A life of sin might lead you to believe one of two things: you got away with it, or God can’t possibly forgive you. Dr. David Jeremiah explains why both of these ideas are impossible, based on the promises in God’s Word.
Some people continue to sin because they believe they’re getting away with it. Others, because they believe God can’t possibly forgive them. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah explains that while these beliefs might be common, they hold no water based on the promises in God’s Word. Listen now as David introduces the conclusion of his message, How Can I Be Truly Forgiven?,
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If you have ever done something that you knew was wrong and knew that you needed to be forgiven by somebody who was hurt by what you did, you know the pain of unforgiveness. And a lot of times when we refuse to forgive someone, we think we’re hurting them and often we’re just hurting ourselves. Here in the story of David is A wonderful exposition of what true forgiveness is all about. Here we learn the pain of unforgiven sin, and here we learn the joy that comes when sin is forgiven. From two Psalms, Psalm 32 and 51, putting those two together in the life of David. We’ll get to that in just a moment, but did you know this series we’re doing right now is called God, I need some answers. And we have a wonderful study guide that has all the detailed outlines and answers to these questions. And we also have a set of CDs with all of the audio teaching that you can have. This is a great study for small groups. If you don’t have a curriculum ready for your next study, you might want to talk about it. God, I need some answers. I promise you the questions that are in this series are questions in the hearts of many of the people who are in your study, and you will have a great time exploring the answers from the book of Psalms and from other scriptures as well. Take advantage of this opportunity and use these resources as you share your own faith and as you share the Word of God. Well, here we are with How Can I Be Truly Forgiven? Part 2, Psalm 32 and 51, and the life of David.
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God sent the prophet to David. David didn’t ask for him. God sent him to David because the prophet was to have a very important ministry in David’s life. He was to help David face up to what he had done. And I don’t know this for sure, but if I have to give you my guess as to what David’s feeling at this moment when Nathan says, thou art the man, along with the overwhelming anguish of knowing now that he has been found out, I have to believe that David also feels a sense of incredible relief. Finally, it’s out. If David had pushed Nathan away, David had the power to take Nathan’s life if he chose. He could have made him another casualty. But David heard the voice of God and it was the first step back. And I want you to note that because the next thing that happened after the confrontation was a confession. And the confession is written for us in David’s journal. For the superscription over Psalm 51 in my Bible says this, to the chief musician, a Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba, and he pens for us in Psalm 51, his own words as he comes back to God. Let me tell you two things about David’s confession. First of all, it was genuine. It was genuine. You say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, isn’t all confession genuine? Not really. I read about a guy who wrote to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the letter said, I haven’t been able to sleep because last year when I filed my income tax report, I deliberately misrepresented my income. I’m enclosing a check for $150, and if I still can’t sleep, I’ll send you the rest. Now, that’s the way a lot of people confess. Do you know folks like that? Confession for a lot of folks is just telling people what you discover they already know. In fact, in our schools, and I can say this from the high school, junior high, all the way through to college, one of the things we learn when we deal with the problems young people face is that a lot of times kids will come clean when they know you already know what they did. But they won’t tell you any more than they think you know. So sometimes you think you got this whole deal wrapped up and after it’s all over, you found out they didn’t come clean at all. There’s a whole bunch of more stuff you should have known. Confession can be dishonest and ungenuine. Did you know that? But I want to tell you something. When David confessed, his confession was genuine. You say, how do you know that? Look into the Bible with me and notice what he said about what he did. Verse one, he calls it transgression. which is rebellion. Verse 2, he calls it iniquity, which is perversion, distortion, acting unjustly, dealing crookedly. Verse 2, he calls it sin, which means to miss the mark. And verse 4, he calls it evil, which is a vile thing which deserves condemnation. The Hebrew words are much more graphic than our words. What David said was, God, I want to tell you that I know what I did, and what I did was really bad. There was no candy coating of his transgression. If you go back in Psalm 32 and verse five, you see what David said about this prayer after he had written it. He says, I acknowledged my sin to you and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said I will confess my transgression to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. In Psalm 51, 17, we’re told that the Lord honors a broken and a contrite heart. His confession was genuine. He recognized that what he did was wrong. One of the things that keeps many of us from ever knowing renewed joy and in fellowship with God, knowing what it means to have the burden lifted is we’re always trying to make our sin look better. We’re always trying to put it in better terms. We’re always trying to couch it in ways