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We often treat sin as a handful of inconsequential debts, so asking God for forgiveness—or forgiving someone else—can feel unnecessary. In Matthew 6:12, Jesus places both debts before us in a single petition: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Do we understand the balance we have run up?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
We face all kinds of different costs as people, don’t we? Some we expect, and some we don’t. Fortunately, I shared something of an example of that just a moment ago. We don’t know what the costs that are coming are. We don’t know what the situations that are coming are. Sometimes they’re really serious. Sometimes they’re not quite as serious. I was thinking about if you’re going into a store to shop. Maybe the place where I can get myself in trouble is a flea market. Anyone else like to go into a flea market? I love flea markets. Now, I realize flea markets aren’t quite as trendy these days as, say, Goodwill. I mean, but kind of if you’re more of a Goodwiller type, imagine sort of the same kind of thing, right? You go in, what are you doing? You’re looking for bargains, right? You’re going to find that thing, whatever it might be, whether you knew you needed it or not, that is priced better than it should be. Something where you can seize the bargain and just come out of that store feeling like, wow, look what I found.
Well, especially on flea markets. The reason I say flea markets in particular is you go in there and they’re not always perfectly clean and organized. They’re often kind of have all kinds of little crevices in places, but if you dig around in there, you find that thing that slipped through the cracks. Maybe literally, right? That thing that’s stuck under there that no one even sees, and you grab it. Then you find something else that way, and you grab it. And I’m not always paying that close attention. I’m paying close attention to the individual price, but am I paying close attention to the total price?
Sometimes I have gone up to the checkout at the flea market and set myself down, thinking, “Ah, look at these bargains, they’re so cheap. This is such a great deal.” And then start to ring them up on the cash register. Of course, at a flea market, you don’t have barcodes, so it takes a little while, right? You see the numbers being punched in and so on. You see that number increasing and you think, wait a second. I had all these bargains there. I didn’t have anything of any great substance. But wait a second, $100? $200? But everything was so cheap. We don’t really realize what balance we’re running up, right? Anyone else? Anyone else? Okay, I admit, this is me. I have done this at a flea market. Yes, I see a few hands. Very good. Yeah, we’re together.
That’s how that can go, right? Because it doesn’t seem like a big deal in the moment, in the individual thing. It’s so cheap. This should be 50 bucks, and it’s 2 bucks. It’s cheap, right? No problem, but it’s the combination of things. I think that’s how we approach sin a lot of times. Because you know what we do? Look at the sins we do today, tomorrow. As far as I know, no one here has murdered anyone today. As far as I know, no one has stolen anything today. Say, “Well, yeah, I was a little rude at the store. I was a little impatient with someone in my family. Yeah, I should have spent a little more time praying with God, but, you know, nothing big, just little cheap things.”
And we have a couple problems there when it comes to sin. The first problem is that we massively underestimate the cost of every sin. But we also don’t pay attention to how they’re accumulating. And when you add those two up, what do we find? Scripture says even one sin, the cost of one sin is death. So it really doesn’t matter how many you have. But the funny thing is, even if sin weren’t as severe as scripture says—and I am not about to say that scripture is wrong on this, scripture is correct on this—but even if it were the case, I think we’d be surprised if we massively underpriced our sins, still how much they add up to be when we get to the checkout.
So, how do we wrestle with that? I think wrestling with that price, looking at what’s showing up on the tally on the cash register, is important because as we come to the next petition of the Lord’s Prayer, we think about praying for forgiveness and praying about us forgiving others. It’s so important that we understand how high our balance has gone. As long as I’m thinking, “Well, I only have a few not very bad sins. I only have a few inconsequential sins,” what happens? What happens is I say, “Well, maybe I don’t really need to ask God for forgiveness.” Or, “Maybe I don’t need to forgive others.”
It’s going to challenge us on both of those things tonight. So as we begin to delve into this next petition of the Lord’s Prayer, let’s go ahead and open our sermon by praying the Lord’s Prayer together, and we’re going to use the ESV’s translation of it tonight.
