Audio on Demand from Vision Christian Media I want to announce today that God is a God of forgiveness. He forgives sin.
That's what he does. We are only permitted to be in his presence because he does that. We are unworthy to be in the presence of a holy righteous God if he does not forgive us of our sin. And he forgives us, as the Bible tells us, we're to forgive others as we ourselves have been forgiven. And we're studying the life of David and his experience in the trifled sin of murder and adultery and deception that was so much a part of one section of his life. And we'll get to that in just a moment as we open our Bibles again to Psalm 32 and Psalm 51. As we come to the weekend, I want to remind you again that Turning Point exists to encourage you Monday through Friday, but never to take the place of your being in church on the weekend. The most important thing you can do now, however you can do it in this situation in which we find ourselves, is to be in church. The church is not the church when it's scattered. The church is the church when it's gathered. And you need to gather together with God's people as you are able to do so. And I know that that brings honor and glory to the Lord. So get to church on the weekend, and then don't forget we're on television all across the nation every month, practically, adding new stations to our network.
Always consult your guide and find out where we are in your community, and join us for the weekend edition of Turning Point on television. Well, right now, I want us to get started with the Friday edition of Turning Point as we finish up our discussion of this question, How Can I Be Truly Forgiven? How do you pray? How do you pray when you've been found out?
How do you pray when your sin is so overwhelming that, like Katherine Powers, you just can't stand it anymore and you've got to get it out in the open? Well, let me tell you two things about David's confession. First of all, it was genuine. It was genuine. You say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, isn't all confession genuine? Not really. I read this week about a guy who wrote a letter to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the letter said, I haven't been able to sleep because last year when I filed my income tax report, I deliberately misrepresented my income.
I'm enclosing a check for $150, and if I still can't sleep, I'll send you the rest. Now that's the way a lot of people confess. Do you know folks like that? Confession for a lot of folks is just telling people what you discover they already know. In fact, in our schools, and I can say this from the high school, junior high, all the way through to college, one of the things we learn when we deal with the problems young people face is that a lot of times kids will come clean when they know you already know what they did. But they won't tell you any more than they think you know. So sometimes you think you got this whole deal wrapped up and after it's all over, you found out they didn't come clean at all. There's a whole bunch more stuff you should have known. Confession can be dishonest and ungenuine. Did you know that?
But I want to tell you something. When David confessed, his confession was genuine. You say, how do you know that? Look into the Bible with me and notice what he said about what he did. Verse one, he calls it transgression, which is rebellion. Verse two, he calls it iniquity, which is perversion, distortion, acting unjustly, dealing crookedly. Verse two, he calls it sin, which means to miss the mark. And verse four, he calls it evil, which is a vile thing, which deserves condemnation.
The Hebrew words are much more graphic than our words. What David said was, God, I want to tell you that I know what I did and what I did was really bad. There was no candy coating of his transgression. If you go back in Psalm 32 and verse five, you see what David said about this prayer after he had written it. He says, I acknowledged my sin to you and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. In Psalm 51, 17, we're told that the Lord honors a broken and a contrite heart. His confession was genuine.
He recognized that what he did was wrong. One of the things that keeps many of us from ever knowing renewed joy and in fellowship with God, knowing what it means to have the burden lifted is we're always trying to make our sin look better. We're always trying to put it in better terms.
We're always trying to couch it in ways so that we don't feel so badly about it. The only way you can ever get any relief from sin is to confess. And you know what the word means?
Amalageo in the Greek language means to say the same thing. It's to look at your sin and to say the same thing about it that God would say, to acknowledge you're wrong. You say, well, pastor Jeremiah, that's so painful and that's so hard, but it's the only way back. It's where you start through genuine confession.
Notice secondly, it was not only genuine, it was God centered. David said against the God and the only have I sinned. Now it's not that he does not understand that others have been affected. David hasn't suddenly lost his knowledge of what happened. He knows Bathsheba has been hurt in this, her purity taken away. He knows that Uriah is in the ground dead because of what happened.
He realizes that Joab has been complicated in his own integrity because of what he has done. He knows what's happened to him, but David said, Lord, it's against you and you only that I have sinned. David now sees that ultimately his sin is an insult and an injury to God. It is God's love that has been wounded. It is the God of grace against whom he has sinned. And when a person takes that attitude, that God's forgiveness is reckoned by his grace and his mercy and that sin is a sin against God.
