Sermon: "The God Who Forgives"

3rd in the "The God to Whom We Pray" series.
Delivered November 19, 2006 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

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Let's pray: Lord, thank you for this day, for your word, which is a lamp unto our feet, a light in to our path. We ask that as we look at Psalm 32 today that you would open our eyes and help us to see how great your grace is and your love and help us to respond by your Holy Spirit; in Jesus' name. Amen.

I am not going to read the Psalm actually today. I just am going to start talking about it as we go along and if you will open to page 395 in the red pew Bible you can find Psalm 32 on the bottom of that page. You can also follow as the words come up on the screen, but you will notice if you turn there that it says "a Psalm of David, a maskil." A maskil is a Psalm that is a wisdom provider. It's almost like a set of Proverbs more than a Psalm and a maskil is a Psalm that guides people into the way of success or skill in life.

If you will look at it, it starts out with the word "blessed" and that word just jumped off at me just to start out, and I thought to myself- I wonder how many Psalms begin with the word blessed? How many do you think? I am going to take a little straw poll. How many people think that more than ten Psalms start with the word blessed? Okay. How many think less than ten Psalms start with the word blessed? Okay. Notice how Pastor John shot up his hand, because unfortunately for him this is the third time he has to listen to this. Only six Psalms start with the word blessed. But there is only one Psalm in which the subject refers to God. The other five Psalms talk about the subject being a human being.

For instance, Psalm 1, "Blessed is the person who walks not in the council of the wicked." Psalm 41, " Blessed is the person who considers the poor or the weak." Psalm 119, Blessed is he or she whose way is blameless who walks in the law of the Lord." And then Psalm 112 and Psalm 128 essentially say the same thing, "Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord", but Psalm 32 is the only Psalm with a passive sense. All of the others are active. "Blessed is he or she whose transgression is forgiven, whose sins are covered." Do you know what that tells me? It tells me not only that God wants to forgive us. It tells me that God is the only one who can truly forgive us. A person may forgive an offense that we have done, but only God can take away what David describes as the guilt of our sins. Only God can take away the guilt of our sins. So he says, "Blessed is the person who the Lord does not impute iniquity to and whose spirits there is no deceit." This Psalm was so important to St. Augustine that he had it put on his bedroom wall in the days that he was dying and he would read it every single day as he was dying and then when he couldn't read it anymore, he had somebody read it to him. It was so important to him to remind him of the forgiveness that he had in Jesus Christ.

So it starts out blessed, you have heaven's approval. You are enjoying wholeness. You are to be congratulated. Blessed is the person whom God forgives and who knows it. Blesses is the person who is free from guilt, who has one of those five basic human needs met every day of their life. They are free from guilt. Not because of psychological counseling, as helpful as that is, but because the God of the universe has cleansed them from their sin and they know deep in their heart that it is so. Do you live with a sense of guilt? Maybe you don't live with a sense of guilt today, but maybe in the past you know what that's like. Maybe you do come here feeling like if people really knew how bad you were that you wouldn't be able to come here anymore. Is there some dark secret, some sin that you felt God could never forgive? I remember one time preaching another sermon on forgiveness to the congregation and a man came up to me, an elderly man and he said, "I can never forgive myself. Maybe God can forgive me, but I can never forgive myself." There is a disconnect there.

Maybe you have recently done something that is out of character and you find it hard to come to grips with or to believe that you have done that and you have a lot of dissidence in your mind. Well if any of those things are true, or if they ever will be true, then you need to be reminded of what's in Psalm 32 and the truth is this; that every person, every human being can be forgiven who holds and knows how to use the keys to God forgiveness. There are three keys and I am going to talk about them in a little bit, but after each one of these three keys, we are going to do something kind of like an interactive sermon, but after each of the keys that I mention, we are going to in some way try to emphasize that key by having another form of communication and you will see as we go. But it is just trying to help drive the points home through a response or a reflection.

