Catechism on Forgiveness (Part 2)

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Mike Abendroth. And in weeks to come, I've got some good interviews lined up.

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Best of Israel, nine -day inspirational tour. That's what it says here on the program.

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Nine days, we're going with Pilgrim Tours again. If you want to go to their site, you can kind of snoop around and see what they do.

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Israel four years ago. And happy with them and Steve over there.

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You can also, I think this is going to air, maybe too late, get fed online, October 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th,

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Christology, I'll be teaching for them. What else is coming up? I'll be speaking at Jimmy Carraway's church in October, I think 24th, 25th,

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Pillar of Truth Conference outside of Pittsburgh.

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Outside of Pittsburgh with the folks there. Should be good.

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I should probably put something, I'll link up someplace. All right. Forgiveness Q &A. Forgiveness Catechism.

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Catechism is a series of questions and answers designed to religiously instruct the catechumen.

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The catechumen. I remember years ago, there was a PC game, Catechumen. I think you had to like slay,

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I don't know, slay the spirits. Oh man.

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So forgiveness Q &A. And what we were looking at last time, I've kind of forgotten my question.

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So I better back up here a little bit. Forgiveness Q &A. The first one we were working through was, is there forgiveness in any other?

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That is to say, forgiveness is found in Christ alone. We have a pluralistic society.

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There's truth in every religion. That means there's not full truth in Christianity. And if you can get forgiveness in other entities, gods, goddesses, then what's the percentage split in terms of Thanksgiving praise.

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But we know that Jesus Christ's son did not come to serve, but to serve, to be served rather, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.

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And we have forgiveness found in Jesus alone. That is the exclusive claim of God, the creator, judge, and savior.

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Jesus is the only way. He's the only one worthy to take the book and break its seals. He's the only one who was slain and purchased for God with his blood meant from every tribe, tongue, people, nation,

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Revelation 5, 9. B .B. Warfield said, there is no one of the titles of Christ, which is more precious to the

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Christian hearts than redeemer, redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the lamb or redeemed, how

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I love to proclaim it, song after song, after song, redeemed. And this redemption is found in one

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God alone. So that was the first question we looked at last time. Question two, how costly was it for God to forgive you?

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And I was working through that a little bit. And it also says in Ephesians 1, 7, in him, Christ, we have redemption through his blood.

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And so instead of thinking of blood with corpuscles and hemoglobin and that kind of stuff, when you think of blood, you think of sacrificial death.

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When you think of blood and they put it over the doorpost and Passover, you should be thinking of sacrificial death, a substitutionary death.

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You should think of blood as shorthand or an abbreviation, a word as O 'Brien said, pregnant with meaning, signifying

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Christ's violent death on the cross as sacrifice is the means by which our deliverance has been, one, obtained at a very great cost.

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That O 'Brien commentary on Ephesians, by the way, if you had to get one commentary on Ephesians, and by the way, you know,

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I like to take little rabbit trails on NOCO radio, always biblical, always provocative, always full of rabbit trails, always in that order, you should get one great commentary, the best commentary on every book of the

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Bible. So you've got 66 slots to fill, and you know, there are multi -volume works and all those kind of things.

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But with series, some authors are better than others. And so what you do is you say, for Ephesians, if I could just get the best commentary for Ephesians, and I'll just get a few per year, and in several years,

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I'll have a great commentary on every book of the Bible. I think that'd be a good plan. That's a good strategy.

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So the one for Ephesians, it's in the Pillar Commentary Series. I think D .A.

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Carson is the general editor. And it is by O 'Brien, for some reason,

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I can't remember his first name, O 'Brien, Peter O 'Brien,

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Peter O'Toole O 'Brien. And it is a commentary on Ephesians. It is great. It is just an excellent conservative commentary, and you will like it.

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Herman Redobose said, It has quite rightly been, out of this we are to understand blood in sacrificial terms.

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Crucifixion was not itself a particularly bloody execution, when therefore the blood of Christ is regularly referred to, it is not so much because of the manner of his death, but because of its significance as sacrifice.

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Okay? So it doesn't have to do with it's really bloody, because beheading, guillotining, drawn and quartered.

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There's lots of ways to have a bloody, bloody execution. And we've seen some of that in the news, as the

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ISIS people behead folks. But the issue here is not manner, Redobose says, and I agree with him.

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But the significance of sacrifice, especially an atoning sacrifice, in which the blood was shed to cover and eradicate sin.

