Last time, I talked about forgiving one another and how hard that can be, but it is a requirement from God, and it is good for our souls. I came across this since then and thought I’d share it with you. If you remember, I started out last week with the illustration of narcissism, and how narcissists aren’t sorry or even aware–sometimes–of their behavior, and how much harder it is to forgive someone who isn’t only unremorseful, but is going to place the blame on you.
I found a YouTube channel called The Royal We, and in one of the episodes, the host said that narcissistic abuse is one of the leading causes of illness and disease. Most illnesses and diseases caused by narcissistic abuse are chronic, degenerative, and aging.
And so without going into all of that, just know how important it is for our own health and well-being to forgive and eventually forget with God’s grace and power.
But it reminds me of Isaiah 43:25 where God said to the people of Israel, “24 You have not bought any fragrant calamus for me, or lavished on me the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your offenses.25 “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more. 26 Review the past for me, let us argue the matter together; state the case for your innocence.”
What does that mean? You would think that God would forgive us for our own sake, but the passage here tells us that it is for His own sake.
Well, the meaning of that is twofold. I’ll start with the first meaning now, and get into the second meaning later on. What it means first is, God forgives us because He loves us. Because He loves us, and out of His love for us, and out of a desire for us to spend eternity with Him, He sets aside his anger and forgives. In the New Testament, the apostle Peter told us that, “God is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
Even our own death is a form of God’s love in this sense because it gives us the opportunity to live with Him forever–and to live completely free from this sinful state that we are in. In Genesis Chapter 3 it is recorded as the whole Trinity having a conversation and God (presumably The Father) said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
And a few chapters after that, at the beginning of Genesis 6 God said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”
By the way, have you ever known or heard of anyone living longer than that? There was a woman who exceeded that by just a couple of years. If you read Genesis Chapter 5, you’ll read through a lineage of people who lived hundreds of years–Methuselah lived just shy of 1,000 years, can you imagine that? The oldest person to ever live since then was a woman named Jeanne Calment from France, who lived fairly recently from 1875–1997, reaching the grand old age of 122.
So that was Genesis 5, continuing in Genesis 6, we read, “5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.””
God could have ended it all there and said, I’m done with these humans, the end of the age is now. But through God’s love and grace, he didn’t. He kept the human race going even though he knew we’d still be full of sin and debauchery. It makes you scratch your head and wonder why he kept going, but aren’t you glad that He did? Today, we are going to look at God’s love extended to us for us and for His own sake.
Turn with me today to 1 John Chapter 1. We’ll be looking at verses 8-10. It’s a short passage that packs a lot of punch, and I’m going to reference Isaiah a lot as well, so you might want to go to Isaiah 48, and we’ll look at verses 8-11.
1 John 1:8-10; Isaiah 48:8-11.
As you’re turning there, there’s a story about a Sunday School teacher who had just concluded her lesson and wanted to make sure she had made her point. So she asked, “Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?”
There was a short pause and then, from the back of the room, a small boy spoke up. “Sin,” he said.
Well, I suppose he’s right. But it goes further than that.
D. L. Moody visited a prison called “The Tombs” to preach to the inmates. After he had finished speaking, Moody talked with a number of men in their cells. He asked each prisoner this question, “What brought you here?” Again and again he received replies like this: “I don’t deserve to be here.” “I was framed.” “I was falsely accused.” “I was given an unfair trial.” Not one inmate would admit he was guilty. Finally, Moody found a man with his face buried in his hands, weeping. “And what’s wrong, my friend?” he inquired. The prisoner responded, “My sins are more than I can bear.” Relieved to find at least one man who would recognize his guilt and his need for forgiveness, the evangelist exclaimed, “Thank God for that!” Moody then had the joy of pointing him to a saving knowledge of Christ—a knowledge that released him from his shackles of sin.
Let’s take a look at our first scripture today and see what it says. 1 John 1:8-10
8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.
You see, what this passage says is, that we need to acknowledge that we are sinners, honestly regret our sins, and desire to turn from our sins. It’s a lot like Alcoholics Anonymous, isn’t it? We have to acknowledge we have a problem in order for that problem to be fixed. We can’t fix a problem if we deny that it’s there. But in order to have a right relationship with God, we have to acknowledge our sins, then come to our loving and forgiving Father, and that perfectly loving Father promises that He will forgive us of our sins.
If anyone here has had a terrible father, maybe that thought hinders your image of God as our father. But let me tell you, God is a perfect and loving father.
If you bookmarked Isaiah 48, now is a good time to go there. As you do, I want to pluck out verse 9 from what we just read, set it aside because we’ll go back to it again, and combine verses 8 and 10 together. If we do, it would read:
8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 10 If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.
I think you can see what that has to do with Isaiah 43 and 48, and what I said earlier about God forgiving us for his own sake actually has a double meaning. One meaning is that he forgives us so that we can have a right relationship with Him so that we can become His children, and be with Him for eternity. We kind of get salvation twisted around to make it all about us, but it’s all about Him. After all, He’s the one who created us, not the other way around. He created us so that He could have fellowship so that He could have an eternal family.
But there’s another aspect to it. Going to Isaiah 48, God also said to the people of Israel, “8 You have neither heard nor understood; from of old your ears have not been open. Well do I know how treacherous you are; you were called a rebel from birth. 9 For my own name’s sake I delay my wrath; for the sake of my praise I hold it back from you, so as not to destroy you completely. 10 See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. 11 For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another.
That last part, “For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this” is God referring to protecting His own reputation among His people as well as the other nations who are watching. It is for the sake of God revealing himself and for His own glory and praise, and to prove to the nations that He is not a liar. God then goes on to say, “How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another.”
