Forgive Us Our Debts Matthew 6:12 Introduction In his book, Mere Christianity, C S Lewis says that this morning’s subject, forgiveness, may be even more unpopular to talk about than the virtue of chastity – sexual purity. And the reason why people may dislike forgiveness more than chastity “is not that people think [it] too high and difficult a virtue: [it’s] that they think it hateful and contemptible,” by which he means that there is something about giving someone who has wronged us a free pass that really rubs us the wrong way. At the same time, he argues that we all give lip-service to forgiveness anyway: “Everyone says forgiveness is a good idea,” he says, “until they have something to forgive.” In other words, the difficulty we have with forgiving people doesn’t really come out until we have felt the sting of being sinned against. It’s one thing to talk about forgiveness; it’s quite another thing to give it to someone who has slandered you, laid you off, disrespected you, or ignored you. It’s one think to give lip-service forgiveness, but it’s another thing to offer it to someone who sexually abused you, who beat you, who cheated on you with another woman. And I couldn’t agree more. Forgiveness is a herculean task. It involves a lot of heavy lifting. And yet, in a world full of sinful, broken people – we need it if we’re going to have any relationships at all with others. Being sinned against is not an “if” question, it’s a “when” question. It has happened to you, it is happening to you, and it will happen to you. People will wrong you. And not just strangers – familiar friends, family, colleagues – people you thought were on your team will betray you. So if you hope to maintain even the semblance of a relationship with other people, weak and sinful as they are, you’ve got to figure out how to forgive them. More than that, because you are one of those weak and sinful people yourself, you are (even without realizing it) counting on other people to forgive you, even expecting them to do it. It’s why you get mad when they won’t get over what you’ve done to them: “It can’t be that big a deal.” Or “20 years of marriage is worth fighting for, isn’t it?” Or “How many times to I have to say ‘I’m sorry’ in order for us to be friends again?” In a fallen world, forgiveness is indispensible. We need to be able to forgive each other if we are going to live in any kind of harmony with one another, if we’re going to have anything like real relationships with other people. But like I said, this is easier said than done. Unforgiveness makes much more sense. “You wronged me; therefore, you don’t deserve to have my love.” True enough. But if we yield ourselves to what Philip Yancey has called “the crystalline logic of unforgiveness,” then what are we left with? We’re left with nothing. We’re left with no hope of relationships – not in a world that’s been stained by human sin and frailty. So we’ve got a real dilemma here, or, at least, a practical one. How can we forgive other people, genuinely and sincerely, from the heart when everything in us naturally wants to see justice be served? And don’t we want other people to forgive us, or, at least, to overlook our misdemeanors? We certainly don’t want other people to operate toward us according to the unyielding laws of unforgiveness. How can we do this? Well, the Bible answers this question for us. The Lord’s Prayer answers the question for us. There is a way in which you and I can genuinely and sincerely release other people from the relational debt they owe us. There is a way. And this morning, I want to work through that with you as we continue our study of the Lord’s Prayer from Matt 6:9-13. So turn there with me in your Bibles, and let’s read it together. <Read the text> It should be clear by now which petition we’ll be focusing on – v 12: And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. The first thing you need to see is that everyone in the world has debts. Forgive us our debts (we’ve got them, and need them forgiven), as we also have forgiven our debtors (other people have them, and need them forgiven). So we’ve got debts, and other people have debts. We’ve all got debts: debts to God and debts to one another. Now the reason we start there is that until you see yourself as a debtor yourself, you’ll never be able to release other people from the debts they owe you. In fact, until you see yourself as having more debt to God than other people have to you, you’ll never be able to truly forgive someone. Jesus illustrates this point in Matt 18:21-35. Let’s read it together. <Read the text> Here in this passage the first thing that Jesus does is to compare our sin against God with a debt to a king that could never be repaid – v 24: When he had begun to settle with his slaves, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Now a talent was equal – get this – to more than fifteen years wages of a day-laborer! And according to Jesus, this servant owed the king ten thousand times that amount! Today, this would be like a subsistence farmer owing someone something to the tune of 75 billion dollars. Now you have to keep in mind that this is not something that would be swept under the rug or otherwise overlooked. Neither could you declare bankruptcy and essentially be granted a financial do-over. Look at v 25. <Read the text> Since the servant did not have the means to repay, the king ordered him to be sold into slavery (along with his wife and children and all his possessions) and