We're going to be in Luke chapter 11.

Open your Bibles to Luke chapter 11 today.

You know, we are ending our series on forgiveness and it has been a journey for a lot of us.

Last weekend, we saw God break chains and help people overcome this thing of unforgiveness.

Now, I was a bit curious about what atheists thought about forgiveness.

And so I went searching on Google and the Internet and I came across this conversation.

And here it goes.

This is an ex-Christian or someone who was a Christian before, and this is what they say.

As an ex-Christian, I used to believe you must forgive people's wrongdoings because God said so.

Even if someone raped you, murdered your loved ones, or abused you underneath toxic leadership, they also said that if you don't forgive, then God would curse you, and you won't go to heaven and other stuff.

Now, I don't know whether that's true about cursing, okay?

It's not true.

But now I'm no longer Christian and I am trying to figure out if forgiveness is still a necessary thing for every wrongdoing a person does to me.

What are your views on forgiveness now?

This person asks and here are some responses.

I think it's gross and unhealthy to force forgiveness for all things.

Some wrongdoings don't require forgiveness.

Some people don't deserve forgiveness.

Another person says one thing to think about.

is you don't have to actually forgive to let go of hatred you carry in your heart.

I don't know, okay?

Do what's healthy for you.

There are some things I'll never forgive, but I can make peace with myself about it.

Uh, that's a contradiction.

I don't accept forgiveness as a concept in the first place, someone else said.

Another person says, no, not everyone deserves forgiveness.

Another person said, I would argue that anybody who would forgive the person who raped them has something wrong with their brain.

And on and on it goes.

The problem is that how can one talk about forgiveness if you're not a Christian because forgiveness is a Christian concept.

Pastor Jeff said this last week.

The human need for forgiveness is a strong present reality no matter how we philosophize about it.

So that is important because when the disciples.

come to Jesus and they ask, Master, teach us how to pray.

What did Jesus do?

That's when we jump into a text right now.

Luke chapter 11 and verse 4.

Verse 1 to 4 says, One day Jesus was praying in a certain place.

When he finished, one of his disciples said, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.

So apparently John taught his disciples to pray.

He said to them, When you pray, this is Jesus, when you pray, say, Father.

Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who sins against us and lead us not into temptation.

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus has more words that he adds to this prayer.

He says, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others, see others their sins, your father will not forgive.

your sins.

All right, so what's happening here?

Let's make some observations.

Number one, Jesus places the principle of forgiveness in the Lord's prayer.

What this tells me is that Jesus placed forgiveness as a very high priority.

He could have skipped it and just added some other things to it, you know, but he did not.

No, what did he do?

He said he wanted you and I to know that forgiveness is a very important aspect of prayer and that it should be lived out.

See there's a relationship between how we deal with forgiveness and how God deals with us.

The prayer says, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Or you could read it this way.

Forgive us our sins for we also forgive those who sin against us.

See, we need forgiveness from God.

We also need to forgive and be forgiven by others.

Forgiveness is a state we are called to live in constantly.

We need to live a Christ-like character that is indisposed towards forgiveness.

So in this prayer, Jesus seems to suggest that it is, we are supposed to have, live in this.

ongoing state of forgiveness.

Our heart should be wanting to forgive all the time.

It's the place where you are supposed to live.

Okay, second observation is Jesus talks about sin.

He says, forgive us our sins.

In his prayer, he says, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

This implies, and I know it's like, duh, but this implies that we sin against God and we sin against other people.

So what therefore is the biblical definition for sin?

This word appears so many times, so many places in the Bible and God seems to want to give us a holistic picture of what sin is like.

The fact is that philosophies and religions outside of God's revelation, the Bible, have never had a true concept of sin in the first place.

Never, ever had a true concept of sin.

For example, Buddhism and Hinduism see sin as ignorance.

Islam...

says it's willed by God.

Liberal and secular Christianity see humanity's problem not as sin, but just as a weakness.

And then in the church itself, there's been controversies about what sin is like, okay?

In the 5th century, there's a British monk who saw sin as basically an outward act of transgression.

And then when you move into the era of the Enlightenment, some philosophers saw sin as a dominance of the lower self, that the lower self overcame the higher self and then you fell into sin, okay?

Sin was basically like a minus sign.

If you're 100%, you got to 95 or whatever it is, okay?

You drop.

Some of them believe that sin occurred as a preparation for grace rather than grace occurring to repair the damage that sin had done, okay?

