"Forgive Us Our Debts"

Grace Reformation Bible Church iconGrace Reformation Bible Church

1 view

Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Matthew 6:12

0 comments

00:01
Well, this morning we continue on in Matthew 6 as we work our way now toward the fifth petition here in Matthew 6, verse 12.
00:09
And we considered that the daily bread, this shift away from focusing on God in the first three petitions,
00:17
God's glory, God's kingdom, His reign, and that God's will would be done on earth as it's done in heaven.
00:23
And then last week with the fourth petition, we saw this shift now to the disciple and particularly the needs of the disciple.
00:31
The daily bread that the disciple receives from the Lord's hand, the way the Lord nurtures us in both body and soul, the way that we are entirely dependent upon Him as our
00:41
Creator as we saw from Psalm 104, as if all of creation itself has its mouth open waiting to receive from the
00:48
Lord. The Lord turns His face away, all of creation shudders in trouble, but when the
00:54
Lord breathes upon He renews the face of the earth. And so we considered what it means to pray for the daily bread.
01:01
And here Jesus presses into another need, a need that we have between God and man, this need to forgive others even as we seek
01:10
God to forgive us. And so that's what we're looking at in the fifth petition. Let me begin from verse 7.
01:18
When you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.
01:25
Therefore, do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you need of even before you ask
01:31
Him. In this manner, therefore, pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
01:40
Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
01:49
Well, as we begin this morning, let me ask the question. Do you pray that God would give and forget to ask that God would forgive?
02:01
It tends to be that we readily come to God for our daily bread, for our immediate needs.
02:07
We don't as willingly, as freely, and as fully come to God that we might be forgiven.
02:15
And certainly that doesn't then saturate the way we think about others as we bear them over in prayer.
02:21
And yet, Jesus reveals that this is a deep need, that as deeply we ought to be concerned for our daily bread, so also deeply we ought to be concerned about God's forgiveness and our forgiveness for others, so that we're not just attentive to what we need to be given, but also what we need to be forgiven by God.
02:41
That's where Jesus goes in this petition. Forgive us our debts. Now what are the debts?
02:47
It's an interesting word. The parallel to the Lord's Prayer in Luke, he uses a different term.
02:54
And this is most likely, commentators of course always have disagreements, but most likely this is coming from a sort of Semitic background, this idea of debt.
03:03
Of course, there's many ways that Scripture speaks of sin, sin being a missing of the mark, sin being a transgression, a crossing of a boundary, sin being a debt.
03:15
This is one way to think about sin. But even before we think about sin, we can speak of debt meaningfully, just in terms of our relationship to God.
03:23
Remember, this is where Jesus has been. We think of the God who is our Creator, who provides our daily bread.
03:30
And even there, there is just a certain debt of being that belongs to God. Debt in the widest frame of reference is that which we owe to God as our
03:39
Creator. Simply by the fact that He made us and we did not make ourselves, there is a responsibility that comes with that.
03:51
Every one of us, in the Romans 1 sense, was made to glorify
03:57
God, simply by virtue of being made by Him. And yet as Paul goes on to argue in the beginning of Romans, rather than glorifying the
04:05
Creator, we rather turned and glorified the things that He created. We glorified ourselves.
04:12
We made idols out of wooden stone, out of ambitions and pride and envy.
04:17
And so we gave thanks to things that didn't deserve thanks, and denied the
04:23
One to whom all things are due. And so there is this debt that is owed to God. This is why
04:29
God turned us over, as a result of the fall, turned us over to our own sinfulness, our own darkened minds, that we could not understand
04:38
Him, nor desire after Him. So again, there is a debt that is owed to God, simply by virtue of Him having created us.
04:45
Every one of us must give account to God. This is plainly stated in Scripture.
04:51
This is not something you can opt out of. You can't say, well, if I become a Christian, then I have to give an account to God.
04:57
No, God created you. Everyone must give an account to God. Everyone has a certain debt that is owed to God, a due by virtue of the fact that they were made by Him.
05:09
And having been made by Him, they were made for Him. No one is of themselves but God.
05:15
Therefore, being entirely dependent upon Him, by virtue of the fact that He made us, by virtue of the fact that He sustains us, by virtue of the fact that we must give an account to Him, there is a debt that is owed.
05:27
We could speak of this as a natural debt, the debt of nature, the debt of being made in His image.
05:34
But rather than glorifying Him, we turned against Him. And sin infected and corrupted every aspect of our being, every faculty, every fiber, every ability, every power.
05:47
Sin infected all of that so that now it's impossible for us to rightly regard
05:53
God in the way that He created us to be regarded. There's no way that we can actually pay this natural debt in a way that Adam, by virtue of being made in His image, would have spontaneously, inherently related to God out of glory.
06:06
You don't need to command that people glorify something glorious. That's just what you do as a response.
06:13
This is how Adam was when he was communing with God, by virtue of creation. Everything he did brought glory to God.
06:20
Everything he saw from the Creator's hand, his desire was pure and facing toward the
06:25
Lord. And sin impacted all of that. When someone hears an incredible song or sees a beautiful piece of artwork or lays their eyes on something glorious, you go to a place, the kind of place where people pull out their cell phones and they try to take 10 ,000 photos, but they can never capture what they're responding to.
06:47
What are they doing? They're glorifying that. It's an impulsive reaction. No one's putting them up to it.
06:53
They're not saying, well, I guess I should try to glorify this. It's spontaneous. They're compelled to do it.
06:59
That's what we're like toward God. But what sin does is it severs that ability to respond to God for the glory that is due his name, and now we are in his debt.
07:09
It's the debt of nature. We do not pay what we owe. We do not respond as we ought.
07:18
This at the minimum is what we're praying when we recognize we need forgiveness for our debt.
07:23
Lord, I have not seen you as you are. I have not thought of you as I should, I have not regarded you as glorious, praiseworthy.
07:31
I haven't loved you in the way that your law says I ought to love you with all of my mind and all of my heart and all of my strength.
07:38
This seems so far out of reach, Lord. That's how far fallen I am as an image bearer.
07:44
Adam loved God with all of his mind, with all of his heart, with all of his strength, with all of his soul. He could not do otherwise until the fall.
07:53
This is the debt of nature, a debt that we cannot pay. That's the minimum, but then we think about the maximum, the debt of sin.
08:02
That's clearly where Jesus is going, clearly that is the parallel here, it's what he means by debt.
08:09
He's talking about sin. Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who debt against us, our debtors, those who sin against us.
