Sermon Part 3--God's Forgiveness

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we use the word “debts”. This word debts is the most literal translation of the word used in the passage.

You see in the time of Jesus, rabbis spoke of sins in terms of debts. And each sin was a debt that put a wall up between you and God. And each good thing, that built a bridge between yourself and God. And the hope was that you could do enough good things to build that bridge over the wall of your sins and to God by the good things that you have done.

When Jesus asks us pray “Forgive us our sins” he asks us to pray that God will knock down that wall that stands between us and him. When Jesus tells us we are to pray asking God to forgive us our debts he is saying something very powerful. He is telling us to ask God to come down and break down that barrier between us and him that keeps us at a distance, so that we can be in right relationship.

When we pray, forgive us our sins we are saying that we are powerless to manage our lives, to manage our relationships, to do anything that is good enough to bridge the gulf that we have created between us and God. When we pray forgive us our sins we are asking God to step right into our lives and knock down the walls and strongholds that keep us from God. And to make us new. We are admitting we are powerless to handle our sin on our own.

We are like that pitiful, pathetic man who comes before God with 4 billion dollars in debt and no way to pay what we owe. We need intervention. We need help. We need to pray, “Forgive us our sins”. Not just some of us, all of us. Me. You. You. And you too.

There is no excusing our sin. There is no making it cute. There is no saying it was just “natural”. No. We cannot go there. We must cry out for help. We must cry out for mercy. Or we will be trapped in a prison of our own creation.
And when we pray, “Forgive us our sins” we find that Jesus has died to break down the walls of hostility between us and God. When we seek the bridge that connect us with God’s love, we find the bridge is actually a cross. The cross of Christ.
We pray forgive us our sins because that is what Christ came for, to set us free. To pay our debts. We know that we are pitiful, pathetic, and lost without Jesus. His kingdom is about forgiveness.

Which brings us to forgiving others.