so that we don’t feel so badly about it. The only way you can ever get any relief from sin is to confess. And you know what the word means? Amalageo in the Greek language means to say the same thing. It’s to look at your sin and to say the same thing about it that God would say, to acknowledge you’re wrong. You say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, that’s so painful and that’s so hard. But it’s the only way back. It’s where you start through genuine confession. Notice, secondly, it was not only genuine, it was God-centered. David said, against thee, God, and thee only have I sinned. Now, it’s not that he does not understand that others have been affected. David hasn’t suddenly lost his knowledge of what happened. He knows Bathsheba has been hurt in this, her purity taken away. He knows that Uriah is in the ground, dead, because of what happened. He realizes… that Joab has been complicated in his own integrity because of what he has done. He knows what’s happened to him, but David said, Lord, it’s against you and you only that I have sinned. David now sees that ultimately his sin is an insult and an injury to God. It is God’s love that has been wounded. It is the God of grace against whom he has sinned. And when a person takes that attitude, that God’s forgiveness is reckoned by his grace and his mercy, and that sin is a sin against God, first of all, he has taken a major step on his way back. Unfortunately, our concept of the holiness of God has been so eroded through our easy believism in this day that people almost feel like That’s the secondary problem. In fact, let me ask you this question. You do something big time and it involves other people and I give you the option today. Either confess it to the person you did it to or confess it to God. Which would you take? Hmm. Easy, confess it to God. I mean, you can do that in a quiet little prayer and nobody knows, but if you understood who God was, you wouldn’t feel that way. You say, what are you talking about? What I’m talking about is we are all into worship and thank God that we are. I love to worship, but sometimes if we’re not careful, we can get so caught up in the mechanics of worship that we forget who it is that we’re worshiping, who God is. His attributes, His love, His faithfulness, His goodness, His holiness, His righteousness. The worship is secondary to the object of our worship, and David understood that. So when he confessed, he said, Lord, I know that this is basically an offense against You. Well, when he confessed, something great happened. And let me hold out this hope for all of us today. Nothing we have ever done. I mean, David, I mean, he did the biggies. Adultery, murder, cover up. And yet I want to tell you something. David took the route back. His conviction promoted a confrontation which brought out of him a confession. And now we’re going to see the cleansing that takes place in his life. The same intensity of words that David uses to talk about his sin, he now uses to describe the forgiveness. And I want you to notice these as you look at Psalm 51. He says, first of all, that he wants his sin to be blotted out. He sees his sin as a record against him in the archives of heaven and he says, oh God, blot it out. Just take a pen. Sometimes when I’m working on a manuscript or something, I’ll get one of these big markers, these big black markers. They make huge black marks. If you want to take out a whole sentence, you just take that black marker and you just go across like this. You don’t have to do it twice. It wipes out a whole sentence. David said, God, what I want you to do is this. I want you to take your marker and blot my sin out of the archives of heaven. Then he said, God, I want you to wash away my sin. He sees his sin as a stain upon his soul. He says, God, take your precious blood and just wash all this sin away. And then he says, Lord, I want you to cleanse me, verse 2. And the technical term that he uses in verse 2 is the term for the cleansing of a leper. And it’s the term that was used to declare that a leper had been cleansed. He said, God, take away the leprosy of my soul. And then notice down in verse 7, this is an incredible insight from the scripture. He prays that he would be purged with hyssop. Do you know what that was? A purging with hyssop was what a Jewish person had to do after he came in contact with a dead body. It was an Old Testament ritual that was prescribed in the law. The Jews had an intense abhorrence to death, and the law provided that after you had come in contact with a dead body, you had to go through this process. You had to go through this ritual cleaning, the purging with hyssop. And David said, God, I’ve come in contact with the dead body. I’m the cause of that death. And I believe that he was talking about Uriah. And he said, God, please wash me clean. And then in that phrase, he employs a verb that’s formed from the word sin. And if we used it in our language, look down at it, it would say, purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. And when he says that, he uses his term. He says, purge me with hyssop and I shall be unsinned. He said, God, unsin me. I never thought of that phrase before. I don’t think that’s the way we talk today, but boy, is it graphic. Oh God, unsend me. Anybody ever feel like that? Just unsend me, Lord. Purge me and cleanse me and take away my sin. So no wonder David said in Psalm 32, one, blessed is the man, happy is the man who goes through this process. David looks back on it and he makes this judgment in Psalm 32. He says, I’ve been through this. I’ve been through the sin. I’ve been through the overwhelming anguish in my soul. I’ve had somebody come and tell me I’m the one. And I’ve had to come and ask you to forgive me. And you’ve taken my sin away. You’ve blotted it out. You’ve washed it clean. You’ve unsinned me, God. And I want to tell you I’m on the other side of it now. And oh, how