Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. What does this mean? We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look at our sins, or deny our prayer because of them. We are neither worthy of the things for which we pray, nor have we deserved them, but we ask that He would give them all to us by grace, for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment. So we too will sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us.
As I was putting together the outline for this series of messages on the Lord’s Prayer, it was fairly easy to pick passages which tied into this particular petition of the Lord’s Prayer. So much of the New Testament is about forgiveness. Forgiveness, as I have noted before, is our divine power, a power which is rightly God’s alone, yet given us by God in order to use to serve our neighbour. We are forgiven in order that we might also forgive those who trespass against us.
The reading from 1 John 1-2 shows us the right way to deal with sin and its stain. Confess, forgive, struggle and strive to live according to God’s will, and most of all, look to Christ, who is the propitiation for the world’s sins.
On the contrary, the example of the first servant in our reading from Matthew 18 shows us how not to deal with sin and its stain. Having been forgiven a great debt, the servant then turns around and reams out his neighbour, who owed him a comparatively little debt. This is not how God would have us be!
One of the most important moments in the history of the church was the Pelagian controversy, nearly 1600 years ago. Pelagius was an influential and popular churchman, attractive, with a good singing voice. He also taught that if you tried really hard, you could live without sinning. Jesus’ death helped a person to live the holy life, but it was possible to be good in God’s sight by your own efforts. On the other side of the issue was a man named Augustine, who was not so attractive, had a chequered past, to say the least, but who was armed with the plain words of Scripture. Galatians 2:19-21 (ESV) shows the sort of thing which Augustine argued to the contrary of Pelagius: “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” Other such passages include Romans 3:9-20 (ESV): “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.’ ‘Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.’ ‘The venom of asps is under their lips.’ ‘Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.’ ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.’ ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’ Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
If the problem of sin were a problem of picking burrs off your coat, as one Lutheran writer put it, it would be easily solved. There are many in our own age who teach of sin as though it were a simple matter of picking burrs off your coat, correcting your own problems, figuring out for yourself what the Lord requires and simply doing it. It’s in your power to do, such people teach. In the area where my parents live, the so-called Holiness Movement of the early 1900s left in its wake a number of Free Methodist and Nazarene churches, which teach that once you’re saved, you don’t really sin anymore. You can do it. If you try hard enough, you can fight off sin and be victorious, with a little help from the Holy Spirit. This is why churches of this tradition have real problems with passages like Romans 7, and figure Paul must be speaking of someone other than himself when he says things like “nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh” (Romans 7:12) and “Wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:24).
But the root of sin runs much deeper than surface actions. I still remember my high school friend, shortly after he was baptized in the Nazarene church, proudly telling me he didn’t sin anymore, after which I asked him if he had sped driving to school–to which he replied that that wasn’t really sinning. Our hearts can make all sorts of excuses why our behaviours aren’t really sinful, or why we don’t really deserve bad things to happen to us.
As the Large Catechism also notes, “We still stumble daily and transgress because we live in the world among people. They do us much harm and give us reasons for impatience, anger, revenge, and such. Besides, we have the devil at our back. He attacks us from every side and fights–as we have heard–against all the previous petitions. So it is not possible to stand firm at all times in such a constant conflict.” (LC, III, 86-87)
We need to listen to the word of God and hear the truth about our human condition. Romans 3:23 says: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” An illustration in the God For Us book I use for adult catechism classes shows a man trying to jump across the chasm between God and man. It’s too wide. We always fall short–to our eternal peril! Again, the Catechism reminds us what we deserve from God: nothing but punishment. To be honest, if you go out on the streets and tell everyone you meet that God says they deserve to go to hell, they’re not going to be terribly impressed, for the most part. You might get one or two to listen to you, but for the most part, people don’t want to hear that sort of thing. It’s true, but it’s offensive to us who want to think of ourselves as being basically decent. There is no particular cause in us for God to listen to us or hear our prayer. But we do pray. We pray not because of ourselves or anything in us, but because we are now in Christ, and He in us.
