“Real help for real people (#2): Unfathomable forgiveness”
RUMC 6/16/2016
“EVERYONE HAS FOUND OUT WHAT YOU ARE
DOING.”
Noel Coward, the famous English
playwright, pulled an interesting prank. He sent an identical note to twenty of
the most famous men in London. The anonymous note read simply, "Everybody
has found out what you are doing. If I were you I would get out of town."
Supposedly, all twenty men actually
left town.
What if you opened your mail one day
and found such a note? What would race through your mind? The income you failed
to report on your 1040? The time you spent on the internet watching
pornography? The expense account you inflated? The lies you told about a
neighbor? Some secret relationship you have? The abuse that happens in your
home? The shameful thoughts you hide?
How’s your stomach right now? A little
queasy? That’s guilt.
Guilt is fear of the past. Fear that someone will find out about
something you did or didn’t do… maybe yesterday, maybe many years ago. It is
like spiritual phantom pain; like the pain an amputee feels after the loss of a
limb. There is nothing there to hurt, but it hurts anyway.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister studied
guilt in 1991 and discovered that the average person spends approximately two
hours a day feeling guilty. And for 39 minutes of that time, people feel
moderate to severe guilt. We are told that a significant amount of mental
illness can be attributed to unresolved guilt.
Therefore, guilt can be a great crippler. But
today I also want you to understand that guilt can be a great motivator. That
is the real purpose of guilt. Just as physical pain tells us that we have put our
hand somewhere it ought not be- like a car door just as it closes- guilt is a
gift from God that tells us that we have strayed beyond what is right, or good,
or legal, or loving. Guilt calls us to stop, go back, and repair the damage we
have done. Or sometimes it pushes us to do things that we know we should have
done, but didn’t. From that perspective, guilt is a good gift from God helping
us to be the best we can be.
Whether Guilt is helping us or hurting
us, at some point we have to deal with it.
Today in this series on the Psalms,
“real help for real people” we come face to face with guilt. We don’t like to
admit that we feel guilty but the truth is that we all carry guilt about one
thing or maybe a hundred things. I do, and I am very certain that each of you
do too. So what do we do with that?
Tradition associates Psalm 51 with a
time in King David’s life when he was dealing with big time guilt.
David had good reason to feel guilty.
He was the greatest king in the history of Israel. He was, undoubtedly, the
most successful and one of the most respected. But he was not perfect. Far from
it. The most egregious sin of his life was the triple sin of lust, murder, and
adultery. David spotted Bathsheba bathing on her roof. HE thought she looked
awfully good. He probably thought something like, “how could something that
beautiful be bad for me?” (Sin #1 lust) He sent for her and they were intimate.
(Sin #2 adultery)
Before long, Bathsheba sent a message
back to David that she was pregnant. (Busted!) For David, guilt had already set
in. AT this development, however, his guilt caused him to make things worse by
trying to cover it up. (You have never tried that have you?) He called
Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, back from battle and tried to cover up the mess he
made. When that didn’t work, he had Uriah killed. (Sin #3 murder). That’s three
strikes- you’re out!… As we read in Psalm 34, David’s guilt was overwhelming,
“like a burden too heavy to bear" And it was compounded by the death of
the child he had conceived with Bathsheba.
You know that feeling. We all do to one
degree or another. Maybe your sin does not compare to David’s triple-header.
Maybe it does. But we all know the terrible weight of guilt on our shoulders…
and we all know that when we feel that weight, we want nothing more than to
have someone take that weight from us. We instinctively know that we need
forgiveness
There are several Psalms that we call
“Penitential Psalms.” They each teach us about guilt and forgiveness. They each
deserve to be studied, but I have selected Psalm 51 for our study today, in
part because I received an email questions about it the other day.
Psalm 51 starts out with an important assumption. It is built on the
foundation of God’s steadfast love and abundant mercy. In other words, it
starts with the presupposition that God in the business of forgiveness. That’s
great news because that means when we come to God with our guilt, we are not
asking God to do something that God does not already want to do. No! What we
are actually doing, coming to God who is in the business of forgiveness, and
opening ourselves to that healing power and transformative grace. We are simply
asking God to do what he does best.
God wants to forgive, but we are not always in a position to receive. So
Psalm 51 describes what I want to call 5 movements… not steps… not
instructions. But 5 movements of the heart that together move us into position
to receive the forgiveness we need and want.
On our journey toward forgiveness, the first movement described in Psalm
51 is movement toward ACCEPTANCE. The first movement is getting to the point
where we can say with the Psalmist, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is
ever before me.” It is movement toward accepting personal responsibility.
When we feel the knot in our stomach
that we identify as guilt, we have two choices. Deny it or accept it.
Unfortunately, for many of us, denial
has become a way of life. We justify our sin, we blame someone else, or we make
excuses. “I didn’t do it.” “I didn’t mean to do it.” “The devil made me do it.”
Or “he deserved it.” These are the kinds of people who, in the middle of a
heart attack, will insist that it is just the SUPER GRANDE BURRITO they just
ate. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are having a heart attack, and
their denial just might cost them their life. Denying our guilt and sin does
not make guilt and sin go away. In fact, that denial just might cost us our
soul.
David, on the other hand, felt the pain
of guilt. He was haunted by the knowledge of the evil he had done. Bu the
ACCEPTED that he had done wrong and he ACCEPTED responsibility. Hence he
writes, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”
The option of denial moves us away from
God’s forgiveness. The option of ACCEPTING our sin and guilt is the only option
that moves us toward forgiveness. There can be no blaming, no excusing, no
denying, and no justifying. If we want forgiveness, we must ACCEPT our sin and
ACCEPT our responsibility. Moving toward ACCEPTANCE is moving toward
forgiveness.
