Accepting God’s Mercy and Forgiveness

On a regular basis, and especially around this time of year, there are certain questions that come up in people's minds. You know, during the year, around the Holy Days, there's always a sermon or two that is just what people talk about. It's what people come to me and talk about. It's what they talk about with each other. And around this time of year, as people begin to examine themselves and prepare for the Holy Days and for the Passover season, I'll hear this a lot.

And it's almost every year. I know that God has forgiven me, but I just can't forgive myself. And all of us have regrets. All of us have things we've done that we're ashamed of, things we hope nobody else ever finds out about or that we know now that other people know about. And we carry that burden of, well, I know God's forgiven me, but sometimes I just feel so guilty, I feel so ashamed, I remember back, and I just can't forgive myself.

How could I have done that? My wife and I were talking about this as I was preparing the sermon some yesterday. And she said, you know, it's funny how as human beings, sometimes we just have this anger towards ourselves. How could I do this? Or how could I think this? Or how could I feel this? Or how could I have this anger towards someone else? Or how could I have treated somebody that way? And sometimes a memory will just rush back into your mind, and it's like you did it all over again.

And it can be a sin you committed forty years ago. And it'll come back, and it's like, I know God's forgiven me, but I just can't forgive myself. And sometimes people at this time of the year, we all struggle with our past sins. We all struggle with the fact that we are sinners still, that God has forgiven us, and we are overcoming, and we are growing, but we still deal with the scars of sin.

It's the one thing about sin. Sin leaves damaged people. Last night at the Young Adults Bible study, I was talking about repentance. And I said, you know, the thing about sin is it's not fair. It does different damage to different people. You can see a person that's just totally damaged by a sin.

They can see someone else committed the same sin, and they don't seem to have any damage at all. Of course, it's not true, because we all have emotional and spiritual damage from sin. But some people just can have terrible sins. You know, someone can be an alcoholic, and for ten years hide the sin, function at work, function in their congregation, function.

No one even knows they have the problem. Other people, they get drunk one time, they go out and drive a car, get in a car wreck, and they're paralyzed. They think, well, how does that work?

Well, sin isn't fair. And sin destroys us, and sin damages relationships with us and God and with us and other people. Because of that, there are times when we begin to examine ourselves, and we begin to look back, and we begin to say, I know God forgave me, I can't forgive myself. That's a very complicated process. And some people are more susceptible to this than others. I mean, there are people that just have never really struggled with that. Those who do struggle with it for various different reasons. That's why it's complicated.

It's not like there's one reason someone may feel that way. There's a lot of reasons a person can feel that way. What I want to do today is just go through four root causes that we can feel like, I know God's forgiven me, but I just can't forgive myself. I'm still burdened down with guilt. It may be a slight tinge of guilt as you remember something you've done. It may be an overwhelming experience of guilt that absolutely paralyzes you, where you just feel like, I can't even function. Why should I even try? And I've seen people say they accept God's forgiveness and can't forgive themselves and are absolutely destroyed by it.

They actually give up eventually on God with a belief that God really couldn't love somebody who's done what I've done. So four root causes that lead us to a very important point of view. A belief and a feeling. It's more than a feeling. It's a whole lot easier to deal with beliefs. It's a whole lot easier to give a sermon disproving the immortal soul because you can present facts. Dealing with emotions are a whole lot harder.

So that's why as we go through these four root causes you may say, well that one doesn't apply to me, but hopefully sometime as we go through this in this next hour there's something in here if you're struggling with it you say, ah, that one does apply to me. That is one of the reasons or the causes of why I feel that way. The first cause, the first reason why we sometimes feel like I know God has forgiven me but I just can't forgive myself is that you don't really understand that it is God's nature to want to forgive your sin so you really haven't fully accepted His forgiveness. I'm going to repeat that. Because you say, well I have accepted His forgiveness. It's not the intellectual problem, okay? Intellectually you've accepted God's forgiveness. It is that you don't understand that it's God's nature to want to forgive you so you haven't fully accepted it.

Sometimes when a person says, I can't forgive myself, really what you're saying is, my sins are so terrible, so horrible, so ugly that I just never can feel forgiven. Since I know God is merciful and it says in the Bible that God forgives us through the blood of Jesus Christ, it can't be God's problem, it must be my problem. And we get ourselves in this loop. We just go round and round. I know God, I don't feel forgiven, I know God forgives, so therefore it's my problem. I can't forgive. And that's a loop it's very hard to get out of. When the real issue is, sometimes we just don't understand God's nature. Yes, God hates sin. Yes, God punishes sin. Yes, there is a lake of fire. Yes, those things are all true, because God is a God of justice. That God is a God of mercy who wants to forgive and heal. He wants to forgive and heal. It's what he wants to do. The only reason why a person will not receive God's forgiveness and be healed is because that person will not accept it and respond to it. So think about it. If any of us don't receive forgiveness and if we're not healed, it's because we won't accept what God wants. God wants, it's part of His nature, to forgive us and heal us. He actually wants that. It's who He is. He doesn't, you know, His nature isn't changing. You see, yeah, but my sins are, stop. Whatever your sins are, God wants to forgive and heal. The question is, will we allow Him to do that?

Look at Psalm 109, or I'm sorry, 103. If there's anyone who should have walked around saying, God's not going to forgive, or God may have forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself, it was King David. How did that man deal with the guilt every day? Because his sins produced results in his life every day for the rest of his life.

