"Experience Complete Forgiveness"
Sermon Transcript for March 28, 2004
Scripture Reading: Ephesians 1:3-13
By Rev. Mike Beck
The movie, The Passion of the Christ, is having a powerful impact throughout our land. People are talking about it with friends and neighbors. I do want to reiterate what Reverend Dan said so beautifully to you last week. In fact, I’m looking over here at Letty Kasting, who with some blood pressure problems, she was talking to me about, “Reverend Mike, should I see this film?” And I said to Letty, “No, probably not.” It’s not a film for everyone. If you don’t see the film, as Dan said last week, know that that’s okay. But Dan reminded us last week, “But be sure to read the book! The story is there in all four gospels.”
But having said that, I would nevertheless encourage the vast majority of you to see the film for this reason: visual images have a powerful impact on us. We have had a tendency to sanitize the cross of Christ to where it is just a beautiful brass necklace that we may wear. Persons who have seen the film will never again be able to gloss over the extreme sacrifice that God paid in Jesus Christ for our salvation.
During these four weeks leading up to Easter, our sermon series is entitled “Experience the Passion” for we are encouraging you not just to go see a movie, but to understand in deeper ways what it was that God desires for us to “experience” through the passion of the Christ. Last week in the introductory message, Reverend Dan preached on the theme “Experience Pure Love”. When we look at the cross, although the film reminds us of the suffering of Christ in such a powerful way, I prayed that people as they left the theater would not be focusing on the suffering but instead would be saying to God, “What an awesome love that God had for me that Jesus was willing to pay that kind of price for me.” I was reminded of the hymn, the words of which are “What wondrous love is this? That caused the Lord of life to lay aside His crown, to bear the dreadful curse for my soul?” Next week we want to talk about the fact that God wants us to experience in the passion of Christ “Ultimate Wholeness”. There are many words and terms used for salvation but the one that I like the best is that because of what Christ has done for us, God wants me and God wants you to be whole in Christ. And then on Easter Sunday we are going to talk about the ability that we have to experience “Eternal Life” through the passion of Christ.
But this morning we want to focus on God’s desire that we experience in the cross “complete forgiveness”. There are three aspects of the forgiveness God wants us to have that I want us to focus on. First of all, God wants us in Christ to know the forgiveness of our sin. But there is more than that! Secondly, God wants us through the cross of Christ to be able to forgive ourselves. And then, thirdly, God expects us through the cross of Christ and what He has done for us to be willing to forgive others.
Forgiveness of our sin: So let’s think for a moment about the forgiveness of our sin that God wants us to have. In the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. That message drove people to their knees and caused them to cry out for God’s forgiveness. Contrast that to the attitude we have in our day about sin. So many people say, “There’s really no such thing as right and wrong. All ethics aren’t relevant to the situation.” Think about it, those of us especially who are getting a little older, the things that society tells us we should accept today as normal behavior contrasted to even 20, 30, or 40 years ago. So many people say, “Well, everybody is doing it. There’s nothing wrong with it unless I happen to get caught.” And the thing I have to be careful of, because Hollywood does it so slickly, is we’ll turn on the TV in the evening and maybe watch one of our popular sitcoms. And have you ever caught yourself, it’s so slickly done, laughing at what God has clearly called sin in the Bible?
Contrast those attitudes, too, as we look at the whole scripture what it has to teach us about the holiness of God. As we look at Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, almost every page of Scripture in one way or another talks about the seriousness of our sin. Consider the lives of people you know that have been destroyed because of the effects of sin. Scripture clearly teaches that although we may gloss over sin, sin is very serious business in the eyes of God. Sin separates us from God. It separates us from others. And it eventually leads to not only physical but spiritual death.
