Have You Not Read S2E2 - Forgiving Yourself

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Podcast. Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, David Kassin, and Andrew Hudson. We're gonna jump right into it today on the second episode of Season 2. We had a question put in from one of our listeners and the question reads, should Christians forgive themselves?

Should Christians Forgive Themselves?

Is this a right thing to do or does this not obey Christ's direction to die to self? Matthew 16 24 through 25. I might reword that to say, is this consistent with.

Christ's direction to die to self? Well, it's a good question. We live with so many different types of ideas and expressions that seemingly are immediately understood by the culture in which we live, especially regarding the self.

There is a very hefty focus in our culture upon the self, to know oneself, to be doing everything you can to care for yourself, to promote yourself, to further yourself, to deepen yourself. The self is the project of the postmodern man.

With nothing else that could be certain or objective outside your own lived experience, then you must do everything to improve your own self, to defend yourself, and so on and so forth. So when we think about this concern to forgive oneself, we have to, I think, I'm not saying that no one who is truly a Christian would ever use this expression or think about it, but what's actually going on here?

A believer, a follower of Christ, one who has put their faith in Jesus Christ for their salvation, you know, following him, trusting him, and so on, when they, if someone like that were to say, I'm having trouble forgiving myself, as a pastor when I hear that, I don't, you know, grant any real authenticity to that endeavor, but I'm hearing that the person is feeling guilt and shame, feeling very low and discouraged, perhaps even hopeless, about the sins with which they struggle, and considering the impact of how those sins have hurt others, how those sins have damaged relationships, that they're living in the consequences of their sin, and feel like there's no way out, no way up, no way to fix this, and I'm going to be blaming myself and regretting my actions from here on out until something happens.

What is that? I guess I need to forgive myself. So that's how I receive that kind of question, and in that regard, I would say we can answer the question in the following way. Our self-understanding is not the definitive truth.

How we feel about ourselves is not the definitive truth. We have to turn to the good news of Jesus Christ, declared throughout all of the scripture, that God has sent his only begotten son to die as his lamb, his substitute sacrifice, suffering upon the cross.

Our sins reckoned to his account, his righteousness imputed to our account, that when we look upon the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, and our faith is in him, we recognize our forgiveness, and we ask for the forgiveness of God, and we know the forgiveness of God.

We know that we have God's smile and favor upon us because we are in his son. His righteousness clothes us, and he is born all of our transgressions, and they are removed as far away from us as the East is from the West.

And I'm thinking about many different passages right now, from Psalms to Isaiah to Romans to Colossians, but even one passage in Colossians, in Colossians chapter 2, we read in verse 13, "...and you being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he is made alive together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us.".

I want you to think of the image that Paul uses here to comfort the Colossians, whom he's never met but loves, and is trying to encourage them in their standing in Christ. He wants them to consider a papyrus scroll upon which is listed all of their transgressions, their sins, their crimes, their shame, their guilt, and he wants them to think of it as having been wiped out.

The Word envisions a common action that one would use when taking that papyrus scroll, and you want to erase what's there. Today we have pencils and erasers, but back then what they would do is that they would scrape the surface of that papyrus, and they would clean it until all of that writing was gone, and Paul says that's the picture of forgiveness.

That's the picture that all of your, that handwriting of requirements that was against you, contra, it's been wiped clean, he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross, right? Where other passages talk about, he who knew no sin became sin on our behalf.