08:17
So clearly that's where Jesus is going. In what sense is sin the worst debt? Well, it's the worst because we have nothing to pay.
08:26
If we could pay the debt, we wouldn't need to pray for forgiveness as Jesus teaches us to pray. Thomas Watson points us out, he says, we're not like the man in the parable who says, have patience with me,
08:35
I'll pay all that I owe. That's not an option. After the fall, as we know,
08:42
Adam made us all bankrupt. So there's a debt that is owed to God and it's a debt that cannot be paid.
08:48
We can't muster enough up to earn satisfaction. There's no way that we can actually carry that balance, we're ruined unless God forgives.
08:58
So Jesus positions and he uses his term debt to position us toward God as our creditor and we as creatures being debtors, debtors to his grace, debtors to his mercy.
09:10
If God does not forgive, we perish. That's the framework here in the fifth petition. And so the whole posture of his disciples then is to be humble.
09:19
Jesus says, even as you seek for daily bread and you have this hunger that compels you and moves you and motivates you, so also you ought to be compelled and motivated by the need for mercy.
09:31
That it would drive you toward a certain humility and recognition of just how patient and long suffering
09:36
God is to you, of how his mercy is renewed every morning, how he never gets fed up and says, that's enough,
09:43
I'm done dealing with you. In fact, when we were his enemies, he sought us.
09:48
When we were wandering away from him, straying against him, he sought us. All of this is contained in the fifth petition when we pray for forgiveness.
09:58
So I want to look at this in three points this morning. Now you'll know just from where we end off in verses 14 and 15 that this is going to come back in about three weeks time.
10:09
So I want to lay sort of a foundation this morning and then get into some of the practical application in three weeks.
10:16
So I want these three points to sort of be a very broad, simple foundation for thinking about this fifth petition.
10:24
And then in three weeks time we get to verses 14 and 15, Jesus is going to turn right back to this point.
10:32
And so you see how important it is for him. You see how important it is for us as his disciples.
10:39
The fact that he didn't just let it be here in verse 12, he came back to it. He emphasized it.
10:45
He put the yellow highlighter on it to say it's really important that you understand this.
10:52
So here's the first point. We pray for forgiveness. It's the most obvious thing about this fifth petition, isn't it?
11:01
Forgive us our debts. What are we doing? We are praying for forgiveness. What is the act of praying for forgiveness?
11:07
What does it actually look like when you pray for forgiveness? Well, it looks like you're confessing your debt, acknowledging, owning, admitting, explaining, not justifying, but clarifying your debt.
11:25
What we're talking about, in other words, is confession. That's what it looks like to pray for forgiveness. It looks like confession, confessing our sins to God.
11:35
Confession, remember coming across this some years ago, Thomas Manton had this wonderful little image for us this morning.
11:42
I hope we're distant enough from lunch that I don't feel too bad bringing it up. If we were at the very end of the sermon,
11:48
I wouldn't bring it up. But he says, confession is the vomit of the soul. Isn't that a beautiful image?
11:54
Confession is the vomit of the soul. And I mean, 17th century cuisine, I think that was something they were accustomed to.
12:01
British cuisine hasn't really moved on that much in 300 years. But if you've ever eaten something that immediately did not sit right with you, you understand what he's getting at.
12:12
You immediately go, something is wrong. I am not comfortable.
12:17
You get sweat in places you shouldn't have sweat, like under your eyelids. My body is going into red alert.
12:25
And it's not right until you get it out of your system, right? You don't find relief.
12:32
In fact, it gets worse, and it gets worse, and it gets worse, until you finally clear it in whatever way
12:38
God sees fit for you to clear it. And then you find that relief. And finally, the pain, that sense of everything that was upsetting and disturbing, it's finally put to rest.
12:49
Now you have some sense of relief and peace, and you can move forward in strength. And that's the idea of confession.
12:55
Something's not right. I've done something wrong. I've had wrong acts.
13:03
I've thought wrongly. What am I doing? It's not sitting right.
13:12
It's soul sweat now. Something's not right. I can't freely now turn to my
13:18
Father. I can't actually dwell in that joy and that communion with Him. Now I feel estranged from Him.
13:25
I feel that where there ought to be a sort of light and peace, there's now a darkness and a hiddenness.
13:31
And now it's really troubling to me. My conscience is very burdened. I just want out.
13:37
I want to get rid of this. I want to have peace and relief again. That's what it's like to confess sin. We're tossing and turning in our soul until, through confession, we pray for forgiveness, and only there can we find relief, peace, reconciliation, the beginnings of joy.
13:54
Jesus is highlighting this. Why does He circle back to this? He knows that this is normative for His followers.
14:02
His followers must walk in the forgiveness that God alone can provide. And having received that forgiveness, they're enabled to forgive others.
14:10
And that's why Jesus can say, even as you're praying for forgiveness, you're cognizant of the fact, if I am praying for forgiveness, if I realize my debts, how dare
14:18
I go scolding and chasing after other debtors? I'm saved by grace. How could
14:24
I not be gracious? I'm spared by God's mercy. How could I not be merciful? God has been long -suffering toward me, again and again and again.
14:33
Why would I not forgive my brother 77 times 7? Of course,
14:41
Jesus emphasizes this in part because He desires for us to walk in peace. He desires for us to have
14:47
His joy. That's His high priestly prayer in John 17, that my joy would be in you, and that joy would be complete.
14:56
The problem, as George Mueller, I mentioned last week, one of the things that George Mueller says is, in our natural state, we don't like dealing with God, right?
15:07
After the fall, Adam's running and hiding. Adam and Eve are putting on a ghillie suit and trying to be statues in the bushes, hoping they can hide from God.
15:16
They don't want to deal with God. All that they responded to in this glorious compulsion now has become a terror to them.
15:23
He's so glorious, so holy, so majestic and powerful, I can't bear to be in that presence.
15:29
Not in this state, not with this sin, not with this guilt, and so in our natural fallen state, we don't like to deal with God.
15:37
I mean, in fact, we shrink away from Him. We shrink away from thinking about eternal realities.
15:44
You see, people shrink away from thinking about death. People don't like thinking through the deeper, more difficult aspects of life.
15:57
They shrink away from the spiritual realities that older generations clung to, and our generation seems like they'll do anything to escape, and this is what
16:08
George Mueller says. We shrink from Him. We dislike dealing with God alone, and this clings to us more or less even after we're born again.
16:18
That's very insightful. Even after we are saved, even after we are following the
16:24
Lord, we may still not like dealing with Him. We may still shrink away from the idea that I'm dirty,
16:32
I'm guilty, I have no right, I need to clean myself up and then I can come to God.