Another philosopher saw sin as a product of selfishness and ignorance.

He believed that when we challenged Allah, that he believed that we could be challenged to live ethical lives.

He allowed for the possibility, listen to this, of sinless lives.

Can anyone live a sinless life?

I don't know.

Then you move to the 20th century and you look at Christian liberal theology.

They define sin as just in terms of oppression, social oppression, exploitation, and surrender to injustice.

Feminist theology, they define sin as passivity to evil.

There's a problem because as Jacques Coutreau says, he says, in every case though, the concept of sin against a personal God is missing.

I'm going to read that again.

In every case that we've described above, the concept of sin against a personal God is missing.

So do you see how these views about sin have crept into the church?

Many Christians today do things they don't consider sin anymore.

For example, many people do not consider sleeping with someone they're married to as a sin anymore.

People who practice, Christians who practice homosexuality today don't consider it a sin.

Or people who lie a lot or who watch movies that are boring that, you know, I've met some people who tell me, hey, go watch this movie.

I go look it up and I'm like.

Why are you telling me to watch this movie?

It is insane.

Or Christians who get drunk and think, oh, it's okay to get drunk.

See, one time I sat back at the back of the church here, and I was talking to a mother who was struggling with a biblical view on marriage in regard to homosexuality and gender and how churches stand.

And through the course of the conversation, I asked her, do you believe Jesus'words in the Bible are supreme authority over our lives?

And there was silence, just silence.

Because if she said yes, that would mean she would have to change her definition of sin.

And after she left, you could tell she was really struggling with, how can I love the people in my life who live this lifestyle and yet agree with Jesus?

She was genuinely struggling.

C.S.

Lewis says, first, human beings all over the earth have a curious idea that they or to behave a certain way and cannot really get rid of it.

That we know how we're supposed to behave, but we can't get rid of it.

Second, he says that they do not, in fact, behave that way.

that we don't.

We know what we ought to do, but we do not.

See, the word sin used by Jesus in Lord's Prayer means this.

The Greek word there is hamatia, which is its OT or Old Testament counterpart is the word chata.

The basic meaning of both is to miss the mark in reference to sin.

This is not an innocent mistake.

It's like I pull my bow and arrow, and I know the target right there, but I deliberately skew myself or deliberately missed the mark and instead of hitting the center, I hit the side.

It is not an accidental thing.

It is rather a deliberate and willful failure for which you and I must bear the blame.

The mark we miss when we sin is the law of God.

It is the failure to hit the mark that God has set.

His standard of perfect love and perfect obedience to Him.

Let's look at some other pictures of sin.

Remember I said that God uses different pictures to give us a holistic view of what sin is.

Another word in the Bible that is used is the word planeo, which means to be deceived or to err or to go astray or to wander away like in Matthew chapter 18, a ship that strays away from the shepherd.

Okay.

Another word is adikeo, which means unrighteousness.

It means to wrong someone or to do wrong to someone.

Now we get to the forgiveness part of it, right?

The essence of this word is lawlessness, that people are just doing things to each other that cause them harm.

Another word is apatheo, which represents the context of disobedience.

The picture here is of children who disobey their parents, but this word refers to disobedience to God.

It paints a picture of humans as God's children who are refusing to follow God's will, even though God has given us...

Laws because He loves us.

They're not given arbitrarily but because He loves you and I.

But instead of following them we just say, nah, I am not going to do that.

Okay, the last one is the word parabino with its Old Testament counterpart, a bar, which means to go over or to go aside.

It means to go beyond an established limit.

It is the Old Testament word means breaking away from a covenant.

See God gives us boundaries in which to live and we say, I'm going to push those boundaries.

So when Jesus says, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, we have to look at this holistic biblical picture of how God describes sin.

To God we pray, forgive us for missing the mark intentionally, for allowing ourselves to be deceived, for deceiving others, for doing wrong to you and to others, for disobeying God's instruction.

for crossing the line.

And to others, we pray, God, that as we forgive those who've missed the mark with us, who've deceived us, who've done the wrong to us, who've disobeyed us, who've crossed the line with us.

As John Mark Homer says, there are three dimensions to sin.

Sin done by us, sin done to us, and sin done around us.

And all of us, every one of us, you and I, are...

in this boat.

All of us have sinned and we fall short of God's standard.

We sin against God and we sin against other people and we continue to do so.

So Jesus'prayer then offers a state in which you and I are supposed to live, to live in forgiveness, being forgiven by God and forgiving one another.

