“Guilt and Forgiveness”
LAGRANGE BAPTIST CHURCH
September 23, 2007
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I want to invite
you to take your Bibles this morning, please, and let's begin at
Matthew Chapter 11, Verse 27.
I'd like to read that. We're
not going to spend time there other than to hear the call of the
Lord Jesus Christ. This morning we
deal with the radical nature of the gospel.
Radical is a good word.
It means root; at the root.
It does not mean chiefly how
we use it today, that you have some kind of radical thing that is
out of control; somebody who is over the edge; somebody who is
outside of the box.
Radical is to the very root, or from the very root of the issue;
it's origin. And the
reason we deal with the radical nature of the gospel, is the gospel
this morning specifically is to deal with the radical nature of you.
Something that can reach all the way to the depths of you as
a human and touch you where nothing else can.
Touch you that things in this life have injured, have upset,
have confused, something that has an arm longer than anything that
can touch the human soul.
Jesus said this:
Mat 11:27
All things have been handed over to
me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no
one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son
chooses to reveal him.
Mat 11:28
Come to me, all who labor and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Mat 11:29
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from
me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for
your souls.
Mat 11:30
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is
light." One of the ways,
those of the words of the Lord Jesus Christ
while he was alive on this earth, and one of the ways I know
that sometimes we need a refresher course in the radical nature of
the gospel is the life of the church.
How we self-define us.
How we, not with words, but with looks and actions say what
we are. As a matter of
fact, if we took the radical Biblical definition of the church, it
would stir us up because of what we are.
We are not a group of people that are better or have been
made better than the rest of all society.
We are not different than the rest of all mankind.
There has been something that happened to those of use who
are genuinely Christians that has made a difference in our lives,
but the truth of the matter is this place is a hospital for
sinners, not a showcase for saints!
It is not a place where people who have it altogether come
and they worship their altogether God in their altogether clothes
with their altogether friends and walk out to our altogether cars
and our altogether family and our altogether job.
But I know we've lost the radical nature of the gospel
because sometimes we act like that at church, or we act like that's
supposed to be the way we are at church.
Do you ever deal
with or suffer from guilt?
Does your conscience ever feel guilty?
Have you ever been so crippled by guilt that you can't get
out of the bed in the morning?
Now, if you went to see a modern secular therapist, they
would do a little work in your psyche and a little work in your
family background and they would blame it on your mother and father
for your sense of false guilt.
Now, that's a caricature and a great overstatement, because
there are some fine psychiatrist, psychologist and therapists out
there; probably not many.
Have you ever considered that in this universe that we live
in, and within the range of our own soul, that if we have false
guilt, that there absolutely has to be a thing
of true guilt?
How do you tell the difference? Have you ever
noticed how we run from guilt?
We run from guilt because we run from everything that makes
us uncomfortable or causes pain, and guilt causes pain.
The Psalmist said, "His bones ache; the soul was like the
ground dried up in summer heat.
His life was falling apart.
That he confessed his transgressions to the LORD and the LORD
forgave him. How do you
get there? How do you
get to the place where you are forgiven and you know you are
forgiven? I'm not
talking about psychology in the secular sense.
I am talking about psychology in the Biblical sense, the
study of the soul, the real soul, the part of you that is as real as
your body is. The true
you and the real guilt that occurs in us and where guilt comes from
and how we deal with guilt and how I cripples us.
Guilt can only be dealt with in the church of the Lord Jesus
Christ by Christ
himself. That's the only
place that you can deal with guilt. Can you remember
your first lie?
Mine will never go away.
I will never forget the sense of guilt that my little conscience
played on me when I told my first big lie.
Do you remember the first time you cheated on a test in
school? Don't look at me
like that! Do you
remember the second time you cheated?
I could just about guarantee you the first time you cheated
is far more memorable than the second.
Do you want to know why?
When we go against conscience, we dull it.
Did you continue for a period in your life telling lies?
