Experience the Passion: Experience Complete Forgiveness

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Rev. Ronald Burcham

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I'm guessing that most of us probably would recognize one of these. One of the best known toys probably, at least in America, the old Etch-A-Sketch. Hours of my childhood were spent in front of these; but evidently the younger generations, I don't think, know too much about them. I went to Toys R Us last night to try to purchase one. They don't have them anymore. They have little bitty ones that really aren't worth much in my opinion, but they just don't have the big ones. I had to borrow this one for this morning. You see, I loved Etch-A-Sketches because, with an Etch-A-Sketch, you can draw whatever you want on the thing and whether you're a great artist or whether you're like me and can build really terrific stairs, it's okay for both of you. There's actually a group I saw on 20/20 once where they actually make portraits on these things, I mean elaborate, beautiful things they make on an Etch-A-Sketch. But the beauty of an Etch-A-Sketch is this: Whether you put one little mark on it or whether you do like my older brothers did to see if you could turn the whole thing black, spend hours doing that, all you need to do is turn it upside, give it a shake, and you can start all over again. You can build another set of stairs. It's just that simple. A quick shake and the whole thing comes out fresh and clean just like it was brand new. This one, I'm guessing, is somewhere around 30 years old and it probably still looks like what it did in the original box, just by turning it over and giving it a shake and everything is back like it was supposed to be.

Wouldn't it be great if you could do that with life? If you could just take things, shake them up a little bit, and then put it back and you could start all over again? I don't believe there's anyone who doesn't have regrets of the things they've done in their life, they don't have actions from their past they wish they would have never done, things they said they wish they could forget and they wish they could take back. I don't think there is a person alive that doesn't live with guilt, guilt over the things they've done and said and thought. Now wouldn't it be great if we could just sort of shake things up and have all of that go away?

That's what we're going to talk about this morning. We're going to talk about being freed from the past, being freed from the guilt. We're going to talk about a fresh start because we're going to talk about forgiveness, and that's what forgiveness is all about. Forgiveness is about a fresh start, a clean start, a wiping the slate clean and starting new all over again. We're talking about complete forgiveness.

Complete forgiveness involves really two things. The first thing it involves is forgiveness from God and then forgiveness from yourself. Of course, the most important of that is forgiveness from God, because that's where guilt stems from. Whether we want to admit it or not, the guilt comes from the fact that we know we have not lived our life in accordance with how God wants us to live. No matter how much we want to deny it, no matter how much we want to avoid it, that's really where guilt comes from. We have a basic knowledge of what is right and wrong, and we know the wrong things we've done have gone against God. And if we're not right with God, the guilt will never be gone. So we have to start with forgiveness from God.

And if we start with forgiveness from God, then there's one recognition we need to make. Sin is serious business. Now maybe that seems self evident to say that sin is serious; but, as I look around at our world, there are not a whole lot of people that are taking sin very seriously. We don't take sin seriously anymore in our world. We want to laugh it off. We want to pass it off. We certainly don't want to talk about it. It seems like an antiquated kind of idea to even use the word sin. We might talk about mistakes. We might talk about poor judgment, but we don't want to talk about sin, of actually going against what God has to say.

I'll give you one example of that. Maybe it's not a good one. David Letterman, a couple of months ago, got up in front of his studio audience and in front of millions of people over the airwaves, and he said this, "Here I am 56 and by all rights, it shouldn't be happening. But there's nothing we can do about it now, and I'm terribly excited about this. I'm scared silly about this. But I'm about to be a father." Well, you think that's great news except then he goes on because everyone knows he's going to be a father with his longtime girlfriend that he's been living with, Regina Lasko. And so he even addresses that fact. He says, "You know, I'm kind of putting the cart before the horse here and I know that." Then he laughs about it, and the whole studio audience laughs about that. And he says, "But I'm just trying to see how much I can get away with." And everybody laughs. And millions of people across America laughed. Now maybe you think I'm making too much of this, but to me that's just symptomatic of our world. We just want to laugh about it. We'll even acknowledge the fact that what we did was wrong. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. "But I'm just trying to see how much I can get away with."

There are countless people who are just seeing how much they can get away with, and the result of that is there are countless people that are dealing with guilt on a daily basis. Because maybe we can put on a façade and a face for everyone else; but when we're alone at night and our thoughts turn inward, there's no escaping. We try to laugh it off. We can't laugh it off anymore, because it's serious. We try to dismiss it. It won't go away. We try blaming somebody else for our actions, but it keeps coming back to us and that's because sin is serious business. It's because sin separates us from God, and sin brings with it a judgment and a condemnation, an eternal condemnation of us. Sin is serious business. In fact, if you saw the movie, The Passion of the Christ, you saw how serious sin is to God.

Prophet Isaiah says this, talking about Jesus, "He took up our infirmities and He carried our sorrows. He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was laid upon Him." With every blow that Jesus endured, with every lash that cut into His flesh, with every nail that pierced His body and nailed Him to the cross, that's how serious sin is to God. It's not a laughing matter. It's not something that can be dismissed, and it's not something we can pass off on somebody else. Sin is serious business to God. And it needs to be equally serious to us. And if we take sin seriously, then we have to turn to God and confess that sin. We have to own up to our actions. We have to admit the guilt we have. We need to come clean with God if that guilt is ever to be removed.