16:37
I can create conditions by which I can be happy and at peace. I just got to work really hard and clean myself up, and only when
16:45
I'm worthy of forgiveness will then I go and ask for forgiveness, but what is
16:54
Jesus doing here in the fifth petition? He's teaching us, remember what He just said, give us our daily bread.
17:00
He's saying this is going to be a daily life of the Christian, not just seeking your needs day by day, but seeking
17:07
God's forgiveness day by day, and if you're seeking
17:12
God's forgiveness day by day, you don't have enough time to clean yourself up. I remember my parents, one of their wedding presents they had, and at my house it's like a museum growing up, our house.
17:26
They had the same dinner set that they got when they were married, 30 years later still going strong.
17:33
We've gone through like eight and a half the time that we've been married. Somehow everything was maintained, immaculate, and they had these three little porcelain musician figures, and I was roughhousing with some friends after school one day, and I knocked them off the cabinet behind, and two of them shattered, and so I threw them away, out of sight, out of mind, and as the villains from Scooby -Doo would say,
18:04
I almost got away with it too, until one of the heads that I missed was found under the cabinet, and it's like,
18:13
I remember these, where did they go, and why is there a broken head? Ross, I thought
18:21
I can just hide it, and then it's dealt with, right? But a
18:27
Christian recognizes that mentality of I'm just going to hide, and then it'll be okay.
18:34
It's like saying I'm just going to keep eating this poisoned food, and even though I'm drenching sweat, and I'm turning all shades of green, it'll be okay, as long as I don't deal with it, and Jesus is saying, no, as soon as something's broken, as soon as you've done something wrong, you come to your
18:51
Father for forgiveness. Daily you come to Him. His mercy renews every day.
18:56
This is a promise that's held out to the Christian. So Martin Luther, when he gets to this point, Martin Luther says, the entire
19:03
Lord's prayer is nothing else but a confession. Isn't that beautiful? The entire Lord's prayer, everything we've been looking at for weeks now, what is it?
19:11
At root, it's just a confession, Lord, you're holy, Lord, you're glorious, Lord, I have needs,
19:17
Lord, I've done wrong, Lord, help me. It's essentially the Lord's prayer, and he says this, what are our petitions other than a confession that we haven't done what we should have done?
19:28
And it's a plea for grace, a plea that we would have a cheerful conscience. Confession of this kind must continue without letup as long as we live, because the
19:38
Christian life essentially consists in this, that we acknowledge ourselves to be sinners and are always praying for grace.
19:45
That's Martin Luther. He knew that in an extreme way when he didn't know it at all.
19:54
If you had said to Luther, prior to his great discovery in Galatians and in Romans of the truth of God's gospel, he would have said, well, all
20:02
I do is acknowledge that I'm a sinner. I confess more than anyone. I'm in this monastic order of Augustinians, it's a revolving door for me.
20:12
They hate me, because I'm five minutes away and I come running back because I sinned in that five minute spin.
20:18
I'm basically torturing myself to have a clean conscience and find peace with God. So pre -Reformation
20:24
Luther would have said, the Christian life consists in acknowledging ourselves to be sinners and praying for grace.
20:34
And then the post -Reformation Luther is able to write this. Same words, completely different understandings.
20:44
And my fear is that for many of us, we're a lot closer to pre -Reformation Luther than we are to Luther after he read through Romans and Galatians and discovered the gospel of the grace of God in Christ Jesus.
21:00
Acknowledging ourselves to be sinners is not torturing ourselves toward absolution and praying for a grace that we never receive.
21:07
That's Luther before the Reformation. It's rather acknowledging
21:13
I cannot clean up my own act. I cannot even cleanse my own conscience. And I certainly cannot have peace with God unless he gives me peace, because he's the one that's forgiving me.
21:24
He gives me grace, therefore I'm reconciled. It's the discovery of Psalm 130, where the psalmist says,
21:31
Lord, if you mark iniquities, who can stand? If you mark iniquities, who can stand?
21:37
The psalmist, like Luther, was struggling with a guilty conscience. He speaks earlier in that psalm about being in the depths.
21:44
What are the depths? Is this some physical trial? You begin to realize, even if it began that way, it is now a spiritual trial.
21:51
It is an ordeal. This man is feeling completely lost. And as he's struggling with his guilt and his sense of alienation from God, he's recognizing
22:00
God has shown mercy. And he recognizes that mercy is nothing that he's earned.
22:06
It simply washes away his guilt. Lord, if you marked it, if you held me to my sins, who could stand?
22:13
No one can stand before you. No one can talk back to the judge. So what it means is that God is no longer marking the iniquities of his people.
22:29
What the psalmist is getting at is God is not pressing the full weight of our sin against us.
22:35
Jesus doesn't even say, when you pray this daily prayer, your list better be exhaustive and detailed.
22:44
And if you miss anything, it'll come back to haunt you. That's not what Jesus said. That's what
22:49
Luther thought when he'd spend hours torturing himself, examining himself for every iota of what could be displeasing to God.
22:59
And then he was freed from that bondage when he recognized a merciful God, not a vengeful God, but a
23:05
God who delights to show mercy, who says, even when you're not seeking my daily forgiveness, I'm renewing my daily forgiveness.
23:11
That's just who I am as your Father in heaven. And so for the believer who's put their faith in Jesus Christ, we recognize our conscience can have peace, our walk can have joy, because God does not mark iniquities against us.
23:26
In other words, he never presses the full weight of our sin. And that's the whole point. If you were charging our sins to us, no one could stand.
23:33
I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't function if I had a weight of my sinfulness against God ever hanging around my neck.
23:44
So this ongoing life of asking God for forgiveness, it does two things. It brings the believer to a better frame of humility before God.
23:53
I'm still asking for forgiveness? After all these years, I'm still finding more that needs to be forgiven?
24:00
After all of this light, I still find stains that run deeper? Guilt that is so neatly hidden?
24:08
Then on the other hand, it's also enlarging the mercy of God. The more I'm humbled and aware of all the little sins, not just the big, obvious sins, but even the little, strange sins, the foxes in the vineyard.
24:21
So that humbles me, makes me realize I'm not what I ought to be, though God has been working in my life all these decades,
24:28
I'm still so far from what I ought to be in Christ. And that humbles me, it makes me sympathetic and merciful to others, but at the same time it magnifies the mercy of God.