That’s why I say that God is not our genie. That is why we shouldn’t tempt God, which I think I will do as a sermon in the near future, perhaps next week because it’s been on my mind a lot lately–but that is the gist of 1 John 1:10, “If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.”
Notice how John says that we make God out to be a liar. He said we don’t make ourselves out to be liars, but God. God is a liar if we have no sin. If we have no sin, then God’s righteous judgment becomes evil judgment. As many atheists claim, God does become a moral monster. But God’s judgment is righteous because He is righteous, and we are not. The king of the universe who shares his glory with no other, has the right to judge his own creation.
But if there is no sin, then there is nothing to judge and Jesus’ death on the cross was for nothing. It was just a historical event if we have no sin. The atheists would argue that that’s all it was–just a historical event. No sin. But if that’s all it was, then there would never have been a Christianity that sprang from it. Think about that. There would have been no reason for it. Christianity would have died with Jesus, the lunatic who thought he was God.
But the fact that Christianity sprang up after Jesus, from his own scared disciples, and Paul–think about that for a moment–Paul the violent persecutor of Christians; and kept going past the end of the first century, spread across the world and is still spreading to this day…proves that not only is there is such a thing as sin, but more importantly, that there is a resurrected Christ. If the apostles’ testimony of seeing a risen savior and the testimony of Paul having seen a risen savior is all a lie, then it’s all a lie. Their preaching and their persecution were all in vain, and beyond comprehension.
But we know we have a risen savior because as we sang not too long ago, “He lives within my heart.” He lives within our hearts because we have been saved and set free from sin. We know we have sin because we have been convicted of sin through The Holy Spirit and through God’s holy standard of righteousness in the Bible. Again, if the Bible were written by man, it wouldn’t be what it is.
Even though the Bible is a big book and there’s a lot in it, I’ll bet it won’t take long before any one of us finds ourselves in this book. Just look at the 10 commandments alone, and you’ll find yourself.
Just this past week, I shared on our church’s Facebook page a reel from Jack Hibbs where he talks about this. He said, “When I pick up the Bible, I start learning things about myself. I do not exactly read this book, when I open it up and find out what’s in it, it reads me.”
I’m not going to go into all of what he said, but I would encourage you to find it, it’s only a short clip of about a minute or less. But he ends with this statement, “Did the law of God kill me? No, it just revealed that I was already dead.”
That is what the Gospel is all about. That is what Grace is all about. We know that we are a mess, and we need God’s grace in our lives. We recognize we have this thing inherent within us that we don’t want. And this thing that we have separates us from God. We sense our distance from God. I talked about the conviction of The Holy Spirit, have you ever sensed a distance from God when you’ve sinned? I have. Have you ever sensed in your spirit a justification for being eternally separated from God? I have. We sense that we need to get ourselves right with God. We need a fresh new start. We need forgiveness.
John Newton who wrote the lyrics to Amazing Grace, was as the song suggests, a wretched sinner too.
John Newton’s epitaph reads: John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.
A.W. Tozer once said: “Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”
I want to bring to you a couple of other passages. God promises us that he will forgive us, not just because he loves us, but for His name’s sake so that he will not be proved a liar. Now, I know that may sound like a religious thing and not so loving and personal, but the idea is that God’s forgiveness becomes solidified with a promise. He has unconditional love, which comes with an unconditional promise, like I said last week, with no fine print. The only condition is that we ask with a humble heart. After David was confronted by the prophet Nathan regarding his adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, David wrote Psalm 51 and in it, he wrote, “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”
And as I said last week, God requires us to forgive others as well. Jesus said in Luke 6:37, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” In Matthew 6:14 and 15, Jesus said, “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
The prophet Micah poetically compared God’s forgiveness as hurling our sins into the depths of the ocean and burying them where they will never surface again.
In Chapter 7, verses 18 and 19, Micah said:
18 Who is a God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
19 You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
Something else I mentioned last week was God’s love and grace to forgive a mafia captain and a serial killer. Again, I have the picture of them with a prison chaplain holding hands and praying, and if you get the chance, I’ll put it up on our Facebook page so you can watch the interview. But this is a perfect example of not only God’s love but also His promise. God is not a liar, and if anything God will uphold his promises for His name’s sake and for His glory and praise. And so, if God can forgive them, he can and will certainly forgive us.
Time and time and time again, all throughout the Old and New Testaments, God promises the forgiveness of every sin we make, no matter what it is, no matter how many times we ask. Every time. He said that the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy of The Holy Spirit which simply means that God isn’t going to forgive us if we don’t believe in Him. That’s the only way sin won’t be forgiven, is if we don’t ask.
Maybe you need to ask God to forgive you this morning. Maybe Satan has lied to you, telling you that God won’t forgive that, or God won’t forgive me anymore, I’ve blown it, I’m out of his grace. Do you remember the verse from last week where Jesus tells Peter to forgive 70 times 7–meaning to forgive every time? Jesus isn’t going to command us to do something He doesn’t already do with ease. It might be hard for us, but not for God. God is not a liar. You’re not the exception. He keeps his promises.
Numbers 23:19 says: “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?”
1 John 1:9 says: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Remember, God forgave the Son of Sam serial killer, and has given him new life. He has done the same for a mafia captain, and he can and will gladly do the same for you.
I’ll close with the words from an old Contemporary Christian song by Steve Camp:
How many times have I denied Him?
One day faithful, the next I turn away
It’s hard to believe He still loves me
When my sin haunts me every day
But He is faithful when I disobey
When I fall short for His holy call
In my weakness His mercy saves me
I confess my sin, He forgives it all
For every time I’ve broken His heart
For every time I’ve fallen
Every time I thought I’d gone beyond His grace
Once for all He stood in our place
He died for every time
He died for every time
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on First Baptist Church of Watkins Glen
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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