Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors

Matthew 6:12

This is the penultimate petition on Jesus’ model prayer. It clearly carries some importance as immediately after giving the prayer, he returns to the importance of forgiving others.

He says that because God has forgiven us, we must forgive others, then goes further saying that if we do not forgive others, God will not forgive us.

Does that mean that God will stop forgiving us? That we can therefore lose our salvation? No, because our salvation, or justification, is a one-time event which cannot be undone (see Romans 5:1, 9; 8:1; 10:10). Also, if God waited to see if we forgave others before he forgave us, then our salvation would be based on our works – which is not the case (see Ephesians 2:8-9).

Rather, it has to do with our ongoing relationship with God. Remember the prayer starts with ‘Our Father’. The context is that of children praying to their father. But is possible for us to spoil that relationship. We can grieve the Holy Spirit by our behaviour (see Eph 4:30). God made us in his image, which means we are like him, so we should mirror him in everything we are and do. The work of the Holy Spirit in us is to restore that image, which was corrupted by the Fall, and if we resist his work by choosing to not reflect his image, he is grieved. In the context of forgiveness, God has forgiven us so it follows that we should do as he does and forgive others.

Forgiving others can be very hard to do, which is why we need the reminder of how much God has forgiven us. Jesus illustrates this in the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35). Here, there is a servant who owes his master an astronomical amount (equivalent to billions of pounds). How he got into such debt is not the point, the amount represents something which is completely unpayable. And that is the point. Our ‘debt’ to God is beyond our ability to pay. It’s not simply financial, it’s the debt of treason, the consequence of our sin. RC Sproul describes sin as ‘cosmic treason’. CS Lewis says ‘Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms’.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

The other day, I was reading the account of Jesus in Gethsemane, just before his arrest. He sweat drops of blood – a sign of great stress. Here is the perfect man, the Son of God, recoiling from the terror of the punishment he was about to face. That indicates the depth of our sin – and the fact that he determined to go through with it shows the enormity of his love for us. While we may never really grasp the real gravity of our sin, we can at least understand that God’s forgiveness is for something we could never repay. And however much other people sin against us, it will still not compare to our sin against God.

And that is the point of the second part of the parable. The forgiven servant refused to forgive a smaller debt. While it was not insignificant in human terms (in the parable it was measured in thousands of pounds), it was tiny compared with the original debt owed by the servant.

In other words, whatever we think others might owe us, it is nothing compared to the debt God has forgiven us. 

And it’s because of that that we should be willing to forgive others. A willingness to forgive is an indication of our own forgiveness. James writes that while we are saved through faith, our faith is demonstrated by our works. (James 2:18). That is, our behaviour or outward actions. 

In Ephesians 4, Paul makes this very practical. He says that a Christian is someone who has ‘put off their old ways’ and ‘put on a new self, created after the likeness of God’ (Ephesians 4:22-24). He then lists several ways this might be demonstrated, finishing with ‘forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you’ (Ephesians 4:25-32).

So when we pray ‘forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors’, we are both asking God for forgiveness, and committing ourselves to forgive others.