Forgiven and Forgiving (Part 1 of 2)

The good news of the gospel is that our sins have been forgiven once and for all. We've been declared right with God because of Jesus work on the cross. So what's the purpose of continued repentance?

Well, today, I'm Truth for Life. Alistair Begg explains. The essential purpose of daily confession of sin with a message titled Forgiven and Forgiving, which we're revisiting today as part of Oncor 2020.

Now to the 11th chapter of Luke's Gospel We Turn. Last time we began to consider this matter of forgiveness and particularly the petition which reads there in the fourth verse, Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.

We said last time that in the space of just a couple of phrases, Jesus reminds us how important it is to seek from God not only our most basic physical requirements as represented in food, but also to cry out to God for our primary spiritual necessity, namely forgiveness. And we labored last time to make clear to one another that this matter of forgiveness is a matter of pressing urgency, that all of the Old Testament prophets were moving towards the day when the one who was the lamb of God, who would take away the sin of the world, would walk upon the stage of history. Jesus comes and makes clear to his followers that he must go up to Jerusalem and they are suffered at the hands of cruel men, be crucified and on the third day rise again. They are not particularly keen on picking up on this news. It seems to them like such a dreadful end to a life crammed full of such potential. Jesus then goes to the cross and the disciples run into hiding, not really having listened carefully to what he been saying to them at all.

He meets a couple of them on the road to a mass on the evening following his resurrection.

They know there has been an empty tomb. They can't quite make sense of what is going on. And on that occasion, as Jesus draws near to these individuals in look twenty four and in verse 46, he reminds them, this is what is written. The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations. Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached. That was what Jesus said would happen. And when the truth dawned on them, the apostles then went out onto the Jerusalem streets to bring the word that was in the Old Testament. So clearly presented to bear upon the lives of their listeners. And so they would have preached, for example, from Isaiah 55, Sikhi the Lord, while he may be found and call upon him while he is near, let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. And they go out onto the streets to say Now the mercy of God is such that he calls you to seek him, to call upon him, to forsake your sin and to turn to him. Indeed, Peter puts it very succinctly recorded in Acts 319. Repent then and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out. And last time we endeavor to make much of the fact that the message of forgiveness is a wonderful message. While other religions may offer merely moralism or an attempt to try and clean ourselves up or to do our best. Christianity is a message for the unworthy. For the lost. For the beleaguered. And for the sinful. Indeed, no one will ever come to embrace the gospel in all of the good news that is made available to us. Until first we realize that we are those kinds of people, those who want to use Christianity as merely a leg up through the journey of their days. We'll never understand the nature of who Jesus is and why he came. And if we are to know the reality of forgiveness, as we said last time, we must come to him in repentance and in faith. It is not that by our repentance we earn our pardon, but rather it is that God has determined to show us mercy as a means of inducing within us a repentant heart.

We ended last time by thinking of the young man in the story of the prodigal sons making his way back to his father. And we said, in the words of the Scottish theologian, the prodigal returned to his father, not primarily because he was driven by a guilty conscience, but because he was drawn by the hope of mercy. It was the hope of mercy. It was the prospect of forgiveness that enabled the man to face this predicament and say, I have sinned against heaven. And in your sight and I am no longer worthy to be called your son, make me as one of your hired servants. And when having risen and come to his father, then he discovered that all of the benefits and blessings, if you like, of the gospel were showered upon him freely as a result of God's grace.

Now, that's where we left it last time. The issue, if you like, that we stopped on stop hold on is the big issue of forgiveness.

Actually, I don't think it is the big issue of forgiveness. That is primarily addressed here in the Lord's Prayer, as I would say to you in a moment. But nevertheless, I couldn't get to this other matter of forgiveness without recognizing the fact that many who sit in worship routinely on the Lord's day have no notion of ever having been forgiven by God. That's why we started there.

And for those of you who have still not dealt with that, then you just really need to stay there.

Although I invite you to listen to the remainder of what follows the question that is almost inevitably raised in the minds of a thoughtful person. Is this given then all that we labor to say last time, if we have been forgiven once and for all by faith in Jesus Christ, why then is there any need for forgiveness afterwards if we have been forgiven. All of our sins? Then why do we even need to take this phrase and pray forgive us our sins, for we forgive those who sin against us? Well, I want to begin by endeavoring to answer that question this morning. And the answer is straightforward. And it is this. When a man or a woman comes to trust in Christ, repent of their sins and accept freely the offer of the gospel that is given to us in Jesus. Sin is not eradicated from our lives. It no longer reigns or rules in our lives, but it remains in our lives.

