Please take your Bibles now and turn with me to the Gospel of Matthew. to the section which is often called the Sermon on the Mount. The middle of that sermon, Matthew chapter six, we're slowly making our way through the Lord's Prayer and we come tonight to the fifth petition found in verse 12, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. That's gonna be our focus together tonight. There is an outline in the bulletin if you'd like to follow along with that. I'm going to read verse 9 down through verse 15 tonight, verses 14 and 15, comment on verse 12 and kind of expand that thought. So we're going to consider those a little bit briefly tonight as well. So let's give our attention once again to the living, active Word of God. Pray then like this. Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Amen, that's where we'll end the reading of God's word and let's stop and pray together. Our Father in heaven, we do ask that you would give us this day our daily bread, that you would meet our needs, and that you would meet our need right now for spiritual nourishment with bread from heaven, with the bread of your word. Father, we ask that you would forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. We are your debtors and we need forgiveness. We thank you that you give that to us in Jesus Christ and we ask now that you would speak to us by your word. Lord God, you are the one who provides bread in a desolate place for thousands. You own the cattle on a thousand hills. And so Lord, certainly you can help us to hear and to understand and rightly apply one verse of your precious word tonight, and we ask you to do that. Help us to focus and rivet our hearts and our attention on you and on Jesus Christ, we ask in his name, amen. Well as we begin to look together tonight at the fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer I want you to notice right out of the gate here how this petition is connected to the fourth petition which we looked at last time. In verse 11 give us this day our daily bread and and forgive us our debts. It's one sentence. It's as if Jesus is teaching us that just like bread is vital and necessary every day of life, so is forgiveness. Just as bread is a great physical need that we all have regularly and repeatedly, forgiveness is a great spiritual need that God alone can meet. And so this is a vital petition. It wouldn't be here if it wasn't. It made Jesus' top six list in his prayer. It's a vital petition. It's an ongoing need, and it's as necessary, if not more so, than our daily bread. But before we take a look at this together, I want you to remember, once again, who we are praying to. Look back at verse 9. The preface teaches us this. Who are we praying to? Verse nine, our father. Our father in heaven. This is a prayer of children to a father. Adopted children to their redeeming father. It's a prayer for forgiven sinners who are covered by the blood of Jesus Christ, who know God as a forgiving and loving father, who have an ongoing relationship with him. and who know that they have need for daily forgiveness for ongoing sin. Well, to help us unpack this fifth petition and pray it with faith and understanding, I want to consider four points together tonight. Defining our debts, owning our debts, forgiving our debts, and then finally tonight, forgiving our debtors. And so let's start by defining our debts. Look again with me at verse 12. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Father, forgive us our debts. Well, to know what we're asking for here, we need to know what our debts are. What are we asking God to forgive? What are our debts? Well, to put it simply, our debts are our sins against God. Now the Bible uses a lot of different words and a lot of different ideas and pictures for sin. And maybe you can think of some of them tonight. Uncleanness, unrighteousness, falling short, missing the mark, rebellion. breaking God's law, trespassing, committing spiritual adultery, and we could think of many more, but here sin is named or pictured as debt. Debt. Us being debtors. Our debts are our spiritual debts of sin against God. Now in common use, debt is something of value, often money that is owed to someone else, some type of payment that is due to another in order to fulfill an obligation or in order to meet justice. And unpaid debts were a serious offense in the ancient world. Today, they're not so much of a big deal. Debt is an entire industry. Thousands live in increasing debt, and it's almost assumed and expected. Entire institutions make millions by buying and selling debt. But in the ancient world, debt was a very serious thing. In fact, it was so serious that it would often be met with great punishment. usually prison or servitude until those debts were paid. In the ancient world you didn't file for bankruptcy, you didn't take out another loan, you didn't expect the government to bail you out, you wouldn't have your assets seized, you would be seized. And you would be expected to pay back in full. Well, Jesus is teaching us here that we are debtors, spiritually speaking, and we need our debts forgiven. We are debtors. We owe our very existence to God. We owe him our lives and our loyalty, our love. We owe him our obedience and service, but we have not paid up. We have been sinning against him from the start. We've been racking up insurmountable debt, and we have both original debt and actual debt. Original sin and actual sin. We were born in debt. We inherited debt from our first father, Adam. We inherited a sinful nature from Adam. But then we have all of our own actual sins in this life as well. Sins of omission and commission. Have you heard those terms, kids? Sins of omission are what we ought to do but we don't do. And sins of commission are what we must not do but we do anyways. And so we have all this debt. God has made us to glorify him, to love him, and to love others. But we are in great debt because we do not do that. We choose to love ourself. We choose to love the creature rather than the creator. We