What does it mean to ask the Lord for forgiveness?

Does He always forgive us? Does He automatically forgive us? If He does, then why ask? And, really, what does it mean to be forgiven by Him?

Let's have a look at what the Bible says about it.

One thing is that we’re told to seek the Lord’s forgiveness. Here are two example passages:

- "Then the priest shall burn it on the altar, according to the offerings made by fire to the Lord. So the priest shall make atonement for his sin that he has committed, and it shall be forgiven him." (Leviticus 4:35)

- "In this manner, therefore, pray…. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." (Matthew 6:9-12)

Second, it's pretty clear that we must forgive in order to be forgiven:

- "For if you forgive people their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive people their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." (Matthew 6:14, 15)

- "And his master was angry, and delivered him to the tormentors until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses." (Matthew 18:34, 35)

- "Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven." (Luke 6:37)

Third, we can see that the Lord is ready to forgive:

- "For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon You." (Psalm 86:5)

- "Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little." (Luke 7:47)

- "And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents…. Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt." (Matthew 18:24, 27)

- "And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left. Then Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.'" (Luke 23:33, 34)

Here are some New Church teachings that are based on these Bible passages.

1. The Lord isn't keeping a ledger (which is good news for all of us!). See this excerpt from "True Christian Religion":

"The Lord, being mercy itself, forgives everyone his sins, and does not hold even one of them against a person. For the Lord says, 'They do not know what they are doing' (but still this does not mean that the sins are abolished); for when Peter asked how many times he should forgive his brother his offences, whether as many as seven times, the Lord said: 'Not up to seven times, I tell you, but up to seventy times seven times,' (Matthew 18:21-22). What then will the Lord not do?" (True Christian Religion 539)

2. Forgiveness is a process. You can think of it as a loop. There are two stages: "being willing to forgive" and a "coming to be forgiven". This is well-described in the following passages from two of Swedenborg's theological works:

"The majority within the church think that the forgiveness of sins involves wiping and washing them away, like the removal of dirt by water, and that after forgiveness people go about clean and pure. This idea reigns especially with those who attribute all of salvation to faith alone. But let it be known that the situation with the forgiveness of sins is altogether different from that. Being Mercy itself, the Lord forgives everyone their sins. Nevertheless they do not come to be forgiven unless the person sincerely repents, refrains from evils, and after that leads a life of faith and charity, doing so to the end of his life. When this happens the person receives spiritual life from the Lord, called new life. Then when with this new life he looks at the evils of his former life, turns away from them, and abhors them, his evils have for the first time been forgiven. For the person is now maintained in truths and forms of good by the Lord and held back from evils. This shows what the forgiveness of sins is, and that it cannot take place within an hour, nor within a year." (Arcana Coelestia 9014:3)

"Another error of the age is to suppose that when sins have been forgiven they are also put away…. However, when this proposition is turned around, it becomes the truth, namely that when sins have been put away, they are also forgiven. For repentance precedes forgiveness, and apart from repentance there is no forgiveness…. The Lord forgives all people their sins. He does not accuse or impute. But He still cannot take those sins away except in accordance with the laws of His Divine providence." (Divine Providence 280)

3. We don’t need to pray for forgiveness. (Wait, what?) This is interesting. In the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus taught, we DO pray for forgiveness. But read this excerpt from "True Christian Religion":

"There are two obligations incumbent on one after self-examination: prayer and confession. Prayer should be that the Lord may have mercy, grant the power to resist the evils of which one has repented, and supply the inclination and affection for doing good, since without Him a person cannot do anything (John 15:5)…. There are two reasons why prayer ought not to be offered before the Lord for the forgiveness of sins. First, because sins are not wiped out, but taken away; and this happens as one subsequently desists from them and embarks on a new life. For there are countless longings attached like a cluster around every evil; these cannot be taken away in an instant, but only one after another, as a person allows himself to be reformed and regenerated. The second reason is that the Lord, being mercy itself, forgives everyone his sins, and does not hold even one of them against a person." (True Christian Religion 539)