blessed is the man who has been forgiven. And all God’s people said amen. If you’ve been forgiven, you know what David’s talking about. He had the answer to his prayer. God did indeed restore unto him the joy of his salvation. And I want to just tell you today, my friends, that the great good news of the gospel is we have a forgiving God. And that when we come clean with God, when we come to Him and open our hearts up to Him and tell Him what’s happened in our heart, God does hear us and He forgives us. And the Word of God is replete with references to the forgiveness of God. Psalm 86, 5 says, For you, Lord, are good and ready to forgive and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon you. Psalm 103 says, for as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. Oh, I could give you dozens of other verses that just continually say, God forgives. God forgives. And he will forgive you. He’s just waiting for you to come and ask him. Now I wish there was some way I could make this clearer to you. Because the sense of sin is so great that if we don’t have a comparable sense of the awesome forgiveness of God, we can leave burden down. But you don’t have to do that. I read about a nun who went to a bishop for confession. And one day the nun told this bishop that Christ had revealed himself to her in person. And the bishop, understandably doubtful, said to her, well, I have some instructions for you. The next time Christ appears to you, I want you to ask him about the sins of the archbishop. And the nun said, of course, I’ll be happy to. So the next time in a period of confession, the bishop said to the nun, well, did you ask Christ about the sins of the archbishop? And she said, yes, I did, Father. And he replied, what did he say? The nun answered, he said, I’ve forgotten them. And he has. That’s the good news of forgiveness. He puts them behind his back as far as the east is from the west. He buries them in the deepest sea and he forgets what he forgives. And yet there’s a postscript. And if I’m going to be an honest pastor and an honest teacher, I need to tell you the postscript. The Lord will not forgive. Erase history. And sometimes there are things which are set in motion while we are out of fellowship with God that are a matter of cause and effect, and we have to reap what we sow. Even when we have been restored to fellowship out of the forgiveness process, sometimes we have to pay the piper. Catherine Power, in the U.S. News and World Report story about her, there was this little paragraph. After all these years, it’s hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for. The children who lost a father. The family who lost a daughter. The young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the 60s. And there are others suffering now. Her husband who she met while she was running with a wife who is now in jail. The son that was born to her while she was a fugitive, now without his mother. Even with the best intention, said the article, some things can never be made right. And that’s the awesome picture that’s real, isn’t it? In fact, when David responded to Nathan, and Nathan said to him, thou art the man, and David got angry, he said, whoever did that’s gonna die, and he’s gonna restore fourfold. How could he possibly have known how prophetic he was? Because that’s exactly what David did. He gave back fourfold. Let me tell you briefly what happened. The child that was conceived and born to Bathsheba died. Shortly after that, David’s daughter Tamar was raped by his son. David didn’t judge that, didn’t take care of it. He should have stepped in as a father and said what needed to be said and taken judgment on his own son and punished him, but how could David do that? His credibility as a father had been shot. Third thing that happened was Absalom found out about Tamar was so incensed at what had happened to her that he went and murdered Amnon. And then Absalom got caught up in a power struggle with his father, tried to start a coup in the kingdom, took half of David’s people and left and had David forced out of the kingdom. And then later you see Absalom hanging from a tree by his hair. And he’s dead. And the most anguishing cry in the whole story of David is this father on the news of his son Absalom. And you just can hear the weeping in his voice as you read it in the pages of the scripture. Oh, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom, my son. So there are consequences and you know, friends, I wish I didn’t have to say that. I wish there’s some way I could just say, you know, if you just come back to God and he’ll forgive you and that’s important and it’s good to have the guilt gone, but he doesn’t just take his magic brush and take away everything that happened while you were walking away from him. You may not want to hear it, but if I’m going to be faithful to you as your pastor, you need to hear it. It’s the truth. So there’s two things that I think we need to say as we close our Bibles and as we think about that. And I just want you to listen to them carefully. There’s two impossibilities. If we don’t get these messages, we won’t hear what God wants us to hear. The first impossibility is this, and listen up, especially young people and all of you who may be on the threshold of going down a road that you think you have carefully protected yourself from. Listen to me. Impossibility number one, it is impossible to get away with sin. You can’t do it. The Bible says it this way, be sure your sin will find you out. Oh, you say, Pastor Jeremiah, no one’s ever going to know about this. Nobody. I mean, we’ve covered this up. I mean, nobody, I mean, there’s only two of us that know. Well, if only one of you knows, that’s enough. Catherine did her best to cover it up, and she managed for 23 years to keep it from everybody else. Even her husband didn’t know at first. But she knew, and that’s why it got out. You know, we have this idea