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.]

277a. 1. We are all involved in evil and need to be led away from it in order to be reformed. It is well known in the church that we all have an inherited evil nature and that this is the source of our obsession with many evils. This is also why we can do nothing good on our own. The only kind of good that evil can do is good with evil within it. The inner evil is the fact that we are doing it for selfish reasons, and solely for the sake of appearances. We know that we get this inherited evil from our parents. Some do say that it comes from Adam and his wife, but this is wrong. We all get it by birth from our parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from theirs. So it is handed down from one to another, growing greater and stronger, piling up, and being inflicted on the offspring. That is why there is nothing sound within us, why everything in us is so evil. Does anyone feel that there is anything wrong with loving oneself more than others? If not, then who knows what evil is, since this is the head of all evils?

[2] We can see from much that is common knowledge in our world that our heredity comes from our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. For example, we can tell what household and larger family and even nation people belong to simply from their faces; the face bears the stamp of the spirit, and the spirit is determined by our desires of love. Sometimes the face of an ancestor crops up in a grandchild or great-grandchild. I can tell simply from their faces whether people are Jewish or not, and I can tell what family group others belong to. I have no doubt that others can do the same.

If our desires of love are derived and passed down from our parents in this way, then it follows that their evils are as well, since these are matters of desire.

I need now to state where this similarity comes from.

[3] For all of us, the soul comes from the father and simply puts on a body in the mother. The fact that the soul comes from the father follows not only from what has just been said but also from a number of other indications. One of these is the fact that the baby of a black or Moorish man by a white or European woman will be born black, and the reverse. In particular, the soul dwells in the semen, for this is what brings about impregnation, and this is what the mother clothes with a body. The semen is the elemental form of the father's characteristic love, the form of his dominant love and its immediate derivatives, the deepest desires of that love.

[4] In all of us, these desires are veiled by the decencies of moral life and the virtues that are partly matters of our civic life and partly matters of our spiritual life. These make up the outward form of life even for evil people. We are all born with this outer form of life. That is why little children are so lovable; but as they get older or grow up, they shift from this outer form toward their deeper natures and ultimately to the dominant love of their fathers. If the father was evil, and if this nature is not somehow softened and deflected by teachers, then the child's love becomes just like that of the father.

Still, evil is not uprooted, only set aside, as we shall see below [279]. We can tell, then, that we are all immersed in evil.

277b. No explanation is necessary to see that we need to be led away from our evils in order to be reformed, since if we are given to evil in this world, we will be given to evil after we leave this world. This means that if our evil is not set aside in this world, it cannot be set aside afterwards. The tree lies where it falls; and so too our life retains its basic quality when we die. We are all judged according to our deeds. It is not that these deeds are tallied up but that we return to them and behave the same. Death is a continuation of life, with the difference that then we cannot be reformed.

All our reformation is thorough — that is, it includes both things first and things last. The last things are reformed in this world in harmony with the first ones. They cannot be reformed afterwards, because the outermost things of our lives that we take with us after death become dormant and simply cooperate or act in unison with the inner ones.