But there is a deeper level to understanding sin.

It just goes a little bit deeper now.

See, one time Jesus is having dinner with...

The laws of the land, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, whatever.

He's just having dinner with fishermen.

And the Pharisees saw these people as the lowlands of the place, right?

They're just like poor people who don't deserve to be loved.

Okay, and then in Mark chapter 2, the Pharisees are having a fuss about it.

On hearing this, Jesus said to them in verse 17, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

I have not...

come to call the righteous but the sinners.

John Mark Homer says this, in this analogy or in his analogy, sin is like a sickness and he, Jesus, was the doctor.

Repentance wasn't just about pleading for mercy before a judge.

It was about opening up your wounds to the physician.

The key here is this, we have to acknowledge that you and I are sick.

that we have a disease and that we are sinful.

See, many of us, Christian or non-Christian, sometimes think...

We don't have a problem because we've accepted the other definitions of sin that we talked about.

That it's maybe just an outward expression of something or it's just a weakness.

Okay, that's ignorance.

And those have crept into the church.

But if you look at the different pictures of sin, you can tell that all of us fit in these categories.

The biblical perspective on sin.

See, when I lived in Uganda, my wife was a teacher and she had done such a fantastic job.

And there was a group of parents.

Korean parents who wanted to honor her for the job that she had done.

So they invited me and her and I to a lovely dinner at home.

And I ate everything on the table.

There was a lot of food, good food.

And I just ate and kept eating and kept eating.

Okay.

After dinner on my way home, I say itching.

Like, what's going on?

I'm itching.

You know, I'm like, what's happening?

We go to a mall.

You know, I'm itching.

And my wife says, Tanya says, let's go back to the doctor.

And I'm like, I do not want to sit in traffic.

I just don't.

Let's go home.

I said, no, I don't want to turn back.

After getting home, I lay down in the bed and I'm itching so badly.

I get up and I look in the mirror and I'm like, whoa, I looked like Shrek with caterpillar stings.

I looked insane.

My face was so in.

I had bumps all over my face.

I needed a doctor, but I needed to acknowledge that I was sick.

I had to look in the mirror.

And some of you today on all of our campuses, whether you're watching online as well, you need a doctor.

And the Bible is your mirror.

It tells you and I that we are sinners and that we need a doctor.

And his name is Jesus.

And he will work on you for a lifetime to make sure that you become like him.

But you need to acknowledge that you are sick, that you are a sinner.

and that sin has damaged your relationship with God and with each other.

Therefore, Jesus asked us to pray.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

So this is a song by one of my favorite bands growing up in the 90s and early 2000s called Dizzy Talk.

Had a good song in there called, What will people think when they hear that I'm a Jesus freak?

But there's another song called Just Between You and Me.

Song about forgiveness.

These are the lyrics in Verse 2, it says, If confession is the road to healing, forgiveness is the promised land.

I'm reaching out in my conviction and I'm longing to make amends.

Beautiful song.

Confession is our part to dealing with sin.

God is the physician and we are the patients.

All we can do is set our sin in his light, says John Mark Calmer.

And forgiveness is where we...

all want to live.

It's the state in which we're supposed to live.

It's the posture that you and I want.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

The human need for forgiveness is a strong present reality no matter how we philosophize about it.

So what are some applications we can learn from this today?

I know that on all of our campuses there's someone who is not in a relationship with Jesus.

There's someone here today who is Far away from God.

Listen, God deeply loves you.

He created you and I and He knows that in Him you can have the fullest of life.

But you are sick and you've got to accept that you are sick, that you are a sinner.

You have disobeyed God.

You have disobeyed His laws.

You have been deceived.

You've missed the mark.

You've gone astray.

Romans 3, 23 to 25 says this, For everyone has sinned.

We all for...

We all fall short of God's glorious standard.

Yet God, in His grace, freely makes us right in His sight.

He did this through Jesus Christ when He freed us from the penalty of sin.

See, what Jesus did, what God did was, He knew that if He didn't pay His price, you'd be eternally separated from Him in hell.

But He sends Jesus to pay the penalty for your sin.

For God presented Jesus as a sacrifice.

Verse 25.

People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shading his blood.

You've got to look in the mirror, my friend.

You need a doctor.

If there's anyone today who's not a Christian, today's God's invitation to you to live in forgiveness.

But you can't define sin on your own terms.

We have to come to God on his terms.

