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.]

279. 3. To the extent that our evils are set aside, they are forgiven. One currently popular misconception is that our evils are taken from us and discarded when they are forgiven, and that the state of our life can be changed instantly, even totally reversed, so that we become good instead of evil. This would be leading us out of hell and transporting us instantly into heaven, all by some direct mercy of the Lord.

However, people who hold this kind of belief or thought have no idea whatever of what evil and good really are or what the state of our own life is. They are utterly unaware that the feelings of our volition are simply shifts and changes of state of the purely organic substances of our minds, that the thoughts of our discernment are simply shifts and changes of their forms, and that memory is the ongoing effect of these changes. This enables us to see clearly that evil can be taken away only gradually and that the forgiveness of evil is not the same as its removal. This, though, is presenting the ideas in condensed form. If they are not explained at greater length, they can be recognized but not grasped; and if they are not grasped, that is like a wheel that we turn by hand. I need to explain these propositions, then, one at a time in the order just given.

[2] (a) One currently popular misconception is that our evils are taken from us and discarded when they are forgiven. I have been taught in heaven that no evil that we are born with or that we ourselves adopt by our behavior is taken completely away from us. Evils are set aside so that they are no longer visible. Like so many other people in this world, I used to believe that when our evils are forgiven they are thrown away just as dirt is rinsed and washed away from our faces by water. That is not what it is like with our evils or sins, though. They are all still there, and when they are forgiven after we have repented, they are moved from the center to the sides. Whatever is in the middle is right in front of our eyes and seems to be out in broad daylight. What is off to the sides seems to be in the shade, or at times, even in the dark of night. Since our evils are not taken completely away, then, but are only displaced or put off to the side, and since we can be transported from the center to the boundaries, it can happen that we once again get involved in evils we thought we had left behind. It is part of our own nature that we can move from one desire to another, and sometimes into an opposite one. This means that we can move from one center to another. A desire determines our center as long as we are caught up in it. Then we are absorbed in its pleasure and its light.

[3] There are some people who are raised into heaven by the Lord after death because they have lived good lives but who bring with them a belief that they are free and clean from sins and therefore wholly without guilt. At first they are given white robes that reflect this belief, since white robes portray a state of having been purified from evils. Later, though, they begin to think the way they did in the world, to think that they have been washed clean from all evil; so they boast that they are no longer sinners like everyone else. It is almost impossible to separate this from a kind of mental "high" that includes a measure of looking down on others. So at this point, in order to free them from the faith they imagine they have, they are sent down from heaven and back into the evils they had fallen prey to in the world. This shows them that they have inherited evils that they had not known about before. This brings them to admit that their evils have not been taken away from them but only set aside, and that they themselves are still unclean, and in fact nothing but evil; that it is the Lord who is protecting them from their evils and keeping them focused on those good qualities; and that all this seems to be their own doing. Once this has happened, the Lord brings them back up into heaven.

[4] (b) A second popular misconception is that the state of our life can be changed instantly, so that we become good instead of evil. This would be leading us out of hell and transporting us instantly into heaven, all by some direct mercy of the Lord. This is the misconception of people who separate charity from faith and attribute salvation to faith alone. That is, they think that the mere thought and utterance of a statement of that faith, performed with trust and confidence, will justify and save them. Many of them also think that this can happen instantaneously, either before the hour of death or as it approaches. They cannot avoid believing that the state of our life can be changed in an instant and that we can be saved by direct mercy. We shall see in the last section of this book, though, that the Lord's mercy does not operate in this direct way, that we cannot become good instead of evil in an instant and be led out of hell and transported into heaven except by the ongoing efforts of divine providence from our infancy to the end of our lives.

At this point we may rest the case simply on the fact that all the laws of divine providence are aimed at our reformation, and therefore at our salvation, which means inverting the hellish state into which we are born into its opposite, a heavenly state. This can be done only gradually as we move away from evil and its pleasure and move into what is good and its pleasure.