Do you remember that the 15th lie hardly ever
bothered your conscience like the first one did because the further
you got from what your conscience told you to do, the duller your
conscience got? What is
this conscience thing anyway? Is it some psychologically made-up
thing so we can make people feel guilty and keep them under the
preacher's thumb? Maybe
you need to decide what that is? Do you remember
the first time you ever stole a dollar from somebody? Or a piece of
gum off the shelf? Do you remember the first time you stole from
your employer? That
night you chose to lose your virginity? Can you remember the first
time you lied to your spouse?
Looked at pornography?
Cheated on your mate? Boy, that's….. I
thought we came to church to feel good.
No. We came to
church to confront reality and find out that there is a God big
enough to forgive sin, all sin.
But until we are willing as an individual, and willing as a
church to face up to the truth of humanity that God has told us
about, and the truth of the radical gospel that reaches deeper than
the most radical act of sin in humanity, we're not ready to be the
church. What we say this
morning about guilt is stunning.
But what's more stunning than that to me is the human
conscience that will not come and confront their own guilt at the
call of Jesus and have his powerful sacrifice and shed blood not
only forgive their sin, but radically cleanse their conscience.
Your conscience
is deep within you.
It is a gift of God.
All of us have a conscience.
Romans Chapter 2, I want to give you a brief view of what the
conscience is and does.
Romans Chapter 2: By the
way, for conscience sake I brought my water this morning in one of
our coffee cups to remind you, to remind me to tell you, "Don't
bring your coffee in here or we'll give you a guilty conscience for
spilling it on the tile or the carpet!" [Laughter]
Just water please! Romans Chapter 2:
Paul in Romans 1 is describing the issue of "sin" and that the wrath
of God has been revealed against sin and when sinners go on and sin,
God just takes his hand away and he lets them go to their own
devices, and once he does that it just gets worse, worse, worse and
worse. He's dealing with
Jewish Christians, he's dealing with gentile Christians.
The Jewish Christians have the Old Testament Law so they have
revelation telling them what's wrong and what's right.
But what about those of us, all of us, most all of us who
don't have a Jewish heritage, how do we know if we've sinned if we
didn't have the Old Testament Law?
Verse 14:
Rom 2:14
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what
the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do
not have the law. [That
is the law written]
Rom 2:15
They show that the work of the law is written on their
hearts.
That's called
judicial sentiment.
It's the issue of the innate knowledge of all human beings
having the ability to discern between right and wrong.
It is placed within us, it's called conscience, and it
is the way in which our mind, what this word means, by the way, this
word is given this definition through Biblical usage.
It's a bit of a different word; it doesn’t have its
theological underpinnings that the other words do.
It's like we adopted it and gave it a Christian, or a
Biblical or a theological meaning.
What it stands as, something deep inside man that measures
our actions against the norm. And
God put the norm in our hearts of what is right and what is wrong.
It's not perfectly there because we are fallen in sin, yet
the image of God is left there and we have this residue , that's how
we make laws; that's how we make judgments, that's how we give out
sentences, that's how when somebody cuts in front of you in line you
think that's wrong; you feel it!
That's how you keep from lying or trying not to lie.
How else would we ever know that a lie is wrong other than by
the law or by conscience sake.
So, Verse 15:
Rom 2:15
They show that the work of the law is written on their
hearts.
Not enough to
save because no one will be saved by the work of the law.
And here's what happens:
Rom 2:15
"their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them"
Your conscience
is as if it is somewhere between your heart, where this is written,
and your thoughts that view your actions.
Your conscience is made known by how you think about
your actions.
So when you think , "I shouldn't have done that, I'm a
horrible mother, what more could I have done.
I'm a terrible parent."
"I’m just not a good Christian."
When you have
confessed a sin a hundred times and you won't leave it alone, you
keep feeling guilty over it.
It is a conscience thing that reminds you in your thoughts of
an action you did, it's called the dead works because it's tainted
by sin and this conscience plays havoc with our thoughts and we feel
guilty. And the reason you feel guilty is because you are
guilty! If there's
false guilt, there is true guilt!
