Why Do We Need to Ask God for Forgiveness?

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everal years ago, we began to pray the Lord’s Prayer together as a congregation every week. I love that we do this. Each week we remind ourselves of how Jesus taught His people – how He taught us – to approach God as our Father whose Name is hallowed, the King whose Kingdom we long for, the God whose faithfulness and forgiveness we need.

But for most of my life, there was something about the Lord’s Prayer that troubled me. Many years ago, when we were preaching a topical series on prayer, we devoted four Sundays to the Lord’s Prayer. I was assigned the petition, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (Matt 6:12).

That was the only part of Jesus’ model prayer that He explained. And there was a time when His explanation filled me with dread: For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins (v. 14-15).

Why dread? I didn’t grow up in a tradition that taught the security of the believer, so those verses always had a terrifying effect: I read them to say that my eternal salvation can be jeopardized by my unwillingness to forgive someone who has offended me! It’s not that I was holding onto a particular grievance, it’s just the very idea that I could – by the altogether human vice of holding a grudge – cut myself off from God’s forgiveness. That seemed like a monstrous threat!

(Some deal with this problem by erroneously insisting that believers need never ask God for His forgiveness, as if those words were not part of the model prayer Jesus gave us!)

But as I read the commentaries, I realized that I was conflating two kinds of forgiveness.
 
In my salvation, God extended His judicial forgiveness: I am made right with God through Christ, and that position is settled and final.

But in His warning about the danger of withholding forgiveness, Jesus was talking about a different kind of break with our Father, not the kind of break that separates me from God forever but the kind that disrupts the sweet fellowship that is mine in Christ. For that kind of rupture in my relationship with God, I must seek His forgiveness.

Like any good pastor, I used my own children as an example in my sermon. Yes, if they wanted to, they could offend me, they could break my heart, they could even consider themselves estranged from me. But one thing they cannot do is change my love for them; they cannot “write themselves out of my will.”

So it is with my Father. My fellowship with Him might ebb and flow as I rebel, come under conviction, and then repent. But my standing before Him doesn’t fluctuate with my behavior; my security rests not on my faithfulness but on what Christ has done for me.

This means that God loves me as much on my worst days as He does on my best days. There is nothing I can do to make God love me more. He’s already given me His Son. There is nothing I could possibly do to earn more affection from God than He’s already shown me in Christ. But there is also nothing I can do to make God love me less; His love is steadfast even when I stumble, even when I rebel.

This was a liberating moment, realizing that I cannot change God’s affection toward me by my behavior, good or bad. That epiphany deepened my assurance that I belong to Him. I asked myself, “If my behavior cannot change my eternal destiny, how do I want to behave?”

Thanks to the gracious sanctifying work of God’s Spirit, I don’t want to waste my life in rebellion and disobedience. Slavery to that life is gone—and good riddance.

What I do want is to see my new life in Christ growing and flourishing in every sphere of my life: in my thought life, my ambitions, my priorities, my relationships, my habits.

I must confess that I don’t want this kind of holy life with an undivided passion.
 
While I am in this body of sin, infected with what the Puritans called “indwelling sin,” I don’t want anything with a perfectly undivided heart. All my desires are mixed, both my desire for sin and my desire for holiness.

But by God’s grace, the Spirit is patiently bending the trajectory of my life toward holiness, so that over time my whole-life love for God and my unselfish love for others become more a part of my nature. In Christ, because of the sanctifying work of His Spirit, the “should” of the Law of Love is slowly becoming “can.”

In the meantime, in the herky-jerky progress of my spiritual life, I can rest assured, knowing that the outcome of my spiritual journey is not in question.

Why? Because He’s my good, good Father, I am loved by Him, and He stands ready to forgive me when I confess and repent.

Persevere.