Let’s pray. 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 thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Well, I actually just slipped up there in the prayer. I switched to King James at the end. You may have caught that, which I’ll just give you a teaser for Holy Week, okay? Would you like a Holy Week teaser? We are going to deal with “Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory” in a special series over Holy Week. We’re going to be looking at that on Steadfast—that Monday, on Monday, Thursday service, and on Easter Sunday. That’s going to wrap up our series.
And part of the teaser on that—and that’s why I think this is going to be really interesting to delve into together—is that if you notice something about your Bible, if you’re looking at your physical Bible or your Bible software, it’s quite likely that you don’t see “for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory” in the Lord’s Prayer. Now, you may see it in a footnote. I believe this Bible does have that footnote right here. Yeah, yeah, it’s there. Most Bible translations do have a footnote that includes that, but it’s not in the main text because it probably wasn’t actually part of this prayer.
So then you’re going to say, but you’re going to spend a whole week talking about it. Well, it showed up, presumably, because as people pray this prayer as part of broader worship services, they added further affirmations from scripture. And that’s what we’re going to use Holy Week to think about. What does scripture say? And how does that come into our prayer life? And how does that come into Easter Week? Because as we pray for “Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory,” a lot of Holy Week feels like it’s not happening. So that’s coming up. File that away.
But as we think about forgiveness in particular, here’s a question for us right now. Take a look at this. Just look at the first part of Matthew 6, verse 12: “And forgive us our debts.” Okay, tell him that’s straightforward enough, right? But I want us to keep thinking back to that flea market picture or wherever it is that you accidentally spend too much money. Think about that place online or in person. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s your shopping cart on Amazon or something. Think about that place where suddenly when you go to check out, you think, wow, didn’t think it was quite that much.
Maybe it’s when you go and you buy a car, right? And it looks like you’re kind of just reaching for whatever the price in the window is, and then you don’t factor in the sales tax and all the paperwork fees and everything else to tack on when they sell you the car, and you say, whoa. Do we really, are we really wrestling fully with when we say, forgive us our debts? Why in the world is it that we mean? I just don’t think we are. No, I’m not. And that’s the thing. I can pray this prayer, and as I’ve been encouraging you, pray this prayer every day as we’re going through this. And if you have been, you might run the same thing that sometimes I do, which is you’re praying through that prayer, and you get to this petition, and you go blazing through it, and yeah, you kind of know that you said it. But sometimes I re-pray it because I think, did I even say it? This went by too fast.
What am I doing? I’m going by like I think I have a couple of 50 cent items in the cart, and I’m just going to take out my phone and do Apple Pay, and I’m going to go speeding by. I’m not even going to have to physically touch the machine to make the payment, and it’s done, and it’s over with, and it’s good.
I believe Jesus actually wants us to pause here. Wants us to pause and say, oh wow. Forgive. Forgive me my debts. There are many. They’re immeasurably vast.
And Jesus talks about this more in Matthew 18, verse 23. We’re going to take a look at there. He says, “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him 10,000 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 be made.” So the servant fell on his knees imploring him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.
What’s the picture that we have here? Well, the picture we have here is of a servant who maybe, presumably, is somewhat of an important servant, but Jesus doesn’t say that. He might not be an important servant at all. He might be just an everyday servant, slave—those terms are interchangeable in biblical Greek. In other words, someone who is really at the beck and call of his master.
This man owes a lot of money. Maybe the reason Jesus doesn’t build up his rank and explain how he accumulated all this debt is he wants us to be thinking about fully how impossible it is for this man to pay off this debt that he owes.
If you take how much, how many years it would have taken to acquire just a single talent, he owes 10,000 talents. If you take a look at how long it would have taken this time to acquire just one talent, an average day laborer would have spent 20 years acquiring one.
I believe the most recent number I heard from government statistics is that the average salary in the United States is now over $50,000. I think it’s like $55,000. The average person makes a year, working full time. So I thought, well, let’s just keep it simple, $50,000, 20 years for one. He owes 10,000. How much does that come to? That’s $10 billion. Here’s a man who owes a debt he will never be able to pay back.