He knew God had forgiven him eternally. He would be resurrected and be healed. But every day for the rest of his life, and you look at sins he committed, you know, there's three or four or five places in the Bible that mention sins he committed, and they affected him as a king, they affected his family, and they affected himself for the rest of his life. And as many times, it would have been easy for him to look at himself and say, I know God has forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself because of the horror of my own sins.

His sins produce God's punishment on a nation. Can you imagine getting up every morning and facing that? My sins caused other people to die. My sins caused innocent people to die. How did he deal with that? Look at Psalm 103, verse 8. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy. Now, we read through that, and we don't really capture what's being said here. It is God's nature to be gracious. It is God's nature to be merciful.

It is God's nature to be loving. It's interesting. Mercy in Hebrew comes from two or three different words. One of the words used to be translated in the Old English translation of the Bible is loving kindness. In other words, it is a love that actually produces kindness towards the one who is loved and is weaker, or the one who has done the abuse, the one who has sinned.

It produces an action. This is an aspect of God. He will not always strive with us, nor will he keep his anger forever. I'm going to read that verse from the New International Version. That's verse 9 of Psalm 103. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever. In other words, he gets angry. We do wrong things, and he says, ah, that's wrong. That's hurtful. And he feels anger. But he doesn't harbor it.

In other words, the anger is at the situation. It's interesting, in the Jewish Publication Society translation of that verse, it says he doesn't nurse his anger. That's an interesting term. A nurse does what? It helps someone along and helps someone get better. When you nurse anger, you just keep feeding your anger. You keep nursing your anger like it's a baby. I can take care of my anger. I've got to hold on to it. God does never do that. He doesn't nurse his anger. Now think about it.

He's angry at sin. He's angry at your sin. You come, but what is his desire in that anger? It's his desire to stay angry. If it was, he would nurse his anger.

He would harbor anger. That's not his desire. What is his desire? For you to repent and be healed and for him to erase your sin. They said, well, he forgives it, but yet he erases it. Let's look what's going on here in Psalm 103. Verse 10, he says, he has not dealt with us according to our sins or punished us according to our iniquities. He has dealt with us with what we deserve.

For as far as heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward those who fear him. Now he didn't say, so great are his mercies are people who live in rebellion towards him and hate him and won't repent. But when we respond to God's love, what happens? See, we think, well, we respond to God's love and now he stays angry with us or he stays displeased with us or he stays in this opposition with us.

That's not what happens. Well, we respond to God's mercy. And this analogy is amazing. He says, you want to understand how great God's mercy is. See, I've never met a human being with this much mercy. I don't have this much mercy. How great is his mercy? Well, go outside and look straight up into the sky, especially on a nice, starry night. And you're looking at stars that are millions of light years away and it's greater than that. That's a lot of mercy.

It's greater than that. You know, sometimes we don't talk about God's mercy. I get a little nervous. I'm going to talk about God's mercy. People will take it as a license to sin. So what we do is we don't talk about this, so we carry these burdens around that we're not supposed to carry around. We all know there's a license to sin. But we forget what God's desire is for us. That is what the Passover is all about.

As we come up on the Passover, we're looking at God's fulfillment of his desire for us. Verse 12 uses another of these hyperboles, as David writes, as far as east is from the west, so far he has removed our transgressions from us.

What we think is God still has a book of all our transgressions. Now he has video tapes, right? CDs. He has a big computer there and he just says, okay, call up somebody's name. Click, click, click, click, click, click, okay, let's look at every sin.

And let's watch videos of ten thousand sins of this person. Every thought they've ever had. There it is. And that's what we think God's doing. He says, when we enter into this relationship with God, where we repent, we respond to his love, because his mercy is like standing on the earth and looking up into the heaven, he says, if you want to understand how much he forgives you, take a sin and take and start in one direction east and one direction west. Now there is a sort of an anomaly on the earth. I guess east and west does meant, because it's round. I'm not sure David knew that it was round.

But it doesn't matter. You know, it's an analogy. The whole point is, what he's saying is those two directions don't mean they keep going in opposite directions. He removes our sins. Whatever sins you and I have committed and we've repented of, they are removed. Now, because we still suffer the temporary consequences, you've heard me talk about this before, we forget that. We forget that, eternally, they're removed. Verse 13, David goes on to explain this, As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him.

For he knows our frame and he remembers that we are just dust. Think of a small child that isn't obeying you as mother or father, that four or five-year-old, and you may punish that child. You may get angry with that child. What would that five-year-old have to do before you said, That's not my child anymore? See, that's the analogy he uses. What do you have to do before daddy says, Take the five-year-old, throw him outside, and I don't want anything to do with him anymore? Do you remember, you know, if you have a small child, do you remember what your five-year-old did last week?

Nah. Unless it's something that you just, you know, I mean, there might be something, but I mean, most of the daily things that child does, do you remember that we're wrong? No. This is a relationship we can have with God. To remove yourself from that relationship gets real dangerous, and this is the problem with, I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself. Now, I think we'll struggle with that until Christ comes back, so I'm not saying that you'll ever maybe totally get rid of that, but to let that overwhelm you is to, you will separate yourself from God.

You will eventually separate yourself from God, and then you will be exactly where you fear to go. So what God is telling us is we don't have to go there. There's a real positive message to we really don't have to go there. This is the whole message of Jesus Christ.