As I was preparing the message today, I thought of this image. Imagine that you are home this afternoon and a knock comes on the door. And you open the door, and lo and behold it is Jesus! And He asks if He might come in. You are glad to see Him. It’s very unexpected that He would knock on your door. You notice that He’s got a package. But you invite Him to the dining room table and you bring out the coffee and the snacks. Then you ask Him, “Well, Lord, why have you stopped by? What do you have in the package?” To which Jesus says, “Well, I brought today a complete set of DVD’s of every event in your life which we are going to watch together in the family room.” Are any of you nervous of what He is now saying? So you go back to the family room. You are a nervous wreck as the DVD’s are put in. But then there is a great surprise! All of the stuff that you were dreading to see that you knew were going to be on those DVD’s (they were a part of your life), all those things have been left out. All that you are seeing are those moments in which you have been living in harmony with God and with your neighbor.
And, friends, I think that’s why we call it the good news of salvation! That if we have acknowledged our sin, if we have acknowledged our need of God, if we have trusted in Christ and Christ alone for our salvation, all of those events in our life have been blotted out of that DVD.
Read with me these versus of Scripture that speak to that. First of all, I John 1:9 (read it with me), “If we confess our sin, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from ALL unrighteousness.” And notice that I’ve highlighted the word “all”. Not just the little stuff, but the big stuff as well. Read with me these words of David in Psalm 103 where he said, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” Those are words of David, we enjoy the psalms of David the great psalms of praise. David was a man who God said; “Here is a man after my own heart.” But do we remember the one who wrote these words, who said, “God has removed our sin as far as the east is from the west”, was an adulterer, was an accomplice to murder, but yet acknowledged his sin and experienced the forgiveness of God? I think of the words of the hymn, which say, “Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. But He washed it white as snow.”
One of the things that many people have acknowledged as they have watched the film, The Passion, is that it ultimately wasn’t the Romans that put Jesus to death. It ultimately wasn’t the Jewish leaders. They played a part in it. But it was my sin; it was your sin that nailed Him to the cross! And if I’ve got my story correct, the only place that you see Mel Gibson in the film is it is his hand holding the nail that is driven in to the hand of Jesus because he wanted to say by doing that, “It was my sin for which Jesus died”.
And so I ask you, have you received that gift of complete forgiveness that God wants to give to you? Let’s move on to an area that’s maybe a little harder than the first one.
Forgiving ourselves: God wants us to forgive ourselves. The title of the sermon this morning was “Experience complete forgiveness”. In terms of forgiving ourselves, we never ought to minimize the seriousness of our sin, the pain that our sin has caused God, the pain it has caused to others, the pain it has caused to ourselves. It is extremely important that we learn from our sin. The Scripture teaches that through the power of the Holy Spirit in us, God wants us with each passing day to become more and more like Christ. But at the same time, we mustn’t deceive ourselves that in this life we ever gain complete victory over sin.
And, friends, I’m confident that one of the enemy’s greatest tools to cause us to be defeated in our Christian life, to cause us to be unwilling to teach a Sunday School class or to work with our youth or serve Christ in some way, lies in our failure to forgive ourselves. We hear the enemy whispering in our ear, “Don’t you dare think you ought to be doing that! Don’t you know the sin that is in your life? You wait till you’ve got your life perfectly together and then you serve God.” Because he knows if he can get you to buy that, you’ll never serve God.
Think about the characters of Peter and Judas. There was Peter in the Upper Room when Jesus said, “You are all going to deny me.” And Peter said, “Well, the rest of these guys may, but Lord, I won’t.” And before the cock crowed in the morning, Peter had denied even knowing Christ three times. But with Peter, despite his sin, he received the forgiveness of God and became one of the great leaders of the early church. Contrast Peter with Judas who realized the awfulness of his sin, but do we realize that Jesus would also have forgiven Judas if he would have asked for it? But Judas couldn’t forgive himself and instead, in contrast to Peter, went out and hung himself and took his life.
Philippians 3:13-14, Paul says, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” We all fall short from time to time. That’s why we need to have memorized Romans 8:1. Read it with me: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Friends, if you are in Christ, you are forgiven—past, present, future. That’s why we call it “good news”! That’s why we call it the gospel! The question is, “Have you forgiven yourself?”
Forgiving others: And then, thirdly, this aspect of forgiving others is I think a part of forgiveness that we tend to overlook. Maybe it is the most difficult part of forgiveness because persons can do some incredibly evil, hurtful things to others. But if we don’t carry forgiveness to this critically important third level, the Bible says we make null and void what God desires to do for us. Take time this afternoon to read Jesus’ parable in Matthew 18 of the Unmerciful Servant. It’s very clear the importance of our forgiving others.