repayment to be made. So even though this servant couldn’t pay the king back, he and his wife and his children and all his stuff could never total 75 billion dollars, this was only just. Pay back what you owe – and if you don’t have the means – pay back whatever you can. And in the culture of the day, the practice of being sold for debt was sanctioned by the Old Testament law. All this – keep in mind – was the absolutely right thing to do: the man really owed the money; the man really didn’t have the means to repay; the man was being justly punished for failing to pay his debt. This is exactly our predicament as non-Christians. Because of our sin, we owe God a debt we could never repay, deep down we know we’re indebted to him (the presence of guilt in our lives – and we all have guilt – confirms the sin-debt we owe), and we are justly condemned by God, under his wrath, and awaiting his after our deaths under the sentence of hell. We are all like this servant – hopelessly in debt with no means to repay – even if we were to sell everything we had, including ourselves, we would never be able to clear the books with God – hopelessly in debt with no means to repay and armed with the certain knowledge of a just punishment. So, recognizing his predicament, the servant falls on his face and begs him for more time, begs his master to have patience with him so that he might somehow, some way, work off what he owed him. Check out v 26. <Read the text> So then, what will the king do? Does he have to give him more time? No. Is he obligated to be patient with a guy he knows could never pay him back – not in a month of Sundays? Absolutely not! And everyone listening to Jesus’ story would have understood the same. If this king is serious about justice, they would expect him simply to say, “I appreciate what you’re saying, but you owe me the money, and you need to suffer the consequences for your foolishness. It would be wrong for me to give you a free pass. You’ve got to learn your lesson so that next time this kind of thing won’t happen to you.” So what does the king do? The answer is found in v 27. <Read the text> The king felt compassion and released him from custody and forgave him the debt. The king forgave him! Even though he owed him so much money, even though this servant should never have gotten himself into this mess in the first place by borrowing money he knew was way beyond his means, even though he made his bed, the king from compassion doesn’t make him sleep in it; instead, he absolved him, cancelled his debt, erasing it completely from his books, settled his servant’s account by settling it himself! That is the gospel. That’s the gospel. It is being released from your debt of sin not at all on the basis of anything good that you have done to try to balance out the scales of your sinfulness. You can’t do that; and even if you tried, you would only barely scratch the surface! The gospel is being released from your debt of sin against the Lord, having it completely erased, having your account settled for you by the substitutionary death of Jesus on your behalf! Now then – and the point I want you to see right now – is that this experience of release is the only thing that will give you the wherewithal to be able to forgive other people. Until you see that you are the person whose 75 billion dollar debt has been canceled, you will not be able truly to cancel the $1.50 debts that other people owe you. Notice vv 28-33. <Read the text> Verse 33 is particularly instructive: Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave in the same way that I had mercy on you? In other words, what should happen to a person who has had such a huge debt erased from his bank account is that he should have no problem whatsoever erasing debts from other people’s bank accounts – the people who’ve sinned against him. But because the man in Jesus’ illustration did not appreciate, understand, or see what a debtor to mercy he really was, his heart was unmoved even by the other person’s pleas for mercy. He couldn’t forgive the guy a tiny fraction of the money he just received from the king. Until you see it yourself, it will be impossible to forgive other people their debts against you. Now you might say, “Wait a second! I am a forgiving person. And I’m not even a Christian. Are you saying that you can’t be forgiving unless you’ve been forgiven by God through the gospel?” Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying! Because the standard of forgiveness, the definition of what forgiveness is determined by the gospel. Without the gospel of God’s grace, you can’t even understand forgiveness. Forgiveness is not ignoring the debt: it is not forgetting. I love how my friend and fellow pastor Dick Kaufmann puts it: “Forgiving is remembering and still forgiving.” When the Bible says that God remembers your sin no more, it is not because your sins have escaped his memory, as if God suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. God is omniscient; that is to say, he’s all knowing. Nothing escapes his memory. He knows full well all the ways you have failed to keep his rules, or used keeping his rules as a way of getting leverage over God so as to put him in your debt. He remembers even the sins you forget. Instead, remembering your sins no more refers to a disposition of God’s heart and a profound promise never to hold those sins against you. Never to make you pay him the debt of sin you owe. It is as if he has forgotten them