You know, it's interesting in Hebrews chapter 9. Now, we know as we get close to Passover, we're going to be talking about Jesus' sacrifice for us. That He came as our substitute. Therefore, forgiveness is real. Forgiveness can be absolute. You know, forgiveness isn't, okay, I'll forgive all of your sins but ten, and for those who have to go to purgatory. There is no concept of purgatory. It's interesting here in verse 11 of Hebrews 9.

He says, But Christ came as high priest of the good things to come, with a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, than is not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood he entered the most holy place, once for all having obtained eternal redemption. And we have to go back to this. And you're going to hear me throughout the rest of the 45 minutes. We're going to go back to this a number of times.

We're going to go back to understanding that blood. He entered the most holy place, once for all having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Now there's two things here. A cleanse conscience and a willingness to dedicate yourself to living as a sacrifice to God.

To do good works. To serve God. And both of these things have to happen. Our conscience must be cleansed. And that means we have to get to the place where when the past sins come out, we have to remember, I am forgiven. And that blood was shed for me. And God doesn't care about that anymore. He cares about what I'm doing right now, even if I'm still suffering the temporary consequences of that sin. And I will live a life dedicated to God. This is what makes it so terrible to be forgiven, to be baptized, to receive God's Spirit, and then live this life in sort of a, you know, half-hearted way.

How can God do all that for us under our responses? Yeah, sort of live your way. Sort of. What I want to. What I feel like it. Or be trapped in the past. That conscience cleansing is more than just changing us so that we know the difference between good and evil. That conscience cleansing is also a reminder when the past comes up that the past is forgiven.

In the mind of God, it's forgiven. But we'll hang on to it. So if you suffer from this first root cause, if you suffer from thoughts, I just can't forgive myself because you don't understand that it is God's nature to want to forgive, and you haven't really fully accepted His forgiveness, then here's some things you need to do. First of all, ask God to reveal His nature of loving-kindness. Actually, ask God to reveal that to you. We know God's nature as justice, as law-giver. We know that. We can't. And we should never set that aside.

But we also need to go ask Him to reveal His nature of loving-kindness, to reveal it to us. They say, okay, I ask of that. What do I do next? Secondly, study the Psalms because this was a core idea in the mind of David. So much so that it probably is at least half of what he writes about in his whole lifetime of what we have recorded in the Bible is about this subject.

It was central to how he thought. Now, you also see there's an awful lot about God's justice in there, about God punishing the wicked, about God dealing with those who won't repent. Okay, that's in there too. But there's also an awful lot of David dealing with God's loving-kindness. The third thing is the approach to this Passover season with a renewed appreciation of Jesus Christ as your Passover Lamb. Now, how do you do that? Well, we just read, His blood was shed for us. Sometimes you have to, even on a past sin, that you know that you're forgiven for but you can't deal with, you need to go to God and you need to ask, would you take that beating, those stripes, that crown of thorns, that pain, that suffering, that last gas room of breath, will you take that and apply it to me?

You have to make it personal. You have to go ask. Jesus Christ, as He stands beside the Father, you have to say, will you tell the Father, accept my death for and fill in your name and my sin?

You have to make it personal. You have to go and say, let that be for me. Let that hurt and pain. We say, well, yeah, I know He died. But see, we're so... it's so revolted to think of His death and His suffering that we have a hard time sometimes, or some people do, actually going and saying, let that suffering, let that hanging there on that stake, let that bleeding to death, let that all that pain...

let that be for me. But you know, it's the only way we get there. If He didn't do that, we can't get there. We have to say that suffering was for me, and for this sin, apply that sacrifice. We talk about it in a general sense. It's hard to do it in a specific sense.

And then the fourth thing to do, if you're struggling with this aspect, is strive to have an attitude of service towards God. In other words, live your life as an adventure. Christianity is more than just resisting sin. We talk about that all the time because we're so inundated with sin, we can get so negative. We say, today I get up and what do I do? What's my purpose today? Resist sin. No, your purpose today is to serve God. It's to be positive.

It's to do. Resisting sin gets a whole lot easier when you're serving God. So that's the first reason why we get trapped in that. The second is that you are a reason that people get trapped into the idea that I can't forgive myself, is that we're still emotionally chained to the past. And because of that, we're emotionally chained to good things, but most of the time we're mostly chained to bad things.

If you ever get out pictures, you know, my wife here a while back, we got out some of the pictures of when the kids were, well, Chris had a birthday. And we got out pictures and we were looking at the picture albums and when the kids were little and you know, there's pictures of all of them when they're naked and laying on the little, you know, cloth thing.

And we all remember this, we have all these good memories. Now, being connected to that is good.

But you know, there's some of those pictures that were bad memories associated with, too. We didn't talk about that, because we don't want to be chained to those things. But we're chained to the bad, negative memories of the sins we've committed. You know, to really understand that, you have to go back to Adam and Eve. You know, Adam and Eve had a natural curiosity that God developed in them. You and I are naturally curious, because it's just God made us that way.

So it wasn't hard for Satan to come along and say, aren't you curious about that? And of course, he said, well, I wasn't before you mentioned it, I am now. It's like, don't think about the color blue. When you're sitting in a room, everything's blue. Now, you probably weren't thinking about that five seconds ago. And I was like, wow, the floor is blue, the chairs are blue, there's blue on the walls, this person has a blue dress on.

