SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the FBC El Daredo Sermon Podcast.
SPEAKER_00: My name is Taylor Gare, and I have the privilege of being the pastor here at First Baptist.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to thank you for listening into our sermon this week.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you this if you're in our area and you don't have a church home, we would love to see you any Sunday morning at First Baptist El Doredo.
SPEAKER_00: Will you join me now in listening to our sermon from this week?
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Open with me to Psalm 32.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 32.
SPEAKER_00: As you arrive there, I will read it for us.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.
SPEAKER_00: For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day, for day and night your hand was heavy upon me, my strength was dried up as in the heat of summer.
SPEAKER_00: I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity.
SPEAKER_00: I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found.
SPEAKER_00: Surely in the rush of great waters they shall not reach him.
SPEAKER_00: You are a hiding place for me, you preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts of deliverance.
SPEAKER_00: I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go.
SPEAKER_00: I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
SPEAKER_00: Be not like the horse or a mule without understanding, which much must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you.
SPEAKER_00: Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus, by your Spirit, would you speak even in these moments as we hear of your forgiveness?
SPEAKER_00: We ask this in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk this morning about the freedom of forgiveness for the sin sick soul.
SPEAKER_00: The freedom of forgiveness for the sin sick soul.
SPEAKER_00: I remember my senior year of high school.
SPEAKER_00: I was heading to class, heading to school one morning down Interstate 630 in Little Rock, about to take the Woodrow exit to make my right off the Woodrow exit to Luderock Central High School, and there's a FJ cruiser right in front of me, and it's her turn to yield and turn right.
SPEAKER_00: And so she starts to go, make her right hand turn.
SPEAKER_00: So I look left because I'm getting ready to make mine.
SPEAKER_00: I see I'm all clear and I start to go.
SPEAKER_00: And uh before I can even turn back around to look where I'm going, should have already been looking at where I'm going.
SPEAKER_00: I hit the rear of this FJ Cruiser because this young lady has decided, and she has every right to do so, even if I don't understand it.
SPEAKER_00: She decided that she was not yet going to take her right turn.
SPEAKER_00: And so we get out, and I I recognize I don't know her, but I recognize her.
SPEAKER_00: She's another student at school.
SPEAKER_00: And uh we we chat for a minute, we look, her FJ cruiser is built like a tank, so we see no damage, and so we just have a good conversation.
SPEAKER_00: She says, uh, looks like nothing happened, we move on.
SPEAKER_00: Crisis averted.
SPEAKER_00: Later on in the school day, between classes, I get a tap on my shoulder and I turn around, and it's this young lady.
SPEAKER_00: And I I don't know what we're up to now, and and she tells me everything looked clear on the outside, but when I got back in the car, that that that rear sensor, you know, the one that beeps when you're gonna back into something.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much it was beeping this morning, uh, but that rear sensor, she said, when I got back in the car was going absolutely haywire.
SPEAKER_00: Something is wrong.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're gonna need to exchange insurance information and go through the process.
SPEAKER_00: I thought I had gotten away with it.
SPEAKER_00: I found out I had not.
SPEAKER_00: And so then I'm terrified because I know I gotta go home and tell my parents what had happened.
SPEAKER_00: And for some reason I was so afraid of that.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know if they'd take my keys away.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what kind of job I'd have to get to pay back what was owed on that repair.
SPEAKER_00: And so I uh head home and I know it's time to tell my dad because it's either gonna be me or state farm, but someone's gonna tell them.
SPEAKER_00: And so I sit down and I tell him the truth about what had happened, and he looked back at me and he said, Okay, I understand, we'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_00: And I kind of look back, thinking, what are we gonna figure out?
SPEAKER_00: Uh what my punishment is, or figure out how long my keys are taken away for.
SPEAKER_00: And and I just remember him talking and just saying, these kind of things they do happen.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, that is exactly why we have insurance.
SPEAKER_00: I'll talk to her, dad, the insurances, they'll talk to each other, and we'll just get it fixed.
