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Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the surety of it. Lord, as we ponder again this topic of forgiveness, we think about your forgiveness that you have granted us in Christ Jesus. Lord, what a gift.
Allow us to be focused on that. Cause us to constantly be focused on that, even as we deal with one another, Lord, that our desire might be to forgive as you forgive. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Well, good morning.
You know, last time went so well I thought I'd try it again. I thought I'd repent of my message on forgiveness. So, let's start out with a couple questions. Maybe we can clarify some issues. And then we're going to go to some texts and work our way through them.
Question. Can an unbeliever repent? Okay. That's kind of a tricky question because you think about it. Well, unbelievers repent, right? They come to faith in Christ and that's when they repent. Well, that's okay.
I give you that. Can they truly mourn in a godly sense over their sin? The answer is no, clearly. So then, can an unbeliever give or ask for forgiveness? Not until regeneration is taking place. I agree with that answer.
Let's move on. Anybody else? Should I move my microphone? I'm 90 degrees off. I hate that. Oh, I see. Well, that's okay because the sound man wants to make sure that things are right. I agree. I just didn't notice that when I put it on.
Okay. Wow, I can really hear myself now. Okay. So, if an unbeliever cannot forgive or seek forgiveness, I mean, this message is basically forgiveness is for believers. It's what we do. Now, forgiveness has, may I say, having stolen this from Jay Adams, if I can find my list of things.
What is forgiveness? I think I inserted it in some crazy place in my message. What is forgiveness? Who could summarize forgiveness for us? Yes, Mike. Okay. So, it has to do with God's view of things, saying that, how did you put that?
Okay. So, that's confession, agreeing with God's judgment, which we'll get to later. And then it's actually, here it is. Good. On page 12. This is how Jay Adams summarizes forgiveness. He says, forgiveness is, this is simple, a promise.
When you say, I forgive you, here's what you are promising to do. I will not bring it up with you again. I will not bring it up with others. And, I will not bring it up with myself. Is that how we forgive?
I will not bring it up with you again. I will not bring it up with others, because what is that? Gossip. And I will not bring it up with myself. Now, just to look at that third one again. Well, let's talk about the first and the third one, briefly.
If you say, I forgive you, and then the next time that person does something to you, you say, oh yeah, knew this was going to happen. You remember two months ago when you did that? You know, I knew that we weren't done.
I knew it was going to come to this. Well, did you forgive them in the first place? The answer is no. How can I say that? Again, let's think about what our model for forgiveness is. What is our model?
As God forgives us. You know, this isn't the Oprah Winfrey show. We don't do things, you know, in touchy-feely ways. Forgiveness is not a feeling. Forgiveness is a promise. When you say, I forgive you, now you may not be able, when you say, I forgive you, you may not be able to think to yourself, okay, that's it.
I'm done with it. I'm not going to think about it. I'm not going to bring it up. I'm not going to talk about it with anybody else. But that is the promise that you're making, and it is your job to work on it.
You need to do that. It's not the other person to somehow make you feel better. Again, forgiveness is not a feeling. It is a promise. Now, sometimes, and I know Pastor Mike's talked about this on a number of occasions, you know, we get into prayer circles, and we go, you know, I don't want to gossip, but I'm really trying to work on forgiving Pastor Steve.
He sinned against me. Let's just pray for my forgiveness of that rascal. Rascal. I haven't heard that since seminary. I have a professor who used to say that all the time. Oh, he's a rascally guy. Anyway, so that's number two.
We don't want to gossip. We don't want to talk about it. Number three, not to bring it up with yourself. Now, that seems pretty, almost silly, maybe a little obvious. But what happens when someone has really offended us, when they've really sinned against us, what do we do?
What's that? We rehearse it. I think that's a great way of thinking it, through it. We rehearse it. We kind of brood on it. We stew on it. We mull it over and over and over. And even when we think we've put it out of our minds, we'll be reading the Psalms, we'll be praying, we'll be thinking about something else, and then all of a sudden we'll be thinking, oh yeah, I remember that.
God, forgiveness, Christ, the cross, Holy Spirit, Scripture, everything put aside because I want to remember what that person did to me. That's not forgiveness. How do we not bring things up to ourselves?