So when he said, aren't you curious about that? I was like, well, I wasn't before, but I am now. And he aroused that in her. As he aroused that curiosity, he now also did something else. So you remember they had free will. They never had to really use that except that, oh, by God, it was easy, it was simple. There was never really another option that came along. As another option came along, they had to deal with conscience, the development of conscience. Oh, I do have a choice.

Wow, I do have a choice. God's not around. I can eat that fruit. I never thought of that before. And you can imagine inside of Eve, there was this enormous stress screening, Don't eat it. It was her conscience. Don't do this. And there was another part of her saying, Wow, I bet you that tastes good. So far, we haven't eaten everything in the garden yet, but everything we've tried tastes really good. And besides, this will make me like God. Maybe God's hiding something from me, which is what Satan had told her.

Maybe God is hiding something from me. All of a sudden, she's actually trying to decipher the difference between good and evil. Maybe I misunderstood God. Maybe what he meant was, don't eat it right away. Whatever thought process she went through, emotionally and intellectually, she eventually ate the fruit. Gave it to her husband. He went through the same process. Ate the fruit. Immediately, what happened? They felt guilty. Their conscience was now twisted, and it was like, Oh, I did something wrong. I feel terrible. I know that they wouldn't be hid from God.

This is what we do. We hide from God. God comes along, and of course, they blame everybody but themselves. Adam is the one that really gets me, because he actually blames God. The woman that you gave me... You had to give me a better model. Maybe we should have done some beta testing first here, because, you know, the woman that you gave me... Satan put some blame on God here because of the guilt.

They did not deal with the guilt of their sin properly. So what happened to them? They got kicked out of Eden, and they spent the rest of their lives feeling guilty over a sin they had committed. That's the same process we go through, and we get emotionally connected to a sin. In a negative sense, oh, it hurts somebody so bad, or, oh, I can't believe I did that.

And the damage it did. We'll go through some of that later, too. Let's go to Psalm 32. One of my favorite Psalms. It seems like I read this one every once in a while, from the sermon. Psalm 32. Let's look at the first five verses here. I'm going to read this from the Jewish Publications Society translation.

Psalm 32, verse 1. See, David did this. He says, "...happy is he whose transgression is forgiven." Now, he only writes this because it's an experience he went through. He was miserable because it wasn't really forgiven. He knew God would forgive him, but he was emotionally attached to his sin, whose sin is covered over. Happy is the man who the Lord does not hold guilty, whose spirit is there is no deceit. As long as I said nothing, my limbs wasted away from my anguish roaring all day long.

As long as I didn't deal with this, and I stayed emotionally attached to it, I emotionally, spiritually, physically, David said, I was just deteriorating, even physically. We can physically destroy ourselves by staying attached to the past sins. For night and day your hands lay heavy on me, my vigor waned as the summer drought. So I could just feel the pressure from God on me. Then I acknowledged my sin to you. I did not cover up my guilt. I resolved I will confess my transgression to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. And he said, now I am happy.

See, he could have stayed emotionally attached to his sins, and he did not. He did not stay emotionally attached to them. He understood how horrible they were. That's what makes David so amazing, too. David understood the ugliness of his sins. He didn't stay attached to that ugliness, because he accepted God forgave me. What if you're the type of person who just...you're emotionally attached negatively to your sins so much that you...okay, I accept God's forgiveness, but I can't experience happiness because I can't let go of my sins, what I've done. Well, if this is an issue that you're dealing with, here's some things you can do. First of all, realize that there is no amount of suffering that you can go through to make up for your past sins.

There is no amount of suffering. It's like, if I suffer enough, then God...I'll get rid of this guilt. There is nothing you can do. There's no suffering you can do to make up for the damage of your own sins to others and to yourself and the damage you've done to God. That's what we forget. Every time we sin, we do damage to God. It's amazing that that doesn't seem to affect him more than he gets a little angry once in a while. He feels bad, but he still has this desire because it's his nature to forgive us, in spite of his own emotional response. It's just who he is. I'm sure glad he is that way. Man am I glad.

Realize you can't suffer enough for your sins. We can't make it right. Only God can. And only God can put your sins as East is from the West. Only God can do that. The second thing is, realize that, and then realize that if you're hiding a sin from God, God won't forgive me of that.

I've talked to people who actually have sins they have never repented of because God won't forgive me of that one. If you're hiding a sin from God, go repent of that sin specifically. In fact, this is the same point that we had in our first reason. Go to God, specifically mention the sin, specifically mention its ugliness and its horribleness, and say, God, please take that meaning and suffering of Jesus Christ. Say to Jesus Christ, please take your sacrifice and give it to me.

See, I think sometimes we just haven't done that.

I think it's too painful. We repent in an intellectual way, but we don't get down to this nitty-gritty hardcore at the very core of who we are because it's too painful.

But this is what it means. And say, this applies to me. This Passover must be for me. You know, they understood a little bit about shedding of blood in Exodus because they killed that lamb. Think about it. A little lamb. Your children played with it. You brought it in. It was in the home for days. You know, they brought it on the 10th, killed it on the 14th.

They watched that animal bleed to death. I've watched animals bleed to death.

They watched it bleed to death. They watched the life go out of that animal. And they knew that that was for them.

We have a sacrifice for us, and it's for us. If he didn't bleed to death, you don't get passed over. And if you don't recognize that sacrifice, you don't get passed over. If you don't recognize the coldness he must have felt as he bled to death, you don't get passed over. What's hard is, you have to go say to the one who did that, apply that for me. Sometimes we haven't done that.