Now, I want to talk about these keys, but I first want to look a few other verses in the Psalms, the first four that tell us why it is so important to use the keys and here is the reason; if you just look at the first two verses, even though in the New International Version it doesn't show this, there are four different Hebrew words for sin mentioned in the first two verses of Psalm 32. The first part of Verse 1; "Blessed is he whose transgression are forgiven." Transgressions mean rebellion or mutiny, like when a soldier fails to obey an order or a command. The second half of Verse 1 says, "Whose sins are covered." This is the word that we constantly use to say that sin means missing the mark. If perfection were the bulls eye and you missed the mark by one foot, that's the sin. That is what it says, when all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And then if you go to Verse 2 even thought NIV does not pick this up, in other translations it says, "Blessed is the man or woman whose in iniquity the Lord does not count against him." Iniquity means to twist away from God's path; to deviate from God's standard; to become crooked. We say that people are crooked because they constantly deviate from God's path. Then in the second half of Verse 2, "in whose spirit there is no deceit." There is another word for sin. In whose spirit there is no coverup attempt. There is no pretending to be upright on one's own. And so these four different words make a clear point, that by nature we are rebels who miss the mark and wander from the right path and then try to cover our tracks.

One of the subtle marks of our rebellious nature is that we are unaware of how much we have deviated from God's path. Our life appears perfectly normal from all external appearances. People think we are doing well, but inside there is something off centered. People who refuse to be reconciled with God through his gift of our Lord Jesus Christ can do many wonderful things. They can share with others. Sometimes they can even sacrifice themselves for others. But those who are not aligned with God through Christ there is one thing that they will not do. They will not dethrone themselves; they are never willing to dethrone themselves from whose in charge of their life.

A.W. Tozer put it this way.

"Sin has many manifestations, but its essence is one. We who are created to worship and serve God sit on the throne of our own selfhood and from that throne declare I am in charge. That is sin in its concentrated essence.

"Blessed," King David says "is the person who is aware of and cleansed of that attitude and its actions." Sometimes we are so dense when it comes to this. We don't realize our situation. I once read of a rock star who went through like 20 concerts not realizing, he thought he had a bout of the flu, he didn't realize that he had had a major heart attack. I don't know how he survived, but he finally got it checked. The point is that we misdiagnose our problem and the seriousness of it. And so, if you look in Verse 3 and 4 of Psalm 32 you see the symptoms of a person in denial.

"When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night you hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer." Selah

Do you notice on Page 396 it doesn't say it on the screen, but it says Selah? That means rest. That means stop and think about this for a minute. Your strength, my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. The Psalmist couldn't go through his days and his night with any sense of center. There was no rest. Worry derailed his concentration. Guilt sapped his energy. His physical health was affected. He was being torn up inside. In essence, he was responding to God, the pressure, see God loves us so much that he is not going to let us stay in a certain sinful state knowing that it's bad for us and so God leans on us. And in a sense the Psalmist here is responding to God in a dysfunctional way while all of this is going on.

I recently read a great definition of dysfunction. It's the exertion of effort in an area of need that causes more problems than it solves. In other words, when a person tries to face this area of need, a greater gap is created than what existed before they tried to do something. For instance, have you ever had a person come and apologize to you and it sounded good in the beginning, but by the time they left it was worse? Maybe people ended up yelling even though it started out a certain way? If you have ever taken a greasy rag to wipe a windshield, you realize that it would have been better if you hadn't done anything, because its worse after you try to do something. See that is why addictions are so dysfunctional, because we think that they are helping and they are making it worse. They are just causing the problem to be exacerbated. That is what dysfunction is and so dysfunctional relationships or when effort is made and you don't get into a clearer reality, it's a foggier reality.

Now, I think at one time or another that all of us can understand and relate to this. We try to pretend that everything is okay, but inside we've got a spiritual heart problem and we don't even know it. So I want to ask you, is God leaning on you today? I am not saying that every problem you have or every struggle that you have is caused by a poor spiritual connection, but sometimes that's exactly what the problem is. But the Psalmist aim is not to tell us about the power of sin. The Psalmist aim today is to tell us about the power of God and how God can take care of this insidious reality that haunts us all. Sin can be defeated but not by us, by God. And that is what the Psalmist is saying. Sin can be forgiven, covered and not imputed. When it says that God takes away our sin, it means that God will take away the penalty, he will remove the penalty for that sin. The scripture actually says, "I will remember their sins no more."