How do we avoid brooding on things? Rehearsing them. Running through everything that ever happened line by line. And you know what? If something has hurt you enough, you can do that. You can remember exactly how you felt, exactly what was said, exactly what you were wearing, exactly everything that was in the air, everything that was going on.
I mean, hey, good times don't last, but the bad ones always do. You can remember, you can savor the anger you had. How do you avoid doing that? Choice. You have to do that. Ultimately, you have to put it in the hands of the Lord.
But, you know, sometimes people say, well, I just can't do that. I just can't get over it. It's in my mind, and there's nothing I can do about it. Would you say that a little louder? What is that? Philippians 4 .8.
Okay? Part of if we want to put off sinful behavior, and guess what? If you say, I forgive you for X, Y, or Z, and then in your private time, in that time that you spend alone with the Lord, you're actually rehearsing, you're actually walking through the sins that have been committed against you, you are committing a sin.
Not forgiving, especially after you've said you've forgiven, is a sin. Imagine if God forgave like that. Oh, I forgive you, but it's going to be rough. I don't know what I'm going to do. God promises to forgive.
When we promise to forgive, we need to forgive in that same way. We need to say, you know what? I am going to forget about that as much as I can, and when those thoughts come up, I am going to push them aside and replace them with other thoughts.
And you know what? If that same thing happens every single time I sit down to study or I pray or whatever it is that I'm doing, watching Oprah in the afternoon, whatever it is that I'm doing, I need to stop doing that.
Or I need to have a list of things that I can do, that I can work through, even if it means, and this is shocking, you want to stop thinking about yourself, you want to stop brooding over your own problems, you want to stop having these feelings that you can't forget, go and serve somebody else.
People say, I'm so depressed. I just don't know what to do about this, and it's a feeling I just can't get over. Well, stop feeling. Go serve somebody else. Get over yourself, sorry to use the vernacular.
It is time for us to put off our old habits and to put on the righteousness of God, to put on positive behavior. When we forgive, we promise not to bring it up to the person, not to bring it up to others, and not to bring it up with ourselves, not to brood over it, not to rehearse it, not to focus on it.
It ought to be shocking to us when we think back and go, oh, yeah, I remember that so-and-so did that. I'd forgotten all about it. That's the way it should be. That's how it should be. Now we sort of got off track, got into a number of things.
Let's open our Bibles to Psalm 51. Psalm 51, verse 1. For the choir director, a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. Now Bathsheba was not a place. I'm stopping right there.
You know, normally you see these little for the choir director kind of things. You just kind of brush over them. But this one is fairly significant. David wrote this, and he wrote this at a particular time, when he was probably at his absolute lowest.
And why would I say that? Well, we'll discover that as we move along. But David not only committed adultery with Bathsheba, he made sure her husband was killed in battle. We all know the story. But if you thought about it from David's perspective, when David did this, what was he thinking?
Who's going to find out? Who's going to know? I'm the king. And we've been talking about kingship in a different way, but kings are absolute monarchs. Nobody questions the king. He does what he wants.
He says what he wants. His word is law. He had unquestioned sovereignty, the power of life and death. And he exercised that power in this case. Keeping your finger in Psalm 51, because we will go back there, let's go to 2 Samuel 12, starting in verse 1.
Then the Lord sent Nathan to David. And he came to him and said, There were two men in one city. And by the way, what's the form that Nathan is using here? A parable. It's a parable. There were two men in one city, the one rich and the other poor.
The rich man had a great many flocks and herds. But the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb, which he bought and nourished. And it grew up together with him and his children. It would eat of his bread and drink of his cup and lie in his bosom and was like a daughter to him.
Now these days we wouldn't have ewe lambs like that. What might we have like that? Dogs? Maybe for some people a cat. Verse 4,. Now a traveler came to the rich man, and he was willing to take from his own flock or his own herd to prepare for the wayfarer.
He was unwilling to take from his own flock or his own herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him. The traveler comes to him, and he needs to treat this guest right. Rather, he took the poor man's ewe lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.
Now at this point, parables over. Verse 5, Then David's anger burned greatly against the man. And he said to Nathan, As the Lord lives, surely the man who has done this deserves to die. Now that's what the New American Standard update says, and I don't think it quite gives us the fullest possible picture.
