I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins

I was blessed to give the following message today at a local downtown community church.

Today, we’re going to continue with our look at the Apostles’ Creed using a book called Creed by Adam Hamilton. The Apostle’s Creed is a set of stated beliefs that was created hundreds of years ago to set forth certain core beliefs of the Christian faith. When we as Christians read the Creed, we affirm that we agree with what it says. I want to start out this week by once again reading through the Creed and affirming these beliefs.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,

creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died, and was buried;

he descended to the dead.

On the third day he rose again;

he ascended into heaven,

he is seated at the right hand of the Father,

and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting. Amen.

As you read through the Creed, we see that it is a list of beliefs. We are affirming that we believe those things. But, for me, there is one belief that really pops out because that belief also calls us to do something – it calls us to action. And that is this belief right here:

I believe in the forgiveness of sins.

Now, you may be thinking, “Todd, that’s just another statement of something we believe in. It isn’t any sort of call to do anything.”

I will challenge you on that though … if we really believe in the forgiveness of sins, then we must to be willing to do a few things. For example, it would be ridiculous to believe in the forgiveness of sins but to then not seek out that forgiveness and live a life of forgiveness, wouldn’t it?

So, how do we do that?

First, we have to be willing to Connect with God and ask for forgiveness. You see, if forgiveness came to us without any action on our part, we would all go through our lives doing whatever we choose because forgiveness would just automatically be ours. If that was the case, we could lie, steal, hurt others, have no regard for anyone else, and still rest at the end of each day knowing that we had been automatically forgiven for every bad thing we’d done that day. Life would be a free-for-all for us – sinning without any regard for others, and without any desire to try to stop sinning. But it doesn’t work that way. God’s salvation is free and it’s easy to obtain but, in order to receive God’s mercy, we do have to ask for it.

The next action that believing in the forgiveness of sins requires of us is that we be willing to Grow with God. We have to be willing to accept the fact that God has forgiven us, thereby also forgiving ourselves and, once we have done that, out of our love and gratitude to God, we must seek to eliminate sin from our lives. Jesus Christ came to earth to try to destroy lawlessness. He sought to end the rebellion of God’s people. In order for that to happen, we must not only accept His grace but we also must strive to sin no more. As Jesus told the woman caught in the act of adultery, “Go now, and leave your life of sin.” Accepting God’s forgiveness calls us to do all we can to change our lives and avoid sin.

And, finally, if we truly believe in the forgiveness of sins, then we must be willing to Go into the world and forgive others. It would be completely wrong for us to accept God’s forgiveness but refuse to extend that forgiveness to His other sons and daughters – folks He loves just every bit as much as He loves you and I. Folks who, just like He would do for you, God will leave the 99 behind in order to pursue that one.

Today, we will be digging into this idea of Connecting with God and asking for forgiveness, Growing in our lives by accepting His forgiveness and forgiving ourselves, and finally Going into the world and extending forgiveness to others. I want to start out by sharing with you a scripture that shows us not only our salvation but also our call to action. Romans 8, verses 1-9.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.[a] For the law of the Spirit of life has set you[b] free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin,[c] he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you.

Let’s look at sin a bit. Let there be no mistake about this … sin is a real problem in this world. While God intended for us all to live with a moral correctness, man failed. Adam and Eve did something that God told them not to do and, sadly, ever since that time mankind has been doing things that separate us from God. Doing things that separate us from His purity. Doing things that separate us from showing His love at all times. Doing things that separate us from the moral correctness that He designed and so wanted us to live under.

The primary word used for “sin” in the New Testament is the word “hamartia” which literally means to “miss the mark”. It’s a word that was used by hunters when they missed their prey with an arrow. Not one of us can claim that we have not “missed the mark” in terms of our behavior, can we? We’ve all sinned by things we have thought, said, and done, and also by things we haven’t said and done. Ever since Adam and Eve, all of us is capable of both good and bad things … and we tend to do both liberally. Very few humans have ever been 100% evil and none of us has ever been 100% good … except Jesus.