God promises to forget. And then when he says covered, it means concealed, a stain that mars or a scratch that mars is taken out. I used to work for a furniture company for a little while and I would take an end table and it was all marred and scratched and by the time this furniture restorer got through with it you though you were buying a brand new table. That's is what God says. Our sin gets like it wasn't even there. Or he says, "Blessed is the person to whom the Lord does not impute or count iniquity." That's a bookkeeping term. Blessed is the person to whom their account is not credited where it says under their name in God's book you owe. Blessed is the person who has the clean slate and clean ledger with God. That's the kind of thing that Psalm 32 is trying to tell us; that it can happen.

So here are the three keys that any person can use to experience Gods forgiveness. Imagine if you will a door with three dead bolt locks and you have three different keys and you have to use all three keys to get the door open. Here is the first key in 5A; then after all this struggle, "Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity." That's the first key, acknowledging, acknowledging. Now that may seem basic, but it's the first step and we must acknowledge that we have sinned before God, before we do anything else, because again we are masters of rationalization. We are naturally skilled in placing blame elsewhere believing problems can be fixed if we just try hard enough, which is what Jesus was trying to say to the Pharisees when they said, "If I can just try hard enough to keep the law, I will be made righteous before God." And he would come to them and say, "Listen guys, you look great on the outside, but inside it's like dead rotten stuff. You don't realize that there is an inside problem that I want to correct."

I noted in a magazine article that a couple wanted to ensure that their marriage would stand the test of time. It was the husband's third marriage. It was the wife's second. And so, they thought that the answer to their problems was a 16 page nuptial agreement and here are the specified details, just a few. They specified how often they would have sex, what time they would go to bed, which gasoline they would purchase. I am not making this up, and who would do the laundry. And the wife was quoted in the article saying, "This is a plan that we think will keep our marriage together for 50 or 60 years." I don't think so, because why? Because it is all on paper. It's all external. It's not, "okay let me think a minute. What was the cause of failure in the first relationship? What did I bring to the table that didn't allow that one to work?" That is the inner question. Acknowledgment is very similar to a sense of brokenness. It sees sin for what it really is. Self on the throne and all attitudes and behaviors of what the Bible calls sin are little more than life under our control. I acknowledge my sin. I didn't hide it. I said maybe the blame is in here.

If you have ever heard of the process of binning when a building has been destroyed by fire or smoke, there is a trade name of something called bin seal; that if wood has been smoke-damaged, that if you don't bin; what will happen if you just paint is that the paint will start to peel and the odor of smoke will come through. So you have to bin seal and that takes care of it. And sometimes the reason that we keep tripping over ourselves is because we don't deeply acknowledge the sin that is in our lives and our part in it. And so that is the first key; to underscore this step.

I want to ask Kathy Smith to come and present Psalm 32 in the Message translation and I want you to listen to how the message translation makes the Psalm flow as a way of underscoring this point.

"Congratulations. How happy you must be. You get a fresh start, your slate is wiped clean. Congratulations. God holds nothing against you and you are holding nothing back from him.

When I kept it all inside, my bones turned to powder, my words became daylong groans. The pressure never let up; all the strength of my life dried up. Then, I let it all out; I said, "I will make a full accounting of my failures to God."

Suddenly the pressure was gone, my guilt dissolved, my sin disappeared.

These things add up. Every one of us needs to pray; when all hell breaks loose and the dam bursts, we will be on high ground, untouched.

God's my island hideaway, He keeps danger far from shore. He throws garlands of Hosannas around my neck.

Let me give you some good advice; I am looking you straight in the eye and giving it to you straight. "Don't be like the horse or the mule that needs bit and bridle to stay on track." God-defiers are always in trouble. God-affirmers find themselves loved every time they turn around. Celebrate God. Sing together-everyone. All you honest hearts, raise the roof!"