The second movement in the Psalm is toward UNDERSTANDING. When we sin,
we have to understand what we have done. One of the ways that we minimize sin
is we tend to view it as only being against other people. That’s why we are
confused when we read, “Against you (God), you alone, have I sinned, and done
what is evil in your sight,” I don’t believe David is minimizing the sin
against Bathsheba, Uriah, and his own family. David understands what many of us
do not: that the ripples of sin extend farther than we think. We have to
UNDERSTAND that it is not just those around us that we hurt. The damage does
not stop at the person about whom we gossip, or the person from whom we steal…
it is not just our spouse and our children who are injured by our
transgressions.
We have to UNDERSTAND that (in addition
to hurting other people) every sin is an act against the glory of God. Every
sin denies God’s existence. Every sin is a quest to overthrow God’s thrown.
Every sin is an affront to our relationship with God.
When I was a young driver, I was being
careless and slid on some ice into a tree. I was OK, but the car was not. The
owner of the tree helped me push my 67 Impala to the curb. And wasn’t worried
about the scar I had put on his tree. All of that was easy compared to the next
step. You see I was only one block from home. That long walk home to tell my
dad what had happened was the longest block of my life. It wasn’t his tree. It
wasn’t his car; he had given it to me. It wasn’t his accident. But ultimately,
I UNDERSTOOD that I had let him down. Similarly, ultimately we have to
UNDERSTAND every sin hurts God.
Moving toward UNDERSTANDING the true
depth of our sin, is moving toward forgiveness.
The third movement toward forgiveness in Psalm 51 is facing the
CONSEQUENCES of our sin. We may need to make amends, seek human forgiveness, or
accept the human consequences for our sin. According to the law, had David not
been king, he would have faced at least two capital charges. Being human, David
still had to face up to the damage he had done to his family and Bathsheba’s
family. David did not try to sidestep the CONSEQUENCES of his sin. He never
tried to avoid it. In fact, he tells God, “You are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.” In other words. “I deserve whatever I
get.”
Our journey toward forgiveness must
include a movement toward facing the CONSEQUENCES of our sin. God, of course,
is in the business of forgiveness but that does not mean we don’t have to
repair broken relationships, or make amends for the evil we have done, or do
the time that goes with our crime. God does not protect us from the personal,
relational, and legal consequences for our sin. .
David accepted the consequence of his
behavior. The son he conceived with Bathsheba would die in infancy. David faced
the earthly CONSEQUENCES, grieved his son’s death, and then got up and asked
for God’s forgiveness.
Moving
toward accepting and dealing with the very real CONSEQUENCES of our sin, is
moving toward forgiveness.
The fourth movement in our journey to
forgiveness is a commitment to CHANGE. In religious language, we are talking
about repentance. It is a commitment to change directions, a commitment to
change behavior, a commitment to not sin again.
The Psalmist prays to God “teach me
wisdom in my secret heart.” In other words, teach me how to change in the
deepest parts of myself so that I will be more like God, and will not sin
again.
Patrick Morley writes that the church's
integrity problem is in the misconception "that we can add Christ to our
lives, but not subtract sin. It is a change in belief without a change in
behavior. It is revival without repentance."
Confession and forgiveness do no good
if we turn around and do the same thing again. Committing to CHANGE is moving
toward forgiveness.
Finally… finally… finally… finally, after moving toward forgiveness by
ACCEPTING our guilt, UNDERSTANDING how we have harmed God, facing the
CONSEQUENCES, being committed to CHANGE we are ready for the last movement:
CONFESSION.
Too often we think that CONFESSION is all
there is. Confession without ACCEPTING responsibility for our sin is empty.
Confession without UNDERSTANDING the ripple effect of our sin is useless. Until
we have made every effort to clean up our mess and face the CONSEQUENCES of our
sin confession is a waste of time. If we are not committed to CHANGE, then
confession is premature.
CONFESSION, however, is essential. I
John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us
our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
Why do we need to CONFESS? If God knows
us better than we know ourselves, doesn’t God already know our sin? Yes. But
confession is not for God’s benefit, but ours. Yes, God already knows, but it
is like an infection that is killing us from the inside out. We must take all
the guilt that is inside of us, and honestly, and humbly, admit our
powerlessness as we lay it out for God to see in confession. Then the healing
can begin.
Movement toward CONFESSION is movement
toward forgiveness.
There you go. If you heart sank when I started
out saying, “EVERYONE HAS FOUND OUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING.” The good news is that
we haven’t… yet… and the even better news is that in the heart of God there is
a solution for the guilt that weighs so heavily upon us.
These 5 movements ACCEPTANCE,
UNDERSTANDING, CONSEQUENCES, CHANGE, AND CONFESSION moves us closer to the
heart of God and closer to forgiveness. And in God’s heart forgiveness is not
just saying “that’s OK,” or “Forgive and forget,” or whitewashing the past. In
God’s heart, we are not fixer uppers. God is not in the business of repair, or
patching us up and sending us out.
Notice there are different terms used
there. "Create in me a clean heart, O God. And put a new and a steadfast
spirit within me." Something is different there. There is talk of newness,
of new creation. This is not the language of cleansing the old, or patching up
the broken, or using duct tape and bailing twine to put us back together. No.
When God forgives us, God creates something new something permanent. Something
beautiful. Something perfect. Something free,
Paul Writes, “So if anyone is in
Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see,
everything has become new!”
The chains of guilt are broken and you
are a new creation. The chains that have held you in bondage and fear of the
past are broken and you are a new creation. The Chains that have trapped you in
the bondage of your sin are gone… gone forever and you are a new creation.
The song says My chains are gone, I've
been set free, My God, my Savior has ransomed me
And like a flood His mercy reigns,
Unending love, amazing grace
Let that be your song as we sing it
today.
AMEN
