Sometimes we’re so familiar with something we miss its obvious significance. The Lord’s Prayer is one of these things; every Christian has either recited it in church many times, or read it in the gospels, and knows how central it is to the teaching of Jesus. I was recently reminded how easy it is to miss the profundity contained in Jesus’ simple prayer at a church service at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. We were down visiting my best friend forever from 7^th grade, Greg Luther Smith, and heard Pastor Rob  Pacienza preach about being forgiven and forgiving, and how intimately they are tied together. It was a powerful sermon, which was indicated by my taking copious notes, and I knew I had to write about it.

He broke Jesus’ message down to a typically pastoral three points:

1. Vertical Forgiveness
2. Horizontal Forgiveness
3. Vertical and Horizontal Power

Basically, God forgives us, we forgive others, and there is life transforming power flowing both ways. It almost seems trite, this forgiveness. We all know the heart of the Christian religion is grace and mercy, the cross, and the love and forgiveness flowing out of it, but what makes it so profound is when it’s actually practiced and experienced in the crucible that is real life lived in a fallen world among fallen people in our fallen bodies. These are not just mere ideas that happen to work when we practice them, that we do them simply because they make life so much easier and more pleasant. We practice forgiveness because it is the very essence and foundation of our faith and the Christian religion, and makes a life of true flourishing and blessing possible. This takes us back 4,000 years to God’s calling and promise to Abram in Genesis 12:

³ I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

Given God is never in a hurry, and it would be 2,000 years before we learn how this blessing is to flow to all peoples on earth in and through Christ, in and through us his people. It would be a spiritual blessing of being reconciled to God that would have profound relational and material blessings throughout the earth. Forgiveness is central to these blessings.

Vertical Forgiveness
Pastor Rob started the sermon with a statement he remembers from his premarital counseling:

The power of forgiveness is the key ingredient to a healthy marriage.

Having celebrated our 39^th wedding anniversary this past August, I could have shouted out in a less Presbyterian setting, “Amen!” This reminded me of the very first words our premarital counselor told us:

The only sinner bigger than the one you’re marrying is you.

When you understand and accept the truth of this statement, you’ll see why forgiveness is so important to a marriage and what makes it possible. This, it seems to me, is as obvious as it is difficult to practice. We’re rebellious self-centered little buggers, and we tend to believe other people, especially our spouses, are bigger sinners than we are, which of course makes forgiving them all the harder.

A lack of forgiveness is a relationship killer, any relationship. Yet how many marriages are destroyed because of a refusal to forgive. Over time in our marriage, it became apparent that forgiving my wife was a choice, and as the saying goes, it wasn’t even a choice. As a Christian I was compelled to forgive because God in Christ forgave me, and he did so when I was his enemy! What makes the cross such a powerful symbol in our lives is that forgiven people forgive, or they should. For God to be able to forgive me, and to remain just, the penalty had to be paid, and as we know that penalty is death. It seems harsh, but we don’t make the rules; we are born into them. It becomes clear to us very early in life that we live in a moral universe, where right and wrong, good and evil, exist. That means punishment and rewards are part of the deal.

Think about a child taking a toy some other child is playing with. What’s their first response? “That’s mine! Give it back!” And if the child doesn’t get it back, the mother or father might say, don’t worry about it, let the other kid have it. The response is inevitably, “But that’s not fair!” The child intuitively, viscerally, feels injustice, and that justice should be done. When obvious wrong is done, all human beings feel that justice must be done, that wrongs must be righted, that debts must be paid. God is the foundation of the moral order, and as creatures made in his image we bear the implant of the moral order in our beings. When Adam ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, sin and death entered the world, and forgiveness became a necessary ingredient of existence.

From the very beginning God had a plan, and we see the need for sacrifice and forgiveness revealed to us throughout the history of redemption, ultimately fulfilled in Christ. The price for sin, death, had to be paid, if man was to be reconciled to God. The legal demand exists and must be paid. Every other religion and philosophy that has ever existed agrees, that the debt must be paid, but in all of them the debt has to be paid by you! Only in Christianity was the debt paid by another, and that by the one against whom the debt was incurred, God himself in Christ. The saying, you can’t make this stuff up! applies here, literally. Human beings don’t make up a religious system where the one offended incurs the penalty of the offender, or there would not be only one religion that does that. In the made up religions, the offender pays their own penalty so justice can be done. In Christianity, by contrast, the justice is done by God for us. One of the most powerful passages of vertical forgiveness is from Colossians 2:

¹³ When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, ¹⁴ having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

Our relationship to God, our Creator, defines everything about us, and he reconciled us to himself when we were completely powerless, dead, to do anything about it. When Jesus said it is finished on the cross, the penalty had been paid, the legal debt to God had been cancelled, the exchange took place, Christ’s righteousness for our sin. Now we are free to forgive others, to live, as Paul calls it, in the ministry of reconciliation, to transform enmity and strife into friendship, peace, and love.

