Intro…
Welcome to the Cornerstone Baptist church podcast. My name is Justin Wheeler, I am the preaching pastor for Cornerstone and today we are in week 51 of our journey through the Heidelberg Catechism. Today, I will be talking to you about question 126.
Transition…
This week we continue working our way through the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13 and we are going to focus on the phrase:
Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors
Lord’s Day Focus...
Question 126: What is the fifth petition?
Answer: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” means, because of Christ’s blood, do not hold against us, poor sinners that we are, any of the sins we do or the evil that constantly clings to us. Forgive us just as we are fully determined, as evidence of Your grace in us, to forgive our neighbors.
Forgiveness is at the very heart of the Christian gospel and it is right at the center of this prayer. In fact, it is sandwiched in between our need for bread and our need for protection.
11 Give us this day our daily bread,
12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
I could be wrong, but it seems that Jesus wants us to pray in three ways here: for our body, our heart, and our soul.
Last week we discussed the need we have for physical nourishment, our need for daily bread. Jesus wants us to know that God is concerned with even the most basic needs that we have. He also wants us to remember that the basic needs that sustain us in life are a gift from God’s hand.
The truth is we take far too much for granted. Jesus wants us to pray for God to meet every daily need that we have, and He wants us to thank Him for every daily need that is met.
The second part of this prayer focuses on the needs of our heart. We need forgiveness and we need God to soften our hearts so that we can forgive others. Jesus wants us to pray that God would forgive us our debts and that we would forgive others when they are indebted to us.
Forgiveness is one of those words we use so often that it has a tendency to lose its meaning. As a father, I instruct my children to forgive one another all the time but I don’t always define what it means. Therefore, they may come away thinking that to forgive someone simply means that we act like they didn’t do anything wrong. But that is not the Biblical concept behind forgiveness.
The Biblical concept behind forgiveness is that we owe a debt and that debt must be paid. Every human being has an obligation to obey the commands of our Creator and when we fail to do so, we fall into debt. Jesus is making that connection here in his model prayer when he uses the term debt.
Before God we owe a debt on account of our sin. When we sin against God, we are building up more and more debt. Every lie, every hateful thought, every disobedient action are all plunging us into deeper and deeper debt. The price to be paid to free us from that debt is death and judgment, “The wages of sin is death…”
“But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.” In His life, Jesus never went into debt before God. He kept the law perfectly. On the cross, He paid the price for sins, not His own, but for ours. When we come to see our sin and the debt it brings before God, and then we receive the free gift of forgiveness that Jesus offers us; that is when we are saved.
When we are drawn to faith in Christ, by believing in Him and turning from our sin, the Bible says that we were saved. It says that we are justified before God, which means that we were declared to be righteous in His sight. Our sins were forgiven, and Christ’s righteousness was credited to our account. All of this is true in a legal sense.
But in a relational sense, we need to continually seek restoration and forgiveness, hence why Jesus is teaching us to pray for forgiveness.
This is the point of I John…
I John 1:8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Jesus wants us to come to God confessing our sin and seeking forgiveness. But He also wants us to forgive others when they sin against us. He wants us to cancel their debt, to overlook their offense and to pardon someone for the wrong they’ve done to us.
Jesus even tells us that our refusal to forgive others will keep God from forgiving us. Does this mean unforgiving people lose their salvation? I think it means that a hard and unforgiving heart is evidence of someone who has never truly experienced God’s forgiveness; or they are so hardened by sin that they have forgotten.
In Matthew 18, Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant, a man who had been forgiven a huge debt but who wickedly punished those who owed him. Jesus called the man wicked. He pointed out, “I showed you mercy because you pleaded with me, but you refused to show mercy to those who pleaded with you” and He ordered the man to go to prison until he had paid off his original debt. The point is that an unforgiving heart reveals an unforgiven heart.
Or at least a heart that has failed to grasp the wonder of God’s forgiveness. There are people who have hurt us. There are people who have treated us so poorly that we have come away feeling inadequate, unworthy, unlovable. We have deep wounds that have healed somewhat, but they are always tender.
God wants us to forgive the people who have hurt us in this way. He wants us to accept their apology, to stop holding their sin against them, to let go of the bitterness that we feel toward them. He wants us to do this because we have grown to understand how much He, our God, has forgiven us.
We grieved His heart. We ignored His love. We shook our fist in His smiling face. We have insulted His wisdom, we refused to acknowledge His glory. We cheered with the crowd as His Son was killed on the cross.
But His love for us never wavered. He had a plan that one day He would show us what we had done. He would cause us to see our sin for what it is, and He would turn our hearts so that we could see His amazing grace in Christ. By no merit of our own, God forgave us, He washed away our debt. He cleansed the stain that it left behind and He has welcomed us into His family.
He has forgiven all those who receive Christ by faith and as we grasp the weight of His forgiveness, we are made able to forgive those who have sinned against us. That is what this part of the Lord’s Prayer is all about.
Thank you for joining me today to discuss this aspect of Christian prayer. Next week, we are going to finish up with the Lord’s Prayer and complete our journey through Heidelberg. I hope you will join me for that final discussion as we look at Lord’s Day 52 and questions 127-129.
Conclusion…
If you want to learn more about Cornerstone Baptist church, you can find us online at Cornerstonewylie.org. You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @cbcwylie. You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/cornerstonewylie. You can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or google play to stay up to date on all the new content.
Thanks for listening.
