Text: Matthew 6:12, 14–15
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
When You See Them Coming Over the Horizon
What the Lord brings us to in his sermon on the mount, in this section in which he teaches us to pray, is not for the faint of heart. It is a teaching that will—at least, if we don’t fend it off and keep it at arms length and plug our ears and hum loudly enough to distract our hearts—make us reckon with the worst things we’ve ever done.
It may even be a text that redefines what we consider the worst things we’ve ever done.
And so it is a text, like all of the words of the Scriptures, which we ought to approach with a humble readiness to be helped, which we may sometimes mistake for being hurt. So remember: If the wounds of a friend are to be trusted, how much more the wounds of our Father in heaven.
Let’s read the whole section of this prayer again, starting in Matthew 6:9, and this time, we will go all the way to verse 15. Look there with me, if you would. This is the Word of the Living God:
“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 also 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.”
-Matthew 6:9–15
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith. Let’s pray.
This morning, as we focus on this petition the Lord Jesus teaches us to bring to our Father, my aim is threefold:
First, that you and I would make eye contact with our debts to God—whether they be the debts of this week, or debts that go deep, that live under the skin, debts like abscesses that need surgery to cut open, scrape out, bind up, and be healed.
Second, that we would understand the gravity of God’s debt-clearing grace—what it is that the Father did to give us this cleansing.
And finally third, that we would see and obey and even love the demands which this debt-clearing grace would make of us as we reckon with those debts owed us.
Debtors, All
The very first thing this petition teaches us—that we are to pray, “…forgive us our debts”—is that we are debtors. That we have debt.
What does that mean? I don’t want to assume that you know, that we are aware of what this means across the board. This language of debt in the Scriptures very straightforwardly refers to our sin.
Debt is sin. And we might ask, along with question 14 of the Westminster Catechism, “What is sin?” To which we are taught to respond, “Sin is any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God.”
Now, there is an obstacle to our reckoning with the underlying realities Jesus would have us face in teaching us to pray this prayer day after day, and that is that you are almost certainly worse than you think you are. So am I. And the reason is that we are ignorant of holiness.
Imagine a child who grew up and never really tasted anything sweeter than fairly dull and woody carrot. And he didn’t even know that there was such a thing as “sweet.” What would that child think if he were to be given a chocolate bar? It would be overwhelming to him, probably to an almost inedible degree.
We have little experience with true holiness. Think of the prophet Isaiah as he witnessed the glorious throne of God in a vision. His response was to cry out, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the minds of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
Or John, as he witnessed the same in a vision recounted in the book of Revelation. The text simply reads, “And I fell at his feet as though dead.”
We are only vaguely aware of our sin, because we have only he vaguest notions of holiness, and so we universally think more highly of ourselves than we ought. And I mean, personalize that: Think, “I am worse than I know.”
Jesus summarized righteousness, obedience to the Law of God, as loving the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then loving your neighbor as yourself.
Think about that for just a moment: What have you left undone in the pursuit of those aims? Not just sins of commission—sins you carried out, things you did that you shouldn’t have done—but also sins of omission—things you failed to do that you ought to have done.
Have you loved the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Moment by moment? With everything in you?
Have you loved your neighbor as yourself? Do you long with everything in you for the good of others?
Do you lust after women you’re not married to?
Are you harsh with your kids?
Are you disrespectful to your husband?
Do you gossip about other people?
Are you greedy and un-generous?
Do you love to serve yourself and tire of serving others?
Do you speak foolishly, take God’s name in vain?
Would you be ashamed if we all knew your search history?
Did you divorce a spouse without biblical grounds?
Are you lazy?
Do you spend your money wisely?
Do you long to be liked by everyone?
Are you afraid of people, but not of God?
Do you love the Scriptures?
Are you apathetic in causes of justice and public righteousness?
Are you controlled by your emotions?
Do you lash out in fits of anger?
Are you frustrated with people all the time?
Have you ever lied to your wife? Husband? Boss? Friends?
Do you work to make yourself look better than you are?
Are you addicted to being seen by the world as cool, one of them?
Everything I just said is like the very tip of the iceberg. What is your debt before God? What is the worst thing you’ve ever done? What would make you want to run away and never be seen here again if everyone were to know about?
The Father’s Debt-Clearing Grace
Into that, the Lord Jesus would have us daily go before our Father and pray, “Forgive us our debts.”
Now, think about this: When the Lord Jesus gave this sermon, it was still a somewhat open question to this crowd of how this petition would be answered.
Forgive us our debts. Will he? Will the Father forgive? How? On what basis? Personalize that. Will the Father forgive… me? Stop excusing yourself. Look at your sin. Stop pretending. Stop thinking about your wife, your husband, your deadbeat dad, your backstabbing former friend. You. Will God forgive you? And how?
The answer that develops in the unfolding story of redemption in Christ is glorious, and I’d like to give it to you with a quotation from the Apostle Paul in Colossians 2:13–15.
“And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”
-Colossians 2:13–15
The glorious answer to the question of this prayer is an emphatic, unrestrained, yes!
The Father will forgive you. He will forgive all who are in Christ. The Father gave his Son, that his Son might become our record of debts, be nailed to the cross, pay the penalty for our sin, and kill it.
The Son willingly offered himself in your stead. He was willing to be God-forsaken, that you could be God-forgiven. Christ was crushed for your iniquities. On him was laid the penalty for us all. And in the glory of his mercy, the Father received this offering willingly.