do not love him and others as we ought. And in our sinful state, we're really helpless to do anything other than that. And so this petition, in this petition, we are putting ourselves in our place spiritually before God. Last time when we asked for daily bread, we put ourselves in our place acknowledging our frailty and our physical needs and asking for daily bread. But here we acknowledge our greatest problem. Our greatest need is spiritual. It's our sin. It's our debt before God. We are debtors in need of forgiveness. And think about this, our debts are not just abstract ideas. They're not just numbers on a balance sheet. Our debts don't represent a simple theological category that needs to be dealt with. They're real offenses, real wrongs committed against the good, glorious God, the God who made us, real wrongs against our fellow man, real offenses willfully committed by us that we must acknowledge and confess and repent of and seek forgiveness for. Real debts that need real forgiveness. And we need to take personal ownership of our debts. And so I want us to consider that second this evening, owning our debts, owning our debts. Look again at verse 12. And forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. Now, I've already told you before there are a lot of plurals in this prayer, but did you notice another plural possessive here in this petition, our. Forgive us our debts. There's a collective responsibility in this petition. There's an acknowledgement that we are not alone in our debt. We are all debtors. We are all in this together and there's also an ownership here. Forgive us our debts. There's a claiming of possession of our debts. They're ours. These are our debts. These are our sins. We are the ones to blame. There's no blame shifting here. The first step in dealing with debt biblically is confessing it to the Father, owning the fact that we sin and that these are our sins, our debt, saying this is mine, that this is ours, owning that debt. Now this is not the same thing as being owned by our debt or being defined by it. And this petition raises an important question. And that is why do we ask, why is Jesus teaching us to ask forgiveness for our sins daily and repeatedly? If he knew he was going to die for them once for all. If as children of God, our sins, past, present, and future have been paid for in full. Is this petition not teaching us to think of ourselves as sinners rather than saints? Is it questioning our justification, our righteousness in Christ? Does that depend on daily seeking forgiveness for all of our sins and always forgiving others? Well, if so, this is a terrifying petition. And the short answer to those questions is no. Jesus is not teaching us that we are condemned debtors and sinners that need to be saved all over again. He's not wanting us to doubt his full forgiveness. His work is sufficient once for all for all of our sins, and we're gonna get to that more shortly. This petition is not calling into question our ultimate standing before God if we are in Jesus Christ, if we are children of God by faith. It's not calling into question our justification in Christ. And it's not primarily for an unbeliever calling out to the Lord for the first time, although it most certainly could be used that way. But rather, this is primarily the daily prayer of the child of God acknowledging a fundamental reality, and that is he or she still sins. They're a forgiven, adopted child of God. All their sins are covered and paid for, their eternal standing before God is not in jeopardy, and yet they are not yet fully like their father. They still disobey. They still go against their father. That doesn't make them no longer a child. It doesn't make them a child of wrath and need of being justified repeatedly, but it makes them a humble contrite son or daughter who out of love for their father comes and says, sorry, forgive me. I have, I have sinned against you. I am in your debt and I need forgiveness. I need the blood of Christ. And so this is not so much requesting, this petition is not so much requesting the removal of condemnation from God as judge, but for the renewal of fellowship with God as our father. And this is why I reminded you of the opening preface, our father in heaven. This petition acknowledges that sin breaks and strains fellowship. It creates a distance and a disharmony in a relationship, and it needs to be acknowledged and forgiven. Think about human relationships. When you wrong another person, when you are in their debt, so to speak. That doesn't mean you are no longer their child or their friend or their spouse. That wrong in and of itself does not dissolve the relationship, but it does create a tension. It does create the need for forgiveness. It does create a barrier. And the way to restore harmony and fellowship is to be reconciled, to admit wrong and own that debt and be forgiven. Well, in a similar way, with God our Father, we need to own our debts. We need to acknowledge them. We need to acknowledge that we do still sin against him, and we need his forgiveness, that we still wrong him, and we don't want to, and we're not perfect yet. And this is part of the tension of the Christian life. We are children of God now by faith in Jesus. As the opening line of this prayer reminds us, we are now alive in Christ, new creatures in Christ. We are righteous. We are holy. We're justified. There's no condemnation. We are eternally secure. We are pardoned in God's sight. All of our iniquities have been hurled into the sea. We've been delivered from the guilt and penalty of our debt. But we are not yet fully perfected. We're not yet fully sanctified. We are not taken to heaven immediately and glorified. We live in this already but not yet tension. As the reformers used to say, we are simul justus et peccator. We're at the same time justified and yet still sinful. We are God's children. We are heirs of eternal life, but we are still becoming like his son. We are still fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil. And the way to deal with the reality of our ongoing sin as God's children is not to say we can fully overcome it in this life and we've arrived. It's not to say God never sees our sin. He only sees Christ's righteousness. No, God sees all things. He sees that while we are righteous in Christ, we are not yet righteous in all of our deeds here and now on earth. We can still displease our Father. We still need His forgiveness. And so, brothers and sisters, the way to deal with your debts, the way to deal with your sin is not to excuse it, or deny it, or ignore it. Jesus teaches you to pray this way for a reason. He teaches you to own your debts and to take them to the Father for forgiveness. Go to the Father and ask for His forgiveness. 