This petition also should cause us to pause and think about how then we deal with others. Given that God’s standard is to follow Him in thought, word, and deed, and that we fall short, that our debt of sin in His sight is like that ten million dollar debt that the servant rang up on his master’s account, how then should we deal with others?
A beautiful example of the power of forgiveness was given a few years ago to hockey star Dany Heatley. Heatley, the only NHL player to score 50 goals in each of the last two seasons, could have ended up in jail as a result of the automobile accident which he was in which claimed the life of his teammate, Dan Snyder. But Snyder’s parents, devout Christians, urged the court to not give any jail time. They had forgiven Heatley and wanted Heatley to move forward with his life. The parents had every right to press charges. But they chose not to, choosing to forgive instead.
Now, is it easy to forgive somebody what they have done against you? No. Sometimes it is a little easier, depending on the gravity of what has been done, but in general, forgiveness is hard. To illustrate just how hardened we can get in our thoughts, one Christian rock group polarized the Christian community by a song they wrote. If you remember the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, apparently while he was in prison, shortly before he was killed there by a fellow inmate, he heard the gospel of Christ and repented of his sin. In response to a television interview to this effect, in which Dahmer expressed his new-found faith, this group wrote a song called “Jeffrey Dahmer went to heaven”–which some received in the spirit it was intended, pointing out the power of forgiveness, but certainly offended many who heard it.
It’s offensive to think of a serial killer being able to repent and go to heaven. It offends Christians because we so often do not think of big sins and little sins as being equal in the eyes of God. But, as the apostle James says, “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.” (James 2:10-12 ESV)
God’s standards are different than ours, and we need to repent of our attitudes toward God and each other which cause us to be judgmental or self-assured, when the fact is that before God, all of us are the filthiest, messiest, ugliest sinners there are. Until Christ comes along, washes us with His blood, and presents us before His Father as perfect, holy, new creatures, without any stain or blemish. That’s what forgiveness is all about–going from putrid to pretty, from baleful to beautiful, from hated to happy.
Every time we pray this prayer, therefore, we pledge to God that we will gladly and freely forgive our brother just as God has already forgiven us–no strings attached, no special exemptions, no provisos. Just pure, free, unmerited grace. And we also note that if we do not forgive according to God’s forgiveness, we ourselves will not be forgiven. The Scriptures tell us not to let the sun go down on anger, in order that we do not build walls of grudges which keep us from God’s grace.
This petition is therefore the hardest part of the Lord’s Prayer to truly pray, as it causes us to turn our backs on our own natural inclinations to hold grudges and seek recompense for our losses. It teaches us to turn the other cheek and to be crucified daily. Yet this petition is also our great hope, that we will not die but live forever, for we are not our own but belong to Christ, both now and forever, having been forgiven of our own sins, washed in His blood through Baptism, given clean white linen to wear, readied for the marriage feast of the Lamb in His kingdom, which has no end.
There is even a certain sense of comfort we gain from the fact that as we forgive, we are ourselves forgiven, as the Large Catechism notes: “He has promised that we shall be sure that everything is forgiven and pardoned, in the way that we also forgive our neighbour. Just as we daily sin much against God, and yet He forgives everything through grace, so we, too, must ever forgive our neighbour who does us so much injury, violence, and wrong, shows malice toward us, and so on. If, therefore, you do not forgive, then do not think that God forgives you. But if you forgive, you have this comfort and assurance, that you are forgiven in heaven. This is not because of your forgiving. For God forgives freely and without condition, out of pure grace, because He has so promised, as the Gospel teaches. But God says this in order that He may establish forgiveness as our confirmation and assurance.” (LC, III, 93-96)
God grant us the grace and confidence in His promises to forgive as we have been forgiven, to live graciously as we ourselves have received grace and every mercy to help us in time of need. In Jesus. Amen.
Last updated March 2008 by the webmaster.