Guilt and Shame

We heard it in the... about God's love in the sermonette and about forgiveness in the song. Forgiveness is an important message in the Bible.

But for that to have meaning, there's also the important message of guilt. Now, we tend to talk a whole lot more about forgiveness than guilt. But the truth is, forgiveness has no meaning unless there's something to be forgiven of. And in other words, unless there's guilt, forgiveness has no meaning. This goes back to something that was... I think Billy Graham was the one who really made it big back in the 50s, 1960s, and back, you know, when I was a little kid. But he would talk about Jesus accepts you just the way you are. Now, his message would also go on to say, you know, you need to seek God's forgiveness, you need to repent, you need to change your life. But that phrase, Jesus accepts you just the way you are, became central to the whole Christian movement in the United States. And it changed, and it changed, and it morphed. And to now, the message is, Jesus accepts you just the way you are, and loves you just the way you are, and you don't have to change at all.

In other words, there is no guilt. There's no concept of guilt in much of today's Christianity. All you have to do is accept Jesus' love, and He'll help you get out of your problems, and He'll make you feel better, and you'll have a better life. But then what does He have to forgive us of, unless there is a thing of guilt? We're coming up on the Passover service, and the only way the Passover can truly have meaning is if we understand a simple process we're going through, and then we're going to look through this process and this complexity in terms of our emotions and our thoughts. This process is that we're called by God, and we realize that there's something wrong with us, so we repent. We cry out for forgiveness. We're baptized. Because we realize we're guilty of something. We've done some things wrong. We've thought wrong. We've been wrong. The remedy for our guilt, and I must add something to guilt, because we're guilty, there is a deserved punishment.

Because you're guilty, there's a deserved punishment. I watched a speech given by a legislator in another state here this week who was talking about why the judges in that state were just, if people arrested, even for murder, there was no bail. They were just let back out. He said, well, they'll have to face trial, but why are we going to punish people for something they did in the past?

They committed the murder weeks ago. Now what we have to do is teach them how not to murder.

So there really was no concept of guilt. The person really wasn't guilty because it was something that happened in the past. So the whole purpose then of love is just teaching them how not to do it again. Now they won't murder anymore. Of course, in that state, the murder rate is skyrocketing because you let the murderers out. Guess what they do again? Because there's no change in the human nature.

And with no change in the human nature, we just do the same things over and over and over again. So it's forgiveness without guilt. You can't have real forgiveness without guilt. You're forgiven, and there is a deserved punishment. Here's where it is very difficult for the woke Christianity. That's what it's called now. It was New Age Christianity and secular humanist Christianity. Now it's woke Christianity. It keeps morphing into new names, but it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And in that Christianity, there really is no deserved punishment. God loves you, therefore He will not punish you.

And therefore, places in the Bible where God punishes people, it's a total, you know, that's wrong. That's just people's interpretation. That's not really what God did. But when we understand guilt, we have to understand there is a deserved punishment, right? There's a deserved punishment. But when that happens, we find out through repentance that we can be forgiven.

And forgiveness from God means the crime committed is pardoned. It's absolutely forgiven, as if it never existed. It's pardoned. That's the whole purpose of the Passover. The purpose of the Passover is to understand the price God paid and the price Christ paid so that you and I can stand before God free of our sins. That He takes guilt very seriously. We have to understand how serious He takes it. And how remarkable this whole process is, because there is no cheap grace and there's no cheap forgiveness. We had a deserved punishment.

When Jesus died, what He took is what every one of us in this room deserve in the mind of God. Understand that. In the mind of Jesus, we deserved what He went through. But He did it so we don't have to. That shows you how important guilt is to God. But it also shows you there's a possibility that has to be free from guilt. Absolutely free from guilt. I usually try to cover this every couple of years, but I haven't covered this subject in depth for five years.

I was looking at sermons I've given and I thought, I need to go back and we need to go through this. Simply stated, guilt is the state of having disobeyed a law or moral principle. We did something wrong, so we are guilty. In Romans 3, the apostle Paul says, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All have sinned. All have committed crimes against God.

And they are crimes in which there are specific judgments for. And when you add up all of your crimes in your corrupted human nature, God says you deserve to die. That's what He says. Now, today people would scream if you'd say, that's not a loving God. No, but that's how God deals with evil. That's how God deals with evil.

He eradicates it. But He's not going to eradicate humanity. He's supplied a way to deal with that. Now, so we're going to have to go back to in a minute here about the idea that, well, God accepts you just the way you are. What the problem with that is? Because there's a deep problem with that. I just stated now, so you know, when we get there, He doesn't accept us just the way we are. He accepts us for what He can create in us.

