Episode #397 Forgiveness Doesn’t Mean What You Think – The Lord’s Prayer for Real Life

Hey, friend. Today we're talking with God through the Lord's Prayer, which is instruction that Jesus gave us as followers for how to come to God. Now, I grew up thinking the Lord's Prayer was a scripted prayer to pray, and you can pray those words to God. But it's not a script. It's insight into how to come to the Lord. In our awareness of Him, in our perspective, in our heart posture. And it's insight into the things that we can ask for His help in.

And today we're talking with Him about forgiveness, picking it up in Matthew 6 verse 12. It says, "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."

Forgiveness is one of those things that sounds really great until there's a person that we need to forgive, right? We love to receive forgiveness. It is such a freeing gift for us, and it's such a freeing gift that we then get to extend to other people.

In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus connects receiving forgiveness with becoming people who forgive. Because we have been forgiven, we get to be those who forgive others.

I have found that oftentimes when we struggle to forgive, it's because we misunderstand things about forgiveness. Part can be that we misunderstand the fullness of how God has forgiven us, and so it's really hard to offer to someone else something that we ourselves haven't received.

We also might have been taught incorrectly that if you forgive someone, you have to have immediate reconciliation back to the relationship before, or that forgiveness means you're removing the consequences, that you have to force instant trust.

None of those things are true. Forgiveness can happen while boundaries remain.

And I've been sitting with this passage from Hebrews 12. Talking about us as believers, how we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and we're running a race that we get to run with perseverance, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. And in verse one of Hebrews 12, it says, "Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles."

Unforgiveness can be one of those things that hinder our walks or that entangle us. Forgiveness releases the person and the outcome into God's hands, and sometimes that's a decision that we return to time and time again, choosing to forgive again. Recognizing, "Oh, this happened again, and I still forgive," or, "I've picked up that offense and I don't want to. I want to forgive them."

We get to operate in forgiveness from the grace that we have received. It's not coming from our own supply or abilities. This is one of those ways we partner with God. He empowers our forgiveness. And I'm spending so much time here because we're about to come to the Lord and talk with Him about forgiving someone or something. And so it's important to know that forgiveness doesn't call the wrong thing right. It places the wrong thing in God's hands, trusting Him to deal with it. Releasing it over, forgiving the debt of their wrongdoing against us.

And so as Jesus teaches us how to pray, He says that we can come to God asking for forgiveness of our debts and acknowledging that we also are forgiving those who have debts of sin against us.

And so here's a question I invite you to take to the Lord today, and talk with Him about any of the ways that this is hard or tender, and ask for His help:

God, when it comes to forgiveness, who or what are you inviting me to release into your hands?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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