April 12, 2026: Forgiveness, Part 2 - Matthew 6:12

So we are moving our way week by week through the Lord's Prayer.

Today we are talking about forgiveness.

And I should point out and note to you, this is actually Part 2

of of forgiveness. We began this sermon really last

week on Easter Sunday, and this is the second section of this.

So if you missed last week, a lot of the important groundwork

for this week was laid then. And I would refer you back to

that sermon as a mode of review. We can see that we have talked

every week about this very important address.

We must not forget, as the week's go by, to whom we are

praying. We are praying to our Heavenly

Father. This Father, this tender term of

adoption and intimacy, means that He cares for us and he's

willing to hear our prayers. But he is also our Heavenly

Father, a term of great power, authority, and of knowledge.

He's not only willing to hear our prayers, but He is able to

act in our behalf. We've noticed that the petitions

of the Lord's Prayer kind of come in two sets.

There are three that are God oriented concerning His name and

His agenda, His Kingdom. And there are three that are

related to our needs. And it's important to have the

order right. Remember to whom we're praying,

think about God's will and glory 1st and then move into our

petitions. We talked about Our Daily Bread,

and now we're talking about forgiveness, for we need

forgiveness in as much as or more than even our own physical

needs. Extremely important.

Talked about how also the Lord immediately in this context in

Matthew 6, riffs a little bit on this idea of forgiveness

immediately after the prayer. It says this For if you forgive

others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also

forgive you. But if you do not forgive others

their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your

trespasses. And at first pass, it sounds

like our forgiveness is conditioned upon our forgiveness

of others. And we talked about this last

week. Our forgiveness of others is not

causing our our forgiveness with God, but rather our forgiveness

of others is evidence that we have been forgiven.

And you can see this very clearly in Matthew 18 in the

parable of the unforgiving servants, which we went through

last week, that the servant who has been forgiven is willing to

forgive. And if he isn't, then something

is wrong with his faith. And we talked about this last

week. So last week we spent quite a

bit of time on the need and provision for forgiveness in the

Gospel. And this week is more about

application. This week we want to talk about

the how of proper forgiveness, particularly in our

relationships, one with another. Everybody needs forgiveness.

Everyone knows what it's like to be shut out from forgiveness.

Deaf, sleepless nights related to a broken relationship, maybe

a misunderstanding, maybe a heinous sin or crime.

We also know what it's like to be on the side of someone who's

been offended. The need to give forgiveness is

hard. We'd rather sometimes bear a

grudge and to continue to punish.

But unless the Lord do a great work in our lives and our hearts

and give us a miracle of forgiving love, we will live in

a type of hellish prison. Someone has said to not forgive.

It's to like take poison expecting the other person to

die. So apartment, so apartment.

So this morning I'm going to go quickly and I've decided and

when I was prepping this week that there's just too much for

you. There's going to be baptisms

today and all of the you very studious note takers.

I'm just going to give you a break today in your bulletin.

My whole outline is printed for you.

You can copy it down later. You can copy down now.

I don't care. But you're not going to have to

worry about not capturing something that you want to have.

It's all there because there was too much in too short a time

briefly to review. And I talked more about this

last week. So there's an important

relationship between forgiveness and justice.

It's no good to have a judge that just forgives everything

all the time. A society that had judges that

just forgave everything all the time would descend into chaos.

There must be law and order. There must be justice.

And we talked last week about Romans 325 and 26 and we talked

about the need and provision for forgiveness.

It's because of the work of Jesus Christ the God.

The righteous judge is able to be both the just and the

justifier of those who asked for forgiveness.

Our key text there's Romans 325 and 26.

Because of Jesus, God can be the just and the justifier of those

who ask for forgiveness. Similarly, but maybe in a more

narrow focus, there's also a close relationship between

forgiveness and discipline. And with that word discipline, I

have in mind church discipline or the discipline in your home

or the discipline in an institution.

And we know that forgiveness must go with discipline because

even in Matthew 18, where this amazing parable of the

unforgiving servant is located, just before the parable, Jesus

gives a teaching on discipline. He gives a protocol for

discipline before he gives the parable.

Peter asks then after that to teaching, Lord, how often will

my brother sin against me? And I forgive him as many as

seven times. He thinks he's being generous.

And Jesus said to him, I do not say to you 7 times, but 77

times. In other words, just keep

forgiving him as many times as he asks and there's a tension

there. You worry, Wow, is Jesus saying

there should never be consequences or discipline of

any kind? He's not.

He just got done teaching about discipline.

