How Do We Want to Be Forgiven

Matthew 6:12, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Jesus was teaching His disciples about many things as he was preparing them for the mission they were about to embark upon. Among the topics He taught was how to pray. He gave them an outline about how to structure their prayers. Today we call this the “Lord’s Prayer”. Inside the middle of the prayer the Lord gave them and us a specific request for forgiveness.
In the instructions Jesus made it clear we are to pray daily seeking our daily bread and also to ask for God’s forgiveness. Jesus knew we would be hard pressed to seek forgiveness on a daily basis. Today with all that fills our lives and crosses our minds we seem to forget to ask God to forgive us until we have amassed a large catch of sins do we come to God? As a result of that large mess of sin we feel estranged from God; our guilty conscience then makes it difficult to go to Him in prayer at all.
Jesus wanted to let us in on a great secret that the best way to keep things straight was to go to God on a regular basis and with a short sin list. We then can maintain a clear conscience with God and can go to Him with more weighty matters and can have assurance of our forgiveness and refreshing our spirit on a daily basis.
Notice something else that Jesus is making clear. Our daily forgiveness is tied purposefully and inseparably to our own forgiveness or others. Jesus is coaching His disciples and us that we must be willing to forgive others with the same forgiveness we want to be offered to us. And forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors is a very interesting statement. One that many today have either forgot or simply ignored. We have all heard someone say, “I could never forgive them for what they did to me.” According to Jesus then you may be cursing yourself. Jesus is not talking here about salvation and the sin debt that He would soon pay for all humankind. He is talking about sins committed on a daily basis. Even after we have asked for and received the salvation paid for on the cross we still will sin and do it on a daily basis. It is on a daily basis Jesus is telling us that we need to come to God and ask to be forgiven. Forgive us as we forgive others---do we want God to do exactly as we ask or as we act? We are to take our sin debt to God in prayer daily. Do we want God to forgive us totally when we hold a grudge and won’t forgive another?
Forgiveness is a real hard thing for us to understand and to do. Yet it is the foundation for how we are to life a separated life in and for Christ. Could it be the largest problem within the Christian community today is the ability or willingness to forgive may have been lost or forgotten?
The questions we all must ponder as we go to God in prayer is do we really want God to forgive us as we forgive others? How do we want to be forgiven? God forgives totally and without question---what do we do?