SPEAKER_00: You're safe and sound, all is well.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how I thought that conversation was going to go, but I didn't think it was gonna go that way.
SPEAKER_00: That somehow my confession uh led to a response I could not have imagined.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what we see this morning in Psalm 32, is we discover the freedom of forgiveness for the sin-sick soul.
SPEAKER_00: David writes this psalm.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know when exactly in his life.
SPEAKER_00: We could surely see and maybe assume and wonder if it happened around the same time he was writing Psalm 51 after his sin with Bathsheba and his deception and lies and even murder of Uriah.
SPEAKER_00: It certainly fits that very well, but we don't know for sure.
SPEAKER_00: But whenever it was written, it tells us some beautiful truth.
SPEAKER_00: And it begins like this in verse 1 Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
SPEAKER_00: And right at that moment, we could shut it down and go home because that's enough.
SPEAKER_00: I won't preach anything better than that.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed, we saw that word two weeks ago in Psalm 1, describing the blessed man or the blessed woman.
SPEAKER_00: This is the first time since Psalm 1.
SPEAKER_00: A psalmist is gonna tell us again what being a blessed person looks like.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed here in Psalm 32.
SPEAKER_00: So, what does it look like to be blessed?
SPEAKER_00: What does it look like to live that happy, blessed life, the life of fulfillment and joy?
SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
SPEAKER_00: It looks like this it's the one who knows that his transgression is forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: Now, in verses 1 and 2, we're gonna get three words describing our sin.
SPEAKER_00: Number one, we get that word transgression.
SPEAKER_00: Transgression, think of it like this of rebellion.
SPEAKER_00: Open outright rebellion against an authority.
SPEAKER_00: An authority has told me what to do, and I have not done it.
SPEAKER_00: Or I have done much more than I should have done.
SPEAKER_00: You you can think of this open outright rebellion of uh I have crossed the line.
SPEAKER_00: And then we see this, whose sin is covered.
SPEAKER_00: That second word, sin, think in terms of missing the mark.
SPEAKER_00: There is God's glorious standard, and I have fallen short of that standard.
SPEAKER_00: Think of Romans 3 23, for all have sinned and done what?
SPEAKER_00: Fallen short of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: So transgression, I've gone way too far over the line.
SPEAKER_00: Sin, I have not even come to the line.
SPEAKER_00: I've fallen up short of God's standard.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 2, which we'll see in a minute, we get the word, this iniquity, that is a just a moral distortion.
SPEAKER_00: I have taken God's good design or God's good gifts and used them for my own glory, for my own means.
SPEAKER_00: So all throughout, we have these uh three words for sin, and over and over again, what we're gonna see with these three words is the fact that you and I are sinners.
SPEAKER_00: You can call it sin, you can call it iniquity, you can call it transgression, you can call it rebellion, you can call it uh whatever you'd like to call it, but whatever it is, it is true of us.
SPEAKER_00: And as you sit here this morning, uh that sinfulness is true of you.
SPEAKER_00: But what does the blessed man see?
SPEAKER_00: What does the blessed woman realize?
SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the one who knows that their transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be forgiven?
SPEAKER_00: That quite literally, in your life, that that you owed a great debt because of your sin, and now, here it is, your debt has been paid.
SPEAKER_00: And not paid by you, not paid by your works or your effort or what you could earn.
SPEAKER_00: It's like this morning if I uh applied for a uh a credit card and I got that in the mail, and I went all over town, and I I just swiped that thing at every uh restaurant, every store.
SPEAKER_00: If I could swipe it, I did it.
SPEAKER_00: And I I I did charge after charge after charge, and it was really fun for a little while, and then the mailman put in my mailbox one day later on there's a letter from American Express, and it's my statement.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm terrified to open that up because I'm terrified of what it's going to say.
SPEAKER_00: Really, what I'm terrified is that it's gonna tell me the exact truth about who I am.
SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna tell me any lies.
SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna say I charged anything I didn't charge, it's just gonna show me what I did charge.
SPEAKER_00: And the truth of that is more than enough.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm terrified to look at it, and I open that letter and I look at it, and all I see in that moment is just zeros across the board.
SPEAKER_00: That somehow I don't owe anything, not because there's nothing to owe, but because my debt had been paid.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: That my my debt had just been swept under the rug?
SPEAKER_00: No, that's not what it means.
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus Christ has never applied for a credit card, he's never reached out to American Express, but one day in his mailbox, he got a letter from American Express, and he said, This must be a spam, this must be nothing, not for me.
SPEAKER_00: He opens it up, and what he sees is every charge that should have come to my account now has been credited to his account.
SPEAKER_00: And so he sees my payments, my charges, excuse me, on his account.
SPEAKER_00: And rather than call American Express, rather than dispute the claims, he pays it in full.
SPEAKER_00: At tremendous cost, my sin was costly, so at tremendous cost to himself, he pays fully the debt that I owe.
SPEAKER_00: And now there is forgiveness because of that.
SPEAKER_00: Not because, again, my sin's been swept under the rug, not because God just looked at me and kind of gave me a wink and said, you know, go get them next time.
SPEAKER_00: It's quite all right.
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
SPEAKER_00: My sin was hideous, my sin was wicked, and yet Christ paid in full on the cross through his death the debt that I owe.
SPEAKER_00: That's how you and I, who want to live the blessed life, can know that we are living the blessed life because we know this.
SPEAKER_00: That blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven and whose sin is covered.
SPEAKER_00: I think about the value that Jesus puts on forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: Think about Luke chapter 5, verse 17 through 26.
SPEAKER_00: This amazing story when there's a uh a man who's been paralyzed, and all he wants to do is get to Jesus, and he knows Jesus is coming through town, but he knows he has no way of getting there.
SPEAKER_00: And so his friends look to him and they say, I'll get you there.
SPEAKER_00: And they get to the house, and there's no way in.
SPEAKER_00: The the crowds are blocking every entrance to the home, and so what do they do?
SPEAKER_00: They go up on the roof, they tear a hole in the roof, and they lower this man in just to get to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus sees this beautiful moment and the extent that these friends would go to get their friend to Jesus, this paralyzed man, and Jesus looks at him and says this.
SPEAKER_00: He says to this paralyzed man, he says, Your sins are forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: That's the first thing he says.
SPEAKER_00: And the reader, as we read it, the first thought is this that's not even why he's there.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, this man, is paralyzed.
SPEAKER_00: This man wants to walk out of this room.
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate the forgiveness, but there's there's more this man wants.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus eventually does get to that because the next thing he does is tell this man he can rise and walk, and he walks out of the building.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus knows something uh so much more important than we as the readers realize at first, and that is this that the far greater thing was given to this man by Jesus when Jesus spoke the first time.
SPEAKER_00: That my child, your sins are forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: That's the value that Jesus puts on our forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: And the extent that Jesus will go to to forgive us, in verse 2, we see it continued.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit is no deceit.
SPEAKER_00: So again, how do you live the blessed life?
SPEAKER_00: It's for the man or the woman that whom the Lord counts no iniquity.
SPEAKER_00: This word count, the same word as Genesis 15, when God looks to Abraham and sees him and that he was counted as righteous.
SPEAKER_00: By his own accord, on his own account, he could not have been made righteous by his own work or by his own effort, but by the favor of the Lord, he was now counted righteous.
SPEAKER_00: And so now the Lord Jesus looks at our account and counts our sin forgiven for those who come unto him for forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_00: There's a dollhouse in my garage right as we speak, and it's been there for a few weeks now, and I don't want it, and I don't need it.
SPEAKER_00: And you say this, it's a dollhouse.
SPEAKER_00: Why don't we give it to you?
SPEAKER_00: You have a daughter, give it to her.