completely, as if they’ve been erased from his memory. So to forgive someone is not to forget what they’ve done to you. It’s to know exactly what they’ve done to you, to remember what they’ve done and forgive them anyway. Is this really what you do? Is even the most egregious sin they have committed against you so forgiven that even though you remember it, it’s as if you’ve forgotten what they’ve done? I don’t think so. If we’re honest with ourselves, even the most forgiving of us all, our forgiveness often doesn’t reach this place. One writer puts it like this: People bury hatchets but carefully tuck away the map which tells where their hidden weapon lies. We put our resentments in cold storage and then pull the switch to let them thaw out again. Our grudges are taken out to the lake to drown them–even the lake of prayer–and we end up giving them a swimming lesson. How often have we torn up the canceled note but hang on to the wastebasket that holds the pieces. This is not to say that human forgiveness does not occur; only that it is rare and that much that passes for forgiveness is often not so at all. Forgiveness is also not excusing the debt: forgiveness isn’t cheap. Whenever you forgive someone you absorb the cost of their offense. I told the story a few months ago of running over my neighbor’s mailbox. (Yes, I actually ran the thing down…but not on purpose). Well, when you run over your neighbor’s mailbox, two things can happen. Either I can pay to replace it, or they can pay to replace it. Now since I ran the thing over, I’m the one who ought to replace it. But what my neighbors could do (and what they actually did) was to release me from my mailbox debt. But it cost them something. They had to replace their own mailbox. They absorbed the cost of my mistake. And that’s how forgiveness works. First and foremost, that’s how God’s forgiveness works! The fact that God can forgive you even though you ought to pay him the debt of sin you owe him was not cheap! It cost him his very own son. First Peter 1:18-19 puts it like this: “You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” Your forgiveness cost your Father precious, priceless blood! The precious, priceless blood of Jesus. Our forgiveness of others works on the same principle. To forgive a person is not to look the other way, or say, that’s not a big deal. It is to say, I can’t look the other way, it is a big deal, but I am going to absorb the cost of your sin. I am going to use the currency of love to pay your debt for you. And this can happen in a variety of ways. In his book called Forgiveness, Dan Hamilton tells this story: Once upon a time, I was engaged to a young woman who changed her mind. I forgave her...but [only] in small sums over a year....[They were made] whenever I spoke to her and refrained from rehashing the past, whenever I renounced jealousy and self-pity, whenever [I saw her] with another man, whenever I praised her to others when I wanted to slice away at her reputation. Those were the payments, but she never saw them....[Forgiveness] is more than a matter of refusing to hate someone. It is also a matter of choosing to demonstrate love and acceptance to the offender….Pain is the consequence of sin; there is no easy way to deal with it. Wood, nails and pain are the currency of forgiveness, the love that heals. So forgiveness is costly. It costs you something. And you pay off the other person’s debt by “choosing to demonstrate love and acceptance to the offender.” The payments you make are like refusing to rehash the past, renouncing jealousy and self-pity, praising the offender to others when you feel like you’d rather slice away at his or her reputation. The payments you make are real payments, even if they are relational. Forgiveness is not cheap. But what is our tendency? Don’t we instead try to exact payments from other people rather than paying the debt ourselves? Tim Keller, in an unpublished article on forgiveness, gives some great examples of the ways in which we can exact and take payment from the offender in three areas: in dealing with the offender, with other people, and with ourselves. a) In our dealing with the offender: 1) We can make cutting remarks and drag out the past. 2) We can be far more demanding and controlling with the person than we are with others, all because "they owe us". 3) We can punish with self-righteous "mercy" which makes them feel small. 4) We can avoid them, be cold to them in overt and/or subtle ways. 5) We can actively seek and scheme to hurt or harm them, taking from them something valuable to them. b) In our dealing with others: 1) We can run them down to others, under the guise of "warning" people about them. 2) We can run them down to others, under the guise of seeking sympathy and sharing our hurt. c) In our dealing with ourselves: 1) We can replay the tapes of what they did to us, to justify our anger and hostility. 