This episode of the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast is brought to you by that Dwell Audio Bible app I've been talking about. I continue to love it. I use it all the time. It is so nice to have the Bible read to you and read to you well. It hits you different, and it's something I know a lot of you are enjoying too. TMBH listeners get 33% off the app by going to dwellapp.io slash TmbH or just clicking on the link down below. All right, my friends, let's get after it. I get this phenomenal Twitter account that I started following here a little while back. It's called Bad Sports Refs, and it's exactly what you'd expect. It's just clips of refs screwing stuff up. And it's really cathartic to watch them make these mistakes because deep down you're like, I knew these guys were incompetent. Take that authority figure for being wrong. And like there's no Twitter account that I'm aware of as like good sports refs who just get everything right and make these bang bang calls where you definitely get it wrong if you were the one doing it, but they're so disciplined and focused they nail it. That isn't fun. I don't want to see refs getting things right. I want to see refs screwing stuff up so I can feel good about myself and superior and know that they were always conspiring against me. But here's what's interesting. You know, you got, say, 32 teams in a National Football League, right? And you'll see a clip on bad sports refs, and 31 30 seconds of the fans will be able to look at that and be like, that was awful. How do you get that wrong? But there will always be one 30 second of the people observing this on Twitter who are like, actually, if you look a little bit closer, you know, that's a difficult. Well, if you go by the letter of the law of the rule book, technically he did make the right. And they just they will put on these goggles that are the color of their team, and they just cannot see reality. And they will extend amazing amounts of forgiveness to that official for blowing that call. But in the very next thread, they're right of there with a mob, you know, mad as can be about how dumb and wrong the refs were on that particular call. And that's definitely not what I do. I'm so much better than those people. I don't do well. I mean, I've I've done it a couple of times. I mean, well, it's really hard not to, is the point, because we got this thing where we want stuff for us, like favorable calls from officials or things to bounce our way, but we don't want that for other people. And it's very difficult in our brains to not be hypocritical and weird when we're confronted with these special dispensations, these gestures of grace from an official where you get something you shouldn't have got from them. And I think it's the same thing in real life. I didn't say likewise. Did you know? Ah, dang it, I just said likewise. It still counts. I do think it's the same thing in real life, where forgiveness or getting something you didn't deserve really is a weird thing. It kind of scrambles the mechanism. We really like it when it happens to us, but sometimes we're a little bit more discriminating about who else should receive that special break. And in Matthew chapter six, right after the very, very famous Our Father, the very famous Lord's Prayer, Jesus wraps up the passage in a way that I think a lot of times we just forget. I mean, I've covered the Sermon on the Mount how many times, and I always forget that this thing is sitting right there. So if you remembered uh Kings to you this time around. So he wraps up the Lord's Prayer, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. I'm saying it all in King James. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. It's an oath of loyalty, an oath of fealty, of abject submission to an all-authoritative, entirely benevolent, entirely just, all-knowing, all-providing, all-protecting king. But then you get to the end of it, and you're like, whoa, wait, how does this fit again? For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you don't forgive men their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. And then he's off to the next thought here in verse 16, how he's talking about fasting and stuff. So we get this weird block, my friends, where you open with a criticism of how the hypocrites pray, right? They stand on street corners starting in verse 5. They want to be seen by men. They can't receive their reward from God and from men. So I tell you, they wanted to impress people. They are going to impress people, and that is all they're going to get out of it. But when you pray, go and pray in secret. And your father who sees what's done in secret will reward you. You'll hear what you're praying. And this is exactly how you should pray. Not with a bunch of babbling words like the pagans, but do this Lord's Prayer thing. So block one about praying wrong makes sense. Block two, well, that follows. If you want to pray right, do it like this, and it's this oath of loyalty. And block three, in isolation, makes perfect sense. You know, forgive if you want to be forgiven. Okay, don't be a hypocrite, cool. But it is a little tricky to see how they fit together. And I think I just gave it away with that last remark off the cuff. I think it comes back to the question of hypocrisy here and this currency of the kingdom. So let's break both of those down. On the hypocrisy question, if you are someone who can pray, you know, Father, you know, give me forgiveness, forgive my debts, as I also have forgiven my debtors, but you don't forgive your debtors, well, I guess you didn't want to be forgiven that bad. You don't really like the idea of forgiveness. You like the idea of not consequences. I think that's what's implicit in Jesus' criticism of such a person who would want forgiveness but not want to give it away. And we'll look here in just a minute, another passage where Jesus has a pretty harsh story about the kind of person who would work like that. So if we agree that the theme of the stuff in Matthew chapter six about doing spiritual drills, spiritual disciplines, is that what you want to do is be consistent and humble, seeking only to commune with and please and honor God. That's what you want to get. What you want to not do is be a hypocrite, then this little addendum here in verses 14 and 15 about forgiving and receiving forgiveness, it would fits perfectly with that. It is hypocritical to say, I want forgiveness, but none for you. It is consistent and humble and dependent on God to say, I want forgiveness, and also I want forgiveness for all the other offenders here. I want everybody to receive this grace and this forgiveness. And it would be ridiculous of me to want it for myself and think that it should be withheld from everybody else, like I'm somehow what, the best prisoner here or something. And it's also interesting that it linguistically is the point of focus that gets carried forward from the Lord's Prayer. And I think the reason is because it's the one thing that you say you will do in all of this, right? I think about the only thing that is assumed that you will do in the Lord's Prayer is forgive. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, nothing there for you to do. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, nothing there for you to do. Give us today our daily bread, no bread for you to be giving out, nothing there for you to do. Forgive us our debts, nothing there for you to do, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Huh. Well, that's something for you to do. And lead us not into temptation, nothing there for you to do, but deliver us from the evil one, nothing there for you to do. So again, I think the reason this carries over is because the only thing in there that you do is forgive. Now, is it conditional on receiving forgiveness for yourself? Well, look, I understand that there are a bunch of you listening to this right now who have been raised around a certain version of Christianity, one I've been raised around, where we are very defensive about this idea that being a Christian is entirely a gift from God and you don't do anything to earn that. I mean, I think that's biblical theology. That sounds good. But also, it sure looks like these red letters are very explicitly saying exactly what they mean. If you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also give you. Uh-oh, here comes the inverse. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. There's no real addendum to this. He doesn't really clarify this. And so what's going on is the way that a person becomes a Christian to forgive other people. And then when you forgive other people, now you get forgiven and then you become a Christian. Uh well, the rest of the text, all the other places where we talk about forgiveness or withholding forgiveness indicate that it's, well, I'm going to reuse the word indicate that it's an indicator of whether or not you actually have received or been receptive or ever wanted forgiveness in the first place. If you have had an encounter with God, the text assumes, and you think that encounter is real and you've received forgiveness, but you don't really want to give it away, you probably don't actually think you need any forgiveness. Or you think you're better than everyone else, and therefore maybe not so worthy of the grace or forgiveness or righteousness of God imparted to you. So it would be tempting to read a passage like this and be like, ah, there's one of Jesus' conditions for what it takes to become a Christian. But it looks like what it takes to become a Christian is to pray or believe or assume the posture of the Lord's Prayer. You're God, I'm not, I bend the knee, I can never get everything right, including forgiving everybody all the time. But there is this call to this orientation to forgive. So this is the second part that I was alluding to earlier. The second reason I think this is here, one is to point out, you know, the importance of consistency, and again to take another swipe at hypocrisy, how that's bad. But the second reason I think this is here is to remind us of this theme that the currency of the kingdom is different than the world currency. In the kingdom, we trade in forgiveness, we trade in grace. In the world, we do business deals, right? You do a thing and then you're obligated to do a thing, and then if you don't meet the obligation, you're in trouble. And that's kind of the sort of Damocles that hangs over all of us when we do dealings in the world. And so you better not screw up, or else people won't hold up their end of the bargain. But here, whoa, the whole kingdom's upside down, remember? Here you forgive. Here you love your enemy. And here, forgiveness is something that it would seem you give away like constantly. And we're gonna have to break that down later as to what that actually looks like and how much can you actually do this before you break? And does the Bible actually teach that you just have to keep forgiving people forever, all the time? Spoiler alert, yes. But I understand that there's a lot of nuance there, and that's a very difficult and challenging thing to break down. And so we will take more time on that later. But it would seem that this is a reminder that the currency of the kingdom is forgiveness. It's the only thing in the Lord's Prayer that it says you're supposed to do like this. I'm praying for myself to have forgiven people. Like if you can honestly pray the Lord's Prayer, but you don't forgive other people, well, yeah, let me put it another way. You can't honestly adopt the posture assumed by the Lord's Prayer and not forgive other people. To do so is to saw off the branch on which you sit. Forgiveness for me, none for you. I withhold forgiveness each time we do that. He's running that saw back and forth. I mean, the thing that connects us to the tree is the grace of God. That's why we're in at all, according to what we're seeing in the Sermon on the Mount. And I think that is why the theme of forgiveness and withholding it versus giving it generously is the third chunk of this teaching on prayer, because the forgiveness of God is what makes admission into this kingdom possible. But if you don't adopt that kingdom value and give it away to others, then maybe you're not really a kingdom citizen. Maybe probably you're not really a kingdom citizen. I said I was gonna read another passage and we were gonna talk a little bit more about the forgiveness thing, and I was gonna cram it in here, but it's not gonna fit. So once again, we'll just kick it down the road and we'll do it tomorrow. So, more we're gonna jump ahead a little bit to Matthew chapter 18, verses 21 through 35, and we're gonna look at a bigger passage about this same question of forgiveness. Now, again in Matthew 6, we get this little tidbit at the end. It's the third block and three blocks on prayer, raises some questions. So, we're gonna do a great interpretive technique that works not just for the Bible, but for everything, which is always interpret the less clear in light of the more clear. Over here, we got more words, we got more clarity. It should speak back into this passage on forgiveness we just looked at. We should be able to make a little more sense of what we actually are supposed to do with it. Now, if you guys noticed that I put the names of the new patrons each week in the Monday show notes, uh just a way to say like hi five and thanks for doing that. And there are a bunch of you here over the last couple of weeks, and I know the world is weird right now, and just know that that really, really means a lot to me. And I appreciate you having my back on this whole internet thing. I'm glad we get a hangout and do this stuff. We'll pick it up, Matthew 18 tomorrow. I'm Matt is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Do it again soon.