When he says to his master, “I will work until I can pay this back, allow me to pay back every penny of it,” the master knows that’s utterly absurd, as much as the man does. Sure, if you have two billionaires talking to each other, and one owes the other $10 billion, he says, “Well, I’ll work until I pay it back.” Then the other billionaire calculates, “Well, it looks like you make about a billion every month.” Okay, no problem. By the end of the year, perfect, right? But we’re not talking about Elon Musk here. We’re not talking about Bill Gates. We’re not talking about Jeff Bezos. We’re talking about a servant, a slave, someone who isn’t probably even making the average salary for a person in this time.
He says, “I’m going to pay it back.” Well, it’s absurd. He knows it’s absurd. The master knows it’s absurd. So what Jesus is wanting us to do, and he’s trying to help us realize this as we think about the process of forgiveness, is to help us think in terms that this is not a debt you can pay back. That’s the challenge, right? We kind of piece meal it, thinking about, “Well, I’m not doing as many sins as my neighbor. I’m not doing as bad as sins as my neighbor. I’m not in debt like my neighbor. Therefore, I’m not really in that bad shape.”
God says, “What is it to you if your neighbor owes a 100 billion dollars? You still owe ten. How you gotta pay it?” Well, unless there’s a secret billionaire in this church, all of us are saying, “Well, I’m never going to have a billion dollars. I can’t pay it,” right? I am not going to be able to do this, and neither could this servant. Yet what do we see here? We see a master who’s looking at this man, not looking at him angrily. Isn’t that amazing? We don’t often know what’s right in front of us.
I wonder, even if the servant knows how absurd it is, if he truly understands what’s happening as he comes to this master and negotiates with the master that the master just doesn’t lock him up immediately and say, “If you had, I mean, even if you were in that ranking of the most wealthy people in the world, and you had more than $10 million, I don’t know anyone who could have someone owe $10 billion of debt against them, and they are immediately trying to get every maneuver pulled out possible against that person. If you have $200 billion in debt, you’re still not going to be happy with someone who just loses 10 billion of it.” I mean, we’re talking money that even the richest people are gonna be hurt by. Even the richest people are gonna say, “Wow, what in the world is this?”
That’s not this man. I think the master fully understands. He clearly fully understands what’s involved here. The servant clearly does not. Often we don’t either.
I read about a woman in France who had a little picture she hung over, she had one of those little hot plates on her counter that you can plug in, you know, and I guess I assume she was in a smaller house. I didn’t see a picture of her house, but she had this little hot plate that she could cook on. She had a little picture on the wall right above it. I like to imagine that as she was cooking her dinner every day for years, she was staring at this picture of Jesus during the Passion Week and felt comforted by it and probably appreciated this picture. She left it there. Presumably, it meant something to her.
Like oftentimes, us getting God’s forgiveness means something to us, right? We’re just looking at it, we’re cooking dinner and we think, “Oh, it’s nice that God forgives me,” or we’re in church, “Oh, it’s nice that God forgives me.” But do we actually understand what we’re truly dealing with?
Here’s the picture she was looking at—a very striking picture called “Christ Mocked.” Now, here’s the thing that she didn’t know until she brought someone in to help dispose of her goods. This picture she stared at while she was cooking her supper using her little portable hot plate every night was painted by someone named Cimabue, a great Italian medieval painter.
He painted a series of pictures of Christ during the Passion Week that were meant to go together as a set. I think it was actually five of them, and one of them had been missing for centuries. It was that one.
This woman, who had this little picture that she put up on her wall as she stirred her soup at night, staring and thinking, “Oh, isn’t that amazing what Jesus did for me?” Staring at her soup there, staring at this picture, steam rising up over it—maybe for some reason, I’m imagining her cooking tomato soup at the moment, splattering over it, wiping it down. That picture, so old. In 2019, when her items were auctioned, it sold for $26 million. It was of such value that even after it sold, the French government put an embargo on it being exported out of the country because they didn’t want priceless works of art leaving France. They held it there until the Louvre could arrange to pay enough money to reunite it with its matching pieces.
That’s the piece of artwork she was cooking dinner by, not realizing what it was valued at. I imagine there were probably other things in her house she thought were of much greater value, no other $26 million pieces of art in her house. In fact, many of the things I read that she had in her house were thrown in the dumpster. They had no value, whatever they meant to her. But this little picture was worth $26 million.