John Stott says this, if we bring God down to our level, and raise ourselves to His, then of course we see no need for radical salvational healing, let alone a radical atonement to secure it.

When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the binding glory of God's holiness and we acknowledge that we are, namely, hell-deserving sinners, then and only does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it in the first place.

See, the cross is God's great desire to forgive you.

God's desire to heal you.

Through the death of Jesus on the cross, God offers forgiveness to all who admit that they are sinners and need God.

God invites you into living in His forgiveness.

God invites you to be saved, to become a Christian today.

The second thing is baptism for the forgiven.

The Bible teaches that every Christian needs to be baptized.

Jesus told His disciples, He said, Therefore, go make disciples of all nations.

baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded them to do.

See, everyone who says that, I'm a Christian, I'm following Jesus, you need to be baptized.

It's commanded by Him.

It's about being obedient to Jesus'first command.

See, in the early church, baptism immediately followed becoming a Christian.

Once you confess Jesus as Lord, you got baptized immediately.

For example, in Acts 2, after the people heard Peter's sermon, this is what happened.

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and they said to Peter and the other apostles, Brothers, what shall we do?

Then Peter replied, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

What does he mean when he says, Repent?

repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.

Does that mean you get baptized so your sins are forgiven?

No.

I cannot go into depth right now because I got 30 minutes only on this particular weekend.

But here's what I know, okay?

The Greek word translated ice, as you say it, has three possible meanings.

But the one that makes sense based on what other scriptures teach about salvation and baptism is the word because.

So you could...

translate this verse as repent and be baptized because your sins are forgiven.

So when you get baptized, you're declaring, I am forgiven.

I am living in God's forgiveness.

Because when you get, when you become a Christian, usually you make that profession of faith privately.

But now you're saying, I'm going to publicly declare that I'm a Christian.

I'm jumping into the church.

You get baptized because you have surrendered your life to Jesus.

You get baptized because you're a...

obeying Christ's command to do so.

It's a commitment to die to yourself and rise to a new life, living and becoming like Jesus.

Baptism declares publicly that you are a new creation living Christ's forgiveness.

So if you're not baptized this weekend, I want to say, man, what are you waiting for?

Today is the day for you to be baptized.

Do not hold, do not let fear hold you back.

Do not let embarrassment hold you back.

Jump in and be...

baptized.

Number three is daily confession for the forgiven.

When you become a Christian, you don't stop sinning automatically and become a saint.

No, but we embark on this journey of sanctification.

Richard Foster says this, that the Bible views salvation as an event and as a process.

It's twofold, an event and a process.

And that's why Paul writes in Philippians chapter 2 verse 12, work out your salvation, work it out with fear and trembling.

Along this journey, you and I still sin.

We frequently disobey God.

We gossip.

We hate.

We commit adultery.

We do different things that break God's law.

Therefore, we must develop the discipline of confession.

James tells us in chapter 5 verse 16, therefore confess your sins to each other.

and pray for each other so you may be healed.

The prayer of a righteous man is powerful.

A righteous person is powerful and effective.

James is not addressing non-Christians.

He's addressing Christians.

He says confession needs to be part of your life so you become aware when you've gone astray, when you get deceived by the world, when you miss the marks, when you disobey God's commands.

Okay?

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

This has implications for us today.

We need to confess our sins to God daily.

We also must confess our sins to trusted people like in your community group or a mentor.

or a counselor and ask forgiveness for anyone that you've wronged.

Here are some tools that I've used before and I still use to today.

There's what we call the prayer of examine by Ignatius of Loyola.

Loyola, very interesting names of towns to help us examine our day in God's presence.

And this you tend to do before bed as you lay down and your mind is swirling all over the place.

These are good questions or good prayer for you to pray.

Number one is...

ask God for his light.

You say, God, I want to look at my day through your eyes, not merely my own.

Instead, ask God, help me look at my day through your eyes.

Number two, give thanks.

Be grateful for the day.

Say, God, I thank you for giving me this day for all the things I've accomplished.

Have gratitude.

Number three, review your day carefully looking back at the things that you've done being guided by the Holy Spirit.

Say, Holy Spirit, help me to review my day to day.

What good things, what bad things have I done?

And then face the shortcomings.

Face what you did wrong and confess it to God.

And then number five, look towards the day to come and ask God, hey God, would you please help me in the next day to do much better?

That is the prayer of examine.

In the song we talked about just between you and me by DC Talk, there's a line there that says, In my pursuit of God, I thirst for holiness.