But, with Jesus, God gave us a way to seek atonement for our sins, to seek forgiveness, to re-connect with Him and to remove the wedge of separation that sin drives between us and Him. We may sometimes think we have done things so horrible or with such frequency that we have no right to even ask God for forgiveness. That we have messed up so badly that He could never love us, could never forgive is. But that isn’t who God is. He wants restoration with us, He wants to forgive us. With Jesus, we see a God Who is more willing to forgive us than we often are willing to ask for forgiveness. Remember, He will walk away from the 99 people who are already with Him if doing so will restore us to Him.

As we come up on Easter, we are reminded that the way for us to gain forgiveness was not pretty. This one and only man of complete purity who walked the earth – Jesus, the son of God  – was sacrificed as the answer for our own sinfulness. Let’s think for a moment of what happened on that cross. Jesus was taken out of the deep cell where the Romans had imprisoned Him. Then people mocked Him. They beat Him multiple times. The Romans offered to release Jesus back to the Jews but, amidst loud shouts of “Crucify Him!”- shouts that were directed at Jesus - the Romans released one of their other prisoners instead -- Barabbas, a man who all agreed was guilty of murder. They paraded Jesus through Jerusalem with other prisoners -- thieves and murderers -- and took Him to Golgotha where the soldiers did their thing, hammering in the nails, lifting up the cross and crucifying Him with criminals.

Once He was hanging on the cross, the people there were laughing and taunting Him, shouting – “You have healed others yet You can’t save Yourself – what kind of King are You?” One person offered Jesus a type of vinegar wine that could act as a sedative to ease His pain, yet Jesus refused it because He knew that He was doing this for you and for me. He wanted to endure the full brunt of His own death because His death was our victory. His death was the only way for mankind to be saved – the only way for us to get to heaven – the only solution to our sinfulness and the problems of this world.

Let’s go back for a moment to that day at Calvary in the Scripture. Luke 23:39-43 tells us how things played out with the two others who were crucified with Jesus that day.

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

It was just like that … one of the criminals crucified with Jesus that day chose to mock Jesus and he most surely faced judgment before God and was condemned of his sins. But the other criminal chose to seek Jesus right at that moment. He chose to connect with Him. And, just like that, the man’s sinfulness was wiped away. More than likely, this was a man who had stolen, who had cheated, who had lied, who had killed … and because He sought to connect with Jesus, simply by having faith that Jesus was his Savior and saying “remember me” … Jesus told the criminal that today he’d be in paradise with Him.

You see, what Jesus did that day was offer us changed lives. He offered us a path to re-connect with God the Father in a way that man had not been able to connect with the Creator ever since the fall of Adam and Eve.

I John 1:9 tells us this:

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

And Hebrews 5:9 tells us that, at the cross, Jesus became the author of eternal salvation for all who follow Him.

And that is our choice. We have the same choice that the two criminals who were crucified with Jesus that day had. We can mock Jesus or we can honor Him. We can reject Him or we can Connect with Him. We can receive the true judgment and punishment for our sinfulness, or we can find atonement through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

So, again, believing in the forgiveness of sins calls us to action in three ways. The first being to Connect with God and ask for forgiveness, all made possible only through His son Jesus.

The next action that believing in forgiveness of sins calls us to is to be willing to accept God’s forgiveness. We must use His forgiveness as a starting place from which we strive to Grow in our relationship with God. If we believe in His forgiveness, we must allow our relationship with Him to change our lives. We must let Him be our Lord as well as our Savior. Jesus didn’t go through what he went through with the intent that we would continue to live under a cloud of shame. But yet so often, we all carry around baggage for our past sins … feeling bad about the way we’ve lived or the things we have done. Our sin can be a huge burden – a great weight that, if we don’t work on it and really live into the freedom that God intends for us to live under, will continue to weigh us down. You see part of accepting God’s forgiveness involves forgiving ourselves. That is where we Grow and get beyond our past lives.

