We are considering Jesus’ teaching on the subject of prayer here on Sunday mornings, and as part of that, lately we’ve been working our way line by line through The Lord’s Prayer. So let me invite you now if you would to take a Bible and turn with me to The Lord’s Prayer as we find it in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 6, verses 9 through 13. Matthew 6, at the ninth verse. Today, we have come in our study of The Lord’s Prayer to the fifth petition, the fifth request, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” The fourth petition that we looked at last week was about our most fundamental physical needs. Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread – our fundamental physical needs. This week, in the fifth petition, we are taught to pray about our most fundamental spiritual need. We need forgiveness. We all need forgiveness, every one of us, and only the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ can provide it. Whoever you are, whatever your circumstances today, this is a petition in which you have a vital and urgent interest. This is a prayer you must learn to pray and can never do without. “Forgive us our debts.”
We are going to look at four things as we unpack the teaching here. First, there is the reality we must face. We are debtors, Jesus says. “Forgive us our debts.” The reality we must face. Secondly, the remedy we must seek. What are we to do with our debts? Jesus says forgiveness for our debts is what we most urgently need. So the reality we must face – we are debtors. The remedy we must seek – forgiveness. Thirdly, the repentance we must display. You’ll notice Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” A forgiving heart is a great mark and principle evidence of true repentance, and repentance is a necessary condition for forgiveness. The reality we must face. The remedy we must seek. The repentance we must display. And finally, the riches we must claim. If we cannot pay our debts, but instead ask our lender, as it were, to forgive our debts, what we are really asking is that the one to whom we owe all things, we’re asking Him to bear the burden and the cost Himself, which He does in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. So there’s the outline. Have you got it? The reality we must face, the remedy we must seek, the repentance we must display, and the riches we must claim.
Before we consider each of those, let’s pray together and ask for the Lord’s blessing in the ministry of His Word. Let us all pray.
Our God and Father, thank You that You forgive sinners when they come to You, crying out for pardon by the blood of Jesus Christ. We come to You now asking that as Your Word is proclaimed and the good news of full forgiveness in Christ is offered to us, that as Your Word and Spirit works in our hearts we might be enabled indeed to come to You and pray this fifth petition from the heart for ourselves, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Would You do that in each of us today, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Matthew chapter 6 at verse 9. This is the Word of God:
“Pray then like this:
‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’”
Amen.
Think with me first of all about the reality we must face. Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.” We are debtors. Jesus is talking about sin, isn’t He? When He later responded to the disciples’ request in Luke chapter 11, they came to Him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray,” He gave another version of The Lord’s Prayer in Luke chapter 11 that makes this point explicit. The fifth petition in the version we find in Luke 11 says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” So the debt that we owe to God is a metaphor for the moral obligation of obedience we have all universally failed to fulfill. We owe God satisfaction for the offense that our rebellion and disobedience has caused.
Now if you think about it, indebtedness is an especially helpful metaphor for our sin because I expect we all have some sense of the unpleasant weight of living with an unpaid debt. Don’t we? You get a letter in the mail – “Dear Mr. Strain, our records show that your account is overdue. We’ve tried on several occasions to reach you. This matter has now been committed to a collection agency who are empowered to seize property up to the value of the amount due.” And the blood drains from your face. “There’s got to have been a mistake somewhere, surely. Is there some old debt I have overlooked and forgotten to pay?” Panic ensures. You call them – “It’s all been a misunderstanding!” You actually paid this particular bill, the check hasn’t cleared yet, and their system has automatically generated this overdue notice in the meantime. “You can ignore the letter, sir. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience.” And what a relief. What a relief! Have you ever had that experience? The relief that you feel when you realize that there is no debt. You thought you couldn’t pay – “Where am I going to find the money?” – and the relief – “There is no debt.” That’s how we feel when we are confronted with an unpaid debt. We feel the weight of it, the shock of it, the burden of it, the urgency of it.
Now my point is this, Jesus’ point is this – Sin is not a cold, ethical calculation. We’re talking about a universal debt. Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” So there is a universal problem. Sin is a debt you owe and I owe because we have offended against the holy law of almighty God, trampled His glory underfoot, worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Sin is a debt that we owe, and we need to understand and feel the weight and the urgency of it. The collection is going to come. “The wages of sin,” Romans 6:23, that is, the penalty sin demands we pay, “The wages of sin is death.” We need to consider, I want you to consider this sermon, God’s overdue notice. And there has been no mistake – you owe a debt to Him you cannot repay. Payment is coming due. Collection is pending. Do you feel the weight of that, the urgency of that?
