After Jesus Prayed.....

Matthew 6:14-15

"¹⁴ For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵ But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Sound familiar?  It should.  Those two verses come from the Sermon on the Mount and are the words of Jesus immediately after the Lord's Prayer.  And remember, it is in the Lord's Prayer, where Jesus said, "This is how you should pray,"  and it includes the part where we are taught to pray for God's forgiveness in the same way we forgive one another.

What prohibits us from having this type of forgiveness toward others when we pray?  We who are so ready for God to forgive us, so ready to experience the freedom of his forgiveness, cannot come to grips with God's insistence for us to be forgiving toward others.  God says we either forgive those who sin against us, or he will not forgive our sins.

The remedy for this dilemma lies in the depth of our understanding of the love of God.  God must really love us because he keeps on forgiving us.  That should lead us into another truth.  The reason we have difficulty in forgiving those who sin against us is because we have not learned to love them.

We love our families, some of our neighbors, we love sports, we love cars, we love golf, we love fishing, we love God.  When it comes to someone sinning against us, we want justice.  They have acted in a way that does not deserve forgiveness.  They may try to make things right, but we have the tendency to hold their sin over their heads from now on. 

If you remember nothing else today, remember God forgives you, and in every sin you commit, you do not deserve his forgiveness.  He forgives you because he loves you.  You can only experience God's forgiveness when you are forgiving toward those who wrong you.

Draw close to God as you need and seek his forgiveness, but draw closer to each other as you are forgiving toward them. 

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