Forgiven and Forgiving | Matthew 6:9-15
Brian Hedges | March 15, 2026
Let’s turn to God’s word this morning. We’re going to be in Matthew 6:9-15, if you want to turn there in God’s word.
Sometimes the power of Jesus’ teaching becomes visible in a moment that really stops everyone in their tracks, and that happened last year at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk. He had been killed on September 10th, and just about eleven days after, in the memorial service, Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erica Kirk, spoke, and she said something truly remarkable. Speaking about the man who had killed her husband, she said,
“I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did and it’s what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love; love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Regardless of your political position, whether you lean left or right or somewhere in the middle, Erica Kirk’s words were remarkable, a remarkable public demonstration of the forgiveness to which Christ calls us. Her statement wasn’t a political statement, it was more like a statement of faith.
Such forgiveness is countercultural in our day. We live in a day that is consumed with rights and with justice and even with vengeance, and that reflects the instincts of our hearts. Our instinct is to seek retaliation, to hold grudges, to demand repayment. But forgiveness, especially when the sin against us is deep, forgiveness is one of the clearest marks of the gospel at work in the human heart. It is exactly to that kind of forgiveness that Jesus calls us in the Sermon on the Mount.
We’ve been studying this passage together for the last several months. We’ve seen that this is the manifesto of the kingdom of God. Jesus here is describing the heirs of the kingdom, the citizens of the kingdom of heaven, and he is holding out for us the good life, the flourishing life, the life that belongs to those who are children of the Father. We saw last week that Jesus gave his disciples a model for prayer in what we now know as the Lord’s Prayer.
We’re going to read those words again today in Matthew 6:9-15, but today I want to focus especially on just one petition from the Lord’s Prayer, the petition for forgiveness, and then on the two verses that follow the Lord’s Prayer, where Jesus singles out this request for forgiveness. It’s the only request that he singles out and gives further explanation and commentary on. We see that in verses 14-15.
So I just want to read Matthew 6, beginning in verse 9. We’ll read down through verse 15. Jesus says,
“When you pray….Pray then like this:
“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.
“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
This is God’s Word.
Jesus’ words here are both heart-searching and instructive. They teach us that followers of Jesus are both forgiven and forgiving. Those who are forgiven of their sins must express that forgiveness to others.
I want to break that down into three interrelated truths:
1. The Forgiveness We Need
2. The Forgiveness We Must Extend to Others
3. The Forgiveness God Gives
1. The Forgiveness We Need
So first of all, the forgiveness we need. Here I just want to focus on verse 12, on the request for forgiveness. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
So this is important, that of the six things that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray for, forgiveness is one of them. It highlights our need for forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that every single one of us needs and that we need to ask for, that we need to seek from the Father.
I think this would include forgiveness in two senses. It would include the forgiveness that we receive in a definitive way when we come to faith in Christ, we confess our sins, we believe in Jesus and his atoning sacrifice for us, and we are justified, we are declared right in the sight of God the divine judge. Our sins are pardoned, we are absolved of our sins, we are received into fellowship with God as righteous. That’s the great gift of justification that Paul describes and defends in places like Galatians and Romans.
But there’s also a secondary sense in which we need forgiveness, and it’s what we might think of as the daily experience of forgiveness. It is the application of God’s justifying grace to our conscience and to our hearts and lives, where we as the children of God confess our sins. We confess our wrongdoing to the Father. We ask him to forgive us, to assure us again of his grace and his mercy, and to restore us to fellowship with him. We need forgiveness in both of those senses.
Why do we need forgiveness? We need forgiveness because of sin, what Jesus here calls debts.
J.I. Packer explains it this way; he says, “How should Christians see their sins?” And then he gives a list of the different metaphors the Bible uses for describing sin.
“Scripture presents sins as law-breaking, deviation, shortcoming, rebellion, pollution or dirt, missing one’s target. But the special angle from which the Lord’s Prayer views it is that of unpaid debts. Jesus’ thought is that we owe God total, tireless loyalty, and our sin is basically our failure to pay.”
