JESUS said to His disciples, “When ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.”
There are two kinds of forgiveness spoken of in Scripture. One is God forgiving a lost and guilty sinner who turns to Him with repentance, confessing his guilt, and believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour. In this way God forgives just once. He forgives thus because Jesus has died for sinners, and has borne the sins of all who believe. When we believe on Jesus, God’s word assures us that all our sins were borne by Jesus, and that when we believed, God forgave them all. This God has done once, and never needs to do again, just because Jesus settled the whole matter by His dying on the cross.
But the Scripture at the beginning of this article speaks of another kind of forgiveness—the forgiveness we receive from God our Father after we have become His children. In the first case, it is God forgiving a lost and guilty sinner; in this case it is a Father forgiving a naughty child. After we have become His children, if we do wrong things, He is not pleased with our ways, and we cannot enjoy communion with Him; and besides, He may take His rod and chastise us because of our naughty ways. Now God delights to forgive; but if we do not forgive, we are not like Him, and He is not pleased with us, and will not bear our prayer. Another Scripture says: “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” And so it is if we do not forgive one another: And if we do not forgive each other’s faults, He will not forgive ours.
Sometimes God’s children have hard feelings in their hearts toward others. This is not right; and so Jesus calls on us to forgive. God does not hold any hard feelings against any one; and Jesus prayed for His enemies when they crucified Him, and God wants us to be like-minded. If we have hard feelings toward any one, we cannot pray for him aright. We need to forgive in our hearts, as God has forgiven us, and then our hearts are free to pray even for our enemies, and God will hear us, and forgive our faults, too.
ML 03/22/1903