SPEAKER_00: This was kind of an extra thing that we didn't mean to get at Christmas, and here we are, and I want to take it back and get a refund for it, and uh I've looked everywhere for it, but I don't have a clue where the receipt is.
SPEAKER_00: The receipt is just long gone, and and so I'm the new owner of this dollhouse.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, in the next couple days, the uh First Baptist Preschool will be the new owner of this dollhouse.
SPEAKER_00: All because of this, and I'm usually good at these sort of things, but all because I I misplaced the receipt.
SPEAKER_00: What is bad news for me at Christmas time trying to make a return is is good news for the follower of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Because every one of us has a receipt of our lives.
SPEAKER_00: There is an itemized receipt of the sin that we've taken part in.
SPEAKER_00: You can almost visualize that receipt being printed out and my sins listed on that receipt.
SPEAKER_00: But you can also imagine this in his glorious mercy, the Lord Jesus Christ saying, My child, I I don't have a clue where that receipt is.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus misplaced it, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: Because on the cross, he took that receipt, every sin that was truly on our account, and he took them to the grave.
SPEAKER_00: And when he rose again, he left it behind, tearing that receipt up.
SPEAKER_00: And uh, as I've said before, as Cory Tinboom says, our sins have been cast into the sea of forgetfulness, and they are gone, they will not be dug up, they have been left in the past.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.
SPEAKER_00: And look at this last phrase of verse 2, and in whose spirit is no deceit.
SPEAKER_00: That word deceit uh has the idea of a cover-up.
SPEAKER_00: If I know I'm guilty, I wonder if I can just deceive my way out of it.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if I can lie my way out of sin.
SPEAKER_00: We think about David's own life when he was caught in sin with Bathsheba.
SPEAKER_00: What does he do?
SPEAKER_00: He uh immediately goes into uh the cover-up.
SPEAKER_00: He immediately uh tries to put Uriah at the scene of the crime.
SPEAKER_00: He immediately sends him to the front lines of battle.
SPEAKER_00: He allows Uriah to be killed in battle, and he thinks the deceit has worked.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I find so fascinating about you and I when we are truly in sin and we are guilty of sin.
SPEAKER_00: We sometimes actually think that we are clever enough to deceive.
SPEAKER_00: That you and I are somehow clever enough to get away with it.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the reality: you and I might be able to deceive for a little while at least those around us.
SPEAKER_00: And you might be clever enough for a little while to deceive a spouse or a friend or children or a co-worker.
SPEAKER_00: You might for a little while uh think you're clever enough, you could deceive me, you could deceive uh, you know, other friends, whoever it may be.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what's fascinating: we might even be clever enough to deceive ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: That if we can just tell ourselves the lie enough, we just start to believe that we are okay, that we can deceive ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: And here's what I find so interesting.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we can deceive someone out there for a little while, but do you know this?
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to remind you of this, of this truth, that there has never been a second that you have gotten away with your sin before God.
SPEAKER_00: There has never been a moment where you've tricked the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: You might for a little while can be clever enough to hide your sin from those around you, but no sin in your life has ever been hidden from God.
SPEAKER_00: And so, with that in mind, in those moments, what do we do?
SPEAKER_00: First, David's gonna show us what we do not do.
SPEAKER_00: Look with me at verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: For when I kept silent, when I went into damage control.
SPEAKER_00: When I tried to come up with a scheme to cover my sin so that this doesn't get out, when I kept silent, look at this.
SPEAKER_00: My bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
SPEAKER_00: David, under the guilt of his sin, is in physical agony.
SPEAKER_00: The guilt weighs on him so heavily.
SPEAKER_00: Look what he says.
SPEAKER_00: My bones are wasting away all day long.
SPEAKER_00: This guilt, I feel it deeply.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing fun about this moment in life right now.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 4, for day and night your hand was heavy upon me.