When we turn to Christ in repentance and faith and we say this all the time, and I hope that is becoming a point of reference for many of us, we are able to look back and say we have been saved from the penalty of sin. All that was against us in our debit account. All that kept us from knowing God. All that kept us from the discovery of his love and his goodness. All of that penalty that we deserved has been annulled, has been eradicated as we have come in repentance and in faith to trust in Christ.

Therefore, we have been saved from sins. Penalty one day. We look forward to being taken to heaven. And when we are in heaven, we will be saved from sins presence.

For there will be no send in heaven nor no possibility of sin. It will be a radically different experience.

But now, living in the present, we are being saved from sins power because despite the fact that sins power is broken in our lives, we still sin and we still miss the mark. Anybody prepared to stand up and say that we don't?

No, any thoughtful person who reads the Bible and reviews their lives. If if a man doubts it, he needs only a wife to put him in, writes concerning it. If you doubt the fact that you still sin, then check with your wife. And as a parent, have you forgotten that you send and check with your teenage daughter? She will point a number out to you. That happened already this morning on your way here.

Well, then that inevitably raises the question in the minds of individuals. Does it mean then that when we sin, we somehow lose our salvation, lose our relationship with God, and therefore have to start the whole process all over again by coming back and starting that the penalty may be removed and so on?

The answer to that is no. When sin happens in the lives of those who have trusted in Christ, our relationship with God as our father is intact.

But what is affected is our enjoyment of our relationship with God as our father, in the same way that if you allow your teenage child to take your car out on the Friday evening and you give them very clear instructions about where they're supposed to go and at what time they're supposed to return, and they ignore all of them and they return at some dreadful hour the following morning.

When you sit together at breakfast, the relationship is intact, but a cloud has descended over the breakfast table as a result of sin, as a result of disobedience. The child has not sinned herself or himself out of a relationship with you as the father, but has sinned themselves into a situation where all of the blessing and all of the enjoyment and all of the fragrance of that relationship has been marred. And what needs to happen? There needs to be a story.

There needs to be consequences. There needs to be forgiveness. And there needs to be moving on in the same way. In our journey through our lives with God as our father. This is exactly what takes place when you and I are tempted to harbor sin.

Then there is no surprise that we would fail to enjoy all of the blessing that God intends for us by means of cleansing and forgiveness when we harbor sin within our lives as Christians. One, we will not know the blessing of God as he desires us to have it and to we will not know and experience of assurance in our living, the Christian life.

Because walking through the world each day, we get our feet dirty.

You may polish your shoes in the morning. It happened to me today. I actually polish them last night. And then this morning before I even got into my car, I spilled something all over the left shoe, enough to annoy me intensely. So at last evening's cleansing was immediately affected by this morning's disturbance.

That's the experience of the Christian life.

I'll just give you Kalvin one more time and then I won't give you any more of him. This is what he says concerning this accordingly. So long as we dwell in the prison house of our body, we must continually contend with the defects of our corrupt nature. Indeed, with our own natural soul, Plato sometimes says that the life of a philosopher is a meditation upon death. But we may more truly say that the life of a Christian man is a continual effort and exercise in the mortification of the flesh till it is utterly slain and God's spirit reigns in us. Therefore, I think he has profited greatly, who has learned to be very much displeased with himself, not so as to stick fast in this mire and progress no further, but rather to hasten to God and yearn for him in order that haven't been in grafted into the life and death of Christ. He may give attention to continual repentance. He may give attention to continual repentance. Now, that is the very principle that Jesus is underscoring and we want to take time to turn to it in. John, Chapter 13. In the encounter where he washes the disciples feet and you remember when he comes to Peter, Peter is protest the fact he says, oh, Jesus, you should not be washing my feet. And Jesus says, unless I wash you, you have no part in me. And then, of course, Peter, blowing hot and cold, as usual, says, well, in that case, don't simply wash my feet. I wash my hands and wash my face as well.

What is Jesus pointing out there?

He's pointing out that unless we are washed by means of coming to him and repentance and in faith, we have no part in Christ unless we have come to Christ. We have no part in him.

Having been washed by him.

Going out into the thoroughfare of our days, we get our feet and our hands spiritually dirty.

Therefore, we do not need to go back and have, if you like, the big wash all over again.

We do need to come to him in daily and continual repentance.