When I was a student training for the ministry years ago in Glasgow, my hometown, I served one summer in Drum Chapel, which is a working class, pretty run-down neighborhood in the city. The pastor of the church had given me a list of people in the congregation to go and see, and so I set off in my suit and tie on my visits. One day as I was walking to my next appointment, a teenager on a bicycle stopped and looked me up and down and asked anxiously, in his broad Glasgow dialect, “Hey mister, are you the man pay the provy?” The provy is the local nickname for Provident Financial, a high-interest pay-day loan company that preyed upon the often desperate citizens of Drum Chapel. Now I was a fresh-faced and frankly rather scrawny twenty-something at the time, hardly the epitome of the kind of muscle usually employed in debt collection, but this teenager rarely if ever saw anyone dressed in a suit and tie on the streets of Drum Chapel and immediately assumed that I could only be “the man pay the provy,” about to come to his parent’s home to collect on the debt. I explained that I was a trainee minister, which didn’t seem to make him much happier to be honest, but at least he didn’t race away in panic to warn his parents to clear out before I arrived!
Now listen, the interest on your debt before God is today steadily accumulating. Your guilt before Him is compounded every day. You fail to make satisfaction for your offenses and we ought to feel something like the same deep, urgent concern that gripped that young man on the bicycle on the streets of Drum Chapel that day when he thought that “the man pay the provy” was coming to his home to collect. You are a guilty sinner. Me too. The thought may never actually have occurred to you before, but I want to make sure you get God’s overdue notice this morning. Dealing with the debt of your sin is the single most urgent thing you could ever do. Urgent. Today. And so that’s the first thing we’ve got to see – the reality we must face. We are debtors, you and me. We owe God satisfaction for our sin and guilt in His sight.
But then notice what Jesus says we need to do in response to this debt of sin that we owe. Here in the second place is the remedy we must seek. The reality we must face, now the remedy we must seek. Look again at The Lord’s Prayer. What does Jesus say in the fifth petition? “Forgive us our debts.” That’s the remedy. He doesn’t tell us to work off our debts. This is so important; we’ve got to get this right. There is no spiritual equivalent of Financial Peace University, you know. You know what I am talking about? Financial Peace University is Dave Ramsey’s thing where he tells you if you’ve got multiple debts that you owe, pick the biggest debt and be as aggressive as you can in paying off that debt. Pay all the other debts the minimum amount you need to keep the lender at bay, and then once you’ve paid off the big debt, roll over that amount to the next largest debt. And once that’s paid off, roll it all over. Keep paying the same amount plus the minimum payments you had already been making, and so it builds and builds, the amount that you can pay, and the debts will get paid off faster and faster and faster. It’s a great strategy. It works really well, and I’m getting no kick-back from Financial Peace University to tell you that!
But you know, too many of us think that there is something like the Financial Peace University model when it comes to dealing with our spiritual debt in the sight of God. We really think we have to pay Him off. We try to make up for our misdeeds with penance or charity or philanthropy or religion. I’ve told you this story before, but the son of a deacon in a former congregation that I once served came to him one day and asked if his dad would spank him. And taken aback, this deacon father asked his son what he had done to deserve a spanking, to which the little boy replied, “Nothing…yet.” He had a nefarious plan, you see, and wanted to bank a spanking in advance!
We laugh, but we often think just like that, don’t we? When it comes to sin and obedience in the sight of God, we try to pay God off. We imagine that our generosity, our neighborlyness, our faithfulness in church attendance, our generally being a nice girl, a nice gal, will somehow buy us some room, some leeway, some margin for our sin here and there. But if you approach dealing with sin by asking God to restructure your debt into a series of manageable monthly payments, if you come to Him trying to pay off your debt, you need to know you have not yet begun properly to understand the extent and the severity of your problem – your guilt in His sight. In fact, if you attempt to pay off your own debt of sin with good works or religious performance or charitable endeavors, you are merely adding sin to sin, increasing your debt, making matters much worse because you are completely misreading your predicament. Our debts cannot be repaid, by me or by you, for the simple reason that you are a creature and you have offended against the infinitely holy Creator. You owe an infinite debt. Your least sin is infinitely guilty. You could never hope to repay it. When you think you can, you have to minimize the greatness of God to do it. You have to say, “He’s not that holy. There’s a limit to His holiness. He’s not infinitely holy. He is measurably holy and I can reach that. There’s a standard I can attain that will satisfy Him. His majesty has limits. His purity has edges.” We are suggesting, when we think like that, do you see, a mere creature can somehow satisfy the infinite, eternal, and unchangeable Creator of all things. We have to make God small and we have to make ourselves big in order to make our debts manageable and repayment possible. What an offense to God we commit every time we imagine we can pay off the obligation of our sin in His sight.