SPEAKER_00: The last phrase, my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
SPEAKER_00: So verse 3 and 4, here is David trying to keep silent, trying to cover up his sin, and he is miserable.
SPEAKER_00: His bones are dried up as in the heat of summer.
SPEAKER_00: It's fascinating.
SPEAKER_00: When I lived in central Arkansas, I thought I knew the heat of summer.
SPEAKER_00: When I lived in Birmingham, Alabama, I thought I knew the heat of summer.
SPEAKER_00: I've recently found out that was all child's play.
SPEAKER_00: Because when I moved to South Arkansas, I understood what it means to be dried up as by the heat of summer.
SPEAKER_00: And here is David speaking of his sin and feeling the guilt of his sin.
SPEAKER_00: And as he keeps silent, there is nothing enjoyable about his life as he lives under the weight of this sin, the physical agony that exists.
SPEAKER_00: And here's what's fascinating about verse 4 to revisit it again.
SPEAKER_00: It says, day and night, look at this, your hand was heavy upon me.
SPEAKER_00: And so who is causing this in David's life?
SPEAKER_00: It says this, God, your hand was heavy upon me.
SPEAKER_00: As he's underneath this guilt, it is the hand of God that is causing this in his life.
SPEAKER_00: Now, uh Dale Ralph Davis used this term of the mercy of misery.
SPEAKER_00: Think about that for a second.
SPEAKER_00: The mercy of misery.
SPEAKER_00: Those two things don't sound like they go together, do they?
SPEAKER_00: The mercy of misery.
SPEAKER_00: That there are moments when we stand underneath the conviction of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: When the conviction of the Spirit weighs heavily upon us, that like David, we feel the misery of standing and living underneath the guilt of our secret sin, and it causes misery in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: That the Spirit convicts us in such a way that in that moment we are not enjoying this one bit.
SPEAKER_00: And yet it is this very conviction that is a mercy to us because it's the very conviction of the Holy Spirit that leads us to the end of ourselves so that we can finally say, I'll no longer deceive, I'll no longer hide, I will come to the Lord as I've been called to come to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And I look at the times in my life when I've stood under the conviction of the Spirit because I've been downright guilty in sin, and his conviction weighed on me, and I look at those times and I see the grace and the mercy of God to bring me those moments, to bring me to those moments so that he can then bring me out of those moments.
SPEAKER_00: The mercy of the misery.
SPEAKER_00: I want to give one caveat.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when I say this, living underneath the guilt of sin, I want to be clear, that's under the guilt of unconfessed sin.
SPEAKER_00: Christian in the room, if you are feeling guilt and shame over confessed sin, sin that's been given over to God, confessed and paid for, then revisit the cross of Christ and remind yourself of the finished work of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: But once again, when we stand with that unconfessed sin, trying to deceive ourselves and deceive God, we can feel the weight of the hand of God, his conviction over our lives.
SPEAKER_00: So what do we do in that moment?
SPEAKER_00: Look with me at verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity.
SPEAKER_00: I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Let's stop there.
SPEAKER_00: What does David do in this moment?
SPEAKER_00: He confesses.
SPEAKER_00: What does confess mean?
SPEAKER_00: It really just means to agree with God about the truth of our sin, to call our sin exactly as it is, to come before the Lord and say this: Lord God, here's what I've done.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the truth of what I have done, the ways I've come up short, the ways I've rebelled against you, here's the truth of it.
SPEAKER_00: C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis says this that sometimes we think we're coming to God with our confession, and really we can be coming to God with our excuses.
SPEAKER_00: We say, like this, God, I know that I've sinned, but if if you really understood the stress I've been under lately, Lord.
SPEAKER_00: God, I sure know I of course I made that little mistake, but if you saw some of the other people in the room at the time, you would have seen.
SPEAKER_00: They did a little bit more than I did.
SPEAKER_00: Their sin receipts probably longer than mine.
SPEAKER_00: We can come up with these excuses.
SPEAKER_00: We can try to justify our sin all day.