God says he can take away guilt.
I've got plenty of true guilt in my life.
I want to know how God can take it away.
Don't you? Let me say a
couple of other things before we get deeper into the text of
Hebrews. I won't be able
to address all of it.
All of us have a conscience.
Our consciences function and we should never go against
conscience that defiles it, it breaks it, and it's a very tender
God-given instrument.
Our conscience cannot be our final guide because it is imperfect,
we'll see in a minute.
But there are others of us, whose imperfect conscience is not given
to the dull side, it's given to the hyperactive side.
Just like some kind of hyperactive organ
in your body that needs medication, the conscience sometimes
gets hyperactive and it needs the medication of the gospel.
You get what the old Puritans called scrupulous.
It's still a word used today because we don’t have a better
word to talk about those who suffer from scrupulosity.
They go buy a shelf or a rack at the department store and
they bump into it and one of the clothing pieces doesn’t fall off,
it just kind of comes off the hanger a little bit and they have
to go back and put that on for fear that if somebody saw them it
would absolutely ruin their Christian testimony, and for those of
you who don't have that kind of conscience, and you walk by the rack
and knock 3 things off, you think, "Oh, the help will pick it up and
you go on." There's a
mixture….. [You could have laughed at that if you wanted to]
[Laughter] There's a mixture in there somewhere that is right.
I don't know that we'll even get to address the overactive
conscience, but maybe in this you will understand to trust the
gospel and not simply your conscience. Let's go to the
Book of Hebrews now, Chapter 9.
Hebrews Chapter 9.
I've been falling down on the job; I don't have the page
number in the pew Bible for you and I don't have it printed on the
screen and I apologize.
Hebrews Chapter 9: Hebrews is the
New Testament gospel written to Old Testament Jews. They had come to
faith in Christ. They
are not struggling terribly because the temple is still standing;
they are being persecuted, they are tempted to go back to the old
sacrificial ways and this book is written to explain to them that
the New Covenant is better than the Old Covenant.
Yes, God did it, it never demeans the Old Covenant, it uses
the Old Covenant for what it's supposed to be, how God used to work
with his people and uses it to shine the light on the New Covenant,
how God completes his work with his people.
Chapter 9, Verse
1:
had regulations for worship and an earthly place
of holiness.
Heb 9:2
For a tent was prepared, the first section, in which were the
lampstand and the table and the bread of the Presence. It is called
the
Heb 9:3
Behind the second curtain was a second section called the
Heb 9:4
having the golden altar of incense and the ark of the
covenant covered on all sides with gold, in which was a golden urn
holding the manna, and Aaron's staff that budded, and the tablets of
the covenant.
Heb 9:5
Above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy
seat. Of these things we cannot now speak in detail.
[If
you want an interesting study, go to the Old Testament and study how
God described to Moses to build the tabernacle and then go to the
Book of the Revelation and see how heaven is described and you will
see that the priests going into the Holy of Holies was nothing but a
picture of Jesus going to the throne of God for us in heaven, that's
very important for us.]
Heb 9:6
These preparations having thus been made, the priests go
regularly into the first section, performing their ritual duties,
Heb 9:7
but into the second only the high priest goes, and he but
once a year, and not without taking blood, which he offers for
himself and for the unintentional sins of the people.
[We are so bent
to sin we can sin unintentionally and not know it.]
Heb 9:8
By this [Listen now, this is Old Testament truth now with New
Testament revelation… by this… the fact that there is a place where
only priests can go, there's an inner place where only the High
Priest can go once a year and then not without sacrifice,
by this….
the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places
is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing.
The Old Testament
temple was built to say, "Yes, I can forgive your sins, but you
can't get to me."
It said, "Stay away."
If the High Priest came in there
Heb 9:9
(which is symbolic for the present age - THAT's US).