[5] (c) People who hold this kind of belief have no idea whatever of what evil and good really are. They do not really know that evil is the pleasure we find in the urge to act and think in violation of the divine pattern, and that goodness is the pleasure we feel when we act and think in harmony with the divine pattern. They do not realize that there are thousands of individual impulses that go to make up any particular evil, and that there are thousands of individual impulses that go to make up any particular good tendency. These thousands of impulses are so precisely structured and so intimately interconnected within us that no single one of them can be changed without changing all the rest at the same time.

If people are unaware of this, they can entertain the belief or the thought that an evil that seems to be all by itself can be set aside easily and that something good that also seems to be all by itself can be brought in to replace it. Since they do not know what good and evil are, they cannot help thinking that there are such things as instantaneous salvation and direct mercy. The last section of this book will show that this is not possible.

[6] (d) People who believe in instantaneous salvation and direct mercy are utterly unaware that the feelings of our volition are simply changes of state of the purely organic substances of our minds, that the thoughts of our discernment are simply changes and shifts of their forms, and that memory is the ongoing effect of those changes and shifts. Once someone mentions it, everyone will realize that feelings and thoughts can happen only with substances and their forms as subjects. Since they happen in our brains, which are full of substances and forms, we say that these forms are purely organic. If we think rationally, we cannot help laughing at the wild idea that feelings and thoughts do not happen in substantial subjects but are breezes affected by warmth and light, like illusions seen in the air or the ether. In fact, thought can no more happen apart from its substantial form than sight can happen apart from its substantial form, the eye, or hearing from its ear, or taste from its tongue. Look at the brain and you will see countless substances and fibers, and nothing there that is not structured. What need is there of more proof than this visual one?

[7] Just what is this "feeling," though, and just what is this "thought"? We can figure this out by looking at the body overall and in detail. There are many internal organs there, all set in their own places, all carrying out their functions by shifts and changes in their states and forms. We know that they are occupied with their tasks. The stomach has its task, the intestines have theirs, the kidneys have theirs, the liver, pancreas, and spleen have theirs, and the heart and lungs have theirs. All of them are inwardly activated solely for their tasks, and this inward activation happens by shifts and changes of their states and forms.

This leads us to the conclusion that the workings of the purely organic substances of the mind are no different, except that the workings of the organic substances of the body are physical and the workings of the organic substances of the mind are spiritual. The two act as a unity by means of responsiveness [to each other].

[8] There is no way to offer visual evidence of the nature of the shifts and changes of state and form of the organic substances of the mind, the shifts and changes that constitute our feelings and thoughts. We can see them in a kind of mirror, though, if we look at the shifts and changes of state of our lungs in the acts of speech and singing. There is a parallelism, since the sounds of speech and song as well as the differentiations of sound that make the words of speech and the melodies of song are produced by the lungs. The sound itself answers to our feeling and the language to our thought. That is what causes them; and it is accomplished by shifts and changes of the state and form of the organic substances in our lungs, from the lungs into the trachea or windpipe in the larynx and glottis, then in the tongue, and finally in our lips.

The first shifts and changes of state and form of sound happen in the lungs, the second in the trachea and larynx, the third in the glottis by opening its aperture in various ways, the fourth by the tongue by touching the palate and teeth in various places, and the fifth by our lips through taking different shapes. We can see from this that both the sound and its modifications that constitute speech and song are produced solely by sequential and constant shifts and changes in the states of these organic forms.

Since the only source of sound and speech is our mental feelings and thoughts — that is where they come from, and there is no other source — we can see that the feelings of our volition are shifts and changes of state of the purely organic substances of our minds, and that the thoughts of our discernment are shifts and changes of the forms of those substances, just the way it happens in our lungs.

[9] Further, since our feelings and thoughts are simply changes of state of the forms of our minds, it follows that our memory is nothing but their ongoing effect. It is characteristic of all the shifts and changes of state in organic substances that once they have been learned they do not disappear. So the lungs are trained to produce various sounds in the trachea and to modify them in the glottis, articulate them with the tongue, and shape them with the mouth; and once these organs have been trained to do these things, the actions are ingrained and can be repeated.

Material presented in Divine Love and Wisdom 119-204 [Divine Love and Wisdom 199-204] shows that the shifts and changes in the organic substances of the mind are infinitely more perfect than those in the body. There it is explained that all processes of perfection increase and rise by and according to levels. There is more on the subject in 319 below.