He accepts us for what we can be. See, that's another reason we have this problem sometimes. Well, when I get good enough, I'll get baptized. Well, then you will need baptized to be baptized. The issue is He doesn't accept you the way you are. He looks at you and says, you can't believe what I can do. I can make you into something else.

He accepts what we can be and says, now you can't stay the way you are. So that little saying, which was real catchy, got morphed and morphed and morphed over the decades. So it means something totally different than what the people said it originally meant. So let's just change it. God accepts what you can be.

Now you have to see yourself a little differently. God accepts you for what He can make you into.

Now we have to deal with guilt, but when we deal with guilt, we also deal with guilty feelings. Right? We feel guilty. We should actually feel guilty. If we've done something wrong, we should feel guilty. That's a sign of a good conscience. So we'll have to talk about conscience here when we get to the end of the sermon. Let's look at two places in the Bible where someone did something wrong and felt guilty, and then look at how they were such different outcomes. One is in Matthew 26. Matthew 26.

Verse 69. This is the night that Jesus had been arrested. He was taken. The disciples still didn't understand what was going to happen, but they knew it wasn't good. He'd been arrested, and as the night went on, worse and worse things were happening to him. Verse 69 says, Now Peter sat outside in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him, saying, You also were with him, with Jesus and Galilee. But he denied it before them all, saying, I do not know what you're saying. And when he had gone out to the gateway, another girl saw him and said to those who were there, this fellow was also with Jesus of Azareth. But again, he denied with an oath, I do not know the man. He's lying, and he's denying Jesus Christ. Though later, those who stood by came up and said to Peter, Surely you also are one of them, for your speech betrays you. Now, in other words, you have a Galilean accent. You're not from Jerusalem. You're with him. Then he began to curse and swear, saying, I do not know the man. And immediately the rooster crowed. And Peter remembered, verse 35, the word of Jesus, who said to him, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.

Can you imagine when that dawned on him? He was bragging to Jesus, how none they may give. These rest of these guys may turn their back on you, but not me. I'm strong. I'm tough. I'll be there with you all the time. Jesus, you have no idea what's coming. And before sun up, when you hear the rooster crow, you have already denied me three times. Not me. It says, so he went out and he wept bitterly. He's just destroyed by the realization of what he'd done. Now, when you read through the book of Acts, what you find is a very interesting story. You find the story of a man named Peter, who repented of what he had done. He felt bad. He felt guilty. He felt shame, but he repented and God forgave him. And God worked through him and he became one of the greatest men in the history of the Bible. One of the greatest followers of God in all the scripture. But look what he did. Surely God, you know, wouldn't forgive him of that. But he understood his guilt. He was guilty.

Next example of guilt is in chapter 27 verse 1. Then came morning and all the chief priests and elders of the people plotted against Jesus to put him to death. When they had bound him, they led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate, the governor. And when Judas, his betrayer, seeing that he had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. He feels guilty. He knows he's done something terribly wrong. He's denied Jesus, turned him over, obviously not knowing he was going to be condemned. Too late now he's been condemned. Then he threw down, or it says, I have sinned, verse 4, by betraying innocent blood. And they said, what is that to us? You see to it. Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed and went and hanged himself. I don't know what Judas' fate is in the future. I don't know. I just know here's a man confronted with his own guilt before God, and he could not ask or accept forgiveness. And he destroyed himself. You know, I've met many people over the years, alcoholics, drug addicts, people who have the most destructive behavior in their lives. And they just believe God won't forgive them. And God can't forgive them. And so they just become self-destructive, just self-destructive. And they never get out of it. They never grow. They never move forward. They just stay there in a self-destructive place. Two examples of men who did something wrong. Two examples of men, one repented, one did not. One responded to God, and one did not. Both felt guilty. Both also felt shame. Shame is a little different than guilt. Guilt is based on, I see I did something wrong. Oh, here's a standard. I broke that standard. I shouldn't have done it. I lied. I shouldn't have lied. I stole. I shouldn't have stolen. Shame is you take your guilt and you're so embarrassed by it that you become in your mind unworthy of God's forgiveness. And you just can't be forgiven. God can't forgive me. In which case, the reality is you believe that your sins are greater than God.