So whatever your theology of forgiveness is, it must fit with

what the Lord has talked about in the larger picture of justice

and discipline. Sometimes there's forgiveness,

but there's still consequences. Following the parable, the

unforgiving servant, if you look down even as the next chapter,

Jesus going to give teaching about divorce.

Sometimes there's forgiveness and yet still hard consequences.

You have to be savvy and wise as we put these things together, as

we think about how we are going to be forgiveness agents in

God's broken world. Forgiveness must go with a

theology of discipline. Next, and I'm going to go too

fast and I'm not going to be able to show you all the

biblical bases for these applications that I'm going to

give you today. I hope that you can forgive

this. Much of what I have to say to

you can be found in Timothy Lane and Paul David's trip.

Paul Paul David Tripp's book. It's a great title.

You're ready. Relationships a mess worth

making. Hallelujah.

Amen. Short book, chapter 10.

The chapter about forgiveness is worth the price of the book.

Change my thinking forever. Change the way I operate the

world. Change the way I parent and work

in my marriage with Deidre. To be a wise and faithful

forgiving Christian, much of what I have to say is tethered

to this. I've also included the reference

in the bulletin if you're wondering about where this is

and what that is. They argue, and I agree, that

forgiveness has both a vertical and a horizontal dimension.

And in this case they are talking about our relationships

with one another. Somebody asks me every year,

probably Pastor Dan, can I forgive somebody who doesn't ask

for it? I need to wait until they ask

for it in order to give forgiveness.

And the answer to this according to Lane and Trip is yes and no.

There's a vertical aspect. Somebody, somebody has offended

you. There's a vertical aspect where

you can you can talk to God about that person, say Lord,

this person is sinned against me, it's eating me up.

But I want to forgive that person they haven't asked for,

but I want to forgive that person.

And in a sense you can forgive that person.

You sort of pre certified their forgiveness like your insurance

company. So should they ask, you're

already primed and ready to go. And in fact, you've already

released them in some sense before God.

They're pre forgiven. Blaine and Tripp argue, and I

agree, that true reconciliation can't really happen until the

person asks for forgiveness, or until the attempt has been made

and reconciled. That horizontal relationship is

conditioned upon repentance. It's not always possible.

Sometimes someone dies before it can happen.

It's something that we live with, has a chronic condition, a

type of limp in this world, and yet there is grace upon grace.

So these dimensions of forgiveness, you can pray before

God to pre certify someone's condition in the vertical

dimension and horizontally when they come and they ask, or when

you approach them and work to reconcile, you can then have

full and complete forgiveness in the horizontal plane as well.

Next, we need to talk about the process of forgiveness, the

process of forgiveness. Now it's important to note that

forgiveness is both an event and a process.

Forgiveness is both an event and a process.

And our ceremony, our Christian rite of baptism helps us think

about this. For just as in the Gospel, we

receive forgiveness of sins in our pardon as an event when

you're justified by grace through faith, there's an

ongoing process of sanctification whereby we are

made holy day by day by day, again by faith and grace in the

work of Jesus on the cross. Baptism kind of represents the

events. It's a type of ritual.

Bath symbolizes the death, burial and resurrection of

Christ our Lord and your justification.

It's the sign of initiation into the visible church and so we

don't repeat it over and over and over again.

Just once reminds you of the story of Jesus in the upper room

when he goes to wash his disciples feet.

Remember what Peter says. You're not going to wash my

feet. I love Peter, don't you?

Jesus is like, well, if I don't wash your feet, then you can

have nothing to do with me. Well, then in that case, watch

all of me give me a bath. And once again, Jesus is like,

that's not necessary. You're already, you're already

clean. The events already happen.

We have this ongoing foot washing thing, this

sanctification, this process that is ongoing.

And similarly, when we come to the Lord's Prayer and we pray

for forgiveness, Christian, you've been forgiven.

But there's ongoing process after the event.

And that's exactly how it works in our relationships with one

another, too. There's an event, there's sort

of a transaction of forgiveness, but then there's an ongoing sort

of maintenance that is necessary.

And the greater the offense, the greater the crime, the harder

that maintenance is. It's going to feel impossible.

It is impossible. And that's why it's in the

Lord's Prayer. You have to cry out to God just

like you're asking for your daily bread, you're crying out

to God to ask you to for the forgiveness necessary to forgive

the people that you sin against. That we need forgiveness in our

relationship. So we're talking about process

as an event and a process. So leading up to the event,

there is a series of stages. First, there's a confrontation.

Hopefully this is not an angry confrontation.

Perhaps better to talk about the initiation of a conversation and

it can happen on either side. You have been offended and you

can go to the person who is offending you and say, Sir,

please listen, I need to talk to you about something.

