“Our bread, our dole, be giving us today. And remit to us our debts, as we also remit those of our debtors. And mayest Thou not be bringing us into trial, but rescue us from the wicked one. For if you should be forgiving men their offenses, your heavenly Father also will be forgiving you. Yet if you should not be forgiving men their offenses, neither will your Father be forgiving your offenses.” Matthew 6:11-15 concordant
Is God’s goodness to forgive no greater than ours? Is the human heart's ability to forgive the limiting measure of divine beneficence? Does God’s impulse to have mercy wait for the stirring of our own mercy? If it is wrong for us to wait to be gracious until someone else is gracious, why is it right for God? While God is God, can He be content to keep back the nature of forgiveness until I am so gracious? Will He really wait for me to forgive wrongs and injustices before He will show forgiveness to me?
It is difficult to understand the meaning of this prayer without further revelation of clear understanding because surely we could assume that God will not forgive us unless we grow in the grace to forgive others. Yet our Father insists on getting His own characteristics written and applied correctly within our life. He must teach us. We must see we cannot receive His blessing and give out a curse.
His blessing binds the tongue of guile that has worked in all men. We look at the scriptures of the Sermon on the Mount as regenerated men, men with spiritual purpose, not as babes in Christ. Today His voice is expounding about these principles of character to all of God’s sons. Those who can hear Him are placed in His body as the very essence of true sons and daughters of God. Jesus reveals what true sons and daughters are.
God does not require unbelievers to forgive mercifully in order to be forgiven. God does not demand spiritual babes to forgive as a condition for forgiveness. But, He does require forgiving mercies of those who grow to be SONS and DAUGHTERS. The Sermon on the Mount teaches his disciples what sons need to know about God's own nature. Jesus said we believers must be as forgiving as God is.
If there is learning we need, it is how to let God’s LIFE dwell in us. God is actually forgiving and forgetting our trespasses against Him (in heart), labeling us as His forgiven people. God grants His One mind to be renewed within us, and He will do this with everyone eventually.
The Sermon on the Mount is the divine training school for sons, teaching us great and glorious lessons that apply true principles about the divine nature of our Father. He daily teaches us by the spirit of His word about how His government should work within us now, teaching us about holy things. Just as athletes must be trained to a degree far surpassing those who merely attend the competition, so THOSE WHO GROW TO BE JUDGES IN THE LORD’S HEAVENLY COURTS ARE TRAINED IN HIS TRUE CHARACTERISTICS.
They grow beyond the hypocritical fallacies mouthed of men, in order to be faultless before His throne. Some people are taught by His Spirit and disciplined in His way of thinking. His disposition governs within these Christian believers. Growing spiritually to be made Kings and Priests by having the Father's name written within their being enables them to forgive, to love, to be peaceful right now, to live as He does. It is most critical for us to learn to bless others with a forgiving heart now and not curse and label people with our own judgments, no matter what they have done or how they have hurt us.
Here in the Sermon on the Mount are great spiritual principles of unalterable divine intent inherent in the ways of His manifestations. We are becoming aware of similar conditions enabling us to expand our ability to possess more of the unbounding forgiveness, acceptance, and love flowing from our Father. God’s Spirit simply flows to mature Christians like a turned-on water faucet.
If you don’t turn on the faucet, the well or reservoir will not supply more water. The faucet is the gate to channel water supply to the lavatory. The reservoir, on the other hand, is the source from which the water is supplied to the faucet. The timing of supply requires the faucet to be opened in order to channel flowing water from the source. Opened faucets cause water to flow to the lavatory, so the reservoir automatically provides an unfailing supply of water to the faucet. IT’S AN OPEN AND PURE HEART (spirit) THAT CAUSES A FLOW FROM GOD’S SOURCE !
We are channels of God’s Loving Spirit, now made able to be loving and kind, merciful in heart in this life. Divine revelation has made love and goodness possible. It flows to our inner spiritual man, so by His Spirit we too are loving, merciful and forgiving. If we are forgiving of heart, able to love our brethren, then God is abiding in our inner man of spirit!
"If you should be forgiving anyone's sins, they have been forgiven them. If anyone's you should be holding (onto), they are held (in the hell of your judgment)." John 20:23 concordant
Husbands, be not bitter against your wives! We are instructed not to close the doors of our heart but to stay open to the flow of God's love between mates. God will gladly permit forgiveness to flow to us and out of us. What He is and what He does becomes our personal experience when our real inheritance is dispensed to us. And now, though it may seem we have traveled a long way around to reach the point, we should see a just balance in this prayer:
“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Matthew 6:12
Sons of God cannot be forgiven fully on any other terms. We are not to be hypocrites, but filled with the joy of the Holy Ghost, filled with the fullness of God’s peace, harmony, hope, mercy, goodness, tender love. Our adversary would rob us of these characteristics to have us, instead, represent resentments, antagonism, bitterness, disharmony, hatred, selfishness. These are common representatives of an unregenerate nature at man's heart.
An unregenerate heart refuses to forgive the offenses of others. Rather, it harbors qualities of hatred that hold us short of the characteristics God is giving. Divine revelation is needed to expose us to our lack. Only His Kingdom light reveals His complete image. True sons and daughters are being exposed, taught, and led of His Spirit. Kingdom priests are made to be forgiving, without personal judgments, and are entitled to the complete, full measure of Godly grace that forgives. We win Christ when we reflect the conditions of our Father's character in our heart. Our spirit is then open to showing love's perfecting work.
Must our Father wait for us to be graciously forgiving of others? Is it possible for us to receive love from God and give out disdainful hate to other people? Can we be joyous towards Him and sullen to our neighbors? Can we accept from Him tenderness, compassion and love while we continue to walk in arrogant hostility and disdain for other people around us?