And the picture is basically, you know, we talk about, you've heard if you want to kill a frog in a pot of water, you just gradually turn up the heat. And that's what Nathan has done. He's just kind of, he started it, and he's just kind of cranking up the heat.
And finally it just reaches a point where David's anger is burning over. He cannot stand it that this guy would do this. Of course, we know the story well. David pronounces the sentence, and he gives his reason.
He must, David says, he must make restitution for the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and had no compassion. So the penalty for the rich man's startling greed and lack of compassion was to be four times the damage he had caused.
Now what do you think David was thinking at that moment when he pronounced that sentence? When he said, this is what this guy is going to get. Yeah, someone else. I think he was probably pretty, he was thinking, boy, that's pretty severe, but you know what?
I'd like to give that guy even more. That guy's horrible. Verse 7, Nathan then said to David, you are the man. Now, I don't want anybody to raise their hands and volunteer anything, but have you ever had a you are the man moment where someone's telling you something, and then all of a sudden you realize the hammer's about to drop on you?
You have done something, and now you've been caught. You've been confronted on it. How do you feel? Do you think maybe David's countenance fell? Do you think he slumped a little bit in his throne? Do you think maybe his stomach knotted up?
Do you think he knew that although he was the king of Israel and could do whatever he wanted, no one could question him? That God knew. All of his earthly power, everything that he had accrued, all the thinking that he had, had been shattered.
This aura of invincibility they had had been shattered by God. Now, listen to how personal this gets. Thus says the Lord God of Israel, it is I who anointed you king over Israel, and it is I who delivered you from the hand of Saul.
I also gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your care, and I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I would have added to you many more things like these.
Why have you despised the word of the Lord by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon.
Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. The message of Nathan, the message of the Lord to David is simple.
You thought this was about you and Uriah. You thought this was about you and Bathsheba. You thought it was about getting what you wanted. But it's about what I've said to you. It's about what I have done for you.
I was willing to give you more, but you weren't satisfied. You actually hated me. You despised my words. And much like you pronounced a fourfold penalty on the man in the parable, this rich man, this theoretical rich man, so I will punish you.
You will never again know peace. Going on to verse 11. Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household. I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion.
And he will lie with your wives in broad daylight. Indeed, you did it secretly, thinking that no one would know. But I will do this thing before all Israel and under the sun. Then David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.
And Nathan said to David, The Lord also has taken away your sin. You shall not die. However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die.
Not only shall you never know peace, that's a bad enough curse the Lord places on him, but the strife, the lack of peace will come from your own household. And we know the story as well. As you committed adultery with the wife of Uriah, so others will commit adultery with your wives.
Finally, the child who is the product of your adultery will die. David says what? I have sinned against the Lord. But Nathan tells him, The Lord also has taken away your sin. You shall not die. But what?
There are consequences for what you've done. You gave the enemies of the Lord reasons to blaspheme, to speak evilly of the Lord. How? How did David do that? How did David give occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme against him?
That's exactly right. When we say that we are Christians and we act just like the world, what are we doing? We give the enemies of the Lord opportunities to speak against him. How powerful is this God?
People who follow him do exactly what we do. What's the big deal? Notice, David was forgiven for his sins. We know that. I mean, God calls him a man after his own heart. But there are consequences for our actions.
In this case, not only was he never going to get peace, but the son that he had with Bathsheba died. It's interesting, too, and I'm not going to go through this part of the story, but what does David do when he knows that the child, well, he's been told by Nathan that this child is going to die, but what does he do?
He prays and he fasts. He begs the Lord not to take the baby. The baby dies. What does he do? Curse God and die? Shake his fist at God and say, you know, I just don't know if I can forgive God? Do you ever see that?
Do you ever read people say, you know, I'm angry at God? What does that mean exactly? Rebellion? What God has given me is not what I want? What God has given me is not good? Does the Lord always do good?
Does the Lord always do what's right? When we say I'm angry with God for this situation, we have a problem. I love God, but I'm mad with him about this. Well, as I've said many times, your thoughts of God are too human.
He's not like you. You don't have the right to not like him, to be angry with him. Let's go back to Psalm 51, and now we can get to verse one. Be gracious to me, O God, according to your loving kindness.
According to the greatness of your compassion, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Blot out my transgressions.