Other passages talk about that God has laid upon him the iniquity of us all. Same concept here, and this is what we're to think about when we think about our sin. This is what we're to think about when we think about our shame and our guilt, that every time as a believer that we sin, and that we mess up, we jump into that slimy pit of sin, and God loves us as a father, and he chastises us, and he convicts us of our sin by the ministry of his Holy Spirit, and when we are convicted, we turn back, and we look to the Lord, we recognize in the light of who he is, in light of his word, what we've done, and we confess that sin, meaning we say the same words about it that he does, we agree with him, we confess that sin, we turn to Christ, we turn to the cross again and again, and this is just, is a beautiful, ingenious, and unfailing, that God the Father would constantly be turning us by faith to the completed work of the Son upon the cross, to know thereby the assurance of the Holy Spirit, we are forgiven, we are forgiven, we can't be looking to ourselves and the feelings we have about ourselves to deal with our shame and our guilt, meaning I can't be looking at my ability to forgive myself, that gives me no assurance, that gives me no satisfaction, there is no atonement there, I must always be looking to what God has done for me and his Son Jesus Christ, and that's what I must believe, and that's what I must reckon is indeed true in my life, to look anywhere else, to be looking to how well others may forgive me, for my assurance, for my standing, to try to gain justification from other people's opinions about myself, or to even try to justify myself, hear me carefully, when we talk about forgiveness of our sins in the gospel sense in the scriptures, we're talking about God justifying us by the righteousness of his Son.

Forgiving myself, well that might just be another way of saying justifying myself, so I think we should be careful about that.

Kind of language. Well you talked about shame, and Paul delineates godly shame and worldly shame. In 2nd Corinthians 7, 8 through 10, he talks about the kind of godly shame that leads you to repentance, the one that drives you to Christ and the source of your forgiveness itself, and then the worldly shame that just leads to death.

There's a place to, and I hate to word it this way, but if when you say forgive yourself you mean move on, because the person against whom you sinned, God, and the people against whom you sinned, you have been forgiven, you have made restitution where necessary, you have been reconciled, it's over.

Move on. Okay, that's godly sorrow that has led to repentance and reconciliation, and the body has been healed. Good. But that worldly sorrow, that worldly shame, that sort of manufacture that keeps us within ourselves, that's not dying to self.

That's being very focused on self, and it just leads, ultimately leads to death. So I would like to think that when people are talking about, well, forgiving ourselves, it's like, just moving on, okay, but there's so much baggage with that phrase that I don't think you can just say, well, it just means to move on.

No, there's, you really have to unpack it, and you have to say, look, that's not the right way to express it. That's not the way the Bible expresses it. The Bible expresses it as, you have taken an action, you have done something against someone, and you need to, and that person against whom you have sinned, that's the person who's responsible to forgive you.

You're not really forgiving yourself. Go through the process, and that kind of godly sorrow produces real repentance, and you can move forward. So you're.

Saying you're not the real victim here. You need to seek reconciliation from the.

Real victim. Yes, you are not the victim. Yeah, good way to put that. Yeah, it's.

Important to recognize that if, and again, one of the signs of a bad and wicked sinful culture that has been turned over to their own evil ends, is that everyone has forgotten how to blush. Nobody has any shame anymore, and I find that some of that is, some of that is pagan liturgy.

You know, shout your abortion, but then people actually do still live with shame. People still live with guilt, and they have no way of dealing with it, and outside of the grace of God, it continually terminates upon the self, and they either begin to own it as an identity, so that which is shameful becomes their prideful identity, because they're never going to get rid of it, so they can't escape from it, so it must be me, or it terminates upon the self in terms of just kind of an exhaustion that manifests in depression and suicide and so forth.

When we read about the worldly sorrow, a sorrow according to the world, well it ends in death of one kind or another, right? But the godly sorrow, and the sorrow which is according to God, is essentially that brokenness which, in thinking about repentance, you know, that the turnaround by God's grace, a godly sorrow is that off-ramp, getting off the highway, I'm going the wrong way, I recognize I get off my off-ramp and do the turnaround to head back.

Godly sorrow is that off-ramp, so we're slowing down and getting off, everything's just gonna stop here, I recognize what's going on, by the grace of God I'm gonna turn around. It's a sorrow that does not terminate upon the self, it's a sorrow that terminates upon the Lord, right?

