Matthew 6:9-15
Matthew chapter six, verses nine
through 15 has the Lord’s prayer. Tonight we think about verses
12 and 13, forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our
debtors. Just verse 12, my mistake there.
So hear the word of God, Matthew six, beginning at verse nine,
Jesus says to the disciples, pray then like this, 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 have forgiven our
debtors. And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their
trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if
you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your
father forgive your trespasses. Amen. The word of the living
God. You are probably familiar with the parable where a king
wished to settle his accounts and there was a servant who owed
him 10,000 talents. Now you got to calculate that
into today’s dollars and it would be at least 12 million bucks.
If you were to ask him to pay that 12 million bucks off at
0% for 30 years, he would have a monthly payment, a low monthly
payment of $33,000, 333 bucks, and probably 33 cents. I guess
that’s how that works. And then an extra penny, of course,
on the final payment. At 3.92%, last time I calculated this,
that was the going mortgage rate, now they’ve about doubled, His
payment would go from $33,333 to $57,000. Amazing what interest
does, isn’t it? Obviously he could not pay this
debt. He had no way to pay and to settle with the king. And
so the king ordered that he and his stuff, he and his family
be sold and put into slavery. The wife and kids, everything
and everybody. The servant fell to his knees
and before the king, he begged for patience. I’ll pay you everything
he said. In Jesus story, the king has
pity. In Jesus parable, he releases
the man having forgiven his debt. You can imagine the weight lifted.
You can imagine the joy. Just imagine if you had no mortgage
and maybe some of you don’t. at the age where you’ve got that
thing taken care of. Now, me over here, I still got
one. Makes me lose sleep at night, but that’s how life goes. But
imagine no mortgage, no car notes, no student loan debts. Maybe
on Black Friday last year, you went and got you a new TV and
you put it on one of those 0% for two months, and now you’re
paying 93% interest. But could you imagine no debts? Now your debts are small. My
debts are small. We can, we can, we can manage
paying them off. Otherwise they wouldn’t loan
them to us. Uh, they look at our income, they look at our
loan to value and all the rest and they, they make a decision.
The creditors do. Can you, can you pay this thing
back? This is a debt. The man could not begin to pay
back. It was a debt so great, uh, that
it could not be paid. Well, put yourself into the story.
Insert yourself into the story. God is the king. God is holy,
and he is righteous, and he is just, and you are the servant
who is in debt. And your debt does not calculate
and accrue in millions. It’s a debt that you’ve incurred.
It keeps growing, but it’s a debt of sin. When I was a 12-year-old,
we went to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt from Greensboro through
LaGuardia. And on the way to JFK Airport,
we were riding in a van. This would have been in the late
90s. And on top of a, not a big skyscraper, but on top of a low
building, there was this debt clock. And I remember seeing
the ticker just go, go, go, go, go. And there was a dollar sign.
And I asked my parents, what’s that? And they said, oh, that’s
the U.S. debt. And I said, well, why does
it keep moving? Well, because we keep spending.
The interest keeps accruing. And I don’t know what the U.S.
debt was back in 1988 is probably when that was. But I imagine
the U.S. debt was a whole lot less than
it is now. I wish we could exchange the
number and begin to pay that off. But you get the idea, don’t
you? As children born in sin, as people
born in Adam, our sin accrues moment by moment, day by day,
hour by hour. And it is a debt that keeps mounting
up to the skies. And if it were not for Christ
Jesus, that debt would continue to accrue. As we are born in
Adam guilty with the sin nature, that sin nature gives us the
ability and the desire to keep sinning. And we call the sins
that proceed from our original sin, we call them actual sins.
And the ticker keeps tipping, ticking, doesn’t it? We are a
rebellious people. We are a transgressing people,
we miss the mark, we defile ourselves, we follow our own folly, and
we are full of guilt. Our hearts, under sin’s dominion,
produce pride and idols and sins, and our debt will grow and never
be paid. We used to sing a song when I
was a kid in church. I owed a debt I could not pay.
I needed someone to wash my sins away. And then Jesus came. He paid a debt he did not owe,
and he washed my sins away. We used to sing that, it’s memorable.
And it’s simple, isn’t it? Our sins, our debts mount up
to the sky. Our sins, our debts cannot be
paid, but thanks be to God for the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. Well, God is the righteous King.