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
SPEAKER_00: Confession says this, like David says in Psalm 51, 4, against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.
SPEAKER_00: Same thing he says really in 2 Samuel 12, 13, when Nathan approaches him and sees the clarity surrounding his sin, and David says this I have sinned against the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: No more deception, no more justifying.
SPEAKER_00: Here is my sin.
SPEAKER_00: And so when we come honestly to the Lord and we confess our sin and we tell him the truth of our sin, how does verse 5 end?
SPEAKER_00: I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Here it is, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
SPEAKER_00: Look at that now.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't say this.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't say, I confess my sin and you put together a forgiveness committee to consider what the next step might be.
SPEAKER_00: That what you did was formed a repayment plan to see how over time I might could make this right.
SPEAKER_00: Uh that you put me on a spiritual probation just to see how I act for the next few minutes.
SPEAKER_00: I confessed my sin and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
SPEAKER_00: It sounds to me like an Old Testament version of 1 John 1 9 that I love so much that if I confess my sin, and here it is, you are faithful and just to forgive me of my sin and cleanse me of all unrighteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So what does it take for you and I to uh take hold of the forgiveness of sin?
SPEAKER_00: It simply takes this.
SPEAKER_00: It takes our confession that when we honestly come to the Lord and just tell him the truth, tell him what we've done and the sin that we have committed, we can be promised that we will be met with his mercy and grace, with his forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: That's why David says, verse 6, therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at the time when you may be found, and surely in the rush of great waters they will not reach him.
SPEAKER_00: You have this picture of the one who calls out to God, and even when the waters rise, he is or she is protected in that moment.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 7, you are a hiding place for me.
SPEAKER_00: I love this.
SPEAKER_00: The contemporary great preacher H.B.
SPEAKER_00: Charles was talking about this passage this week.
SPEAKER_00: That early in the passage, we see that we are trying to hide our sins from God.
SPEAKER_00: Later in the chapter, verse 7, we see that our hiding place is God.
SPEAKER_00: From hiding our sins from God to realizing that our hiding place is God.
SPEAKER_00: Moving from a relationship that says, Oh, I messed up, my dad's gonna kill me, to a relationship that says, oops, I've messed up, I've got to get to dad.
SPEAKER_00: That I've messed up and I have a heavenly father that stands ready and waiting for me.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 7, you are my hiding place.
SPEAKER_00: You preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts of deliverance.
SPEAKER_00: I love the picture of verse 7 that as we come in confession and receive the forgiveness of God, he really brings this into a corporate setting that the forgiven man, the forgiven woman, now stands in this corporate setting with all of us around, shouting these shouts of deliverance as we proclaim again and again what Christ has done in the life of one person who comes honestly before the Lord in confession and finding forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: This is true of the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: And I think throughout history, throughout God's word, throughout all throughout church history, we see pictures of how forgiveness paves the way for new life.
SPEAKER_00: I think of someone like Martin Luther, who late one night in his study felt, I mentioned this before, just felt attacked by the evil one.
SPEAKER_00: Almost could hear Satan telling him, Martin, you've sinned so greatly.
SPEAKER_00: You are so unworthy.
SPEAKER_00: You are such a sinner.
SPEAKER_00: And finally Martin said this uh everything you say is true.
SPEAKER_00: I've sinned so greatly, I'm so unworthy, but Christ Jesus has taken my sins upon the cross.
SPEAKER_00: I think of someone we've talked about before, John Newton, the great slave trader, turned slave freer, who found Christ Jesus, and forgiveness paved a way for a new way forward.
SPEAKER_00: He became the great abolitionist, he became the author of Amazing Grace, he found the grace of Christ and it changed everything.
SPEAKER_00: I think think of someone like Zacchaeus in Luke 19, the biggest crook in town, had an encounter with Christ, and forgiveness paves the way for a new life, as then he becomes a follower of Christ, who begins to repay every debt that he owed in town.
