Forgiven

 DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE

FORGIVEN

Luke 11:2-4

2 He said to them, "When you pray, say:

"'Father,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

3 Give us each day our daily bread.

4 Forgive us our sins,

for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.

And lead us not into temptation.'" 

NIV

Who does not need to have sins forgiven? Now that we have hallowed, or declared His name to be holy, which as we now think more about that, we are declaring personally within ourselves that His name is holy and pure and we have asked that His kingdom, or as Matthew recorded, His will be done on earth, meaning His will be done in us, as it is in heaven. We have also asked for that daily bread of life, in our lives, and now it is time to ask for our sins to be forgiven. Now there is a caveat regarding whether we forgive those who sin against us. However, there is another interesting point in that two different words are used. One for God forgiving our sin, and another for us forgiving those who sin against us. First, the Greek word used by God to forgive is afieemi which directly means to send away, to send forth, to let go, or to expire, to disregard, omit, or neglect. This is something only God could do, for even if we tried our hardest, we could not send away the sin someone did against us. Our minds cannot ever forget and that is why the Greek word for those who sin against us is ofeiloo. It has a direct meaning to owe, as in being in debt to or to owe money to, yet in the context of having the wrong someone did and yet not making amends. Still, we could see this in two ways. First, for God to forgive us, we must forgive those who have wronged us. Second, we must forgive those who have wronged us in the same way, just like God forgives our sins. Therefore, we must send away, neglect, or let that wrong expire. Because God has let all our sins expire, or He has sent them away, meaning it does not exist anymore, and therefore God will never bring up our sin to us, saying, "Hey, remember when you did this or that, and I forgave you”. Our sin has been sent away, gone, and God will never bring up that sin to us ever, for it is gone, out of existence. This is pure grace at work, grace that only our Father in heaven can exhibit. We live in and by His pure grace, as we live free from our sin, never having to pay the price for sin, because, by the grace of the Father, he sent Jesus to pay that price for us, thus satisfying His own need for justice, so that He now declares us holy and blameless in his sight. It might be good for us to declare anyone who has wronged us, to be holy and blameless in our sight. Then we would be forgiving as we have been forgiven.