24:39
Who is patient like God? Who is abundant in His mercy like God? And that humbles me more, as it glorifies
24:49
God more. So these two things are always happening as we pray this, as our daily prayer. If God should mark iniquities, none of us could stand.
25:02
Utterly lost, ruined by the fall, lost without hope. So this is where the psalmist goes from verse three to verse four, you have this adversative conjunction, it's the most beautiful part of the psalm.
25:12
If you should mark iniquities, who could stand, but there is forgiveness with you.
25:20
That's the discovery that takes him out of the depths, there's forgiveness with you. He didn't clean his act up.
25:27
He didn't say, Lord, let's barter, I promise I'll do this,
25:36
I promise I'll work harder. I promise I will work to please you if you just forgive my sin.
25:42
He discovered this joyful reality. But God is not going to press him with the full weight of his sin, because with God there is forgiveness.
25:51
Jesus is saying the same thing in this petition. Forgive us our debts. Why? Because you are the
25:57
God who forgives. With you there is forgiveness. So instead of crushing our souls with all the staining misery of sin, we find in God forgiveness for our sins.
26:10
Psalm 86, we use this as our responsive reading this morning. Psalm 86, you,
26:16
Lord, are good, ready to forgive. Did you notice that? He's more ready than you are.
26:23
He's more ready to forgive than you are to ask for forgiveness. That's who God is, ready to forgive.
26:31
We finally, when we're at that heightened state of theological nausea, we finally drag ourselves, as it were, to the confessional.
26:40
And God's there already going, what took you so long? Did you think
26:45
I wouldn't be here? Have you known me to be cruel and vengeful and spiteful?
26:53
Did you forget that I am good and ready to forgive? You, Lord, are good, ready to forgive, abundant in mercy to all who call upon you.
27:08
And Jesus is telling his disciples every day call upon him. Every day he's ready to forgive you.
27:17
Every day he's furthering his calling in your life, fulfilling his purpose. He's the one that began the work.
27:23
That was the whole argument of Galatians. It was it was like a lightning bolt. Luther had a couple of occasions with lightning bolts, the first lightning bolt.
27:31
He he had this view of God as this judge that was against him. And the lightning bolt was I'll work it off.
27:37
I'll become a monk. Just spare me. The second lightning bolt was reading Galatians, where Paul says you began this by grace and now you're going to finish it by works.
27:48
What did you do to save yourself? God has done the work. So if it began by grace, how are you going to complete it by works?
27:56
It was a lightning bolt for Luther. You, Lord, are good, ready to forgive, abundant in mercy to all who call upon you.
28:09
It was it was in that Augustinian order that Luther actually understood what Augustine was getting at.
28:15
Augustine was a theologian of the grace of God. Augustine himself said when a man cloaks his sin,
28:22
God strips it bare. But when a man uncovers his sin, God covers it beautiful.
28:30
When we try to camouflage our sins and get by and we're nauseous and we're weakened and our strength is draining.
28:39
God actually just lays it open. God just strips it bare. But when we confess our sin, in other words, when we uncover our sin and just say,
28:48
Lord, here it is, he covers it. This is what it looks like to pray for forgiveness.
28:53
It's laying bare all those things for which we need forgiveness and being motivated by the fact that he's a
29:00
God ready to forgive. So that's the first point. We pray for forgiveness.
29:08
Second point, we pray as those forgiven.
29:15
We pray as those forgiven. So we don't just pray for forgiveness, but we pray as those who are forgiven.
29:23
And this whole sermon, of course, I'm speaking of believers in Christ, Jesus, of those who have faith.
29:29
I'm not speaking generically of all people. Speaking of those who have put their faith in Christ for salvation.
29:35
For those who pray for God to forgive. They're also praying as those who are forgiven.
29:41
Very important point. Jerry Bridges pointed this out and what book it was, but I saved it as a note.
29:47
And I've turned back on it year after year. Jerry Bridges says we tend to drag our old sins along with us and live under a vague sense of guilt.
29:58
We're not nearly as vigorous in appropriating God's forgiveness as he is in extending it.
30:04
And therefore, instead of living in light of God's forgiveness through Christ, we tend to live under an overcast sky of guilt most of the time.
30:16
This is what I'm getting at with. We tend to be more like pre -Reformation Luther than post -Reformation
30:22
Luther. Living with some vague sense of guilt. Not the recognition of my debts are forgiven and I ought to be humbled.
30:33
But somehow I still have debts that need to be covered and I better be humble as I try to work them off.
30:39
That's the difference that we're talking about. A vague sense of guilt. Well, why do you feel this way? I don't really know.
30:45
I just know that this is how I feel. A vague sense of guilt, not the light of God, but an overcast sky.
30:52
You look outside. It's mid -April. Why is there four inches of snow on the ground? Why is the sky gray?
30:58
Are you like me? You're waiting for blue jays and chickadees and daisies. It's like I wanted to take some strolls around the park.
31:05
Why am I shoveling? Why am I de -icing? That's what it's like. We live under this overcast sky.
31:12
We live in this. It's supposed to be warm and rich and lively and glorious. But instead, it's cold.
31:18
It's frozen. This vague guilt. Jesus doesn't want his disciples to function in this way.
31:26
Pray for your father to forgive you. That's what he says. He doesn't want you to walk in some vague guilt.
31:34
How dishonoring is that to his sacrifice? Lord, you mostly made the way for my forgiveness.
31:43
I'll make up what is lacking. That is dishonoring to the gospel. Lord, you forgave most of what you could, and I'll just find a way to work off the rest of the debt.
31:55
That is blasphemous to the gospel. Jesus does not intend for his followers to walk in this sense of vague guilt, to mope around like a spiritual
32:07
Eeyore. Jesus knows what Nehemiah knows. The joy of the Lord is your strength.
32:13
And the joy of the Lord is your strength, because without the joy of the Lord, you are weak. And where does the joy of the
32:19
Lord come from? What does it consist in? It consists in Psalm 130. With you, there is forgiveness.
32:26
That's that's the that's the heartbeat of joy in the Christian's life. My debts are canceled.
32:34
My shame is lifted. My burden is released. I'm forgiven. I'm free.
32:40
I'm cleansed. I'm counted worthy. I'm counted pure. I'm blessed. I'm adopted.
32:45
I belong. I'm an heir, not for my sake, but for Christ's sake. Not because of what I've done or what
32:51
I've failed to do, but simply because of what Christ has done on my behalf. That's the joy that becomes a strength of the
32:58
Christian. We operate under a sense of vague guilt again. No wonder there's no strength.
33:04
There's no joy. No wonder there's no power in the Christian life. There's no sense of forgiveness, no sense of mercy.