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So when you think of blood, you should think of sacrificial, and it should make you think of costly.

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It was costly for God to forgive you. And so this easily trickles into thoughts that we have about the costliness of forgiving others.

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What will it cost us if and when we forgive? And the cost, if you think about it on another level,

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Lloyd -Jones instructs, God, the Father is no indulgent father who will just say, all is right, my child, come back, all is well.

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There has to be bloodshed. Theology of blood is in the

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Bible, violent death, bloodshed, Colossians 120, having peace through the blood of his cross.

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God's not going to just let bygones be bygones. Something must be done.

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And when you see blood in the Bible associated with the death of Christ, you ought not to think of biochemistry, as Donald Gray Barnhouse would say.

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You ought to think of something so terrible that is sin. There has to be a ransom paid, and it cost

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Jesus his very life. Lloyd -Jones, sin is so terrible, so foul, and so vile that nothing could deal with it but the blood of Christ.

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And that is what happened on the cross. It is not a patching over, a covering over of sin.

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It is not God saying, do not worry, all is well. It is God showing us sin as it is, really bringing it out of the light or to the light and then dealing with it.

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And so that's why we have all these songs praising God about the blood. Question three in our forgiveness catechism.

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How complete is God's forgiveness? How complete is God's forgiveness? So there's forgiveness found.

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Is there forgiveness found in anyone else? No. How costly was it? Costly.

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Cost Jesus his life. Three, how complete is God's forgiveness? And Ephesians 1 .7

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goes on to say, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.

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And if my Greek serves me rightly, my memory serves me rightly, my mind serves me rightly, forgiveness of our trespasses, here in Ephesians, I don't have it in my notes, but positive, it's an apposition.

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It's like you could put an equal sign between blood and the. In him, Jesus, we currently have redemption through his blood that is equal forgiveness of our trespasses.

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That's what that is. It's forgiveness of our trespasses. How complete is it?

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Well, it's all of our trespasses. When I was growing up, maybe you were just like me, similar to me.

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And I grew up in a sacramental system, a Lutheran, liberal

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Lutheran system. I didn't know any different. This is just why we went to this particular church.

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That's just where my mom chose. She grew up Lutheran. Her mother was a Catholic.

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Her father was a Lutheran. And I think she gave in, she, the grandma, Grandma Nona. And so we went to this

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Lutheran church, maybe it was the closest Lutheran church. I lived directly across the street from St. James Parish, the

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Catholic church. And the nuns across the street actually thought my father looked like Billy Graham.

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And so my father wasn't a Christian man. I hope God saved him at the end.

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When my father asked the pastor to come and give him communion on his deathbed, maybe my father was thinking sacramental salvation.

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Maybe my father was thinking, I only have one hope for forgiveness. I sure hope to see him in heaven.

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Well, funny thing is my dad did like look like Billy Graham, a tougher version, a tougher version of Billy Graham.

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So anyway, I would think as a Catholic would think, my guess is, but certainly as a

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Lutheran would think. And I thought to myself, I need to confess all my sins at nighttime before I go to bed because what if I die in my sleep?

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I remember one time after I got my tonsils cut out, taken out, tonsillectomy, the removal of the tonsils and adenoids, right?

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Didn't they do adenoids? What is an adenoid? That annoys me that I don't know what an adenoid is and they took it out.

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You know, appendix maybe you don't need, but adenoids you probably need, especially if you're going to be a radio host talking to people across the world, right?

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So adenoids, tonsils and adenoids. And I was told to be careful when

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I was coughing because after I had them out, it was the holidays. I was home from college, University of Nebraska and went back home to Omaha and stayed at my parents' house and I caught a cold and I was coughing and you could then get a bleed, right?

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A re -bleed in your tonsils because you're coughing. And if you're coughing from your throat, you get a re -bleeder.

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So I was told to cough from my stomach. Well, when you're sleeping, you can't really talk to yourself so much unless I was some charismatic dream state deal.

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And so I was coughing in the night and while I was sleeping, I woke up, there's blood everywhere.

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I remember laying there with the yellow pages for the hospital, trying to think, do I call the hospital, when's the re -bleed making you want to go back and am

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I going to die? And at the time I didn't have an internet or anything, so it's just yellow pages. I believe it was 1980 and no,

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I didn't have hair like the flock of seagulls, although I did see the flock of seagulls down at the beach in Santa Cruz a couple of years ago.

