Voice of the Nazarene 2-23-25

Voice of the Nazarene 2-23-25

Transcript

Unknown: 0:01

Coming to you from North Central Ohio. We share with you the voice of the Nazarene a week by week. Venture into the Word of God sponsored by the Bucyrus, Ohio Church of the Nazarene. We join our Pastor Reverend Ray LaSalle, and the voice of the Nazarene,

Pastor Ray LaSalle: 0:17

Philippians chapter three, they had been persecuting the church. And then just a few verses later, in the 13th verse, Paul writes, forgetting those things which are behind and I confess to you, as I struggle with forgetting, I've got a good forgetter about things that aren't very important, and I remember things that I should forget, the hurts, hindrances, hang ups, habits, disappointments, but Paul said we need to forget those things which are behind. John picks it up in Revelation, chapter 12, and he says that they overcame by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony. I spent some time last week talking about forgiving others, totally forgiving others. I probably should have talked about forgiving God. These years, I've had people tell me I just can't forgive God. I don't know how God could be God and allow these things to happen. But I want to limit it this morning, I want to talk to you about forgiving, totally forgiving self, yourself, forgiving our selves. And I thought about a problem in my own life as a pastor while my kids were yet at home. Honestly, I put the church and the congregation before I did my family. Back in those days, it seemed like there was a lot of emphasis on that, and there were times I never showed up at my kids games, and I found out later that they stood at the very last moments and said to their mother, isn't dad going to come to our game. And I was in the office late at night trying to develop sermons, trying to craft words so as not to upset some folk, just takes a word or two if you don't tweak it right. Lot was happening at that time, and I was just simply trying to survive pressure. I found there were times when I was running the hospital up in the late hours of the night and driving many miles. There were times I took my work from church to home. Times I'd be sitting around the table and the kids would say something to me, and finally, their mother would say, Just give your dad some space. He's under a load right now, and he's got other things on his plate, and somehow it just I heard it, and it rolled off. And I confess to you, there's two great things that have really bothered me through the years. I'll not deal with the other, but putting the church and putting preaching before my family, I missed the mark, and I came up short. Years are lost, and I won't go any further with it than that, but to say that it's hard to lay that down now, and somehow I thought I was putting God first. I thought putting the church first was and I have a feeling that if I would have put my family first, the preaching would have went along, just probably as well. And I found that I haven't forgiven myself over this thing, and it's plagued me and embarrassing, though, as it is, I can't go back and get those years, and you have no idea of the guilt that I felt, and I've never said that in this pulpit. And I meet Christians all the time that say, you know preacher, I know God's forgiven me, but I can't seem to forgive myself. I understand. I've had that problem too. So I want to give you the first reason why I think that you should forgive yourself. At least it's helped me. If it doesn't help you, maybe it'll help me to remind myself. The first reason you need to forgive yourself is because that's what God wants you to do. Isn't that simple? Simple as that. It's what God wants you to do. I mean, if you pray for your enemies, you pray for others, it would only make sense that you would pray for yourself. And if you forgive your enemies and you forgive others, why not get in on the program and forgive yourself? When we forgive ourselves, we're honoring the word, and God doesn't want you to be sorrowful and beating yourself up and feeling guilty, and that's why He sent His Son to die on the cross, and when I saw that was what he wanted me to do, it was easy, and it's helped me to change my life. Now maybe your problem that you're dealing with is in a different vein, since you're not a pastor. I don't know what it might be that you're beating yourself up over and I'm not sure just what God is wanting to say to you this morning, maybe giving up too soon and wondering what might have been. Maybe letting people down. Maybe it was falling into some kind of a sexual sin. Maybe it was mental habits and your thought life. Maybe it might have been attitudinal maybe, maybe it's been not able to control