Forgiveness Given and Received

Forgiveness Given and Received

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Matthew 6:12, 14 & 15

As Christ teaches us to pray, He adds a postscript to the text we have been considering for the past days. He declares, ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ Herein lies a condition for our receiving forgiveness ourselves. We confess that the experience of many of us is that others have done us much harm. They have abused and mistreated us perhaps for many years. How can we come to terms with that? In the larger context, Christ shows us how, by His further commentary upon the subject of forgiveness and by His Own behavior. When our offenders repent, we have the moral and spiritual obligation to forgive them. If they have not yet repented, we ought, like Christ, to stand open-handed, and utterly disposed to forgive, should they repent. We should intercede for them, and appeal to God the Father to deal with them in His Own time, even as Christ did for His crucifiers. In this way we follow His Divine pattern. If they repent, we must forgive them, because when we repented, Christ forgave us. If we refuse to forgive a repentant soul, we give evidence that we have not truly repented ourselves. This enables us to both give and receive forgiveness without perverting the natural course of justice. When we come to pray, ‘And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,’ we are asking a large thing of a large God.

Our Kind and Forgiving God,
we rejoice that You extend Your forgiveness to us.
We praise You that Christ our Savior has
shown us both how to pray and how to forgive.

Tomm Tice
Where the Bush is Burning