First of all, he has taken a major step on his way back. Unfortunately, our concept of the holiness of God has been so eroded through our easy believe-ism in this day that people almost feel like that's the secondary problem. In fact, let me ask you this question. You do something big time and it involves other people and I give you the option today. Either confess it to the person you did it to, or confess it to God.
Which would you take? Easy. Confess it to God. I mean, you can do that in a quiet little prayer and nobody knows, but if you understood who God was, you wouldn't feel that way.
You say, what are you talking about? What I'm talking about is we are all into worship and thank God that we are. I love to worship, but sometimes if we're not careful, we can get so caught up in the mechanics of worship that we forget who it is that we're worshiping. Who God is. His attributes, his love, his faithfulness, his goodness, his holiness, his righteousness.
The worship is secondary to the object of our worship and David understood that. So when he confessed, he said, Lord, I know that this is basically an offense against you. Well, when he confessed, something great happened and let me hold out this hope for all of us today.
Nothing we have ever done. I mean, David, I mean, he did the biggies, adultery, murder, cover up, and yet I want to tell you something. David took the route back. His conviction promoted a confrontation which brought out of him a confession and now we're going to see the cleansing that takes place in his life. The same intensity of words that David uses to talk about his sin, he now uses to describe the forgiveness and I want you to notice these as you look at Psalm 51. He says, first of all, that he wants his sin to be blotted out.
He sees his sin as a record against him in the archives of heaven and he says, Oh God, blot it out. Just take a pen. You know, sometimes when I'm working out a manuscript or something, I'll get one of these big markers, you know, these big black markers.
They make huge black marks. If you want to take out a whole sentence, you just take that black marker and you just go across like this. You don't have to do it twice.
It wipes out a whole sentence. David said, God, what I want you to do is this. I want you to take your marker and blot my sin out of the archives of heaven. Then he said, God, I want you to wash away my sin. He sees a sin as a stain upon his soul. He says, God, take your precious blood and just wash all this sin away. And then he says, Lord, I want you to cleanse me. Verse two. And the technical term that he uses in verse two is the term for the cleansing of a leper. And it's the term that was used to declare that a leper had been cleansed. He said, God, take away the leprosy of my soul. And then notice down in verse seven, this is an incredible insight from the scripture. He prays that he would be purged with hyssop.
Do you know what that was? A purging with hyssop was what a Jewish person had to do after he came in contact with a dead body. It was an Old Testament ritual that was prescribed in the law. The Jews had an intense abhorrence to death and the law provided that after you had come in contact with a dead body, you had to go through this process. You had to go through this ritual cleaning, the purging with hyssop. And David said, God, I've come in contact with the dead body.
I'm the cause of that death. And I believe that he was talking about Uriah and he said, God, please wash me clean. And then in that phrase, he employs a verb that's formed from the word sin. And if we used it in our language, look down at it, it would say, purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. And when he says that, he uses his term, he says, purge me with hyssop and I shall be unsinned. He said, God, unsin me. I never thought of that phrase before. I don't think that's the way we talk today, but boy is it graphic. Oh God, unsin me.
Anybody ever feel like that? Just unsin me, Lord. Purge me and cleanse me and take away my sin. So no wonder David said in Psalm 32 one, blessed is the man.
Happy is the man who goes through this process. David looks back on it and he makes this judgment in Psalm 32. He says, I've been through this. I've been through the sin. I've been through the overwhelming anguish in my soul.
I've had somebody come and tell me I'm the one and I've had to come and ask you to forgive me. And you've taken my sin away. You've blotted it out. You've washed it clean. You've unsinned me, God.
And I want to tell you I'm on the other side of it now. And oh, how blessed is the man who has been forgiven. All God's people said, amen. If you've been forgiven, you know what David's talking about. He had the answer to his prayer. God did indeed restore unto him the joy of his salvation. And I want to just tell you today, my friends, that the great good news of the gospel is we have a forgiving God. And that when we come clean with God, when we come to him and open our hearts up to him and tell him what's happened in our heart, God does hear us and he forgives us. And the word of God is replete with references to the forgiveness of God. Psalm 86 five says for you, Lord, are good and ready to forgive and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon you. Psalm 103 says for as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward those who fear him as far as the east is from the west. So far has he removed our transgressions from us. Oh, I could give you dozens of other verses that just continually say, God forgives, God forgives, and he will forgive you.
