Sunday message · If My People (A Call to Prayer) series
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Message Summary
Near the end of the prayer series “If My People,” Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Matthew 6:12: forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. After the church listens to the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, Phil notes that preaching on forgiveness always prompts conversations afterward. Jesus’ teaching can seem too simple, and we want to qualify it. It is simple, he says, but not easy.
Voices across the political and religious spectrum agree that while resisting injustice has done much good, forgiveness is being forgotten. One pastor observes that society has kept Christianity’s sense of sin but forgotten salvation. The world offers revenge instead, the old instinct to get even that drove every kung fu movie Phil watched as a kid, or the newer impulse to get mad and get even by calling people out and stripping them of dignity. Jesus teaches another ethic: you are blessed when people insult you; love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven (Matthew 5).
Phil offers a short Greek lesson. Many grew up praying trespasses, which is fine, but the word in verse 12 means that which is owed. Verse 14 uses a word for stepping off the path, and Luke 11 one for missing the mark, a word Aristotle used for the error that brings a tragic hero down. The word debt is intentional. Paul tells the Colossians that God forgave our trespasses and erased the certificate of debt against us, nailing it to the cross (Colossians 2). As one scholar puts it, our IOUs have been paid in full.
Why pray this often? Drawing on Kevin DeYoung’s book The Lord’s Prayer, Phil gives two reasons: we still sin, and, more compellingly, God is our Father. Seeing God only as judge leaves us only innocent or guilty. At his best, Phil wants his own children neither to fear being thrown out of the family nor to treat disobedience lightly, and a good father forgives the child who confesses. As one scholar notes, we forgive debtors, not just debts, because forgiveness is relational. God so loved the world (John 3:16), and Colossians 3 calls us to forgive as the Lord forgave us. Forgiving others is a commitment to live in right relationship with them.
So the prayer is not a humble brag but a confession of our commitment to becoming like Jesus, sometimes of where our hearts want to go but have not yet arrived. It is the only line of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus stops to clarify. Through Christ, God has given us the ministry of reconciliation and made us his ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5). Believers are more loved than they deserve and forgiven in a way they could never earn. Phil challenges the church to grow in grace toward others, so that its message sounds less like shame and more like this: you have fallen short, but you are still loved and can be made right with God.
