forgive us forgivr others: If you have a Bible, would would you join me in Matthew chapter 18? We're gonna look at verses 21 through 35 in in just a few minutes. We are in a in a series right now on the Lord's Prayer. And the way we're framing this is we're we're learning how to pray like Jesus. In in Luke chapter 11, the version of the Lord's Prayer that we see in Luke chapter 11, the disciples, people who grew up in praying in the synagogues and they knew the one true God, and they they grew up learning and understanding what prayer meant, they they saw something different in the way Jesus prayed. So in Luke 11, they say, Lord, would you teach us to pray? It's like they were learning all over again how to pray. And so we've been taking that posture as a church. Jesus, would you teach us how to pray? Because Jesus gave them as a way of instruction: this is how you should pray. And then he began to say, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, even as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. And so we have been learning this prayer together and learning how to pray this prayer both as a prayer we should recite, because Jesus said, When you pray, say this, recite this. And so we pray these words literally. But Jesus is also teaching us this prayer to provide a model for our personal prayers. Because we we both are encouraged to pray these written prayers and to offer our own personal prayers. How many of you need a prayer when you don't know what to pray? Lord's prayer can be that prayer. Just pray. He was like, it doesn't feel authentic. Just pray. It's Jesus' words. It's better than anything you could come up with anyway. Just pray it. And let that prayer begin to form your own personal prayers. I have been sitting with with the Lord's Prayer since the spring, every morning, in preparation for the series, and and and just brought that into my own personal prayer life, just to pray it very intentionally. And I want to say it has, I was, I think I was talking to someone about this yesterday, it has radically changed the way I pray. It's not more spectacular, but it feels deeper. It feels more consistent. And it's given me insights on what matters to God in prayer in a way that that I thought other things mattered and I'm starting to be shaped into a way of praying where I go, I'm not sure if I care about that as much anymore. You hear what I'm saying? So this is what we've been learning in this series. And today we we come to a line of the prayer that I sense is going to be perhaps the heaviest and hardest for some of us to receive, but is also perhaps where the Lord has the most freedom and joy for us to be realized. And it's this line of the prayer that follows. It's the second thing we ask of the Father. The first half of the prayer is about who God is, yours is the kingdom, hallowed be your name, right? All those things. Your will be done. And then we go, and give us today our daily bread. We have needs. Everyone has needs. We're praying for the world's needs. We're praying for the church's needs around the world. But then there's a second line, and it says, and, and this is what we're talking about today: forgive us our sins or our debts, depending on the translation. Forgive us our debts, even as we have forgiven our debtors. So I want to read Matthew chapter 18, verses 21 through 35, so we can get a little glimpse of how Jesus taught about forgiveness and how it works. And then we'll get into considering how that helps us understand how to pray this line of the prayer. Starting in Matthew eighteen, verse twenty one, it says this Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Maybe up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times, or in some translations, seventy times seven times. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king, Jesus says, who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And as he began the settlement, a man who owed him 10,000 talents, that's millions and millions of dollars in today's money, was brought to him. And since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his knees before him. Be patient with me, he begged, and I will pay back everything. The servant's master took pity on him, cancelled the debt, and let him go. But when the servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denari. Maybe that's like a hundred bucks today. And he grabbed him and began to choke him. Pay back what you owe me, he demanded. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, Be patient with me, and I will pay you back. But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed. And went and told their master everything that had happened. And when the master called the servant in, then the master called the servant in, and he said, You wicked servant, I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured. Until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. Let's pray. Jesus, we come before you with a a particularly troubling set of teachings of yours. And and Lord, we ask that you would empower us to see and live in what you are calling us to, Lord, because I I confess my sin right now that it is it is too much for me to live into in my own strength. And Lord, it is too much for us to live into in our own strength. So we pray, Lord, this morning that you would lead us into the life of praying for our forgiveness and extending forgiveness that you have called. us to, as only you can. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. That text and that story should tell you that God's economy and the way God thinks about things works very differently than the way you and I think. think about things. I I I was thinking of a story from a few weeks ago. We had our our denomination the Christian and Missionary Alliance, we we've been putting on this annual worship conference for worship teams and production teams and leaders and stuff for the last several years. If you don't know, before I was a lead pastor, I was a worship pastor for a number of years. So I'm I'm pretty involved with helping equip and train worship leaders in our our denominational district and and in our denomination as a whole. And one of one of the things that we've done with this annual conference is you know we gather and we we worship and we we get some of our worship leaders and and people that play from different different churches to come together and we make these amazing worship teams and they we have them all these people with experience teach these great breakout sessions and just just kind of help pour into to leaders and teams and stuff and so we've been running this conference and it's been it's been a great conference the the worship team's been amazing all the teachers the preachers have been amazing we I think we had about eight or so from our our team that were there that was awesome We had you know great seminar speakers, like you know, all these people just doing amazing stuff. We had people just connecting and networking. It was just so awesome. All this stuff's going on, right? And and I was responsible for some of the some areas of oversight Related to just like how how the the people attending the conference were having the experience of the conference. So some hospitality things. I was teaching a seminar and and different things and a part of the planning team for it. And anyway, so we're so I'm doing all this stuff and I'm involved in in in my different activities and then you're just in all the sessions it's amazing and then this this happens the night before the final day we had like one more like afternoon session that afternoon that that the the main session my friend who was she was leading overseeing the the worship team for for this year's conference and she said hey so and so had to leave early can you jump in and and play acoustic and just do some backing vocals And so I was like, man, you gotta understand, like once you kind of get out of it for a few years, like I still will lead worship occasionally, but like they're doing songs like I'm like, I've never heard that song in my life. like Lindsay does a great job choosing music, and I really genuinely kind of stay out of it. And we picked a great great worship director, isn't she awesome? And and so we let her do that job. I don't do that job. So I'm like, I don't know half the songs you guys are doing. And so I was like, Okay, I th they're pretty straightforward. So I I learn them. I jump in with the With the team for the last session, we do like three songs and one more closing thing at the end. It's all done and the conference is done. Everyone's like, Yay. And then usually what happens is like, you know, everyone, let's get a picture together. And so the band gets a picture together and they're like, Andrew, you gotta get in the picture. I'm like, I mean I got I wasn't really like in the band though. Come on, we gotta get in the picture. Yeah, thank you, John. I'll pay you later. Thank you. and and so like I'm in the picture with the band. Two other people that were there for the whole thing had to leave early, and they weren't in the picture, and I was in the picture, and I didn't do anything. I didn't plan anything. I like just listened to these songs a few times and was like, all right, I think I can muddle my way through it, and we we went from there. I didn't do anything, and I was in the picture. I didn't do anything for that and and I was in the picture and I want you to understand that this is how God's economy of forgiveness works. You owe everything, I owe everything, the world owes everything, and the master, as in this story, says it's all canceled. It's all canceled. Yes, I see that debt, I see the weight of the sin of the world that you carry, and I say it is all canceled. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute with how we like to earn things or we believe we should earn things. We'll even say, no, no, no, no, I couldn't. When we feel like we haven't earned something, even when someone wants to give us something as a gift. What's wrong with us by the way? Kids get this. My kids get it. They don't have to think twice. They don't worry about whether they earned it or not. If I say I want to give them something, they're like, Yes, please. Isn't it kind of odd how we we we get trained out of receiving gifts as we get older? And that doesn't work with God's economy because Jesus says you have to receive the kingdom with childlike faith. And so as we think about this subject of forgiveness, I want you to understand that there is absolutely nothing you can do to receive or earn this. It is a free gift that God gives to us in place of our sin, in place of the debt that we owe. And and I I want you to see this: all of the debt, all of this the weight of sin. It's all not there anymore because of forgiveness. And Jesus teaches us in this prayer to make a regular habit in our prayer life of