Thank you Kathy. Did you hear? Did you get the sense of how the Psalm flowed from burden to healing? God desires are always in trouble. God celebrators are free. That is the first key. The second key after acknowledgment is found in the second half of Verse 5. The Psalmist says, "I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin? Do you hear how the Psalmist is thinking back on what he did? I mean he is already speaking in the Psalm, but then he says, I said I will confess. That's the second key; after acknowledgment is confession. It's speech. It's more than getting it off our chest. It's going directly to God and speaking what it is that is our transgression. To confess literally means to say the same thing; to say the same thing as God about whatever it is that is causing a barrier. It means to agree that we have sinned. Specifically, its not going to God and saying, "Well if I have done anything wrong God, please forgive me." It's saying, "Lord, it's my greed that has gotten me where I am today. Or my lust, I ask that you cleanse me of my selfishness, that you forgive my envy;" and that you name it specifically. Guilt is forgiven when it's named. I mean you know this from your own personal experiences. If someone has offended you and they come to you and they say, "Well hey if I have done anything wrong, would you kind of overlook it or forgive me?" And they have done something very specifically and they just kind of don't name it.

It kind of reminds me of a Dagwood & Blondie cartoon. Dagwood is sitting in his office and his boss is outside in the first frame and he says, "I better go back in Dagwood's office and apologize for calling him a dim-witted noodle brain." The second clip, he goes back in to his office and he says, "I am sorry you are a dim-witted noodle brain." And then the third is, "there is nothing like a heartfelt apology to clear one's conscience." That's dysfunctional. But we laugh at it in the cartoons, but we don't laugh at it in ourselves. So confession is the way that the second key goes. So we say to a person, "I am sorry that I hurt you by my anger, by my selfishness. You didn't deserve that. Would you please forgive me?" That's confession. That's trying to work for reconciliation. So, Biblical forgiveness is more than talking about our problems. Even to God; God is not a celestial therapist. It's telling God about whatever our sin is. Why? Because ultimately every single thing we do that is not in alignment with God's will is a sin against God. And that's why he is the only one who can forgive it. And God will forgive it when we honestly confess before him, honestly speak and say the same thing.

We are going to do this second response piece. I want to ask you to focus on the screen as we do it. I am going to try for those who are auditory learners to walk you through it. If you prefer to close your eyes, then as I read what's on the screen this may be more meaningful for you. But for those who are visual learners, just watch what comes up on the screen as we play it out, okay?

Shape you hands in to the form of a bowl or cup. Imagine your cup holding the things that you have done wrong. Begin to visualize and name the things that you are holding. Fears, holding grudges, unforgiveness, lying, selfishness, pride, anger, manipulation, jealousy, distance from God, stubbornness, sexual impurities, cheating, hypocrisy. Express your sorrow to Jesus with the sin that you hold.

Now empty your hands of the sin you are holding asking for his forgiveness. Reform you hands in to a cup or a bowl. Hear these words of forgiveness. If we confess our sins he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

Now imagine your hands filling with the gracious gifts of God. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control against such things, there is no law. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man or woman who takes refuge in him. Hold your hands up to God in a sign of thanksgiving and praise.

We usually do our prayer of confession in the beginning, but we just did it. That's the second key and the third key is very briefly found in Verses 8 and 9, because when a person has used the first two keys, they don't want to keep going backward and getting tripped up over the same thing. They want to go forward. In Verses 8 and 9 it says, "I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. Don't 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." This verse talks about repentance, about turning to stay on the right path. Verse 10 in the beginning tells us that there is one path that goes one way and the rest of Verse 10 and 11 tells us that there is another path that goes another way. Look, many of the woes of the wicked, that is one path. There is the path of pangs and woe. But the other path is the path of praise. Rejoice. The path of grace where a person has repented and turned and found the power to stop getting tripped up over the same things.

The repentance key gives us a clear indicator. So we have to do something about what we have acknowledged and confessed. Many times in AA language this is talking about making restoration or making amends. Restoring what was stolen, asking forgiveness for the person that we have harmed, stopping certain behaviors.