I think that challenges us when we think about the picture we look at every day when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. Every day when we pray, however we pray, if we come to God and ask for his forgiveness, we’re going about our day, we’re cooking soup on the hot plate. Maybe cooking is not a bad time to pray to God; there’s nothing wrong with that. But we’re just cooking, not really thinking about the fact that this piece of art in front of us, this beautiful thing in front of us, isn’t worth $100, $200, not even worth $26 million or $10 billion. It’s utterly, utterly priceless because it’s the very life of Jesus given for us that we would be saved. Whatever we think of as most valuable doesn’t compare to it.
Yet, just like that lady looked for however many years at that painting and didn’t realize what it was worth, so too we look at God’s forgiveness and might say in a song, “it’s of incomparable value,” or this or that, beautiful sentiments. But we need to actually internalize that into ourselves and say, these words, I sing these words, I pray, they actually mean something. They mean that I need to quit trying to tally up what’s going to be up at the cash register because I’m already too deep in debt to even think about it.
Just scattered around our lives, we don’t even realize it’s there part of the time. If you look on your chair—or maybe you already have, maybe picked it up—you might see a strip of black cloth-like stuff, kind of rough, but you can kind of ignore it. You could sit on it and you wouldn’t even feel it, right? Sort of thin. If you actually wrestle with it, it’s rough. You know, if I keep running my fingers against it, eventually I’m going to really dry out my hands, I’d imagine, and it probably wouldn’t be very good. But if I just kind of ignore it, say it’s under my book, I can just ignore it, right? And that’s how it often feels with sin—that we can just ignore it, that it’s not really there.
And yet, if you hold on to that piece of fabric and really just hold on to it and really touch it and feel that roughness, we start to get a sense, well, maybe there’s something to this. You see, every one of our sins in and of itself feels like if we do enough wrestling in our heads that we can just kind of sit on it and ignore it, it’s not really any big deal. It just gets scattered around. You may have noticed, in fact, as you were looking around, we had a work day yesterday and, yeah, I see there’s stuff scattered on the floor, there’s stuff on the chairs. Yeah, maybe you didn’t notice that much, but you just noticed a few pieces of it, you didn’t notice up here. We don’t notice all the sin that we’re accumulating in life.
So we think, well, I’m pretty good, have everything pretty well covered. We don’t realize when God says he’s going to forgive us, it’s not just picking up a few little pieces off of a chair or two. Pieces we would just be okay if he left them there. Yeah, the chairs look a little messy, but we can still sit on them. Yes, the floor has some stuff on it again after David did a beautiful job vacuuming it, but we can still walk on it. We don’t realize what’s really happening.
Because, you see, if we think about sin, it’s not just a little rough. It’s not just a little bit ugly. Sin is absolute toxin. If you think about it, you can read about the different scary things that they’ve developed for chemical warfare and so on. You realize just the little drop of it is utterly deadly to us. It touches our skin, and it can kill a person. You breathe it in and it’s barely even measurable. You can’t even smell it, and it kills a person. You think about that. That’s sin.
Now, imagine you take one of those toxins and had enough of it to form a cloth like this. How deadly would that be? That’s it. But do we actually understand it? Because here’s the challenge. Here’s why it’s so important that as we get to the middle of the Lord’s Prayer and we pray for God’s forgiveness that we understand that here lies the very heart of God.
As we think about everything that we read in scripture, we read about God’s patience and his continual restoration. Tomorrow night on Steadfast, we’re going to be talking about Noah and God’s response to people crying out for salvation as we think about way back then and way up here now and whatever comes in the future and whatever was happening in the New Testament times and everywhere in between, what do we see? Over and over and over again, we see a God who’s patient, who understands fully the cost. He understands we owe that $10 billion. We are never, ever going to be able to pay. And what does he do? He offers us forgiveness.
If you’re using the Lord’s Prayer as a guide but you’re not praying it verbatim, you’re just, as I mentioned, that’s another good way to pray through the Lord’s Prayer. Can I use its order but then put it into your own words? Especially thinking, keeping in mind what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospels, I think we’d be very, very on track to say, “Forgive us our incomprehensible debt.”