doing three things: confessing our sin. It's kind of implicit in this. Forgive us our sins means that we have sins we've named and confessed, right? In our prayer life, we should be confessing our sin. We should be receiving this free forgiveness. And also. Jesus says we should be extending forgiveness to others. And as we pray this way, church, it will shape our lives so much that we will be a witness of God's radical generosity, of God's radical economy of forgiveness all over the Highlands. People who should have things held against them for a long time will suddenly be like, It's forgiven. And they won't understand what happened and they're gonna think you want something from them. And you're gonna say no. It is powerful to pray, forgive us our sins, forgive us our debts, even as we forgive our debtors, even as we forgive those who've sinned against us. Because when we do, we are not only receiving the forgiveness of a debt we could never repay, but we are extending to others a debt that they could never repay to us. And in doing so, we're announcing to them that there is an even greater debt that has been paid off in their lives. And so I want to just consider each of these three aspects with you this morning. That we repent and confess our sins, that we receive forgiveness, and that we learn to pray and extend forgiveness to others. So I want to talk about this first. First, if we're going to pray this prayer. We need to, in our prayer life, in our life with each other, we need to recognize and repent of our sin. First thing we're gonna have to just establish right now is what is sin. What is sin? I wanna be clear. Sin is not like a bad feeling. I'm gonna be clear about this. I love Pastor Glenn Pacquiaum says this about what sin is. Sin is three things. He says sin is a condition. Meaning it is a power that we are under that keeps us enslaved. This is why death is in the world, because of sin. That's not how things should be. Sin gives birth, the Apostle Paul says, to death. Because it is a disconnection, it is an oppression of the entire world away from God's life-giving freedom and under this enslaving power of sin. So sin is a condition. Second, though, sin is also a contagion. It's an infection that inhibits our capacity to live fully into what God has called us into as humanity. We can't do it because we're sick with sin. We're sick with a condition, not specific sins that's coming. We're we're just sick as human. You just like turn on the news for two seconds, you can see we are sick with the condition of sin. And one group blames the other group, and that group blames this group, and then that we are sick with the condition of sin. And then that all gives way. The the the condition of sin and the contagion of sin gives way to a decision to choose sin. And this is the sin we're typically familiar with: the the sin that is a choice. That we are now morally culpable for and responsible for. This is the lies, the things we do, the theft, the lashing out at people, the bitterness, the gossip, these are the jealousy, these are the things we choose into. Are you with me? So sin is a condition, it is a contagion, and it is a decision. It's not one of these, it's the whole thing. Sin is way worse than you think it is. Someone say, hallelujah. I'm so encouraged now. Sin is way worse than you think is. We're actually gonna do a whole series on sin during Lent. Everyone's like, that's so I'm so excited for that. You just said, Yay, Pastor Appreciation Month, and the pastor goes, Let's talk about sin. But but I want you to understand that sin is way worse than we think it is, because Jesus' forgiveness is way more beyond anything we could have imagined. When you think sin's like this, you're like, I only need God's forgiveness to like this powerful. But when sin seems to have no end of how deep and pervasive and infected it is and everything in our life, we go, there's no hope but God. And so I want you to understand how big what we are saying is happening when we say that God has forgiven us. It is massive, it is systemic, it is all-encompassing. It is not just the things you have done in your life that you are morally culpable for, it is the entire condition of the world. Jesus, God incarnate, came into the world to save us from this sin. And so this is what Jesus has made a way for. Jesus frees us from the condition, the power of sin. Jesus heals us from the infection, the contagion of sin that limits our capacity and all that. And Jesus also has made a way to forgive the guilt of sin when we are morally culpable for decisions we have made. And and Jesus does all this and it forgives these effects of sin because, as Cornelius Plantinga, the great theologian, says, sin is not the way it's supposed to be. Sin is a perversion, a twisting of God's good creation. And so when there's sin in the world, it's not God coming along to catch us for doing something wrong. God is trying to come to restore us to what we are meant to be. This is why Jesus came into the world. This is the good news of Jesus. That the condition, the contagion, and the decision are destroyed and freed from and healed of and forgiven for because Jesus has freed us and healed us and forgiven us. So I want you to hear this and see this. This is so important. Because sin is not the way things are supposed to be, because sin is not the way things are supposed to be, whatever remains unconfessed in your life will continue to destroy, continue to dilute, and continue to separate your life from God. So I wanted to hear this because some of you probably are used to some kind of church situation. This was kind of my I grew up in what we call the holiness Pentecostal traditions. And let me tell you, yeah, a couple of you know what I'm talking about. You you you try to get real holy in the holiness Pentecostal tradition. And sometimes you feel pressured to do things, and you feel guilty or ashamed. But you don't actually like, you know, wanna talk about what's really going on in your life because it's this is I've j everyone when they talk about this, it just shames me. I feel I feel embarrassed. I feel judged. I've never feel judged at church before. But but I want us to see and I I have to say this because many of us have felt judged, we've not had safe spaces to confess our sin. But I want you to recognize that there are certainly unsafe spaces and people who are not good to confess our sins to. But when we do and we have good people to do that with, we are freed from the destructive nature of sin, the deluding nature of sin, the oppressive nature of sin, all that separates us from the life of God. And we're brought into the way things are supposed to be. This is what Jesus wants us to understand about how sin operates. Because the the disciples in his day, they were thinking about like what you put in. They were thinking about, this food's unclean, so I can't eat that. This this thing is bad, and so I can't I can't eat that. You know, and but this is what Jesus says in Matthew 15. He He says, Are you still so dull? Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? I just I like how he just keeps that really vague, out of the body. That's what happens with food. That doesn't mean you've sinned because you ate a certain food, but this is what Jesus says the things that come out of a person's mouth come from the heart. What's coming out of your life is sin. And so these are Jesus' words, not anyone else. He says this these defile a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery. Sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander, these are what defile a person, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them. See, a lot of times we're in we've been in church cultures or we've heard things about church, and people get really nitpicky about rules about essentially whether you're washing your hands or not. We have our own versions of that today. But what Jesus is saying, can we get to the heart of the matter? Can we deal with the issue of sin about how things are not as they should be? And how I have created you for so much more. Let's get free from the delusion and the dullness and the death that we are living in because of sin, and step into the fullness of life that God has created us for. This is what we're talking about when we talk about sin. This is also why it's really helpful to understand the nature of sin, because in Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer that we've mainly been saying, the forgiveness. Us our debts, as even as we forgive our debtors. This word debts is really helpful for us to understand what Jesus is saying sin is. Sin, just like a debt, is relational. If you think about it, it's hard to think about this because like when you buy a new car, we bought a new car like I don't know, five, five years ago, something like that, six years ago. And we got we we got this car, and you you interact a little bit with the car like salesman, right? The salesperson, but but then like it's just some bank, like Chase Bank, like so it doesn't feel relational, but let me tell you, it'll feel really relational if you don't pay that car payment. You're gonna you're gonna feel the they're gonna come, hey, you're not holding up your end of the deal. Right? So it feels different, but but this is what debt is. It's relational. There's two parties that have made this agreement, and or one is indebted to the other, and you you feel this sense of tension there. This is what sin is, and this and we are indebted to God, and when we sin against each other, we're indebted to each other. And it's really expensive. This sin, like just like debt, is a burden. You you really want to free up that space in your your budget every month, right? Like I want to get rid of this payment. But sin is a burden. And it actually limits our capacity. But finally, here's the other thing. Sin is costly because debt usually carries interest. And it's not interesting, interest. It's very uninteresting. It's very painful interest. Right? So sin is relational, it's a burden, and it's costly. And this is what Jesus wants us to understand: that yes, that it's this contagion, it's this condition, it's a decision, it's all this, but we also have to understand that the effect of sin doesn't just like mean that I owe God something. It's actually affecting the relational quality that the church can have with each other. Even if I think, well, I just, you know, kind of like didn't wasn't honest with God about something, that doesn't affect so-and-so. It does. Jesus is saying it does because they're debt now. Because I have less capacity now in my life to be who I am to my brothers and sisters in the community. So a lot of us like to say that, well, you know, this is like a private thing. Your sin is not private. It affects all of us. My sin is not private. And that's terrifying as a pastor. It is not private. I owe something to you as the community I'm a part of to be faithful to Jesus and when there is sin to confess it and receive forgiveness. You have a responsibility to me and to each other as a community brought together by Jesus to confess sin so that we're not burdened by this, so it doesn't limit our capacity together, so that it's not costing us, so that our relationships are right. How many of you want to say amen? And how many of you want Leave right now. Yeah, a little of both. That's a good way to be, that's a good place to be. Listen, I want to say this: I am not saying that every single person in the church needs to know what your sins are. Here's how I usually put it to people: I say not everyone needs to know everything, but you need to have some people that know everything. Not compartmentalized like this person knows this, and this person knows this. You need to have trusted people in our church community that you can spill the beans to. That you can tell things to that maybe you've never told to another soul. If we do not confess our sins, friends, we are not going to live in the fullness of the way things are supposed to be. I love this quote from Simon Tugwell to understand just how significant and serious sin is, but how powerful what Jesus has done is. He says this: take a good look at the cross of Jesus Christ if you want to know what sin is. The horrific depravity and weight of all that sin does. God who did nothing wrong, God who created this world, and this world said, thanks, see you later. God became human and took the entire weight of all of that wrong upon himself. And God did that because God loves you. God did that because He loves this world. He created this world out of love. And so Tugwell goes on. He says, You want to see, look at the cross of Christ if you want to know what sin is. And then he says, This: if you want to know the raw material of forgiveness, you need to look at the cross. And then he says, it is not a comfortable sight. It's like, eee. What are we talking about here? I I want to say, friends, not as a way of embarrassing or judging one another. But I want to say it is good to feel uncomfortable, and it is good to feel a certain amount of pain and remorse when it comes to our sin. Just look at your neighbor and say, it's good to feel some remorse about your sin. Some of you are like, I did not sign up for this this morning, why did I come here? But but I want you to know it is good to experience that because we cannot, as we're we're about to talk about forgiveness, but we cannot actually receive forgiveness for something we have left unconfessed. If we don't say, This is a sin and I confess it and I am walking away from it, we're actually unable to receive the forgiveness that God has available to us. If if in our story The the master said, You owe me all this money, and instead of begging for mercy, the guy said, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't think I owe you anything. It would have been impossible for the master to cancel the debt. Because we're not living in the same world. And so we have to start in our prayer to learn to recognize and repent of our sin. And when we do that, we are able to, number two, receive forgiveness for our sin. Many of us often walk around ashamed of our sins because we've named our sins instead of being forgiven and released from our sins. A lot of us live in what I call sin management mode. We go, ooh, I wasn't supposed to do that. Okay, I'm just not gonna do that again. I'm not gonna make that mistake again. And then every we're just like, I'm just not gonna do that again. I'm just not gonna make that mistake. Or I need to do better next time, I'm not gonna make that mistake again. And we just we get on on the on in on the hamster wheel and we just kind of keep going over and over. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Okay, I just can't make that mistake again, I just can't make that mistake again. And never in that whole talk to ourselves are we bringing it to the Lord or bringing it to our community to say, I need to confess my sin. And and so what happens is is we know it wasn't right and we might even know it's sin, but because we haven't actually brought it to the Lord and brought brought it to the Lord in community, we can't receive the forgiveness that's for us. Like, you hear like this isn't rocket science. Like, I know it's like hard, but it's pretty actually pretty simple. We say, hey, yeah, I did this. And then you come under the washing of God's forgiveness. It's pretty profound. Here's what the enemy, the evil one that we pray later in the prayer against. Here's what the enemy wants you to be. The enemy wants you to be ineffective. In your life as a witness of the good news of Jesus. Have you ever thought about that? The enemy would actually prefer that you be a very dull and boring Christian who just like doesn't really deal with stuff and you just kind of float. I'm just gonna be low-key. I've had someone say to me once, it was so great. They're like, I don't know if I wanna be like a really like intense Christian. I'm like, there's a lot of grace because we're all growing in this, but also there's like kind of an on-off switch. It's like you're either doing it or you're not doing it. And I'm not saying that to put pressure on you. You hear what I mean. Like there, there's a we're we're gonna step into this or we're not. And and and what the enemy wants you to do is think that, like, hey, it's probably better that no one knows about this. Because that you won't get forgiveness for, definitely not. So don't bring that up. Or, yeah, yeah, you know it's bad totally. You definitely shouldn't do it again. But don't like bring it up to people so you can make sure you're forgiven. You know what I'm talking about. We we we we all have versions of this. It's like, okay, it's like I know this is like the eighth time. You brought it up before, so they know. Just it's like the eighth time. Don't bring it up now. It's that's it's gonna be you're gonna be too much for people. They're gonna be disappointed in you. They're not gonna say, Well, nope, there's no more forgiveness. But what does Jesus answer to Peter? Should I forgive him seven times? Jesus is rhetorical here, obviously. He's saying there's no limit to how many times you should forgive. Because there is no limit to how many times God has forgiven you. Any sin that we bring to him is forgiven. Any debt that we have is paid off. And it is yours to freely receive. So stop pretending like you don't have it. There's this this great moment. John Oliver, the the British comedian, he has this show. I think it's called like Last Week Tonight or something like that. And and about 10 years ago, they they they did this thing to shed some light on the debt-buying system and economy that has sprung up. And and some of you might be familiar with this. There are companies like you know, say Bank of America, or in in their case specifically, medical loans. Millions and millions of dollars in loans, and the companies know these are never gonna totally get paid off. So they will sell that medical debt for pennies on the dollar. So if it's like, you know, a million dollars in medical debt, you'll get it for like a fraction of that. Or like for every dollar in medical debt, it'd be like three cents, six cents, or something like that. So millions and millions, and they'll sell it off, so at least they recoup some money from this medical debt, right? And then what these companies will do is they now own the debt and they have the right to come after you for the original amount. So they paid. Way less, but now they can go after you for the entire amount. It's really messed up. And so he did this whole bit like ten years ago where where he decided it's like I want to see just how easy it is to to get into this business. And literally anyone can get in. He's like, I spent an hour, my me and my team, and we set it up an incorporated entity and and and they set up this whole medical debt buying company and they bought fifteen million dollars worth of debt for sixty thousand dollars. $15 million in debt of medical debt that people had for $60,000. It's a crazy, crazy system. And it's like they're like no questions asked. They just started, people started approaching them. You want to buy this debt? You want to buy this debt? Insane. But obviously, John Oliver had a different idea. Instead of going after these people for $15 million, his team personally called every single person to say that their debt had been canceled. Every single dollar and they had paid as a as a a a company like sixty thousand dollars and they paid off fifteen million dollars of medical debt in doing that. Now can you imagine if someone picked up the phone, heard that good news, and say, no, no, no, I I need to pay this debt because I I got this medical procedure done. No, I I still need to, like, but what about this? And I well, there was this thing. And that doctor spent a really long time with me, so I think I should probably pay that. Would any of you do that? No, you're not stupid. Maybe one of you is, but no, I'm just j I'm joking. I'm joking. You're not dumb. You're not gonna do it. You're gonna be like, thanks, this is the best news of my life. Yet we still try to pay the debt that Jesus has forgiven. Every day we're still carrying the weight of things from the past that the Father has forgiven, that the debt has been paid for. Church, stop making payments on debts that you don't owe anymore. Only crazy people do that. But we do it all the time. Stop paying debts that you don't owe anymore. Jesus has paid the debt. Receive his forgiveness for your sins. And it is when we are able to do that, confess and repent sins of our sins, and then we're able to receive fully the assurance of our forgiveness that we are able to do number three, and this is the second half of the prayer: is we are then able to extend forgiveness. We pay it forward. That's exactly it. As Jesus has done for us, we do to others. Here's where I want to just be really clear about what forgiveness is not. forgiveness is not this. Forget about it. Forget about it. I I love what C. Clifton Black says about this. He says, you cannot forgive what you forget. That's good. I wish I had thought of that, but he said it. But you cannot forgive what you forget. It actually matters that we know what each other has done. And that's not a shame thing, it's not a judgment thing. It's to say, I see it, and you're still forgiven. So forgiveness is not, forget about it. Here's the thing: forgiveness is also not, that doesn't hurt me anymore. That doesn't hurt me anymore. When we do that, we are suppressing and minimizing the pain of the sin when someone commits a relational wrong against us. I understand sometimes we we we feel like after a while it doesn't hurt, but but there's often because of our lives we've just piled so much stuff on top of us that we don't even feel that particular hurt anymore. But it's there. I I know because I know from my own life when these things have finally been surfaced and I've finally been able to deal with them so I could finally extend forgiveness. We have to deal with the pain from what someone did to us before we have the ability to forgive them. So do you hear me? This isn't a quick thing. It's not a, it doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. Because these things hurt and they need to be processed and grieved and get it all, as my friend Rob Reimer says, you have a bucket of pain, and you gotta empty that whole bucket before you're gonna be able to forgive. And so forgiveness is also not number three, hey, we'll let it go this time. We'll let it go. Don't worry about it, just don't do it again. That is a denial that there was a problem. That's a denial that sin has been done. And what that does is, I'm prone to this one honestly, because what that does is it lets it start to fester and boil. And when they do it a second time, we snap, and then maybe we never do forgive. Deal with things up front. Come take the emotionally healthy relations class class in the spring. You'll learn all sorts of great tools to be able to do that. And then finally, I want to say one more thing. Forgiveness is not reconciliation. Some of you perhaps have, I'm sure, I know in this room, deep pain, abuse, various things that have been done against you, and those people are not safe for you to be around. I want to be clear. Forgiveness is not now we're best friends again. Forgiveness is a release of any debt that is owed to you. Reconcili forgiveness you can do by yourself with the power of God. Reconciliation takes two people coming to the table to saying, This was wrong. I confessed my sin. I want to repair this. Can we work to rebuild trust and things like that? And and the grievous and horrible part about this broken world that we are still in the midst of is not everyone is going to be willing to do that or capable of doing that. And it might not be good for you to step into that. So do you hear what I'm saying? Forgiveness is not, forget about it. It's not, it no longer hurts. Forgiveness is not, we'll let it go this time. And forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Remember, returning to this idea of debts, because debts are relational. What we have to do is they have to be forgiven as such. I have at home that car payment that I mentioned earlier, that car bill, we paid that car off in the spring. Hallelujah. I was so happy. But you know what I have at home? I have the final letter from the bank saying, you owed this much, but this has been paid in full. This is what forgiveness is, friends. This is how we understand. We see it. This is what happened in my life. This is what my sins are. But look, I have this letter here that says the list of everything, but guess what? It's been paid. So I want you to see that we do not forget. We forgive, we release and cancel the debt of what was owed. And when we begin to do that for other people, when we begin to release the debts that are owed to us, the offenses that have been done against us, we begin to experience peace. We're we're often I I know in my life I'm often warring in myself when I have not released someone from a debt they owe me. When I have been wrong, when I have been spoken poorly of, when I've been slandered, when people have gossiped or talked behind my back, when people have disappointed me or not been there and done things and followed through when when they say they're going to do certain things, man, those things hurt. And if I do not release them and forgive them, I would be a pile of muck standing up here right now. Many of us experience even physiological or physical issues in our bodies because we have unforgiveness that is undealt with. Some of you have testimonies in this room of getting physical healing after you forgave someone. This is how profound unforgiveness is if we leave it alone. If we do not forgive as we have been forgiven, we will not experience peace. We need to release people from their sins that they have committed against us. And this is why Jesus teaches us to pray this. Because if we pray this, we will be living in peace that passes all understanding. First John It says this those who say, I love God and hate their brothers and sisters are liars. For those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. Do you understand? It is actually impossible for you to love God if you will not forgive one another. The amount that we love God is directly connected to how much we are willing to forgive the most horrendous offense done against us. And for some of us, that feels unfair because some of us have experienced some horrendous things that others of us have not. But each of us has our own like well of experiences. And that has affected us all, and the biggest thing each of us has experienced is the biggest thing each of us has experienced. Does that make sense? And unless you forgive out of all of that and release your brothers and sisters, release your neighbors, release your co-worker, release that teacher that gave your kid a bad grade, release people in the community, release people that you know all over the highlands, release people from high school that you haven't talked to in 20 years, whatever it is, if we