He's just waiting for you to come and ask him. Now I wish there was some way I could make this clearer to you because the sense of sin is so great that if we don't have a comparable sense of the awesome forgiveness of God, we can leave burden down, but you don't have to do that. I read about a nun who went to a Bishop for confession. And one day the nun told this Bishop that Christ had revealed himself to her in person. And the Bishop, understandably doubtful, said to her, well, I have some instructions for you. The next time Christ appears to you, I want you to ask him about the sins of the Archbishop. And the nun said, of course, I'll be happy to. So the next time in a period of confession, the Bishop said to the nun, well, did you ask Christ about the sins of the Archbishop? And she said, yes, I did, Father. And he replied, what did he say?
The nun answered. He said, I've forgotten them. And he has. That's the good news of forgiveness.
He puts them behind his back as far as the East is from the West. He buries them in the deepest sea and he forgets what he forgives. And yet there's a postscript. And if I'm going to be an honest pastor and an honest teacher, I need to tell you the postscript. The Lord will not erase history. And sometimes there are things which are set in motion while we are out of fellowship with God that are a matter of cause and effect. And we have to reap what we sow.
Even when we have been restored to fellowship out of the forgiveness process, sometimes we have to pay the piper. Katherine Powers in the US News and World Report story about her, there was this little paragraph. After all these years, it's hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for. The children who lost a father, the family who lost a daughter, the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the 60s. And there are other suffering now. Her husband who she met while she was running with a wife who is now in jail. The son that was born to her while she was a fugitive now without his mother. Even with the best intention, said the article, some things can never be made right.
And that's the awesome picture that's real, isn't it? In fact, when David responded to Nathan and Nathan said to him, thou art the man and David got angry. He said, whoever did that's going to die and he's going to restore fourfold.
How could he possibly have known how prophetic he was? Because that's exactly what David did. He gave back fourfold.
Let me tell you briefly what happened. The child that was conceived and born to Bathsheba died. Shortly after that, David's daughter Tamar was raped by his son. David didn't judge that, didn't take care of it. He should have stepped in as a father and said what needed to be said and taken judgment on his own son and punished him. But how could David do that?
His credibility as a father had been shot. Third thing that happened was Absalom found out about Tamar was so incensed at what had happened to her that he went and murdered Amnon. And then Absalom got caught up in a power struggle with his father, tried to start a coup in the kingdom, took half of David's people and left and had David forced out of the kingdom. And then later you see Absalom hanging from a tree by his hair and he's dead. And the most anguishing cry in the whole story of David is this father on the news of his son Absalom. And you just can hear the weeping in his voice as you read it in the pages of the scripture. Oh, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom, my son.
So there are consequences. And you know, friends, I wish I didn't have to say that. I wish there's some way I could just say, you know, if you just come back to God and he'll forgive you and that's important and it's good to have the guilt gone, but he doesn't just take his magic brush and take away everything that happened while you were walking away from him. You may not want to hear it, but if I'm going to be faithful to you as your pastor, you need to hear it.
It's the truth. So there's two things that I think we need to say as we close our Bibles and as we think about that, and I just want you to listen to them carefully. There's two impossibilities that if we don't get these messages, we won't hear what God wants us to hear. The first impossibility is this, and listen up, especially young people and all of you who may be on the threshold of going down a road that you think you have carefully protected yourself from. Listen to me, impossibility number one, it is impossible to get away with sin.
You can't do it. The Bible says it this way, be sure your sin will find you out. Oh, you say, Pastor Jeremiah, no one's ever going to know about this.
Nobody. I mean, we've covered this up. I mean, nobody, I mean, there's only two of us that know. Well, if only one of you knows, that's enough. Catherine did her best to cover it up and she managed for 23 years to keep it from everybody else.
Even her husband didn't know at first, but she knew, and that's why it got out. You know, we have this idea today, this idea that God's a big grandfather up in the sky kind of just pats us on the head. Listen, you can do what you want to do. As I've said to you before, you can get your kicks, but you got to take the kickbacks with them.
Amen. So I just want to tell you as faithfully as I can, don't think you're going to be the one who will get by with it because you won't. You won't do it.
Nobody ever does. But there's another impossibility that's good news, and I want you to listen up. You may have messed up.
Who of us here can look at another and say, I haven't ever had to come back and ask for the cleansing and the hyssop. We all have. And you may have messed up, but maybe you're in the midst of it right now.