And the third thing, if your sins damage others, sometimes we need to go back and deal with the damage we did to others. Maybe you did a sin 30 years ago, or 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, and never dealt with the people you damaged.

Sometimes real forgiveness isn't experienced until you go sit down with somebody and say, I hurt you, I damaged you, I didn't even know what I was doing. It was stupid, it was wrong, or maybe I was mean, I was whatever. And I'm coming to you and telling you, I was wrong, but I'm asking you to forgive me.

You say, well, what if they won't forgive me? Then you go to God and say, I did everything I could do. See, we're afraid to do that because we know sometimes people won't forgive us.

But if they don't forgive us, that's not the point. Do you realize somebody else's forgiveness will never give you eternity? Nobody else's forgiveness will ever give you eternity. Only God's. But God still requires us to try for the other person and for ourselves. A third reason why we struggle with this. I can't forgive myself. Sometimes, and this is a really difficult one, because this is really hard to get into. The next two are really hard to get into. It's because you actually haven't forsaken the sin. It's because you still have a fond attachment to the sin. It's like the guy that likes to tell everyone, Yeah, before God called me, I was the sinner. Me and my buddies, we'd go through $500 of booze and heroin in one night.

All the women? Woo, the women! Before God called me, you can't believe why I saw it. And it's like he's bragging. It's like, this is a good thing. Oh, no, I've been forgiven. But, boy, those were party times then. And you realize, he actually remembers his sin with fondness. And sometimes, we haven't really forsaken the sin. I've dealt sometimes in marriages where there's a marriage problem because one of the couple, the man or the woman, remembers a relationship they had with someone before they got married. And they're always comparing the husband or wife to that person.

Boy, I tell you, when I was 17 years old, I had this boyfriend. And between 17 and 19, and it was just so wonderful that I've been married to this guy for 10 years, he's never measured up. Boy, what kind of relationship did you have? Well, I have to admit, we were committing fornication all the time. But it was just wonderful. Wait a minute. So you're comparing your husband to that sin, and your husband somehow doesn't measure it up.

Well, here's the problem. You like your sin, still. You're attached to your sin. You have a fond memory of your sin. Now, remember, sin brings pleasure for a short season. So, there is fun to sin. You know, people will tell you, yes, I used drugs, it was fun for a while. I got drunk, it was fun for a while. I slept around, it was fun for a while. I was dishonest, and it was fun for a while. You'll hear people talk like, yeah, when I was younger, man, what we used to do for kicks, we used to go shoplifting for kicks, and it was a thrill.

And it's almost like, oh, I like to shoplifting just one more time because it was sort of fun, you know. But, yeah, God says not to do it. We're not abhorred by the sin itself.

So, sometimes, sometimes, we don't express the forgiveness, and we can't forgive ourselves, because really, we don't want to forgive ourselves. This one gets complicated. This one gets complicated. But it is a ... people can have this. Isaiah 55. Isaiah 55. I get so many Bibles up here. I don't know which one to read it from.

I'll just read out of the King James. Isaiah 55. Verse 6. Isaiah says, Seek the Lord while he may be found, Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way. See, sometimes, we just haven't forsaken the sin. And the unrighteous man, his thoughts. Sometimes, we forsaken the sin, but not the thoughts. I remember when I was a kid, we had a woman that we would pick up and take the church with us.

And she was an older woman. Now, I was a teenager. I thought she must have been 150. I have no idea how old she was now. I think back in the day, I really don't know how old she was. But she just seemed ancient. But almost every Sabbath on the way to church, she would start talking about, Oh, you and I really miss pork rinds. We would fry off our own pork rinds. We would eat it, and the juice would just run down your face. I miss that so much. So we don't get sick. She'd describe it, and how much she liked it.

Now, I'm not saying this woman was in this, but I'm just using that as a humorous example. How many times do we hold onto the thoughts of the sin?

The thoughts of the sin. Let him return to the Lord. And notice what it says here. And he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. He's just not going to pardon. Pardon is just going to come out of him. It just flows out. But you have to forsake the sin. And sometimes, we don't feel forgiven, because we're still sinning. Sometimes, the reason we don't feel forgiven, is because we're still sinning. We may not be committing the act, but in here, in our minds, we're hanging on to the joy, the pleasure, the fun, whatever we experience, the thrill, whatever we experience during the sin. So we're hanging on to that part of the sin. Well, of course, we don't feel forgiven. How do you forgive yourself when you're still vicariously committing the sin? Proverbs 14. Proverbs 14. Proverbs 14. Here's what happens. We sort of get into this point where we relive the sin as a good thing. We know it's bad, but we relive the sin as a good thing. Proverbs 14 says, The backslider in heart will be filled with his own ways. The backslider, the one who just keeps going back and sliding back into the old sins. But a good man will be satisfied from above, from God. We will get our satisfaction from God, not living in our thoughts of our past sins. This isn't a reason that you find as often as the others, but it is occasionally, like a person who can't feel forgiven, they can't forgive themselves, and the reason why is they're still vicariously living the sin. That's why. So if this is the problem you have, what do you do with this?