33:12
You can be motivated to certain duty. You can be motivated to discipline under a sense of crushing guilt, but not for long.
33:21
People will come to church under a crushing sense of guilt. And that only lasts what?
33:27
A handful of weeks because there's no joy in that.
33:34
It's just guilt and guilt only drives people so far. And so in their weakness, because guilt has not been absolved by the forgiveness offered freely in the gospel, they have no strength.
33:46
And though they're trying so hard to enter that narrow way, that few find they're too weak to do it. And so they perish on the way.
33:56
Those who are strong might might not look very strong. They might look very humble.
34:04
They might not look very mighty and bold. They might look very meek. They might be described as full of mercy.
34:13
And these are the strongest Christians you'll ever meet. They have the joy of the Lord. It's cleansed them and absolved them of all of their guilt.
34:22
They've learned what Jesus teaches his followers to pray, forgive my debts. Even as I forgive others, their debts against me.
34:32
Blessed is this one who understands these things. Psalm 32, which Paul takes up in Romans four.
34:38
Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven. It's a blessed man.
34:44
That's a strong man. That's a mighty Christian. Listen to the logic here.
34:52
It's all about forgiveness. And I want you to see the the effects, the consequences, the fruit of God's forgiveness in Psalm 32.
35:01
Here's the banner statement. Here's the picture. Blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven.
35:07
That is a blessed man. What does it look like on the on the one hand, what does it look like to be a man without your sins forgiven, without a conscious awareness that you come to a
35:18
God who is good and ready to forgive and you receive that forgiveness freely? What does that look like when you don't have that?
35:24
And what does it look like when you receive it? Those are the two things at the beginning of Psalm 32 that David brings across.
35:31
So here, blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the
35:38
Lord does not impute iniquity, in other words, hold to account. We're using accounting language.
35:44
Pin the debt in whose spirit there is no deceit.
35:51
There's a debt. Something's been wrong, but he's not adding sin to sin. He's not lying about it.
35:56
He's not deceiving himself. He's not deluding himself and hiding it from others. Here it is,
36:01
Lord. Here's what I've done. Here's how I've been in my shame,
36:09
Lord. Here's who I am right now. And what's the consequence of not being forgiven?
36:16
When I kept silent, David writes, my bones grew old through my groaning all day long.
36:23
Here's that theological Eeyore moping around. Every joint hurts.
36:30
He has a spiritual fatigue that hangs around him like a dark cloud. I kept silent.
36:37
My bones grew old. He's a young, vigorous man. He's a young, mighty ruler. And he's like inside,
36:43
I'm 95 years old. I'm withering away in the inner man. I'm groaning all day long.
36:49
Why? Night and day, your hand is heavy upon me. He's trying to hide.
36:57
He's trying to delude or distract himself from the sense of guilt. And the separation of God feels like this, a heavy hand on him.
37:06
Well, there's a mercy in that he must belong to the Lord. He must know God as his father.
37:12
If his father's hand is heavy upon him because he's done wrong. If he didn't belong to God, if David had no relationship to God as his father, he wouldn't feel that hand upon him to be very heavy at all.
37:27
He would be chiefly preoccupied with hiding his sin from others and convincing himself that he's still a good person, in fact, still a lot better than most people.
37:36
But when you're a child of God, when you're a believer in Jesus Christ and you try to hide your bones grow old within you and your father's hand is heavy upon you, it feels heavier.
37:49
The further you go, the more you pull, the more you hide. That hand gets heavier and heavier. But what
37:58
David realizes is that hand that was so heavy. It wasn't heavy because he was gripping me to push me away.
38:06
Which is why I was running and what I was fearing, it was actually so heavy because it was gripping me to turn around and draw me in.
38:16
When I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all day long. Day and night, your hand was heavy upon me and my vitality.
38:25
My strength, my liveliness was turned into the drought of summer.
38:30
Selah, an untranslated word, we don't fully know what it means. It could have been a sort of musical notation to break into a refrain or an interlude.
38:41
Generally, it's understood to be in terms of reading, pause here and contemplate. And if that's true,
38:49
I love where he places these contemplations in Psalm 32. Your hand was heavy on me all day and night.
38:55
My strength dried up and what should have been a lively, fruitful summer became a drought.
39:02
Contemplate on that. Think about that. But just like Psalm 130, verse four, but.
39:13
Your heavy hand finally did its work, it gripped my shoulder and turned me toward you. And seeing that your face was full of sympathy and compassion rather than running in camouflaging, actually just freely acknowledged all of my sin before you.
39:30
That's what he says. But I acknowledged my sin to you. That heavy hand turned me around.
39:36
It drew me close. I acknowledged my sin to you. My iniquity, I did not hide. I said
39:41
I will confess my transgression to the Lord. And you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
39:50
You see the transaction here. What happens in the space of that turning?
39:57
David does not say, I acknowledge my sin to you. And as I turn to you,
40:02
I said, I will work so hard to not mess up again. He doesn't say that.
40:09
Doesn't say this time will be the last time now I've really learned my lesson and look at the lengths I'm going to deal with this
40:15
Lord. Now, have I earned your approval? Now, can I be accepted? Now, can I cleanse and scrub my conscience?
40:21
He doesn't say that. He simply says, when that heavy hand turned me to see your compassionate face,
40:27
I just owned all of my sin and you forgave me. Jesus says, pray to your father in heaven for your debts to be forgiven.
40:37
We pray for forgiveness so that we can be forgiven. And when we do that, we realize we are praying as those who already are forgiven.
40:49
You pray for forgiveness if you're a child of God. You pray for forgiveness as one who's already forgiven. Why would we hide from him?
40:59
Why would we spurn the heavy hand that only wants to bring us close? We're already forgiven, already accepted in the beloved.
41:10
So as First John says, if we say we have no sin, we're deceiving ourselves and the truth isn't in us.
41:16
But if we confess our sins. He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
41:26
Again, what is the transaction there? That's First John one, eight, nine and ten. What's the transaction?
41:33
It's not if we confess our sins and clean up our act and work really hard and start following through, he will be.
41:41
He doesn't say any of that. It's simply this. If we confess, he is faithful to forgive and cleanse.
41:48
Do you see how simplistic this is? It's so simple that it's almost impossible to walk out with any consistency in your life.
41:57
The default of your flesh and the effect of the world and your flesh and the devil will make you run through all sorts of obstacles, all sorts of hurdles.