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It was a free beach Friday night boardwalk deal. And the sound sounded the same, ran so far away and I mean, it's interesting to just hear them.

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They weren't my favorite band, but it was fun to see them at the beach for free, but they didn't have the hair. Pretty much had my style of hair.

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I don't know what it is, but with one hit wonders has been bands that they show up at the beach boardwalk and pretty much every one of them is kind of, as they used to say, they kind of let them go to pot.

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Maybe pot has something to do with it. I don't know. You can get free marijuana there, you can get a medical grade marijuana in Santa Cruz.

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So all this is leading us full circle back to confession.

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So I tried to get all my sins confessed before I would die and re -bleed with a tonsillectomy and or just regular nights because I thought sins were forgiven that were confessed and no other sins were forgiven.

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I didn't understand justification. I didn't understand Christ's life, righteous life imputed to the account of believers.

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I didn't understand how Jesus pays for every sin and here the forgiveness of our trespasses.

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All of our sins that we have committed past, present, and future, sins of omission, commission, thought, word, and deed, everything else is all taken care of.

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Forgiveness. Okay. It is God dealing with our trespasses and he forgives them all.

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And so we can just be thankful. We don't have to call them addictions and we don't have to blame and blame shift and call them syndromes and pass the buck.

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This word here, forgiveness means to send away. Isn't sin awful? Isn't sin a burden?

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And it's just sent away. Christ carries the burden on the cross and he removes, right?

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Strictly speaking, this is a removal. It's got an old Testament sense to it, a dismissal, a release, a pardon, a cancellation of debt, the forgiveness for our false steps, for our transgressions.

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So we have false steps. We have deviations from the right path and here

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God lets them go. He forgives them. He lets them go.

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He releases us from guilt. Can you imagine? We're standing before God. We're guilty and we're released.

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He's not going to hold anything against us. Guilt removed. There's no anger toward Christians.

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There's no resentment towards Christians. All that guilt has been removed because only

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Jesus's perfect substitutionary work can do that.

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And so isn't it nice to be loose from what binds us? That is sin.

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All our trespasses, full forgiveness, sin's gone. This reminds me of Colossians 2, having forgiven us all our transgressions.

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Can you imagine? There in Colossians 2, it's at the end of the Greek sentence, for emphasis, transgressions, high -handed transgressions,

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Christian, forgiven, ignorant transgressions, forgiven, original sin, forgiven, actual sin, forgiven,

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Adam's imputed sin, forgiven, past sins forgiven, future sins committed. I mean, they're just cast into the depths of the sea,

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Micah 7. Isn't that nice? They're out of his mind. I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.

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As far as the East is from the West, not only does Micah say it, not only does Jeremiah say it, but the Psalmist says it, he's removed our transgressions from us.

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Isaiah, cast all our sins behind his back. And we are thankful because if God would mark iniquities, who could stand?

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Psalm 30, 130, excuse me, but there is forgiveness with you. No wonder

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Micah says, who's a God like you who pardons iniquity? There's no one like you.

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And we need a God like this because essentially we're under the paradigm of obey, do this and live.

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Cursed is he who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them, God said to Israel and all the people shall say, amen.

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But our sins have been canceled, right? Colossians 2 says, canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile to us.

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The debt of sin, the hostility of that towards us, the writing was on the wall.

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That's really the certificate of debt. It was handwriting and it was a debt to God.

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No wonder we say, forgive us our debts as we sin.

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So God takes away this certificate of debt and he nails it to the cross and we have forgiveness of sins past, present, and future.

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That's why when I pray at night, I can pray, Lord, forgiving my sins that I've committed in a parental setting,

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I the child of God and me sinning against God. But I know they're ultimately all forgiven anyway.

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If I forget to confess one, it might not be the best for me, but eternally I'm secure because of justification.

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Remember there's two kinds of forgiveness, judicial, parental. When God saves us, we're standing before him in a judicial sense, courtroom sense.

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We are justified. We are not condemned. We are declared righteous by the work of another, alien righteousness, a different righteousness,

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Christ's righteousness. And then when we do sin, we confess and God cleanses us. And so in my child sins, they're not kicked out of the family.

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They're always in a band draught and there's just maybe a fellowship issue. And that's what we have with parental forgiveness.

