This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome back to our look through the first part of Matthew chapter 6. We're in
day 4. We're going to look at verse 12 today.

We've been talking this week about how to have a healthy relationship with God
and what Jesus teaches us about it as He talks in chapter 6 about prayer and
trying to not impress others or impress God but express our relationship with
Him. What has He taught us? He's taught us to start with the relationship, our
Father.

He's taught us to make desiring God's will more important than knowing God's
will. He's taught us to trust God as the one who meets our needs. And then in
verse 12 He teaches us, well here's what Jesus said.

Pray like this, forgive us our debts as we've forgiven our debtors. Forgive us
our sins as we've forgiven those who've sinned against us, He says. Jesus is
telling us very simply here, very clearly that forgiveness brings freedom.

It meets the needs of your life in two important ways. It gives you freedom from
guilt and freedom from bitterness. Freedom from guilt.

Forgive us our sins. Forgive me the sins in my life that frees me from guilt and
freedom from bitterness as we've forgiven those who've sinned against us. I'm
not bitter against them anymore.

Let's take a look at both of these. First God wants to bring into your life, He
wants to meet the need in your life for freedom from guilt. Forgive us our sins.

You know, I hear people say all the time, "I feel guilty. " In fact they might
even say, "I feel guilty all of the time," but I don't very often hear people
say, "I feel forgiven. " Now if we can feel guilty, we should be able to feel
forgiven.

I know we can know we're forgiven sometimes, but how do you feel forgiven?
Forgiveness is not an emotion, but it should cause an emotion. Forgiveness is a
genuine experience of God's work in our lives that Jesus has done on the cross.

And when you trust Christ for forgiveness, He promises that He will give it. He
gave His life for us on the cross so we would experience forgiveness, so we
could experience forgiveness. So for those of you that are feeling guilty all of
the time, but you know you've accepted God's gift of forgiveness in Christ, how
do you start to feel forgiven today?

Let me just walk through a few simple truths to help you to experience, to feel
the reality of God's forgiveness. God wants to forgive you. He is a God of
forgiveness.

Nehemiah 9:17 says, "You are a God of forgiveness, always ready to pardon. "
That was in the Old Testament, by the way. This idea that God was a judgmental
God in the Old Testament and a forgiving God in the New, that doesn't really
understand the Old and New Testaments.

God has always been a God of forgiveness. God is not reluctant to forgive you.
He wants to forgive you.

God didn't need to be convinced to forgive you. He went to the extent of sending
His Son to die on a cross so you can be forgiven. Just let that sink into your
heart for a minute.

Feel forgiven because God wants to forgive you. The second truth, God completely
forgives you. In Christ, God has forgiven all your sins.

Now, if you're not sure if you trusted Christ for God's forgiveness, then do it
right now. For heaven's sake, do it right now. Say, "Jesus Christ, I trust what
you did on the cross.

I trust in your forgiveness. I trust not in the good things that I do to make
myself right with God. I trust in what you did for me and the gift of
forgiveness that you want to give for me.

Thanks for paying for my sins. Thanks for the new life you want to give me. "
When you prayed that prayer, whether you just prayed it just now or you prayed
it many years ago, God completely forgives you.

Colossians 2, 13, and 14, He has utterly wiped out the evidence of broken
commandments which hung over our heads. He has completely annulled it by nailing
it to the cross. God's completely forgiven you.

You need to hear that, see that. That God is not looking at your sin anymore.
When He looks at you, He sees Christ.

He has completely annulled it. He has forgotten it. He has let it go.

There's a famous story of a priest who struggled all his life with some misdeed,
some sin that he committed during his school days. He asked God again and again
and again for forgiveness, but he never could feel forgiveness and the horror of
what he'd done, it kept coming back to him. One day he met a lady in his church
who claimed to have a special ability to communicate with God, to know things,
to have discernment that other people couldn't have.

So he decided to test her because she seemed to be pretty mature in other ways.
So he asked her doubtfully, "Okay, ask God what sin your priest committed in
seminary back when I was in school. " She returns to him next day and he says,
"I asked God and God said, 'I don't remember.

I've forgotten it in Christ. '" Jesus paid for your sins. He served out the
sentence for you.

It's done. It's forgotten. You can be forgiven and feel forgiven because God
completely forgives you, because God wants to forgive you.

And number three, third truth, God freely forgives you. You don't have to pay
for it again and again. He freely forgives you in Christ.

All of us have sinned, Romans 3. 23 says. Yet now God declares us not guilty by
offering him if we trust in Jesus Christ, who freely takes away all our sins.

He gives all this for free. Now, not for nothing. The price was high.

Jesus gave his life. He gave everything. But he gives it to us for free.

When we freely trust, God freely forgives. So when you talk about being
forgiven, you don't bribe God for forgiveness. God, if you forgive me, I'll do
this.