Because what do we find? Well, we think ours is comprehensible. We think we can tally it up. We can pick up, you could pretty quickly, it might take a few minutes, but you could go through here. If we all set our mind to it, we could get all these little cloths up in the church in just a few minutes. We think that’s our sin. But if we really wrestle with the cost, if we really understand that every time we just fail to do some little thing that’s so imperfect to a holy God, it’s deadly, we start to understand, well, no, we can’t pick it all up.
Melanie started out the service with Isaiah 6 as they’re called to worship, and you think about that beautiful call as Isaiah comes into the throne room of God. He’s going to be sent out as a prophet, but what does Isaiah realize when he’s not just a man amongst other men and he’s actually now in the presence of angelic beings? He’s in the presence of God himself. What does he say? “Woe to me, a man of unclean lips.” He says, “You know, I thought I was a pretty good person, but I can see the holiness of God now, and I know I…”
The best thing I can hope for is a quick death because I’m ruined being in God’s presence. I am ruined being in this holiness. There’s no hope for me.
Yet why does Jesus call us to pray this prayer? Why does he tell us that parable? Because he wants us to understand when we come before the holiness of God and we say, “Woe to me,” because suddenly we actually realize how far, far short we’ve fallen, that God doesn’t destroy us, and God doesn’t send us off to some murky region to be forgotten. God restores us. God offers us grace to us.
The master doesn’t destroy that servant; he forgives the debt. The master doesn’t destroy us; he forgives the debt.
Now, we’re trained, and rightly so in our culture, to ask, “Well, what’s the catch?” And in a sense, there is a catch. What’s that catch? That catch is that we actually have to believe. We actually have to understand what we’re coming to when we say that we believe. We have to understand who Jesus really is and come to him and ask for his forgiveness.
I think a lot of times we say, “Well, it’s really nice that Jesus paid my flea market bill. It wasn’t too bad. Jesus is a nice guy,” and we go on about our way, and we haven’t actually wrestled with him. We haven’t actually confessed Jesus as he is. We’ve confessed the rich guy standing in line at the flea market that decides to pay everyone’s bill for the day. We put the name Jesus on him, but we don’t really mean Jesus.
We hold this little piece of cloth and say, “Well, it’s really nice that Jesus is going to clean these up, but you know, I was okay sitting on that chair.” How many of us are okay sitting on the chair? We’re okay because it doesn’t feel that uncomfortable. A lot of times in the moment, it actually feels comfortable. There’s even worse thing. A lot of times, it actually feels comfortable.
And so we have the second part of this petition. The way I think we need to look at this, as we go into the second part, is as a spiritual health check to see if we understand what we’re dealing with here, to see if we actually understand that our sin is incomprehensibly large, to see if we actually understand who Jesus is as we come to him.
If we look again at verse 12, the latter half of it: “As we also have forgiven our debtors.”
If we jump again to Matthew 18, we’ll pick up our story here. The servant’s just been forgiven of his great debt. The master said, “You know, yeah, you owe me $10,000,000,000, but I’m not going to take away your family. I’m not going to lock you up in debtor’s prison. I’m going to liberate you from this debt.” What does a servant do? Verse 28: “But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred dinari. 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; I will pay you.” Does this sound familiar? I think we’ve heard this before. He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servant saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed and 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. Should you not have 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.
How is everyone feeling about that? You see, here’s the problem: as we hold on to our sin, we’re holding on to our sin and saying, “Well, I have this. Apparently, I am a little more sinful than the rest of you because your sin cloths are a little smaller, right? Okay, so but it still feels manageable. This wouldn’t be overwhelming. Good for all of you that you’re not quite as much in sin, right?” But it doesn’t feel that hard to deal with.
You see, that servant, I just don’t think it registered in his head, “I can never, I will never, ever, ever, ever have enough money to pay off this debt.” Maybe he knew it intellectually, but he didn’t feel it in his heart. So he thinks, “Well, the master made a deal with me. Okay, now let’s get back to the deals I need to make. You know, yeah, the master was soft, but I don’t need to be soft. My fellow servant, he owes me a little bit. Nothing compared to what I owed, but it wasn’t really that big a deal. You know, the master’s rich. He can write off debt, no problem. He probably got it as a tax write-off. It was no big deal.”