today, this idea that God’s a big grandfather up in the sky kind of just pats us on the head. Listen, you can do what you want to do. As I’ve said to you before, you can get your kicks, but you’ve got to take the kickbacks with them. Amen? So I just want to tell you, as faithfully as I can, don’t think you’re going to be the one who will get by with it, because you won’t. You won’t do it. Nobody ever does. But there’s another impossibility that’s good news, and I want you to listen up. You may have messed up. Who of us here can look at another and say, I haven’t ever had to come back and ask for the cleansing and the hyssop We all have. And you may have messed up, and maybe you’re in the midst of it right now. Let me tell you the next impossibility. Yes, it’s impossible to get away with sin, but it’s also impossible to get away from the love of God. And you may think that because of what you’ve done, God doesn’t love you anymore. Don’t you think that? The very fact that he brought you here is an evidence that he loves you. And if you have gotten into a situation where you don’t want anybody to know what you’ve done, and you say, it’s bad, Pastor. I want to tell you something. I don’t care how bad it is. God loves you. And if you’re one of His children, He will come after you, and He will keep after you, and He will come in every way He can to draw you back. You may have to feel some of the sting of what you’ve done before you open up and take note of it, but I want you to understand today that just as surely as you cannot get away with sin, you cannot get away from God’s love. You cannot. He loves you with an everlasting love. And how many of us as parents have not had to on occasion, as I did once, take hold of a child by the shoulders and say, I don’t care what you’re doing or what you think you’re doing. But I want to tell you something, no matter what you do, I will never stop loving you. Never. And if I’m like that as a human father with my imperfections, I want to tell you that’s the way God is. He will never stop loving you. You may be unlovable, but he will never stop loving you. I read a little thing that I want to share with you as we close. It’s in a book by Ruth Harms Culkin. It’s a little book called Lord, Don’t You Love Me Anymore? And she tells a story kind of in a poetic way of a conversation she had with a little boy, seven-year-old boy. This is what she wrote. He is seven years old, and he’s my friend. His eyes are merry and his hair is short and his nose is covered with freckles. And on a cold rainy day, we sat on the floor eating hot buttered popcorn. The popcorn went down quickly, but the questions came out slowly. If I told a lie today, would God stop loving me? Well, no, of course not, David. Well, if I told two lies or three, would he stop loving me then? No, but you’d be unhappy in your heart. What if I punched Johnny in the nose and made his nose bleed real hard? Would God stop loving me then? No, but you better not try it. What if I threw a rock and broke your window? Would God stop loving me then? No, but you’d have to work to pay for it. What if I stepped on the snails and ate all your flowers? Would God stop loving me then? Not for a minute, David. Well, when would God ever stop loving me? David, not until there is no more earth and no more heaven and no more God. Then it’s never going to happen no matter what. That’s right, David. Even if it sometimes feel like it might, it’s never going to happen no matter what. And that’s the good news. God loves you. And the reason you have that hurt in your heart right now is because you’re God’s. And he doesn’t want you out of fellowship with him. And you’re never, ever going to have it back the way it should be until you come clean. And David’s given you the formula, hasn’t he? He’s given you the plan. You can even borrow his prayer if you like. But whatever you do, my friend, don’t go on living unforgiven. He waits for you with wide open arms and he will accept you back if you’ll come.
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Amen. I’m often reminded of Jonah in the Old Testament who failed God so miserably, and then the Bible says, and the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time. God gave him another chance to go and serve, and he was willing to do that to you. He’s willing to do that for you. Whatever you’ve done, however far away you have fallen from him, God isn’t finished with you. He wants to forgive you and help you get restored to meaningful living. He did that for David. Much of the good that we know about David took place after these things happened, and God is willing to help you as well. I hope you hear me and take advantage of His grace and His goodness. Well, tomorrow, a standalone message called, Why Should I Be Thankful? On Friday, we’re going to talk about why trouble overwhelms us sometimes. Again, a couple of psalms with answers to these questions. Be sure to have a good day. Be sure to walk with the Lord. Thank you for listening. I’m David Jeremiah.
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The message you just heard came to you from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Dr. David Jeremiah, the senior pastor. Reach out and tell us how this ministry blesses you by writing to Turning Point, P.O. Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. Visit our website at davidjeremiah.org slash radio or calling 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David’s new book, Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life. It’ll help you abide with God, and it’s yours for a gift of any amount. You can also view over 1,200 of Dr. Jeremiah’s sermons on any screen anytime you like on our Turning Point Plus streaming service for a monthly gift of any amount. Visit turningpointplus.org for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue God, I Need Some Answers on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
