Matthew 6 : 9-16
New Living Translation (NLT)
9 Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven,
may Your name be kept holy.
10 May Your Kingdom come soon.
May Your will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today the food we need,
12 and forgive us our sins,
as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
13 And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but rescue us from the evil one.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound; that saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost, but now i'm found; was blind but now i see...
These words deserve for me nothing less than me on my knees; crying in awe of the God who gave it all to redeem a wretch like me! And cry unashamedly i will, for the Lord, our God, the creator of all, in whom all there is, lives and moves and has its being (Acts 17:28); chose to leave aside His home and come as a babe, that you and i might be with Him for all eternity (Phil 2:6). Wow, truly what child is this!
And forgive us our sins
But here is something interesting about this line in the Lord's prayer - and forgive us our sins. Notice that it starts with the conjunction 'and'. So in effect there is a joining with the previous sentence of the Lord's prayer when we asked the Lord to Give US this day our daily bread. Perhaps the Lord was teaching us to recognize that every time we ask for and receive our 'suprasubstantial' daily bread we ought to remind ourselves of His pardon that we so need too. There is a deeper implication to this - the Lord by this was asking us to remind ourselves of a fact that we all as humans get very complacent about. We all love to get into the 'I deserve better..' mode. But if we were to truly talk about what we each deserve, we deserve no good thing. For all of us have sinned and fallen short (Rom 3:23), more times than we are willing to accept or even truly comprehend.
We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind. (Isaiah 64:6)
But no, all have turned away; all have become corrupt. No one does good, not a single one! (Psalm14:3)
Do we truly deserve his pardon, let alone His love? I think not!
The Lord however through His grace and mercy chose to give us all good things (1 Tim 6:17, Jam 1:17), even much more than we can ask for or imagine (Eph 3:19-21). We are reminded therefore to not forget the fact that we need His forgiveness more than we need food; for we shall not live by food alone (Mat 4:4). After all, isn't it easier for the Lord to heal us of our infirmities that are a consequence of our sin, by first forgiving us? (Mat 9:5).
Sisters, Brothers, you and i take too much for granted the need for us to be forgiven each day. On this side of the bridge leading to eternity, we are bound to sin by birth. As such, in order to truly be new wine (vine) in a new bottle (branches) (Mat 9:17, Jn 15) we ought to seek His forgiveness every day like Daniel did (Dan 9).
The Lord was teaching us to pray seeking His forgiveness by confessing our sins (1 Jn 1:9), for He is faithful to forgive us. Where i do not accept the practise of confession in the Catholic persuasion, its main motive is unquestionable - we ought to take our sin seriously. Just in case, the Lord's coming to earth couldn't have made this clear enough, He taught us to the importance of the seeking forgiveness for our sins by including it in the model prayer He taught us.
But as everything else in the Bible there is a second side to this statement.
As we forgive those who sin against us
As with the previous statement, this one too starts with a conditional conjunction. The Lord was substantiating His teaching about not coming to His presence asking for grace and mercy without first treating others the same way (Mat 5:24).
The German philosopher Schopenhauer compared the human race to a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter’s night. He said, "The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth; but the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. And in the lonely night of earth’s winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness." Christ has given us an alternative: to forgive each other for the pokes we receive. That allows us to stay together and stay warm. For in the same way that we have freely received His forgiveness, we ought to give it too (Mat 10:8).
In essence we are asking the Lord to forgive us our sins LIKE we forgive those who sin against us. So we make our own forgiveness conditional to forgiving others first. Is that a trap? We seem to be after all telling the Lord to not forgive us if we have not forgiven others ; as a direct implication of the statement.
The biggest problem is any time a hurt happens to you, a crisis is initiated. A wrong was done by someone else, but you are left holding the bag of hurt. It’s not fair, but it’s very real. You are faced with the question of what to do with the pain.
What do you do, if forgiveness is your destination? You hold the wrongdoer accountable for what he or she did. It’s not forgiveness if you just slough it off and say, oh, it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing. It was hurtful. It was unfair. The person needs to be held accountable. By saying that I don’t mean that you necessarily have to confront the person. Sometimes that is exactly what you need to do, but other times it’s not feasible or practical. Maybe the person has moved halfway around the world, or has died. Or the person has no interest whatsoever of patching things up or apologizing. The place where you hold the person accountable is in your heart. You can do the work of forgiveness whether the person apologizes or not. Whether the person knows a wrong was done. Or not. Whether the person cares. Or not. It’s tough to accept, but we need to understand that sometimes people are just plain insensitive to the fact that their actions have hurt someone else.
