Prayer “His needs, our needs”
BibleClass.com.au Teaching Series Series: The Lord’s Prayer / The Sermon on the Mount Part: #2 of 6 Main Scripture: Matthew 6:9-13 Teacher: Dr Paul Iles Date: 21.10.2012
Inline, direct scripture quotes are italicised. Block quotes are indented. The New King James Version is used unless otherwise stated. This transcript has undergone minor editing to ensure readability.
The MP3 audio of the study upon which this transcript is based and a learning guide are available from http://bibleclass.com.au/
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Again we will look at this remarkable instruction of the Lord Jesus as to how we should pray in Matthew chapter 6.
Summary of previous study
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f we will just learn some very straightforward lessons from this prayer and this instruction of the Lord Jesus, we will find that there comes a much greater blessing into our prayer life. We will discover more of its secret and of its meaning and of its effectiveness. We will also discover the way in which it changes us. Prayer changes things, that’s true, but prayer also changes us. That’s even more true. If you follow the structure given here carefully and thoughtfully in your approach to God, you will discover a change coming over you. The most vital part of that change is a realisation of God. That is so important - a realisation of God. Having had a realisation of God, you see your own need in its right perspective. The thing which overcame you and troubled you and seemed too great for you, suddenly is compared with the greatness and the grandeur and the glory of God. Your needs were so important to you. They seemed so impossible to be met. The problems you have seemed so insurmountable. But first of all you have thought about God and His kingdom and the work that He is doing and the needs which He has... And now you see your own needs in their right perspective Having seen that, you suddenly find that to pray becomes a help. To pray becomes a blessing. When you finish praying, to say the very least, you feel different. You have a different perspective on the entire situation and a fresh realisation; a fresh sense of God. The Lord Jesus is saying that if you are to make your prayer life realistic, effective and a blessing, then this is how you do it; these are the guidelines that you follow.
Introduction
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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. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. [Matthew 6:9-13]
n this manner, therefore, pray” - like this, in this style, or observing this kind of structure, this kind of approach. It doesn’t really mean to use the exact words but rather more the order and the thoughtfulness which you put into your prayer - “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.” - Now we are referring to our own petitions, our own needs - “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” - Or, as we forgive those who sin against us - “And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the
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power and the glory forever. Amen.” - There is a certain triumph in the way that ends; a certain sense of peace and realisation.
Exclusion
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eep the steps that we have covered so far in your mind: What do you do first? You exclude. What was that? You go into that room or closet and you shut everything else out. You are going to concentrate on what you are doing. You are excluding all other influences. It’s good to have a place where you do deliberately go to pray, particularly in the morning and in the evening, where you are not distracted, where you can shut out and realise that you are shut in with God. It’s you and the Lord alone together. Sometimes you may want to pray in a day and you might say, “Well I can’t go into my inner chamber, I can’t go into my closet, I can’t go into my little private special place.” But that’s not the point. You can be in the busy world, you can be sitting on a bus, you can be just going about your life, but you just take this step of shutting everything else out, not gabbling off a few prayers and not thinking about it, but shutting yourself in with the Lord and after that there comes realisation. You realise what you are doing, who you are speaking to and you come to realise the seriousness of your prayer life.
Realisation Our Father
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hat do you do next? Then you say “Our Father who is in heaven.” What are you actually doing when you say that? You are realising again, you are recollecting, you are remembering who you are speaking to – your Heavenly Father. This is a good way to start your prayer; to call God what He is to you. Your Father. Every child of God can do that.
In Heaven
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s your Heavenly Father, He cares, He is interested, you are His child, you have a relationship with Him, He never forgets you, He is a true Father. What kind of Father? “Our Father who is in heaven.” Not just like an earthly Father. You can have the best of earthly fathers. We are talking about our Heavenly Father. A perfect Father, with a full realisation about you as His child, a total commitment to your care and to your keeping and to your blessing. So there you are, feeling distressed or distraught or, as it were, overwhelmed or left alone and just for a moment you just shut yourself in. You realise what you are going to do and you recollect who you are going to speak to and you say, “Our Father who is in heaven” and you think, “Oh that’s better I am speaking to someone who is above everything, who is more powerful than anything and who actually cares about me.”
Invocation Hallowed be your name
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ow, as His child you are going to say, “Hallowed be your name.” You are going to call on His name - the name of “our Father who is in heaven.” This is what I am calling “invocation” because I am calling upon Him. To say, “Hallowed be your name” means: may it be that your name is reverenced and respected for ever and ever.
