Let’s go on to the next portion. It says, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive others.” Or you could say, “Forgive us our sins, our mistakes, and our failures.” We need to admit that we, as human beings, make mistakes. A lot of people try to say that if you are a man of God or a Christian, you should not make mistakes. But if you read the Bible it is hard to find a character or a person who did not make mistakes. Even when Jesus chose His disciples, two of them specifically, made some real big blunders, and others had some problems too. One of them He chose was Judas, and he was the treasurer. He handled the money and he betrayed Jesus. Then the leader of the twelve, you could say, Peter denied the Lord, not once, not twice, but three times! He didn’t do this in front of the supreme court, but just in front of a woman servant. Servants, at that time, were really low class. I mean you could care less what a woman said in that day, but Peter couldn’t stand up to anybody and say, “Yes, I am a follower of Jesus.” Peter failed. We fail also. All human beings have failures and problems. Here He is saying that we need to be forgiven. We need to be forgiven for our problems and things that we do wrong, as we forgive others. Often we look at others and say, “They goofed. They are bad, we don’t like them anymore. We don’t accept them anymore. We don’t want to be around them. We are going to look down on them forever and ever.” We get that way about people, but the problem is we never see ourselves. If you look at yourself and I look at myself, we can see we have had a lot of problems and we have made a lot of mistakes in life. We realize that if we could do things over we would not do that again. We wouldn’t get involved in that, or if I could do it over I would not have said it that way. If I had the wisdom I have now, I would have done better. We all have a history of mistakes in our life. We need to forgive others as God has forgiven us. When we hold things against others, it holds God back in our experience, so it is important to forgive others.

As we continue on with this prayer it says, “Lead us not unto temptation and deliver us from evil.” Jesus was admitting that there are temptations out there, and we will face evil. But in prayer we ask to be delivered from these things. But sometimes we fail, and the Bible makes provision for our failures. Not only does the Bible record the positive things people they have done, but it also records their failures. King David’s failure was recorded in the Old Testament.

As an eBook on Olive Tree see The Lord’s Prayer by Drew Haninger

Taken from a Cable TV broadcast called In the Beginning by Drew Haninger  Message number: TV0023 web site:  www.DrewHaninger.com