Let me tell you the next impossibility. Yes, it's impossible to get away with sin, but it's also impossible to get away from the love of God. And you may think that because of what you've done, God doesn't love you anyway.
Don't you think that? The very fact that he brought you here is an evidence that he loves you. And if you have gotten into a situation where you don't want anybody to know what you've done and you say, it's bad, pastor, I want to tell you something.
I don't care how bad it is. God loves you. And if you're one of his children, he will come after you and he will keep after you and he will come in every way he can to draw you back. You may have to feel some of the sting of what you've done before you open up and take note of it. But I want you to understand today that just as surely as you cannot get away with sin, you cannot get away from God's love.
You cannot. He loves you with an everlasting love. Now, many of us as parents have not had to on occasion as I did once take hold of a child by the shoulders and say, I don't care what you're doing or what you think you're doing, but I want to tell you something, no matter what you do, I will never stop loving you.
Never. And if I'm like that as a human father with my imperfections, I want to tell you, that's the way God is. He will never stop loving you.
You may be unlovable, but he will never stop loving you. I read this week a little thing that I want to share with you as we close. It's in a book by Ruth Harms Culkin. It's a little book called Lord, Don't You Love Me Anymore? And she tells a story kind of in a poetic way of a conversation she had with a little boy, seven year old boy.
This is what she wrote. He is seven years old and he's my friend. His eyes are merry and his hair is short and his nose is covered with freckles. And on a cold rainy day, we sat on the floor eating hot buttered popcorn.
The popcorn went down quickly, but the question came out slowly. If I told a lie today, would God stop loving me? Well, no, of course not David. Well, if I told two lies or three, would he stop loving me then? No, but you'd be unhappy in your heart. What if I punched Johnny in the nose and made his nose bleed real hard? Would God stop loving me then?
No, but you better not try it. What if I threw a rock and broke your window? Would God stop loving me then?
No, but you'd have to work to pay for it. What if I stepped on the snails and ate all your flowers? Would God stop loving me then? Not for a minute, David. Well, when would God ever stop loving me? David, not until there is no more earth and no more heaven and no more God then it's never going to happen no matter what. That's right, David. Even if it sometimes feel like it might, it's never going to happen no matter what.
And that's the good news. God loves you. And the reason you have that hurt in your heart right now is because you're God's and he doesn't want you out of fellowship with him.
And you're never ever going to have it back the way it should be until you come clean. And David's given you the formula, hasn't he? He's given you the plan. You can even borrow his prayer if you like. But whatever you do, my friend, don't go on living unforgiven. He waits for you with wide open arms and he will accept you back if you'll come. Amen. Amen. The God of forgiveness is the God I know who I'm introducing him to you if you do not know him.
And here's the best news. The way you get to know God is through the process of forgiveness. You come to him and you say, Dear God, I know I have sinned and I have violated your holy standards.
I have grieved you and I ask you to forgive me. And when you ask him to do that in your prayer, simply as you know how, he will do it. He's never turned anyone away. He's not going to turn you away. He's going to hear you and he's going to forgive you.
And you're going to know it in your heart almost immediately. There's nothing like the joy and relief of being forgiven. Once you put your trust in Christ, talk to somebody you know who's a Christian. Go to a good Christ honoring church. Continue to listen to programs like this that will build you up and strengthen you. Send us a note and we'll send you a couple of books that we've prepared for people when they make this decision to put their trust in Christ.
They're free. We'll send them to you absolutely. And we'll pray for you too because we know this is an important moment.
When you look back over your life, this will be viewed as one of the most important moments in your life when you made peace with God and found divine forgiveness. Well, as I mentioned earlier, we're taking time away for the weekend. We'll be on the radio on the weekend. We'll be on television on the weekend. And we'll be right back here on Monday to talk about why we should be thankful.
Why is gratitude so important as a part of the Christian attitude? We'll talk about that on Monday. Have a great weekend, friends, and we'll see you next time on This Good Station. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor, Dr. David Jeremiah.
We'd love to hear how Turning Point is impacting your life. Write and tell us at Turning Point, Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. Or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of our 14-month 2021 calendar, Colors of Creation, highlighting God's breathtaking handiwork.
It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your favorite smart device or search in your app store for the keywords Turning Point Ministries for instant access to our programs and resources. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hoogford. Join us Monday. As we continue God, I need some answers. Here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-03-10 13:41:19 / 2024-03-10 13:51:34 / 10