42:06
To try to earn your keep and cleanse your own conscience when God would just have you come to him. Receive what he freely gives as the gift of his grace and be strengthened in the joy that comes from his mercy.
42:22
So one purpose of confession, according to First John one, is that the truth would be in us. And the truth is we have sin that we need to confess.
42:31
Our lives don't measure up. We are not as we ought to be. So the first thing that this petition does, the first thing then we're saying,
42:41
Lord, forgive me for my debts today. We're realizing I need your truth to show me what is in error.
42:49
I need your righteousness to show me what is false and wrong. Lord, I recognize there's debts that I don't even recognize.
42:57
And so I want your truth to expose these things. I confess so that your truth will be in me.
43:04
That's the first purpose. The second purpose is so that I will be cleansed. Now, I say there's a difference between the sort of pre -Reformation
43:13
Lutheran, the post -Reformation Lutheran, though they say the same things. Acknowledge the fact that you're a sinner and then beg for the mercy of God.
43:20
They can say the same thing, but they mean by an entirely different thing. Really, the emphasis would be on beg for Luther before the
43:29
Reformation, beg and earn somehow this mercy of God. Where beg is hardly the right word after the
43:36
Reformation. Boldly receive, confidently claim.
43:42
The mercy of God through Christ. That's the difference the Reformation made for Luther. It's the difference between recognizing what is true about our justification.
43:53
In other words, our standing with God as a result of Christ's own sacrifice.
43:59
The fact that we are counted righteous, not by anything we've done or failed to do, but simply we're counted righteous because of Christ's imputed righteousness.
44:09
Christ's own righteousness is counted and credited to us as our righteousness. And this gives us a positive standing before God.
44:17
So his death atones for our sin and his perfect life, his perfect obedience gives us a positive righteousness with God.
44:25
This is our justification, our right standing with God. We are justified.
44:32
But then there is an ongoing work of of of sanctification, this renewal, this cleansing, this being conformed to the life of our savior, his spirit being at work, renovating, transforming us from one degree of glory to the next, occupying our lives and our minds and our hearts, overtaking our affections and our will.
44:51
This is what it means to be sanctified. And this is a work that will continue by degrees until we draw our last breath.
44:58
The vague sense of guilt comes when we blur these categories. When I smuggle in to justification what it means to have ongoing sanctification, this is where we have a vague sense of guilt.
45:15
Somehow I need to be re -justified. Somehow I need to earn back the place that had once been given by grace.
45:22
Now I have to occupy it again by my works. We would never put it that way. But effectively, that's what we're doing.
45:28
We smuggle sanctification into justification. We miss the fact that justification is a once for all forgiveness for all sins, past, present.
45:42
Future, you think about that.
45:49
You don't think about that nearly enough. Christ's blood is so rich.
45:59
He's forgiven you for the sins you haven't even committed yet. You couldn't possibly be more justified than you are.
46:13
And so we see this in years past have looked at this. This is the whole point here. Jesus illustrates this in John 13.
46:20
He doesn't use the language that took a millennium and a half to develop these terms like justification and sanctification, recognizing there are two sides of the same coin, but they must be held in distinction.
46:31
And where's the biblical warrant for that? Well, John 13. You remember the scene in John 13 where this this woman rushes in sorry, where Jesus is with his disciples.
46:45
And this is all part of the prelude for the Lord's Supper. I'm getting ahead to think of another another episode with the woman.
46:51
I think we'll save that one for three weeks. We're not going to have time this morning. Remember the setting. Jesus is in the upper room with his disciples.
46:59
And he's washing their feet. And Peter, who's confessed this is the
47:07
Messiah we've been waiting for. This is the glorious one. This is the seat of promise. This is
47:13
David's greater son. This is David's Lord. This is the conquering king that we spent our whole lives dreaming about.
47:22
And he's scrubbing my filthy feet. John the
47:27
Baptist said, I'm not even I'm the Jesus said of John the Baptist, the most holy man, the most righteous man that had ever been born of a woman up until that time.
47:39
There was never a prophet greater than John. And that mighty holy man said of himself,
47:45
I'm not even worthy enough to stoop down and just untie your sandal. That's how glorious you are.
47:54
And now this glorious one is bent over, is scrubbing the feet of a fisherman.
48:01
And so Peter is recoiling. He says, you'll never wash my feet.
48:10
It's very sharp language. It's almost inappropriate.
48:16
It's so sharp. He's rebuking Jesus. Of course, he's doing it out of decorum. He's doing out of a sense of this is so wrong.
48:25
You are worthy of all out. How dare you stoop down to scrub my feet?
48:30
And that's Peter's heart. You'll never wash my feet. It's like this clip
48:35
I saw. They were interviewing different workers in Africa and so on and talking about, you know, the economic differences in Africa.
48:44
And so they're saying they go up to this, you know, random guy in the street in Ghana. And then we were asked, you know, would you be comfortable to have, you know, your wife earn more money than you?
48:56
And he looks at the camera and goes, never, never. It's like, OK, buddy, calm down. That's Peter.
49:03
You will never wash my feet. You will never wash my feet, Lord. But Jesus turns the tables on him.
49:12
If I don't wash you, you have no part with me. It's beautiful.
49:17
You can't clean yourself up, Peter. If I don't wash you, you have nothing to do with me.
49:26
When you neglect confessing your sin. If you don't daily say,
49:31
Lord, here are my debts and I can't do anything about them, forgive me.
49:40
If you fail to confess in that way, even for the small things, you are essentially coming to the
49:45
Lord like Peter and saying, you'll never wash my feet. Never. But that's the only way to have a part with him, he says.
49:54
You can only abide in me if you keep coming to me with an acknowledgment of where you've fallen short and the fact that I renew you with my own mercy.
50:02
And you need this every day of your life. Not because I'm trying to beat you over the head with a sense of how unworthy you are.
50:11
Rather, I'm trying to produce in you this recognition day after day of how my love has made you worthy of forgiveness.
50:19
My love and my love alone has counted you worthy. For my own cross. So, Peter, he gets on board with this real quick.
50:29
Lord, not my feet, but my hands, my head. In other words, wash all of me.
50:35
Then the last thing I want is not have a part with you. And you'd almost want to say, oh, he finally got it, but even here he's wrong.
50:46
Because Jesus is teaching him without using the language, he's teaching him the difference between justification and sanctification.
50:54
Between the once for all forgiveness that Christ accomplishes and the way that that flows into an ongoing work of renewal in the
51:01
Christian's life. And he does that with this imagery. Jesus says to him, he who is bathed needs only to wash his feet.