That turns one to the Lord, and like David, against you, you only have I sinned. A recognition of, I'm not the victim, I'm the villain, right? I deserve, you know, great judgment and disaster. There's only one who can save me, and only one who can redeem the mess that I've made.

So there has to be a robust belief rather than an unbelief. And again, Christians can struggle with doubt and unbelief, and like, it's hard to really grab a hold of that actual justification, and that forgiveness, that cleansing, that God the Father loves me as much as he loves his Son, because I'm in his Son by faith, and God really does smile on me when I loathe myself.

Again, this should continually take us.

Back to the cross, back to the cross, back to the cross. It would be easier for us to go toward the therapeutic solutions, right? And like you were talking about earlier, our entire culture is like, all these things are pagan liturgies.

Well, they're also like cottage industries that have come up to cover one's shame with pharmaceuticals, with alcohol, with covering yourself in a colorful flag because of the darkness of your heart. You know, these types of things are industries that have popped up, and people have made billions and billions of dollars off of covering shame for a moment, rather than actually going to the one who deals with it, and the one who takes it far, far away from you.

Yeah, any.

Kind of approach of, let's think more about you, is the absolute wrong direction, right? That's, you talk about the first lie ever told to mankind. Let's think more about you. How would you define? Yeah, don't you, you know, enough think about God's Word, and God's creation, and God's goodness, and God's, you know, all of that.

Let's think more about you. Who are you? What do you want? Why don't you orient yourself on you? And that's Genesis 3. I mean, that's just straight up the first.

Lie is how Satan was a murderer from the beginning. So, we've talked a lot about the doctrine of forgiveness itself, and what the Bible says about it, and you know, we have Matthew 18, where Peter asks that question, you know, how many times should I forgive my brother who sins against me?

You know, seven times? And Jesus goes, well, no, 70 times 7. And of course, the old joke is like, alright, so that's 490 times, so 491, no, you don't have to forgive him. No, no, that's not the point.

I think we all understand that. And then Jesus launches into that parable of the unforgiving servant who had this enormous weight, enormous debt that was forgiven, and then he has a relatively, I mean, it's, you know, a lot of denarii, but relative to the debt that was forgiven him, it was relatively small, and he was unwilling to forgive his fellow servant.

What I'd like to put to you guys is that then, verse 32, then his master summons him and said, you wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me, and should you not have mercy on your fellow servant, I have mercy on you.

And in anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay off all his debt. So also, my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. So when someone comes to you and asks for forgiveness, we're not talking about forgiving yourself, but someone who actually is repentant and asks for forgiveness, our responsibility then is to do so.

What do you say to the person who just is unwilling to forgive? That sin was too much. I was hurt too much. Well, you tell them the parable. What a great.

Story. You know, I love that parable because it's the guy was forgiven six million days wages when you do the calculation, and he wouldn't forgive the guy who had a hundred days wages of debt. And what I love about that parable is.

That it just makes no sense. Yeah, I actually think it kind of does. Well, the.

Point is, like, you know, like the other stories, like you put a seed in the ground, and then, like, a plant comes up, and, like, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, I'm following that. And in this one, the guy gets forgiven six million days wages, and then he goes out immediately and, like, chokes out a guy over a hundred.

Now, there's one way it doesn't make any sense because, like, that could never happen. I want someone says that. But on the other hand, that's an example of the.

Absurdity of the depravity of man. And I also think it did happen on a nation level. I think Israel did that to those who had debts in that time period. And if you want to finish out the parable, you can say, what happened to that servant?

Go.

Look what happened to Jerusalem. Right. And, again, think about a culture in which you can take the historical cultural realities going on. And, Dylan, I know you've talked about the buying and selling of debts and the kind of debt culture that was going on in that time period that Jesus is obviously exposing, right?

He's obviously exposing that. Yeah, six million days wages is a national type debt at that point. That's national type wages. And then to say, you know, so what in the world are you doing? You're a wicked and evil servant if you act this way.

