A Prayer Request and Barometer of Your Faith

¹² And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors… ¹⁴ For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵ But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Matt 6:12, 14-15

In Jesus’s model prayer, The Lord’s Prayer, He instructs His disciples to pray to the Father for forgiveness of their debts (sins). We are not simply to pray “forgive us our sins” but rather “forgive us as we forgive others”. In other words “Father, just like I have forgiven others their sins, please forgive mine.” “Father please do for me what I have done for others.” Is this a prayer you can wholeheartedly pray? Have you forgiven others of their sins? Are you holding out forgiveness? If that sounds harsh, what Jesus says afterwards is even more sobering. “But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” This should cause us to do some serious soul searching.

If Jesus is saying that in order for God to forgive us we must forgive others, does that make forgiveness a work necessary for salvation? Salvation is by faith not works. Romans 4 says “⁵ But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.” So what does that say about Jesus’s statement that God will not forgive us if we do not forgive others? The answer is found in a parable Jesus shared on forgiveness. In Matthew 18 Jesus told a parable of a man who owed a king a great debt.  The man could not pay and begged the king to show him mercy.  The king did and forgave the man’s debt.   The same man went out and found someone who owed him money and demanded to be paid. The other man begged for mercy asking to be forgiven his debt, but the man would not.  When the king found out that the man he had forgiven would not forgive another man’s debt, he was furious. He rebuked him saying “should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’” (Matthew 18:33) The king then threw him in prison until he could pay all his debt.  The point of the parable is that once God has forgiven you, you are expected to forgive others. Why would a man who was forgiven a great debt refuse to forgive another man his debt? The answer is that the man was not truly repentant in his heart. He just wanted to get out of a jam. When he got out of the jam he went back to being his old miserable self. In the same way our hearts are exposed when we have a chance to forgive others. If we realize just how much God did for us by forgiving us, we should jump at the chance to forgive others. How could we who received so much mercy not do anything but lavish mercy on others? If you refuse to forgive others it may show that you never really repented and turned to Jesus in the first place.

Make this process part of your daily prayer life. Ask God to forgive your sins and search your own heart to see if you are holding out forgiveness on someone else.