And he will settle his debts. And Lord willing, you’re found
in Jesus Christ who has settled your debts for you. But we remember,
we understand that sins must be accounted for. They cannot
be overlooked. They can’t be swept under the
rug. We live in a time where even
the church makes light of sin. Oh, sins are just mistakes. Sins are like parking tickets,
a quick five bucks, 10 bucks, whatever they are, we’ll pay
it off. But we’ve got to remember, love
how R.C. Sproul speaks of sin, even the
smallest sin is a cosmic act of treason against the Holy One.
And we need to understand there is a holy and infinite God, and
when we sin, we sin against Him. We sin against His holiness and
His righteousness and His justice. And when we sin against God,
those debts accrue. Those debts accrue and he demands
justice. The wages of sin is death. And so if we’re born in Adam,
we are enslaved to sin. We’re born in Adam and we are
dead. We are apart from God. We are
estranged from God under his wrath and his curse, and we are
cut off with no hope. And so our lives of rebellion,
our lives of ingratitude, our lives of degenerate living, which
we see in the culture all around us, continue until the last day
when they are judged. God will raise up the unrighteous
from the grave and raise up their spirits. And he will raise up
the righteous from the grave, raise up their spirits, and he
will put away the unrighteous, but those found in Christ, those
justified in Christ, he will acquit. He will openly acknowledge
them and bring them into everlasting joy as we are with him in his
presence forever. And so the free offer of the
gospel, the free mercy of God in Christ is offered, isn’t it?
In this parable, the mercy of God is shown in the king who
has pity on those who repent. He has pity. He has mercy on
those who turn to him in faith. responding to what Jesus has
done for us on the cross. I wonder, as we think about this
petition, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, or
if you’re a good Methodist, forgive us our trespasses, right? As
we forgive our trespasses. You can always tell in church
who the Methodists are, right? They mess up the Lord’s prayer.
Now, both of these are good sin words. Sin is debt against God. Sin is a trespass. It’s crossing
the line. These are good sin words. As
we understand sin, we understand it to be dangerous and filthy
and odious. It’s a stench in the nostrils
of God. It’s a debt that mounts up to
the skies. God is a really good accountant.
He does not forget. He does not miss adding our sins
to his books. And he will settle accounts.
He will call us before him. We are doomed and without hope.
And so we understand sin, but we also understand mercy. God’s
own son became man. And for us, he kept the law.
And for us, he atoned for sin. And for us, he satisfied God’s
wrath. And so as we understand sin,
as we grapple with his mercy, we see before us the gift. We see before us the pearl of
great price. And we see that Christ took our
filthy rags and Christ gave us his righteous robes. And in that
great exchange, our sin, our debt for his obedience and his
righteousness, God sees us just as if we’ve never sinned. Debts
paid, sin atoned for. And he sees us as if we’ve always
obeyed. And then he brings us into new
life, new life in the kingdom of light, new life as new creations,
new life. As we continue in this life to
grieve our sin and hate our sin and forsake our sin. And as we
heard this morning, we grapple with it. We war with it for the
rest of our Christian walk. But we turn from our sin towards
godliness and we purpose or endeavor after the new obedience. And so why then, if we are justified,
why then, if we have a right standing before God, do we need
to pray, forgive us our sins? Why do we have a confession every
Sunday? in our little pattern of prayer that we might use during
the week. A-C-T-S, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. Why is there the C part? If he’s
already forgiven us, why do we need to confess our sins? I think
Martin Luther was helpful when he said of the Christian in Latin,
he said simul justus et peccator. At the same time, we are just
and sinners. While we have a right standing
before God, While he sees us as if we’ve never sinned, while
he sees us as if we’ve always obeyed, the reality in our lives
is that we still sin. We still have remnants of the
fall. We still follow our own hearts, to use the popular phrase
of the day. We still follow after the voice
of Satan. We still follow after the tug
of this world. And we do sin against God. But
isn’t it wonderful that God forgives the just. The blood of Jesus
continues to be effectual for us. And so, yes, we are just
and at the same time sinners in this life. But God pardons
our sin in that justification. He subdues it in our sanctification.