Now, this stands to reason when you think about God’s law. The first and the greatest commandment, Jesus said, is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.” This is what we owe God. God created us, our life is entirely dependent on him, we owe him everything; and Jesus says what we owe him most of all is the love of our hearts. We are to love him with everything we have.
Listen, friends, that is something that we fail to do every single day. That means that every day we are in some ways guilty of sins—sins either of omission or commission—sins of omission when we fail to do that which God has commanded us, and sins of commission when we actually do those things that God has forbidden. And sins of either kind leave us in debt. Sin means that our accounts do not balance, and therefore we need God’s forgiveness. This is something Jesus says you’re to seek for, you are to ask for.
Now, I think this shows us or exposes for us two errors that people may have when they think about forgiveness.
The first error is the error of presumption. It’s just to assume that God will forgive our sins. Jesus doesn’t assume it; he tells us to ask for it. But many people, I think, just assume that God will forgive. They presume on God’s grace. It’s like the poet W.H. Auden, who once said, “I like committing crimes, God likes forgiving them; the world is wonderfully arranged.”
“I like to sin, God likes to forgive; he’s a forgiving God. Everything’s great.” That is a presumptuous attitude about sin and forgiveness. It’s the idea that forgiveness is automatic and that because God is loving, he will inevitably forgive. “Repentance is therefore unnecessary, judgment is unlikely. God is a forgiving God. Therefore, I don’t need to worry about my sins at all.”
That is not the way the Bible characterizes God or characterizes sin or forgiveness. Jesus does not allow us to think in that way. He, rather, says we are to seek this forgiveness. We are to recognize that our sin is an offense against a holy God and that we need the forgiveness of God, and therefore we must seek it.
But on the other hand, there are people who would deny the very possibility of forgiveness. For them, the world is run according to strict justice, and as long as their good outweighs their bad, there’s no need to seek forgiveness. They may not even believe that forgiveness is possible. For them, there is no real category of mercy.
I think both ways of thinking about forgiveness are evident in our culture. Both ways are errors that Jesus teaches us to avoid.
Let me give you an illustration. This is an illustration that comes from a great work of literature, Victor Hugo’s book Les Misérables. It’s really a story that’s all about forgiveness. It’s about a man who needed forgiveness, but he has a nemesis, he has a rival who doesn’t really believe in mercy or in forgiveness.
So the man who needs forgiveness is Jean Valjean. He is this ex-convict. He had spent nineteen years imprisoned because he’d stolen a loaf of bread to feed his daughter’s hungry children. As soon as he is released, he is bitter, and he goes straight back to stealing, but he encounters a man who shows him incredible grace. He encounters this bishop, a bishop from whom he steals silver, but when Jean Valjean is caught, the bishop says, “No, I gave it to him,” and he gives him the silver, and he says, “I want you to start a new life.”
That moment of grace changes Jean Valjean. He’s overcome by it, and it results in a new identity in his life, and he begins to live his life for the sake of others, all because of the grace that he has received.
But hot on Jean Valjean’s trail is Inspector Javert. Inspector Javert is a man of law. He’s a man of justice. For him, there’s no category of mercy. If you break the law, you must pay.
For years, he is hunting down Jean Valjean, driven by this rigid sense of justice. And there finally comes a moment—it’s in kind of the climax of the play, if you’ve ever seen the play—when Jean Valjean actually has the opportunity to kill Javert and finally rid himself of this man who has been dogging his tracks, haunting him for years, hunting him for years. And instead of killing Javert, he shows him mercy, he rescues him. He saves his life, spares his life.
Javert does not know how to respond to it. If you’ve ever seen the musical, this is what he sings. He says,
“How can I now allow this man
To hold dominion over me?
This desperate man that I have hunted,
He gave me my life. He gave me freedom.
“I should have perished by his hand;
It was his right.
I was my right to die as well.
Instead I live—but live in hell.”
You see, the problem for Javert is he’s too proud to receive forgiveness. So, in despair, he throws himself into the river.
Some people assume God’s forgiveness, some people deny that forgiveness is even possible—they can’t imagine forgiveness at all. Jesus corrects both errors. He shows us our need for forgiveness, and he shows us that it’s possible. We should simply ask the Father.