If we constantly live under the shadow of our own sinfulness, we’re kind of like Eeyore, the down-in-the-mouth donkey from Winnie the Pooh. Does anyone remember Eeyore? Now, I don’t know what Eeyore did previously in his life that made him so horribly down on himself but I have to think there was something. I don’t know. Maybe he refused to play with the pigs, claiming that donkeys were better than pigs. What do you think? Maybe he refused to participate in the Pin The Tail On The Donkey game at Christopher Robin’s sixth birthday party? I don’t know what was back there in his past but Eeyore was always walking under a shadow, wasn’t he? He was always looking at the bad side of things. He always said things like “guess I’ll just have to get used to it” … he refused to believe that things really could get better than his past!

But, my friends, don’t be an Eeyore.  Jesus didn’t die on the cross … He did not go through that pain and suffering for us so that we would continue to live in darkness. His death offers us complete freedom, not the shadow of a storm cloud.

Isaiah 43:25 tells us this

I, even I, am He who blots out

    your transgressions, for my own sake,

    and remembers your sins no more.

That’s the great thing about the forgiveness offered by Jesus … He not only forgives but He forgets! He erases. He wipes the slate clean. No matter how much you may feel like you need to stay beneath the dark gloomy Eeyore cloud of your past behavior or past lifestyle, God doesn’t look at it that way at all. In fact, God doesn’t even remember the bad things we’ve done!

I, even I, am He who blots out

    your transgressions, for my own sake,

    and remembers your sins no more.

The 103rd Psalm reminds us that God won’t always play the judge but that instead His love for those who love Him is as high as the heavens. As far as east is from west, that Psalm says, that’s how far God has taken our past sins away from us.

But I know that it’s not always that easy to get away from our pasts. And sometimes even though we have asked God for forgiveness, we find ourselves sinning again, don’t we? We find ourselves saying things like how could I have been so stupid, so careless, so thoughtless, so sinful? How could anyone stoop lower than I have by messing up and sinning again after all God has done in my life? We don’t want to sin. We want to live in God’s light. We want to be a vessel carrying His pure love to the world but, fact is, sometimes we mess up!

I am glad to say that, even for that, there is good news! Jesus knew that would happen and, while salvation is forever once we accept Jesus as Lord, Jesus left us with something that would serve as an ongoing reminder that we have an inherent sin nature that, even after we’re forgiven, we need to keep working on.

Are you wondering where Jesus did that? It’s in the Lord’s Prayer … In both the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke, Jesus told us how to pray daily. And that prayer is what we today call the Lord’s Prayer. And in that prayer is one very important line …

And forgive us our sins.

Now different translations may use other words like forgive us our debts or forgive us our trespasses … but the bottom line is that Jesus knew that we’d continue to struggle with sin in our lives. He knew that He was the only one sinless to ever walk this earth. Even the great Billy Graham who so protected His life that he wouldn’t even get on an elevator if it meant he’d be alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife, even he regularly called himself a sinner. Yes, Jesus, knew that we’d struggle so, when He taught us how to prayer, He included a powerful reminder that we are always sinners. I believe that when He included that in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus was saying “Don’t ever fool yourselves … I am your path to salvation … but you are human and you will always be a sinner.”

And forgive us our sins

Seek to grow with God in your life. He loves you enough to not just save you but to also change you.

And, from the Lord’s Prayer, what comes right after “and forgive us our sins”?

As we forgive those who have sinned against us.

Wow. Like I said earlier, saying that we believe in the forgiveness of sins goes way beyond being just a belief. It is a call to action. If we’re going to accept forgiveness, we must extend forgiveness.

Does anyone else have problems with forgiving others? And not only forgiving them but forgetting about the sin? It’s tough isn’t it? I certainly struggle with it.