So what does he do? He’s holding on to this big old piece of cloth. His fellow servant has a cloth that’s not even this big. I mean, it’s not even visible in comparison. He says, “Okay, pay up. If I need my money.” He comes out asking forgiveness, and he immediately is unforgiving. Well, the people around them see it, just like we often see it when other people do this. We see that when someone behaves badly and someone treats them with kindness, they really want that kindness, but then they go and show a lack of mercy to other people around them. We see that when it’s external to us, but we don’t see it when it’s actually us.
When it’s actually me, “Well, it’s different. Yeah, God’s forgiven me, but God doesn’t understand what this person’s done to me. God doesn’t understand how much this person owes me.”
God can forgive. He’s in the forgiveness business. You know that master? He can just print more money. He’s probably a king if he can have a million as a servant just fritters away. You know, if he has that much money, he’ll just print some more money. No big deal. But me, I can’t print money, so I better demand what’s mine and have it back.
And that’s exactly what this servant is thinking. He’s looking at it and saying, “Pay up. I’m not wealthy like the master, so I can’t be merciful like the master.” And often that’s the kind of reasoning that we think here.
I say, “Ah, but the master isn’t really that merciful. Look what he does to the servant.” He takes the unforgiving servant, and he throws them in prison. He didn’t really forgive him after all. He wasn’t giving him freedom from death. He had strings attached to that. He wanted something out of it.
You know what? The master wanted the servant to understand. The master wanted the servant to have a relationship with him. Because here’s the thing, if the servant actually understood what the master had done for him, and the servant actually understood how much he had owed the master, and how much he’d been forgiven, and that new restored relationship he had with the master, he couldn’t possibly go and show the very lack of mercy he just begged not to see himself.
If there was a string attached to the master’s offer to forgive him, it was this: “As you’re pleading your case, I want to forgive you. I just want you to actually understand who I am to you. I want you to look more like me. I want you to so much want to be in relationship to me that you allow my mercy to influence how you show mercy to other people.”
Sometimes we need to look for confirmation for things. A few weeks ago, I had a bill that was due. I paid the bill online, as we often do nowadays, right? You go online and log into your account and pay the bill. I have two different accounts that the money can draw from, and it depends how I’ve shuffled things around where I wanted to come in to pay the bill. I sent it to where I knew I had the money at and I paid the bill. I got a receipt and felt good. I didn’t look at it anymore.
Well, something went wrong in the system, and even though I said to the other account, the one that had the money in it, it reverted to the account I’d used previously and tried to draw the money out. When the bank said there wasn’t enough in there because I didn’t intend to pay with that account, well, the bill wasn’t paid anymore. I didn’t know until I got a late notice saying I hadn’t paid the bill.
I think sometimes the challenge for us, as we think about the Christian life, as we go between two opposite extremes, is on the one hand, “Well, Jesus paid it all.” Right? That’s true. So we say, “Okay, now I don’t need to worry about anything. It doesn’t really matter if I even understand who Jesus is. If Jesus is who he says he is, well, he’s paid the bill, and if Jesus isn’t, then, oh well, you know, but I think it’s all taken care of.” And we go on our merry way.
Jesus is challenging us to actually wrestle with who he is. To wrestle with who the Father is, to say, I really want to understand.
What are we told is the cost of receiving forgiveness? Trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, confessing him as our Lord. See, that’s the thing the servant doesn’t get. The servant is looking at this transaction. He doesn’t really understand that the master is really his Lord. If he did understand that the master was his Lord, that he was still a servant to this master, he couldn’t possibly think it was a good idea to act completely different than his master.
And what Jesus is challenging us to is he calls us to show forgiveness to others. It’s not that we’re going to earn our forgiveness by showing forgiveness. It’s a spiritual health check. Has the bill really been paid? Or do we just think it’s been paid? But we’re really drawing out of a different account.
When we pray for forgiveness, we’re really thinking, “Well, I’m doing this ritual, so now God has forgiven me.” We’re not actually drawing from the unlimited mercy and grace of God’s account. We’re drawing from the “I feel good as a human being because I’ve done something religious” account. And we go about our merry way feeling very good about ourselves while we’re actually still owing the bill, and we’re still going to have that catch up with us. Now we’ve committed even more sin because what? Because we’re using the words of Jesus but we’re not actually bothering to bother with Jesus himself.
