Luke 11:4 (NIV) Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation. In Luke, we can see that these debts include those things that are sins. You, like all the rest of us humans, have done things that have hurt people. In some cases you didn’t mean to; in others you did. There have been times when you couldn’t identify with other’s situations and that caused you to say and do things that damaged them. There have been times when you were insensitive to their needs and problems. They tried to reach out to you and you couldn’t or wouldn’t help. God calls this behavior sin.

Even though you are a Christian, you still hurt people because you are damaged yourself. God knows you are going to continue to hurt people until you have been healed in all the damaged areas of your heart. He knows that, if He doesn’t help you, sin is going to keep on making you worse. No matter how hard you try, you are going to keep on mistreating more and more people. That is one of the reasons you made Jesus the Savior, Lord, and King of your life, so you could get Jesus’ training, healing, and power.

Why should you be asking for forgiveness, if God has already forgiven you of all your past, present, and future sins through salvation. Why are you back here praying this part of the Lord’s Prayer? This is because salvation gave you a perfect record so you could have direct access to your heavenly Father. This was a general forgiveness in an overall way.

This prayer is helping you look through eyes of love at a moment when you sinned, made mistakes, and failed at something that specifically hurt you, other people, and God’s plan. He is making you feel guilty about it so you will identify with others. He not only wants you to have a clean record with Him, He wants you to start having a clean record with other people.

These sins against you, other people, and God’s plan won’t separate you from God. As long as you hate them and are looking to Him for forgiveness, He will see your DESIRE and honor it by KEEPING your record perfect with Him. BUT, if you get to the place where you no longer care that you are hurting yourself, other people, and His plan, He will remove the perfection from your record.

Salvation-forgiveness made your record clean and perfect through the grace and mercy of God. If you didn’t have salvation-forgiveness, you would not be allowed to enter into God’s presence as His child and as a citizen of His Kingdom. You wouldn’t have any of the rights and privileges of His child or one of His citizens. You wouldn’t be able to expect to come to God and get your relational behavior changed through sanctification-forgiveness.

You are still sinning, making mistakes, and having failures that hurt you, others around you, and God. What you are still doing is wrong but is forgiven through salvation-forgiveness; but, your record with yourself and others is far from perfect. Your relational behavior needs changing through sanctification-forgiveness. It is a process where you make mistakes, sin, and fail in your relationship with yourself, others, and God and then “do what it takes” to make it right.

Rom 8:15-16 (NIV) For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by Him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. This is because of salvation-forgiveness; so, why do we need this relationship with our heavenly Father? Why should He allow us to be His child and a citizen of His Kingdom if we are still hurting ourselves, other people, and His plan? Because this relationship with Him is THE ONLY WAY we are going to STOP hurting ourselves, other people, and His plan.

Rom 8:17 (NIV) Now if we are children, then we are HEIRS--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory.

If you stop immorality, lying, cheating, misleading, gossiping, pride, selfishness, and other sins, you will lose some business opportunities, friendships, relationships, and financial benefits. This will cause a certain amount of suffering; but, if you are willing to allow your heavenly Father to help you, train you, and empower you, you will get MUCH better business opportunities, friendships, relationships, and financial benefits through Him. If this is what you are willing to allow God to do to you, then your repentance will be real. You won’t keep sinning, repenting, sinning, and repenting again and again.

You can see from this Scripture in Romans 8:17 that we INHERIT special rights and privileges from our relationship with our Father. But, you can also see there is something about sharing in Jesus’ sufferings. This guilt you are experiencing through the Holy Spirit is causing you to suffer when you do something wrong. This suffering won’t change your behavior; but, it will bring you to this prayer; and, the prayer WILL change it.

A lot of the reasons we sin is because we don’t want to suffer. We take the “easy” way out and lie to keep from getting into trouble. We cheat or mislead so we won’t lose a job, miss a deal, or fail to get our needs met. We gossip so we won’t feel inferior to someone else. We argue and fight so we won’t be cheated or misunderstood. Rather than suffering while putting our trust in God, we take matters into our own hands. Rather than allowing Jesus to protect us, we make sure we don’t suffer by protecting ourselves.

John 16:8 (NIV) When He [the Holy Spirit] comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. When God’s Holy Spirit speaks to our conscience about something we did wrong, we feel guilty about it. We can attempt to get rid of that guilt by trying to forgive ourselves, trying to explain why we did it, trying to convince ourselves that it wasn’t our fault, or trying to see if we can get our friends to help us feel better about what we did, OR we can allow God to show us how wrong, bad, or evil it was.

If we come to God and start praying this prayer, He will lead us into the painful aspects of how what we did hurt other people. We can shrink away from that process; or, we can allow Him to help us love and care for others. And that can involve us going back to a person we have hurt and making things right.

There are several things we can try to do, rather than going and making things right with a person we have hurt. We can promise God we will never to it again, if He won’t require that we go back and make it right. We can try to do some good things to the person we hurt or do some things we think will impress God. We can try to ignore what we did and just pick back up with God, as if we didn’t do anything wrong. We can try to use our good deeds to balance out our bad deeds; or, we can ask God to make it right for us so we don’t have to do it. But, the only thing that will please God, is for us to go to those we hurt and MAKE IT RIGHT. Then we can come back to God and ask Him to forgive us for what we did.

If we don’t go make it right, we won’t see how much we hurt others, we will minimize every wrong, bad, or evil thing we do. We have to allow others to show us the wounds we caused. We have to WANT to stop hurting people the way we do. We have to feel their pain so we can see that they are just like us. Love is only possible, if we SEE things from other people’s perspective.

When we go to make something right, we aren’t just going there to apologize. If we only go to apologize or make things right, then we are only taking care of our spiritual needs. Instead, we are going to see how they are, what they are going through, how what we did affected them, and how we can better serve them. We want to walk away from that situation with a better understanding of the person. We want to establish a healed relationship, if at all possible. We want to open the doors for future times together, if we can. We want to see what we need to pray about that will help us and them in that relationship; this is an opportunity to be a blessing to them.

John 8:32 (NIV) Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The reason you are sinning, making mistakes, and failing at some things is because of missing truths in your life. 2 Tim 2:15 (AKJV) Study to show yourself approved to God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. You have been doing these studies and not only learning a lot of truths from the Bible, you have been praying and God has been setting you free through them. As you ask your heavenly Father to forgive you for this current situation, you have to forgive the one you hurt BECAUSE THEY FIRST HURT YOU. The Biblical truth that will set you free is, forgiving them will give you the power to be forgiven.

As we also HAVE forgiven our debtors. This part of this prayer is assuming that you have already asked your heavenly Father for His power to forgive those you are holding a grudge against. If that is not true, then you will need to ask for and receive the ability to forgive all who have sinned, hurt, damaged, and frustrated you. Once that is accomplished, you are ready to pray this part of this prayer.

If you want forgiveness for yourself and have forgiven ALL others, say these words: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”