10. Forgive Us Our Trespasses
You can’t read the gospels for long without noticing that forgiveness of sins is an important theme for Jesus. I am not so sure we understand it as much as we need to.
What I think is surprising for most of us is how often the context has to do with prayer and healing.
In Matthew’s gospel, immediately after Jesus gives to His disciples the Lord’s Prayer, He tells them that they need to forgive others their trespasses, otherwise God won't forgive them their trespasses.[1] He doesn’t elaborate on that; He just goes on to something else.
Several chapters later, a man is brought to Jesus in obvious need of healing, and Jesus begins by forgiving the man’s sins. The man didn’t ask for it, and I am sure he wasn’t expecting it. This issue became a point of instruction to the religious leaders who were present, but I can’t imagine that Jesus only forgave the man’s sins to prove a point.
Later in the New Testament, James mentions healing briefly, and he tells his readers to confess their sins to each other and pray for each other that they may be healed.[2]
Chapter 18 of Matthew speaks at length about forgiveness and ends with the thought that, if we don’t forgive others from our hearts, neither will our Father forgive us.
Mark 11 is the passage where Jesus tells us how to move mountains and how we should pray in light of that. He then concludes by saying that, when we are praying, we should forgive anyone who we have anything against, in order that our heavenly Father may forgive us.
Jesus does not spell out all that it means and how it affects us to have unforgiveness in our hearts. In most cases He was talking to His disciples, and we cannot believe that our eternal salvation is contingent on the constantly changing relationships that we have with people.
Some of us may find that, after having been hurt, we may struggle for years to be able to really forgive the person who has hurt us. We may differ here on what it means to forgive another person, whether it depends on the other person’s repentance, our ability to live with this person as if this thing never happened, and whether forgiveness implies that we no longer feel the hurt of the injustice.
The point is that none of the passages in the Bible that address our eternal salvation, how it is that we receive it, speaks of the need for forgiving every person who has ever hurt us as a precondition.
These are separate issues, but there certainly is some way that our unforgiving spirit has an effect on our relationship with God and our prayers. We don’t know in detail what the effect is, but we know that it is not a good one.
So three times in the gospels, Jesus warns us that, if we don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive us. Twice this warning follows His instructions on prayer. We may not know all that this may mean, but I think it is safe to say that not forgiving others can have an adverse effect on our prayers. We may pray for things, but the answer will not come (i.e. what we would call a No answer) when God would much rather have answered it (i.e. what we would call a Yes answer).
The common expression is that God always answers our prayers. Sometimes the answer is Yes, sometimes it is No, and sometimes it is later.
But we have seen earlier that this is not always the best explanation. Why would we need to be taught how to pray, if that did not mean that the outcomes were in some way dependent on how we prayed?
And now we see another factor that has an effect on the results. If we refuse to forgive those who have hurt us, our prayers can be hindered. This reminds me of that verse in I Peter, where Peter says that the prayers of a husband can be hindered by his not showing the proper respect for his wife.[3]
I think that, even apart from the fact that knowing unforgiveness hinders our prayers, we should try to understand why this would be the case.
At work, one of the tasks that I make sure I do is that of checking the loads in. Everyday we get in about 2 to 3 pallets of meat products to sell. If I don’t check the product for freshness, price, and just making sure that we are getting the correct merchandise, we can lose hundreds of dollars a week in potential profits.
As a part of this receiving process, I then have to pull the pallets from the receiving dock to our department. The pallets can weight anywhere from 1500 to 3,000 pounds. The weight of the pallet is not the biggest problem in moving them, but the condition of the handjack that I am using. I don’t know all the inner parts of these things, but I know they have wheels and ballbearings that help them turn.
If the wheels are not smooth and the bearings are not well lubricated, or if other parts are rubbing against one another, friction can make even the lighter loads difficult to move.
Now we cannot see into the invisible, spiritual realm that surrounds us and in which we live. We know from other passages in the Bible that the greatest commandments are to love God and other people.[4] That is another way of saying that the most important things in life to do are to love God and to love people.
There are many passages in the Bible about joy, but one in particular that stands out says that “the joy of the Lord is our strength.”[5]
So what is the connection in all this? The prayer first asks that God forgive us our trespasses. Falling short of God’s perfection is an inherent part of the human condition, but willful and subconscious transgressing of boundaries and standards set by God originate from a mindset that lacks confidence in the desirability of holding to those boundaries and standards.
Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they came to believe that God was somehow holding back on them, that this fruit contained something that they should really have to be fully happy and God wanted to keep it from them. They couldn’t believe that God really had their full best interests in mind. They couldn’t believe that they could be fully happy living completely as God wanted them to.
