Your reading this evening is from Luke chapter 11. I ask that you would rise as we hear God speak to us through his word in Luke chapter 11 verses 1 through 4. Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples. And he said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation. If you'll turn to welcome Daniel back to the pulpit this evening. Thank you, Daniel. Well, we return to the Lord's Prayer to pick up from my last couple of sermons. I know they've been spaced out, but maybe you remember something about the Lord's Prayer. Who knew you could get three or four sermons out of such a few sentences? This is that prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. It's recorded here in Luke chapter 11 and Matthew chapter 6. And as we've seen before, this is A prayer that's appropriate to pray word for word, but it's also a model of prayer for us. The Lord gave his disciples an example, a sample, a structure for forming their prayers. Perhaps you've heard that acrostic for prayer before, acts, A-C-T-S, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. That's a simple way to recall some aspects of prayer that are important. And I wouldn't suggest that that's some formula we can employ to make our prayers somehow magical, to assure that they will be answered according to our wishes. Our prayers are answered by God in his revealed will, found in the scriptures, and in his hidden will, discovered as the days unfold, as I've pointed out when we talked about this prayer before. There are no magic incantations that cause God to do what we want. Instead, prayers and activity in which we acknowledge the majesty of God, admit our dependence upon God, express our desire for His goodness and blessing, and give Him thanks for His undeserved mercies toward us. One way of remembering all of those aspects of prayer is through that little acrostic, that little tool, Acts. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. We see these four characteristics of prayer in the Lord's Prayer, the model that Christ gave. And we covered some of those aspects before. Today, let's consider confession. Looking at verse 4 of Luke chapter 11, we see the phrase here, "'Forgive us our sins.'" not to get into a bunch of Greek terminology that's all Greek to us, but there's this word here for sin is hamartia. If you've been in the church long and you've been in Sunday school, you've probably run across this word. It's that old familiar word found throughout the Bible or in the New Testament in the Greek for sin. In the record of Matthew, in Matthew chapter 6, we see the word debts. In other places in the Bible and in other translations of the Lord's Prayer, we find some of these words. Faults, trespasses, offenses. Whichever one of these terms is used here, the moral condition of our souls is what is at issue. J. I. Packer described it this way, Scripture presents sins as law-breaking, deviation, shortcoming, rebellion, pollution, and missing one's target. And it is always all these things in relation to God. But the special angle from which the Lord's Prayer views it is that of unpaid debts. This word in Luke's gospel means essentially missing the mark, that is, failure. But what mark are we missing? How have we failed? We're missing God's standard. What sort of standard? We're missing God's standard of holiness, of perfection. God alone is perfectly holy and we, his creatures, are not. we might well say, forgive us our unholiness, unrighteousness, ungodliness, wretchedness, offensiveness, failure, fallenness, indebtedness, treachery. Forgive us our sins. As we read the scriptures, we see, as the Spirit brings us to understanding, that we are all sinners. As Paul quoted in his letter to the Romans, there is none righteous, no not one. There is none who does good, no not one. And John tells us, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Crying out for forgiveness is a recognition that God exists. that He is able to hear us, that He is able to forgive us, He is above us, and He is holy. Crying out for forgiveness is also a recognition that we are sinners. We have been born into sin, and we have sinned in word and deed. The wickedness we have left undone with our hands or our lips has been done in our hearts. Recall the words of Jesus, you've heard that it was said of those of old, you shall not murder and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. You've heard that it was said of those of old, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." As we've seen in our study of Deuteronomy, God requires an unblemished sacrifice. and all mankind has been born with a defect of sin. Only Christ was the unblemished one. Only He, God in flesh, came without sin and lived without sin. Only He has overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3, 23. Every human being is sinful. Why am I emphasizing this? Because all who trust in Christ have been forgiven a great debt. Without trying to wander into heresy, which can be easily done when you start getting into analogies, I want to use some figurative language here to try to convey the sense of this. God requires absolute holiness, 100% holiness. We might say God's in the black on the ledger. He's holy completely. And we start in the red because of our sin nature. We are naturally sinners. And every day we are floundering in unholy bankruptcy. We don't simply add a little bit to our indebtedness. We have no means whatsoever by which we may satisfy our debt. We can never do anything that will make us holy, that will get us out of the sinful muck and mire. Only God has holiness. Only God has merit. Only God possesses perfection. And only He can redeem us of our sin. And when he does, it's not as if our bank accounts suddenly have money. No, our moral bankruptcy is still there. We still have no currency with which we can gain goodness. The wretchedness that we still do comes from our imperfection, our unholiness. And any goodness manifested through us comes because God's Spirit is using us as his instruments to bring honor to himself. We're still unable to accrue merit, to leave our natural sinful state. Instead, God's wealth overflows our lives. granting us the benefits of His goodness, His benevolence, His perfection. And He ascribes holiness to us as if our debt does not exist. He has satisfied our indebtedness through the obedience of Christ and His bloody sacrifice. He looks upon us as a people redeemed by him, people who had no hope or expectation of making any progress at all toward clearing up the red ink. Our ledgers are dripping red with sin, and only the indelible mark of Christ will do away with it all. All who have been set free from the curse of sin by Christ have been set free from a great debt. So we should continue to pray that the Father will forgive us our sins. The sins of the past and the sins of the present require the mercy of God, which has been granted in the atoning sacrifice of Christ Jesus. Forgive us our sins is a confession, an acknowledgement that we have sins. It's a recognition that despite the mercy we have already received from God, that we have broken faith with Him. We've repaid Him with treachery, betrayal. Instead of acting with gratitude, we have been unfaithful, obstinate, careless