51:09
And is completely clean and you are clean. Yet your feet need to be washed.
51:20
You're clean, you're justified, but you have need of sanctification.
51:31
Jesus does all the washing. Please note, Jesus is washing justification.
51:38
He's the bather. He's the baptizer. And he's also the sanctifier. He's also washing the feet.
51:44
Either way, you need the part with Jesus that only he can do. I have to clean, he says. But there's a difference between me making you clean and me cleaning you up.
51:54
I have made you clean. And now day by day, as you come to me with your debts,
52:00
I clean you up. That's the difference that makes all the difference. That's the difference between pre -Reformation
52:07
Luther and post -Reformation Luther. That's the difference between living out the
52:13
Christian life under a vague sense of guilt. Or living with the joy that becomes your strength as a
52:20
Christian. Freely forgiven. If you have clung to Christ for salvation, you couldn't sin his mercy away.
52:31
That's how bold Luther... That's why Luther said these really mystical things like, sin boldly. It's like, what?
52:37
Worst pastor advice ever? Sin boldly? He's just trying to make a point about how radical justification is.
52:46
It's radical. And when you begin there, only then can you go to Romans 6 and go, if you really take this to just be a license to sin, it shows you've never received the grace of God, because a true child of God would never take his ongoing free mercy to become an occasion, a license to sin.
53:04
But we shouldn't begin at Romans 6 because Paul doesn't begin there. That was the great insight of Martin Lloyd -Jones.
53:10
You haven't really preached a gospel of grace unless they accuse you of preaching licentiousness, lawlessness, because that's what they do to Paul.
53:18
Paul's preaching a gospel of grace and they say he's lawless. So Lloyd -Jones says if we if we begin with a radical nature of justification.
53:29
Only then can we move to Romans 6 and say, God forbid when
53:34
I come to God with a troubled conscience and my summer vitality turned to drought and I examine myself and bring my debts before him and I know that I'm forgiven.
53:45
I'm not emboldened to go on sinning. I'm humbled and sorrowed that I'll ever sin again.
53:54
That becomes the burden. It's no longer the burden of I need to be cleansed.
53:59
I'm filthy. It's like a bone out of joint. It's like I have food poisoning. I need to get right with God.
54:06
That was the burden then. But then with forgiveness, the new burden is you're so merciful.
54:13
I hate that I will fail you again. That's the burden now. I hate that I'm such an unprofitable, unworthy servant.
54:24
When you are so merciful. So glorious. So loving to me, and that's justification.
54:34
Flowing into sanctification. No longer condemned. No longer judged for our sin.
54:43
We preach the cross, we cling to a crucified savior. Yes, we receive
54:49
God's fatherly discipline for our sins. We know that his hand will be heavy on us to chasten us.
54:54
But even that heavy hand, as I said, chastens us just to draw us close and restore us. Not to push us away or chase us down.
55:03
The forgiveness that follows this ongoing daily confession becomes our life of sanctification. This is how he cleanses our conscience.
55:11
This is how we walk in joy and strength. We have this restored joy of communing with God. I'm right with him because of Christ.
55:18
Therefore, I have peace and having peace. I have confidence. I have strength. Now I'm emboldened to walk according to this new life within me.
55:27
And that means when you pray, you truly pray as the forgiven. So you haven't prayed the
55:35
Lord's prayer. You haven't prayed the fifth petition. You have not prayed for forgiveness without receiving the gospel in such a way that you pray as the forgiven.
55:48
You could put it this way. If Jesus says of his father in heaven, he knows what you need before you even ask.
55:53
You could almost say. Even before you confess, you're already forgiven. That's just the truth of justification.
56:04
God forgives us for sins that we don't even confess to him. It's amazing.
56:11
I remember reading through the. Some of the diary entries of of a
56:17
Scottish preacher around the time Callum was born. John McDonald, the Ferentosh, and that was one of the things that stood out to me the most, one of the last few letters he wrote.
56:27
Entries he made in his journal basically were just along toward the end of his life, just long form prayers.
56:34
Kind of like Augustine's confessions, just I'm just going to say everything I can about you and to you.
56:41
And he said, you know, of all the mercies that God has attended my way, I thank him chiefly for this.
56:48
He never exposed my sin to others or even to myself in ways that he could have.
56:56
He was just meditating on the mercy of God, but like a little toddler who.
57:03
Is so ignorant that they don't realize how much love is doted upon them, even when they're whining and complaining or breaking porcelain figures off a cabinet.
57:15
Just love. Mercy. We pray as the forgiven.
57:24
So so I'd venture to say this to my pre -reformed Luthers in our midst.
57:31
You may be missing the richness of the gospel. You may be you may be missing the richness of the gospel when it comes to your walk, especially in how you think of and relate to your father in heaven.
57:47
Life with God is not merely about justification. It is about sanctification, too, but either of those can mislead you to think that somehow
57:57
Christianity is obtaining that precious get out of jail free card. I just need the assurance that I'll be forgiven.
58:04
I am I in the right place? Have I believed the right doctrine? Few get out of jail free.
58:11
I just want something in my pocket. I want some status. I'm willing to maintain it. I'm willing to order my life just to try to barter for it.
58:18
That's not Christianity that will pass for a season, for a worldling, for a hypocrite.
58:24
They'll do what they can to manicure and maintain, but that will never pass for a true child of God. It will pass muster for someone who shows very little regard for God.
58:35
And intends to find their happiness apart from God. And if they're trying to find their happiness apart from God, why would the why would they be troubled by his hiddenness?
58:46
A child of God, it's like it's like a toddler when their parent is gone, when their parent has a stern countenance, when their parents are showing disappointment, it troubles them.
59:00
They try to get you to laugh, to smile, unless they just don't care about you at all. They just go their separate way.
59:08
For the worldling, for the hypocrite, they have such little regard for God. They never intended for him to be the true source and wellspring of their happiness.
59:16
So they're not bothered at all when when his face isn't smiling, when his presence isn't found. They're not like the psalmist in Psalm 130.
59:24
I'm shriveling up and drying up because I don't find your presence. I don't see your smile. I don't feel the warmth of your of your life within me.
59:32
I'm troubled. I have this guilt. And I know that I can't distract myself away from it. I have to be made right with you, even if everything else goes wrong.
59:43
It's like this is great. I saw it on one of these little posts not long ago.
59:50
He said it years ago. It's such a good statement from John Piper. He said, I'm astonished at people who say they believe in God.
01:00:00
But live as if happiness is found by giving him two percent of their attention. So I'm astonished.