According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that
cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper,
Heb 9:10
but deal only with food and drink and various washings,
regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation.
[The time of straightening
out]
God is giving us
first the description of the work of the gospel on the conscience.
He's describing what the conscience is and then he describes the
perfection of that conscience, so the first word is: Description,
what is your conscience like presently?
What is the environment in which you live with this
conscience? I want to start
with where we left off in that last reading:
Heb 9:10
but deal only with food and drink and various washings,
regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation.
[The time of straightening out]
Sometimes that's
what we think religious is, a bunch of actions that deal with
outward things, and so we fancy up church buildings.
We discover wonderful dress for those who may lead us in
spiritual things. We do
everything we can to make ourselves feel spiritual and all of those
issues are nothing but outward things.
God is not interested in the outward, he is interested
in the internal change so the outward becomes right.
The first thing he tells us is, in Verse 8: By this the Holy
Spirit indicates that the way into the Holy places is not yet
opened. As long as the
Old Testament worship was going on, there was no way for people to
genuinely and actually go into the presence of God.
Sin had separated man from God and what they could do at this
time was have ceremonies and rituals and washings that prepared them
outwardly to come into the functional worship of God.
Were Old Testament saints saved? Yes.
By grace through faith? Yes.
But we're looking from here backwards. In Verse 10 we hear
the mention of the word, conscience.
Heb 9:9
According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are
offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, Make it complete.
The way is closed, the conscience is incomplete. And the religious
offerings of that time could not complete or perfect or fulfill what
the conscience was supposed to be and do.
Not only is the conscience incomplete, but we read on and see
that the conscience is impure.
Heb 9:11
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things
that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not
made with hands, that is, not of this creation)
Heb 9:12
he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of
the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood,
Do you get the
picture? The High Priest
in the Old Testament entered into a tabernacle that was a picture of
heaven. That's why Moses
had to make it exactly according to God's instructions.
However, this radical gospel, Jesus dies on the cross
and enters in the real Holy of Holies into the presence of God, not
where golden cherubim are over him singing, but 6-winged living
cherubs are flying with their wings crying day and night, "Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And at that holy place, in the
presence of God, he was fully qualified to offer the sacrifice for
the sins of all mankind who would believe in him.
We aren't looking at a shadow.
We are looking at the radical
reality of the work of God to purify our consciences.
He entered by the means of his own blood, the end of Verse
12….
thus securing an eternal redemption.
Can you hear the
strength of those words?
What Jesus did secured and he secured something that is
eternal, never ending, and what he secured is our redemption;
redeeming us from sin and the guilt of sin.
Heb 9:13
For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of
defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the
purification of the flesh,
[See, if you did
all those things, you would be sanctified and could worship]
Heb 9:14
how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our
conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
Our conscience
presently without Christ is impure, it's incomplete.
Without Christ the way to God is closed.
If the High Priest went through all the preparations, he not
only could go into the outer part, he could go into the inner part
of the temple. Jesus,
look at Verse 13 again:
Heb 9:13
For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of
defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the
purification of the flesh, It prepared them
to come into the presence of God, not fully, not eternally, but
temporarily….
Heb 9:14
how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our
conscience from dead works to serve the living God. He's talking
about 2 things. He's
talking about what has taken place in heaven in the very presence of
God. Christ was sufficient for eternity and he was sufficient to
satisfy God, he was without spot and blemish, and it is in the very
presence of God that an offering was offered to forgive our sins and
purify or cleanse our conscience, to give it a literal catharsis
is the word. I'm glad he said
purify our conscience, aren't you?
There are many other places where we're told our sins are
taken away and forgotten.
But, you see, you still have a conscience.
When you are a believer here on earth, it still interprets
what's on your heart through to your thoughts and you think it out,
and sometimes our thoughts are inaccurate thoughts, and so he gives
us the gospel so that he can purify our conscience from dead works.