2) We can "root" for their failure or fall or pain. Forgiveness is a promise, to not “bring the matter up” to the person, others, or even ourselves. At each point when we are tempted to exact payment, we refuse, and though it hurts, that is a payment. If this is forgiveness, if forgiveness is not cheap, don’t you see how you need something more than your own resources for doing it? You might be able to do this with your ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, but how about with your sexually abusive father, or your overbearing, demanding mother, or with your philandering husband. These payments are much harder to make because they are much more expensive. But this is what true forgiveness is. It is costly. It is not cheap. Forgiveness also isn’t increasing the debt: forgiveness doesn’t require penance. The funny thing about the kind of forgiveness we tend to offer is that there’s a sense in which we want to be paid back more than what we’re owed. We want to be paid back double, triple, quadruple what we’re owed. We say forgive the person, but we want them to do something nice for us in return. We say we forgive the person, but they better show some dramatic improvement in this area. We say we forgive the person, but not without a lot of groveling – they have to be really, really, really sorry for what they’ve done for me. But the nature of forgiveness is that it doesn’t require penance. It doesn’t require the offender to do things to make up for their failure. It doesn’t require them pay you what they owe. Forgiveness means you’ve paid that debt for them. The reason they need your forgiveness is precisely because they don’t have the means to pay you – their in debt! So true forgiveness can only be offered to someone who has nothing to give you, except their debts; otherwise, it’s not true forgiveness. This is exactly how God deals with us in our sins. He doesn’t say, “Get your act together, then I’ll forgive you.” He doesn’t say, “Walk old ladies across the street, and donate money for Haitian relief, serve meals at the local soup kitchen, get up really early for Bible study and prayer, volunteer to serve at your church…and then I’ll forgive you.” Not at all. Instead, he says, “While you are still a sinner, Christ dies for you.” Christ pays your debt in the midst of your indebtedness! Like the old hymn goes: “Nothing in my hand I bring/Simply to Thy cross I cling.” Forgiveness does not require penance. You don’t increase a person’s debt when you forgive them. You release it – all of it. But this doesn’t mean that forgiveness is unconditional. It is not unconditional. Now this may sound strange because we are often told that forgiveness should be unconditional. I think the reason for this is owing to some confusion over how forgiveness is granted versus how it is maintained. I would say that forgiveness is granted conditionally and maintained unconditionally. Let me explain. When I say that forgiveness is conditionally granted, I mean that God forgives you when you confess your sin to him. You must confess your sin and purpose to turn away from your sin in order to be forgiven. First John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Do you hear the “if” there? If we confess our sins, God will forgive us. If we admit our wrongdoing and take full responsibility for what we’ve done, not blame-shifting or making excuses or looking for a scapegoat, but taking full responsibility for how we have incurred our relational debt, the Lord will forgive us. Or, in the language of the Lord’s Prayer, only when we pray “Forgive us our debts,” our heavenly grants us forgiveness. That’s why Jesus tells us to pray it! We need forgiveness, and we need to ask for it. And we need to ask for it not like this: “Father, forgive us our debt,” but “Father, forgive us our debts” – plural! We’ve got to get specific. No one truly confesses or can purpose in their hearts to turn away from wrongdoing in general – it’s got to be specific. You have to admit to God precisely how you’ve offended him, broken his rules, or used keeping his rules as a way for you to make God give you what you want. You’ve got to get specific. And when you do, God will forgive you. But you must confess in order to be forgiven. Forgiveness is conditionally granted. On the other had, forgiveness is also unconditionally maintained. That is to say, that once God has forgiven you, he unconditionally maintains the status of your forgiveness. He never throws it in your face. He never says, “Well, now that I’ve forgiven you of this heinous sin (or respectable sin) you need to behave properly; otherwise, I’ll take my payment back. I’ll call the bank and order a “stop payment” on my check. So you better stay in line.” There is nothing more to be done to experience his forgiveness. You confess, you admit what you’ve done with a view to turning away from it, and it’s over. The language of Scripture to describe this is beautiful. He remembers your sins no more. He separates you from your sins as far as the east is from the west. He drowns your sins in the ocean. So although forgiveness is conditionally granted, it is unconditionally maintained. Now what this means for our relationships is that it is impossible for you to forgive someone who hasn’t come to you for forgiveness. Or, again, using the language of the Lord’s Prayer, it is impossible for you to forgive someone who hasn’t acknowledged their debt. In order for you to make deposits into their negative account, they have to give you the routing number and account number and password; otherwise you can’t help them. But wait a second! I thought that we are supposed to forgive someone before they even ask! I mean, shouldn’t I forgive someone even before they ask me? Well, you can’t forgive them if forgiveness is conditionally granted. If what is required for a sin-debt to be canceled is admitting your wrongdoing and seeking to be forgiven by the injured party, then even if you desperately wanted to forgive them, you couldn’t. Forgiveness, though a deeply relational thing, is in this sense