You know, when I see that word blot out, I won't tell you exactly what I think, but I think of taking a paper towel and putting it on like an ink spot and just blotting up all the ink. You know, taking it all out like that.
But the Hebrew word means to wipe or to wipe out, efface, erase, cancel, or obliterate. Obliterate my transgressions. Spurgeon said this, My revolts, my excesses, are all recorded against me. But Lord, erase the lines.
Draw thy pen through the register. Obliterate the record. Though now it seems engraven in the rock forever, many strokes of thy mercy may be needed to cut out the deep inscription. But then thou hast a multitude of mercies, and therefore I beseech thee, erase my sins.
God has a record of every single thing that we've ever done. But the idea here is that He scratches them out. He obliterates them so that it's as if we did not sin. Wipe out the records of my sins. That's what He's asking.
And then He goes further. He says, even beyond clearing my record, in other words, eradicating the record of everything that I've ever done against you, cleanse me. Make me right. Verse 4, Against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified when you speak and blameless when you judge.
Well, against God only? This is David writing, right? Remember what he's just done. How could he say, against you and you only have I sinned? What about Bathsheba? What about Uriah the Hittite? What about his other wives?
I don't know how many. What about those other people? What about them? How can he say, against you and you only I have sinned? Why didn't David say, against me and me only have I sinned? Isn't that what they'd say today?
You go into therapy and what do they tell you? Steve, if you're not happy, nobody else can be happy. You can't make somebody else happy unless you're happy yourself. Well, they'll do that too. Blame somebody else.
You know, this whole idea, again, the thing about self-forgiveness. If we really believe against thee, against God and God alone, we have sinned because we've broken His law. When David did these things, other people were involved, other people were impacted, but whose law did he break?
Whose commandments did he break? Who did he ultimately sin against? If nobody else was there on the entire planet, his desires still would have been wrong. Why? Because they were against God. Charlie?
Well, if they were still alive, I mean, life expectancy wasn't... You know, but well, and I think, well, let's put it this way. How do Christians who have truly forgiven one another, no matter how bad the sin is, if you knew somebody who had murdered your child and that person had actually repented and you... could you forgive them?
And the question is, would you have the right not to forgive them? You know, would Uriah the Hittite You ever wonder what happened to the Hittites? Anyway, would Uriah's parents, if they were believers, have the right not to forgive David?
Well, if they understood that the sin was against God and God only, and if God has forgiven David, then did Uriah's parents have the right to sit there and go, well, God might forgive you, but I'm not going to.
And how dare you sit here and hand the choir leader that music for us to sing when you killed my son? I wouldn't want to be in that place. We talked last time about forgiving yourself. We got into multiple scenarios.
You know, I would just say this. If we objectively understand that all of our sin is against God and God alone, then the problem we have with forgiving ourselves as the culture says, the problem we have with forgiving ourselves is really a problem of what?
Pride. Putting off, putting on, and really believing that our sin is against God and that God has forgiven us. If he has forgiven us and we are not willing to forgive ourselves, then we're going right back into the I want to brood about my sin.
I want to think some more about it. I really want to feel bad because somehow I am going to make up in my body for the lack of Christ's suffering on the cross. I am going to pay the price for my sin because I'm not really sure Jesus did.
There are some things that we have done in our lives that surely we regret. But did Jesus pay for that? And do you believe that? Psalm 51 verse 5. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.
Now, some of you will say, I already know that. But David is not confessing his mother's sin here. What is he saying? He was sinful from the time he was conceived. This is basically another statement of original sin.
We all come into this world opposed to God. We're not neutral. Let's read verses 6 to 10. And behold, you desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part you will make me no wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.
I shall be whiter than snow. Whiter than snow. Now, that's a song. This is a figure we see often in the Old Testament. Isaiah 1 and other places. What's the concept? Being whiter than snow. Pure, clean from sin.
Forgiven. This is the picture of forgiveness. Though your sins may be like crimson, you shall be whiter than snow. Verse 8. Make me to hear joy and gladness. Let the bones which you have broken rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities again. Strike them from the record. Erase them. Destroy them. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit in me. Cleanse me.
Give me a heart that wants to follow you. Verse 11. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. David pleads for God to not do what he has the right to do. He knows that when he sins, God would be right and just and have the power to cast him away forever.
