We often treat sin as a handful of inconsequential debts, so asking God for forgiveness—or forgiving someone else—can feel unnecessary. In Matthew 6:12, Jesus places both debts before us in a single petition: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Do we understand the balance we have run up?
Pastor Tim takes us to the question “Are all people, just as they were lost through Adam, saved through Christ?” from the New City Catechism. What do we need to do to be saved?
Methuselah lived 969 years — longer than anyone else recorded in Scripture. Does that mark success or remind us of failure that creeps around even that long of life?
When something’s keeping you up at night—an unexpected bill, a looming deadline, a need you can’t see your way through—it’s easy to wonder whether those worries are too ordinary to bring to God. Jesus is clear in the next part of the Lord’s Prayer that simply isn’t the case.
Pastor Tim takes us to the question “What else does Christ’s death redeem?” from the New City Catechism. Does Christ’s death and resurrection “only” grant us salvation or does His work do even more?
We’ve all looked at this world and thought, it just doesn’t seem like God’s will is being done. Underneath that thought is a deeper fear that God’s reserve of will and ability runs dry the way ours does. That fear is exactly what Jesus targets when He teaches us to pray “your will be done.”
Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.
