"The Authority To Forgive Sins"

Hi there, this is Lon Solomon and I'd like to welcome you to our program today. You know it's a tremendous honor that God has given us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's word as it is uncompromising and straightforward. And I'm so glad you've tuned in to listen and be part of that.

Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio. And now let's get to the Word of God. We're continuing this morning in our series in the life of Jesus Christ from the Gospel of Luke and I want to begin this morning by asking you a question. What is the greatest problem of mankind?

Now immediately our minds start to spin. You say, Lon, that is really much too heavy a question for 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Some people would say world hunger.

Maybe some people would say poverty or crime or economic issues like the national deficit here in America or nuclear weapons or whatever. It's very interesting, however, when we turn to the Bible that we find a very different answer than any of these that I've just said. The answer God gives us in the Bible is very simple. He tells us that the greatest problem of mankind is sin. You see sin is the central theme of the Bible from cover to cover. The Bible begins in the book of Genesis by telling us about sin entering the human race through Adam and Eve.

And then the Bible ends in the book of Revelation by telling us about God's plan to eradicate sin once and for all from his creation and in between every page in between deals with the issue of mankind sin and God's response to it. So the answer to the question, what is the greatest problem of mankind? God's answer is sin.

Now I have a second question for you. What is the most distinctive or the most unique thing that biblical Christianity proclaims to this world? The answer to that question is that the most distinctive thing that biblical Christianity proclaims to our world is that sin can be forgiven, is that God is interested and anxious to forgive your sin, my sin, and everybody else's sin who's willing to come to him the way he tells them to. It's true that Christianity offers us a noble way to live. It's true that Christianity offers us great behavioral models to pattern our life after, men like Abraham, Moses, David, and Paul, women like Mary and Ruth and Deborah. But the essence of Christianity is not noble ethics and the essence of Christianity is not giving us great behavioral models. The essence of true Christianity is that God is offering to forgive our sin and he's made a way to do it and still remain holy himself in the process. And Jesus talks about this in our passage for this morning and so I want to talk to you about it in a message entitled The Authority to Forgive Sin. Now before we look at the passage in Luke 5, it would help us if we understood why sin is a problem. So let's talk for just a moment about what is the problem with sin. There are two reasons I'm going to give you.

I'm sure there are more, but there's two I'm going to give you this morning. Reason number one is sin separates us from God. Here in Isaiah 59, I want you to look. It says, verse 2, but your iniquities have separated you from your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear you. You see, friend, sin severs us from God and that's why for so many of us, God seems so far away, so distant, so remote. God is not remote.

God is not far away from you at all. But he feels that way and he seems that way because sin has erected a barricade between you and God. And if we don't fix that barricade sometime during this life, A, we spend our whole life feeling alienated and isolated and distant from God, missing the things that he wants to do in our lives. And if we don't fix it before we eventually die, we go out into eternity separated from God and God has no choice but to send us to a place where people live estranged from God for all eternity, a place the Bible calls hell. Sin separates us from God. That's a problem. That's a problem that is unfixable by any human being and that's a big problem. The second problem with sin is that sin produces guilt.

In the book of Genesis, I'd like you to turn back to the very first book of the Bible, Genesis chapter 3. Sin produces guilt. You know, there is false guilt in our world.

There are many people who grew up in families where mom and dad got divorced and as children, they felt guilty that somehow it was their fault that mom and dad got divorced. If you grew up in a situation like that, allow me to tell you it is not your fault. That is false guilt.

You have no business carrying it. It's not your fault. There are some of us who grew up in homes where we were molested or abused either physically or sexually and many times people grow up feeling like it must be their fault somehow that this happened to them. If that's you, may I say to you, that's false guilt. It was not your fault. You are not responsible for that. But many people in the world would have us believe that all guilt is false guilt.

That's not true. There is real guilt also in our world. Real guilt comes when our conscience tells us that we have offended God and done something that's wrong. That is real guilt.

That is genuine guilt. And it is part of the psyche of what sin produces in the human spirit. Would you look in Genesis chapter 3. If you remember, Adam and Eve were told they couldn't eat of this tree in the middle of the garden. Now I don't know whether it had apples on it, oranges on it, or pomegranates on it. It just says in the Bible it had fruit.

But whatever the fruit was doesn't make a bit of difference. What makes a difference was God said don't eat of it and they ate of it. They disobeyed God. And something very radical happened in Adam and Eve's psyche that had never happened before. It's guilt.

I want you to see it. Verse 8. It says in chapter 3 verse 8, then the man and his wife, Adam and Eve, heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

God would come to the garden every day in the cool of the evening to walk with man and talk with man. But this day it was very different. Because it says on this day, verse 8, they ran and hid themselves from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Now Adam and Eve had never done that before, ever. Something had gone radically wrong inside Adam and Eve. They were feeling something they had never felt before. What they were feeling was guilt.

Because their conscience was registering the fact that they had offended God and disobeyed him. Separation from God, genuine guilt. These are two of the big problems that sin brings into a life.

That's the bad news. God wrote the Bible to tell us the good news. And the good news is that God has made a prescription for dealing with sin. He's made a way to reconcile us to God when sin has separated us. He's made a way for us to get rid of the guilt once and for all, not just to sublimate it with drugs, or sublimate it with sex, or sublimate it with alcohol, or sublimate it with therapy, but to get rid of it. Jesus talks about that in Luke 5.

So let's go there and look, shall we? Luke chapter 5. The events that happened here happened in the little town of Capernaum around the Sea of Galilee, and they happened in Peter's house. Luke doesn't tell us that, but Matthew does. And so this takes place in Capernaum, verse 17. One day as he was teaching Pharisees and teachers of the law who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and from Jerusalem, and they were sitting there, and the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick.

And so Jesus began healing people. Well, it didn't take long before there was a huge crowd that gathered, a mob almost. They packed in the house like sardines. They spilled out of the house into the street. The crowd was so large and so pressed in that people could hardly even move, the Bible tells us.

It was kind of like Circuit City just before Christmas at this place. And so this is the situation that's important for us to understand if the rest of what happens here is going to make sense. Verse 18. It says, and some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat, on a stretcher. And they tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus, but they couldn't.