Fierce Church Sermons

When You Hate Your Past | Land of Blue

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💙 Welcome to the Land of Blue — the Valley of Regret.

If you’ve ever looked back on your life and thought “I hate who I used to be”…
If guilt keeps replaying old moments you wish you could undo…
If shame makes you feel distant from God, faith, or even yourself…
This message is for you. 🫶

In this sermon, “When You Hate Your Past,” we explore Psalm 51 and David’s honest, broken prayer after his greatest moral failure. Instead of hiding, deflecting, or minimizing his sin, David runs straight to God — not because he deserves forgiveness, but because God’s mercy is stubborn, faithful, and real.

đź“– This message unpacks:
Why guilt exists (and when it’s actually helpful)
The difference between godly sorrow vs. worldly shame
Why confession isn’t punishment — it’s freedom
How forgiveness works when you can’t forgive yourself
What to do when regret feels heavier than hope

This is a safe sermon for people who feel stuck in their past, burned by church culture, or unsure if God could really forgive them. If you’re walking through depression, deconstruction, or deep self-doubt — you’re not alone.

✨ Big Idea:
You don’t heal by running from your past.
You heal by bringing it into the light — where mercy lives.

👉 If this message resonates, subscribe to Fierce Church and walk with us through the Land of Blue.

🔔 Turn on notifications so you don’t miss the next stop on the map.
📩 Share this with someone who’s carrying regret silently.

➡️ Fierce Church YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FierceChurch

