It Sets Us Apart

“Our Father…”, the prayer given to the apostles by Jesus at their request: “Lord, teach us to pray.” is a lesson in who God is, what we want or expect from Him, and the one thing that sets us apart from the other religions and ways of life. It contains, by itself, the guidelines of what it takes to be a good Christian. God gave us the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament, handing them to Moses to teach and lead the Israelites as He demanded. This simple prayer contains within it a simple command or bargain.

The entire first half of the Lord’s Prayer tells us who God is, the supreme ruler who lives in the home to which we all wish to go when our time is up. It says that not only is He a ruler, but also the holiest of all. It contains the promise that someday His kingdom will come to occupy the Earth. As the supreme being, it tells us that His will, not ours or another’s , must be done. It must be done at all levels of His kingdom. He is, after all, the supreme king.

As His subjects, we have the right to expect Him to take care of us, making sure we have food and shelter. It is a request, politely stated, from the ruled to the ruler. We also ask that He protect us from temptation, with the implication that that temptation may be beyond our normal strength to resist. It also asks Him to protect us from whatever evil there may be which is attempting to attack us. It closes with once again acknowledging His absolute power over everything and that the glory is all His.

Now, before you point out that there is a part missing from the second half of the prayer, no there isn’t. That part is the focus of this writing. It contains both a request and a bargain. As human beings, we are going to fail and fall. It is a part of our imperfection, part of our inheritance from the first sinners, Adam and Eve. We know that we are not going to live up to the promises and best intentions we have as Christians. So, we ask for His forgiveness, secure in the knowledge that we will receive it. The kicker, the bargain, is that we ask Him to forgive us in the same manner that we forgive others. If we don’t forgive others, then we are telling God it is okay with us to not be forgiven by Him.

What kind of forgiveness are we talking about? The unconditional kind, of course, without limits on the number of times we forgive. We all remember the parables about the servant who was forgiven by the king and then didn’t forgive one of his fellow servants, and the fate that befell him. Or, the man who asked Jesus how many times he should forgive and the answer was “seventy times seven times”. Taking into account that culture and those rules, Jesus was really saying there is no limit. There is nothing in that part of the prayer which allows us to put conditions on our forgiveness. We are supposed to forgive as God forgives, with a forgiveness that implies forgetting as well.

The ability to forgive and forget is something that all of us, as followers of Jesus Christ, should learn and practice every day. The ultimate act of forgiveness, the best of all examples, is the one that Jesus himself showed us. As he was dying on the cross, full of pain, his last act was to ask his Father to forgive those who had tortured him, hung him on a cross like a common felon, and killed him. Can we, as Christians, do less within our own lives?