And we live a life of an irreconcilable war where the spirit wars against
the flesh, the spirit wars against the world, the spirit wars against
the devil. And we thank the Lord that he’s
with us along the way. But we continually, we daily
break God’s law and thought, word and deed. We trespass. We
fall short. We defile ourselves. We rebel
against God. And so we need God’s grace. We
need a life of repentance. And if you think about the pattern
of the Lord’s prayer, you think about how we pray to God, Father,
Son, Holy Spirit, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
We pray for his purposes. His kingdom come, his will be
done. But we also pray his promises. His is the kingdom, his is the
power, his is the glory. But we also pray for our provision.
Lord, give us daily bread and cleanse us of our sins. So a
lot of the praying has been toward God doing and accomplishing his
purposes, his holy ends. But we pray for two very specific
things. We need to eat and we need to have our sins forgiven. We need to have them washed away. And so these are important aspects,
important parts of the Lord’s prayer. Forgive us of our sins
for we ourselves, Forgive everyone who is indebted to us. It’s definitely a wonderful thing
to be forgiven, isn’t it? Can you imagine how that man
felt when his loan was forgiven? His indebtedness had been ended. Maybe some of you hit that point
in your life where you paid off the mortgage. You know, payment
number, what would it be? 360, is that 12 times 30 years? Something like that. You know,
you get the car paid off. You get the last kid through
college. You get these milestones taken care of. Do you feel the
joy of having your burden of sin lifted? Think of David in
Psalm 32. Blessed is the man whose sins
are forgiven. Blessed is the one whose transgression
is covered. That’s the happy, that’s the
beatitude word, isn’t it? Blessed are those whose sins
are forgiven. But Jesus now turns our attention,
as the King has forgiven us, as Christ has been Christ-like
to us, are we Christ-like to others? So we’ve been forgiven
by God. We’ve been relieved of our debt.
Do we forgive others? as Christ has forgiven us. It
can’t be true of a Christian that we are unforgiving. It shouldn’t
be true of a believer, one bearing the fruit of the spirit, that
we are bitter towards others. We shouldn’t be grudge holders.
We shouldn’t be vengeful. We shouldn’t be imprisoned by
our own hatred for others. Now, some people say, well, so-and-so
hurt me. I’m offended by it, but they
haven’t come to me and repented. And the answer to that is, well,
repentance and confession and forgiveness is transactional,
isn’t it? And we ought to, as far as we are able, be at peace
with others, be willing to forgive them when they come around. We
understand repentance is a grace of the Holy Spirit. A person
won’t repent unless the Holy Spirit tells them. You know how
this is when you have little children. You know, they do something
wrong and you catch them and they’re just mad. And you say,
say, you’re sorry. And they pound their foot. I’m
sorry. Well, it’s not out of a changed
heart, is it? It’s perfunctory, it’s performance. It’s because they have to say
so. And we need to be careful as
we interact with other believers, not just to go through the motions
like maybe we did as a toddler. We need to ask for the spirit
of God to move in our hearts. and grant us the desire to seek
repentance and confession and forgiveness and restitution.
But on our part, we should be ready to forgive others. We should
perhaps set boundaries. Those who continue to sin against
us, we should maybe protect ourselves from that and stay at a distance. But we should seek confession
and assurance, repentance, forgiveness. We should look for it. We should
push for it. and we should pray for it. Remember
the disciples said, what if I get tired of forgiving somebody?
What if it’s a one time, two times, three times. Remember
Jesus says 70 times seven. Now I’m not really good at math,
but 70 times seven, I guess would be 490. So we get, you know,
478, 479. Okay, buddy, you’ve run out. Now the point Jesus was making is you keep
on forgiving. You keep on forgiving until we’re
blue in the face. Um, we don’t want to forget how
often we go to Jesus. We don’t want to forget when
people come to us and offend us, that when they seek our forgiveness,
that we have gone to Jesus over And over and over, he freely
receives us. We can’t say, sorry, no more.
You’ve run out of gospel. Free passes. If we confess God is our father
and God is our judge and we seek his forgiveness, shouldn’t others
who come to us receive our forgiveness? We should not play God. We shouldn’t
hold things over. other people. Now, I’m going
to say a little something here just to be fair on the flip side.