Why? So presently
on this earth even now we can begin our service freely to the Living
God. Those who have lied
and cheated to their spouse, those who cheat their employer, those
who cheated on tests at school, those who lied, those who
dishonored, rebelled against their mother and father, Jesus is
saying, "Come, what I have is enough to cleanse that guilt!" I could preach
this same gospel message in KSR (Kentucky State Reformatory) and I
could offer, on the power of Christ, the same free grace and Jesus
can wash their conscience clean.
It's POWER. It is
the power of God unto salvation! Before the cross there was no way
to get rid of our deserved punishment.
There was no way to get rid of sins defiling pollution and
there was no way to get rid of sin's dominating power.
But Jesus did something for us on earth and then went into
the presence of God.
That's the description of the conscience. Now, let's look
at the perfection of the conscience.
Chapter 10, Verse 19: Do you remember
that the Holy Spirit signified by these things that the way to God
is closed. It's closed!
Verse 19, Chapter 10:
Heb 10:19
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the
holy places by the blood of Jesus,
Heb 10:20
by the new and living way that he opened for us through the
curtain, that is, through his flesh,
[What is
the curtain? The curtain is that veil that was rent in two from top
to bottom that kept the Holy of Holies from people, but you've got
to remember that curtain--- on this side of that curtain was
humanity. On this side
of that curtain was God Himself, his holy presence, and look at what
the New Testament tells us:
Heb 10:20
by the new and living way that he opened for us through the
curtain, that is, through his flesh
Where humanity
and divinity touched, in the flesh of Christ through his
crucifixion, he opened…. he threw wide open….the way to God!
He's the one who
said, "I came not for those who are well, but for those who are sick
for they know they need a physician.
He opened the way that was closed.
He perfected the conscience that was incomplete.
Look at verse 14:
Heb 10:14
For by a single offering - [It was perfect, it was
sufficient, it was fitting for what he needed to do] he has
perfected [same word in the positive as our word conscience is in
the negative without Christ] for all time those who are being
sanctified.
He completes our
conscience, our very lives before God and he also cleanses our
conscience. Verse 21:
Remember, he's saying in Verse 19, Therefore, brothers since
we have confidence to enter the holy places, he's telling us to come
because we have confidence in Christ, Verse 21:
Heb 10:21
and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
Not only do we
have one who washed away our sins and cleansed our conscience, now
we have one who is operating not in the Holy of Holies on earth, but
in the Holy of Holies in the presence of God….. Since we have this
great high priest over the house of God…. Listen to this!
This is for you!
This is for you, who feel the crippling guilt of conscience….
Heb 10:22
let us draw near with a true [or sincere] heart in full
assurance of faith,
Now, let me say
something about that.
You're thinking, I don’t have that full assurance of faith.
He's not talking about your subjective assurance about
yourself. What he's
talking about is the absolute assurance that you can come because of
this undeniable, unstoppable, unending work of Christ, you can come
with confidence.
Heb 10:21
and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
Heb 10:22
let us draw near with a true [or sincere] heart in full
assurance of faith,
with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil
conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
A closed way is
open, an incomplete conscience is completed, and an impure
conscience is cleansed.
Those are just the facts.
What are you going to do with them? There is no
psychological trick to removing guilt.
There is spiritual work to have the subjective
experience of knowing your guilt has been taken away.
I've tried to lay this down for 13, almost 14 years.
There is the objective work of God in the gospel; it's really
done! It's a fact!
There is the subjective experience of the gospel that we have
here on earth. Some days
we feel forgiven, some days we don't feel forgiven.
Sometimes our conscience doesn’t accuse us, sometimes our
conscience won't shut up.
It accuses us. It
damns us. It hollers at
us and won't let go and we're driven in the ground by that and we
think, 'Did Christ really save me?"
"Did I really trust him?"
That's all subjective experience.
Nothing changes over here.
That's the radical nature of the gospel. In truth, this real
concrete work of God reaches all the way over here into the depth of
our very conscience and perfects it and cleanses it so in actuality,
in objectivity, it can no longer accuse us because our sins have
been thrown as far away as the east is from the west.