When we look at it in those contexts, we must be very cautious about any kind of culture building, any kind of cultural movement, which is always trying to count the debts of others, right? And trying to always try to make people pay for those debts at all costs.

And so Jesus points out that has nothing to do with the reality of Christianity, at the heart of which is the forgiveness that God gives to us, which we can't calculate. You know, we could do like a 490 days or 490 times and we can say six million days.

That's not the point. The point is that those who are forgiven by the Lord are those who forgive. I mean, that's part of the model prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples even. So when it comes to this, I mean, like it's such a, it's such a device of Satan to get us to be thinking about how can I forgive myself when in reality we need to be focusing on the forgiveness that God gives us in Christ and then living out that grace.

And mercy towards one another. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would go to creating a far more just society than everybody focusing on forgiving themselves for things that they have done. And then, you know, then you get into the, you know, that grievance industry that you alluded to just prior.

If you give me the way where I can be repentant and I can pay this penance and I can pay this tax or I can do these things, then I can be forgiven for this guilt. That's a very big business right now.

This is also a warning that if you are caught in this trap of I need to constantly forgive myself or I need to pay these penances and do these things so I can pay for these historical wrongs, yeah, you're caught in that cycle.

But if you're focused on what Christ has done and then you're able to forgive others for those same sins that have been done against you, and they in turn be focused on Christ, then you have within the church—now I'm not talking about culture at large, I'm talking about within the church—there should be no divisiveness between the different members of the bodies of Christ calling for reparations for this or grievance for this or whatever you want within the body of Christ.

We should be so focused on all the things that Christ has done for us that these relatively minor things should be easy to forgive. That will create unity in the church itself.

When the tribes all come up to Mount Zion, they beat their swords in the plowshares. What were we fighting about? We're all forgiven in Christ. And we're.

Working together. Yeah, we're working. We're actually producing something. Plowing. Yeah. Amen to that. Well, I think we've gone all as far as we can go with that one, so we'll head on to what are we thankful for.

Michael, we'll start with you.

Well, I'm thankful for my sixth born. He's a hoss, eight months old, almost 25 pounds, and he's just, you know, his personality is developing, and he's just a hoot to hang out with, and he interacts with all of his siblings, and it's just a joy to be around.

Just thank the Lord for Jackson Shiloh.

I'm very thankful for an extended time that I had with my firstborn—my onlyborn, actually—and it's sometimes difficult to get an extended time with your teenager. I had several days. We did an overnight trip and actually got to see some family in Florida as well, and it was the first time that we've been able to do that, and just the things that we talked about, life lessons, thinking through things for an extended period, the questions she would ask, things that we saw.

It was incredibly special. I'm very thankful that I have a job that affords me the flexibility where I can do that. I can't do that often, but I can do that once or twice a year, have an extended time off, and I am incredibly thankful that God provided that.

Awesome. Andrew? Earlier today, I was.

Remarking on just the beauty of having another child, an infant, just so much life that's happening, lots of new firsts all the time, new words being spoken. I mean, we were counting how many words that our youngest knows already, and it's—life is beautiful.

How much more so the one who gives life. Mm-hmm. So one day, one day, as in Ecclesiastes, it talks about returning to the dust and the breath of life, going back to the one who gave it. Times like that are a good reminder to remember the Lord while you're still young, and find.

Pleasure in life. Amen. I'm glad you looked at me when you said you're still young. I need that affirmation every now and then. No, I'm thankful for the forgiveness from the one who can forgive. I know I cannot forgive myself because, like we've talked about, we're not the offended party, but I know how often I offend the Lord.

I know how grieved He is at that. I know how detrimental that is to my walk, but I'm so thankful for the forgiveness that I have in Christ, and no other can provide that for me. And I can go looking for it elsewhere, but I must return to my Savior, and I must return to my King for that, and I am so thankful that He is there, and He is ready to hear me when I.

Confess my sins. And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners, and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read?