Requests for God Concerning His name
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hen you realise that this isn’t actually happening in the world today. So in that regard, you are making a request. You want His name to be held as a holy name. You say, “Well that is not happening. What’s wrong?” The problem is that people don’t recognise God. People don’t bow the knee to God. They don’t own him as their king, as their sovereign, and as their ruler. They have no respect for Him. So for this reason also, you have said, “Your kingdom come! Hallowed by your name!” Before you’ve thought of yourself, what you need, what you want or what is worrying you, it is most important of all that God’s kingdom should come and that His name should be reverenced. When that happens, everybody will be blessed.
Concerning His kingdom
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hat do we mean when we say that we want God’s kingdom to come?
The kingdom of God is the rule of God. People who are in the kingdom of God recognise the authority of God. They are coming under the blessing of the bountiful rule of an almighty God who is also their Father. His kingdom today When the Lord Jesus was here, He said, “The kingdom of God is among you.” When John the Baptist preached he said, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Why was he saying that? Well, the King had come. He was right there in their midst, so the kingdom of God was at hand. God’s ruler, God’s King was right there. When you got saved what did you do? You bowed your knee to the Lord Jesus Christ and you crowned Him Lord of your life. That means that when someone gets saved the kingdom of God has come in their life. They bow the knee, they acknowledge His rule, His sovereignty, His almighty power. There is no King but almighty God. Now God rules through his ruler, the king The king is the Lord Jesus Christ. When someone is saved they come into the kingdom under that rule of God in Christ. You have Christ as your King, as your Lord and your Saviour and almighty God is your heavenly Father. So, when you say, “Your kingdom come,” what you are thinking about is other people getting saved as well. That is the very next thing you are thinking about. You know that the Lord Jesus, the King has already come and you are thinking about other people bowing their knee to Him and being saved. You want to see them saved, and in your heart you are crying out to God, “Let your kingdom come, your rule be acknowledged in the life of someone that is not saved!” But even more than that you are also saying. “I want His rule over and in my life in every situation
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that I am. I want God to rule me.” You might say that sounds a bit sort of authoritative and a bit austere. No! God rules in your life because he wants to bless you. He rules as a father would rule over a family to supply and to keep and to guard and to bless. And what you are saying is that you want to know that blessing in your own life. You don’t rule yourself anymore. You have come under the magnificent, the blessed rule, the bountiful rule of almighty God and you find that grace reigns. Grace is on the throne and it is a wonderful rule of righteousness, joy and love and peace in the kingdom of God. His kingdom in the future Even more than that, when you say that you want His kingdom to come, you are looking into the future and you are thinking, “What I really want is for Jesus to come. I want to see every knee bowed. I want to see the man about whom they said ‘we won’t want Him to reign over us.’” I want to see that man who died on the cross. That man that the world rejected, that ruler, that king, the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to see him come in power and I want to see Him come in great glory and I want to go right in to the full reality of the kingdom when the Lord Jesus Christ Himself is going to be King over all the earth. When that happens, everyone who is saved, who has already crowned him Lord of all will go into that kingdom and we will see Him lifted up in glory, and power and splendour and acknowledged and worshipped. We will feel the warmth of His rule, His blessing, His grace and His mercy pouring out upon a world that has crowned Him Lord of all. This is why, in the end of the book of the Revelation, it says, “Even so come Lord Jesus, amen.” That is the last prayer, the thing you really want to see. Because, in that day, when the Lord is King over all the earth, everyone will be blessed. All creation will be blessed. You and I will be the happiest we have ever, ever seen. Why? Because the Lord will be King over all the earth. By praying these things, you are saying that this is what you want to see happen more than anything. Now think this through carefully. What do you really want in life? What are your priorities? I might say, I want to get on in my job. I want to get things happy in my circumstances. I want my problems solved. Hold it! There are bigger things at stake! Bigger things going on than that! That’s what the Lord is saying when He tells you to pray this way. I want you to be looking at the big, big picture! I want you to realise that your problem is so tiny in the light of a God who is infinite! He is so big, if I put it that way - you can’t contain Him. Whose thoughts are grand and glorious and great, whose thoughts and plans stretch from eternity to eternity and who has included you and me in those plans.