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, we're back in the land of blue. Some of you remember we've been in the land of blue. We got to Christmas Eve and we talked about a blue Christmas, but we're still in the land of blue. Let's see that map again, Jacob. These are what we're saying is we're we're walking through different uh messages, little territories inside this map. These are areas of depression or discouragement or anxiety or stress. And we're saying we can get stuck in these places. And what if there was a way for God to not only maybe provide some relief, what if there's a way for God to leverage it in our life, even use it for our good, if we just asked him? So we were in the, we we crossed through the gate of honesty. That's how we started. Then we went through the shadowy forest of feelings. And one of the things we learned was you can't always trust your, excuse me, you can't always trust your feelings. Right? Then we went through the uh disappointment valley or the valley of lost hopes. That was Christmas Eve. Now we're gonna go see that valley, that little trench there. We're gonna go deeper into that. Now we're going to go into the valley of regret. See, in in the previous message, we were talking about what happens when you just have a giant disappointment. Something went wrong. Something didn't happen that you wanted to happen, or something that you wanted to happen, didn't happen. Um, yeah, that that happens, but that was kind of outside of you, and you have to react to it. Today we're talking about what if you realize you're part of the cause of it. What's up, Lisa? Hey, um, what I hope I get some hot dogs today. That means she's gonna say amen real loud. And I hope everyone, as your as your 2026 uh resolution, is your I'm gonna say more M amens louder for Carter at Fierce. That's what I'm gonna do this year. You know what that is, really? Just we're it's a little tangent, but what that is really is if you if if you're watching football, you know when someone makes an amazing play, everybody loses their mind. They're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should see my wife, man. She's not she's not at the game, but she jumps up and she's yelling. And what she's saying is, I like that play. I like that. What I want to challenge you to do is if you like the way God says something through the message, you won't say, I like that. I like that, God. Amen. That's what you're doing. You're just you're not applauding me, you're applauding God and saying, Hey, bring some more of that. Jesus, Holy Ghost, let's have it. That's what you're doing. So uh maybe for some of you, even through the screen, just like Kenzie does through the screen, give me some amens, uh, a little bit louder, especially on today's message, because we're talking about the valley of regrets. We're talking about there's things that I realize I'm part of the problem. I cause some of what's happening. And, you know, we talked about in the digital service past Sunday. Um, hey, let's all get excited, make some goals for 2026. But I really want to help everybody today, not bring anything into 2026 that you should leave in 2025. There's things we do wrong, there's mistakes we make, and what they can do is they can cause a lot of discouragement and even despair, and even a little bit of trauma. And some of it comes through betrayals of conscience. And you know what this is like. You know what it's like to experience a little bit of a tinge of conviction a little bit. Let's so let's say that you gossip just a little bit, and you're like, I don't feel like I need to just go like fall on my knees and repent before Jesus, but I'm aware of like that was that was not quite right when I did that. Let's say that you uh brag about a situation. You're you're kind of you're embellishing the truth a little bit. And and as you walk away, you realize I embellish the truth so much that's not even really totally true anymore. And there's a little twinge of conscience, and you're aware that that happened. I've just try to try to you know just move on from it. Well, after you get about 10 of those, or 50 of those, or a thousand of those, we can't help but just carry that around with us. We can't help but be weighed down really by our guilt. So, did you know that clinical research confirms that chronic guilt is a major contributor to depression, to anxiety, and to even a version of PTSD. The National Library of Medicine says this moral injury, which is just guilt, that's what it means. It means I'm feeling wounded by something I did or was part of. Moral injury is independently associated with suicidal ideation, suicide attempt in military veterans, healthcare workers, and first responders. And so what we're saying is unconfessed sin can have all kinds of negative impacts on us. It can impact not only like our discouragement level, it can give us stuff like insomnia, like back pain, like fatigue, high blood pressure. All these things contribute to us feeling a little bit more way down. And we might ask, well, if that's the truth, why did God even give us a conscience? Just to make us feel bad all the time? Just to