What we need, Jesus says, is not a monthly payment plan to deal with our spiritual debts. What we need, our only hope, your only hope and mine, is for the complete, unequivocal, entire forgiveness and cancellation of the debt. And so listen, here is Jesus’ direction to me and to you. We must humble ourselves, we must own our sin, confess our guilt, our liability to God’s judgment, our inability to satisfy His demands, and like the threadbare paupers and beggars we really are, we must cast ourselves on His mercy and ask Him to forgive the whole debt – not part of the debt, not the worst of the debt and we will take care of the remainder. We need to face the fact we can’t hope to make restitution to God even for the slightest offense. Every sin deserves the wrath and curse of God in hell forever because God is endlessly, limitlessly holy. And so we have to ask for God not to manage our debt but to forgive it, the whole of it, all of it. “Forgive me, Father, the sin I bear by nature. The sin that is mine, guilty in Adam, with the guilt of his first transgression. Forgive the sin and guilt of my wicked inclinations, the biases of my heart. Forgive the sin of my unfulfilled duties, all the responsibilities I’ve shirked and refused and hidden from and excused and minimized and avoided. Forgive the sins of my willful transgressions. Forgive my worship, every day, at the altar of self. Forgive my gluttony, my lust, my rage, my pride. Forgive me. Forgive my past sins. Forgive my unintentional sins. Forgive my future sins. Forgive my wicked self as well as my wicked ways. My only hope, your only hope lies here. “Father, forgive me my debts. All of them.”
Have you prayed like that? For forgiveness? For all, all of your sin and guilt in His sight? Or are you still trying to buy Him off, make restitution, appease Him, do penance before Him? There is no peace and there is no pardon that way. The reality we must face – we are debtors. We owe the infinitely holy God full, entire satisfaction for the debt of our sin. The remedy we must seek – not a restructuring of our debts so that we can make regular repayments. Not penance. It can never work. We need pardon. We are bankrupt, do you see. We can’t pay. We have to come to God and ask Him for the whole amount to be forgiven. You are a beggar. You are a beggar. Me too. And we have to come to Him as beggars asking for our debt to be forgiven.
And as we plead for forgiveness, notice in the third place the repentance Jesus says we must display. The repentance we must display. Look again at the fifth petition. What does it say? “Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.” The assumption is that the one asking for forgiveness has a broken and a contrite heart. He knows he can’t come before God asking for something he’s not willing himself to offer others. That’s the mark of true repentance, isn’t it? A change of heart. A heart that turns from the very sin for which it seeks God’s pardon.
Now just to be clear, Jesus isn’t saying that repentance earns forgiveness. He’s saying repentance is a condition of forgiveness. Repentance demonstrates that, from our hearts, we have truly come to hate the sin we confess. It ensures we are not playing with God, or at least attempting to play with God, attempting to manipulate Him, while secretly still indulging ourselves. Friends, we’ve not really confessed from our hearts our sin in God’s sight, if at the same time, as we mouth the right words, our hearts continue to hold grudges and will not extend to those who wrong us the same grace we ask the Lord to extend to us. Such an important issue, actually, that Jesus returns to it after The Lord’s Prayer in verses 14 and 15. Doesn’t He? Look there please, verses 14 and 15. “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Forgiving others is a principle evidence of a truly repentant heart. It is a Christian duty, you know, not an elective option for those who are really keen. Colossians 3:13, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”
I wonder if you are worried that actually you stand today still unforgiven before the heavenly tribunal of almighty God. All your religion notwithstanding, you have no certainty, no assurance, that you are forgiven and accepted and welcomed in the embrace of God’s mercy and love. You might be right, you know. You might be right. You might not be forgiven today. Your fears may be justified. You need to scrutinize your heart and ask yourself if there remains some unforgiveness in you, a stubborn, immovable, unwillingness to pardon those who have wounded you. Now let me acknowledge here that nobody forgives perfectly but God alone. Sometimes forgiving others is very hard indeed, isn’t it? And it is possible to be a true Christian and fail to forgive as we should. We are all a work in progress after all, aren’t we, and learning to forgive, for some of us, is one of those areas where God’s grace is still slowly training our wounded hearts in pause of new obedience.