Concerning His will
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ow you say, “Oh. Where do I go from here?” He tells us, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In heaven, every creature acknowledges God’s rule. In heaven there is peace. In heaven there is harmony. In heaven there is happiness. In heaven there is contentment. In heaven there is fulfilment. In heaven there is joy. That’s what I long for, really and truly, beyond everything else I would love to see it really happen. For not only would all my needs be met but all the purposes of God would be fulfilled and all that Jesus Christ deserves would be made known.
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Do you ever think of praying that way at first?
Requests for ourselves
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gain, why do we pray this way first? Well, you then come along to your needs, and you can see that suddenly your needs – they’re still there and they’re still real, but they can’t overwhelm you anymore. You know that you are in your heavenly Father’s hands and this is the kind of Father that you’ve got. This is the sort of plan and this is the sort of mighty, powerful work that He is doing. So now you suddenly have your own problem in their right context, and prayer suddenly takes on its right perspective.
Three Daily Needs
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ow He is going to pray for the things that we need for our daily life. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts” - or our sins - “as we forgive our debtors” - or those that sin against us - “and do not lead us into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.” In this section, three areas or categories of needs are considered. 1. Daily bread; 2. Problems dealing with our sins; and 3. Problems dealing with the difficulties that we have facing temptation and the evil. These are three distinct requests that you will need every day. Please get this clear - all of your needs are in those three requests. Daily bread - that is physical isn’t it? Physical needs. Forgiveness of our debtors - that’s our relationships with others, isn’t it? That deals with the fact that I might have a wrong relationship with someone else. I might not have forgiven them. This is also our relationship with God, isn’t it? It deals with the fact that I might not have a right relationship with God or I haven’t confessed my sins before him. I might need His forgiveness. Then, finally, temptation - that deals with the final need. It could make me fall and ruin my happiness in life, my relationship and my walk with God. Now put that all together. This is what you are going to need every day. You need your physical needs to be met, you need your spiritual needs to be met, and you need the needs of your body and soul to be met. Your life and my life consists of a relationship that we have with ourselves - keeping ourselves alive with food for example. Your life and my life consists of a relationship with others - how you relate to others and how you get on with others. There is that relationship all the time. We are social creatures, if you like, with relationships with others. But we are also spiritual creatures - we have a relationship with God. Jesus is saying that when you start to pray, get those things all in their perspective. Pray about your physical needs. Pray about your relationship with others. Pray about your relationship with God, that it might not be spoiled. The whole ambit of your life is covered. Relating the three needs to the Christian life We must pray about these things because they are all impacted and changed due to the fact that
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we are Christians. When you’re in the kingdom of God and God is your Father, that faith of yours changes, impacts and affects every area of your life. You think differently to the way that the world thinks. How you relate to other people is different - your relationship of compassion and forgiveness - and people see that your social relationships are quite different compared with a person who is not in the kingdom of God. Furthermore, your relationship with God is one of the most important things to you. That means that you have a different attitude to sin - it worries you, it really does. You wake in the morning and you think, “I’ve got to go out there and I am going to face a real world. Sin could easily overtake me. I don’t want to sin anymore.” There is no true Christian who likes to sin anymore. One of the hallmarks of the fact that you or I are truly saved in the kingdom of God or have God as our Father is that we hate sin like we never hated it before. Previously, sin wasn’t high on the agenda of our worries. Everybody does it, afterall. What’s the harm in it? We might have asked. But now I realise who my Lord is. He died for me . That is what it cost Him - His death. I also realise what God thinks about sin. He is a holy God and he judges it and he hates it. I am one of his children and I am in His kingdom and I am thinking now about facing that world out there and it is only me and I am not that strong. I have got lots of weak areas and when I am put into a position where I could sin, right, with my mouth, with my feelings, with my attitude to others, with my forgetfulness of God, it could easily overtake me so I am going to pray about this so that I will preserved. Let me say it again: when you are a Christian your Christianity impacts and alters every area of your life. I must pray for the needs of my body, the needs of my soul - the person inside me that affects my interpersonal relationships and my feelings and emotions - and the needs of my spirit. My spirit is the part of me that relates me to God - my spiritual needs concern my relationship to God. As a Christian, I realise that life isn’t just all about eating and drinking. That is how people think. What am I going to do today? I’ll have fun and look after myself. But what about you me? Well, I am a living creature too, but I also have another kind of life called eternal life because I am a Christian. Eternal life is a different kind of life which is lived in a relationship with God. Because I know Him as my Father, I’ve found out what life is really all about. The Lord Jesus said, “I have come so that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” And, “This is eternal life to know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” I’ve got that life! I want to live that life everyday! My life is not just a life where I am feeding myself or where I am enjoying myself and satisfying myself and giving myself everything I want. No! I want to nurture my eternal life as well! My relationship with God! I want to live in such a way that people look and say, “What’s he got that I haven’t got? Why is he different that marks him out from the rest of the world? What qualities has he got inside him?” Now this is what you are concerned about when you are saved. These are our real needs, you know. It’s not a question of praying for a rise in salary or a promotion, or a brand new motor car or how many things we would like to have for ourselves. It is actually all about how effective I can be in the world for God. How I can enjoy better my walk with the Lord so that it is real and it is living and its thrilling. This is our life. “Christ who is our life” the Bible says - our life, our life, our life!
