Forgive Us Our Debts

The Lord’s Prayer daily reminds us that we need more than strength to do better—we need God’s mercy and forgiveness. Today, Sinclair Ferguson describes the freedom from guilt and resentment into which this prayer invites us.

Welcome to Things Unseen. If you’re new to this Ligonier weekday podcast, let me say you’re very welcome and you found us this week thinking about the Lord’s Prayer. And for many of us, it’s a very familiar prayer, but I sometimes think we forget just how wonderful and important it is, because one of the things we’ve been seeing is that the prayer not only teaches us how to pray and gives us a framework for growing in prayer, it also teaches us how to live, seeking first God’s glory and His kingdom, doing His will, depending on His provision. And today, we’re thinking about how it teaches us about a life of forgiveness.

Now, I know it’s often said by Christians, as well as by others, that we’re living today in a culture where the concept of shame is more relevant than the concept of guilt, and I’m not so sure for a couple of reasons. One is that shame and guilt are actually intimately related to each other. And another on which I want to comment is that guilt is actually still a major factor in the world in which we live—it’s just that we’ve changed the basis on which we count people guilty. So, if you are not on board with the social agenda of certain pressure groups, yes, you should be ashamed of yourself, and you may even be shamed. But there’s more, you’ll be treated as guilty, guilty of transgressing the law of the new norms that have been set for you—and that’s why you should feel ashamed. You should feel ashamed because you’re guilty, and because you are guilty, you may find yourself both shamed and condemned. So, guilt is very much alive and well in the twenty-first century. And it’s on our real guilt that Jesus’ prayer now comes to focus in the words, “Forgive us our trespasses.” In Matthew’s version of the prayer, the same idea is expressed, as you know, in different words. We’re taught to pray, “And forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors.”

You remember Jesus’ parable of the two debtors, I’m sure. The master of one of them forgave him a vast debt. But then the debtor insisted that another man, who owed him a relative pittance, should pay every last cent. The parable ends with the lesson that a man who is offered forgiveness but who does not forgive is a man who will at the end discover that he is unforgiven. It isn’t that our forgiving others causes God’s forgiveness of others, it’s that not forgiving others is a sign you’ve never really received forgiveness yourself.

My parents’ generation, by and large, hated being in debt. We are a different generation, and I suppose credit cards have changed everything. I remember one of the earliest of them advertised itself as taking the waiting out of wanting. And these cards made it possible to have all your debts consolidated under one simple agreement, sometimes with extraordinarily extortionate interest payments. But most people got used to being in debt. I suppose the majority of us, certainly if we are under fifty, are debtors—whether it’s a mortgage on our house or the balance on our credit card—just part of life. And it’s created a different attitude to debt. Debt has become normal and we’re comfortable with it. In fact, we budget for it. We know we can manage our debt.

Perhaps that’s why we need this prayer more than ever. It’s a daily reminder to us that we have a debt that we can’t manage, that we can’t pay off. Because we are sinners, we can’t pay back what we owe for our past sins. Not all of our efforts and accomplishments can ever balance our failure, nor can this debt be canceled by any compensatory efforts we make to be holy. That’s a mistake many people who are spiritually awakened make, isn’t it? They think, “I’ll do better and cancel the debt, balance the debt.” But like the national debt, each day, our liability simply increases. We cannot pay the debt, and there is nothing we can do to earn enough to pay it back.

So, our situation—this is the teaching of Jesus—is helpless and hopeless. What we need is not strength to do better, but first of all, mercy and pardon and forgiveness. And you see, when we understand this, the relief of God’s forgiveness is enormous. The joy is wonderful, the new life is freedom. And then, instinctively, we want to forgive others if somehow they have become debtors to us.

So today, as we reflect on these words, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors,” I wonder if you feel a stab of pain in your conscience because there’s somebody you haven’t actually forgiven. If so, well, you know what to do, don’t you? You ask for the Father’s forgiveness, you bathe in it, and then you forgive.