your tongue. Maybe it was having that abortion. Maybe it was unfaithfulness in a marriage, maybe being sentenced to prison for crime, abusing your children, lying to your best friend, ruining another person's career. Maybe you injured your own health through carelessness, wasted years with the wrong company. Maybe you give wrong advice and it hurt another person's future. Maybe you ruined another person's reputation. Maybe you lived with the wrong choice in life, or you waited too long and you put off. God, I would like to define totally forgiving ourselves it's kind of like totally forgiving others means that you're letting them off the hook. And when you totally forgive yourself, you're letting yourself off the hook. You see, when God forgave your sins, he let you off the hook. So we need to affirm what God has done. It honors him. It honors the blood of Jesus. And the first reason why we need to forgive ourselves is because it's what God wants us to do. Could I suggest a second reason the devil doesn't want you to do it, one of the quickest ways to know the will of God is to figure out what the devil wants you to do, and if you'll do the opposite, you'll probably be right. And the reason the devil doesn't want you to forgive yourself is because he wants you to be in bondage. He wants you to be in slavery. He wants you to live in guilt. He loves it. Don't give the devil that pleasure forgive yourself because it honors the blood. Thirdly, you have inner peace from the bondage of guilt when you forgive yourself, Bible says, Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. I hope that's not a new verse. There's liberty. We testify better. We live freer. We're unshackled. We're liberated when we're at peace. And a fourth thing, it'll directly relate to your usefulness. You see, God can't use you the way you are if you're living under bondage grievances when you're not listening to him. Forgiving yourself sets you free, and you'll be more useful. Here's a fifth thing, it'll cause you to love people more. People will like you better. You say, Well, I don't care what people think, you lie. Yeah, you do. The only reason you're saying you don't care is because you care. You care. I mean, who wants to walk into a room and everybody said, Oh, my dear, you don't. To be that kind of a person. You want people to like to be around you, and there's something when we've got things harbored on the inside and we're grieving and we're. A wounded spirit who could bear and you want people to like you more. Here's the sixth thing, forgiving yourself will help you to fulfill all of God's purpose for your life. We deprive ourselves while we're living in guilt. I want to hurry. Here's another, totally forgiving yourself will keep you from being paralyzed by the past, by the past. Let it go. Move on. Get past abuse, get past being soiled. Move on from being abandoned, from being disappointed. You've got to move on. If people hurt you, they'll move on, not even though they did it. And there you live and sit grieving and grieving and grieving. Here's another your physical health is at stake. Medical science tells us that. Mayo Clinic tells us that Cleveland Clinic tells us that living in unforgiveness is harmful to your health. Holding a grudge causes your blood pressure to rise. There used to be a book when I was a kid preacher, None of These Diseases, and it talks about anger and what jealousy and anger would do to you. Kidney failure and holding a grudge helps cause diabetes and heart trouble and on and on. Let me give you another real quick, like your mental health is at stake. It's a common denominator among all pathologists. No wonder the devil doesn't want us to forgive ourselves. He'd rather we be depressed and obsessed and unfocused and burdened down and overloaded. And here's your main one, your relationship with God, grieving the Spirit. Who wants to live in a house with someone who is harboring insidious, grievous feelings? Would you want to live in the same house? Do you think the Holy Spirit wants to dwell and live inside of us when we've got all of this internal conflict and guilt, and that brings up another issue, this issue of guilt. You know, there's a difference between true guilt and false guilt? Two different kinds of guilt, true guilt, sin, false guilt, not sin. Pseudo guilt means it comes from that word false. And false guilt is not sin, but if you give in to it enough, it will become sin. And here's the irony, true guilt is easier to deal with than false guilt. You just simply admit I'm wrong. I see it as sin, and there's a gracious God, and He forgives, and he's not always pointing his bony finger and trying to make it hard for you to return to him and say, you know, just keep