God, please don't do that. Verse 12. I love this. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain me with a willing spirit. What happens when we sin? Our fellowship with God just continues on the same as it always was.
No, what happens? There's a separation, a distance, a loss of joy. We might get depressed. We might feel like we're in a rut. What does repentance do? Restores the joy of our salvation. What were you like when you got saved?
What was that day after salvation like for you? Did you just go back into work and just go, hey, good morning, coffee ready? Is that what it was like? It wasn't like that for me. I went into the office and people were like, what is wrong with you?
And I said, well, I became a Christian. Not a born-again Christian. What is the joy of salvation? You have gone from being weighed down by the worries and cares of the world by your own sin to what? Forgiven.
Knowing that there's a moment in salvation where you go from knowing that you are condemned, that you are on your way to hell, and then you're no longer on your way to hell. You've been forgiven for everything you've ever done.
And what is that feeling? If you had wings, I guarantee you'd fly. Sometimes you don't have wings, and you still feel like you can fly. It is an elating, exciting moment. And he says, take away the burden.
Take away the guilt. Take away the drudgery and the suffering that I have been putting myself through by refusing to reconcile myself to you. Restore to me that salvation, that joy of my salvation that I had in the beginning.
That's what I want. Verse 13. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will be converted to you. What's the result of the joy of salvation? You want to tell others about it. What happens when you say to people like MacArthur does, you know what I do for a living?
You don't have to tell me you do this for a living unless you do. I tell people how they can have every sin they've ever committed forgiven forever. That's some pretty good news. A lot of people will be interested in that.
There is an excitement and a joy that comes with knowing that God has forgiven you. Now skipping over some of the things that we talked about before, knowing that we will not get to the end again. We talked about the difference between forgiveness and sorrow.
We talked about that. Okay. Let's talk about this, because this is one that really bugs me. What happens to a Christian who dies while committing a sin? What happens to a Christian who dies in the commission of a sin?
Or they've just committed a sin, and they die. Past forgiven for past, present, future sins. 2 Corinthians 5 .8, Paul says, We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.
That's what happens to Christians. And may I just say, in all love, we are not Catholics. This is what the Council of Trent teaches. Talking about... What is it? Urgent unction. What's... Extreme unction.
There it is. The last rites. Council of Trent teaches that this sacred unction of the sick was instituted by Christ our Lord as a sacrament of the New Testament, truly and properly so called, being insinuated indeed in Mark, but commended to the faithful and promulgated by James.
And the corresponding canon anathematizes anyone who would say that extreme unction is not truly and properly a sacrament instituted by Christ our Lord, but merely a rite received from the fathers or a human invention.
The teaching of the Council of Trent, and this is straight off a Catholic website, is directed chiefly against the reformers of the 16th century. Luther denied the sacramentality of extreme unction and classed it among rites that are of human or ecclesiastical, meaning church, institution.
Calvin had nothing but contempt and ridicule for this sacrament, which he described as a piece of histrionic hypocrisy. He did not deny that the... Well, whatever. Here's the point. The point is, you know, there's this business in the Catholic Church where if somebody's dying, the priest has to come in and give them the last rites.
Why? So that in case, since the last time of their last confession until now, they've committed some sin that would cause them to lose their salvation. You can't lose your salvation. If you're saved, you're always saved.
You can't lose God's forgiveness. You can't lose God's love. Once He sets His affection on you, He doesn't withdraw it. He doesn't make it dependent upon you going to confession. He doesn't make it dependent on the priest getting there before you die, pushing the emergency workers aside, and giving you the last rites.
We might have to have a part three. I don't know. Let's pray. Father, we are indeed blessed to consider that You have obliterated the record of the sins of Your children, that all those who call upon the name of Jesus Christ will be saved.
Father, we praise You for that. We praise You for giving us as an example of an imperfect man, David, who committed grievous sins, and yet, Lord, You forgave him. Father, there is no limit to Your mercy save the rejection of Your dear Son.
Father, I would pray for any who are here this morning who have not received Christ that You would so work in their hearts that they would flee to the cross. Lord, would You just cause us to live in light of Your forgiveness, to be restored to the joy of our salvation, that we may understand indeed the greatness of the forgiveness that You have granted us in Christ Jesus.
Amen.