Matthew here, in his description of the Lord’s Prayer as he gives it to us, isn’t saying that we are forgiven when we forgive others. It sounds like that in some translations. For example, ESV, as we prayed through it, it was, “And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” And we hear that and sometimes think, “Ah, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” When that master offered that incredible deal, “What you’re saying is, when you forgive the debt to other people, paid to you, then come back and let’s talk about that 10 billion and we’ll negotiate it out, and we’ll make it okay.”
We say, “Ah, that’s what God’s really doing. Yeah, it is a great deal. I should take it, but he’s demanding a work from me.” What God’s doing is arranging a debt transfer arrangement of some sort where I’m going to do all these good debt forgiveness deals in my life, and then God’s going to give me a debt forgiveness deal.
Well, that’s what we think we’re dealing with. If we think that’s what we’re dealing with, we’re not actually dealing with Jesus. Just like that servant isn’t really… Yes, he’s standing there. Yes, the master’s there. He’s here. They’re talking about this, but he’s dealing with some character of this master, someone who’s just doing a transaction, not actually the one who’s showing him great mercy because he loves his servants.
So often when we pray, we do the same thing. So why does it say it the way that it does in scripture? Well, if you go over to Luke, it says it slightly differently. We talked about in the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer series that there are some differences because Jesus presumably taught this prayer multiple times. Luke describes it in a different time that Jesus is teaching. Jesus was teaching different people how to pray.
It’s also a matter of translating it into a different language. It’s going from Greek—assuming from Aramaic into Greek, presumably. Jesus was teaching in Aramaic. It’s written down in Greek and Luke and Matthew describe the expression differently. Matthew, he’s writing to an audience who spoke Aramaic as their first language, says it a bit more in the way they would have said it, which sounds a little unnatural to our ears. We start to hear that arrangement of “Well, if I do this, then God will do that for me.”
But if we actually look at it, and we think about what Matthew would have been translating, commentators have observed that the Aramaic was really saying, “Please be forgiving me… constantly in life. Please be forgiving me as I am living this life forgiving other people.”
And in some sense, I think really what we can say is that even the second part is a prayer. Well, of course there’s a prayer, it’s in here, but it’s a prayer for God’s help. God, I need your forgiveness every day. My debt is incomprehensible, and every day, I want to be the person who’s forgiving other people, because we struggle with it.
But here’s the thing for that servant that we looked at. I don’t think Jesus’ point is if you struggle to forgive other people, that you’re not mine. The key thing, though, is that you struggle. We should want to be people of forgiveness. We should be moving toward being people of forgiveness.
If we’re not quite there yet, if we’re wrestling, that doesn’t mean God takes back the money. The parable isn’t a perfect analogy because no analogy is a perfect analogy. But he’s trying to challenge us on something that we can be flippant about.
Because, see, a lot of times, we do think that bill’s paid, and it’s just because I’ve uttered some words.
John Calvin makes this distinction between sometimes we hear an offer received, right? You get a coupon in the mail. You can get $100 off your next time at Schnooks. You’re going to go there, and they’re going to give you $100 off. If you don’t actually go to Schnooks and use it, you didn’t get $100. It expired. It’s gone.
Sometimes we hear about God’s mercy, and we pray the prayers, but we’re not actually wrestling with who Jesus is. We’re not actually coming to him and saying, “Jesus, I want you to be my Lord. I want you to be my Lord so much that you’re reshaping how I show mercy to other people. You’re making me a forgiving person. You’re making me a person who hates when I struggle to forgive and wants to run from that, and wants your strength to do otherwise.”
We just think that I uttered some words, so I’m close enough. We need to get the order right. The order starts with God’s mercy. We also need to understand how to read the second part and what it is. It is this chance to see: is the Holy Spirit working in my life?
And if you’re not even struggling with asking for God’s forgiveness, or, “Well, that’s a pretty clear sign,” if you’re not, if you’re struggling to think that you should forgive others because you’re saying, “Well, they all have sin like this, and I only have this. I don’t need to forgive them,” and you’re forgetting that this is enough to kill.
And we’re forgetting how to really relay these things.