If you’ve offended somebody, please don’t go to them and say,
I’m sorry that you got offended. That’s a bad start. That’s a
non-start. OK, second worse, I’m sorry if
I offended you. Um, apparently you did. Uh, I
love how the catechism says we should confess our sins, particularly,
uh, not only to God, uh, but to those we’ve offended, you
know, you hurt somebody, you know, you say a cross word, you,
you sin against them. You ought to think about it and
say, you know, so-and-so I, I did this. And I know that it’s made
you feel this way, or it did this to you, that to you. We
ought to recognize not only the sin we’ve committed, but the
repercussions of it, the effects of it. I think of King David
when he saw Bathsheba, took Bathsheba, committed adultery with Bathsheba,
killed the husband, and on and on and on, he owed a confession
to God. In a sense, he owed a confession
to Israel. I’m your king and I’m living this way. He owed
a confession to his army. I had Joab, your commander, kill
one of your comrades. He owed a confession to Bathsheba. He owed a confession to the child
at some point. He owed a confession, I suppose,
to his other wives and on and on. And God will show us by grace,
maybe by degrees over time, how we ought to confess our sins
particularly. Now I don’t mean we need to be
so introspective we want to curl up and die, but it’s good to
confess our sins particularly and make things whole again. It’s never so wonderful to have
to have this transaction with someone, but isn’t it wonderful
when somebody comes to you and says, you know, I did this and
I see how it affected this and this and this, and I’m really
sorry. And I want to make things right.
And I hope we can have a friendship. I hope we can trust each other
again. And those are the fruits of the
new creation. Maybe you’re estranged from someone. Maybe you’ve wronged someone
and you need to make things right. Maybe you have been wronged and
it’s your opportunity to be merciful, to show goodwill. Maybe you can
pray the Holy Spirit would show you, show the other person. Provide
the opportunity. It can hinder our worship, can’t
it, when we’re at odds with others? It can hinder our relationships,
and it can even hinder our blessings that God seeks to give us. And so we ought to, as far as
we are able, work towards being reconciled to other folks. What if somebody’s unwilling?
Unwilling to forgive you, you go to them and say, you know,
brother or sister, I’ve sinned against you. I want to seek forgiveness and
restitution and, and, and restore our relationship. Well, the rest
of the story that Jesus tells comes into play here. As soon
as the King released this man, he went and found someone who
owed him a few bucks. He was just forgiven $12 million.
So he found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii,
just three months pay. Not a jumbo multi-million dollar
mortgage. And he seized him and he choked
him and said, pay up. He seized him and he choked him
and said, pay up. And he fell and he pleaded with
him. And he said, have patience, I’ll pay you back. But the one
who had just been forgiven refused. He refused to release the man
and forgive him. So he had him thrown into prison.
Now, you need a little Psalm word there, Selah. That’s the
stop for a moment. Think about it. That’s the put
this in your pipe and smoke on it. Ponder it. Right. Think on
it. Let it let it mellow and simmer. Let it let it marinate in your
mind. His fellow servants saw him and
were greatly distressed. They couldn’t understand how
he had been forgiven so much and could forgive so little.
And don’t we see this in our culture on afternoon television?
You’re sitting at the oil change place, and they don’t have cable.
They got the little TV with rabbit ears and say, you’re forced to
watch Judge Judy. I’m dating myself here. You’re forced to
watch Judge, I don’t think Judge Watner’s around anymore. You’re
forced to watch Judge Mathis. And all that afternoon TV where
it’s all these people, they’re just fighting. You took my car. You wrecked my car. You stole
my boyfriend. You blah, blah, blah. Little
petty stuff, but that’s the way we live in the flesh. We encourage
it. We live in fractured relationships
and we need the mercy of God in Christ to step in. Well, the
king heard the report. He heard of this troubling event
and he sent, he summoned for the man he had forgiven and said,
you wicked servant, I forgave you all that you owed. You pleaded
with me. You begged me. Should not you
have had mercy on your fellow servant? as I had mercy on you. And he was angry and he called
the jailers and he said, you’ve got to pay your debt. That debt,
he had just been shown mercy. And Jesus ends the parable and
he says, so also my heavenly father will do to every one of
you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. Let’s ask for God’s help in this.
Lord, we thank you for the reminder of how much we’ve been forgiven.
And what people owe us is small, but it becomes big in our eyes.
We hold grudges, we bear grudges, we feed them, we fester in them. And it does us no good. It kills
our souls. But we thank you that by the
grace of God in Christ, we’ve been forgiven and therefore we
can forgive others. Lord, we become estranged from
other people because of our hard hearts. And so we pray that by
your spirit, by the encouragement of your word, we might seek to
be restored to others by your grace and for your glory. We
pray in the name of Christ, our savior. Amen.