Well, first of all, spend some real times considering what are the real benefits. I mean, really meditate. What are the real benefits I got from that sin? Now, what are the consequences of sin? I mean, if you really understand what's going on, you've got to realize whatever benefits you got from that sin are absolutely destroyed by the consequences of the sin. Think about the eternal consequences. Think about the cost in your own mental health. Think about the cost in your relationships. Think about the cost and the stress on your own body.

The sin has a terrible stress on our bodies. Think about, why do you think I really got out of that sin, that I'm sort of hanging on to it? What is the real consequence? The next thing you do, well, it's the same as the other two. You go get on your knees before God and confess the sin. You know, God, I'm hanging on to this. See, we like to confess things in a general sense, not in a specific sense. Now, there's times it has to be really specific. I have a sin I'm hanging on to.

I've actually figured out it's not a sin. I've been able to reason around this, not a sin. You know, I'm not really a gossip. It's just I'm really, really interested in people. And I'm really concerned about, you know, people's bad habits and sins, and I want them to be helped.

So I talk about it to everybody. I'm not gossiping because my motive is I'm interested in relationships. You know, you just go create wreckage wherever you go because you just gossip all the time. Well, yeah, but I'm not really gossiping. See, we'll actually convince ourselves. We have to go confess it. Yes, I am a gossip. And I'm confessing this sin before you. Look at 1 John 1. 1 John 1. We have direct instructions from the Apostle John.

1 John 1, verse 8, he's speaking to the church here. He's not speaking to the world. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. All of us still struggle with sin. Okay. He says, so let's set that premise. We all still struggle with sin. Hopefully we're not dealing with the absolute breaking of the letter of the law.

And we hope at this point you're not involved in idol worship. We hope you're not using God's name in vain. We hope you're not committing adultery, you know, stealing, just overtly breaking the Sabbath. You know, we're past those points of letter of the law, but he says we're still sinning. He says, verse 9, if we confess our sins, if we go and we just lay this out before God, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We get back into this concept. He wants to forgive us, but it just isn't forgiveness.

Oh, I forgive you. Go do what you want to do. And think of the absurdity of that. I forgive you. Now go back out in Satan's world to do whatever Satan wants you to do. No, he has to cleanse us from it. We actually overcome our sins. We get rid of them. We get rid of the vicariously living of sin. So we don't feel forgiven because, well, we're still reliving our old sins. He says, if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, these things I write to you, since you may not sin, and if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

He himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours, only but for the whole world. In other words, what is John saying? Exactly what I've been saying all along. Take it to God. Spill it out, and in all of its ugliness, and all of what it is, and then say, apply this blood for me. Take this beating for me. Take this crucifixion for me, and apply it to this sin.

That sin will even get uglier when you do that. And suddenly, you don't want to live it anymore. Your justification of it sort of disappears. Vicariously living that sin becomes just as destructive to you as if you were actually doing it. It's just to eat away at who you are, and your conscience, and it just hurts to do it.

The fourth point is very interesting, because I've come to the conclusion that for a lot of people, this is why they feel like they can't forgive themselves. And it's going to sound like a little strange when I say it, but I want you to bear with me here, and let's go through it, and I'll show you what I mean.

We can't forgive ourselves, because we can't accept the depravity of our own human nature. So what we look at is an event. I remember the time I, and fill in the blank, I remember the time I cheated on my wife, I remember the time that I lied to this person and they got hurt, I remember the time I got drunk and wrecked the car and killed somebody, I remember the time I divorced my wife when I shouldn't have.

And we go back to that, and we look at that moment, and we say, I can't forgive myself for that moment, and we forget something. That moment is an expression of our nature. Just like God's forgiveness is an expression of His nature, God can't stop Himself from forgiving. Now, He chooses whether it's forgiven or not, but I'm saying it's just part of His nature.

His doesn't. It says He is love. It's who He does. It's the first thing that goes through His mind, His spirit, is forgiveness. If you don't repent, okay, then we have to go down to justice. His first response is, let me forgive you and let me heal you and teach you obedience. That's His first response. What happens next depends on how we respond to Him, right? Our first response is from a depraved human nature.

Our first response is from a nature that's partly good and partly evil. So our first response, in certain circumstances, depending on which area of your mind is corrupted, because we're all corrupted a little differently, our first response is evil. And that's what we don't want to deal with. This event becomes a focal point. The event is a symptom of a depraved, corrupted human nature. And somewhere in our early years, Satan came along and started to pump some of himself into us, and each of us has an accepted part of that.

So all of us have part of Satan's nature in us. And that's what we don't want to face. So, oh, I just keep going back to these events in my life and what I did, and I was so horrible, I can't believe I did that. That's why I hear a lot. I can't believe I did that. The answer is, oh yeah, and you're capable of much worse. We're all capable of horrible things because of our nature.

That's why God says He has to change our nature. That's what this whole process is. And at some point, we take an ugly look at what our nature is, that our initial response, depending on what our weaknesses is, our initial response to certain circumstances is evil. It's wrong. And before God came along and gave you His Spirit, you just live responding that way because it's what you were. I can't forgive myself. Well, at some point you say, I don't want to be this way anymore. See, it all gets healed if we turn to God.

There is a time when you and I aren't a mixture of good and evil. There is a time when all of us are nothing but good. There is a time when all of us are nothing but good. But before we get there, we have to come face to face with this. You know who is the best example of this in the Scripture? It's the Apostle Paul. Let's go to Romans 7.

Time to read this from the NIB. Romans 7. And this is the reason why sometimes we say, I can't forgive myself, because we're looking at an event instead of at the bigger picture, which is, oh my, I'm capable of all kinds of things. We've got to get down to that capability issue of who we are. And once we get there, it's like God changed me. Apply the sacrifice and give me the Spirit so that Christ will change. I'll become more Christ-like. And we start to move away from this massive burden of guilt. We begin to move towards, change me, change me, change me, because someday I will be changed, and I will no longer have any guilt at all.

Someday I'll be resurrected, and I'll be good, and I will have forsaken everything that's bad. Paul had to come face-to-face with this. Romans 7, verse 14. We know that the law is spiritual, reading from the NIB, but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin, which is the whole theme of the Days of Unleavened Bread. I'm sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, but that which I hate I do. This is the very thing that makes me mad. I do. Now, we know Paul wasn't out murdering people.

Paul, at this point in his life, wasn't doing a lot of sin. Paul may have been carrying a lot of burdens from his past sins, though. The certain things in his writings that make you believe he still, at times, had guilt over his past sins, especially when he persecuted the Church. Paul is saying, this is written a good 20 years after his conversion, he's saying, I'm still stronger with these things. He says, I know I shouldn't covet. And then I look at somebody else's life and say, God, why do they have a good life and I don't?

Why am I out here preaching the gospel? You know, my clothes are tattered. I've been on the road for three weeks, haven't had a bath in four. And why did this person have a good life and why am I doing this? I don't know what he's dealing with, but he's dealing with some pretty serious issues inside his own heart and mind. He's at the core of who he is. And at that core, because on the outside, believe me, Paul was keeping the letter of the law.

He was keeping the letter of the law before he was converted. Do you think he stopped obeying God in the letter when he was converted? No! He kept doing those things. But now he's doing it at that core level and he's looking at that deep level and he's saying, boy, this is a struggle. He says, verse 16, and if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.

He says, when I do something and at the end of it I just feel guilty, what am I saying? I'm saying the law of God is good. See, he's not tearing down and doing what with the law of God. It's the opposite. He says, every time I sin, I feel guilt. Why do I feel guilt? Because the law of God is good and it convicts me. And now I feel guilt. Guilt is an actual factual state. You and I are guilty when we break the law of God. It's that simple. We are in a factual state of guilt. And Paul looked at the law, he looked at himself and he said, yep, there are times I'm in a factual state of guilt and I'm actually going against what I want to do.

As it is, verse 17, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. That's an interesting statement. He said, I looked deep enough inside of me and found out that intellectually I don't want to do certain things or intellectually I want to be. It's not just what you do. Sin can be what we don't do. When we know to love our neighbor, we don't. We know that we should do certain things for others, and we don't. We know that we should come to Sabbath services, and we don't. When we do these things or don't do things, right, he said, I look inside of myself and say, what's in there? We think, well, if we find deep enough, we go deep enough inside ourselves, we'll find this little child. Right? Is that what psychologists say? Get in touch with your inner child. Paul said, well, I tried to find the little child. I found a brat. I looked deep enough inside of myself. Well, what do I see? Oh, my! It's a mess.

That's what he found. And he wrote a tale for everybody. He's just like David. Yeah, I better let everybody know. Deep inside, I found a mess.

He says, I know that nothing good lives in me. That is my sinful nature. It wasn't just...you know, he could be saying...think about this... He could be writing, I feel so guilty. I put people in prison because they were Christians. And some of them died. I gave them permission to stone Stephen. What are the great men of God? He could be saying, and I just can't forgive myself for that. Why isn't he doing that? Surely that bothered him. Of course it did. Did he have regrets? Of course he did. We all have regrets. Why is he obsessed with it? Because he says, well, I looked deep inside myself, and guess what I found out? I was motivated to do that because I have a sinful nature. It wasn't just an event. Yeah, it's in there. It's in there.

He says, the rest of this verse, I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. I have a desire to do what is good, but I can't carry it out. Now, we look at the life of Paul, and I think, what in the world, Paul, are you not carrying out?

It shows that no matter how spiritual you are, no matter how much you truly grow, the great people of God always were able to look inside and say, yeah, they're still inside there. They're still a corrupt nature. It's getting better. It's being healed. It's not what it used to be, but there's still some of it there. And they were willing to do that. They were willing to see that ugliness and then say, thank you, God, for you have forgiven me. So, wait a minute. Paul here, at the end of this, at the end of Chapter 7, he's just writing, O wretched man, I am! He didn't find any solution.

He didn't find any answer to the fact that, no matter how much city he came out of and how much better he got, he still found inside of him something that wasn't quite right yet. Now, he didn't stay there, by the way. Paul didn't spend every moment of the day looking at that ugliness. But he went there once in a while and then said, okay, God, forgive me and I will do better. How do I come to that conclusion? Chapter 8, Verse 1. Therefore, there now is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. He said, but inside I know that this will be fixed. I will be healed. All this will be forgiven. This will be changed.

Because through Jesus Christ, the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do, and that it was weakened by the sinful nature, the law of God can't convert us of itself. Because why? Deep inside, we hate. Oh, we don't hate all of it. We just hate parts of it. Right? But it ain't part of all. The parts that apply to what I want to do. So I like the law that says, honor my mother and my father because I want my kids to honor me.

So I mean, I want to honor my mother and my father, but I want them to honor me. So we like the law as it applies to us, but the sinful nature is the problem. He says, God... Well, let me read the whole sentence again.