Let me ask you today, have you seen your need for forgiveness? You owe God perfect love, perfect obedience, loyalty, and yet every day you fail to render to God what he is due. You need forgiveness. Have you ever asked for it? Have you ever sought his face and asked him to pardon your sins? If you’ve not done so, let this be the day that you ask God for the first time to forgive your sins, and then begin this life where you regularly, daily, seek God for his mercy and his grace.
2. The Forgiveness We Must Extend to Others
So, we see the need for forgiveness, but if forgiveness is something that we need and we can receive from God our Father because of his love and grace, forgiveness is also something that we must extend to others. You see that, again, in the petition itself in verse 12: “Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” But then Jesus expands on this in verses 14 and 15. Let me read it again.
“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Those words have troubled many readers. What does Jesus mean? If you don’t forgive, you will not be forgiven. If you forgive, you will be forgiven; if you don’t forgive, you’ll not be forgiven.
I think we cannot water these words down. Jesus clearly means that our forgiveness, our receiving of God’s forgiveness, is in some way conditioned upon our extending forgiveness to others. That’s what the “if” does. If you forgive, you will be forgiven. If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven. You can’t avoid the “if.” There’s a logic there; somehow there is a conditional relationship between these two things.
Now, we have to clarify that in light of New Testament teaching. I think John Stott is helpful in his commentary. He says,
“This certainly does not mean that our forgiveness of others earns us the right to be forgiven. It is, rather, that God forgives only the penitent [or those who repent], and that one of the chief evidences of true penitence is a forgiving spirit.”
I think that’s basically right. I think the point is not that forgiving others merits or earns God’s grace, but rather that a genuine, transforming experience of God’s grace will so change our hearts that forgiveness and mercy towards others will be the inevitable result. The forgiven will become the forgiving.
Jesus actually illustrates this principle in one of his own stories, and you have this in another passage in the Gospel of Matthew. This is in Matthew 18; it’s the parable of the unforgiving servant. So, Peter asks Jesus, “How many times must I forgive when somebody sins against me? Seven times? Do I have to forgive seven times?” Jesus says, “Forgive seventy times seven,” and then he tells a story. Let me just kind of paraphrase it.
It’s the story of this servant who owes his king a great debt. Jesus says it’s ten thousand talents. Now, that is just an unimaginable amount of money. A talent was equivalent to something like fifteen to twenty years’ worth of salary. So, to owe ten thousand talents means you owe something like a billion dollars. You’ll never be able to pay it off. So he goes to the king and he begs for mercy. “Forgive me this debt!” The king says, “Okay, I’ll forgive the debt.”
But on his way home, this servant comes across another servant who owes him a few thousand bucks. And he grabs him by the coat and he shakes him and says, “Now pay me what you owe!” And the servant doesn’t have it; he says, you know, “Have mercy upon me and I will eventually pay you.” And this wicked, unforgiving servant will not show the same kindness that he’s just received. He will not show it to his fellow servant. He throws him into prison.
When the king hears about it, he is angry, justly angry. This is what Jesus says. He’s kind of ending the story. The king says, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me, and should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?”
Then Jesus says, “And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Once again, the point here is unmistakable. Those who are forgiven must also forgive others. If we will not forgive, we betray a profound lack of understanding of our own debt to God, of the great grace that God offers to us in Christ in the forgiveness of sins. If we have not grasped that, it betrays something that is wrong with our hearts. I think that’s what Jesus is teaching us here. Those who have been forgiven must also forgive others.
Now, I do think it’s important here to clarify what it means to forgive other people. What does it mean when we extend forgiveness to others?
Sometimes the best way to clarify something is to say what it’s not before you say what it is. So, really quickly, just to help us practically know what it actually means to forgive, let’s look at this for a minute. I think we could say that forgiveness is not several things.
(1) First of all, forgiveness is not minimizing sin. When Jesus commands us to forgive, he is not asking us to pretend that evil doesn’t exist or that the evil against us was small. He recognizes and we must recognize that some sins are destructive, some wounds cut really deeply, and forgiving someone else does not require us to deny that reality. Forgiveness does not minimize sin.