in our constant returning to sin. As believers in Christ, as his adopted children, we still fall into sin. The Lord's Prayer models for us how we are to come in humility. recognizing our continued sinfulness. J.C. Ryle put it this way, we are instructed here to keep up a continual habit of confession at the throne of grace and a continual habit of seeking mercy and remission. Or in the words of Dr. Packer, repentance is faith's fruit. Do we truly have faith in Christ? If so, we will come again and again to confess our sins, to cast ourselves upon His mercy. After all, He has proven Himself faithful. If you're familiar with the story of Martin Luther, who, as a monk, had this constant awareness of his sinfulness, he recognized that he carried an enormous burden of sin and unrighteousness. And he spent hours and hours and hours in confession, admitting each and every sin he could possibly think of. And as soon as he left with the priest's absolution, He would run back a moment later to confess some more slight things that came to mind, the smallest things that he could remember from any point in his life. His conscience was in agony over his sin. Thank God that Luther had an awareness of his sin. May the Lord reveal to all of us the bankruptcy of our souls, our inability to pay our debt. Luther's tortured conscience did not find relief, however, in his acts of penance. It was only when he read the Scriptures and was enlightened by the Spirit of God to understand that salvation comes by God's grace, not by the works of men, that he found relief. He discovered that nothing he could do would save his soul from God's wrath. Only God himself could settle the debt of Luther's sin. Luther recognized, he understood, first, his sinfulness, his wretchedness. Second, his inability to pay the debt to satisfy God's justice. And then third, that God has satisfied the debt. And therefore, fourth, that he should rejoice in God's mercy instead of wallowing in his inability, incapacity, and inadequacy. And the same applies to us. Our great sins have been forgiven by the Almighty God. Yes, let us confess our sins to Him daily. And let us also rejoice that He has saved us from His wrath. He has granted us mercy. He has resolved the insurmountable debt we owe. Remember that great verse of promise First John 1.9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. God is ever faithful. It should be reassuring to us that he grants mercy for all who repent. R.C. Sproul described it this way, "'There's no greater state than to get up from your knees, knowing that in God's sight you are clean, that He has forgiven every sin you've ever committed.'" We admit our guilt and we receive God's pardon. This morning I was looking at Psalm 98 in my chapel service. And it talks about praising the Lord and giving him thanks because he has shown his salvation to all the nations of the earth. And we should rejoice. He has brought his salvation to those who were not a people and made us a people. He has taken us who owed a great debt and relieved us of that burden. Reflecting on the second half of this sentence, John Mason wrote that it is important we do not overlook the link between our asking God to forgive us and our need to forgive those who have wronged us. The link is not causal, but rather consequential. In other words, God does not give us forgiveness because we have forgiven others, but we show forgiveness because God has forgiven us. Our mercy toward others does not merit God's mercy toward us. Instead, we who have been forgiven by God have been delivered of a great debt. And in humility, we likewise show mercy toward others. Consider Christ's parable of the unforgiving servant recorded in Matthew 18. The king called in his servant's debt, a sum that would be equivalent to billions of dollars today. Anybody have a few billion dollars? That would be an insurmountable debt. I'm just guessing, I don't know all your bank accounts, but I'm just guessing all of us here would have a really hard time coming up with a billion dollars among all of us. It's an insurmountable debt. There's no way any of us could pay that debt. But this king forgave it all. And that servant expressed his gratitude. but he was truly ungrateful. Another servant owed him the equivalent of about 100 days wages. Think about your income. How much would be about a third of your income in a year? If that were your debt, it probably would not be insurmountable. It would not be insignificant, but it would not be insurmountable, probably. But it pales in comparison to the virtually uncountable debt that the first servant owed his master. The actions of that unforgiving servant betrayed his ingratitude, his callousness, his sinfulness. Every time we are unforgiving to others who harm us, we betray our own ingratitude for the mercy of God shown to us in Christ. Mercy that we do not merit, that we do not deserve. We have the command of God to forgive others, and we should have humility, recognizing our own faults and overlooking the faults of others. We should, as an act of worship and thanksgiving to God, show mercy to others as he has shown mercy to us. What relief has come from our redemption by Christ One of the ways we recognize it, honor the Lord, and bring Him glory is displaying love for our neighbors through mercy. When we are wronged, we forgive, and God is glorified. I was digging around to learn more about this passage in one of those big theological dictionaries, those things that typically are pretty dry and It's easy to lose interest in, and I found this sentence. Human forgiveness is neither a precondition for God's forgiveness, nor can it make any claim to it. Rather, it is an echo and a command of the forgiveness received. Let us echo the forgiveness of Christ, calling all men to repentance, to God's mercy. Confession is an important part of prayer. The Lord showed us this in his model prayer. Repentance is needed. God's forgiveness is required for our salvation. We should be quick to admit our sins. We should not deny them, but readily acknowledge them before God. It is in quickly repenting that we can be speedily reminded of the constant mercies of our Lord. May we run to the Lord when we fail, when we recognize the debt of our sins. And one of the commentators said it this way, we can become what we were made for, to love God and enjoy him forever, and to allow that love to overflow to needy neighbors all around. That is gloriously possible, but we shall never get beyond having to pray with contrition and deep sincerity, forgive us. Lord, forgive us our sins. We also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. Let us pray. Lord, forgive us. We give thanks. We owe unending thanks. for the great debt from which we have been freed through Jesus Christ. Lord, when we are unmerciful to others, bring to our remembrance the mercy we have received, that we, as an act of gratitude, of worship, may show some lesser degree of mercy toward those who offend us, those who upset us, those who intentionally harm us. Lord, remind us daily of the deep debt from which we have been freed, not a constant groveling in our sins, but a constant rejoicing in our freedom through Jesus Christ our Lord. In whose name we pray, amen.