It seems we Christians have lived under an order of duplicity, a corruption that really is the height of hypocrisy. God has promised a deliverance. Nothing hypocritical can possibly be found within the great priesthood of God’s Kingdom. We pray for healing deliverance from sin’s captive dark nature within fallen man. We can see that God would release us, wash us, and regenerate us into godly graces. These freely absorb the everlasting good news about God's intended deliverance of liberty that Jesus openly declared:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” Luke 4:18
This passage was stated in Jesus’s hometown, His home synagogue, and it announced an acceptable time of deliverance. Note particularly the word “deliverance” and the term “set at liberty.” Deliverance or set at liberty is translated more often in the King James Version as ‘forgiveness’ or ‘remission.’ The Greek word has the metaphor or word picture of opening up a prison door and of captives walking out free — released. It relates especially to the Old Testament year of Jubilee when all Israel’s sons in bondage as slaves are set free and all their debts canceled.
God's forgiveness does open the doors of past judgments, wrong estimates of what is owned, debts caused by trespasses, hurts and wrongs that have imprisoned us in a debtor's prison of judging others. We can’t pay our way out of our own mental prison houses if we haven’t learned to forgive other people. When we keep others imprisoned with our personal judgments, we also lock ourselves up in all manner of hellish deceptions that captivate us in hate, again and again.
Only God’s Spirit can renew right thinking within our inner being. Men are blinded by accepting their own wrong thinking. Spiritual revelation delivers us into God’s light, into his thinking. This helps us see and understand the importance of having the teachings of Jesus applied to our inner spiritual man today.
Christian people are robbed of heavenly thinking when they are debtors to man’s judgments in their daily lives. World news is broadcast according to man’s knowledge of good and evil. It turns out to be the spirit of our adversary that is angry about wrongs and requires us to receive portions of torment:
"And the great dragon was cast out, the ancient serpent called Adversary and Satan, who is deceiving the whole inhabited earth. It was cast into the earth, and its messengers were cast with it. And I hear a loud voice in heaven saying, just now came the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of His Christ, for the accuser of our brethren was cast out, who was accusing them before our God day and night. And they conquer him through the blood of the Lambkin, and through the word of their testimony, and they love not their soul until death." Revelation 12:9-12 concordant
Our spirit is bound as a prisoner while we hold agreement with the Adversary's dispositions, judgments, and mindsets. We conquer only by faith in God’s truth, and loving not our souls unto the death until we think of and then proclaim God’s truth. Great progress is made when we forgive the offenses of a brother, a family member, a neighbor, a friend or spouse.
We go to the prison house of wrong judgments, however, when harboring malice without cause. We don’t get out of that mental prison until we pay the last farthing. Why is this important? Because at the centermost desire of God's heart toward us is a desire to set us free from death’s dispositions. God is bringing sons and daughters to a deliverance that expands the connection of His Spirit within us.
There is a great and universal gathering unto this which is true in Him. This is what sons are now groaning to grasp: an inner release from the corruption of man’s death processes. The Word and Spirit of God are promising to set us believers free from death, free from all its debts that we may have accumulated.
We have all come short of glory. Yet God has set a time for men to be freed, as He did when He gave Jesus the keys of death, hell and the grave. He is now unlocking our hidden inner parts by instilling great confidence in God’s mercies. We know God’s freedom is exercising forgiveness powerfully within our inner man toward others. There, within us, is divine power to forgive others, speak truth in love, and know what God has given us.
God is Fathering plenty of opportunities to exercise true forgiveness in our lives today. Many of our unspoken thoughts are being brought into subjection to the mind of Christ. Christ enlightens our spirit to practice forgiveness and forgetting the offenses of others. Jesus conquered the death within to raise up and go forth liberated in the right spirit.
God is now concerned about how we Christians understand the scriptures. He wants to know if we understand the written word BY SPIRITUAL REVELATION. Jesus still opens our understanding to the scriptures, but would rather have sons who can’t read or understand His plans but whose SPIRIT IS RIGHT — merciful, kind, patient and forgiving of others, whose inner life is flooded with and made one with God’s power to love. What is this but the fruit of a more excellent ministry?
Paul is a brilliant man. He was a scholar indeed and a lawyer versed in the scriptural law. He said he was given a dispensation of conciliation, the message of reconciliation of God being our Father:
"Who conciliates us to Himself through Christ, and is giving us the dispensation of the conciliation, how that God was in Christ, conciliating the world to Himself, not reckoning their offenses to them, and placing in us the word of the conciliation.” II Corinthians 5:18-19 concordant
In some church orders the method of conciliating was to get a bullhorn, go out on the corner, and tell people they are going to hell, unless they confess their faulty ways. The need to come to church fellowship was obvious, but many took one look — and many took a long, long look over many, many years — and saw how carnal and obnoxiously hypocritical they were. They said within their heart, “If that’s all church does for you, I don’t want it, thank you.”
Yet for two thousand years sons of God have been coming out of candlestick church orders because they hungered for lasting heavens that possessed the reality of real JOY, real PEACE, real LOVE from the Christ life. Duplicity has had its day within mature Christians, but now a new Day has dawned. A third day has dawned as the Christ of God is coming within His people to rule over our own earthly minds and members, just like He promised He would.
The Kingdom of God is within us NOW, even while church goers are going hither and thither, following every big name preacher, buying and selling influence among God’s people, joining in unequally yoked unions, eating and drinking the husks of the scripture, reasoning about their tomorrows, and trying to find some kind of meaning to this life.
Meanwhile, the instructions of the King promising freedom have been accessible all the time TO THOSE WITH EARS TO HEAR WHAT THE SPIRIT IS SAYING to the church of God.