As We Forgive

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. MATTHEW 6:12

Moody called forgiveness perhaps the most difficult of all the elements of prayer to deal with, and he placed unity beside it because both concern the same thing: how we stand toward other people when we come to God. He was convinced that more prayers are blocked here than anywhere else. “I believe this is keeping more people from having power with God than any other thing—they are not willing to cultivate the spirit of forgiveness.”

The only petition Christ explained

Moody noticed that of all the petitions in the prayer Jesus taught His disciples, only one is explained by Him afterwards. It is this one.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. MATTHEW 6:14–15

He did not know, he said, how language could be plainer. “When you go into the door of God’s kingdom, you go in through the door of forgiveness.” And he asked his readers to let their minds run back over the past and through the circle of their acquaintance. Is there someone against whom you are nursing a hard feeling? Perhaps for months, perhaps for years? How can you then ask God to forgive the ten thousand sins you have committed against Him?

Moody went further, following Christ to the altar. It is not only a question of whether we have something against someone else. Has someone something against us? Perhaps they only think we have wronged them. Moody’s counsel was characteristically direct: go and see them before you sleep tonight, and settle it. If you are in the right, you may still win your brother.

Stories from the enquiry room

As usual, Moody made the point with people he had met. A husband once asked him to speak to his wife, who seemed deeply anxious about her soul. The longer they talked, the darker she became. At last Moody asked her to repeat the Lord’s Prayer with him, phrase by phrase. When they reached forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us, she stopped. There was one woman, she said, whom she would never forgive. Moody told her plainly that her prayers would go no higher than his head.

In another enquiry room he was talking with a young woman who could not find peace, and asked whether there was someone she had not forgiven. She pointed across the room to another young woman with whom she had not spoken for a long time. It was a hard struggle. But at last she went, and it turned out that the other was fighting the same battle at the same moment. They met in the middle of the floor and could not finish their sentences; they simply embraced. The two of them and the two workers knelt together.

And in one town Moody and Sankey preached for a week to no effect. Moody said one day that perhaps someone was cultivating an unforgiving spirit. The chairman of the committee rose and walked out in front of everyone. He had been at odds with another man for six months. He found him, asked his forgiveness, and came back in tears. That night, Moody says, the enquiry room was thronged.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. EPHESIANS 4:32

Unity

The next element, unity, is forgiveness written large. “If we do not love one another we certainly shall not have much power with God in Prayer.” Moody noticed that the Spirit came at Pentecost when the disciples were all with one accord in one place, and he did not believe the blessing would have come if they had been quarrelling. His own experience confirmed it. When three churches in a town united in a campaign there was more blessing than when one stood alone, and when twelve united, more again.

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. ACTS 2:1

He was grieved by the divisions of the church, and he had fun with them. Suppose Paul and Peter came back, he says, and were told about Churchmen and Dissenters, and then about the Dissenters’ own divisions, and then about the divisions within the Church of England. Paul, who had rebuked the Corinthians for saying I am of Paul and I of Apollos, would hardly know what to say.

Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:10

“What we want to do is to get these miserable sectarian walls taken away.” Moody lived it. His meetings drew Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists onto the same platform, and he refused to be claimed by any one of them.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. JOHN 13:35

Weighing the chapter

Moody is right that forgiveness is not optional for those who have been forgiven, and right that Christ tied our forgiving and God’s forgiving together in words that cannot be softened. The reader should notice what he is not saying. He is not saying that we earn God’s forgiveness by forgiving others. He is saying that a heart which refuses to forgive has not yet understood what it has received, and cannot receive more.

Two cautions are nevertheless in order. The first concerns the woman who would not forgive. Moody adds that he later heard she had been taken to an asylum, and that he believed her unforgiving spirit drove her there. That may be so, but it is a hard thing to say, and no one should use it to frighten the grieving or the mentally ill. Forgiveness of deep wounds is often a long road, walked with God’s help a step at a time, and the Lord who commands it is patient with those who are trying.

The second concerns unity. Moody’s longing to tear down sectarian walls was noble, and much of the division he mocked deserved it. But unity can be bought at the price of truth. In his later years some of his friends worried that his generosity led him to share the platform at Northfield with teachers whose views on Scripture were far from his own. The unity Christ prayed for is unity in the truth, and it takes both love and discernment to keep it.

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! PSALM 133:1

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Let your mind run, as Moody asked, through the circle of your acquaintance. Is there anyone you have not forgiven? Name them before God.

2. Is there anyone who thinks you have wronged them? Before you sleep tonight, decide how you will go to them.

3. Pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly, and stop at the petition on forgiveness. Can you pray it honestly?

4. Pray this week for the blessing of a church of a different tradition from your own in your town.

5. Read the chapters Forgiveness and Unity in Prevailing Prayer, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Father, You have forgiven me ten thousand debts. How can I hold a hundred pence against my brother?

I bring before You the one I have found hardest to forgive. I cannot do it alone; forgive through me.

Show me anyone I have wronged, and give me the humility to go and be reconciled.

Tear down the walls between Your people, keep us together in the truth, and let the world know by our love that we are Yours. Amen.