Do keep your Bibles in hand and turn to Matthew’s gospel, chapter 6; Matthew chapter 6. And we’re going to be looking again at the teaching of Jesus on the vital subject of prayer. We’ve been working our way through the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve come this morning to the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Last time you will remember we looked at the hinge prayer at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer, the fourth petition – “Give us this day our daily bread.” It marks the transition from prayers focused on God, His glory, His kingdom, His will, to prayers that focus on our needs and the needs of our neighbors. And we saw that, perhaps surprisingly, given its central position in the Lord’s Prayer, it does not focus on lofty, theological concerns or mysterious, spiritual priorities. It asks for daily bread. It’s a prayer for bodily necessities.
But now having brought those basic physical needs to God, we finally turn to focus on our spiritual needs. And as we’ve noticed throughout the Lord’s Prayer so far, the sequence and the order of these petitions is important. You notice the logic at work. After praying for God’s glory and the advancement of His kingdom and the performance of His will, “on earth as it is in heaven,” we pray for daily bread because daily bread is necessary for physical life. And how shall we hallow God’s name? How shall we advance His kingdom or do His will on earth as in heaven except in our bodies, presented “as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship.”
But then the very next thing for which we are taught to pray, the next priority, is the forgiveness of our sin. And one conclusion I think we are meant to draw from that is that just as daily bread is absolutely necessary for bodily life, so also forgiveness of sin is absolutely necessary for spiritual life. Bread is the staple of the body; forgiveness, the staple of the soul. So important is this petition that it’s the only one to which Jesus returns at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in verses 14 and 15 and amplifies His teaching on this point. Do you see Him repeat the same point in verses 14 and 15? It’s like He took a fluorescent yellow highlighter pen and went back over the fifth petition and said, “I want you to give some particular attention to the teaching of this verse.”
And I think we are meant to understand that there really is very little use, very little use in praying for daily bread, for daily needs, for the nurture of your body, only to ignore the even more pressing need for sin’s forgiveness and thus spend eternity in everlasting death. To pray for earthly, physical life and neglect the life of the soul – that is the epitome of foolishness. Jesus said, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul?” If God gives you daily bread to sustain your physical life, He does it in part that you might have yet another opportunity to seek His pardon and enter into the fullness of life. So all of that to say, the fifth petition could not be more important. It could not be more important. Eternity hangs on our ability to pray each word of the fifth petition with our whole hearts.
In a moment we are going to examine the message of this fifth petition under three very simple headings. First, the problem. The problem. Sin is a debt. “Forgive us our debts.” Secondly, the solution. “Forgive us.” There is forgiveness available. And then finally, the condition. The forgiveness we are seeking hangs upon a condition. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” So the problem, the solution, and the condition. Before we get into all of that, let’s pause and pray and ask for the Lord to help us.
Lord our God, we bow before You and we ask You now to speak Your Word in the power of Your Spirit with force, exposing our sin and then applying Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Savior, to our hearts to give us life and to grant us pardon. For we ask this in His name, amen.
Matthew 6, beginning at the ninth verse. 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.
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.”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy Word.
The Problem
Let’s think first of all about the problem addressed here in the fifth petition. “Forgive us our debts.” Our debts. The Greek word that Jesus uses there has a commercial meaning originally. It means just what our English word means – “an outstanding, financial obligation.” And just like our English word, “debt,” it has metaphorical meanings as well. It can refer to any kind of social indebtedness or moral duty that remains to be performed. A social debt, a moral debt, a debt of honor, and so on. As verses 14 and 15 make clear, the particular debt in view in the fifth petition of course is the debt of sin. Jesus uses the word, “trespass,” as a synonym for the word, “debt.” “If we forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” So clearly in Jesus’ mind the debt for which we are seeking forgiveness is the same thing as a trespass. It’s sin. And both words teach us something about the nature of the sin in view. That sin is a debt, reminds us that God is owed and we are obligated to Him. He is owed personal, perfect, perpetual obedience. We are to “love the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and our strength, and we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.” We owe God, as His creatures, full and complete obedience, and all the glory that is due His name. It’s our debt to Him.
And then as Jesus amplifies the point in verses 14 and 15, He speaks of sin as “trespass.” That reminds us that our lives are bounded by God’s good and holy Law. The Law of God marks for us the boundaries of that country within which we are safe to live and thrive and enjoy all His good gifts. But beyond those borders, across that line, outside of this fence, we are in real spiritual danger. If you see a sign saying, “Keep Out! No Trespassing! Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted!” we might assume whoever owns that land is a mean and ungenerous miser who wants to hoard his property for no other reason than to spite those who might otherwise wish to enjoy it. But the truth is, God has posted those signs at the borders of the Christian life in His holy Law – that’s what the Ten Commandments are – they are “No Trespassing!” signs; like the signs that a power company will post on a fence around an electricity substation – “Keep Out! Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted!” because it’s not safe to go in there. It’s not that He is being mean-spirited in keeping something from you that would otherwise be a blessing. It’s simply not safe to cross this boundary. The moral law says God is holy like this, and if you wish to avoid contact with the high voltage power of His holiness, you’d best not trespass beyond these bounds.