So what do I do with this conscience that still haunts me? One thing, before
I explain that.
Your conscience does now work rightly and the Holy Spirit will use
that conscience to bring the severest of conviction when you truly
sin, and he's never general.
If you're walking around with a general cloud of guilt, you
just feel guilty and you've done nothing wrong, that's the devil!
That's you! But if you've sinned, my friend, and you know it,
and you're living in guilt, that's the Holy Spirit of God and you've
got to come back to the cross to get rid of that.
So, what's our
application? You need an
educated conscience because an uneducated conscience mistranslates
the work and word of God to our mind.
Some of you are still trying to work for God.
Some of you think God can't love me because of all these
things I do or have done, or my thoughts.
I'm just not worthy. God's angry with me.
When you can find that in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you
bring it to me and I'll preach it, but until you do, my friend, I'm
going to preach the rich, full and free grace of Christ because
that's the gospel.
You're going to get to heaven, you're going to please God by doing
good things, my friend, you are a rotten, ruined sinner saved by the
grace of God, upheld by the arms of Jesus, so the first thing to do
to train your conscience is to get your mind off of yourself and put
it on Christ. The
Puritans used to tell their church members, "You, my friend, with
you guilty conscience, you're spending too much time thinking about
your sins instead of contemplating the savior."
Strangely the more we contemplate him and all he's done for
us, the less we want to sin, the less we're harmed by our past sins.
He breaks the power of cancelled sin.
So what do I do? Here's the
picture. You have the
Old Testament tabernacle into which the High Priest could only once
a year for the sins of the people.
He would lay his hands on the scapegoat and confess all the
sins of But Jesus, when
he came, was the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.
He was a man and he was God.
And the sins of all mankind were laid on his back and when he died
on the cross, dear ones, he was receiving God's just punishment for
sin.
He was buried because he really died. He was raised to prove
that the sins that were laid on him were now paid for him.
He took himself, he ascended into heaven before the very
Throne of God to which the Father said, "I accept your sacrifice!" So, how do you
educate your conscience?
You do the same thing the Old Testament Israelites did in shadow,
you follow your High Priest to worship, except this High Priest
doesn’t take you to the tabernacle and say, "This is as far as you
can come." He says,
"Hey, you! You! I know
everything about you, but what I want you to do, I want you to come
boldly to my Father's throne of grace because I'm sitting right
beside him." Look at it
yourself, it's in Hebrews Chapter 4.
I'm not making this up.
You have an open invitation to God because of Christ.
Verse 16, Hebrews Chapter 4:
Heb 4:16
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace,
that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. He does say,
"Tiptoe in." He doesn’t
say, "Well, Hey, I want to come in, can I come in now?"
He says, "Come!"
He's inviting you, Come!
Come! And we dillydally
around and won't run in.
My friend, if you're a Christian, don't you know you're
already there? Look in
the Book of Ephesians.
You can do it. It's just
a couple of pages back, Ephesians Chapter 2.
This is educating your conscience.
This is what I'm talking about. There are two basic things:
You put the information in your head about what Christ did on earth
and in heaven, and then you walk to follow him there.
You see, our conscience is cleansed by Christ's work.
Our conscience is strengthened by following him there.
That's why Colossians says: "Set your mind on things above
where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." Look at what
Ephesians Chapter 2, Verse 4 says:
Eph 2:4
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with
which he loved us,
Eph 2:5 even
when we were dead in our trespasses,
The love of God
comes to us first even when we're dead in trespasses….
… made us alive together with Christ [without Christ it couldn't be
done]--by grace you have been saved-- [Now Look at this]….
Eph 2:6
and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Know what he's
done, follow him there.
That is how you educate that conscience.
You need to use every means God has given you: Church,
preaching, teaching, reading, memorizing, listening to music,
cultivate affections I do not know
what burdens you walked in here with, but I do know the One
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