For what the law was powerless to do that was weakened by the sinful nature, God did, He did, in other words, what was weak becomes strong by sending His own Son and the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. See where He goes back to? To get on your knees and confess and say, apply that sacrifice to me. And so He condemned sin in sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

Now, that's a fascinating sentence. The law... Here's what people think that means. The law will be set aside because God has died for you and Jesus' righteousness is now applied for you and you just enter into a relationship with God as a sinner and you stay a sinner and it's okay. That's not what it says. And I read from the NIV deliberately because the NIV sometimes waters things down a little bit.

It doesn't water this one down. Looks good as sin. So He condemned sin in sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us. Oh, boy! Inside of us! The law of God is met. If the law of God inside me says, Thou shalt not steal, believe me, the actions are not going to steal. It doesn't condone the breaking of the law when He's making this even stronger.

He says the law is actually fulfilled inside of us. It is done inside of us. We do it because God is living in us. We do it because we're submitting to Him at that level. We're doing it all the time knowing as part of your nature that doesn't want to do some of the stuff, as part of your nature that means some things.

And once in a while you look in there and say, Hey, that's ugly, but God will help me. I will submit. I will follow. I will obey. So what if this is your issue? What if your issue is, you just can't accept your own depraved human nature?

It's easy to look at individual sins and then say, Well, God, I just can't forgive myself for that. Well, you can't forgive yourself of your own nature. That's where the real ugliness happens when we get those moments before the Passover when we look at our real nature and say, I can't forgive myself for that either because it's who I am. And then you go to God and God forgives you.

And God says, We've got a lot of work to do, son. We have a lot of work to do, daughter, but we'll get it done. We've got a lot to do here, but we'll get it done because we've accepted the ugliness of it.

And we've accepted the beauty of what God's doing in us. Remember, there comes a time when there is no ugly part to your nature left. In the change, there is no ugly part left. But the only way you and I get there is we accept the ugly part now. Say, Okay, what do I do if this is my problem? I can't accept the depravity of my own human nature. It's easier for me to feel guilty because I treated my mother bad for 20 years and then she died and I was never able to say, you know, I'm sorry, and I really treated her badly and I've always felt guilty over that.

It's easier for me to obsess with that than deal with what made me treat her badly because that part of me is still there to one degree or another. What do we do? Well, get out Psalm 51. Write down every verse. Take a sheet of paper, take Psalm 51, put a line down the middle of the paper and write out every verse of Psalm 51, and then on the other half of the sheet of paper, write out what is God telling me.

What did David experience that I'm supposed to experience? And then you ask God to help you experience Psalm 51. You literally ask for it. You go and ask God, help me to take that verse now and apply that verse to me and help me take this verse and apply this verse to me. And you're always brought back to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. As we approach the past overseas Him, I know we've been getting to examine ourselves. There was a sermonette last week on examining ourselves. And hopefully all of us can look at ourselves and say, you know, boy, there's ways over the last year, two, three years that God has really worked in my life.

And I've overcome this sin and I've worked on this, and I've worked on this faulty attitude and this wrong emotion, and this relationship and that relationship is better, and I'm closer to God. Hopefully all of us are, you know, we can look at all kinds of things that are positive. But, you know, in this process, if we do more than a surface analysis, we get down into these other issues, these core issues.

And some of that is still ugly. That shouldn't discourage us. It should help us realize God is with us. If you didn't have Jesus Christ to compare to, you wouldn't know it was ugly. You wouldn't know! You'd think you're a pretty good person. The reason it's so ugly is because God is inside of us in His Spirit.

Christ is inside of us, and we're comparing ourselves to them. And we look at that and say, oh, wow. But don't forget whose Spirit that is in you. That's part of the process. We are comparing ourselves to Christ all the time. And sometimes we go in and we look at the ugly. And when God forgives us, there is a point.

There is a point. And sometimes it takes years. That those sins that we can't forgive ourselves over, there's a point where it's released. There's a point where you accept that part of your nature is being changed and healed. What caused you to be that way then, you couldn't do that now. What caused you to sin then, you wouldn't do now.

Let's use the example of the woman, just was mean to her mother. It says, I've used my mother for 20 years. I was mean to her for 20 years. And I just can't deal with that. And I can't forgive myself. There is a point as you go through this process that you realize, wait a minute. I thought that same person. I would not do that now. I wouldn't do it now. Because God has changed me. Because I have submitted. Because I have grown. I'm not that person. Now, I've got other problems to deal with. And that part of the time, it just comes to the...

it's that realization. I'm not that person anymore. And finally, you can be freed from the past. Finally, you can say, yes, I forgive myself. I understand God's forgiveness now. It's not just forgiving me for what I did. It's changing me from who I was. And in doing so, we come to a conclusion. And this is our conclusion today. Let's go to Psalm 51 and read one verse. Psalm 51 and verse 12.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Ultimately, the past seven days of the London bread is a time of joy. It's an absolute time of joy. We say, well, that doesn't feel that way. It seems like we always have more trials before the Passover. You ever notice that? The land is a joy. Yes, it is. Its salvation in eternity is a better life now. It's everything that God is offering us. Restore to me. And that's what the Passover is all about. It's being restored back. We begin a new Holy Day year with restoration. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit. Pray that, let God do that in your life, and let's prepare for the joy of the Passover.