Matthew 6:14-15 – Forgiveness on Both Sides

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.

Matthew 6:14-15 (ESV) 


Forgiveness can feel impossible, but if our sins were forgiven, then anything can be.

Forgiveness is a struggle for a lot of people, and I think a big reason is because it’s not a concept we can really understand - not unconditional forgiveness, anyway. Like, think about the extent of God’s forgiveness. He created us, we willingly turned away from Him. Even so, He’s stayed with His creation since He created it, going so far as to sacrifice His Son (and Himself) so that we would never have to experience the full consequence of the same sin that we betrayed Him for. Even so, He forgives us as many times as we ask, and even gives us the free will to choose Him. No matter how many times I try to process that, it always ends with: “why would You do that?”

Well, that’s unconditional forgiveness. So it makes sense that that kind of forgiveness is difficult for us to even consider for other people, because it’s so reckless that it kind of defies our logic.

This passage is a part of the Sermon on the Mount, and it comes directly after Jesus’ instruction of the Lord’s Prayer, and what our prayers should look like. I plan to go more in depth into that prayer another time, because it can help to know prayers should be structured. But there’s a parable later in the book, in Matthew 18 that tells a story of a king and one of his servants. The servant owed him a crazy amount of money, but at risk of him and his household being sold into slavery, the servant begged for him to forgive his debt. He had pity on him and agreed, only for the servant to later bully one of his own debtors of a fairly small amount of money. Then the king ordered for him to be sold into slavery until his debt was paid.

In reality, what we owe for the Cross is more than we could ever pay back. By the grace of God, we don't need to pay it back, only to believe in who Jesus is.

Forgiveness is hard, and sometimes, it's a long and arduous process. Some sins cause so much pain and trauma, that things will never be the same as they were before. And forgiveness doesn't mean that we forget the sin, or blindly trust the wrongdoer, or defend them from its consequences. Forgiveness is "a realization that sin exists, that sinful people hurt sinful people, and that I am one of those sinful people."

"Who have I still not forgiven? What have they taken from me, and what do I owe You?"

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