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Let’s understand this a little further from 1 John 1:1-7 Here we are told that our life is a life of fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. John is telling us that this is what life is all about. He says that life is having fellowship with the Father and with the Son. Not just food and drink, not fun and friends - there is more to it. Our ultimate friendship is actually with God and your ultimate friend is Jesus. There is friendship, relationship... This is eternal life. In light of this, John tells us to walk in the light, confess our sins and have fellowship with God. Now that is what I want tomorrow morning when I wake up to go to work. I want my life to be deep and real fellowship with God in a world that’s dead against the true King. In a world that has rejected Gods ruler, that is what I want. Daily Bread Let’s go back and deal with the individual requests in a little more detail. The first one was, “Give us this day our daily bread.” What does this mean? Many of us pray for things that we think we need. Unfortunately, the bulk of our prayers are often made up of things that we want over things we actually need. God isn’t going to give you things that you don’t need. He says, “I will give you your daily bread.” It’s a prayer for the physical necessities of the day. You can guarantee He knows the things you have need of. And you can go to Him and pray this prayer. Maybe you do need something physical, quite desperately - and that can happen because we live in a very complex and demanding and expensive society. You may yourself be in a situation where you feel, “I’ll never get this,” but if it is something you need, your Heavenly Father knows you have need of it and He will supply it according to the scriptures. Even though it may seem an impossibility, the cattle on a thousand hills are His. Remember, with five loaves and a few small fishes He fed the 5000. Remember the story of the widow with just a cruse of oil - nothing else in her house - the creditor comes to take her children away from her. She’s got nothing to pay and God says, just pour out that little cruse of oil. Just keep filling up vessels with that little cruse of oil. You say, “Lord it was empty long ago!” But He just kept filling them up and kept filling them up until she had no more vessels left to fill. What had happened? The Lord had supplied her need! The God of the impossible had supplied her need . Now, He will do that for the believer. That you can be assured of. But let me say it again it is a prayer for necessities. You might ask, “Well if He already knows what I’ve got need of why have I got to go and ask him?” For several reasons. If God came to you when you got saved and said, “Okay you are going to be living on this earth for the next 50 years. Here’s everything you will need.” And splat, He puts it in front of you. You might say, “That would be good wouldn’t it! Take away all my worries!” But God knows it would also be bad because you would soon get so wrapped up in what you’ve got that you would forget the one who gave it. Life isn’t lived like that. Life for the Christian is a life where you are dependent on your Heavenly Father and He loves to give you what you need. It gives him joy. Did you ever think of that? Your Father is pleased; He is glad to be able to give you what you need and just as any father or mother loves to hear the little child come and ask, so God delights to hear you come and ask Him. By asking Him, you acknowledge Him. All the world is rejecting Him. All the world is living without
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Him, and there is you and there is me in the middle of teeming thousands of men and women lifting up our hearts to God, acknowledging Him and asking Him and recognising Him as our Heavenly Father and thanking Him. You see now why he has done it this way and why prayer is that means by which we make our requests to God. We become God conscious and remain God conscious. We become God dependent and remain God dependent. We’re not carried away with what we’ve got, not relying on ourselves but trusting in the living God. That is what it’s all about. Forgiveness of debts The next one is, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” or what that really means is, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” What surprised me here was, why did the matter of our daily needs come first? Why didn’t we go in and say first of all forgive me my sins? Why didn’t we rush in first and talk in terms of well, don’t lead me into temptation? I just say this: we are physical creatures. If you are starving, if you are sick, if you are unwell, if you are hungry it actually affects the rest of your life. Can I repeat that as a doctor? I get so angry when I see a patient who is really ill, and they are weak and they are failing and then somebody comes in who is fit, happy and healthy and they stand there and they start almost abrading them, almost rebuking them for not rejoicing in the Lord and you see it all the time. When they are in that situation, they have a need. What is it? It’s a physical need. Let’s look at the example of Elijah. Why did he feel like quitting the ministry? He was exhausted, he was tired, he was hungry, and he sat under a juniper tree and he said, “Lord I am as bad as the rest of them, I am no use at all, I am a total failure, take away my life.” And the Lord said to Elijah, “You naughty boy Elijah, you disgusting prophet, Elijah!” NO! Of course He never said any of