Prayer For Forgiveness
Minister: | Rev. Ronald Van Overloop |
Date: | 6/9/2013 AM |
Text: | Matthew 6, 18; Lord's Day 51 |
Psalters: | 391, 143, 362, 83 |
- The trespass and debt.
- To know forgiveness we must truly understand the reality and depth of sin (appreciate health after being sick).
- Sin is any transgression of God’s law (I John 3:4), i.e., any deviation from right, anything not to the glory of God.
- Sin, because it is against God, incurs "debt" (guilt), which makes the sinner justly worthy of punishment.
- To ask to be forgiven is to confess, to admit that we did wrong and owe the greatest debt.
- To know forgiveness we must truly understand the reality and depth of sin (appreciate health after being sick).
- We seek forgiveness from the One against whom all sin is committed.
- To forgive consists of two things:
- To wipe out the debt or to be loosed from it, so it is as if they had never been committed (Psalm 51:1).
- And it includes the positive blessing of righteousness.
- The only way God can forgive is if the debt is really paid (He cannot just forget sin).
- Forgiveness is only by atonement.
- Only the Son of God could bear God's eternal and infinite wrath (II Cor. 5: 19), and earn perfect righteousness for elect.
- The gospel is the good news and glad tidings that our sins are paid for in full.
- This petition is also asking for the assurance of forgiveness.
- To forgive consists of two things:
- The experience.
- While salvation rests solely on divine grace (and not human accomplishments) those who receive it are active: believe!
- Included in faith is the ability and the will to forgive.
- Unless we forgive men, we will not be shown we are forgiven (Matt. 6:14,15).
- Our forgiving is the on-going striving, for God's sake, not to hold it against them with the goal of forgetting it.
- It is to cast from our minds all anger and desires for revenge and the promise not to think about the sin.
- Transactional forgiveness (telling them) takes place when they confess.
- Our desire to forgive is evidence of our having been forgiven, of the real change God has made in us.
- To want to forgive is unnatural - we have to know divine forgiveness to do it.
- God forgives for His own sake (Isaiah 43:25) and we forgive for God's (Christ's) sake.
- Jesus shows the need for every child of the heavenly Father to be striving to forgive.
- While salvation rests solely on divine grace (and not human accomplishments) those who receive it are active: believe!