And what happens when we do this, when difficulty comes, if you will look at Verse 7 you will see that instead of going to the addictions or going to the problems or going to the things that keep making matters worse, it says, "You are my hiding place. You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance." God becomes our hiding place when we turn and repent. In a Christian sense what happens in repentance is, we don't just say "thank you for forgiveness," we turn toward Christ, we acknowledge and say, "Lord, come in to my life. Give me the power that I need through your Holy Spirit, so that I will continue to be able to walk the path with you and be back in the relationship that you designed for me."

Now, let me just say this. It can cost you to do this. It can be costly. For instance, when you make amends you may have to deal with something that really has been hanging out there for some time. I printed off an article from the web from the other day and it says, "A man confesses to a 1984 University of Virginia sexual assault." Twenty something years ago he sexually assaulted a classmate and then apologized to her two decades later as a result of working through the 12 steps. He is quoted outside the courtroom. This began as an effort to make amends, "Twenty-two years ago I harmed another person and I have tried to set that right." What he did was he emailed the woman that he assaulted and they started a correspondence and then she got so distraught that being unable to just forgive it, she turned him in and he was extradited back to Virginia and is going to be sentenced in March of next year to what seems to be a two year plea agreement. So sometimes when we make things right, it's going to cost us. Here is the reality. The woman who was offended, and I have no sense of how deep that pain must be, but the woman who was offended; to forgive him would have been to withdraw the penalty. Now some of you are sitting there thinking, "hey he deserved the penalty" and we can say that. But, at the end of the day here is what she said. "I think that the idea for closure for any victim of sexual assault is not a reality. There is never closure." I would say that if that is true, then what I am talking about is off target. But if there is something that is close to closure it's what King David is talking about. You see, even though that guy got two years, I don't know if it made her feel a little bit better, but she will never be free until she forgives the offense. That's painful and that's the essence of forgiveness.

When you forgive somebody even if they do not acknowledge it, even if they don't want to be reconciled with you, when you forgive somebody you not only withdraw the right to their penalty, you take on the pain of that reality and you say, "wait a minute, I want to get even. I want to get back." The scripture says, leave that in the hands of God. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't work for justice and all of that, there is times to do all of that. I am just saying that if you say "that's too painful," then you get some idea of what God feels every single day, because he holds out his hand and he says, "Come on be reconciled to me. Here, I have paid the price. Come to me." And people will say, "No thank you" and so God experiences pain every day. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked the scripture says. We have this image of God like, "okay you are going to get it now." That's yours. God takes no pleasure in any of that. He is burdened that people won't be reconciled.

So what do you do with somebody, here we are coming to Thanksgiving, some of you, I know most of us have functional families, but some of you may have a dysfunctional person in your family somewhere along the line and Thanksgiving is coming along and stuff is not dealt with and they don't want to talk about it, what do you do? You let it go. You try as hard as you can and then you let it go. And you leave it over to God and God's timing for healing.

I could tell you stories. I could tell you stories about people that I have tried to do this with that are not interested. It is very painful. It makes me lose sleep sometimes. But when you have done everything that you can you just let it go and you say, "God, maybe in your timing there will be reconciliation" and you just trust Jesus. Spirituality is the process someone said of confronting the gap that exists between God's will and our lives. So today is a day to level with God, to talk openly and squarely with God, the answer isn't silence, it is not rationalization, but acknowledgment, confession, and repentance. The cross is God's pledge. The word of God is God's bond and the experience of the Psalmist and millions like the Psalmist is evidence that we don't have to be condemned to our past. Happiness, blessedness begins with forgiveness from God and nowhere else.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that as we come again to you, that you are a God who longs to forgive us. You tell us to draw nearer and boldly to the throne of your grace, to receive mercy and to find grace to help in time of need. Lord, I ask for those who are here today who are being nudged by your Spirit to realign themselves, that you would show them how safe it is to do that and even though there may be a price to pay that it's the way of freedom and healing and joy. Help us as we come to you to do that; in Jesus' name. Amen.

© 2006, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org