The Lord’s Prayer | Forgive Us Our Debts, part 1

We’ve been looking at the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer Jesus has given the family of God. Today we look at the petition in Matthew 6:12: “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”Everyone, everywhere, cannot escape the brutal honesty of this petition. The need for forgiveness is universal. Why? Because everyone, everywhere, experiences conflict and pain in relationships. Everyone everywhere has, at some point in their lives, done something to someone for which they need forgiveness. And everyone everywhere has had something done to them in which forgiveness must be offered. All of us need forgiveness, and all of us need to forgive.

Think about your own life. What keeps you from thriving and flourishing? I’m willing to bet that often it’s because you are experiencing hurt from a relationship that you haven’t dealt with or because you have hurt someone else and don’t want to face it. And Jesus knows this. He knows that we need forgiveness and that we need to forgive. That’s why Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” And this is so important for Jesus that he goes on to explain this further in verses 14-15 and says:

¹⁴For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵ But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

Let me ask: Do you struggle to ask for forgiveness? If you do, why do you struggle to do so? And do you struggle to forgive others? If you do, why do you struggle to forgive others? How you answer the first question provides a clue to how you answer the second.

And Jesus knows this, and that’s why he connects the two in this prayer: “forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” He knows that our willingness to forgive others is directly connected with how we see our need for forgiveness. And this is what Jesus is getting at in this part of the Lord’s prayer: Forgiven people are forgiving people.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus refers to our sins as unpaid debts: “forgive us our debts.” Our modern understanding of “debt” might dull this word’s edge for Jesus’s original hearers. In Jewish thought, every sin created a deposit of debt before God, creating a wall of separation between humans and God. And that’s what sin does: it creates a barrier between God and us. And Jesus used this common concept to explain that we can ask the Father to wipe our debts! We can ask the Father to forgive our debt for falling short of his glory in our lives!

And this is such good news because we know that our sin debt is bigger than we can pay. Paul says in Romans 6:23:

²³For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When we pray, “Father, forgive us our debts,” we realize that death is the penalty for our sins and debt. And that is a present reality, not just a future one. All you have to do is look around our world and see the brokenness and death-causing destruction of sin: coronavirus, racism; hunger; domestic violence; homelessness; divorce. And then you think about our pride, anger, and lust—all the things going on in us and the world. You see the wages of sin every day. And those debts are too big for us to pay.

But Jesus tells us that we can ask the Father to forgive us of it all—not because we can pay the debts of our sin—but because Jesus himself paid the debt for us. Mark 10:45 tells us:

⁴⁵For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

When we understand that we have forgiveness in Jesus—that we are forgiven ones—we have a correct view of God, an accurate view of ourselves, and a proper view of sin. We get what it means to say: Forgiven people are forgiving people. When we understand the power of God’s forgiveness for us, we can pray the next part of verse 12:

“as we have forgiven our debtors.”

We’ll tackle the second part of this petition next week, so hang tight until then. In the meantime, as you pray this petition, ask yourself the following:

Do I struggle to ask for forgiveness?

Do I struggle to forgive others?

Ask God to give you a fantastic view of his forgiveness for you in Jesus, and ask him to help you forgive others. Forgiveness is the mark of a disciple.

I am praying that we will be a forgiving people, FBC! You are deeply loved!

–Wade