Now, the Westminster confession of faith tackled this years and years ago, actually almost 350 years ago now. And when you read it to your prophet, you find, for example, that it says God doth continue to forgive the sins of those who are justified.

This is the issue, you see. Why would those who are justified by their sins forgiven if all of our sins have been dealt with? Why then do we need to confess our sins? God does continue to forgive the sins of those who are justified because they fall under his fatherly displeasure. Because they fall under his fatherly displeasure, because the cloud has come down over the breakfast table. And God in his grace and in his mercy, does not leave us to live under that cloud. But gives to us a mechanism whereby we may know what it is to live under his smile.

Incidentally, Augustine said, I don't believe that this petition refers to the great forgiveness, which is assured is a thing passed, but rather that Christ is referring to the sins of a daily infirmity.

So you have a Guston, you have Kalven, you have the Bible. I think that's a pretty good trail. The latter being the best.

The Westminster divines, when they give us the Westminster confession, didn't simply recognize their need to confess the doctrines of the faith, but also they recognized the need to confess the sins of their own lives as an essential part of daily repentance. I don't know about you. I don't know what it is that you come to God with on a routine basis. But I would be surprised if some of us have even had it occur to us that some of these things would provide the very necessity for continually praying this petition in the Lord's Prayer. I can't go through all of them. But let me just give you a flavor of the kind of things that they wrote down in the 17th century that confronted them with the need for continual repentance and ignorance of God and a lack of nearness to him.

Exceeding great selfishness in all that we do. The fact that we are glad to find excuses for the neglect of our duties. The fact that we neglect the reading of scripture in the secret place. The fact of our refined hypocrisy whereby we desire to appear what indeed we are not, the fact that we are ready or to search out and censure faults in others, then to see or to deal with faults in ourselves.

Our foolish jesting, our way of time with useless conversation. The existence of bitterness rather than zeal.

Too much eyeing of our own credit and applause, being pleased with it when we get it.

And unsatisfied when we don't. Forgive us our sins.

We recognize that in the letter of John in that first letter, he is concerned that those of us who follow after Christ may not sin. He says, I write to you that you may not sin, but if you do sin, then he says, We have an advocate with the father. We have one who is the propitiation for our sins. We are one who pleads our case in the presence of the father so that when the father recognizes that we sin, Jesus pleads our defense and says, I died for that sin. Father, do not hold it to his account.

And for that reason, it's imperative that we keep short accounts with God. By confessing our sins as we become aware of them, we keep short accounts with God.

By confessing our sins as we become aware of them, we were unable to live in fellowship with God and with a clear conscience.

And it is then with a sense of gratitude that we're able to live a Christian life that pleases him in every way. Now, the risk of undue repetition. Let me state this principle once again, because I want to go on from here to the second part of the petition. Forgiveness as we live our Christian lives is not ours until we seek it with repentance. It is not ours until we seek it with repentance. Do you remember when you came to Christ, when you turn from your sin, your repentance was clear and it was deliberate.

If then our Christian lives are to be journeys of continual repentance, then our repentance needs to be equally clear and equally deliberate. Our sins after we are converted are not forgiven until we repent of them.

He has made for us once and for all and atoning sacrifice for sin in Jesus. He has declared that the penalty is no longer held against us. But as we walk through the journey of our days and as the clouds of disintegrated fellowship descend upon us, he awaits. Father. Forgive me, Father. I'm sorry, Father. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have thought that.

And it is in that encounter, in the keeping of short accounts, that all of that blessing and enjoyment is experienced. I say to you again that the Christian life is to be one of continual repentance daily, turning from sin to God daily, asking for his forgiveness for the occasions when we have not turned away from sin quickly enough. And by means of that, repentance becomes both a principle and a habit.

Not that it merits our pardon. But it prepares the way for it.

It is by God's mercy that we are pardoned. And it is by repentance that we make entry into the enjoyment. I suppose you left a ticket for me. It will call you paid that you paid for the ticket and you left it there for me. When I take the ticket, I have to do something with it. And that is that I have to I have to pass it in. And it is in putting it in that I enjoy the benefits that the ticket conveys.

Christ, if you like, in a very simple illustration, has paid for us and he has left the ticket for us. It will call and as we pick it up and pass it, and then all of the benefits that he has provided by means of his payment become ours and that so on a daily basis.

Forgiven and forgiving. That's the title of our message today from Alistair Begg. You're listening to Truth for Life.

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