There’s something about us that, when someone does something that hurts us or hurts someone we love, we want payback. When someone commits a horrible sin, we want retribution for that, don’t we? We want justice. As humans, we have developed a court system which protects innocent citizens from others who might want to do them harm. And that’s good but, still, if someone has hurt us or a friend of ours in a big way, forgiveness can come hard, can’t it?

But, here’s the reality folks … our lack of forgiveness toward someone else doesn’t do even one teeny tiny thing to bring them toward justice for their sinfulness. God alone is the One Who can bring about justice for the sins of mankind. And He always does that in just one of two ways. There are only two paths of making man’s sinfulness come out right.

One, is through Jesus’ precious blood. And the other is through God’s judgment and wrath if, when we die, we have not accepted His forgiveness for our sins. When you think about the sins of other people, you and I do not play any role in the ultimate determination of the justice for their sinfulness. Just like ourselves and just like the two criminals who were crucified with Jesus that day, either they will accept the fact that Jesus paid the price for their sins and they will bring Him into their life, or they will reject God, they will refuse His salvation, and they will pay the price with eternity in hell.

But you may still struggle with this idea of forgiving others. What if someone has done something horrible to you or to someone else? Murder, rape, robbing. How can we forgive them of horrible things like that? Where is the justice? Fact is, it is not our place to seek justice. Upon that person’s passing from this earth, either their sin is paid for by the blood of Christ or they will be judged by God. We do not play a role in either of those scenarios. Instead, we must see peace and calm in the forgiveness that Jesus gives us for our sins, and allow him to deal with everyone else. There is no sin that goes unaddressed by God. God will by no means ignore the guilty. But, when we forgive them, we release the stronghold they have over our lives. By forgiving them, no longer can they cause us to be angry or bitter.

And, I want to push us just a little bit further here … by forgiving that person and even loving them, maybe, just maybe, they will see enough Jesus in us that they will seek their own forgiveness before it’s too late for them.

We are freed from having to take vengeance … God is good and a place of safety for us. He has freed us from having to take any vengeance in the world for wrongs that might have been done to us. He gives us all the same options … accept His mercy and grace or burn in hell. There is nothing we can do to change that cold, hard reality even for folks who have sinned against us.

If you have not yet put your hope, faith, and belief in Jesus Christ, then I beg you, believe and accept His salvation now. If you have accepted His salvation, then realize and appreciate the horrible eternity that God has saved you from through His forgiveness of sins and point others to Him. Praying for others that they might find Him. Ultimately, God sets it all right.

Connecting with God and accepting His forgiveness, Growing with him and letting Him change our lives, and Going out into the world and forgiving others … those are the most powerful things that any of us can do, both in our own lives and the lives of others.

I want to close my sermon this morning with a special prayer – a prayer seeking God’s salvation and forgiveness. Mike and Rodney, if you wish, while we’re praying, come on up and get ready for our final song. This is a prayer that perhaps you have prayed one time or many times, and it’s fine to repeat it. But, if you have never prayed it before, please consider this as your opportunity to connect with God in a way that will forever change your life, a way that will save your soul for eternity and give you direction for the rest of your earthly days. A way that will bring you salvation through Christ.

With our heads bowed and our eyes closed, I am going to go through this prayer one phrase at a time and then I will pause, allowing you, if you wish, to repeat what I just said in your mind, soul, and heart.

Lord Jesus, for too long I’ve kept you out of my life. I know that I am a sinner and that I cannot save myself. No longer will I close the door when I hear you knocking. By faith I gratefully receive your gift of salvation. I am ready to trust you as my Lord and Savior. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for coming to earth. I believe you are the Son of God who died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead on the third day. Thank you for bearing my sins and giving me the gift of eternal life. I believe your words are true. Come into my heart, Lord Jesus, and be my Savior. Amen

Go forward this week and don’t just believe in the forgiveness of sins, but let that forgiveness change your life. Seek to live a life of freedom that is unshackled through God’s Grace, and, in turn, give that Grace to the world.