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It's a matter of fellowship. It's not a matter of eternal destiny. Number four, no compromise radio,

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Q and A catechism for you catechumens out there. Is there a difference between judicial and parental forgiveness?

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Hey, somebody needs to edit this to move that back up. I was, I was teleported into this new question.

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So just back that up a little bit mentally. We'll be fine. This is a low budget radio. We have a philosophy around here.

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I never asked for money and I, then I never get it. Cause if you don't ask, you don't get, I think that's

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Matthew seven, isn't it? If you don't ask, you don't get a, I don't know if there's a donate button on no compromise radio website or not.

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I think I said, ah, you might as well go ahead and put one on there, put it on. So when the cursor moves around the page, it always opens it up.

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So whatever you click on, it's a donate thing because times are tough. It's that time of year again, cost a lot of money trying to be on all these other things.

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People have figured out how to give, that's the fun. How do you give to no compromise radio if you even want to?

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So give Jesus your money. Here's my address, judicial and parental.

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So God deals with unbelievers as a judge, right?

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And he sees their sins. They're going to have to pay for it.

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They've broken his rules, his laws, rebelled against his nature. And for those who are in Christ, those who

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Christ has died for and the spirit of God has regenerated. Of course, the father would have elected them in eternity past.

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They don't interact with God as a judge. They interact with God as a father. We don't believe in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

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That is, God's the father of everyone in a relationship like this. He is the father of just the

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Christians that he's adopted, Ephesians chapter one. And so there's two different kinds of forgiveness.

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Justification takes care of this judicial issue. And parentally, then we say things like, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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Now there's some debate. Is that for unbelievers or believers? But what we will say is we just agree with God as Christians.

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And we say, this is what we've done. Please forgive us. And Proverbs 28 is true.

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He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes him will find compassion.

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Q &A number five for the catechumens out there. Can I forgive something, someone, if the person's already dead?

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Well, what are you going to do? Talk to the dead? That'd be wrong. Pray to the dead? So people ask this question because somebody in the past has hurt them, and that person has died.

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And then now the person's finally the alive person. You have figured out what forgiveness is.

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You've been forgiven by God. And you said you'd never forgive that person. It was an unforgivable sin.

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And now you've realized you've been so graced, so forgiven by God, that you're compelled to want to forgive.

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And it's too late because the person's dead. What do you do? Well, you don't want to talk to the dead person.

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You don't want to pray to the dead person. Those people can't repent. Those people can't grant forgiveness.

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You're not going to talk some two -way seance or something with Houdini and Penn and Teller. Did you know

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Penn and Teller, when I took my wife to see Penn and Teller in 1989, 1990, we were sitting on something like the second row, first row, and they called me up on stage and I was in the show and they like sawed my head off and put it back on.

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It wasn't that. I was glad for that. I was glad it wasn't sticking 10 needles in my eye. But they did something and I had to check something that was, you know, tied on properly or they wrapped my arms up in something.

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I wish I remember. I just was probably, you know, still coming out of the marijuana haze.

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I didn't smoke marijuana when we were married, but I think I still was influenced by it.

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But anyway, I was up on the stage with Penn and Teller. See, who would have known? So what do you do if someone dies before you can reconcile them?

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Well, there's lots of ways. We just think through it. Okay. So you don't want to talk to the dead. The dead is not going to talk to you. You don't want to pray to the dead.

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The dead is not going to pray back to you. If the person that died that hurt you was a

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Christian, was a Christian, they're in heaven now. They don't need any more for forgiveness. They're glorified.

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They're perfect. And, you know, I hate to say it, but they just don't need your forgiveness because they don't need anything. They have all that they need.

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And that is Christ Jesus in front of them as they worship him. So they're all perfect. And to imagine that God dwells with them and God is their

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God and God has wiped away the tears. Death's no more for them. There's no mourning.

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There's no crying. There's no pain anymore. Former things have passed away. That's what Revelation 21 says.

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And since that's true, what you do is you just say, well,

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Lord, I want to have a forgiving heart toward them. I don't want to have any bitterness towards them or resentment towards them.

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If they were here, I'd, you know, seek restoration, but they're not here. And so just remove any bitterness and resentment that I might have or thoughts, those negative thoughts from me.

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That's all you have to do. You don't have to forgive a dead person. And if the person is not a

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Christian, then that's another show. My name is Mike Havenroth. This is No Compromise Radio, Forgiveness Catechism, Part 2.

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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Havenroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.