So if you are the one who has been offended, you can initiate

the conversation and a type of confrontation.

Or if you're the one that feels convicted that you have sinned

against someone, you may go and initiate a conversation of

forgiveness. Look, I, I need to ask for your

forgiveness. I didn't tell you the truth back

there. I lied.

So there is this initial phase, this beginning a confrontation,

initiation of a conversation. But next there is a negotiation.

You in this beginning phase, even discovery phase of this

conversation, if you will. You want to find out if there's

any mitigating circumstances or even if what you're offended by

is a sin or not a sin. There's going to be a talk

whereby you analyze the ethics of what happened and agree upon

a judgement. Hopefully.

Maybe there was no sin and no forgiveness is necessary.

A mistake has been made. Maybe there's a

misunderstanding. You want to talk that out with

lots of openness and clarity. Hopefully you're narrowing in on

the problem and you want to discover, yes, there is a sin

and this sin requires forgiveness from the treasury of

our Lord Jesus Christ who has given us forgiveness to extend

to others. After this negotiation, if

there's a judgement, indeed, yes, there is a sin or sins,

maybe on one side or on both sides, then now it's time for

the event, the judgement of repentance.

The cost is absorbed by the cross of Jesus Christ and

forgiveness is granted, like a judge granting A pardon to one

or both of these who are seeking reconciliation, gospel

reconciliation. So now we have repentance and

because of this condition we can grant forgiveness and that's the

event. That's the event, the event of

forgiveness. Difficult.

You may actually need help negotiating those things.

You may need to do what Matthew 18 describes.

We're one-on-one, then two on one.

We're three on one where there's a growing amount of discernment

needed in order to reconcile. But once this forgiveness is

granted, now we go move into the process of ongoing forgiveness.

I call this maintenance. Maintenance Lane and Tripp argue

that in this ongoing process of forgiveness, this maintenance

that you're giving, you're extending A threefold promise.

You're extending A threefold promise.

This promise is to not bring up this incident in the future to

gain leverage. To not bring up this incident in

the future to gain leverage. Something else happened.

You're like bring just dredging up the past.

No forgiveness means you promise not to weaponize the past. 1st

to the person themselves. If you live with this person,

you engage them in an ongoing basis.

You're not going to hold a grudge.

You're not going to keep bringing it back up.

You're going to let it go. You're also making a pledge, a

type of promise to not bring up this incident to the community

around you. Sometimes this is disappointing

because we want to tell somebody, Can you believe what

he did to me? Oh, no, he didn't.

We want the community to know. We want the the feeling of

empathy. Maybe we want to punish them

still. So there's a promise not to

bring it up to the person for leverage or to the community.

It's a form of slander or gossip.

But we're also making a promise to try, And this is the hardest

one, to try to not continue to rehearse our hurts over and over

and over again in our own minds and hearts.

That, my friends, is the toxic road to bitterness.

And by this we punish ourselves far more than we punish the

person we are seeking to have a grudge against.

And this is where the most needed prayer, and the medicine

of prayer in this particular petition is needed daily.

Forgive me, help me, forgive him, forgive her.

This should not be made light of.

And if a person is weaponizing this unconditional sort of

radical obedience, perhaps boundary is needed.

And these are hard conversations that you may need to seek wise

counsel for, But this is how it's supposed to work.

We promise not to bring it up as leverage.

You know, the Bible says, we think the Bible says forgive and

forget. You know, there isn't actually a

Bible verse that has a command for you.

And oh, Christian, forgive and forget.

It's not in there. You can keep looking.

It's not in there. Now there is a Bible verse that

talks about the Lord's dealing with our sins as a type of

forgetfulness. He will remember our sins no

more, the Bible says in Jeremiah.

Now, that does not mean that the Lord forgets something.

He's omniscient. He can't forget something.

Forget in that verse means he doesn't hold it against us

anymore. He has issued A pardon.

Some of us have thought that we need to, in order to forgive

somebody, to work to sort of somehow erase our memories.

We ever tried to do that. That's not possible, and that's

not what the Bible is saying. It is rather to grant oneself to

the other person this threefold promise, to not hold it against

them, to bring it up into the future against their person, or

take it to the community, or to keep rehearsing it to yourself.