also a transactional thing. It is the canceling of a relational debt. It is relational, but it is also debt. And to cancel debt requires a transaction. In the case of forgiveness, it requires that the offender take responsibility for his or her wrongdoing. Now although this is true, I have met and known people who would use this truth as a way of excusing their bitterness, coldness, animosity, and fantasies of revenge. They hide behind the transactional side of forgiveness under the guise of doctrinal precision or biblical faithfulness, when in reality they are using the Bible’s understanding of forgiveness to sin more. So when you have heard people say that you should forgive someone before you ask them, what you should hear is that you ought to have a disposition and a desire to forgive them even before they ask you. This is exactly what happened with Jesus Christ. When he was on the cross, Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The same thing is true of Stephen, the church’s first martyr, who, when he was being stoned to death for a sermon he preached, said, “Father, do not hold this sin against them.” In both cases, for Stephen and for Jesus himself, neither of them actually forgave the people. Instead, they prayed that they would be forgiven. Now let me ask you something: can you persist long in your hatred of a person for how they’ve wronged you when at the same time you are begging God to forgive them? So when people say that you need to forgive people even before they ask you, take it to mean that you should, like the Lord, promise forgiveness to them. You should be willing to forgive anyone who asks you for forgiveness, now matter how severe the crime. You should be ready to absorb their debt. “Here I am,” you say, “I am ready to release you from what you owe me. I can’t wait to forgive you. I am so looking forward to releasing you.” This is why Jesus says in Matt 18:35 that our forgiveness must be “from the heart.” There can be no begrudging the release of someone’s debt of sin against you. Of course, what I’ve been saying all along is that something has to happen to you before you can do this. You need to have experienced the liberating debt-removal of your heavenly father. And you need to keep experiencing it in order to be able to forgive other people from the heart. In fact, the acid test of whether or not you have been forgiven by God is that you forgive others. That’s what Jesus means when he tells us to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors.” That’s what Jesus means in vv 14-15. <Read the text> He’s not saying that you earn forgiveness by forgiveness, he’s saying that the sure sign that you are appropriating and appreciating the fact that your debts against God have been canceled is that you cancel other people’s debts yourself. Or we can put it negatively and say that your unforgiveness shows that you have not confessed and repented of your sin; therefore, you can’t be forgiven by God. Remember: in order to be forgiven by God you have to come to God empty-handed. Or better, with your sins (your debts) in your hands. God cannot pay for something (neither would you receive it) if you didn’t think you had any debt in the first place. Instead, you’d be insulted at the insinuation that you were not financially solvent. Your failure to forgive those who have wronged you is your insistence that you are not wrong yourself. So as one writer puts it: “[I]f we are to open our hands to receive his gracious pardon, we cannot keep our fists tightly clenched against those who have wronged us.” All this is to say that in order to forgive other people, you absolutely must know the forgiveness of God in your life. As you realize this release, it becomes easier and easier to release people from their debts. How does knowing my forgiveness make me forgiving of other people? Because you are free! And the freer you feel the freer you are with other people. It’s why you’re more patient with your kids and spouse and friends when you’re happy, content, secure, why you’re more forbearing, why things roll off your back – what was so important to you just seems smaller. They broke that thing, but I’m a billionaire! I can cover their debt. It’s like that give-a-penny, take-a-penny thing at gas stations. Do you ever begrudge throwing a penny in the tray? Of course you don’t. And do you know why? Because it’s a penny! Or think of it like this: if you’re in line at Target and the person in front of you needs a penny, don’t you check your pocket to cover it for them? On the other hand, I’ve never seen anyone, nor have I been inclined to cover someone’s bill when they were $100 short. But what if $100 were like a penny to you? You’d pay it. You have the resources to cover the shortfall. Of course, this illustration, as they say, doesn’t stand on all fours. Some of the sins that people have committed against you may be unspeakably horrific – things you’ve never told a soul about – what they have done to you cannot be and should not be trivialized to say that it’s just a penny’s worth of hurt. It doesn’t feel like a penny; it feels like a billion dollars share with another person. It is not trivial. So I’m not saying to ignore the seriousness of the sins committed against you. But what I am saying is that the debt you’ve been released from and the deposit that’s been made into your account is so much greater than even the most vile, disgusting, unspeakable atrocity ever committed against you – as great as