(2) Number two, forgiveness does not mean that trust is instantly restored. If someone has sinned against you and it’s broken down trust in the relationship, you must forgive them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you immediately begin trusting again. Trust has to be built over time. And in some situations, wisdom will require boundaries and distance and accountability. Forgiveness does not eliminate that.
(3) Number three, forgiveness does not mean that justice no longer matters. Scripture consistently affirms that wrongdoing has consequences and holds out God’s concern for justice in the world. We’ve seen that expressed as well in Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve said this many times now at Redeemer, but I’ll say it again: If you have been the victim of a violent crime or of abuse of any kind, forgiveness does not mean, don’t say anything. It does not mean, don’t turn them in. It does not mean that. You must stand up for your safety, for the safety of your children, or for the safety of people that you know are in those situations. Forgiveness does not cancel out justice.
(4) Finally, forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. Reconciliation requires repentance and the restoration of a personal relationship. Sometimes reconciliation doesn’t happen.
But forgiveness is something else. Forgiveness is something that you do from your own heart, and it’s more about you releasing something to God. I think we could put it this way: Forgiveness means releasing the debt that the other person owes you, releasing that debt to God, so that you surrender the right to revenge, you refuse to nurture bitterness in your heart, you trust justice to God rather than taking it into your own hands. It means that you stop holding the other person’s sins over their head, in your heart and in your mind.
The reason why you and I can do this and must do this is because God does not hold our sins over our head, because he has forgiven us. Listen to Paul in Ephesians 4:31-32. He says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Now there you have it, the measure of forgiveness. Forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.
Colossians 3: “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” Once again, the forgiven must become the forgiving.
One of the saddest experiences that I’ve had as a pastor was attending the deathbed of an elderly woman who had been under my pastoral care. This was a woman that I liked. She was a sweet woman. I had visited in her home several times. But I discovered as she was dying that she was estranged from her children. She had no speaking relationship—they were not on speaking terms—and she refused to let them come visit her even as she was dying.
I read the words of Jesus to her. I pled with her. I urged her. I said, “Jesus says if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven. You need to forgive,” and she would not do it, and she died without ever speaking to her children again.
Unforgiveness does something to the human heart. It hardens the heart. At first it feels justified, then it becomes familiar, but before you know it, it’s a prison. It’s a prison locked from the inside. Jesus’ warning is to not let that happen, and I think his teaching, and the broader teaching of Scripture, shows us how we can be released from that prison. It is through the forgiveness that God himself gives.
3. The Forgiveness God Gives
Jesus does not merely command forgiveness; he provides it. This is the heart of the gospel, and it’s the heart, really, of the Gospel according to Matthew. Matthew, as you maybe know, is the most Jewish of all the Gospels. It is the Gospel where Matthew presents Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. And throughout this gospel, Jesus is seen as the King who comes treading on a path that is paved with prophecy. So over and again something is written to confirm and to show the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
For years, the people of Israel had longed for that day when God would fulfill his new covenant promise to forgive their sins. They participated in the sacrificial system, the sacrifices that reminded them of sin, and there was a temporary relief, but their sins were never fully removed. But they’re longing for that ultimate and final covenant promise to be fulfilled, and it all happens the night before Jesus dies, when he celebrates that Passover meal with his disciples. Echoing, I think, the promise of Jeremiah 31, Jesus says, “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
Here’s how you get it. This is the forgiveness God gives. If the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to ask for forgiveness, the cross is what purchases forgiveness for us. The reason why we can then release the debts that others owe us is because at the cross, God released the infinitely greater debt that we owe to him.
In fact, that language is used elsewhere in Scripture, in Colossians 2:13-14. Let me read this one to you. These are Paul’s words.
“And you, who were dead in your trespasses, in 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.”
What a vivid picture! It’s as if all of our sins were written down in this legal document, this legal document that records our debts. And God takes that legal document and he nails it to the cross of Jesus Christ.
We even sing this, don’t we?
“My sin—O the bliss of this glorious thought—
My sin, not in part, but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more;
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”
The debt is canceled, the sin is forgiven. The gift of God’s forgiveness is lavish and it is costly.