SPEAKER_00: Someone like Peter, who betrayed Christ on the night of his arrest, is later restored by Christ in John 20 and becomes the great leader of the early church.
SPEAKER_00: Someone like Paul, the great threat to the church.
SPEAKER_00: Acts chapter 9, sees Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness paves the way for a new life.
SPEAKER_00: He becomes the great missionary of the church.
SPEAKER_00: I think about all these stories of people who have honestly come before the Lord in confession, found forgiveness, and the Lord paved a new way forward.
SPEAKER_00: I also think of the stories of many in this room.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if you don't have a story in your own life.
SPEAKER_00: The only moment in your life when you've come before the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: You've finally decided to stop playing the game.
SPEAKER_00: Stop with the deception and the manipulation and even deceiving yourselves, and you've just come honestly before the Lord and said, Against you, you only have I sinned.
SPEAKER_00: You've confessed your sin and you have felt the freedom of forgiveness for the sinsick soul, and it changed everything about your life.
SPEAKER_00: And when you wake up now in the morning, you wake up not as someone who stands under the guilt and shame of past sin, but you are someone who wakes up knowing that I have confessed my sin, my sin is paid for, taken care of on the cross, taken care of through the resurrection, and my story is no longer the story of sin.
SPEAKER_00: My life is not the sum total of my mistakes, but my life is hid with Christ in God.
SPEAKER_00: And that this is your story.
SPEAKER_00: I just wonder if there's not someone in this room, you've been a Christian for years, and yet you still live under the guilt of sin.
SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder if even now, if Christ is just calling you forward to lay that at the foot of the cross, because as you lay that that weight down, he wants to free you to be used by him in ways you never thought possible.
SPEAKER_00: In ways you never saw coming.
SPEAKER_00: And that the the next chapter of your life will be the most beautiful chapter of your life because it will be spent living under the freedom that has been declared through the finished work of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: If you are even a believer and yet still live under the bondage of any unconfessed sin, I just pray today that you would lay it down.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're in the room and you still live under the bondage of confessed sin.
SPEAKER_00: You've given it over to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I I've I've been in your shoes.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I'm still living in your shoes.
SPEAKER_00: There wasn't a youth camp I grew up in that.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't get saved again.
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say that prayer again just for a little insurance.
SPEAKER_00: I laid those sins down again and again and again, and I confessed the same things over and over.
SPEAKER_00: What it took was this is just a reminder of the gospel message that Christ has paid for sin.
SPEAKER_00: Here it is, once for all.
SPEAKER_00: And if I have confessed that sin and given it to him, then as far as the east is from the west, so far has it been removed from us.
SPEAKER_00: The receipt has been torn, the weight has been lifted, and you and I can experience freedom in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Last thing I'll say, maybe there's someone in this room that wants to experience that today for the first time.
SPEAKER_00: You want a relationship with Jesus, and for the first time, you want to come in true confession, and you want him to be Lord of your life, and you want a relationship with him.
SPEAKER_00: There's no better day than today.
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to talk to you after about that.
SPEAKER_00: If you have any decision to make, I'll be down front.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus, I thank you for the truth of the forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_00: I thank you that you have called us to live in that freedom and we don't have to live a second longer in guilt and shame if we have indeed confessed those sins to you.
SPEAKER_00: And so, Lord, I just pray if there's someone in this room, even now that's living under the guilt of unconfessed sin, Lord, I just pray, actually, even in these moments, in this quiet place, I just pray between us and you, even now, if there's anyone who needs to give sin over to you in confession, Lord, would they do it right now in this moment?
SPEAKER_00: Lord, you say, if we confess our sins, you are faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the truth of those words.
SPEAKER_00: And for anyone in this room that has handed their sin over to you, would they know and embrace the forgiveness that has met them in this moment?
SPEAKER_00: If there's any other decisions to make, would they be made even now?
SPEAKER_00: I pray this in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Would you stand as we worship?
SPEAKER_00: I'll be down front.