That's helpful. And the last thing that we'll

share in this brief sermon this morning is the script of

forgiveness. And this is where the book

really helped me change the way I interact, change the way I

teach my children to engage with one another, to give them a

better script for forgiveness. Now script sounds a little

inauthentic. I don't mean inauthentic

forgiveness. We want forgiveness from the

heart. But sometimes we need to learn

the words of forgiveness before we can feel the feelings of

forgiveness. Sometimes those feelings lag

long behind and we have to front load and grant forgiveness, even

if we don't yet feel it. So what is the script of

forgiveness? Well, first of all, and I'm not

laying down hardcore rules, there are not Bible verses that

you know, tie you to a certain like really strict script of

forgiveness. This is wise counsel given by

godly counselors in lane and trip.

First, it's helpful to reserve. I'm sorry for non sin categories

like mistakes, errors and accidents.

The word I'm sorry, I'm sorry comes from the word sorrow.

I have sorrow for something sad circumstantially that has

happened and say I trip over my feet and spill my water all over

you. I'm sorry.

I'm I'm sorry that happened. And as long as I wasn't being

negligent, there was not a sin category related to my stumbling

fall. And you're soaking, so you're no

good demanding that I beg you for forgiveness when there's no

sin. But I would be a real jerk if I

didn't say I'm so sorry. I have sorrow for this.

Children, by the way, can't really tell the difference.

They sort of feel internally the same way whether they've spilled

their water or whether they've punched their sister.

So they need clarity, parents from you to know when they need

to go through a liturgy of forgiveness or whether they need

to apologize for a mistake or an error or an accident.

And the siblings will need help knowing if they should be

demanding of this. No, you're not owed an apology.

This is something sad that has happened.

And you can say you're sorry. You should say you're sorry with

kindness. This is not a forgiveness

scenario. So that clarity is very helpful,

very helpful not only for grown-ups, but for children as

well. I'm sorry I have sorrow for

these things. Forgiveness is a little more

narrow. Forgiveness has to do with sin.

Use the words forgive me for sins.

And it's important, friends, that we are honest about our

sins and we don't try to justify them and call them all mistakes,

which we desperately want to do, by the way.

All of us have an inner lawyer that wants to blame shift and

make excuses and call our sins our mistakes.

Fire them. Get out of here, buddy.

I'm going to own this with the type of biblical repentance that

we see in the heroes of Scripture.

Forgive me, but before we say forgive me, we have to name the

sin in as much as we can with the clarity the Lord has given

us. I identify a sin, Name it.

Please forgive me for name it. And now comes the request for

forgiveness. And we put the word humbly on

there for a very important reason, because Christians are

awfully good about weaponizing this into a demand.

Now, you know, you're a Christian.

That means Jesus said you have to forgive me.

I ask you for forgiveness, you have to forgive me.

That is not a humble approach. That is not a repentant frame.

The request for forgiveness always comes in a beggarly way.

Please forgive me. Acknowledging the sin,

acknowledging that you were indebted, putting out a plea in

a humble way. And it's hard parents to teach

kids to get this right because they say things like sorry.

All right, let's try that again. We're going to start at the top.

You can't say sorry and you help them.

And it's amazing how that liturgy of forgiveness, when

you're trying to teach siblings how to respond to one another,

how that can, that can work on you too.

And if you don't want to have kids, that's fine.

There's lots of opportunities to practice in all of life.

Please forgive me now, the one that has to extend the

forgiveness. This sometimes is the hardest

part because we might want to retain the grievance.

We may want to keep rehearsing it and holding it.

And the Lord does teach us because of what he's done on the

cross to let it go, let it go. And it's amazing how being so

explicit with the words, I forgive you, how powerful those

are. This is different, friends, than

just saying it's fine, no worries, it's not fine.

Even small sins are not considered small and Holy

Scripture. These are things for which

Christ gave his life and shed his blood costly.

Now you may want to act nonchalant, but it's probably

just better to use the words and say I forgive you.

You don't have to make it a big deal.

What a pomp and circumstance. Make the person grovel.

No, you just generously and briefly grant the pardon.

I forgive you. And then begins the work on your

knees before God, the maintenance to refuse to bring

it up again to them, to the community.

And the hardest one of all 2 ones self.

This is the script of forgiveness.

Hopefully you'll forgive the brevity and look it up more

deeply. I promise this is biblical and

wise counsel. We're going to conclude where we

started, remembering that our sin is what produces this

hostility. But praise be to God, because of

the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, forgiveness is possible

as an event and as an ongoing process so that we may be

reconciled one with another. We've been concluding by praying

the Lord's Prayer together. If you don't know it, that's OK.

We're going to say it together if you if you'd like to.

If you don't know it, you just listen.

When we get to the line about sins or deaths or trespasses,

we'll say trespasses. Will you pray with me, our

Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy

Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our

trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine

is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.

Amen.