confessing, confess on and I can't let you get back to me that easily just keep grieving. Jesus forgives instantly and entirely and completely. First John 1:9, If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just. It's a contract to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And the good news is, once you realize it's sin, you confess it. So as a father that's missed the mark, come up short and God reveals it, you just say, God, I see it. I'm not going to sweep it under the rug. I'm not running from you. I'm not going to hide it. I'm not going to make excuses. I come clean. I'm guilty. And just simply say, I confess, forgive me. And guess what he does. He corrects us. God, I recognize it. I miss it, forgive me. And the freedom is so good. I almost feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Guy, preacher, had somebody bought him a boat. Said, Preacher, you need to get away. You're losing your mind. I want you to get out on the boat and fish. He said, I got out in the boat and fished and felt guilty for not building sermons and visiting folk in the hospital. Got back to my office, said I felt guilty they spent so much money on the boat. The irony is that true guilt is easier to deal with. False guilt always keeps you struggling, and the devil, he knows how to use that. One of the reasons it's hard to forgive ourselves is because of self righteousness. Self pity and self righteousness are twin sins. It keeps us in bondage and not forgiving ourselves is competing with the atonement. Isn't that ridiculous? How can I, little old me compete with the atonement that Jesus made when he said, I'm willing to forgive if you just turn it over to me, how do you outdo the atonement? And God doesn't like that. And I believe, in a sense, the Bible's commanding us to forgive ourselves. You gotta get right in your own skin, and that's why He told those Hebrews, you need to get the blood applied to the doorpost, and we need to have the blood applied to the doorpost of our life. Keeps the enemy out and it keeps victory within. So simply, we just admit it, we come clean, we don't sweep things under the rug. We have a gracious God. Now, when we hurt people, when we're rude and we're crude, we need to admit it. Remember the three R's of spiritual warfare? You remember em? Hello. Nobody home. It's remember, refuse and resist. What do you mean by remember? Well, let's just use another word instead of remember. Recognize. Recognize. Recognize when the devil shows up. You know when an evil thought comes, recognize this is from the devil, this is not from God. And I don't have to, I don't have to give this a front room attention. I just resist it. Recognize and when unforgiveness tries to build up in your heart, and the devil tries to get a grudge going in your thoughts, recognize it's from the devil, and then refuse to listen to him. And then the Bible says, when we resist the devil, what happens? He flees from us. He flees from us. And here's another thing that will help you to forgive yourself that I found, and I've never mentioned I don't think this from the pulpit. I did yesterday at a board meeting in the district, but we have a family secret. I'm going to let the family secret out, Okay, just to the family. The rest of you don't listen it's a family secret. We know that God's working things together for our good. Romans, 8:28, it's the great family secret that the Christian has. Paul writes, We know who are we? The family, the insiders. Somebody said, I don't believe that. Well, Paul said, it doesn't matter you're not in the family. Didn't expect you to believe it. Our family's secret is what we know. We know that all things work together, to them that love God, and to them which are the called according to His purpose. How do we know? We found it out. It's something that God does, and he uses that Greek word that we know, meaning a well known fact. You know, there's some things that are a fact. I found that what goes up must come down. I found that when you fall, a fall doesn't hurt you. It's when you hit the bottom that hurts. Just a well known fact. And the Bible's teaching we who are in the family, a well known fact that we've been around enough years to see that God always makes things work out for his good. I'd like to share an illustration or two, but probably I'd better not. But I do want you to know if you look over your life, some of the things that you went through that you thought would break your heart, God had to move you through some of those things, and he used them to give you a testimony that you would have never had, and to bring you to a point of decision where you responded to him like you would have never responded to him. It's well known fact Romans

8: 19:07

28. Designed partner to help you to never feel guilty again. God is saying, just leave it with me. Watch what I'll do. I'll make every day out of the past work out for your good. But there is a caution, a very important caution. Listen carefully. The fact that it works together for good doesn't mean that it was right at the time. And Joseph said to his brothers years later, I know that you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. I'd have never been down here in the will of God, if you hadn't put me through this, but God's turned it all around, and it's forgiven. It's in the past and God's at work. God makes it work together for our good, and doesn't make it right. What it was that you went through, and he's speaking from your what I call your pre conversion past, or your post conversion past, I find most of us have no problem forgiving ourselves for the way that we were before we were saved. That was before I was converted. And it's easy to deal with God. Would you forgive? God forgives us. Our problem is if we have sinned since then, or if we've been improper since then, or if there's been any impropriety in our life since then, right? You see, I got saved at the age of nine kneeling beside my parents bed. Wasn't a whole lot to confess, but since then, I've had a failure or two. Don't get excited. We don't have enough blackboard up here to put your names up. You say, Well, Pastor, what were they? You'll never know. Why won't I know because as far as the East is from the West, so far as our transgressions have been removed. Now I mentioned one of them this morning. I came up short as a dad. They had a great mother, but dad kind of blew it. And when God says all things, not just back in your past, he said, Leave it with me. And incidentally, you don't have to try to help him out to make it good. He's big enough to handle it. Now, how many have read the first chapter of Matthew lately? Anybody in the crowd? It's a book of the Bible. I would never encourage a new Christian to read the book of Matthew to start with. Read Mark, Luke, John, but book of Matthew, let me just read a little bit of the first chapter, the book of the generations, of Jesus Christ, Son of David, son of Abraham. Abraham, beget Isaac. Isaac beget Jacob beget here, I'm going to sleep. What have I gotten myself into? It's gotta be the most boring thing that I've ever read. But if you keep reading, you'll get down to verse six and Jesse, beget David the king, and David the king, beget Solomon of her that had been the wife of Uriah. What's going on here? Well, don't come and ask me go to see Keith. What's going on by the sovereign plan of God, when Matthew wrote the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the greatest sin ever listed in the Old Testament is bridged in and shown to us, somebody said they shouldn't have mentioned that in the genealogy of Jesus. That don't look very good. My life didn't look very good either, and it may have been that yours wasn't so good, but I'm glad he put my name in the book. I hope your name's in the book. David committed adultery. I'm saying David was a peeping Tom. This great man that I get so excited when I read about him, but the old boy got between the sheets for the wrong woman. Fact of the matter his mind went off trying to cover up how he would keep his kingdom and not be ruined in the sight of people, and not blow his own marriage and kill his influence with his kids. And he thought, I'll have her husband killed. And God allowed it to be written in the book. What David did was wrong. I mean, very, very wrong. But God took over, and God wanted to show His goodness even through Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, just a signal to let us know that he's a gracious God from everlasting to everlasting He is God. And you know what I want you to know? God knows about your past, and God knows about your guilt. You may be sitting here this morning or watching by live stream, and nobody else knows what has happened in your past, and you're carrying that grievous thing in the back of your mind wondering, will it ever get out? And he invites you today to do what I was able to do, and that's to honor his offer. Come unto me, all you that are labor and are heavy laden, and watch what God does. All things work together for good. Forgive yourself totally, and watch what God does, and notice what he says, I will restore to you, Joel, 2:25, the years that the locusts have eaten, and I'm hanging on to that promise. You need to accept his promise. John 8:36 if the Son sets you free, you're free, indeed, you're free. All you got to do is accept his offer, and some of us need to make a decision to forgive ourself once and for all. And the young pastors looking for their district license yesterday, questions were being asked, and how would you handle this, and how would you handle that. And the leader of the group asked the question, you've just preached a funeral. He's talking out of his life. He said, You just preached a funeral. You've headed over to the room, and you're gathering with the family to eat a meal, and a woman that was there that you did not recognize, that she comes up and whispers, preacher, can I ask you something, or can I say something? That was my father. I've not seen him for more than 30 some years. My father violated me when I was a teenager, and I left home, and I've never been back. And the question to all those wanting to get their district license. What would you say? I'm glad to respond in my own way that father may have never released you, but there is another father, and I want you to know he will release you, he'll never violate you, and he'll work in your life to bring things out of your past and still make life turn out good if you turn it over to him. And there's people here this morning, in this audience, not only watching by live stream and telecast, there's people here today that are carrying things they need to unload on God and once and for all, get free. To get free. Father, just look us over for a moment. We're weak, we're part of the dust of the Earth made into your likeness. We wear human skin. Most of us have some kind of a past. Not everybody had a perfect past, and while we're pretty good at forgiving others, we have struggled at forgiving ourselves. And people are weary not being set free, they'd love to be free this morning. They'd just like to lay some things down once and for all and walk off and leave it there and say, God, I'm not going to carry this any longer. I'm in the family now, and I know that you can take what happened and turn it around and make me a better person, and you're not holding against my record.

Unknown: 28:12

Thanks for being a part of the voice of the Nazarene. Visit us every Sunday at 9am with BNC's Pastor, Ray LaSalle, for more information regarding BNC, visit bucyrusnazarene.org.