walk around feeling discouraged? No, I think maybe a good place to go to learn the answer to this is to go to Batman Begins, when little Bruce Wayne falls down a well. Okay, somebody remember this scene? He falls down a well, and then his father, Thomas Wayne, repels down into the well to rescue him. And remember what he says? He says, Why do we fall down, Bruce? To learn to pick ourselves back up. That's what he says. We fall down to learn to pick ourselves back up. And we might even apply that to this conversation. Why does our conscience uh ding us sometimes? Well, you could say it dings us to tell us something is wrong, and that's true, but New Testamentally, there's an even deeper truth. Our conscience dings us to teach us to run to Jesus to be cleaned. That's what it's about. That's that's what that thing is doing. It's dinging you. It says, run to Jesus to be cleaned. Instead of avoid it, instead of walk away in shame. In other words, what that implies is there's a good version of shame. And we got to get this right now, man. We got to get this in this time in particular, because it's becoming the deal, I don't know, for some reason, in our culture, where any kind of shame at all is like that you can't say anything is bad. Okay? So I remember up until about 2006, 2008, there was a version of tolerance that was, hey man, you gotta be able to tolerate other people's perspectives. What that meant was everybody gets a place at the table. Everybody can talk, everybody can say what they they want to say. It slowly has morphed, though, in recent years to you can't disagree with anybody or you're a bigot. And that that messes with us though, too. So not only if if I see something, I don't know, I don't know if that's right, but I can't say anything or I'm a bigot, that somehow gets back to us sometimes. We say, I don't know if I can even say what I'm doing is wrong, even though I feel like it is wrong. And we're getting this moral vertigo, and we don't really know what to do with that. And so I just want to learn, according to scriptures, there's a good version of shame. There's a version where the Spirit of God is saying, Hey, pay attention. You're doing something wrong, and I need you to go and put that where it belongs, and that's in the hands of Jesus. And what we do wrong sometimes is we just we translate it differently. We say, Oh, I messed up. You know, I I made a mistake. And you you did, and you did, but it's not really just that according to God's word. God's word says, what we do when we knowingly do that is we we cause a breach in our relationship with God. And that's really the biggest problem on planet earth is people's separation from God. Now, we can get discouraged because of that, but the problem is we want to feel better, we just don't want to be honest with ourselves. We don't want to be, hey, thanks. I like these plays. People are people are yeah, keep it up, keep it up. Um, but we don't want to be honest. And if if what we would do is we would take our sin and bring it to Jesus to receive his forgiveness, what we'd all notice is, well, I've got a much lighter heart. I'm not feeling so low and so down because I don't have a thousand things that I'm carrying that I'm just trying to like avoid and not think about. And maybe one of the people that would be best to teach us about this was King David. So many of you know King David, he spends the first chunk of his life fleeing for his life, trying to get to the place where the promise of God comes to pass, and he's he's a great musician, and he's writing poetry to the Lord, and he finally is in place and king as king, and then he does a ton right as king. He goes on all these uh amazing strategic military campaigns. But the day comes when, like many some of us do, he just he's not he's not thinking, man. He's not paying attention. And as he's not paying attention, he walks right into a temptation, and he takes this young woman named Bathsheba, and she's somebody else's wife, but he impregnates her, and then he realizes she's pregnant, and so he says, Well, I can't have this. I'm gonna get her husband to come back from war and sleep with her so that he thinks it's his baby. And he tries that again and again, but it doesn't work because his name's Uriah. Uriah the Hittite is too honorable to go home. He wants to stay with the soldiers, and so that's what he does. And so ultimately, King David, like a dip. And we all get dippy sometimes. I think it's encouraging. We gotta know that, dude, if even David can be dippy, it's okay if I if I jacked stuff up from time to time and I just walked into it like a mook, like a moron. Well, that's what he does. And so he tries to hide it, and he he he has him killed. He has his his he causes his commander to, hey, position him in just the right way, so he's gonna die. Well, a year goes by and he's cut himself off from the Lord, he's hardened his heart. And God's like, All right, enough of this. And he sends in the prophet, and the prophet tells them, David, you're the you're the dude, man. You're you've totally done this, and you're guilty before the Lord, and you need to own it. And David, to his