Horizontal Forgiveness
The way we do this is realizing forgiven people forgive others, or they should. The vertical forgiveness we receive from God naturally flows into horizontal forgiveness for others, or it should. The most important need of the human heart is to be forgiven, to be accepted, loved and cherished as if our lives really mattered to others. On the other side, the next most important need of the human heart is to forgive, to be the kind of person who forgives others when offense is given. If we don’t, we will not only destroy the relationship, bur ourselves and others. This is what the writer to the Hebrews gets at in these verses from chapter 12:

¹⁴ Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. ¹⁵ See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

Roots grow underground, they are invisible, but without roots the tree doesn’t exist, doesn’t grow. The roots of bitterness, or unforgiveness, grow poisonous fruit, and the trouble caused in the person’s life stain or pollute or contaminate us and other people. Forgiveness, or lack thereof, is never just about the people directly involved, but many in their orbit. If we really want fruitful, flourishing, and blessed lives, we’ll live lifestyles of forgiveness. The word grace is critical to enabling such a lifestyle because, as we know, grace is unmerited favor. The other person cannot merit, or earn, forgiveness, because like God in Christ it must be freely given.

We can see how we do this from the words Jesus prays. He specifically uses the word debt for a reason, and not trespasses as Catholics read it. The idea is that when offense is given something is owed to the party offended, and forgiveness is declaring that we will not make the other person pay what they owe us. We’ll wipe the slate clean as if the debt had already been paid because it has, in Christ. Our debt was death, as Paul says, “the wages of sin.” Sin, whether against God or others, always incurs a debt, and because of Christ we get to decide what to do with it, whether we will make the other person pay for their guilt or not.

That means, the other’s repentance isn’t required before forgiveness will be granted. We simply decide because, as I said, we have no choice, to forgive. This doesn’t negate the earthly consequences of sin either. Just because I forgive someone, it doesn’t mean I have to be their best friend, or that there will not be real, harmful, material or relational consequences. These have to be negotiated with prudence and wisdom, for which we daily pray. The bottom line is that without forgiveness, we will either grow naïve or cynical, we’ll be taken advantage of and abused on the one hand, or live lives of distrust and suspicion on the other. Love expressing itself in forgiveness is the better way.

Vertical and Horizontal Power
One of the most radical and profound truths revealed to us about the nature of God in Scripture is that God is love, and in that revelation we learn that God’s love is efficacious. That means God’s love in the meaning of that word is capable of producing a desired result or effect, and because God is God, sovereign and all powerful, his love always accomplishes his desired end, which is our justification, sanctification, and redemption (I Cor. 1:30). The blessings he promised to come through Abram (Genesis 12), were accomplished in Christ, and is being fulfilled in his people. In I John 4, the Apostle is exhorting us to love one another, and he roots our ability to love others in God having first loved us. As he says in verse 19, “We love because he first loved us.”

That means we have the power, the ability and the capability, to love others, and a significant part of love is forgiveness. John tells us we have this power to love specifically because in loving us, God “sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins” (4:10). The word propitiation, what Christ accomplished on the cross, means an offering to appease or satisfy an angry, offended party. God’s wrath was fully satisfied in Christ, the debt our sin incurred, was fully paid, so that now if we become the offended party, we vicariously experience that propitiation toward others as God in Christ experienced toward us. Those who are forgiven are now able to forgive. We are no longer hostages to our pride which often gets in the way of forgiving others.

In speaking of the ministry of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul explains John’s point in another way, that this power, this ability is available to us because of what Christ has done for us. He says, “Christ’s love compels us” (v. 14). And because he died for us, those “who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (v. 15). This means as he says in the next verse, we no longer see people, literally, “according to the flesh.” The NIV says, “from a worldly point of view.” We now realize it’s no longer all about us! Just because someone wronged us, it’s not the most important thing in the world anymore. Our perspective is completely changed because everything is now viewed through the Christ lens, through forgiven to forgive.

This perspective and power available to us as God’s holy, set apart people, is especially important when we don’t want to love or forgive others. Just because we now have the ability to forgive, doesn’t mean it comes easily. Even as forgiven and redeemed sinners, we’re still self-centered sinners on this side of eternity. The beautify of Christianity, though, is that because we are rooted and established in Christ, we can each in our own feeble way, exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, which Paul tells us is, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5). Think about living a life filled with those things, and how glorious that would be, how glorious it is! If we compare that to the alternative, there is no comparison.

Lastly, Jesus puts his prayer in the affirmative. We are asking God to forgive our debts because we already forgive our debtors. In other words, we have no right to ask God for forgiveness if we don’t forgive others, but because we do, then we can pray with integrity, “Forgive us out debts, as we forgive our debtors.”