1 John 1, 8 and following says, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And so friends have you owned your debts? Do you own them daily? Don't deceive yourselves. Acknowledge and own the fact that you still struggle with sin. Repent and seek forgiveness. Pray this petition daily. Humble yourself before the Father and confess your sins. Seek his forgiveness. And that leads us to consider third tonight. God graciously forgiving our debts. God forgiving our debts. How is it that God grants this forgiveness that we seek? Why does God keep forgiving us? Well, the only way for our debts to be forgiven is by way of payment. God is a just God and he cannot overlook evil. He can't simply ignore our debt. He doesn't just forgive and forget our debt and say, you know what, we're good. Let's just call it even. Let's move on. If someone owed you a great debt and because of that you couldn't provide for your family, you couldn't feed your family because that debt was not paid and you went before a judge with your debtor to seek justice and payment. Imagine if the judge said, you know, I'm feeling really merciful today. Can we just get along? Can we just, you know, say that this debt isn't there? Can we act as though he doesn't really owe you? Would that judge be right? Would that be justice? Do you want to live in a world where debt is no big deal? Maybe if it's your own debt, but not if it's against you. Well, God is righteous and he cannot and he does not ignore or overlook debt. But thanks be to God, he does forgive it. He does provide a way for debts to be paid. And the way he forgives debt is not by asking you to pay. It's not by just waiving the debt. It's not by having other good people pay it for you. There is only one way, and that is through Jesus Christ. And when Jesus gave us this petition, when he taught us to pray this way to our Father, he knew this as he taught us this. He knew that forgiveness could be granted only because he would take our debt himself. He would take that debt. He would be the surety or the cosigner, if you will, assuming all the responsibilities for our debts, paying them in full. on the cross and then crediting to us his debt-free life, his righteousness, imputing that to us freely. You and I cannot earn forgiveness by anything we do. And even if it were possible, even if we stopped sinning from here on out and lived a perfect life and sacrificed all for the Lord, we would still come nowhere close to paying for our debts. And yet we don't like, in our human pride, we don't like to acknowledge this. In our foolish pride, we often don't want this good news, this free grace. We create our own debt payment plans, our own debt reduction plans to try to earn salvation and earn our own forgiveness. But this is because we don't see the enormity of our debt. We don't see our complete spiritual bankruptcy, our complete inability to pay. The Bible is clear. There is only one way. There is only one name given under heaven, Jesus. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Brothers and sisters, thanks be to God, Christ has shed his blood. He came to take your debt himself and pay it in full, and cancel it by nailing it to the cross. Ephesians 1.7, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace, which he has lavished upon us. Forgiveness can only be given once for all through the perfect life, the perfect death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ through his shed blood. And so this petition proclaims the gospel to us daily. It drives you to Christ. It drives you to the cross. It trains you to lay hold of Christ. Again and again. Because it is through Him alone that we can have our debts forgiven. And we appeal to Jesus Christ, to His perfect work each time we sin and we repent and we seek fresh forgiveness from our Father. The Father grants that forgiveness freely, not by a new way, Not by us doing something, not by a new sacrifice, not by a repeated sacrifice, but by the all-sufficient sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Christ alone can pay for your debts, and he has paid for them if you are his, if you are trusting in him. And so call upon your Father to forgive you for the sake of Jesus, for the work of Christ alone. And if you've never done so, if you've never acknowledged your sin, if you've never owned your spiritual debt, the fact that you owe God, the one who gave you your life, if you've never acknowledged your inability to pay, if this is not something you have done or you do regularly, don't wait. Don't brush this off. Go to the Lord. Go to the Lord tonight. and confess your sin. Ask Him to be your Father. Ask Him to forgive all of your debts through Jesus Christ. Give up trying to pay for yourself. Find forgiveness in the free fountain of all grace, in the riches of Jesus Christ. That leads us to a fourth and final point tonight. The fifth petition doesn't stop with just the first phrase, forgive our debts, but it adds a curious line to the end. I want us to consider fourth and finally tonight, and rather briefly, but let's consider fourth and finally tonight, forgiving our debtors. Look again at verse 12, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And then skip down to verse 14. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. We don't have time to do justice to this tonight, but this phrase here in verse 12, as we also have forgiven our debtors, and then the added explanation in verse 14 through 15 can be somewhat confusing. It can almost appear on the surface as if Jesus is making God's forgiveness of us conditional, based on us extending forgiveness to others. And if we do that then God responds and God will forgive us. But we need to understand Jesus is not saying our forgiveness is the cause of God's or the ultimate condition. He's making a comparison here. He's issuing a warning and he's also giving an encouragement. Our forgiveness is not the foundation of God's forgiveness of us but it will be a fruit. In fact, it must be. God's forgiveness is free. It is not earned as a result of our forgiveness. It is unconditional. The only conditions are met entirely by Jesus Christ. And so what what is Jesus saying here well Jesus is saying that those who are truly forgiven by the father through faith in Jesus Christ will be those who go on and forgive others because they themselves know forgiveness because they have tasted mercy because they have been forgiven so much more. And their forgiveness of their debtors is a fruit or a sign of the forgiveness they have been given. It flows out of that. It's not a work that merits their forgiveness, but it is a result. We are forgiven by faith alone, but by a faith that does not remain alone. And so the warning is that if you pray this petition and want God's forgiveness and think you have his forgiveness but you will not and you do not forgive your debtors, you in fact might not truly have forgiveness. It's a warning against hypocrisy that claims Christ and claims forgiveness but shows no evidence of that in their lives. It shows no evidence of a new heart, no evidence of God's grace in relating to others. This is what's pictured in the parable of the unmerciful, unmerciful servant. And actually Joseph touched on this last week in his sermon on Mark 11. It's almost a contradiction to call on God in prayer for mercy, but to give none to others who owe us far less. And so if there's little grace and little love and forgiveness in you toward others, let this be a warning. God's forgiveness changes us. It humbles us. It makes us loving and patient and forgiving. Colossians 3.13 says, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. And if you harbor this sin in your life of not forgiving others, and you're not confessing that and repenting of that, why expect God to forgive you? And so that's the warning that Jesus builds in here, but this is also an encouragement. If you do see the fruit of forgiveness in your life, this is evidence of the Father's forgiveness of you. This is evidence of a supernatural work in your heart. We don't do this naturally in ourselves. We can't. We don't have the power or the ability. This is evidence of you truly tasting God's grace and mercy and wanting to extend that to others. God's forgiveness of our debts drives us and empowers us to forgive our debtors. And I'm not trying to tell you tonight that it's easy. But this is the reality and as we forgive our debtors we are becoming by God's grace like our forgiving father we are being formed into his image we are imitating and mimicking our father who's forgiven us so much more. And so brothers and sisters are you forgiving those who have sinned against you forgiving your debtors. Are you living out the gospel? Are you living this grace that you have received? Are you living that out in your life and in your relationships? Do you love because he has first loved you? Well, that brings us to the end of our four points tonight. And as usual, there's much, much more that could be said. And I want to encourage you to continue to consider this petition and think about it and go back and review and use this daily. Pray this petition. Jesus has given this to us for a reason. See how it drives you to keep short accounts and forgive those around you. See how it weaves the gospel into the heart of prayer and drives you again and again to Jesus. How it humbles you and reminds you of your spiritual need, your debt. Daily, the reality that you are not yet fully sanctified. And yet it brings you to your loving Father. It brings you to your Father as children. Your father who is full of grace and ready to forgive, who has paid all your debts by his son if you are trusting in him. We've heard some warnings tonight, but we need to hear the gentle, loving call of our father to come to him. We need to hear this call of our father in Jesus teaching us to pray, this call to forgiveness in Christ. You need to hear this call and be in awe and be amazed and let these realities permeate in our lives. Brothers and sisters, trust that your debts have been paid in full. Live in harmony with your father. Praise and thank him and go out in love and forgive as you have been forgiven. Looking forward to that day when you will no longer need to forgive. when you will no longer need to be forgiven, when you will sin no more. And so brothers and sisters, look to Jesus in faith. Look to your Father in faith and ask him to forgive your debts as you forgive your debtors because of Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we are in awe And we are amazed that you would teach us to call you father, and that you call us your children, and that you would have us come to you again and again for forgiveness. We are amazed that you sent your only son to take our debt and pay for it himself, and to give us all of his righteousness. And so Lord, let us be quick to come to you in repentance and sincere confession of sin for forgiveness. Sanctify us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. But when we do still sin, please forgive us. And then Lord, make us quick and ready to forgive as we have been forgiven. Lord, thank you that we have the good news of the gospel. and that that is to permeate our lives and even our prayer lives, and we pray that it would do so. And we pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen.