The Lord's Prayer - Ep 13

2026.07.27 Lord's Prayer Monday

Welcome to the Lord's Prayer podcast by Bridgeway Christian Church. The Lord's Prayer has been recited by Christians around the globe for centuries, but more than a beloved tradition, this prayer invites us to live the way of Jesus, to be shaped by his priorities, to partner with his spirit in bringing the kingdom of God to bear on our world. Every Monday during the summer devotional series, we will read the Lord's Prayer and then members of our pastoral team will offer some devotional thoughts based on the text.

I'm Pastor Brian. Today, I'm joined by Pastor Anthony and Pastor Heather, and after I read the prayer, we'll discuss the other side of forgiveness that this prayer names as we have also forgiven our debtors. Let's pray.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Pastor Anthony, Pastor Heather. Hello. Hello.

Good to see you. Good to see you too. Well, we are diving into this next line of the prayer and Pastor Anthony, last week we discussed what it means for God to forgive us our sins.

Today, we're talking about what it means for us to forgive those who have done us wrong. Let's start with a biblical portrait. What are some passages or examples or teaching in scripture that really reveal God's design and will for our practice of forgiving others? So there's a scene in Matthew 18 where Peter asks Jesus, how many times do I have to forgive my brother who sins against me? Seven times, he asks.

And I like to imagine Peter kind of beefing with someone off screen and like he's looking for a loophole to hold a grudge or something like that. But Jesus answers Peter, not seven times, but 77 times. Now to the literalist reading this passage, it sounds like Jesus is simply making Peter wait longer before he no longer has to play nice with whoever he's beefing with, right? But you know, that's not what Jesus is doing.

He's using the number 77 intentionally. He's actually hyperlinking back to the figure of Lamech in Genesis 4. So in that text, Lamech composes a short tune for his two wives, boasting about how he killed a man out of revenge. Now the last line in the song says, if Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is 77 fold.

Lamech expresses the intensity of his vengeance in maximal terms. And so by virtue of correcting Peter's, his number seven to 77, Jesus brings the story of Lamech's vengeance into the conversation and to the degree that Lamech sets his mind to avenge himself. That's the degree that Jesus wants his people to set their minds on forgiveness.

Forgiveness is maximally important. And so in fact, forgiving our debtors is so important that after Jesus finishes his prayer, he immediately returns to the topic of forgiveness and insists that our forgiveness of others is directly tied to God's forgiveness of us. So Jesus says in verses 14 and 15, for if you forgive others, their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you.

But if you don't forgive others, their trespasses, neither will your father forgive yours. So forgiveness is serious business and we're meant to live a life of forgiveness. Yeah, forgiving others is just so clearly central to Jesus.

I mean, he demonstrates it himself as one of his final acts on the cross. I mean, it's, you know, father, forgive them for they know not what they do. I mean, it's literally his darkest moment and he has every reason to withhold it, but instead forgiveness is what he offers.

And then, you know, obviously he instructs his followers specifically in the Sermon on the Mount. If someone has something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go and be reconciled first. And what always strikes me about this passage is that Jesus doesn't say, if you have something against someone, he says, if someone has something against you, right? So that forgiven people don't sit around waiting for relationships to fix themselves.

Worship can wait. Forgiveness cannot. Like, that's how important forgiveness is.

And then, you know, Paul in Ephesians, he just anchors it when he says, be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as Christ God forgave you. I mean, our forgiveness of others, you know, it's not just this nice, nice idea or something that's optional. It's a direct byproduct of having been forgiven ourselves.

People who truly understand what they've been forgiven find it very hard to withhold forgiveness from others. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's absolutely right. So, kind of this forgiveness idea is so important. So how does that biblical portrait of extending forgiveness differ from what our society says about forgiveness? I mean, put another way, what are some of the most common misunderstandings Christians have today about forgiving others? Well, I think, Pastor Heather, a big part of it is what you just shared with us.

You look at what Paul writes in Ephesians, we forgive each other just as God in Christ forgave you. There are times where Jesus says things like, he who has been forgiven much, loves much. We need to be clear on where the strength to forgive comes from.

Like any one of us, from just the strength of our character, has some ability to offer forgiveness, right? But that runs out really quickly. And that we are not called to forgive because we're good people or because it's the right thing to do. We are called to forgive because we have been forgiven.

And this is where I think it is so important for us to have a clear understanding of our sinfulness, to have a clear understanding of just what we have been forgiven of by the Father so that, number one, that can point us back to worship and rejoice at what God has done for us. Number two, that actually becomes the fuel to allow us to forgive others. When sort of our strength to forgive runs out, we realize, well, hold up, I have been forgiven so much, I can extend that out to others.

And I think there's another aspect too, that this might sound a little strange, but forgiveness is not entirely altruistic. That is actually really good for us as well. Like obviously we want to release people from this sense of debt or from the burden they might carry from wrongs done, and there's a lot of benefit in that.

But I think about what Lewis Means, an old ethics professor at Fuller, used to say, to forgive someone is to set a prisoner free and realize the prisoner was you. That we need to understand that so much of forgiveness is about releasing our own burden and attachment to the situation. Now Pastor Heather, there's one other common misunderstanding about forgiveness that you're going to tell us about that I think is possibly the biggest one out there.

Tell us about it. Oh yeah, I mean, I think one of the most common ones is that phrase, forgive and forget. You know, it's while that idea of being is well intentioned, it isn't actually a biblical definition of forgiveness, because forgiveness is not pretending something didn't happen, and it's not minimizing the hurt.

It's not excusing the pain. It's not even necessarily forgetting, because I, you know, I mean, I think often, you know, I can remember pain with that, with still having kind of extended the forgiveness. But forgiveness is really a decision to release the person, the pain, and the outcome to God.

It's choosing not to make the other person pay the debt that they owe. And while forgiveness begins with a decision, it's often followed by a process. We really see that over and over again, that some wounds are deep, betrayal, abuse, abandonment, broken trust, and significant loss can leave wounds that take time to heal.

And we often expect our emotions to immediately follow our decision, but that's not always how healing works. You can genuinely forgive someone and still feel hurt. You can release a debt to God and still grieve what was lost.

Yeah. I think about one of the ways I've heard forgiveness described is it's saying to someone else, you don't owe me anymore. It's not saying you didn't wrong me.

It's not saying it didn't hurt, but it's saying you don't owe me anymore. And you can say that to someone and still say, hey, and our relationship is pretty significantly altered based on your behavior. We can't go back to how things were necessarily.

You don't owe me. But the nature of what took place means boundaries need to be set up. It means I'm not quite ready to re-engage the way we used to.

And I think we need to give ourselves permission to recognize, like you said, Pastor Heather, that that healing is a process. And too often, I think forgiveness can be kind of weaponized in Christian cultures where we go, well, come on. I mean, yeah, you just need to forgive them and move on.

It's like, well, okay, first of all, you don't get to force me to forgive. And second, just because I've forgiven someone doesn't mean, okay, everything's back to normal. I think of a situation in my own life where I'd go, yeah, they don't owe me anymore.

But also there are new boundaries in our relationship on account of past action, and I think that's okay. Yeah. I think we can also doubt ourselves because we think, okay, my feelings haven't changed.

Maybe I haven't forgiven this person. And I think that, yeah, it is good to measure our feelings and to pause and search our hearts. But I also think we need to give time for our feelings to catch up with our decisions to release that person from their debt, and then spend some time asking the Lord for healing and talking to our friends about it and just being honest with our hearts and give our emotions time to catch up with the decision that we've made to release it to the Lord.

Yeah. No, that's really well said. Now, one of the most inspiring experiences that we get to have in Christian community is when we share stories and testimonies.

When people share these types of stories of God's grace in their lives, it's really moving and it builds our faith. It even humbles us and helps us grow in our own faithfulness. We especially love stories of God delivering people from things like drug addiction or divine healings that doctors can't make any sense of, or these kind of miracles of, hey, a check showed up in the mail for exactly what I needed.

These are the kind of testimonies that we live for and that we celebrate, and rightfully so. But what about testimonies of forgiveness? Those can just be incredibly powerful, even if they don't necessarily have that kind of wow factor that we look for. Pastor Anthony, can you share a story of forgiveness, either something from your own life or something you've heard that really displays the power of releasing those who have wronged us? I love the story that Brad Gray shares in his book, Bringing Heaven Here, and he shares one particular story about Corrie Ten Boom.

She's a fascinating character in recent church history. Corrie was a Dutch Christian who hid Jews from the Nazis during World War II, and after the war, she regularly shared her experiences and her faith publicly. You can read her biography, most famously in her book, The Hiding Place.

The story goes that after one church service in Munich, Corrie had finished speaking to the congregation when a former Nazi soldier introduced himself, and he was thanking her for the way she was sharing the gospel and how Jesus has washed away his sins. Now he extended his hand to shake hers, but she froze because she immediately recognized him as one of the guards at the Ravensbrück concentration camp where she was detained. Now he didn't recognize her, at least it didn't seem to her that he recognized her.

But seeing his face just triggered the trauma that she endured back in the concentration camp. And even though she often preached the need to forgive, she couldn't bring herself to shake his hand. Now understandably so, I mean, just you're confronted with your own, like, persecutor.

But you know, so she couldn't muster even a single warm feeling or a smile toward him, and she silently prayed for the Lord to help her in that moment, but she still felt nothing, right? And she kept her physical and emotional distance from him, and so she prayed again, and she confessed her inability to forgive. I love that honesty about her testimony, she confessed that inability, and she specifically asked Jesus to deliver his forgiveness through her. And so she finally found it within herself to take the man's hand, to shake his hand, and to her astonishment, she immediately felt a current travel from her shoulder down her arm and threw her hand to his.

And along with that movement of warmth came this overwhelming love for that soldier. And this is such a moving and instructive testimony. We don't know how that man received Corey's handshake, and his story is left untold, but we do know how forgiveness affected Corey.

And so this kind of goes back to your point, Pastor Brian. When forgiveness is impossible for us, we can surrender ourselves to Jesus as a conduit of his forgiveness. And when that happens, Jesus' forgiveness doesn't simply pass through us, it changes us in the process, and it can heal the trauma.

And here we are, decades past Corey's moments with that soldier, and we sit in awe at God's grace and how it's entirely not human, right? It's completely other, it's set apart, it's sacred, and the human heart can't generate that depth of forgiveness. And what was once a painful memory has been transformed into a testimony that beckons us to honor God's name as holy. Yeah, wow.

We watched that, her snippets of that story in the Alpha videos, and it's so powerful to hear it told in her voice, just that story of forgiveness. One of the things that really shaped me, just kind of in learning about forgiveness, kind of how it's practiced and stuff, is when I was involved in college ministry, we used to have this, literally have an annual forgiveness talk. And whoever was teaching that night would just walk through kind of Jesus' instructions on forgiving others.

And then here's the different part, right? It wasn't just a teaching, that we would spend time, quiet worship music would play, and we would reflect and pray, and we would ask God to reveal any bitterness or anger or resentment, any unresolved conflict that we were carrying with the very students and staff that were around us. And then after that, we would spend the evening, kind of for the rest of the night, just kind of having small conversations with each other, asking for forgiveness, kind of saying, you know, kind of what we felt, pursuing reconciliation. We had some ground rules, you know, established there were no accusations, use eye language.

And then we were also instructed to use the actual language, you know, will you forgive me? And I forgive you. And those yearly talks, which I did for four years as a college student, and then taught many of them for the 10 years that I was on staff, just deeply shaped my own experience of forgiveness. We kind of used to joke afterwards about who had the longest line, you know, and even though it was funny, you know, it was an amazing example for me, because I wasn't raised kind of with that type of practice as a kid, knowing how to do that.

My family was pretty conflict avoidant. So I learned how to give and extend forgiveness, you know, kind of in my 18 to 25 year old range by really practicing it on a really practical level with my, with my friends. That's amazing.

And what I love about that is you use the word in describing your family of origin of avoidance. Yeah. It's so easy to avoid the work of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Oh, yeah. In fact, I mean, I even think about just in my own life, how I'm almost surprised when I see people who are really actually willing to do the work to go like, hey, this didn't go great. I don't love that.

I'd love for us to try to figure out a way to reconcile and move forward. Yeah. And like it actually happens.

I don't know what that says about me that I'm surprised by it. But I just think that the health to go, no, we actually want to be able to keep short accounts. We want to be able to work through bitterness and frustration and anger and not let those things rule us and keep healthy community in the midst of all of that and do that work to keep the community healthy.

I think, man, that's beautiful. Yeah. I don't know.

Annual forgiveness talks. I know. I know.

We need to do that. Yeah. It's a saying a lot that 18 to 20 year olds are doing.

Yeah. No kidding. Yeah.

I think the thing I learned about myself the most was how easy I was towards resentment, honestly, because I was I was a stuffer. I mean, that was just my family of origin. And and I could you know, I could get resentful with the with the best of them.

And then I learned to recognize that feeling in my own self and then much able to just kind of release it and kind of ask for forgiveness or see where I'm kind of taking things personally. Like it just it really grew me. It was very formative.

Yeah. I love it. I love it.

Very cool. All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us.

Be sure to check out a few more resources in the show notes. And don't forget to tune back in on Thursday for more prayer. I'll see you then.