Matthew 6:12 “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
As children approaching their Father we ask for the entire world to know the greatness and glory of His name. We pray for the embodiment of His kingdom to come and live within us in the baptism of the Holy Spirit and for His will to be done in and through us by the Word of God. Last week we saw that our Father led Jesus to teach us to pray for all of our needs to be met each day, that His concern with us is so great that there is nothing that we need that He is not aware of and willing to provide and His desire is for our trust in Him to be so established that we ask Him for all of our needs each and every day. Our Father loves our dependence upon Him, He created us to lean upon Him and He orders our steps in a manner that allows for us to lean upon Him. Maturity in God’s eyes is not when we outgrow our neediness but when we acknowledge our neediness and choose dependence upon Him over independence that we wrongly believe will prove our worth.
Now that we have prayed for all of our essential needs to be met Jesus teaches us to ask for our greatest need “forgive us our debts”. Forgiveness is our greatest need for many reasons. Paul wrote in Romans 3 that we are all sinners and come short of the glory of God (the very thing we have already prayed to be seen by the entire world through us). Psalm 51:5 says “I was brought forth in iniquity”. We are sinners by birth not simply by deed, when Adam sinned mankind sinned, we may not understand it, we may not like it but the reality is that “all like sheep have gone astray”, our nature is sinful simply because our nature is human. Our sinfulness is not our only reason for needing forgiveness, add to our sinful nature God’s holy character and we have a divide that cannot be crossed except by atonement, except by the Holy God paying for our sin and granting us forgiveness. Forgiveness is our greatest need because it paves the way for redemption, nothing and no one can be redeemed unless first forgiven. Jesus paid for our sin because if not paid in full, if not fully forgiven we would have had no opportunity for redemption, adoption and salvation. Being forgiven is the beginning of being restored, being redeemed, being delivered and being secured. Unless and until I know I am forgiven I live life in fear of being found out or cast out. It is forgiveness that allows me to believe I’m loved, to enter into relationship, to begin to establish trust and to lean back in dependence. Our greatest need is forgiveness because forgiveness is the beginning of redemption and we were all born to be redeemed, because God wills that none would perish but that all would come to repentance. But Jesus doesn’t teach us to just pray for forgiveness, at the exact same time that we ask to be forgiven, in the same sentence, the same breath He teaches us to pray for our forgiveness “as we forgive our debtors”. This teaches us our point for next week, forgiveness isn’t something we consume it is something we sow. The fruit of repentance becomes the seeds of forgiveness. We are forgiven to forgive, even in our prayer we are taught to pray that we would be equal in the forgiveness we receive and the forgiveness we grant, that the nature of the One who has forgiven us would become our nature so that we can follow Him in His example and be forgiving. When the nes forgiven become the forgivers the name of the Father is hallowed, His kingdom has come, His will is being done and we have been transformed. Forgiveness is our greatest need and it may just be our greatest calling.