that is – and therefore you can be set free from the slavery of hating that person, of being cold toward that person, giving them the silent treatment, nursing the grudge – you can be liberated from the tyranny of your unforgiveness. The more you realize how far and how wide and how deep the cross of Jesus really goes, the freer you will be to forgive everyone, and the more willing you will be to release people from the debts they owe you. When you see Jesus dying for you, and see how exorbitant a payment he made to pay your debt, everyone else’s debt, as much of a pile as it is, will seem small in comparison. This, incidentally, it why when people say, “I just can’t accept that God forgives me,” “I’ve confessed and confessed, but I just don’t feel forgiven” – when they say things like this, they are actually guilty of the sin of the unbelief, refusing to believe that God’s salvation is totally free. Sometimes this kind of pride comes out like this: “I know God is forgiving, but I cannot forgive myself”, they mean that they reject God’s grace and insist that they be worthy of his favor. Both religious pride and despair are forms of self-righteousness. I can’t forgive myself is a falsely humble way of rejecting God’s grace. It’s a contraindication of experiencing God’s grace. Get in touch with God’s grace, and you might find yourself unwilling to receive it. What we want by nature is not grace; it’s deserts! We don’t want charity. We don’t want a hand-out from God. To say that you can’t forgive yourself is a kind of passive-aggressive temper-tantrum in which you insist to be worthy of God’s favor. I don’t want forgiveness to be this free! I want to contribute somehow! I want my name in the credits. The reality is that God is faithful. He promises forgiveness. And you can be as certain of it as certain as Jesus died and rose again. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses. Period. And amen. Conclusion: A Brief How-To on Forgiveness Meditate on the reality of your own forgiveness. See Jesus dying for you and paying your sin debt on the cross. Colossians 2:13-14 says “You, who were dead in your trespasses, God made alive together with Jesus, 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.” All your debts have been nailed to the cross. Every bill says PAID IN FULL! Confess your sin. Really take responsibility for it. See it for what it really is. A deep offense against the God who loved you so much that he sent Jesus to rescue you. “Too often our confession is…Lord, I promise to try harder. I’ll make up for it. I’m turning over a new leaf. It sounds good but it is just one more effort to avoid Jesus.” Admit your need for release – and be specific. Remember you are coming to a heavenly father who loves you no matter what. He wants more than anything to forgive you. He wants the relationship restored. Think of the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son. He runs to meet his son before the kid makes it home. And is kissing him and embracing him and celebrating his return to the family before the boy even has a chance to express his repentance. Otherwise, you’ll just feel guiltier and more insecure. There is nothing you can do or confess or admit to him not only that he doesn’t already know, but also that none of these things can ever separate you from your adoptive love. Knowing this will free you to be brutally honest about your sins and therefore more robust in your confession. Otherwise, you’ll only feel guiltier. More than that, it will enable you to see how deep the father’s love is for you. Now you’re ready to forgive other people. These three steps will cultivate in you the disposition and desire to forgive everyone who asks you. It will make you long to forgive those who have wronged you. It will change you from the inside out. From here, you simply follow the instructions of the Apostle Paul: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Forgive as you have been forgiven…which means… You grant forgiveness freely, joyfully, willingly. You resolve never to bring up their sin again – to them, to others, and to yourself. You practice love toward them by continuing to make payments on their debt, secretly as you resist exacting payments from them and love them actively. But let me say one more time that none of this is possible without the gospel. The more persuaded you are of how much of a debtor to mercy you are, the more you will forgive others – period. So don’t think of this how-to on forgiveness as a one-time thing. It is a daily thing, a moment by moment thing. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts. It’s not only bread that we need every day – it’s also forgiveness. And it’s ours in Jesus. Amen and amen. EXTRA How about when people say that you need to give yourself a break and forgive yourself? Doesn’t that solve the problem? Not if sin is a debt. If my sin is a debt that I have incurred, to forgive myself is to pay off my own debt, which in the very nature of the case is impossible, since my indebtedness means that I have no resources with which to make the payment. I am in debt $5. I’ll just cancel my own debt, which means that I’ll give myself $5 to pay myself off, which I don’t have because I’m already -$5. Get it? When we’re told to forgive ourselves, we are essentially told to deny that we have any debt. Ignore it. Excuse it. Act like it’s not there. The only problem with this is that deep down we all know it’s there, gnawing away at our consciences.