Cancel The Debt - Shane Willard - 20 September 2026

I want to talk to you this morning on the topic, cancel the debt.

The title of the message is to cancel the debt.

I want to talk to you about what do we do with failure, regret, offense for ourselves and others? Like the loudest voice in your head at night cannot be the voice of the person you can't forgive.

Even if the voice is your own, that even complicates matters more.

What do we do when someone else does something unjust? Or what do we do when we can't get over what goes on in our head? It's an age-old question.

Thank goodness we don't live in ancient Sumerian culture.

In ancient Sumerian culture, if you offended the gods of the sky, here's what they thought.

They thought all the celestial bodies were different gods.

And what comes out of the sky is obvious, it's rains.

And so the idea is that if the gods were happy, they would send rain.

If the gods were upset, they would withhold the rain and you would go hungry.

And if the gods were very upset, they would send too much rain.

And so the question is, is what must I do to please the gods of the sky? I've done something offensive.

And the problem was in an agrarian society, if you've offended the gods and God withholds rain from you, that means we all suffer.

You couldn't separate your offense from everybody else because if the water's withheld, it's withheld from you and everybody and everybody around you.

And so what they said is that to please the gods of the sky, you had to cut yourself until it rained rain.

well, they lived in Iraq.

Their arms would be falling off.

We've evolved past that a bit, but the question underneath the question underneath the question is still there, and that is, what must I do? How do I respond to this? Now, the earliest idea in the Bible, I think, is still the best first idea.

Now, at Kingdom City, we affirm that the Bible is not a static record of God.

The Bible is a A dynamic, progressive, moving revelation of how people related to God, leading to the final revelation of God in the risen Christ.

The Bible is the Word of God, but the final Word of God is a person.

It's Jesus.

And so the first answer in the Bible was this.

Take one day a year, set it aside, make it different than all the other days, and that's the day that God forgives all sins, and we are called to forgive all the sins of the people who have hurt us.