So, what should we pray for? The point is fairly subtle. What I see in the passage above is that we don’t need to pray for forgiveness, per se, as part of the process of repentance, since during that process we’ve already prayed for mercy and the power to do better. These are the things we’re really asking for when we pray for forgiveness. Asking the Lord to forgive us is acting according to an appearance. It’s a useful exercise, which is why the Lord commands it in the letter of the Word, but the deeper truth is that we have never been anything but forgiven in His eyes, and whether or not we actually come to be forgiven is up to us, not Him.

Summing up...

Being forgiven by God has always involved an action on our part. In the Old Testament, people were required to make sacrifices. In the New Testament, Jesus surprised people, teaching that they needed to forgive others — many times. And now here, we can see that our own (hard) work of repentance is what we also need to bring to close the loop.

So the bottom line is that there are two levels of being forgiven by the Lord: ours and His. The Lord always forgives us. (As far as He Himself is concerned, we are never unforgiven.) But we don’t actually become forgiven until we do our part of the process; that's what allows the forgiveness to flow around the loop.

[This article has been adapted for use here from a November 2023 presentation by Rev. Jared Buss.]

281. 4. So the permission of evil is for the purpose of salvation. We know that we are quite free in our thinking and intentions, but are not free to say and do whatever we think and intend. We can be atheists in our thoughts, denying the existence of God and blaspheming the holy contents of the church's Word; we can even want to destroy them utterly by what we say and do; but civil and moral and ecclesiastical laws hold us back. So we indulge in these ungodly and criminal practices in our thoughts and our wishes and even in our intentions, but still not in our actions. People who are not atheists are still quite free to harbor any number of evil thoughts, thoughts about cheating, lust, vengeance, and other senseless things, and even act them out at times.

Is it credible that if we did not have this complete freedom we would not only be beyond salvation but would completely perish?

[2] Listen to the reason. We are all immersed in many kinds of evil from birth. They are in our volition, and we love whatever is in our volition. That is, we love all the intentions that come from within; and we intend whatever we love. This love of our volition flows into our discernment and makes itself felt there as pleasure. It moves from there into our thoughts and into our conscious intentions. So if we were not allowed to think the way the love of our volition wants us to, the love that is within us by heredity, that love would stay closed in and never come out where we could see it. Any such hidden love for evil is like an enemy plotting against us, like pus in a sore, like a toxin in the blood, and like an infection in the chest. If they are kept hidden, they hasten us to our end.

On the other hand, when we are allowed to think about the evils of our life's love even to the point of wanting to act them out, they are healed by spiritual means the way a life-threatening illness is cured by physical means.

[3] I need to explain what we would be like if we were not allowed to think in keeping with the pleasures of our life's love. We would no longer be human. We would have lost the two abilities called freedom and rationality that are the essence of our humanity. The pleasures of those loves would take control of the inner reaches of our minds so completely that the door would be opened wide. We then would not be able to avoid talking and acting in similar fashion, displaying our madness not only to ourselves but to the whole world. Eventually we would not know enough to cover our private parts. It is to keep this from happening that we are allowed to think about and to intend the evils we have inherited, but not to utter and do them. In the meanwhile, we learn civic, moral, and spiritual principles that also work their way into our thinking and displace these insane principles. The Lord heals us by this means, though only to the extent that we know how to guard the door, and not unless we believe in God and ask for his help to resist our evils. Then to the extent that we resist them, he does not let them into our intentions, and eventually not into our thoughts.

[4] We do therefore have a freedom to think as we wish, in order that our life's love may come out of hiding into the light of our discernment; otherwise we would have no knowledge of our evil and could not abstain from it. It would then follow that the evil would gain strength within us to the point that there was no space for recovery within us and, since the evil of parents is passed on to their progeny, hardly any space for recovery in any children we might beget. The Lord makes sure, however, that this does not happen.