"Standing Tall Against the Fear of Skeletons in the Closet"
Sermon Transcript for August 3, 2003By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
Today we are going to talk about fears again; continue our series
for this summer. And today it is the fear of “skeletons in the closet”. Now
we all, probably, if we are honest with ourselves, have some sort of skeletons
in the closet--maybe little bitty ones or great big ones or a whole bunch of
them. You know what those are, don’t you? Skeletons in the closet refer to
those painful, dark things in our hearts. They include our secret sins from
the past and even some secret sins from the present. Do the words “shame,
hiding, or fear” link your thought process to any particular skeletons in your
closet? Is there anything that needs to be confessed before God?
If there is, then I want you to listen carefully for the next few minutes as we look at Psalm 32 as David, the Psalmist in this case, teaches us some important things about receiving God’s forgiveness and all the great benefits that come with living in God’s grace. I hope today that we will be able to uncover some of our skeletons in our closet and that we will be able to confess them before God and then receive God’s gracious forgiveness. So let’s begin then, as we look at Psalm 32, first with versus 1 and 2. Here these words, “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit.” Now that second verse is your memory verse for this week. And I’ve given it to you in the bulletin in “The Message” translation so let’s look at that together and I ask that you read it aloud with me so that we can begin the process of committing it to memory. “Count yourself lucky – God holds nothing against you and you’re holding nothing back from Him.” Now think about what you just said. If you take nothing else away this morning, take that good news away. God holds nothing against you and you are holding nothing back from God.
What does that teach us? Blessed are those who have a clean slate before God. Happy are those who don’t have skeletons in their closet. Happy are those who have received all of God’s graciousness and forgiveness. God is in the forgiving business and we forget that sometimes. But that goes all the way back to the very beginning of the Bible. You remember in Exodus, I’m sure, that Moses had quite a rocky relationship with the Lord and yet the Lord said this to him, “He passed in front of Moses and said, ‘I am the Lord, I am the Lord, the merciful and gracious God. I am slow to anger and rich in unfailing love and faithfulness. I show this unfailing love to many thousands by forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion.” God revealed that to Moses and then as we’ll see as we look at Psalm 32 he revealed it very carefully to David and he revealed it to all of us, to the whole world, through His Son Jesus, our Lord.
The verses of Psalm 32 are going to show us some very important aspects of God’s love and forgiveness—that he forgives rebellion, that he puts our sin out of sight, and that he clears our record of sin. The Apostle Paul was so convinced that he used these very words of the Psalmist in his letter to the Romans to assure us that that happens through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. You know, that kind of forgiveness is like waking up from a bad dream. Have you ever had a bad dream that was so awful that when you woke up in a cold sweat and finally realized it was just a dream, there was such a great sense of relief in knowing that you were going to be okay? That’s what it’s like to receive God’s gracious forgiveness. It’s like waking up from a bad dream.
I once heard a story about a seminary student who was participating in an “Urban Ministries” class in Chicago. And the class met each week in a different location around the city where they learned from ministers and caregivers in the various Christian ministries. And on one particular week the instructor asked the class to meet in the traffic court downtown. They all speculated as to what sort of ministry would be going on in traffic court. Well, the truth is the instructor told them, when they arrived, he had a ticket to pay. And that’s why they were meeting there. But they all learned a really profound lesson that wasn’t expected that evening because in a somewhat peculiar act of grace the judge said that everyone who had bothered to show up that night (about 100) that their slate had been cleaned, their fines were forgiven. They were not going to have to pay the penalty. Just because they showed up! Now, the judge didn’t say to those people that they weren’t guilty. He did not say that they had not committed the crime that brought them to that court to pay the penalty. He simply chose, as an act of graciousness, to forgive them. He wiped the blot from their record and excused the penalty that they deserved. So that everyone walked out of that traffic court that night with a smile on their face.
Let’s continue now, looking at versus 3 and 4. “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” Can you sense David’s agony as he is trying to bear up against the sin that he is holding to himself? He couldn’t live with what he had done. And the truth is, we shouldn’t be able to either. If we are harboring some sin in our hearts, I hate to say this, but I hope that it is gnawing at us and causing a certain kind of agony because it is a reminder that we need to be right with God.
