Forgive us Our Sins As We . . . What?!

Have you been faced with . . . 
   * wanting to forgive, but the person who wronged you denies or minimizes their offense, or
     *  knew you needed to forgive but you didn't feel capable of it?
        
And have you . . . 
     * wanted to receive forgiveness, but it wasn't offered, or
       * received forgiveness when you knew it was immensely difficult to the one who offers it? 


In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus teaches us one of the hardest prayers for us to say with complete sincerity,

Forgive us our sins 

as we 

forgive those who sin against us

It's the "as we" that hits us between the eyes.  If we were just asking for forgiveness for ourselves - and sure, we could ask God to forgive those who sin against us - that would be one thing.  But he ties the two aspects of forgiveness together, 

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.

What is there about un-forgiveness that short-circuits God's forgiveness for us?   Is it that grace, after all, is somehow earned - or perhaps withdrawn depending on whether we forgive others or not?  Or is there something deeper going on?  I opt for the second option and that's what we'll discuss in this week's message. 

I'll also be sharing a clip from a film that impacted me profoundly when I saw it recently.  It's called As We Forgive (trailer here), and it shares the true, contemporary story of Rwandans who were called to forgive those who participated in the genocide of over one million of their brothers and sisters in 1994.  If you've ever struggled to forgive something terrible, you'll want to see it.  If you need to sense God's forgiveness in new ways, join worship at CHBC this Sunday. 

- Curtis 

Soul Surgery (& Prayer)

This week we're starting a three week series of messages looking at prayer.  I'll just be straight-up here and confess that prayer has never come easy for me.  That's not to say that I neglect talking to God, which I do quite often through the course of the day.  But prayer is not something that comes easily to me like breathing, walking or craving a chocolate chip cookie.  Perhaps I have spiritual ADHD.  Prayer often feels like more effort than it's supposed to be.   The father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, supposedly said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours (of each day) in prayer."  I can't really imagine that kind of daily prayer focus.  When I pray for more than about 20 minutes, I get irritated, bored, and doubtful.  I start thinking, right in the middle of talking to the Almighty Creator of Everything, "I've got things to do.  Gotta run!"  That's not what you want your pastor saying about prayer, is it?  


I suspect that there are a lot of other followers of Jesus who are like me.  Charles Spurgeon, an English Baptist preacher in the mid and late 1800's, preached 130 sermons about prayer.  Is it possible that Spurgeon preached about prayer so often because he knew it's hard for the average person to pray?  I long to be someone who can relate to/with God like Moses in Exodus 33,  "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend."  How great would that be?  


The more I think and even (gasp) pray about my prayer problem, the more I've come to realize that it is my misunderstanding of prayer that's the real trouble.  Even though I know better, I still tend to pray as if it's all about me telling God what I think he should be doing.  I may couch my prayers in a respectful formula (ie, the old ACTS prayer recipe . . . A=Adoration, C=Confession, T-Thanksgiving, S=Supplication - ah! At last supplication where I get to what I want!), but the truth is, I see prayer as all about me.  That, I fear, is the real trouble with my prayer life.  And so that's part of the reason I decided to preach on the Lord's Prayer this week (on the left side of this blog you can see the other sermons coming up).   I figure Jesus must know how to do this prayer thing pretty well, so that when he teaches us to pray he probably knows what he's talking about.  I like how straight forward he is about prayer and that he says, "...don't babble like the pagans because it's really annoying to my Father..." (my paraphrase, but that's actually what Jesus says). 


In worship this week we will unpack this most amazing prayer and try to tear off most of our preconceptions and misconceptions, and get a clear view of what Jesus is teaching.  One peculiarly fascinating possibility is that Jesus' prayer had a lot to do with the Hebrew Exodus story as the Jews were delivered from Egypt.  Could the Lord's Prayer be a later development of praying through our own deliverance from the things that enslave us?  That's one possibility we might explore.  
- Curtis