  In reality, it will be many times more.  It’s about time, therefore, that we realise that the wrong others do to us is small in comparison with what we do wrong over against God.

Now if God is willing to love us and send His Son to die a cruel death for us in order to forgive us our sins, can we not love our neighbour enough 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 depend on it.  Was God only willing to show mercy until we repented?  No, He was prepared to be merciful and forgiving long before we humbled ourselves and said ‘sorry’.  The fact is that we are remade in God’s likeness and His Spirit enables us to be merciful and gracious and that forgiving attitude in us does far more to bring about a willingness to repent in others than a stand-off attitude that says, ‘unless you’re sorry, I am keeping my distance.’

Every wrong-doer always has an obligation to repent and make amends, but in this fifth petition we are to pray for a forgiving attitude, 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.

Stop concentrating, therefore, on all those times that the other person made your life a misery; 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.  And we all nailed Christ to the cross with our sins.  But what did Jesus say?

‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ (Luke 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.’

We’ve all had experiences with echoes, that repetition of a sound produced when we send soundwaves against a curved barrier.  If we say, ‘I am sorry, but I can’t forgive you’ then those words will be returned to us from heaven, ‘I am sorry, I can’t forgive you.’  A remark in this life, ‘He is not coming into my house’ will have God echoing back to us, ‘He is not coming into my house.’  And if we say in deep anger, ‘He can go to hell’ then a terrible echo will come back to us, ‘He can go to hell.’

Yes, ‘…in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.’ (Matt.7:2)  How necessary, therefore, is this prayer for forgiveness and for 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