that. He said, “You just have to sleep for a little while and I will get my angel to bring you some bread and some water and we will talk about it later on.” So bear that in mind, will you? Your physical condition impacts on every other part of you: your spirit and your soul. There is therefore some responsibility to look after that in the correct and the right way. They go together - there is actually a relationship between illness and spiritual attitude and a lot of other things. So God is wise in telling us to pray this way. He made man, afterall. Next he says, “Forgive us our sins.” What does that mean? Think carefully for a minute, and I want you to consider whether you, on a daily basis, go to your Heavenly Father and tell him the things that you have done wrong in the day. Do you confess them and seek to have them put right with Him? Is that your normal behaviour? Be honest. Why does the Bible teach us to do that? Why is the bible distinctly saying, as part of your prayer life, go to your Heavenly Father and say, “Forgive us our debts, forgive us our trespasses, forgive us our sins.” When you got saved didn’t you get the forgiveness of sin? Answer: yes. Wasn’t the forgiveness full, total and complete? Answer: yes. You were justified; freed from your guilt. Then you became a child of God in the family with a Heavenly Father. But then you sin. What happens? Does God say to you, “You’re not my child anymore, get out. You’re not saved anymore, get lost.” NO! You are a child of God and you are forgiven, but you have done something which grieves Him. A sin. That sin cost Him the death of His only Son and caused the Lord Jesus Christ so much suffering on the cross.
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The situation can be compared to your position in your family, when you sin against your father. You have done wrong in the light of your parents and the standards of that family. What happened? Did they pick you up and boot you out of the family and say, “You’re no son, you’re no daughter of mine.” No. But when you went and sat down at the dinner table that night the atmosphere really wasn’t too good, was it? You know, there is just something between you and them. And you might be sitting at the same table but there’s a barrier between you. You might sort of laugh or joke or try to get passed it or you might sit and sulk. There’s a cloud that’s come between you and your earthly father, you see. Something has disrupted the happiness of the family and of your enjoyment of the happiness of the family. This is what happens when the Christian sins. It’s like a cloud comes between you and your Heavenly Father and His smiling face, if I could put it that way. And you go to him in prayer and you find that there is something wrong. There is a cloud between you. And you suddenly find that all your enjoyment of the Lord and that light spirit which comes within you, that sense of peace and happiness and joy is just not there like it used to be. What’s wrong? Well there’s something you need to tell Him you’ve done that’s wrong and there’s something you need to ask His forgiveness for, as a Heavenly Father. Not as a God of punishment and judgement to relieve you from going to hell but to just take away that distance and that cloud so that you’re back into the enjoyment of the family to which you belong. Now the truth is that you still belong to the family. That is the first truth. The second truth is you are still the child but the difference is you are now back enjoying it all over again. We also confess our sins because we hate them. They stay on our conscience. It is never normal to be a Christian, to sin and not to have a conscience about it. It is between you and God. It’s spoiling your walk and your witness and it’s taking away from the meaning of real life. So you ask for His forgiveness not so that you won’t go to hell but so that you enjoy again what it means to be part of the family As we forgive our debtors Then you say to Him, “Lord what I’m asking for is I’m asking you to do this to me because that is exactly what I do to other people.” Just think that through will you? “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” What you are actually saying is that you are illustrating what you want from Him by what you do for others. When it comes to forgiving people that wrong you, it can be extremely difficult. In the world you will not find forgiveness from other people. You will find payback, grudge bearing and bitterness. And when you wrong somebody out there in the workplace, don’t kid yourself, they will seldom forget it! They won’t be the same to you as they were and often when you try to put it straight they won’t even let you. The difference with the Christian is that you’ve done wrong many times yourself and you’ve got God’s forgiveness and you know how much He’s forgiven you, and God says, “If you belong to my kingdom you will be like me and you will do to others what’s been done to you.” No you won’t be looking for payback, you won’t be looking for revenge, you won’t be bearing a grudge, you will actually be forgiving other people as freely and as frankly and as fully as I have forgiven you. Forgiveness because we have been forgiven. This marks out the Christian as different to all other people. At the same time when we fail to forgive, we dishonour God. When we fail to forgive,