This is lavish forgiveness. Let me give you just another quick illustration. Donald Grey Barnhouse is that great pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He once told a story about a man who had lived a very wicked life before he became a Christian. It was a life of great sin and evil, but he’s saved, he becomes a Christian, and he wants to marry this wonderful young Christian woman. But he knew he needed to come clean, he knew he needed to tell her about his past, and so he did. In painstaking detail, he went through, he told her about his sins. She then did something that was truly astounding. She took his face in her hands and she said this—let me read it to you—she said,
“John, I want you to understand something very plainly. I know my Bible well, and therefore I know the subtlety of sin and the devices of sin working in the human heart. I know you are a thoroughly converted man, John, but I also know that you still have an old nature. The devil will do all he can to wreck your Christian life. The day might come—please God that it never shall—but the day may come when you will succumb to temptation and fall into sin. The devil will tell you that it’s no use trying and that above all you are not to tell me because it will hurt me. But John, I want you to know that here in my arms is your home. When I married you, I married your old nature as well as your new nature, and I want you to know there is full pardon and forgiveness in advance for any evil that may ever come into your life.”
That’s astounding. “Lavish forgiveness promised in advance.”
Of course, the moral of the story is that if anything would keep someone from sin, it’s that kind of forgiveness. And that’s what God offers to us. He says to us, “Don’t sin, but if you sin, my heart is your home. If you sin, come to me and I will forgive you. If you sin, there is an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one.” He has died to atone for our sins and for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:1-2). Don’t sin, but if you sin, there is a provision. This is the lavish grace and forgiveness that God gives to us through his Son, Jesus Christ.
But listen, it is costly, because it cost the very death of Jesus, the Son of God, on our behalf. Therefore, if it really works appropriately on our hearts, it should move us so that the last thing we want to do is sin against such love.
The cross calls us to confess our sins as we seek the forgiveness we need, the cross models for us the forgiveness that we are to extend to others, and the cross shows us how the gift of God’s forgiveness can be ours.
In a few minutes we’re going to sing together that well-known hymn,
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee!
Let the water and the blood
From thy wounded side which flowed
Be of sin the double cure;
Save from wrath and make me pure.”
That’s what we need. We need the double cure, so that our sins are forgiven, we are saved from wrath, we are counted as righteous before God, and our hearts are changed, we’re made pure. Our hearts are changed.
When Jesus calls us to both ask God for forgiveness and to forgive others, his words speak of that double reality. We seek forgiveness because part of the double cure is God forgives our sins; but we also forgive others, because part of the double cure is it changes our hearts so that we forgive others.
Let me ask you this morning, who do you need to forgive? Who do you need to forgive? Release that debt to the Lord. And let me ask you, what do you need to be forgiven for? Take that to the Lord as well. Let’s pray.
Our gracious Father in heaven, we thank you this morning for your lavish, costly grace, given to us through Jesus Christ your Son, through his cross, his resurrection. Lord, we do not deserve such grace. We could never deserve such grace. But we are this morning the grateful recipients of it. We confess our need for it. And right now we bring our sins, our burdens to you. Once again, Lord, we want to lay them down at your feet, at your throne of grace, so that we can receive mercy and help in our time of need.
Lord, we ask you today to work in us forgiving hearts that release others from their sins against us. Help us, Lord, to follow the teaching of our Lord Jesus. Help us to remember that we have been forgiven such an insurmountable debt that the only appropriate response is for us to show a similar kind of mercy to others. We ask you to search our hearts and show us where forgiveness is needed—forgiveness of our own sins or forgiveness that we are to extend to others. Help us see that clearly in these moments as we prepare our hearts to come to the Lord’s table.
We ask you to use the table today as a means of grace, to be a visible demonstration of the cost of our forgiveness, as we think about the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus Christ on our behalf; and also to be for us through the Holy Spirit a way in which we really participate in the life of Christ as we come to you, as we experience your friendship, your fellowship, your favor, and your grace in our lives, sanctifying us, filling us, making us more like Jesus. So we ask you to draw near in these moments as we seek your face. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