credit, he doesn't deny it, he doesn't try to make excuses for it. Essentially, you get the sense he falls on his knees and repents. He's like, Wow, yeah, that's that's totally right. I'm the man, I'm the one who did all this wicked evil. And he pens Psalm 51. Now, this is an awesome, it's called a penitential psalm. And what that means is it's guiding people in repentance. So it's not just as I don't think this was just necessarily like a diary entry of David's or one of his little poems that he wrote down. Over the last 3,000 years, the people of God have used this as a pattern. It's not just a diary entry, it's a pattern. God teaches how to reconnect with God after we've done something wrong. After we're guilty, after we find out that we're the man or we're the woman, what do we do when we hate what we did, when we hate our past? So we're gonna read the first nine verses of this, and then we're gonna pull it apart. So just listen to this. Be gracious to me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the abundance of your compassion. Blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only I have sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you're justified when you speak, and pure when you judge. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and my sin in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you delight in truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part you'll make me no wisdom. Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I'll be whiter than snow. Make me to hear the joy and make me hear joy and gladness, let the bones which you've crushed. That means conviction. He's under the weight, the weight of it. Let the bones which you've crushed rejoice, hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. What do we do when the land of blue is not just something that happened to us, it's something that we helped build. The answer is simple. It's like David. You do one thing first, you run straight to God. When you hate your past, number one, come directly to God. Come directly. That's that's how he starts. He says, Be gracious to me, oh God. He doesn't go through a third party, he doesn't share this with anyone else. He goes to God and he says, on the basis, God, of what? Of your loving kindness, of your compassion. He could just think, well, God's God's gonna be angry, God's gonna lay the beat down on me. He goes, No, no, no. I remember my people, the people of Israel, are in covenantal agreement with the God of heaven, Yahweh, that he's not going to leave us, that he's gonna be faithful to us, that he's gonna have this loving kindness. It's this word Hasid. It means God's loving kindness is a stubborn, holy kind of a love. He just won't let go. Other people will let go of you, but God won't let go. David is going on the basis of that covenant. He knows God is gonna be who he said he's gonna be. God doesn't love me based on the mood he's in. Are we hearing this? Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Um see when you bring your worst stuff to God, he doesn't flinch. He doesn't he's not like, oh geez, I don't know you're gonna bring that up. No, he's like, Yeah, I know, I know. Bring me the whole thing. God doesn't try us out. Okay, so if you try out Netflix, and then you just like you remove the credit card or the debit card or you just stop paying them, they're gonna like kick you to the curb, man. They're gonna give you their service anymore. God doesn't do a trial version of his love for you. He's uh it's it's it's it's for sure, it's committed, it's forever. God's like, no, I'm not letting go. You will be faithless to me, but I will never be faithless to you because I cannot deny myself. I will not be unfaithful to you. I covenanted with you in Jesus Christ with the blood of the Son of God. I'm not leaving. You can come directly to God. So you don't have to feel like it's awkward. How many of you have ever gotten a text and you kind of ignored it for a little while? And then you're like, I can't text them back now. Now it's it's been like a week. Now it's awkward. Or you go, well, now it's three months awkward. I can't say anything now because I should have said something at first, and now I didn't, and now it's weird. God's never like that. God's never like, it's kind of weird now. No, he's like, hey man, have you been gone a week? Have you been gone three months? Have you been gone 10 years? Come back right now, come directly to God. It's not awkward, just come. And some might say, Well, you know, I was thinking about coming, but here's the thing. I feel like if I could just get a little bit better record before I come, if I could just get my together a little bit more before I come, that's a lot like, okay, let's use this scenario. Let's pretend that you were in a car accident. It wasn't fatal, but it was it was kind of bad. So you're bleeding and you're told your clothes are all torn up, you got a little bit of like road rash all over you, you know, and the EMT comes to you like, hey man, okay, we're gonna get you an ambulance, we're gonna take you to the hospital right now. And you say, Whoa, no, no, no, no, no, yeah. I