Not long before she died a rather well known secular humanist author named Marghanita Laski said something that surprised people in a television interview. She said, “What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness; I have nobody to forgive me.” In Psalm 32 we really get a sense of David’s great relief. He says, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away, but when I received God’s great forgiveness, what joy I experienced.” You can really get a sense of what the transformation was like when you look at the translation from “The Message”. “When I kept it all inside, my bones turned to powder, my words became daylong groans. The pressure never let up; all the juices of my life dried up.” I like that phrase, “All the juices of my life dried up”.
Could it be that when you are living in some sort of sin or harboring some kind of sin that you feel as though you are just drying up from the inside out? And yet the Psalmist assures us that the answer is simple. We must confess. Confession is the key to forgiveness. Listen to verse 5, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” Here it is, friends, the secret to forgiveness in one word—confess. The way to get rid of the sin is to say something like this to the Father, “Father I have sinned; please forgive me.” We’re not to conceal the sin. We are not to withhold it from God. Perhaps the reason the Psalmist says that he was drying up from the inside out was because this sin that he harbored inside was like a cancer and the only way to purge it, the only effective way to stop the progression of the cancer of sin was to confess it and thus remove the sin. And when we do, God promises to forgive us. In a sense God says, “Tear up your traffic ticket, I’m letting you go.”
However, some of us struggle with not letting it go. Some of us still feel guilty even after we have been forgiven. Now, I want to step aside from the text for just a second because I want to say that I understand that for most of us here the kind of sins we might be talking about aren’t so big in the world sense of the word. I realize that all of us watch the news and we can hear about horrible sins, terrible cruelty; but in God’s economy sin is rebellion against Him, to simply choose to do something other than God’s will. And of that we can all be guilty; we are all guilty. Billy Graham always says in his crusade sermons, “Somewhere along the line, sin is something we are all guilty of because if we’ve ever told a lie, if we’ve ever cheated, if we’ve ever done anything that we’d rather God didn’t see, we’ve sinned.” So we can all hear the words of the Psalmist about sin.
So getting back to this let me just say that if you have confessed your sin before God, if you’ve lifted that before God and given it over to Him, you’ve got to let go! You know, this is a very personal thing to me. And if you’ve listened to me pray in this sanctuary over the last three years, you’ve often heard me say, “Lord, I’m laying it at the alter and leaving it there.” Because I have learned in my own journey that coming to God’s alter and confessing before Him is pretty meaningless unless you sacrifice something there. We don’t make blood sacrifice on our alter anymore; that’s been taken care of. What we do, however, is to give over those things that we hold in us that poison us. We lay those on the alter on that place of sacrifice and we leave them there in God’s hands.
Look at it this way, suppose you are in a traffic accident here in Franklin. If you are the main cause of…you ran a red light and broad sided a lady in a brand new Cadillac, you’re guilty. You know it; you know it was your bad judgment. You were looking at something else. You ran through the light; you hit her car. Thankfully she’s not hurt although when she got out she was holding her neck just in case. You did it; you’re guilty! And when you stand before the judge in court, he throws the book at you. He declares you guilty; and you know it’s true. But then something peculiar happens because as you leave the courthouse you look at the documents that have been given to you and you see in very bold letters “All fines paid in full”. To your surprise you read on and find that all of the property damages have been covered, all the lost wages have been covered, all the court costs have been covered, and your penalties have been covered. And this seems very strange to you because you know that you are guilty and you know that you have no insurance and you don’t have a whole lot to offer but this lady could have easily taken it all from you. But someone has paid your debt! And you find out later it was the judge, for some unknown reason, who paid your debt. Now as the years go by, every now and again you see a red light or a Cadillac and you remember that big mistake and you want to feel guilty about it but you remember that it is in the past now and it has been forgiven and that the penalty has been paid. And if you are really struggling to remember that, you can always pull out the court document and read it again in bold, red letters, “All debts paid.”
And it is exactly that way with us and our Lord. Your sins have been paid for. Jesus died on the cross. The one perfect person who never sinned has taken upon Himself the burden of all of our sins. He has suffered the penalty that we rightly deserved. And if we are tempted to forget, if we come to that point where we want to feel guilty again for those things that we confessed before God, we only have to open our Bibles. And if yours is like mine, it’s in red ink! You are forgiven. Jesus said it himself. You are forgiven. It is so essential that we recall not only the need to confess but also the fruits of confession which is the peace of mind that comes from being totally forgiven.