And of course the truth is, we do trespass where it’s not safe for us to be. Don’t we? Every day – in our thoughts, in our words, in our actions. And we do withhold that obedience that we owe to God every day, don’t we? And so we have incurred an unpayable debt; an unpayable debt. I was reading an article in The New York Times last week about the current debate in congress about raising the debt ceiling. And the reporter listed our national debt, which now stands at a staggering $28.43 trillion. That works out at more than $80,000 per person alive in the United States today. It’s a staggering sum – $28.43 trillion. I don’t even have a concept of how much that is.
But it is nothing, nothing compared to the scale of the debt we each owe to God. Since God is infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His holiness, and since the standard of obedience reflects the perfection of His own holy character, falling short of that standard as we all must, is an infinite offense. Ours is in infinite indebtedness. That’s what Jesus was saying in His rhetorical question in Matthew 16:26 when He asked, “What can a man give in return for his soul?” The answer of course is nothing, there’s nothing. There’s nothing you can give to repay the debt you owe and buy ourselves out of the debtor’s prison into which our sin has condemned us. Helmut Thielicke, the German theologian once said, “All of us have a great mortgage upon our lives, a vast mortgage upon our lives.”
And that means, by the way, that we are all in this together. Remember Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts” – not just “me” and “mine” but “ours.” We are in this mess together. I am in the hole; you are right down here with me. You can’t help me get out because you’re stuck too. “The whole world is full of God’s debtors,” writes Philip Ryken. “We see them all around us, running up their charges with their selfish ambition at work, their angry words at home, their petty disputes in the church. Thus when it comes to your spiritual accounts, no one can help you because no one else has any more assets than you do. Asking someone else to settle your account with God would be like asking for financial help from a man headed for bankruptcy court. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” “There is no one righteous, not even one.” You see the problem? Your problem? My problem? We owe an infinite debt that we cannot hope to repay. You and me, we are guilty in the sight of God. We have trespassed into forbidden territory. We have accumulated a debt far exceeding $28.43 trillion. Each of us. We have fallen short of the glory of God. We have been arraigned before the everlasting Judge of all the earth and we, all of us, have been found guilty. That’s the problem – your problem, my problem.
The Solution
Well what can be done about it? What can be done about the problem? First, the problem is our debt. Secondly, notice the solution. “Our Father, forgive us.” We need forgiveness. That’s the solution; the only solution – to have our debts forgiven. And it might not surprise you to learn that just as the Greek word for “debt” is originally a commercial term, so too the word Jesus uses for “forgiveness” is a commercial term. It means “to wipe the slate clean.” You walk into the bank with that unpaid mortgage on your life, that infinite debt, and you say to the president of the bank, “I want you to delete all the amounts owed from your ledger under my name. Just delete the amounts. Make it read ‘zero.’” That’s what Jesus is teaching us to pray here.
But we do need to understand what it is we are asking when we pray like that. We are not just asking that our debt not be held against us. We are not simply asking that we be excused the obligation to pay. No bank in the world would simply shrug and smile and wipe your debt away. They would understand if you don’t pay then the bank will have to pay. The debt has to be covered somehow. The banker would have to shoulder the debt. That’s exactly what Jesus is teaching us to pray. We’re asking for the banker to absorb the cost himself. And framed like that, doesn’t it seem audacious, scandalous even, to make such a request given the scale of our obligation before God?
Think about it. We have inherited debt – the guilt of Adam’s first transgression. We have community debt – we are entangled in and aided and abetted by the sin of others. We have compound debt – piling up our own sin upon sin upon sin. We have sins of omission, failing to do our duty, and commission, doing what we are forbidden to do. There’s not a commandment we haven’t broken, not a duty we have not failed to perform as we ought. There is no faculty of our human natures that remain untouched by the pollution and power of sin. We sin in our minds, with our eyes, with our tongues, with our hands. We sin with our appetites; we sin with our biases. In our purest moments, in singing the praises of God, even our hymns would damn us were we judged solely on the basis of how we offered God the worship He is due. That’s the scope of our indebtedness. We are in big trouble. And now we have the temerity to come before the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and ask Him to wipe the slate clean and absorb the cost of our debt Himself. It’s stunning; it’s a stunning thing to pray.