David, when he wrote Psalm 32, put it this way, "When I kept silent," that is, he didn't admit his sins, "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away. My strength was sapped." David was saying when he didn't confess his sin, he actually physically hurt, that things were going on in his body. His strength was sapped. He said, "But then I acknowledged my sin. I said I will confess my transgressions before the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin." When we take sin seriously and we acknowledge that sin to God, we acknowledge our guilt. We acknowledge the infractions we've made against His will. When we confess that sin, then God comes in and He forgives the guilt and He takes away that sin. When we realize and we read Isaiah and we say Jesus took on my infirmities, when He was crushed for my iniquities, when He was pierced for my transgressions, when we make that confession, then we receive the forgiveness that Christ won for us. The prophet said, "The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him." The punishment of our sin, the eternal death that our sin brings to us, that punishment was placed upon Jesus instead of being placed upon us. The punishment that you and I deserve was put upon Jesus instead of us. He was crushed. He was shattered. He was destroyed so we could have peace with God. Another way of putting it is this: Christ went hell on the cross to free us from the living hells of each and every day and the ultimate hell that is stored for us in the future. Jesus released us from that. God takes sin so seriously that He was willing to watch His Son die so He could take it away from us. God takes sin so seriously that He would stop at nothing so He could remove that from you and remove the guilt that goes along with it. In Jesus, God has wiped the slate clean and He gives us a fresh start, a new start. God forgives us.

Now it's time for us to forgive ourselves. If God has forgiven us, then we need to forgive ourselves. I'm continuously amazed at how long we will hold onto a sin after God has forgiven us and God has forgotten. God says to the same prophet, Isaiah, "I will remember your sins no more." God makes a choice not to remember our sins anymore because of what Jesus has done, and yet you and I will remember them. You and I will hold onto them. Long after a sin has been confessed and forgiven by God, it will still haunt us in the middle of the night and the regrets will still be there and the guilt will still be laid upon our shoulders. We need to get something straight here. If we have confessed the sin to God and we know that God has forgiven that sin and if we're still carrying the guilt from that, this is no longer an issue of forgiveness. It's an issue of faith. It isn't an issue of whether God has forgiven you or not, because He has. But it's a matter of faith. Do you believe what God has done for you? Do you believe God's word when He says He will remember your sins no more?

Ask yourself, especially if you've had the privilege of watching the movie, after Jesus' passion and all He went through, the fact He was willing not to use His divine powers and to stop the whip or to come down from the cross, considering the Father stood by and watched His son be tormented, that His Father didn't answer when Jesus cried out to Him, "Why have you forsaken me?" Consider that the Father waited and watched His Son die. Why? So He could forgive you. Do you think He wants you to hold onto the guilt? Do you think He'd watch Jesus do all of that and not remove that guilt from your heart and not grant you the forgiveness that He won? It's time to release yourself from the guilt. If God has chosen not to remember your sins anymore, in other words, God just isn't absentminded and forgets about it, but He makes a choice not to remember your sins, you need to make the same choice. Knowing what God has done for you, now it's time for you to make the same choice and to forget those sins, to choose not to remember them anymore, to let go of that guilt, to let go of the sleepless nights, to have the faith and trust and belief of what Jesus has done for you. Refuse to think about it, choose not to remember it, and then lead a different life. Lead a changed life. That's what Jesus said to the woman who came to Him. Here they are, they drug her out, they caught her in the act of adultery. She's guilty. She knows it. Everyone else knows it. There's no debating it. There's no laughing about it. There's no blaming somebody else. She's thrown at the feet of Jesus. Why? Just because the teachers of the law want to trap Him. "Okay, Jesus, what should we do with the woman? Shouldn't we stone her?" You know the story. We just read it. Nobody condemned her. So how does Jesus end that? He says, "Then neither do I?" But what does He say after that? Once He grants her forgiveness, He says, "Now leave your life of sin." Leave the life of sin.

When we have experienced God's forgiveness, when we've been released from sin, when we've been released from the guilt, there's a change in our heart and there's a change in our life. When you experience the complete forgiveness given by God, you experience a change in who you are. Jesus completely wiped the slate clean for this woman. All of her deeds were wiped out. She has a fresh start. Now leave your life of sin. Why would she go back to the same sin and the same guilt she lived with everyday? It was time to leave that and to lead a different life. And it's time for us to leave our life of sin and to lead a different life. And the same God who has forgiven you is the same God who empowers you to do just that. Complete forgiveness from God. Complete forgiveness means that God has forgiven you. You have received that forgiveness. You forgive yourself and now you make a commitment, a commitment to God and a commitment to yourself to lead a changed life. That's what complete forgiveness is about. In fact, that's what the passion of Jesus is about. It's about being completely forgiven.

Kind of like our Etch-A-Sketch. Whether there's one mark on here or the whole thing is blackened out, you turn it over and shake it up and it's completely gone. The passion of Jesus says this: Whether you have one sin or whether you have thousands of them, because of what Jesus has accomplished for you, the slate's been wiped clean. You are completely forgiven. Amen.

Copyright 2004 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church