That’s all true. But it is also true that a resolute refusal even to try to forgive those who wrong us can be an evidence of a fundamental failure truly to repent of our sin in the first place. Our determined resolve to hold onto our grudges, our quiet cultivation of inner bitterness, minds that constantly justify our spite by appealing to the failures of others, all of that may actually be the reason you have no assurance that you stand forgiven in the sight of God. Could it be that the reason you have no peace, no assurance that you are forgiven, is that you have not yet truly repented of your own sin as you ought and begun to learn to forgive others? Do you want to know that your sins are forgiven? You must learn to forgive. Forgive. Relinquish the bitterness of your heart. Seek out the one who has offended you and be reconciled to them. If you seek the pardon of God, it is a mark of your sincerity that you offer pardon to others.
Jesus makes this point really forcefully in the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18. Do you remember it? Let me just read it to you. There was a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants:
“When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
The reality we must face – we are debtors. We owe satisfaction for the debt of our sin. The remedy we must seek – we cannot possibly hope to repay this debt. We need forgiveness. We need the debt to be forgiven. The repentance we must display – if the debt is to be forgiven, we must turn from our sin from the heart, a great evidence and mark of which is that we ourselves become forgivers. And then finally, notice the riches we must claim. Jesus teaches us to cry to God for the forgiveness of sin, and in 1 John chapter 1 verse 9, I mentioned this in our assurance of pardon earlier, he says this wonderful Gospel promise – “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” If you come repenting, crying for pardon, God promises, He promises to wash you clean and forgive all your sin.
Just notice the surprising language John uses – “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” We must expect him to say something like, “He is faithful and kind, faithful and merciful, faithful and gracious” – all of that is true, of course, but he says, “God is faithful and just.” It’s a matter of justice somehow. How is your forgiveness a matter of justice? Well, understand God never simply winks at sin. When you ask Him for forgiveness, you are not just asking Him to ignore or act as if you had never sinned. He’s not an indulgent, doddering old fool who looks the other way and smiles benignly as His children disobey Him. He doesn’t make excuses for our sin. Debt, there is a cost, and it must be paid. He never looks the other way.
The parable of the unforgiving servant which we just read, the king who called in his debts, you notice he didn’t simply absolve the debtor of his responsibility to pay the debt. When the king forgave the man’s debt, he was absorbing the costs himself. He shouldered the responsibility from his own treasury. A debt has to be paid, and John is saying if you come pleading for mercy, the debt has been paid. It’s been paid, and so it’s now a matter of justice that God should treat you as one whose debt has been settled, whose obligation is settled. He has given from his treasury the dearest thing He ever could – His own Son, to the hell of the cross, that He might make full, perfect satisfaction for sinners by His obedience and blood. When He cried, do you remember when Jesus cried from the cross, “Father, forgive them,” He was saying, “Father, accept My obedience and My sufferings as payment in full for her and for him. Forgive them and punish Me.” And when, with His last breath, he cried, “Tetelestai,” “It is finished,” He was saying, “Now the work is done. The debt is paid.” So when you come to God the Father, as Jesus here teaches us to do, you come really asking Him to accept the infinitely precious obedience of His Son, Jesus Christ, as payment for all the debt that you owe. He has made, He has made complete provision, perfect provision in the cross of Jesus Christ for you. You must take those riches as full payment of your debt. The forgiveness you need has already been provided; you must take it. It is yours for the asking.
Stop trying to pay your debts to God. Stop attempting to cut a deal, strike a bargain. There’s no need. There’s none. Can’t be done! Any attempt to pay off your sin just compounds your sin and makes it worse. No, no, all things are ready. Atonement has been made. The debt has been paid. Claim it by faith in Jesus Christ. Won’t you come today, now, and say to God from your heart, “Father, I have debts I could never repay. Please forgive me. Your Son has made satisfaction for sinners and is available by Your appointment for me that my debts might be cancelled in His obedience and blood. And so for Jesus’ sake, Father, forgive me.” “If you confess your sin, He is faithful and just and He will forgive your sin and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.” Let’s pray together.
Our Father, there is no faculty of our human nature that is not guilty, warped and distorted by our sinful hearts. We are guilty in Adam. We are guilty by habit. We are guilty by preference. We turn aside, every one of us, to our own way, like wandering stray sheep. We are sinners. We owe an infinite debt and we have no means to pay. O, how we bless and praise You that You have matched our debts and surpassed them by the great treasure of the obedience and blood of Jesus Christ. He crowns us with riches even when we come to You in our beggarly poverty and rags. And so we come now asking, please Father, for Jesus’ sake, forgive us. Jesus is our only refuge, hiding place and hope. For His sake, count all our debts paid in full, for we ask it in His name, amen.