Darrell Johnson says that there are three words we need to reckon with as we struggle to understand this fifth petition – justice, mercy and grace. Justice, mercy and grace. What does justice mean? Justice means getting what we deserve. What about mercy? Well mercy is not getting what we deserve. And what about grace? Grace is getting – what? It’s getting what we don’t deserve. So justice is getting what we deserve. Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we don’t deserve. When we ask God to forgive us our debts, we are asking that justice not be done to us and that mercy be shown instead. And more, we are asking that we might get what we do not deserve – grace and favor.
But here’s the problem. How can God not give us justice and still be God? He is holy and righteous and just. To fail to be so at any point, anywhere, is impossible for God. God must always be God. So how can He not do justice upon us? How can He show mercy and give grace to such guilty sinners like me and you? Paul frames the question, he says, “How can God be both just and the justifier of the ungodly?” How is it possible? The answer, of course, brings us directly to the reason that Jesus came. You remember when He came, He came proclaiming the forgiveness of sins. The paralyzed man, He says to him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Or the woman who came and washed His feet with her tears and dried them with her hair? He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” And when He teaches us here to pray, “Father, forgive us our sins,” He is obviously confident – this is a prayer, audacious as it may seem – confident that this is a prayer the Father will gladly answer. How is He so confident? How can He proclaim forgiveness?
You remember in the upper room at the Last Supper, He took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood which is poured out” – for what? “For many, for the forgiveness of sins.” And then at the cross, the thing that cup symbolized became a reality and He poured out His lifeblood. And you remember as He did it, He prayed, “Father, forgive them.” And then at the last, as He yielded up His Spirit to God in sacrifice, you remember His cry, His cry of victory. What did He say? “It is finished!” – “Tetelestai!” It’s another commercial term. It was found on bills of sale, written across it – “Tetelestai!” “Paid in full!” “Paid in full!” No more debt to pay. How can you come to God with this audacious, scandalous prayer on your lips, seeking the depths of your debt, the enormity of your sin – how do you presume to approach God at all with any hope of mercy and grace and not pure, perfect, unrelenting justice? You do it because payment has been made in full. You can do it only because justice has already been done. Upon the shoulders of Jesus Christ in your place, God Himself, in the cross of His beloved Son, has absorbed the debt so that the account of your sin might be wiped clean now and forever, dear believer in Jesus. Colossians 2:13, “God has forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.” At the cross, all record of your debt was removed forever. Your debts were settled at Calvary.
So here’s your warrant to go with boldness to the One before whom even the unfallen angels who have no sin must still hide their faces as they cry, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” Here is your warrant to go to Him, in all the grime and shame and filth and guilt of your sin. You can walk right into His throne room and ask for every sin to be absolved, all of them, all your debt to be cancelled, not one remaining outstanding; you can do it because of the cross. You must resolve to say today, “For nothing good have I, whereby Thy grace to claim. I’ll wash my garments white in the blood of Calvary’s Lamb. Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, and He washed it white as snow.” The problem – the insurmountable, unpayable debt of our sin. Do you see it? There is a solution – the free gift of forgiveness, obtained by the only One who wasn’t a sinner, who wasn’t stuck in the same sink hold of debt in which we all find ourselves – the Lord Jesus Christ. He has paid in full, body and soul, in your place, on the cross.
The Condition
But then thirdly I do want you to notice the condition. There is a condition attached to this prayer. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” It’s obviously important; Jesus goes back to it again in verses 14 and 15 to amplify the point. “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.” That makes this conditional clause really important. He goes back and says it twice over – positively and then negatively again.
So what does it mean? Well let’s start with what it does not mean. It does not mean, “Forgive us our debts because we have forgiven our debtors.” The cause of our being forgiven cannot be anything that we have done or could do. God doesn’t forgive us because we have compelled Him to do so by the meritorious act of forgiving someone else. Neither can it mean, “Forgive us our debts insofar as we have forgiven our debtors,” or, “to the extent that we forgive our debtors.” After all, there is a vast difference, isn’t there, between our forgiving others and God’s forgiving us. The forgiveness we receive from God is absolute; it is comprehensive. But the forgiveness that we extend to others will always necessarily be imperfect and incomplete. If our forgiving were the measure of how much we can be forgiven, we would all be in really big trouble. Wouldn’t we?
So what does Jesus mean? He really means that being forgiving towards another is a crucial measure and a defining mark of true repentance in our hearts. And only those, He’s saying, whose repentance is this real, this thoroughgoing, this true, can be forgiven. It’s a real condition. Repentance. If you refuse to forgive those who sin against you, if you carefully hold onto and cultivate your grudges, if you will never let go of that hurtful thing that was said all those years ago, if you cultivate your animus toward another for the way they wounded you, you are demonstrating a heart that remains hard and resistant to the grace of God.