If you are in Christ by grace and through faith, you are clean. Your debts are cleared. He will remember them no more. As we are taught to sing in Psalm 103,
“The LORD is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.”-Psalm 103:8–14
Glory of glories. What more could I possibly say to add to that? It is finished. And what the Lord would have us do is to come day by day, and continue to bring our debts to him—not to shove our noses in them, but to free us.
This is an invitation to ask for pardon from the very one who can offer it. But we must also see the demand that comes with the offer, the insistent demand:
“…forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors…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.”
-Matthew 6:12, 14–15
The Demands of Forgiven Debt
Now, we have all sorts of clever ways of avoiding this teaching—clever turns of phrase that sound very theological, but which would pull the teeth out of this passage. “I mean, we’re saved by grace, not works. We’re not saved by our forgiveness of others.”
But listen to the grammar: If you forgive others your trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Oops. Looks like the Father isn’t an antinomian.
Now, of course you aren’t saved by your works. Duh. If you really got the first ⅔ of this sermon, you’d get why such an idea is ludicrous. How could you clear your own debt? You couldn’t.
Later in Matthew, Jesus will help us see what’s going on in this prayer and this conditional, if/then sort of language about forgiveness and forgiving with a parable of a man forgiven something like ten-million bucks, who then goes on to shake down someone who owes him a fiver. We’ll talk more when we get there.
But what you need to see is that this language is real. Don’t de-fang the Scriptures. If you prove to are a bitter, unforgiving, unmerciful man, who tries to receive grace from God in a dump truck, but then measure out mercy to others in a thimble—you may prove also to be an unregenerate imposter who hasn’t really tasted the mercy of God.
So it’s very simple: Forgive. Clear debts owed you. Use a generous measure with your mercy. Use the measure which you’d like to have used with you, in fact.
It’s easy for us to make a critical error, here, an error that comes in with the question, “How does forgiveness relate to the unrepentant?”
Because some of us may be thinking right now, “How can I do this? How can I forgive my abusive father, who sexually abused me and my siblings? Or how can I forgive the former friend who betrayed my trust? How can I forgive my bitter, unrepentant, unregenerate family member who continues to sow division and poison in the family with every single conversation, holiday, email, etc? How does my forgiveness relate to them?”
Let’s make some distinctions and think carefully about this issue so that we can know our duty before God—which is just another way of saying that we need to know the way to follow the Lord and therefore embrace life and joy and peace and glory—as well as what we are not being asked to do.
Remembering the greatness of our debt before God, this debt that was beyond even the possibility of our repayment, we are to cultivate an attitude of heart that longs for mercy, forgiveness, restoration, and good for those who have wronged us. [REPEAT]
Let me give it to you in a picture that maybe will be familiar to you: When we are sinned against, our goal as forgiven sons and daughters of this good Father should be to stand on the porch, eyes straining at the horizon, eagerly hoping to see the one who sinned against us step over the horizon—in even the first steps towards repentance and confession—so that we can run towards them, put a ring on their finger, a robe on their back, and welcome them with joy.
That we would look that person in the eye without bitterness or remembrance of their former sin, and assure them that they are clean in your eyes, that you will not be bringing that sin back up, that you will not be keeping a secret record of it in your mind, to be brought forth at a personally convenient moment.
Our goal should be to follow our Lord Jesus as he hung on the cross, pleading even then for the forgiveness of those who were crucifying him. Our goal should be to follow our Father’s example, who puts our sin away from us as far as the East is from the West. As Paul puts to the saints at Colossae, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
How has he forgiven you? Totally, completely, irreversibly. Remember what he taught us in Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, the they shall receive mercy.” And as James wrote,
“For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”
-James 2:13
And so some of us need to forgive. We need do it now. Immediately. Some of us need to stop waiting for our debtors to pay us back, and to simply imitate our Father.
Has your spouse confessed to sin against you, maybe even grievous sin? Forgive.
Are you bitter? Are you angry? Are you continually going back to the same old wounds like weeping scabs and picking at them? Do you glory in nursing little molehill slights and annoyances and grudges into mountains? Are you blowing on the embers of old wrongs, trying to keep them burning?
The Lord is clear to you: Repent. It’s that simple. Repent. Be free. Stop it. Turn. What you’re doing is wickedness. And what you’re doing is enslaving. Maybe you will even find that the worst thing you’ve ever done isn’t something you’ve done, but something you failed to do. Maybe it’s the forgiveness you withheld after being forgiven such an astonishing debt.
Later we’ll see, rather, we’ll hear, something somewhat astonishing from the Lord. He says that with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. What measure are you using with your enemies? I mean, even with your family—your wife, your husband, your kids, your friends, your parents?
Is it generous? Is it running over?
Hear me clearly: I am not saying that you can force reconciliation with an unrepentant person. I am not even saying that the one who sinned against you ever will appear over the horizon, coming to your door to ask for mercy. That would be a kind of wish-dreaming, sugar coating of reality. No. Some will never repent, never confess, never come to you and humble themselves. And your marching orders are clear: Even if just before God, you settle the account. You say, “I won’t demand payment here, Lord. You didn’t demand payment of me. Either bring them to your grace, or you settle the issue between us. I won’t bother about it for one more millisecond. I won’t hang onto it for one more millisecond. It’s yours. And if I ever see them coming over the horizon, give me a heart to laugh, to run to them, and to kill the fatted calf to welcome them in.”
For our part, we are to trust wholly in the judgment and vengeance of God and not our own, ask the Lord to give us a heart of mercy and readiness to forgive and reconcile, and so be free of the canker of grudge, unforgiveness, and debt-mongering.
For our good and his glory, world without end, amen.