And the greatest benefit that comes from this process of confession and remembering constantly that we are forgiven, is that we walk in right standing with God. We are walking in rhythm with God. In Psalm 32, we are reminded of this in versus 6 and 7. “Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you [God] while you may be found; surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him. You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.” What a wonderful phrase that is, “You are my hiding place.” What a great comfort there is in knowing that God wants us to hide ourselves in Him to feel all of His protection and provision. Now, I’m not suggesting that bad things don’t happen to good people. I know better. But what I am sure of as I read this is if we confess our sins, accept God’s forgiveness, we can walk in harmony with God and feel this protection and provision in everything that happens in our lives. But we must confess the sin in order to feel that.
Let’s read on now, versus 8 and 9, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you.” We all want God’s guidance. We all want to experience God’s leading in our lives, but too many of us want to act like an old dumb mule and wait to be led along. God values a personal relationship with you. God does not desire that you should enter the kind of relationship with Him like that of a mule and his owner. God wants to partner with you in everything that you do in your life so that you are a child in the loving care of a father.
Let’s look at verse 10 now, “Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.” Now this isn’t to suggest that God doesn’t love the wicked. In fact, God saved all of us even as we were yet sinners. But it does help us to understand the point that I just tried to make that when we walk in harmony with God, we can feel His unfailing love around us in everything that we do. We are forgiven and righteous in God’s sight so that we are in step with God as we live day to day.
As I watch my own children grow up, and my oldest turned 18 just last week, I have been aware of my intense love for them even when we are not quite right with each other, even when they behave badly, you know, just doing the things that children do. Even when I have behaved badly, there’s still this incredibly intense love that I feel for them. And what’s beautiful is that when things are going well and they are obedient and thoughtful, and I am obedient to my heavenly Father and thoughtful about my children, why then there is this wonderful rhythm in the way that we live together, my children and me. And it makes it so free and easy for me to share all the love and blessings that I have to give to them. Now thankfully, God is so much, much, much more than a man like me and yet I can relate to this part of God’s nature as a father. And I do believe that this is how God wants it to be with us. That He would share His intense love with us, and that we would obey and be thoughtful about Him so that we are walking in rhythm and harmony with God all the days of our lives.
And, finally, the last verse of our Psalm, verse 11 says, “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!” The Psalmist is telling us that we live in joy that we are forgiven, that our traffic tickets have all been torn up so that we walk out of the courtroom happy! You know, I’m willing to bet you that that group of people in the story I told about the judge in Chicago all walked out of there ready to celebrate that night. I bet some of them were acting just a little silly, don’t you think? And don’t you know some Christians, I’ve been accused of this, who act a little silly some times? I think it’s because they are so happy, they just can’t help it! And I think that this is the joy the Psalmist is telling us about. Our sins are forgiven. We have constant reminders of the release that’s been brought our way. Not because we deserve it, but because it has been done on our behalf by Jesus. And so sometimes we ought to probably just jump up and down for joy. When’s the last time you did that? When’s the last time you felt this great sense of release and joy knowing that no matter how awful the world around you gets, the God of all creation has taken a personal interest in you and has forgiven your sins and has offered to be your personal hiding place. Now that should inspire some real joy.
And maybe one of the reasons that you are not feeling it today is because you need to confess something. And so as a response to God’s word today, I want us to take a few minutes to pray together. Now, Roger is going to play softly for us because the music helps us to focus our minds. It helps us to get centered. And I’m going to pray several little statements for you that end with a blank line. And as you hear the statement I want to ask you to just fill in the blank quietly there in your pew. And let’s see what God does among us right now. Let’s bow our heads now and pray.
O God, I am frightened because of needing to confess the sin of ____________________.
Jesus, I am making this appeal for mercy to you because __________________________.
My reasons for wanting to be forgiven are ______________________________________.
Thank you for scriptures that encourage me, like _________________________________.
What I believe your forgiveness can do for me is _________________________________.
Right now I receive your forgiveness and express my thanks in these words ___________.
In the future, to be a better friend to you, I want to _______________________________.
Thank you, Lord. Amen.
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