can't walk in there like this. I'm gross. Let me go home. Let's go. I gotta get a shower first, and then you can take me to the hospital, and then it'll be good. No, that would be, you know what that is? That's that's not like courageous, that's not smart, that's delusional. You need to get in the ambulance and go to the place where they fix people. And that's what David knows. He knows the smartest thing for me to do is to run to where the mercy is. What I need is mercy. I'm gonna go to where the mercy is. The mercy is in the presence of God. Keep it coming, guys. You're doing good. Come on. Keep it coming. So, number one, we come directly to God. Number two, like David, we lament and confess our sin. We lament and confess our sin. Before we just jump to the forgiveness part, God wants us to not be vague about what the sin was. Let's get clarity on it. Let's understand what exactly happened, though. So he says, blot out my transgression, wash me thoroughly of my iniquity, uh, cleanse me of my sin. Down in verse 14, which we'll study next week. Deliver me from blood guiltiness. So let's let's walk through what this is doing. It's not just synonyms for sin. There's a little bit of shade of nuance to each one of these words. So I want to pick them apart. When he just says sin, that just says, hey, look how I've missed the mark. That means there was a standard and I came in below it. Or there was a there was a touchdown and you got to the 40, but that's all you did. You didn't get there. That's what sin is. You didn't get there. You didn't do what what you were supposed to do. You didn't do what love required. You came in under what love would be. So you were supposed to be there for your friend, and you told them to get lost. Well, that's less than love. That's not what you should do. Okay, you were supposed to be working on the project at work, and instead you're just doom scrolling. That's less than integrity. So that's missing the mark. So that's sin. But then there's another one, it's transgression. And this means I knowingly crossed a line I knew was there, but I did it anyway. It's a relational betrayal. It's saying, God, I know what you want, I'm just not gonna do it. And so I know the cheating is wrong, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. I know I shouldn't talk to them like this, but I'm just going to do it anyway. See, I think if I just lie a little bit, I'm just gonna step across the line a little bit, but then I can get out of the negative consequences for whatever it is, and that's transgression. Then there's iniquity, and this one goes a little bit deeper. Iniquity is me realizing there's something in me that is bent that produces this. Iniquity is I've got a twisted heart. It's not just the sin that I did. Okay, so it's not just that I behaved pridefully, it's that I have an arrogant heart that causes prideful things to come out of my mouth. That's what it is. It's not just that, oh, I I had a touch of lust that day. No, what it is is your heart is wicked enough to want things that are forbidden and bad for you, but you do it anyway, because that's what you want to do. It's not just that I'm a little bit jealous, I'm a little bit envious of this person, and there's just like one little event. No, I've got a heart that is envious that says, Well, God has given me is not enough. That's the twisted heart. That's iniquity. And then it goes one layer deeper, and this is really in a category of its own, and this is blood guiltiness. Blood guiltiness is where my sin spills over into the lives of others. This is not just murder, okay? It's when I'm careless with how my dumb is gonna hurt somebody else. So if I drive high and I'm like, well, probably no one's gonna get hurt. You didn't sin if they get hurt, you sinned when you decided it didn't matter. That's what it was. That's when the sin happened. If you if I decide I'm gonna bully this person, and they're probably tough, they can probably take it, they'll probably just be just fine. It's not sin if they're not fine, it's sin when I decided I'm just gonna let my hell loose into somebody else's life. That's blood guiltiness. That's even a little bit worse. What God wants us to do is He wants, hey, before we before we do the forgiveness thing, we're gonna get there. Before we do that, let's watch the game tape. When I was in high school, I was a wrestler, and my mom would sometimes bring the big old heavy camcorder and she'd film us wrestling, okay? We didn't just have, you know, one of these things you pull out of your pocket and do it. You had to you had to bring that thing with. Um, and so she'd she'd tape these on these these little big old VHS tapes. And you know, sometimes I'd watch it, and and when you're watching the game tape, you see everything. You see everything, not only that was good, you see the bad stuff. You see, like, ah, that was a dumb move. I did not come in aggressively enough right there. Or I've not, I just turned the wrong way. That was that was so dumb. God is saying, hey, let's get honest. Let's watch the game tape. Not just what were the highlights, what were the great things that you did this week?