God can't forgive me. And you get stuck. I've seen people stuck. God can't forgive me. God can't forgive me. And I've seen in a couple cases that people never got beyond that. They spend their lives and die believing God can't forgive me. So shame takes it even farther than guilt. Guilt recognizes, yes, I am wrong. And yes, I have to be forgiven. Shame says, I can't even repent. And I can't be forgiven. And shame, it's just so overwhelming. That's what makes Islam so much so violent. There's no forgiveness. There's only shame. You have to rectify shame. How do you rectify shame? You kill the people who shame you. So it's always going to be violent because there's no way out of your shame.

When we understand guilt, we understand that we can give up shame because we have been forgiven and the depth of what that means. We've actually been forgiven. Now, there's three kinds of emotional guilt, and I'm breaking down a complex subject in the little small bites here. But one is shamelessness. This is where a person has no shame or guilt at all. These people are insane. They can kill people. They can steal. They can lie. They can cheat. And there's no—they feel fine. This is a heart of evil here. Shamelessness. There is zero feeling of guilt, zero understanding of right and wrong. A second type of guilt and shame is created in us but not from the law of God. Now, not all of this is bad, but we have to understand that sometimes we have game and guilt and shame that is good in a social sense. I mean, if you were taught when you were young that you don't eat like a pig in front of other people, and then you go over to someone's house and everybody's sitting here—no, no, no, no. You should feel guilty if you're doing that at somebody's house, okay? Unless they're doing it and they say it's okay to, but then I guess you have to, not to—anyways, the problem is that there are certain norms that we should look—I mean, nobody here showed up in a bathing suit today. There's a reason for that, right? There's societal, there's church, there's family things that create guilt and shame because it's based on the norms of that group. And not all that's wrong, but it can be. You know, I've seen people that feel guilty because they went to college instead of staying home and working for the—with their family business and the family business went under, and it's like, it's my fault because I went to college. Oh, is it? Do you not have a right to go out and step out with your life, too? Or someone feels guilty because they didn't marry the person that all the other family members wanted them to marry. I mean, people can feel guilty over almost anything because there's some kind of social norm to it or family norm to it.

Some people can feel guilty—I used to write commercials, so I understand this—you know, you put some actor with a, you know, white smock who has a, you know, IQ of 95 and you—not that all actors have IQs of 95, but that's a little below normal. Okay, so this guy's a little—he's not real smart. Put him in a white smock, he can memorize the lines, and he says, whiter teeth makes you a more attractive person. And you go look in the mirror and you say, oh, my teeth are yellow, and then you feel bad. Oh, man, you know, I'm covering my mouth with my smile now because—no, I need to go buy that stuff because four out of five dentists say I should use it. I don't know. You go ask five dentists, will you get four out of five? It's four out of five that they asked, probably all picked. And you can feel guilty because your teeth isn't strangely white. Sometimes you look at someone's teeth and you say, wow, they must use a whitener because nobody's teeth is that white, right? But they don't feel guilty. They feel great because they've colored their teeth. So, you know, even advertising is designed to make us feel shame and sometimes. And I tell you who creates shame and guilt in each other are teenagers all the time. I can remember as a teenage boy, there was always that challenge. Soon as someone said, I dare you. Okay. And we did stupid stuff, right? And then you learn as you get older, I really don't care. You can't make me feel shamed. You be the idiot. I'm not going to. But it takes a while to learn that out. You learn that, right? Teenagers shame each other all the time. Girls shame each other too, just different ways. They usually are challenging each other to do something stupid. Well, yeah, they can too. So there's all kinds of norms that create shame and guilt that aren't necessarily bad, but they can be bad because they can create in us, well, a shame that just shouldn't even be there or a guilt that shouldn't be there. The type of guilt we're talking about today is the guilt that's based on a relationship with God and based on breaking a law and instruction, a principle of God, doing good or evil. And if you do the evil, if you do something bad, God wants you to feel guilty. If you've actually broken something and you've done something wrong, you broke one of his laws, He wants you to feel good. There's a reason for that feeling because that feeling drives you towards something. It drives you to God fixing what had happened. So, guilty feelings are good to a point. Even shame can be good to a point. It depends on where we go with it and where we use God to drive it towards something. Look at what John writes in 1 John 1. I think, oh wow, we're going to hear a sermon today about how I should never feel guilty. No, every one of us should feel guilty. I should feel guilty. You should feel guilty when we've done something wrong before God. That's the way it's designed to be so that something can happen to us. If you never feel guilty, something's wrong.

Either, well, either you're perfect or something's wrong.

We feel guilty when we... But this is the sorting through process because feelings of guilt and feelings of shame can be legitimate or not real or based on a misunderstanding.

A misunderstanding of what God's forgiveness really is. What is God's forgiveness? 1 John 1.5. This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. This is real important. You're washed. You're dirty and you're washed. That's the imagery here. But you're not taking a bath. You're washing the blood of Christ dying for you. This is the price paid for forgiveness. This is why accepting God's forgiveness is really important. To deny God's forgiveness is to deny the blood of Jesus Christ, the penalty paid to deny how terrible our sins are and the price that must be paid for us to have a relationship with God. It's not cheap. God paid the price. Christ paid the price. That was how expensive it was for you and I to become His children. And He willingly did it. He willingly paid this price.

He didn't do it any cheap way because He hates sin. He did it because He loves us. He says, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Now, remember, He's not writing this to the world. John's writing a general letter to all the churches all over the Roman Empire at the time. It's been out to all the churches. He's writing to people who've been called by God and have been baptized, you know, repented, baptized, received God's Spirit. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. My little children, John always, there was this affection he showed the church because he's a very old man at this point. He says, my little children, these things I write to you that you may not sin. He says, you know, if you really understand this, you're going to be motivated to keep stopping sinning. You're going to keep being motivated to come out of sin. When we truly keep the Passover, we go home and say, man, I want to do better this year. You're not going to do perfect. But you want to do better. You want God to keep helping cleanse you.

This is why the Passover and the Days of Love and Bread are connected. We'll show that in a minute. And if anyone sins, okay, so you do sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And he himself is a propitiation. He's the sacrifice for our sins and not for ours only, but for also the whole world. He did this for anybody that's willing to come to God. That's the price he paid. Now it says, you have an advocate. You know, in Greek, the advocate was a term that could be used just like in English. An advocate can mean your defense lawyer. Can you imagine a trial where you're standing for the judge and it's a capital crime with the death penalty. And the defense lawyer says, oh, my client is as guilty as sin. In fact, guilty of sin. Absolutely completely guilty. That's my client. And that's the only defense you get. And then your defense lawyer says, kill me instead. Let him go. Let her go. That's what happens in this court of God. Apply my blood to what this person deserves.

And then let's make them into something else. Not let's accept them as the way they are. Let's accept them for what they're going to be. Let's accept them for what they're going to be. And God says, yes, child. And this relationship with you and God changes from being judged to father. Now, father still is tough on you. Nothing has changed as far as right and wrong. That hasn't changed. But he's a little, he's more concerned with you growing than the judge who is only concerned with applying the law. He's concerned with us growing and becoming what we can be.

You know, there's temporary punishments God gives us all the time. There's temporary consequences of sins you and I will carry for the rest of our lives. Things we've done that literally will pay for for the rest of our lives. But those are all temporary. Even God's judgments on us now, if he punishes us for something, it's temporary. Because he keeps saying, this life's temporary. Eternity, that penalty is gone. That penalty is gone. You know, bill verdage died because all people who are born into this world and experience sin die of physical death. His spiritual penalty is erased. There is no spiritual penalty for bill verdage. He's resurrected in the first resurrection and he's got a spirit body and he's got a clear, totally healed mind. That's his reward. This life was preparing him for that because that penalty has been paid.

It's what he deserved. He doesn't deserve it now, by the way. Bill Verdage doesn't deserve that anymore because God forgave him. God turned him into what he wanted him to be. He accepted him for what he became and said, you're ready. He gets it when he's resurrected.

Think about that. Think about that. Rick Beam was ready for it. Now Rick was sick. He got sick. He started to go downhill over a month ago. He didn't want anybody to really know. So Gary, his brother and I talked on the phone, you know, when should we announce this, Gary? Oh, and Rick says to. Okay, we'll wait. And we watched him go down, down, and down. Finally, he said, you better tell everybody because I won't be around much longer. But you know what's amazing? The whole family was praying, please don't let him suffer. If you want, if it's his time to go, please don't let him suffer. The day he died, he had pancreatic cancer. And the day he died, from the point that it came back, like six weeks, the day that he never had pain one day, not any. I mean, just a little uncomfortable, but he said he really had no pain. They'd have to take any pain medicines.

So what we have is this realization that God paid it so that we don't stay the way we were, and we become what he wants. And that means forgiveness. Look what you said. What's that feel like? Okay. What's the emotion of that? Well, let's go to Psalm 32 because here David, David experienced it. And David being David wrote it down. He had to write down what he experienced.

You want to be blessed. We went through all the beatitudes here over the last couple of months about blessings. Well, here's another blessing you can receive. Bless is he whose transgression and transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Bless is the man whom the Lord does not impute iniquity and whose spirit there is no deceit. He says, bless is the man who has received pardon. It's like your charges are gone. Your list of sins are erased. Your list of sins are erased. And guess what happens when the new ones come on? As long as we're in this relationship with God and we're constantly repenting before him, and he's working in us, they keep getting erased too.

Now, this idea that, oh good, that means I have the license to sin, means you'll end up with those sins on there. You can't just go out and sin.

I was talking to someone today that said that they were talking to some friends at work and so forth. They were talking about, oh no, God just forgives you. It doesn't matter. Someone, you know, you can steal a car today and God forgives you. Steal a car the next day and just say, I'm sorry, God forgive you. You can steal a car every day for the rest of your life. And God forgives you. I have to do say, I'm sorry. No, it doesn't work that way. And we'll talk about what it means in a minute. We'll talk about what really happens here. So David then says, when I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. Now, I sort of picture this. Hebrew is poetic and is picturesque, and I don't know exactly what he was saying here, but in my mind, I picture God putting his hand on his shoulder because he won't repent. He just keeps whatever the problem is here. He just won't repent. And he gets smaller and smaller. His knees buckle. He gets shorter and shorter. Then he's down, you know, he's down on his knees, crawling and the hands get heavier and heavier. Finally, he's worshiping because in Hebrew, worship means to put your face to the ground. Finally, he's face down to the ground and God says, you want to see how heavy I can get? And then he realized I need to repent. So he says in verse five, I acknowledge my sin to you and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. See, he experienced the freedom of actually being forgiven. Actually being forgiven. You've been forgiven. The problem is sin keeps coming back, right? The problem is we struggle.

The problem is we drift away from God. But he has accepted you for what you can be and what he will make you into as long as you keep having him bring you back and keep being forgiven. Over and over and over again, the price was too high. The price God paid for us was too high to throw us away.

That's what we see at the Passover, how high the price was. We're reminded of that every year. This is the price God pays. Our price is to become a new person, to become his child. That's a pretty nice swap.

You think what God the Father and Christ went through for us to be forgiven, and then we get the opportunity to be changed by the power of His Spirit into His child? Wow. That's a pretty good deal for us. God thinks it's a good deal for Him too, to have us as children. Now, in all this, there's one thing that has to be done, one thing more. And that is, during the days of unleavened bread, we take the bread and the wine, we commemorate the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But we then take out leavening, and we continue for the whole rest of the week to take in unleavened bread. That shows the taking in of Jesus Christ for the rest of our lives. We're taking in who He is so that we become like Him. That's the whole process here. I forgive you, repent. I call you, God says, you repent. You're baptized. I forgive you. I give you my Spirit. And then you go through this process of becoming what I want you to be. I accept you for what you're going to be. Not for staying a thief, you know? Not for staying what we were before. We're accepted for what we're going to be. And He won't give up on us as long as we don't give up on Him. And this comes down to the concept of the conscience. And once again, making this simple, there's three basic kinds of conscience. You know, our conscience is how we determine good from evil. It's our thoughts and our emotions. It's our motivations. It's how we bring down the concepts of good and evil into application. And the first kind of conscience is just the natural conscience of the average person. It's a mixture of good and evil.

You know? You see, people do something really nice and good. And the next moment, they're doing something absolutely wrong. We say, we don't understand. The natural conscience, except in those whose conscience is just so wrong, they're just evil, totally evil. But most people are a mixture of good and evil.

So, you know, Friday night, they go downtown Nashville, they get drunk and they sleep with some guy, and then they come home the next day, and they get over it. The next day, they go to church. And they go work serving the poor in a soup kitchen, which is good to go serve the poor. It's a good thing. But what's the problem? The problem is the conscience is a mixture of good and evil. The second is the seared conscience. And Paul talks about that in 1 Timothy when he talks about people who know good and evil, and they choose the evil over and over and over again, till it's, you know, it's a gruesome image. If you've ever seen an animal that's branded with a hot iron, he says, like, it's branded with a hot iron. You know, they take a hot iron and they burn it right into the hide of, say, like a steer, right into it, until it burns in through the hide so that it leaves a permanent mark, a scar. It leaves a scar on that animal. He says there are people who have scarred consciences. It's like there's, it's been burned and marked to the point. It can only, it chooses evil. But they know good and evil, but they choose evil. And then there's a third kind of conscience, which is one, we've already read a couple of times how his blood cleanses us. Our conscience, our understanding of good and evil is cleaned up. It's cleansed. This is the days of Unleavened Bread, where we're taking in Christ and remembering we have to constantly be changed and molded by God so that we are cleansed. And our concepts of right and wrong are cleansed. And what's developed in us is a Christlike conscience. Look at Hebrews, chapter 5.

Hebrews 5.

Verse 13, For everyone who protects only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he's a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. In other words, people who are really growing are learning through their experiences to choose good and evil. They're choosing good more and more often. The New International Version translates verse 14 as, Who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish between good and evil.

That conscience is now being changed through the power of God's Spirit and our subjection to it. Our willingness, our humility before God, because we understand the price paid. See, the price paid motivates us to do what's right. I'm amazed how many people take the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as an excuse to do whatever they want to sin. The opposite happens if we understand what it really means. It means we want to keep coming out of it and growing and changing and struggling. Hebrews 9 verse 11. Now, he writes this in context of the Day of Atonement. But the Day of Atonement and Passover are connected. There's certain things that are connected in both. Jesus is the Passover, the sacrifice of the Passover. The Day of Atonement is both the High Priest and the sacrifice. Fulfilling all this. So when you go through the Holy Days, you see where all those things are about Him. So even though this is about the Day of Atonement, we can apply it to the Passover. Verse 11. But Christ came, as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater, more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is not of this creation. And now 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. Once again, we've got to think of the price, the actual pain, the stress, the fear, the shock. Everything He's going through, knowing He has to go through this, and He has a reason for going through it. So that we won't be accepted for what we are, but we will be accepted for what we will be. For what God's going to do with us.

He says, For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies the purifying of the flesh, or these physical things, let people have a physical relationship with God, 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? How many times have we looked to see the word cleanse so far? And now He says, cleanse your conscience.

So that we are learning, we are taking Christ in, we are becoming what He wants us to become. That's a lifetime, isn't it? And now you can spend your life thinking, I don't know if I've really changed enough, and you have no idea how much God has changed sometimes. God keeps working with us and changing us and make us into somebody else. He makes us into His son, His daughter.

And He cleanses our conscience so that we begin to understand and want what He wants.

Before the Passover, it's a time to look at yourself and go before God and discuss your state of guilt. You know, it's this exam on ourselves. Okay, what is my state of guilt?

I repent. And we say, God, we don't have to make a list, by the way, of all the sins you've committed over the last year. God wants a concept. He wants you to come before Him. He wants all of us to come and say, I have failed at times. And sometimes I know, always this time of year, I always think of a few things, yeah, boy, I really messed up here and here and here. I messed up enough. I just come and say, I need help. I need forgiveness. I want the freedom of your forgiveness so that I can be better, not freedom so I can sin more.

Freedom so I can have the power not to sin. We repent and remember, you have been declared guiltless by God. When you go back into this process, and that's what we're celebrating on the Passover, God says, I have pardoned you. Your crimes aren't on the docket anymore. The record of your crimes has been erased. That's what it says.

God says, I've forgiven you of those crimes. You're still suffering from it. And you'll suffer until the resurrection. Then you won't suffer anymore from it. Okay, so you drove a car at 18, drunk, 100 miles an hour, and had a wreck. And now you limp. God says, yeah, you're going to limp the rest of your life, son. But it's not on there anymore. That's just every limp reminds you of something. And that is, I'm changed when Christ comes back. I'm somebody different. I'm me, but I'm cleansed. I'm me, but I'm clean.

And then we have to have our conscience renewed. And ask for that this day is of 11 bread. Every time you take in a piece of 11 bread, ask God, help me be renewed. Help Christ live in me through your spirit. So that I become your child. Because that's what you've been called to. Man, the price paid for you and me to be the children of God is unbelievable.

Accept the price. As humbling as that is, and terrible of a concept as it is, accept the price. Because God says, accept I did it. Now come to me, accept the price. And be humbled by it. Ask God to help you understand. And in doing so, to lift off of you the burden of guilt and shame. You say, but I'm not worthy of forgiveness. No. I mean, I hate to tell you that, but none of us are. There's not one of us in this room worthy of God's forgiveness. We're not worthy of that sacrifice. We just aren't. God does it because He wants to. God does it because He wants to. Christ did it because He wants us that much. Don't forget that. Don't forget that. Don't make small what has been done by understanding God did it because He believes that if you want it and you submit to Him, He is going to change you. He's going to change you into what He's already accepted you as. Because He hasn't accepted you for what you are. He's accepted you for what you're going to become.