Some people are fenceposts – insensitive, unaware. The good news is that you can forgive someone whether they take responsibility for their actions or not. Because forgiveness is something that happens in you.
Once you’ve acknowledged that the bag of hurt belongs to you, even though the wrong was done by someone else, you need to take a little trip to the dark side of your soul. The place where anger and rage and even hate sometimes live. Hate can be either passive or aggressive. In a passive kind of hatred you will not seek revenge, but you will not wish the person well either. Hate becomes more aggressive when you actively hope that the person suffers, and even want to help that suffering along. If you deny that you have such dark feelings and desires, you will get stuck in the mud on the road to forgiveness. You will find yourself mired in the muck and not even AAA can pull you out. You will be unable to live happily and fully. But if you face the feelings and acknowledge them, at least to yourself and God, then they can be a part of the healing process.
Hateful feelings are normal and you need to face them, but on the other hand, if you stay in them, they will kill you. It’s kind of like morphine. A little helps you through the pain, but if you keep taking it, it will take you. You have to move on through to the healing.
"If you cannot free people from their wrongs and see them as the needy people they are, you enslave yourself to your own painful past, and by fastening yourself to the past, you let your hate become your future. You can reverse your future only by releasing other people from their pasts." - From The Art of Forgiving, Lewis Smedes
Jesus’ model prayer underscores the essential connection between receiving divine forgiveness and forgiving others. As we experience God’s gracious forgiveness, we are called and empowered to forgive those who have wronged us. If we choose to hoard the forgiveness granted to us by failing to forgive others, not only do we disobey the Lord’s teaching, but also we miss the full benefit of forgiveness. God’s purpose in forgiving us is that we might be reconciled to him and to each other. The experience of divine forgiveness enables us to do what otherwise is beyond our strength.
When you forgive the person who did you wrong, the hurt and the hate are healed. Forgiveness does not change the past. But it changes how you view the past. You are able to let the pain go and move on. You can breathe again. Laugh again. Love again.
How do you know when the miracle has happened? When you have truly forgiven someone? It happens when you genuinely begin to wish that person well. You no longer daydream about them getting hit by a truck or getting AIDS or getting attacked by a pit bull. You genuinely wish them well.
Corrie Ten Boom's life reminds us of the same thing - she had been incarcerated in one of the worst concentration camps in Germany during the Second World War. Many years after that horrendous experience, she met for a second time one of the most cruel and heartless German guards she had ever known. He had humiliated and degraded her and her sister. He had jeered and visually raped them as they stood in the delousing shower. The former guard was among the audience at one of her talks. Now, the man stood before her with hand outstretched. "Will you forgive me?" he asked. Corrie writes: "I stood there with coldness clutching at my heart, but I know that the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. I prayed, Jesus, help me! Woodenly, mechanically I thrust my hadn into the one stretched out to me and I experienced an incredible thing. The current started in my shoulder, raced down into my arms and sprang into our clutched hands. Then this warm reconciliation seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. ‘I forgive you, brother,’ I cried with my whole heart. For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard, the former prisoner. I have never known the love of God so intensely as I did in that moment!"
How can we pray this prayer today?
1. Forgive those who hurt you: Because if you do not forgive, you in essence are asking God to not forgive you too! But more importantly you are choosing to remain in bondage. Break it down in Jesus name!
2. Pray for wide spreading mercy: As a result our prayer and our own forgiveness becomes a wide spreading mercy. Our own forgiveness is not simply an individualistic thing, but a corporate. So ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’ echoes with a deeper meaning and a more eternal and cosmic significance than simply, “Help me to forgive the people who have hurt me.” Instead it becomes a great intercessory prayer pleading for forgiveness not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. Because let us not forget that like the remainder of the Lord's prayer, we are taught to ask that He forgive US as WE forgive those to sin against US.
3. Reflect Christ through your lives: It’s said that, “to sin is human, to forgive divine”. We’re never closer to God’s grace than when we admit our sin and cry out for pardon. And we’re never more like God than when, for Jesus Christ’s sake, we extend forgiveness freely and completely to those who have sinned against us.