You don't bargain with God for forgiveness. God, if you forgive me, I'll give
you this. You don't beg God for forgiveness.

Oh, please, please, please, please, please. You don't bribe. You don't bargain.

You don't beg. You just believe. And when you believe in God for forgiveness in
Christ, he completely wiped out those sins.

You can know that you are forgiven and you can feel his forgiveness. You can
have freedom from guilt in Christ. Forgive us our sins.

You can also have freedom from bitterness. Forgive us our sins as we have
forgiven those who sin against us. If we don't forgive those who sin against us
as God has forgiven us, then we're going to live with bitterness.

When you hold sin, unforgiveness, in your heart towards someone else, it
inevitably turns to bitterness. You can't let it go. You feel angry.

Your emotions come up every time you think about it. You feel these negative
thoughts toward this person, the hopes that this will happen to them. It's
bitterness.

Bitterness is paralysis. When you hold on to a hurt, it turns to hate and it
locks you up. It takes a toll on us physically and emotionally and spiritually.

So how do you get freedom from bitterness? Well, I can tell you what doesn't
work. Repayment doesn't work.

I'm going to get freedom from what they did to me by getting them to pay me
back. I'll demand my money. I'll demand justice.

I'll sue and I'll get freedom from this bitterness. Bitterness might sometimes,
unfortunately, be necessary, but they're never going to cure bitterness. You can
win the lawsuit, but unless there's forgiveness in your heart, the bitterness is
still there.

There is not enough money in the world to pay for the hurt in a human heart. So
what are you thinking that they're going to pay me back? They can't pay you back
enough to get rid of that bitterness.

So some people try not repayment, but revenge. If they can't pay me back, I'll
pay them back. Just don't get mad, get even, but you never get even.

You'll never get even because what they did to you, the depth of what they did
to you, how could you do enough to get even with that? Revenge doesn't work.
Other people just try plain old resentment.

They don't do anything. They just feel something. I'm going to hold it in my
heart.

I'm going to hold a grudge against that person. I won't even tell anybody else,
but it's like trying to hold acid in your hand. You hold a grudge in your heart.

It burns through your heart spiritually. You'll always get burned. Repayment
doesn't work.

Revenge doesn't work. Resentment doesn't work. What does work?

Release. You release it to God. That's what it means to forgive.

To forgive doesn't mean you trust them in such a way that they can hurt you
again. There are sometimes when you forgive someone, you still have to protect
yourself against some financial or physical hurt they brought into your life.
You can still release it to God.

There are two Greek words in the New Testament for forgive. One of them means to
offer a gift of grace. The other means to release or to set free.

So you release them to God. Listen, if you don't release your bitterness, you
will begin to resemble your bitterness. Actually, by being bitter towards
someone who's hurt us, we start to look more and more like the person who has
hurt us.

Because whatever you think about the most, whatever's in your mind the most, you
start to become like that thing. You've got to release it. And Jesus says you
can have freedom from bitterness by releasing it to me as we've forgiven those
who sin against us.

Now, how do we do that? Where do you find the power to do that? You find it by
realizing that the forgiven heart is the forgiving heart.

This is why Jesus taught us in verses 14 and 15, "For if you forgive men when
they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you
don't forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. " Now,
this is not a threat from Jesus.

This is teaching from Jesus about how our heart works. If you struggle to
forgive, let me just say this. If you struggle to forgive, it just shows you're
human.

It's a process to forgive. We don't get there, many of us, immediately. If you
struggle to forgive, it shows you're human.

But if you've determined you will never forgive, Jesus says that shows you're
not forgiven. How could you not forgive when God has forgiven you so much? Now,
he said this not to make you feel guilty about not forgiving.

I know that's the first place you want to go, but that's not what he's talking
about here. Satan would like you to go to the place of, "Oh, I'm going to feel
guilty about not forgiving. " Satan's the one who brings guilt, remember, not
God.

No, Jesus is saying this to show you the path to freedom and to forgiveness.
Stop trying to forgive. Start focusing on God's forgiveness of you.

And find in that the fact that God has forgiven you, the power, the strength,
the Spirit's ability to release it, to let it go to him. Let's take a minute to
pray together. And for some of you, right now, this is one of the most important
spiritual moments of your life because you're going to pray a prayer that you
needed to pray maybe for years, "Lord, I release it.

I forgive them. I release it to you. " And you might be thinking, "I can't, I
want to, but I can't pray that prayer.

" Then I ask you to pray at least, "God, I'm willing to be made willing. Work in
my heart to get me to a place where I can release it to you because I don't want
to live in bitterness. I don't want to live in guilt.

I want to live in freedom, the freedom that only Christ can give. " So I ask for
this in Jesus' name, amen.