The God Who Forgives
Fifth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer — March 18, 2026
[INTRO]
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have been working through the Lord’s Prayer this Lenten season, and we have been learning that the Lord’s Prayer is more than just a prayer. It is deeply theological. It has a special role within the catechism. The Ten Commandments teach us God’s will for what we should do, and they expose our failure to do it. The Lord’s Prayer reveals God’s will for what he will do. The seven petitions are the seven things we should ask of the Father and expect from him. They are the seven things he desires to do in our lives.
Tonight we come to the Fifth Petition: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Now, this is a petition that we pray all the time. We pray it every Sunday, and many of us pray it at home during the week. But I wonder how often we think about what we are actually saying when we pray it. Because when you pray “forgive us our trespasses,” you are confessing that you have trespasses. You are admitting that you have sinned against God and that you need his forgiveness. And when you pray “as we forgive those who trespass against us,” you are saying something about how you treat other people who have sinned against you. Both of those are serious things to say, and we should not say them lightly.
What I want us to see tonight, from our four readings, is this: God will forgive. That is what this petition reveals about God’s will. He will forgive. Not “he might forgive” or “he could forgive if we are sorry enough.” He will forgive. And when that forgiveness takes root in us — when we actually believe it — it changes the way we deal with the people who have wronged us.
We have four Scripture readings tonight, and they each show us a different part of this truth. Let us start with the Psalm.
[THE CRY — Psalm 51]
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” (Psalm 51:1-2)
Psalm 51 is David’s prayer after Nathan the prophet came to him about his sin with Bathsheba. And I think the reason this psalm has been so important to the church for thousands of years is because of what David does not do. He does not make excuses. He does not explain the circumstances. He does not say, “Well, I sinned, but it was a difficult situation,” or “I sinned, but I have done many good things for Israel.” He does not try to balance the scales. He just confesses. “Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” (v.4). That is honest confession, and that is what the fifth petition asks of us.
Now, when we look at the Hebrew words David uses in the first two verses, we can see how desperate this prayer really is. He piles up four different words, and each one is an appeal to God’s character, not to David’s worthiness.
The first word is channeni, which means “be gracious to me.” This is a word for unmerited favor. David is not asking for what he has earned. He is asking for a gift he has no right to.
The second word is chesed, which we translate as “steadfast love.” This is God’s covenant faithfulness. David is not appealing to God’s justice — if God gave David justice, David would be destroyed. He is appealing to God’s character as a promise-keeping God. God made promises to David, and David is clinging to those promises, even though he has been utterly unfaithful himself.
The third word is rachamim, which means “abundant mercy” or “compassion.” The root of this word is the Hebrew word for “womb.” David is asking God for the kind of deep, instinctive compassion that a mother feels for her child. This is not a cold, legal mercy. This is a mercy that comes from the very depths of God’s being.
And then the fourth word is machah, “blot out.” This means to wipe clean, to erase the record entirely. David does not want a partial pardon. He wants the whole thing erased.
So you can see the progression: grace, faithfulness, deep compassion, and then total erasure. David is asking God for everything, and he is bringing nothing of his own. That is what the fifth petition sounds like when we really mean it.
And then David goes even further. In verse 10 he prays: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” The word “create” here is bara, and in the Old Testament this word is only used for what God does. It is the word from Genesis 1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” David is not asking God to help him improve. He is not asking for a tune-up. He is asking for a brand new creation, because he knows that the heart that led him into adultery and murder cannot be repaired. It needs to be replaced. And only the God who created the world out of nothing can create a clean heart out of the wreckage David has made.
Luther picks up on this in the Small Catechism. His explanation of the fifth petition says: “We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look at our sins, or deny our prayer because of them. We are neither worthy of the things for which we pray, nor have we deserved them, but we ask that He would give them all to us by grace, for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment.”
That is an honest statement. “We daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment.” Luther does not say “we occasionally make mistakes” or “we sometimes fall short of our potential.” He says we sin daily, and we sin much, and what we deserve is punishment. This is not meant to crush us. It is meant to make us honest, so that we can receive the forgiveness God offers. You cannot receive a gift if your hands are full of your own accomplishments. You have to come empty. And the fifth petition teaches us to come empty.
So the fifth petition starts here, with the cry. With Psalm 51. With the moment when we stop making excuses and simply agree with God about who we are and what we have done.
But then a very important question comes up, and our epistle reading tonight answers it. The question is this: When we confess — when we really mean it — will God actually forgive us? And you might think the answer is obvious. But the way the apostle John explains it is actually quite surprising, and it makes all the difference in the world for how we pray this petition.