unknown:

Fine.

SPEAKER_00:

But let's look at what you did over here that was transgression, that was iniquity. Let's look at this blood guilt that you've got over there. And there's not condemnation in it. It's just like, no, I want to be clear though. Let's look at what it was. You've got to know, and guys, this is so important to be able to like receive Jesus for all that he is. You've got to know that apart from God, you are a creature of wrath. You've got to get no hope in you. That's where grace becomes the awesomest. When you're like, no, dude, I'm this bad. I regularly do this. Look, you can watch all the game tapes. I do this all the time. And that's because of what's in me. And that's why Jesus is the greatest, the greatest, the greatest, the greatest savior. Come on, somebody. This is where I'm gonna get specific, just like David was specific. I'm gonna get specific. It's not the ref's fault, it's not Bathsheba's fault, it's my fault. God, I'm owning it. I'm bringing it to you. I'm running directly to God and I'm telling him what's wrong, and I'm owning it, and I'm owning this is God, this causes naturally a breach between you and I. And when we get there, guys, we can experience this thing that the Bible calls godly sorrow. See, there's really two kinds of sorrow that the Bible points out one's godly sorrow and one's worldly sorrow. Let's read about in 2 Corinthians 7 10 real quick. For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads away from sin and results in salvation. There's no regret for that kind of sorrow, but worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death. Worldly sorrow is, man, I'm sorry, I'm I'm just I feel bad that that happened. I feel bad that I got caught. I don't want anyone to know. I don't want the results of this thing. That's worldly sorrow. Oh man, it's just so bad that, yeah, I mean, I feel like a real louse, I feel like a real jerk. That alone is worldly sorrow. When it's godly sorrow, it says, God, I I might even own that, but I go further and I say, God, I sinned against you. That's what that's what David does first. He goes first vertical, and he says, But God, it was it was against you and you alone. And he doesn't mean that only God was affected or that no one else was affected, but he says, Behind everything, I first and foremost hurt my God. That's what I did. That's godly sorrow. It owns the fact that I don't want to hurt my friend, the only one who's always loved me, the only one who's always done me right, he's the one that I hurt. Even when I hurt somebody else, even when he hurt Uriah, even when he hurt Bathsheba, he says, the first and foremost one that I hurt was God. See, we we got we got to get this. We're never sinning and not first sinning against God. There's never a time where you're sinning against a friend or a spouse or a kid or whoever. You're never just sinning against them. All sin is God related. Before you sinned against them, in your heart, you first sinned against the Lord. You first stepped out from under his umbrella of blessing. You first said, God's ways don't need to apply with me right now. So when you spoke harshly to her, that was first against him. When you tried to manipulate him, that was first against him. And we've got to know that's always the case. And so, even though I might have to ask some people for forgiveness, first I go to God and say, God, I've misrepresented you. This is what it was. This is my sin. I'm done defending myself. I'm not trying to come up with an alibi. I'm not trying to get the ref to make a different call. I did this, and I'm no longer willing to admit it. God, I just want to confess it. And so we name it. We name it. And it gets really good after we name it. Naming it is like going deep. It's going low. It's saying, I've got to go all the way to the bottom of the barrel. This is what it was. Before we continue the message, I want to do this. I want to take 25 seconds. I want us to bow our heads and I want to ask the Lord to bring to mind, or maybe you already know, not in a condemning way, but in things that have been between he and us. Things that we haven't really owned, we haven't been sure about, we haven't been, we've been self-defensive about. Let's go there. We're gonna ask the Holy Spirit because he's the spirit of conviction. We're gonna ask, would you bring to mind right now things that Lord, we still need to ask your forgiveness for. We still need to own it was wrong. Let's bow our heads, y'all online, you can bow your head with us right now. Let's do it. Spirit of Jesus, Jesus, you promised this spirit would bring conviction. I'm asking right now, you bring conviction to our hearts. We didn't love you the way we should have. We didn't love them the way we should have. Come to us right now and speak it to us. Show us, bring it to mind. Give us the impression. Help us to recall. Now you don't have to share that with anybody. You can just hold on to that. We're gonna go to the end of the message, and then we're all gonna we're all gonna bring it to Jesus. You're you're not gonna have to confess it to anybody. We're just gonna bring it to Jesus, we're gonna get it cleansed. But let's keep moving. So when we hate your past, you come directly to God, you lament and confess your sin, and then we get there. We ask for forgiveness. See, for some of us, what we'll do is we'll we'll get to the point of like lamenting and be have sorrow for our sin, and we'll stay there and punish ourselves. Like, you idiot. I'm so disappointed in you. I can't believe, like, I I don't know if you've ever had like this version of self-hatred. There's like, I can't believe you did this again. Some of us get there and we just start going in circles right there. David doesn't go in circles, he presses right on in and he asks for forgiveness. He says, Blot up my transgressions, wash me, and I'll be whiter than snow. David gives us this picture of, I'm gonna bring God myself, but I feel like like dirty laundry. Like I feel like me doesn't belong in the pure, holy, beautiful presence of God. I'm just gonna bring it to him because he's my only hope. He can take something that is nasty, dirty, and make it pure and clean. If you live, so anybody somewhere else in the world, you might not know what I'm talking about. But if you live in the Midwest, especially especially if you live around Chicago, you know what nasty snow looks like. It's dirty snow. And sometimes this is what we feel like. We're like, well, I did ask for forgiveness, but I'm still this. Like, this is what I've got going on in my heart. This is the gunk that I am. But that's not what the scripture says. See, God can make us white as snow. Let's see the better picture. God makes us beautiful on the inside because what he does is he takes Jesus' beauty and he imparts it right into us. And he takes all that nasty snow, and where does he put it? He puts it on the shoulders of the Son of God on the cross