Matthew 6:12-15 (ESV) The Lord's Prayer

¹² and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
¹³ And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

¹⁴ For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 

¹⁵ but if you do not forgive others their sin, neither will your Father forgive your sin.

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We are now on part 3 of The Lord’s Prayer, or rightly it should be called The Disciples Prayer because Jesus was not teaching this about Himself, he was teaching His disciples, then and now, how we should pray.
 

And so we have learned that this prayer has firstly two parts to it. Firstly the focus on being serious about God and rightly so His name, His kingdom, His will; the second part of the prayer that God is serious about us – about meeting out deeper spiritual needs and indeed, all our needs.

And this is how Jesus ends – ¹² and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
¹³ And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. ¹⁴ For if you forgive man who has sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you, ¹⁵ but if you do not forgive man their sin, your father will not forgive your sins (Matthew 6: 12-15).

Forgiveness is a much misunderstood concept today. And here is Jesus giving us deep spiritual insight as always from Him, who has come from God. And so the first lesson from this would be if there's anything we want to be serious about in life, it's not being serious about external acts of religiosity, external acts of spirituality; if there is anything that we shall serious about as believers and disciples of Jesus, we should be serious about forgiveness

Why? Because moment to moment, day by day, we either sin against others, or others will sin against us. It is almost a guarantee there is no such thing as a sin-free day. And so if there is no such thing as a sin-free day, there is no such thing as a forgiveness-free day because every day we sin against others, and we are sinned against. We always need both to offer and to receive forgiveness. If that is true, here is a Jesus or Gospel principle or truth.
 

Forgiveness is not an option, forgiveness is a lifestyle

Forgiveness is a Christian lifestyle, forgiveness is not an option. And once we have realized that by listening to the Lord Jesus, it is wonderfully real and truly liberating. It warns us that even as you believe in Jesus as our personal Saviour and Lord, we will sin and we will fail one another. And even as we sin and fail one another, there is always the kingdom practice of forgiveness. So, how does this work out in our life?
 

Kingdom Practice of Forgiveness

“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

In one of my conference overseas, it was a long day and long night, I finished preaching and people were lining up for ministry and prayer after message. There were others around, but this man just waited in queue to see me. And finally I got to meet him, I apologized for making him wait because of so many people asking to be prayed for, but he said he's fine, and he just wanted to tell me his story. His story was he grew up in a home with a drunken and abusive father. The father would constantly and regularly beat up his mother. And one day, as the children were sitting around to eat their dinner, his father stumbled in with a strong smell of alcohol. He walked straight up to the kitchen sink where his mother was washing out after dinner and the children were still eating, and then for no rhyme or reason, he started to shout at her, push her, and before long, he had hit her. And this man who was telling the story, he was a teenager then, he had enough venom and anger in his heart, and he got up and with one move, he floored his father. The father was on the floor. This young man was about to hit and punch his father in the neck with his fist, which would possibly kill him. But something stopped him. And so he got on a bus, and at the bus, a total stranger started talking to him and invited him to something in church. He didn't know what it was, he was so lost and he had nowhere to go, so he went. For the first time he heard the good news of Jesus – our Jesus coming to love us and bring peace with God and with one another, to bring forgiveness. And he gave his life to Christ. And his life, slowly but surely changed from that point onwards. This young man told me he stood in line because he wanted to tell me that in knowing Jesus, he now had totally forgiven his father so much that years later, he invited his father to live with him, and though the father has not become a Christian, yet a believer, he is praying as the son that one day the saving love of Jesus would touch him.

How do you go from a man who had enough anger, righteous anger to hit and kill his father for beating his mother, to someone who now is praying, caring, hoping and hungering for his father to know Christ? I think by the grace of God, it is one of those undeniable stories, again and again that in believing in Jesus, we are so “made new”, we are so empowered to forgive those who sin against us, and to be forgiven of our own sin.

And we can multiply that right across the board for us. You could have a spouse who has repeatedly wrong you, you may have a child who has repeatedly failed you or abandon you, you could have experienced friends who has gossip against you, or even people in church who have bad mouth and backstab you, and so as Kingdom people, Jesus tells us that forgiveness is not an option, forgiveness is a lifestyle.

And what is that means in verse 13 “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one”? He is drawing us to the fear spiritual battle which is with the Devil. And in some version, this is translated “deliver us from evil”, and in some versions “deliver us from the evil one”, there is not much difference between the two because it is the devil, who is the source of all evil men and women, and it is the devil who is the source of all evil acts and actions towards one another. And so we have to realize that we are in this deep Titanic battle against Satan that only Jesus can deliver us from.

When we mention the devil in our modern-day world, from Western societies to Asian societies, more and more people are disbelieving in religion and believing in Humanism and Atheism. When we mention the devil in our 21st century world, to Millennials this younger generation, people think that the devil is a joke! They have the mental picture of this one with pointy ears and a pitch fork and we all laugh at! But the devil was not a joke to God and to His sent one, the Lord Jesus. In fact, the heart of Jesus’ works was to destroy the works of the devil, which is to mislead men and women, which is to divorce us, to decouple us from God and His word and His will of living. May we take Jesus teaching seriously and ask always to be delivered from the evil one, or the evil man and woman and evil acts and actions.

What does Jesus means at verse 14 when He says ^“For if you forgive man when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive man their sin, your Father will not forgive your sin”. He is not talking about the chronological sequence of time sequence of sin. Unless we humanly, horizontally forgive people, their sins, God will not divinely and vertically forgive us. Rather, Jesus is teaching us about the logical sequence of forgiveness. Because we have been forgiven first and fully by God through Jesus Christ Our Lord, we must then not simply by recipients of that big time billion dollar forgiveness, but pass it on in our lives as channels and vessels who have received forgiveness. Jesus will of course speak about this more, and He has recorded for us in Matthew 18 about the parable of the unmerciful servant, that in receiving forgiveness, he does not pass it on.

And so, here we have it, the final portion of the disciple’s prayer. May we learn that forgiveness is a Christian lifestyle, may we learn to pray to be delivered from the evil one, and may we pray to be channels and vessels of forgiveness.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we bow before You, and thank You for Your son, the great Lord Jesus, forgive us, we know not how to live, we know not how to pray, we know not how to please You. But in these precious words of Jesus on prayer, we learn it is about us being serious about You. Firstly about Your name, Your kingdom, Your will, Your glory, not ours, and then to know that You are serious about providing for us, spiritually and in every way. And teach us to be serious about forgiveness, for we know that we will wrong others and we will be wrong ourselves. And teach us always to pray for You to deliver us from the evil one, and we pray to be vessels of forgiveness to others. In the mighty name of Jesus, Amen