We have a lot of beautiful spring flowers right now. I hear some pictures of daffodils. Haven’t the daffodils just been beautiful this year? It just seems like there are daffodils that are absolutely stunning this year, and they just stick with you and you just see them, and they make you happy.
I could take pictures of them for hours. They’re just beautiful.
Now, you look at the daffodils and say, “Ah, spring is here. The daffodils are blooming.”
But here’s an important question for you: did the daffodils blooming cause spring?
Does anyone think that daffodils blooming make spring happen? Right? The daffodils come up, and it gets warm because of the warmth of that beautiful flower blooming, how it shines into the world—that’s now made it spring, right? It’s not how it works, right?
And neither is it that what Jesus is saying here is that when we show the daffodils of forgiveness to people, that we’re bringing in salvation to ourselves. That’s not Jesus’ point.
And yet, when do daffodils bloom? Well, they bloom in spring. So when you see daffodils, you’re quite rightly thinking, “Ah, it’s spring; I see daffodils.” And when we see people who forgive, we can quite naturally say, “Ah, there’s someone who’s experiencing that warm, beautiful, refreshing spring breeze of God’s forgiveness.”
And I think that’s a challenge for each of us: evaluate our spiritual health because it doesn’t even have to be cut and dry, saved or unsaved. Sometimes we’re saved, but we’re not actually enjoying the spring that God has given us at the moment.
We’ve stepped into a deep freezer off in the corner and are pretending it’s still the cold harshness of the most bitter day of winter, even though there are beautiful daffodils springing outside.
Because we’re not really encountering Jesus. We’re encountering a business deal. I’ll offer some forgiveness to people. I’m offering daffodils to people. Am I offering forgiveness to people? Am I wanting to just give them to people because I understand how much that spring warmth of God’s forgiveness is transforming me? And I don’t want to hold on to the coldness.
Or am I holding grudges? Where do I actually even find it somehow sort of makes me feel better to revisit wrongs done? Kind of keep building on them, let them grow.
We might be believers who are still in winter when we should be in spring.
This isn’t about, as we say this, some kind of work-based salvation that Jesus is saying, if we’re good enough at forgiving, that he will forgive us. This is about Jesus saying, check your heart and come to me. And when you’re struggling to forgive, come to me.
Because you understand who I am if you’re in relationship to me. And if you don’t see any daffodils, if it’s genuinely still winter in your life, then don’t just keep praying that prayer thinking somehow a ritual is going to save you.
Come to me and actually know me, and then pray that prayer with a new gusto because you actually know that I am forgiving you, and I’ll help you to forgive others.
We struggle with sin. We have sin all over the place, and I’d encourage you: take your sin cloth home with you. There’s something you didn’t think you were ever going to say you were taking home from church, right? Take your sin cloth home with you and put it someplace you run into it. Maybe put it in your pocket and just stick your hand in there and feel the roughness of it. Or stick it someplace like on your nightstand. When you wake up in the morning, you’re trying to think about what God’s done for you. Just grab that for a moment and just feel it on your hands and say, “Wow, this is rough, but imagine how much rougher sin is against holiness.”
When we really reckon with that, and we say, “Well, but wait, God’s taken that away. He’s brought me into spring.” And that next part of that prayer follows, “God, help me then to show spring to others. Help me to be those beautiful daffodils that perk up a person’s day. Help me to be a people of forgiveness, of people known as those transformed by forgiveness.”
That’s the family we belong to. That’s the servants whom we are, servants forgiven by our God.
Let’s do that right now. Let’s pray for God’s forgiveness, and for that, I’m going to turn us over to Brian who’s going to help us meditate on that.
[Fast John chapter one]
Hey, happy Sunday, Little Hills Church family.
The call to confession today is from the book of 1 John chapter 1, verses 5 to 8, and I read:
“This is the message we have heard from him and declared to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Amen.
So just as we’ve been reflecting on our need for forgiveness, and now we also struggle to extend forgiveness to others, let’s take a few moments now to come before the Lord in silent prayer.
[Silent prayer]
I wish to quote 1 John chapter 1 verse 9 for our assurance of grace, which reads:
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
That is the word of the Lord.
So let us now prepare our hearts for a time of communion.
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