Later this morning I go for my 8th cycle of chemotherapy out of 12 total. I am praying for the ability to endure the coming sickness and to not lose heart. I am also continuing to ask the Lord to kill the cancer by these means. Thank you for your prayers.
I have suggested in previous posts that what those with cancer should pray is the same thing that those without cancer should pray. What we should ask our Father in heaven to do has been told us by the Lord Jesus when he gave us what is called the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). Today I want to reflect on what is perhaps the most difficult part of the prayer to understand. The fifth petition of the prayer goes like this (ESV): "Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors." We will consider the first half of the petition today and the second half later.
Jesus commands us, each and every day (That this prayer is to be prayed every day is seen in the previous petition, "Give us today our daily bread"), to ask our Father in heaven to forgive us our debts. The way that Jesus states this petition shows that the concept of forgiveness comes out of the world of economics. Each and every day we "borrow" or "take" something from God which belongs to him and we use it for ourselves thus placing ourselves in debt to God. We are legally obligated to pay him back but we have no resources by which to pay him back, thus each day we ask him to release us from the debt, to forgive the debt.
How do we put ourselves in debt to God? It is by our sins. This can be clearly seen when Jesus repeats this prayer in abbreviated form in Luke 11:4. There Jesus states this petition like this: "and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us." Here the concepts of sin and debt are combined. So how are we to understand our sin? Everything we are and have has been given to us by God. He gave us our life so that we would love him, be delighted with him, desire him above all other things. As Jesus said, the first and greatest commandment is to love God with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, strength. Jesus also said that there is a second commandment that is like the first; we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. God aims for us to use all that he has given us to joyfully serve our neighbors. Thus every failure to love God and to love our neighbor during each day is to take the "wealth" that he gave us and to squander it on ourselves. We've not given God what we owe him, that is, we've sinned and thus we are in his debt.
Our situation with God is like the person who gets a small business loan from the bank to start a new business. However, instead of using the money to start a business the person takes the money and goes to the Ho Chunk casino in Wisconsin Dells and loses all of it gambling. He owes the bank and has no way to pay the bank back as he has no business from which to get income. In a similar way when we use all that God has given us to serve ourselves and not to love God and others we are in his debt with no way to pay him back. Thus our only hope is if God will forgive us.
This leads to another issue. Jesus commands Christians to ask their Father to forgive them each day. However, the NT makes very clear that all the sins of Christians have already been forgiven by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Consider these few NT texts, out of scores that could be cited: Colossians 2:13-14, "And you (those who have faith in Christ, see Col. 1:2-4), who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross." Romans 4:5-8, "And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: 'Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not account his sin.'" Hebrews 10:14-17, "For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying, 'This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,' then he adds, 'I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.'"
If it is true that all of our sins have been forgiven by Christ's death and that God no longer remembers our sins and lawless deeds, then why does Jesus command us to ask the Father to forgive our sins each day? The answer to that question is clearly stated by the apostle John in his first letter. In 1 John 1:8-9 he writes: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." John says that if we are not daily (present tense verb: confess) confessing our sins, then we are saying that we have no sins. If we say we have no sins then we deceive ourselves, the truth is not in us, we call God a liar and his word is not in us. Thus, all true Christians make it a regular practice of asking the Father to forgive them their debts. They confess, acknowledge their sins. Are we forgive because we confess, because we ask? No. We are forgiven, as John says, because God himself is faithful and just. This means we are forgiven because God placed our sins on Christ and killed him in our place and he promised, on the basis of Christ's death to forgive everyone who believes in him. Thus we are forgiven by what Christ has done and one of the evidences that this is true for us is that we regularly confess our sins, ask the Father to forgive us our sins.
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