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God says, “I will do exactly the same to you, not because I am going to send you to hell again but because I want you to learn the importance of every subject in my kingdom being like the King, having the character of the King and living as the King has lived. Treating others as you have been treated by almighty God.” It is essential that the Christian is a forgiving person. It is one of the hallmarks of the fact that we are saved and changed. I realise how big a sinner I am, I was, and I continue to be and I find a God who forgives me because of Jesus Christ and I enjoy his forgiveness. I have been set free from a debt I never could pay so when someone wrongs me I am only too ready to do for them what has been done for me. This would transform every Christian group if there was forgiveness one to the other. But there is not. There is not. There is not. God forgive us. There is not. Why do we fight, quarrel, schism, stand off from one another? No forgiveness! You say, “Well, you only forgive when somebody repents.” Let me say something about that. Let us say for instance that Brendan here wronged me really badly. Something really serious that really went deep and really mattered. And I look at him and I think, “I’ll teach him a lesson!” Is that how you feel? No. I look at him and I say, “God tells me I must forgive him.” You say, “Well that’s fine I will just stand back here and when he comes and says sorry I will do that.” When the person comes in repentance, right, it is very easy. It is much easier, I should say, to extend forgiveness to somebody who comes and says they have wronged you. If you as a Christian will refuse to do that then I’ve got to say you do not know anything about forgiveness yourself. If Brendan comes to me and he says, “Sorry Paul, I did you wrong,” and I say that’s it, handshake, forget it, we are brothers back enjoying our relationship again. But, before Brendan came to me I cannot look at him with bitterness and grudge bearing. I can’t take the attitude that I’m not going to beat him up, I’m not going to run him down but I’m still going to let him know where he stands. No! I look at him and I say, “In my pocket here I’ve got something to give that man if only he will come and ask me for it.” What I’ve got is forgiveness. I have got it in my heart, from my heart. I always liken it to the handkerchief in the pocket you know. A clean folded white handkerchief. You’ve got it there and you are going to take it out and use it just at the right time, when it is needed, but you always have it there. So also you must forgive from your heart every man for those sins which they sin against you. I am not suggesting that this is easy, but this is the way of the master, this is the way of the king, this is the way of the Christian. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And he is saying, “If you can say that and you can do that you are proving that you are speaking to one who truly is your Heavenly Father and you are a real Christian.” Now put it into practice in your marriage. Put it into practice in the family in the home. Put it into practice between your friends. Put it into practice in the church circle. The real meaning of forgiveness for wrongs that have been done to you. Let’s look at an example from Jesus in Matthew 18:21: 21 Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. 23 Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24 And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. 25 But as he was not able to pay, his master com-
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manded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. 26 The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ 27 Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt.
Now that’s where you and I stand. People who have been forgiven a debt we could never, never repay. The debt was our sin against God.
28 “But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ 29 So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ 30 And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. 31 So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. 32 Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me.
Now that is exactly what God did to you and me. He forgave us because we asked him.
33 Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ 34 And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him.
35 “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.”
Because if you don’t do it, if you don’t find that you can do it, then that means that you have never been forgiven in the very first place and you will never be in the kingdom of God. You will be eternally shut out.
Therefore, I go to my Heavenly father as I wrong him, and I say, “Forgive me my debts, forgive me my trespasses, forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me.” One last point: make confession of your sin part of your daily prayer life. Always do it when you have done something wrong. Do one more thing: Don’t be just general about what you say to the Lord. “Oh Lord I thought the wrong things today, oh Lord I said the wrong things today, oh Lord I treated somebody wrong today.” That is general. Don’t do that. Actually say who or actually say what. Name it and describe it. Then you will feel it. You will feel more ashamed of it. You will understand what sin is a lot better and you will get God’s forgiveness and you will know, you will enjoy the fact He is your Heavenly Father. He doesn’t become your Heavenly Father again - he always was - but you will be back enjoying it all over again. END
The other parts of this study are available from http://bibleclass.com.au/
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