do not. release we will not experience peace. And so we need to pray. we have forgiven our debtors. Some of us are gonna have to pray a lot to be empowered to be able to forgive others as the Father has forgiven us. But like Jesus' parable to us here, if we want to fully receive the Father's amazing, incredible debt cancellation in our lives, we will need to be just as radical in extending that forgiveness to others. As we were singing that, I love that song we were singing, even our enemies, we were singing earlier. Even your enemies. This following Jesus business gets real radical here. But when we do this, we live confessionally and repenting of our sins. When we live really receiving fully the forgiveness that's ours, when we really extend forgiveness to others, we will be a witness to people all over the highlands. It's not going to be understandable to anyone outside of knowing who Jesus is. Why did you let this offense go? I don't understand it. Wanna close with this story and then and then I wanna make sure we can pray for a moment. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Ruby Bridges. She was a first grader who was one of the first kids to re-integrate after the Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education in the 1950s. And every single day she would go into school, and there would be all of the parents and townspeople from the town, and they would be there either side of the walkway going into the school, and they would be screaming horrific things at her, shouting death threats at this first grader, just because she was black going to what was previously an all-white school. And and every day she would go in and have to listen to this on the way in. Every day as she went out, she would have to listen to this on the way out. and it got so bad there were U.S. marshals escorting her into school and out of school every day. And there there was a child psychologist by the name of Robert Coles, and he he met with Ruby at one point because he wanted to understand what the psychological effects were for these children that were trying to reintegrate in school. Into the schools. And this is an excerpt of his conversation with her. He was surprised to hear that Ruby Bridges was praying for all these people that were shouting horrific things at her. And so this is the conversation. Cole said to her, You pray for the people there? Yes, she said. Really? Why do you do that? Because, she said, they need praying for. Well, Ruby, why do you think they need you to pray for them? Because I should. Why? Because I should. Ruby, you know, I'm still puzzled by this. I'm trying to figure out why you think you have to pray for such people given what they tried to do to you twice a day for five years. Well, especially it should be me. Why you especially? Because she said, listen to this, if you're going through what they're doing to you, you're the one who should be praying for them. If you're going through what people have done to you, you are the one who should be praying for them. And then she quoted to me, Cole said, what she had heard in church that Sunday from the minister. He said that Jesus went through a lot of trouble, and he said about the people who were causing his trouble, forgive them, because they don't know what they're doing. And now little Ruby was saying this in nineteen sixty one about the people in the streets of New Orleans. And then Coles made makes this comment. He says, How is someone like me supposed to account for that psychologically or any other way? Friends, I want you to understand that when we really receive radical forgiveness from the Father and begin to extend and release people with radical forgiveness, people will not be able to account for that. People will be unsure of what your motives are. They will be confused and flabbergasted. Some will probably get more angry at you, just so you're aware, because they don't like that you just release them from your offense. But others are going to be so perplexed and stunned and moved that they'll begin to ask why? What motivates this? Where could this even come from? Because it doesn't make sense in a world that is try constantly trying to hold things over one another. We can only forgive like this if we have received radical forgiveness from the Father. And we can only receive that radical forgiveness from the Father if it comes through a confession and repentance of sins. So as we close, I am aware of the time. And I I want to say you I I I want you to stick with me for a minute here because what what I sense the Lord wants to do this morning, and I as I I've I've sensed this and and talked with a f and prayed with a few of our leaders this week, is we felt like our church was being asked by the Lord to do three things this morning in prayer. Number one, confess sins. Some, many or all of us have unconfessed sins that we need to name. Not out of shame, not so that someone has dirt on you, but so that we can get free because it's not the way things are supposed to be. Second, the Lord was very clear that we are to pray for each other to receive assurance that we are forgiven. Some of you have been doing sin management and paying debts that you do not owe anymore. And it's time to walk in the fullness of your forgiveness. Number three, finally, the Lord asked us specifically this morning to spend time helping each other pray to extend forgiveness to those that we are still holding in our debt.