As I approach the sun, I must consider this.

Offenses unresolved, they keep me from the throne.

Unconfessed sin, hidden sin, will keep the Christian from enjoying a deep relationship with God and with others.

But the benefit of confession is amazing.

You get to put God's holiness and your humanity in the right perspective.

So you start to relate to God in the right way.

It helps you become more aware of your tendencies.

So you become less hurtful towards others.

And you become an instrument of God's healing.

And to ask God to be more like him.

You become more mature as a Christian.

Number four and the last one is the forgiven worship expressively.

This is my favorite one.

One of my favorite ones.

See until...

what Jesus has done for you becomes real, your response in worship when we gather together is going to be weak.

In Luke chapter 7, there's a story that is titled, Jesus is anointed by a sinful woman.

That simply refers that she was a prostitute, okay?

This woman embarrasses herself.

There's a bunch of men sitting around a table eating, and this woman gathers up every ounce of energy she has, every ounce of courage, and she walks into a room.

And what does she do?

She embarrasses herself and she stands at the feet of Jesus and starts to weep as she cleans Jesus'feet. Then pours, breaks a jar and pours expensive perfume on his feet.

And Jesus says this, Which means, Whoever has been forgiven much, loves much.

Jesus said how many sins have been forgiven.

Her worship was expressive.

She was crying.

She was kneeling.

She was praying.

She was pouring.

She was being generous with her perfume and bathing Jesus in it.

What an amazing picture of worship.

The problem is, I don't know if many of us know that we're really, really bad.

that we've been really bad compared to a murderer or a gangster or a rapist or a racist.

Yet Jesus says sin starts in the heart where no one is able to see.

And so you and I have enormous amount of sin.

This woman, her love for Jesus overrides her embarrassment and her fear and whatever she's done.

So until what Jesus has done for you becomes real, you will never clap.

You'll never raise your hands, you'll never sing, you'll never dance, and during worship you'll stand there like a statue.

Because you've never realized what God has done for you.

And just like the woman in Luke 7, the person who has known forgiveness and released from persistent, nagging habits of sin should rejoice greatly in this evidence of God's mercy.

So if you're engaging with God daily in the prayer of examine, you'll know how much you've been forgiven.

And the result will be...

Expressive worship to the King of Kings, to the God who has forgiven you.

And please do not tell me that you worship in your own way.

I don't like when people say that.

The Bible tells us, tells you and I how to worship.

Worship is objectively defined and determined by God, not you.

So what has God done for you?

What has God done for you?

What are you going to do about it?

Is your gratitude in worship going to override your pride, your fear, your embarrassment?

Is it?

Are you going to lift your hands and sing?

Are you going to worship and bow down?

Are you going to clap your hands, all you people, shout to God with shouts of triumph?

Psalm 103 says this, bless the Lord, O my soul, who forgives all my iniquity.

And then it says this, as far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our sins from us.

So what's that thing as a Christian that's stopping you from dropping on your knees and breaking the alabaster jar and worshiping God?

What's stopping you from lifting your voice and worshiping God?

My prayer today is that you let your worship be expressive because you know how much you have been forgiven.

If you and I are committed to living in forgiveness, knowing how much God has forgiven us, then extending it to others.

Not once, but like Jesus said, 77 times 7.

Imagine what the Holy Spirit can do through us when we live in forgiveness.

Imagine the love and the compassion the world will see from the outside.

Imagine how compelling that would be or this would be for the unbeliever.

Our prayer is that this becomes a reality for you through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lord Jesus, we thank you so much that you've called us to live in forgiveness.

God, we pray that we'll remember that you placed forgiveness in the Lord's Prayer so that we can live it out.

Help us to live this out through the...

power of your Holy Spirit today and help us Lord Jesus to apply these principles in our lives today in Jesus name we pray and everybody said amen we hope you enjoyed today's message if you decided to follow Jesus or just want a little more information about this walk with Jesus I want to encourage you to go to one and all dot Church last Jesus and so that way we can help you along this journey We have a couple resources for you for your walk with Christ, and one of them is the daily podcast, and you can listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it be Spotify or Apple Music, and it's just a two to three minute daily devotional so you can have time with Jesus and reflect upon your day.

The second one is our conversations podcast.

This is where we get to sit down with our speakers, authors, theologians, and just get to dive deeper into Christianity.

you can watch those on our YouTube channel.

And we'll end as we always do with one hope, one life in Christ.