Listen, if we seek the forgiveness of God while clinging desperately to long held resentments, we are not yet serious about asking God to intervene in the hidden life of sin that still festers in our messy lives. You see, forgiveness requires of us, receiving forgiveness requires of us a willingness to stand alongside of God in His verdict against all our sin, including our bitterness and our grudges and our lack of forgiveness towards others, and to confess them as damnable; not precious, not exempt from His condemnation, but hell deserving and repulsive. And only then, owning the full scope of the ugliness of our wicked hearts, we go to Him. Not like the Pharisee, you know, who thinks he is owed the grace of God even while he judges others. But like the publican, who beat his breast and stood afar off and would not even lift his eyes to heaven and instead said, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!” You’re not yet serious about asking for forgiveness from God if you are not now willing to let go your defense of all your sin, including your lack of forgiveness of others.
So today, you might be aware of one dark spot in your heart; that one, sore, sensitive area that zings, you know, whenever that particular person’s name gets mentioned. And you know, you know you’ve been holding onto anger and resentment and hurt like an open wound for a long time. This morning, the Lord Jesus Christ is calling you to bring that hidden spot into the light. He wants to set you free from the chains of unforgiveness. He wants to cleanse you of the besetting sin of bitterness. But you have to be prepared now before Him to let it go, not to defend it. Stop saying to yourself and to God, “Well, I would forgive him if he’d only admit how wrong he was! I’d let my anger go if only she would make amends!” Stop doing that. When you do that, you’re not looking to show mercy or extend grace. Are you? What are you looking for? You’re looking for justice. You’re looking for a pound of flesh. But that’s not what you want from God, is it? That’s not how you want God to treat you, is it? You don’t want Him to show you justice, do you? You want mercy and you want grace from Him, but you can’t have it both ways, Jesus is saying. It’s time to confess all your sin, all of them, including your hurt, angry heart that has not been willing to forgive for far too long.
You remember that night in the upper room in John 13 when, after supper, Jesus got up, took off His outer garments, wrapped Himself with a towel and washed His disciples’ feet. You remember that? And they were all just shocked, scandalized at His behavior. This is the lowest, most menial task, reserved for the slave, not for their Rabbi, their Master. It’s a shocking moment. They’re all very uncomfortable as He washes their feet. And when He gets to Peter, Peter says, “You shall never wash my feet, Lord!” And Jesus said, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with Me.” And so he says, “Well then, not my feet only, but my head and my hands also!” That surely is the right attitude. When we say, “Forgive me,” we are saying, “Forgive all of me. Forgive all of it. Wash me all the way through. Not my feet only, but my head and my hands also. I want there to be no area of my life where I continue to cling to my sin. So wash me clean in every place, in every spot.” “Naked come to Thee for dress, helpless look to Thee for grace; foul I to the fountain fly; wash me, Savior, or I die.” That was what Peter was saying. Is it what you are saying? Is it?
One last thing before we’re done. You’ve been very patient; let me say this. That night in the upper room, Jesus went on to explain why He washed their feet. He said, “You’re clean. You’ve had a bath. You’re clean. You don’t need to wash again except for your feet. Because you walk the dusty streets of Palestine, your feet are going to get dirty and you’ll need to wash them every day, probably more than that – multiple times every day.” Christians are clean, once and for all clean. When you come to know Jesus, your sin is forgiven. Praise God you are clean, but there is still daily grime. Isn’t there? You still sin every day; me too. And the shocking moment in the upper room is so full of beauty because it preaches to us the good news that Jesus is willing, He’s willing to wash away daily grime. So you can go to Him and confess your sin. The Master Himself will still come and wash your feet and make you clean. So why hang back? Why cling to your pet sin, festering away with all its poisonous, deadly impact? Let it go. Come confess. Jesus is ready to wash you clean. Take the bold, audacious prayer on your lips. “Father, forgive all my debts. Wipe the slate clean. Jesus has paid in full. Not my feet only, but my head and my hands also. Wash all of me. Wash me, Savior, or I die.”
Is that your prayer today? That’s the prayer Jesus is teaching us to pray. It ought to be your most familiar prayer – every day, coming to get clean. “Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Let’s pray together.
Our Father, we do need Your cleansing grace. How urgently we need it. Every day we are guilty; every day we are dirty. Every day we fall short. Today, there’s not a single one of us, not one, who does not need Jesus to wash us clean. So Lord Jesus, not our feet only but our heads and our hands also, all of us, all the way through. Make us clean. Thank You that You shed Your blood to make us clean, that there is no debt to pay when we trust in You, for You have paid in full. Because it is finished, we have hope. So we come to You and we ask You to, “Wash us, Savior, or we die.” Hear our cries, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.