and he puts it to death rightly judging it. And we begin to realize I can't make myself clean. I can't wash myself enough. I can't get in God's good graces somehow by some kind of performance. I've got to learn just like Peter had to learn. Jesus said to Peter, Peter, if I don't wash you, you can't have any part of me. And and and I must hear the Spirit say to Carter, Carter, if I don't wash you, you can't have this. And he says it to you. If I don't wash you, it's not going to work. I need to wash you. I need to cleanse your heart. I need to cleanse your conscience, and I need you to decide to believe. See, some of us, we we even know this a lot. Like we oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, I'm forgiven. And what's what's tragic about the way that we're doing it is we we know we're forgiven, but we're not enjoying being forgiven. See, when you're enjoying being forgiven, dude, you're gonna have a whole lot less regret. You're gonna have a whole lot more joy because I'm not just aware of the fact, maybe the theological fact that I'm forgiven. I'm walking in the joy in the presence of God. Some of us, what you're doing right now, there's a party in there full of the people that are enjoying the forgiveness of God. But what some of us do is we kind of like lurk in the hallway. We're like, I can't go in yet. I need to stay out here. I need to beat myself up a little bit more because you know what? My sin is pretty bad. And you know what? God knows. And he still gives you the righteousness of the Son of God. And what he says is, forgiven people, you need to know this, forgiven people don't lurk anymore. Forgiven people walk into the party, man. They walk into the room. Forgiven people walk in. So, how does God do this? Because the thing is, I don't know if you've been thinking this yet, David's sin was pretty bad. It wasn't just adultery, it was murder. That's that's pretty bad. How can God do that for him? Like, how can he just forgive him? How can it just be, oh, that's fine? I'll tell you how. Psalm 51 asks this question. It doesn't really answer, it doesn't say God does it because of this. It just says this is it implies this is what is needed, this is what I need. Psalm 51 asks for this blotting out of sin, this white as snow of reality. Psalm 51 asks for it, and Jesus answers it. That's what happens. So, number four, we look past the sin to Christ, and we rest in what he has done for us. Let's read Hebrews 10, 10, and 14. For God's will, here's here's his here's his answer. For God's will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time. For by one offering he made for he forever made perfect those who are being made holy, those who have trusted him to take their sin and pay for it with his blood. Many of us know that we're forgiven-ish, we just don't know how to enjoy it. To change the metaphor slightly, it's as though Jesus bought you a ticket to this incredible, beautiful concert, but you're still not going in. You're like, I have the ticket. Thank you, thank you, Lord. I have the ticket. He says, No, I want you to come in, I want you to enjoy my forgiveness, I want you to live life from a free place. Don't stay outside the gate, come in. Live from the place of I don't need to walk in regret. I do have a sense of regret that that happened and that I did it, but I'm walking in the joy of someone who the in in guys, in a theological way, the person that did that died with Jesus on the cross and he's made me a new creature. I'm gonna live the new creature life and enjoy all the joy that Jesus died for me to have. Jesus doesn't just get you the ticket, he gets you in and wants you to enjoy the concert. It's true. Sin makes us guilty and sin needs to be blotted out. And Jesus Christ alone is because of Jesus Christ, it's still just for you to be forgiven because he took the penalty for sin. Let me say it a different way. Psalm 51 gives us the problem statement. Jesus Christ gives us the solution. Psalm 51 assumes a guilt that it cannot answer. Jesus Christ is the mechanism for forgiveness. Psalm 51 calls out a blood guilt that is in all of us. Jesus Christ is the only one who bears the blood guilt, and yet without any violence at all. Psalm 51 calls for an atonement that it cannot yet explain. Jesus Christ is the atonement and he explains it in his very person and life. Jesus Christ declares the new creation in the soul of every person who trusts him in faith. Psalm 51 says, You need to repent. The cross of Jesus Christ makes repentance effective. It makes it work. So here's what I want to do together. We've already stopped for a minute, we've already contemplated. Now I want us to run right into the throne room, just like David, and say, God, here it is. I'm asking you to blot it out. I'm asking you to forgive me, not on the basis of anything I've done, but on the basis because Jesus Christ answered Psalm 51. That's why I want you to do it. And then I want every one of us to walk away from the screen, to walk away from our seat today. I want us to be owning the treasure in our heart. I am forgiven and I'm forgiven to enjoy it. I'm forgiven to enjoy the fact that my heavenly Father smiles upon me the same way that he smiles upon the Son of God, according to the scriptures, because he delights in the new heart he's given me, and that all the sin is gone. Let's do it together right now. Let's bow our heads. And take our dirty, nasty snow and make it beautiful in his own eyes. God, there's many of us right now that we want to ask for forgiveness for not even going into the party, for not going into the concert. We know what the sin is. God, I'm asking you for the one you showed me. I failed to love a friend by not following up with them. And I repent for that. God, would you forgive me? And I'm sure a thousand other things I'm not thinking of. Here it is. I ask you to forgive it. And now I look past it and I see the Son of God. And I hear you say, Yes, you're forgiven. Oh, it's so beautiful, Lord. Now I rest in that reality. I rest in the fact that I am forgiven because of Jesus. God, would you teach us as a people? We've all got regrets, but we don't want to live in the valley of regrets. We want to live in the beautiful concert that Jesus made us to enjoy, knowing that we are the delight of our Heavenly Father. In Jesus' name.

unknown:

Amen.

SPEAKER_00:

Alright, folks, that's all the time we have, but thank you so much for listening to this sermon. If you got a lot out of this, feel free to share this with somebody who might need it. Also, there's a ton more content on our website, on our YouTube channel, on our Instagram channel, on our TikTok channel. Feel free to check all that kind of a thing out. Also, if you're interested in leadership type stuff, go ahead and check out another podcast or any other blogs or videos or anything over at BibleLeadership.com. And whatever else you do, make sure that you believe God for something big today.