Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our debts

As we forgive our debtors

Or as Luke 4:11 has it, “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Pairing this portion of the Lord’s prayer with 1 John 1:6-10 helps us understand how we are to live together in community with Christ. A requirement of life with Christ includes an open acknowledgment of our sin. John says, “But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). (These are all present tense, continually happening verbs, by the way.) Living in the light means living where our sin is being continually revealed and forgiven.

I would hold that the single most common threat to being a healthy community of Christians is the disease of Pharisaism. And the main premise of Pharisaism is to hide one’s sin and maintain an artificially “righteous” life. This is what John calls walking in darkness. It’s avoiding the light of Christ that reveals the truth about us and shows up our sin, to us, and everyone around us, for the simple reason that we are being revealed by the light. And because of our propensity towards sin, even as Christians, we need to always be praying, “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Look at 1 John 1:7 again. “When we walk in the light, we have fellowship with each other” because we are all sinners, but the beauty is that Christ’s blood cleanses us (together) from all sin as we share in this forgiveness. This is not a one time occurrence; it’s a way of life. So being Christians in community looks like walking together in the light, confessing our sins, receiving forgiveness as we forgive each other. Don’t you want to be in that group? We can be if we simply step into the light.

One more observation about the prayer Jesus taught us to pray. It couples our own forgiveness with our forgiveness of those who have sinned against us. It seems you can’t have one without the other. You can’t receive forgiveness while still holding someone who sinned against you in contempt. An inability to forgive someone else reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about forgiveness.

Forgiveness requires confession and as we discussed, there are no degrees of sin, except that my sin is worse than anyone else’s, because it is mine. Even Paul called himself “the worst of sinners.” So if I can be forgiven from my sin, as the worst of sinners, how can I not forgive someone else — who (in my eyes) is less of a sinner than me. It’s like the parable Jesus told about the man that was forgiven a debt of $500 and no sooner had he received that than he went out and demanded someone who owed him $50 to pay up, or he’d throw him in jail.

It’s all about relationships. God forgives us as we forgive those who have sinned against us. We can’t walk together without this. It’s what keeps us whole. We are walking in the light and we are stumbling and falling and getting back up again, and all the while, the Lord is with us. When we hurt each other, there is forgiveness. There is restoration. There is hope. We do not all think alike. We aren’t all on the same page. We are being stretched by each other. But we are in the light, and in that light we love.