So much of our lives involves what we would call delayed gratification. We postpone our immediate means of providing pleasure in the belief that in the long run we will achieve more. So we go to work when we would rather stay in bed. We forego the ice cream because we believe we will be healthier for having done so.
But what happens when we lose our confidence that prolonging the gratification will give us more in the future? We rebel. We eat the ice cream, we indulge our fantasies, we let down our inhibitions.
And are we happier on the inside? Actually no. We experience some immediate forms of pleasure, but this pleasure is driven by our unhappiness, our anger, our frustration, our bitterness. So these immediate pleasures only have a temporary effect on us, because they are not dealing with these inner pains, these bigger issues.
We can have these issues with God, and we can have these issues with people. People can and do hurt us in myriad of ways. They reject our affections, they block our advancement, they hinder our efforts, they ridicule our dreams. They refuse to give us the opportunities we need, the respect we crave, the rewards for our efforts.
We want to be self-sufficient, because only then can we have full control over whether our needs will be met. But what we find then is either that we can’t escape our need for the approval or affirmation or affection of others or we find that inwardly we are becoming cold and dark and sad. Because we are alone.
People have transgressed against us. And the worst part is that either they don’t know it or they don’t even care. So we are angry, we are hurt, we are frustrated.
And this anger, this hurt, this frustration, is like rust on the ballbearings of life. They are like foreign substances that have adhered to the surface of the wheels that cause them to slide rather than revolve. They are like tiny chips of wood or tiny pieces of debris that, when you are trying to pull a heavy pallet of meat over them, stop the whole thing from moving.
The Greek word used here for forgiving is a)fi/hmi (a-fi´-ay-me), which basically means “to let go.” To forgive someone is to let it go. It’s like you are taking all that anger, that bitterness, that hurt, and just letting the wind blow them away. Instead of clutching them to your chest, you just open your arms and let them fall where they will.
So first we acknowledge before God that we have failed to love Him and trust Him and do all the things that we believe He would want us to. We want to be happy and successful and fulfilled in life, but life is often hard. We don’t see how things are going to turn out, and it certainly looks like it can go many different ways. We are tired, we are hurt, and we are in need of comfort. And we haven’t always seen God as always insuring us of the right outcome. We are afraid that surely it must depend in some way on us, and we are afraid we can’t live up to what we need to do that.
So we have taken shortcuts. We have taken sidetracks. We have done things just because they felt good at the time, and not because we believed that these were the best things that could have been done at that time. These were not things that Jesus would have done. But we had to do something, and this is what we felt like doing at the time.
God, forgive us. We feel like we are walking in the dark, and we don’t know hard much farther we have to go. And we are tired of the trip, and we are beginning to wonder if our dreams will ever come true. How long must we wait? Will we ever be really happy this side of heaven? Or is always going to be one thing or another that we have to see our way through?
And then we have to face the things that other people have done to us. Maybe they meant it, or maybe they just weren’t paying attention to our feelings. After all, they have their own problems. They aren’t aware of our hurts, our needs, our past. They know only of their own.
If we hold on to these hurts and our anger, we are putting dirt in our carburetors and sand in our gas tanks. When we can let go of our hurts, our anger, our pain, it is like putting fresh grease on our axles and new oil in our engines. It brings harmony back to the symphony of life.
Asking forgiveness from God is related to forgiving others, because you cannot really seek the one without doing the other. Other people act out of the same self-interest that we act out of. When they hurt us, they are either expressing the same indifference to our wants or the same hostility that we express to God when we choose our way over His.
If we don’t forgive others, we are not really understanding or addressing our own attitudes and motives. And it is far more serious for us to act this way toward God than for others to do the same towards us.
To understand ourselves is to understand others, and the first step to forgiving them. The first step to understanding ourselves is to see ourselves in our relationship to God. We see His laws, and we see our response to them. We see the difficulty we have in trying to keep them, and we understand the motives that drive us to do the things we do.
We see our need for forgiveness, because we see how our own needs and desires show the inadequacies and deficiencies in our relationship with God. We see our need to forgive others, because we realize that they are not the problem. If we could but trust and love God fully, what others do or don’t do to us will not be an issue for us, but opportunities for us to show the love of God to them.
Forgive us our trespasses. Don’t do to us what we have been doing to others, because it’s killing us. It’s poisoning our insides. We forgive others, because they are the same hurting creatures that we are. This cycle of hurt and hate and anger has to stop somewhere. Let it stop here. And now.
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