We almost every Sunday we say together the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses…” And what’s the next part? “…as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In Matthew 5 following the words we call the Lord’s Prayer, this is what follows. Read it with me: “If you forgive men when they sin against you, Your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the plainness of that.
But some of you are now thinking, “But Reverend Mike, you don’t know the depth of how much this person has hurt me!” And in no way would I want to minimize your pain. But in the film, The Passion of the Christ, we were shockingly reminded of the physical and the emotional pain that Jesus endured on the cross so that our sins might be forgiven. Yet once again Jesus modeled for us what pure love is all about when He said from the cross in the midst of that excruciating pain: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It seems like Jesus told us we had to take up our cross daily and follow Him. And maybe for many of us, the way we have to do that is in our willingness to forgive those who have hurt us so badly. But I want to say this about forgiveness. Does forgiveness mean we do not remember what’s been done to us? I don’t think so unless you live on a planet different than the one I live on. Some pain is far too great for us ever to be able to forget it. Does forgiveness mean just sloughing off the pain and the hurt with some glib, insincere words, “I forgive you”? No. Don’t settle for that. True forgiveness, friends, often involves years of honest struggle. And I’ve counseled with numerous people and said to them when they are struggling with forgiving others that all that God expects is our willingness to forgive. Acknowledging that we don’t have the power in our own strength to do that. That the only way we would ever forget is if God gives us the strength to do that.
But, friends, here’s what a willingness to forgive others looks like in the end. It means “freedom” instead of “bondage”. It means “life” instead of “death”. It means discovering a future where God in His grace is making “all things new” instead of wallowing in the self-pity of events that we have no power to ever be able to change.
And so as we think this morning about complete forgiveness, I need to ask you the question: Are you willing to receive complete forgiveness in the willingness to forgive others?
As God laid this message on my heart this week, I began to say, “How in the world through this Lenten season, can we experience in such a powerful way the passion of Christ and not extend to people some opportunity to spend some time in prayer? Persons can respond to God in a variety of ways. Here at Grace we are not in to manipulation, we are not in to extreme emotionalism. But yet throughout the ages of the church, one powerful expression of the seriousness of our commitment to God, is to simply humble ourselves by stepping out of our pew, coming to kneel here at the altar of prayer before God.
So I felt led this morning to extend a very broad invitation as we close the service today. There may be persons hearing my voice this morning that have never received God’s gift of salvation. You know about “religion”, but you’ve never moved it that six critically important inches from your head to your heart. And if you need to receive that gift of salvation, the invitation is for you to seal that commitment this morning. There may be others of you that you know Christ, but you know you haven’t been walking with Him as you should. The cares of the world have kind of taken over your life. Maybe you would like to spend time in prayer rededicating your life to Christ and His love. Maybe there are some who what you are struggling with you know God forgives you, but you haven’t been able to forgive yourself. And that’s a heavy burden to carry. Maybe it needs to be left right here this morning at an altar of prayer. And then for others the step in your journey of faith may be that struggle to forgive someone that has hurt you to the very core of your being. And you need to spend time in prayer with God about that. Jesus said, “Come to me all of you who are weary and burdened—burdened by sin, burdened by guilt, burdened by hurt and pain—and you need to receive the rest God wants to give.”
Friends, God is here. He wants to touch your heart with His love. We are going to give you as much time at this altar of prayer as you would like. The instructions are there in the bulletin, if you would like someone to pray with you. But when persons come to pray, sometimes I feel that I am interrupting. They are doing their business with God. We’re simply going to sing all the verses of that wonderful hymn of invitation. I am confident that there will be people that God leads to come and to pray. So when we have finished the hymn, Sarai will continue to play. I’ll just ask you this morning to leave quietly that people might continue to spend time with God. God loved us so much that He gave His only begotten Son. Died on a cross that we might know complete forgiveness. If He is speaking to you this morning, you come spend time with your loving Heavenly Father.
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