01:00:06
You say you believe in God, but your life is as if happiness comes by just giving him two percent of your life, two percent of your attention.
01:00:15
That's someone who will never pray the fifth petition with any meaning. They don't come to God as a debtor and that may be just out of obligation or we're all sinners or help me.
01:00:25
But there's no sense of my my joy and my strength and my life and my liveliness and my health and my peace and my.
01:00:32
It's all bound up with you, Lord. Take away everything else, but not your presence from me. That's a child of God.
01:00:41
For the true child of God, the presence of guilt, the unacknowledged sin, the dirty hands and feet, it disrupts their fellowship with God, it interferes with the sense of his presence, his peace, his delight, they can't go long in that direction.
01:00:56
And so their personal relationship being disturbed, they seek restoration. Jesus says, come to your father in heaven, he'll restore you.
01:01:03
He forgives your debts as quickly as you acknowledge them. He restores your soul. He he renews the spirit within you and strengthens you with his own pleasure.
01:01:13
The Puritans spoke of it in this way. They said, yeah, in justification, there's sort of a repentance.
01:01:21
That satisfies our debt once for all, we're talking about justification. Right, that that initial act of turning from your sin and turning to God to say,
01:01:30
I'm done living this life this way. I'm done being darkened and ignorant of you. I'm done with my conscience eating away at my life.
01:01:39
And and what I know in my heart to be true, though, I repress it. Now, Lord, I'm yours.
01:01:45
I surrender. You are and you have saved me by your grace.
01:01:50
And I am yours. I've been bought with this price. And and so you realize that that initial act of turning that initial repentance, that's in a sense, the once for all repentance of justification.
01:02:01
But just like there's an ongoing cleansing of sanctification, there's an ongoing repentance. And the
01:02:06
Puritans spoke of this as a as a renewal of repentance. It's a very beautiful way to think of it, because they're saying just like justification is not something entirely dissolved or separated from sanctification.
01:02:22
Justification flows into sanctification. They're saying that once for all repentance flows into the ongoing repentance.
01:02:29
In other words, that initial act of turning from sin and turning to God is just renewed. Not that you need to be read justified, but you're actually asking
01:02:38
God to apply that gospel grace afresh. And the same way that you're taking up that repentance that you had decisively shown when you first came to faith and now you're renewing it again,
01:02:51
Lord, forgive me, cleanse me again. And the same gospel grace that justified me now,
01:02:58
Lord, sanctify me, cleanse me, apply it to me afresh. So you not you don't approach this petition as the break the glass in case of emergency kind of prayer.
01:03:12
Oh, I really blew it this time. It's time to go ask God to forgive my debt. Jesus said, this is your daily prayer.
01:03:19
In other words, this is just life as a Christian. Your daily need for your father's forgiveness.
01:03:26
That the blood of Christ can be applied to you afresh. That you can bask in the recognition that though you are a sinner, your sins have been forgiven you.
01:03:37
And though you are often loveless to God, he's loved you with an everlasting love, a covenantal love that will not break, will not falter, will never cease to be renewed and will endure to the end.
01:03:48
And recognizing that you you have your whole frame of life shaped in this approach and recognition of the delight of God.
01:03:55
It humbles you. And if we had more time this morning, we'd get to the third point, which is it trains you in the forgiveness of others.
01:04:03
I think I'll leave us here simply because we don't have time to unpack this third point, but I do so with a clean conscience because we'll be there in three weeks time with verses 14 and 15.
01:04:15
But we are missing the last half of this petition. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
01:04:23
We come back to this. We'll discuss again why it is that God's forgiveness bears this kind of fruit in our lives.
01:04:31
And I trust providentially it'll be more meaningful by the time we get back there. So let me say as we close, do you know what it is to receive
01:04:42
God's forgiveness? Not as Luther running to the convent.
01:04:51
Do you know what it is to receive God's forgiveness freely and fully? Do you know what it is to have a forgiving spirit as a result of that?
01:05:03
Do you know the difference between being made clean and being cleansed? Between turning to God in a once for all way of justification and then renewing that turning to God day by day as you acknowledge and turn from your sins day by day?
01:05:21
Do you know what it's like to hunger after reconciliation with God? As much as you hunger after your daily bread to see that as a great need, as much as any other bodily need.
01:05:32
Do you recognize that forgiveness is the daily life of a Christian? Because as Luther said, the
01:05:37
Christian's life is faith and repentance. If not, you will never be able to pray with any sincerity, the
01:05:48
Lord's Prayer. Not as Jesus intended us to pray. In the Lord's Prayer, we pray for forgiveness.
01:05:55
But we also pray as the forgiven. And even then, we pray as those who forgive others.
01:06:02
The Lord, we pray, forgive us our debts, even as we forgive our debtors. Let's pray.
01:06:14
Father, thank you for your word, Lord. Thank you for what you reveal in your word,
01:06:20
Lord. You know our tendencies. You know the ways that we delude and distract ourselves.
01:06:28
You know the ways that we justify ourselves and hide from you and measure ourselves against others rather than just acknowledging ourselves before you.
01:06:41
You know us, Lord, and you taught us how to pray for that reason. And in this prayer,
01:06:46
Lord, you teach us our need for forgiveness. You teach us to view God as the one who alone can wipe away a debt we can never repay, we can never work off.
01:06:57
A debt that needs to be paid and is freely paid. A debt that having been paid ought to humble us.
01:07:06
But not a humility unto weakness, but rather a humility unto strength. For, Lord, you say that.
01:07:13
Mercy belongs to the merciful and the meek inherit the earth. And so,
01:07:18
Lord, we pray as a church body, forgive us for our debts as a church, Lord, as a church, we're not what we ought to be.
01:07:28
Forgive us, Lord, as individuals here, as brothers and sisters in our roles. Forgive us for our debts. How easily we we spurn your design, we flout your commandments.
01:07:39
We don't have faith that your ways are right and good and lead to blessedness and joy.
01:07:47
We chew the cut of the world for sustenance. Rather than come to the feasting table that you spread for your saints, for it's often veiled and hidden behind narrow and difficult ways to obtain.
01:07:59
Give us the strength and give us the faith to persevere in these ways, Lord. Help us,
01:08:05
Lord, as we press forward in a few weeks to verses 14 and 15. To be between now and then, especially thoughtful about your forgiveness for us, your long -suffering patience, your free and rich mercy that covers as quickly as we lay bare.
01:08:22
And let us think about that in relation to one another. That we would be kind, tender -hearted, forgiving one another, even as Christ Jesus forgave us.