You Can Find Forgiveness

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Charlie and Madeline and I got here this morning just in time to hear Leah rehearsing that song. And we sat down and listened. We walked in as she was doing the second verse where it talks about being dirty and ashamed and talks about how grace is unable to change some people and how that’s the fear anyway.

And I was just stunned and I asked Christi, I said, is she doing that this morning? She said, yeah, it was kind of a last-minute decision. And I said, but that fits perfectly with what we’re going to talk about this morning.

And it’s amazing how God orchestrates those things. Many times we will underestimate the power of God to forgive. And it’s unfortunate that we do that.

You know, I think of a couple of situations that have come to mind recently. There’s a man in prison in New York right now named David Berkowitz. Some of you are familiar with that name.

There are several documentaries that if you have various streaming services, you can go watch these right now. David Berkowitz is in prison for the series of Son of Sam murders in the New York City area back in the 1970s. If he did what he confessed to, then David Berkowitz deserves to be in prison.

As a matter of fact, if you’re in favor of the death penalty, then that’s what he deserves. And I’m not saying that he doesn’t. But David Berkowitz, during his time in prison, came to faith in Jesus Christ. And he has a website, as a matter of fact, that some people outside maintain for him as a ministry, talking about his testimony of how God has changed him through Jesus Christ. Not for him to say, oh, because I’m a different person, excuse me, because I’m a different person, I should get out of prison or anything like that.

But to testify to the incredible power of Jesus Christ to forgive and to change people. Now, understandably, many people are skeptical about what David Berkowitz claims. And they complain about him claiming the forgiveness of God and say, oh, he shouldn’t ever be forgiven. I don’t want to say that anybody ever shouldn’t be forgiven.

I think I understand the thought process from a civil standpoint, even as a fellow believer in Christ. I say David Berkowitz is right where he belongs. But from a spiritual standpoint, I say thank God that his grace is so great that he could save even David Berkowitz. There’s a man who died a year ago this month His name, and I probably won’t pronounce this correctly, but his name was Khang Kek Yau.

During the 1970s, he was responsible for one of the most notorious prisons run by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The communist regime in that country that slaughtered a third of its citizens. He ran the Toul Slang prison in the capital city where for tens of thousands of people who passed through this prison and were tortured to death, only seven people survived the four years of that regime.

This man went into hiding for years and years after the Vietnamese overthrew their regime and years later emerged and said he had come to faith in Jesus Christ and expressed remorse for all of them. This man put David Berkowitz to shame in the number of murders he committed, but showed remorse and said he was a changed man in Jesus Christ. They put him on trial for his war crimes, and rightly so. He died in prison.

That’s where he belonged. But from a spiritual standpoint, he said, I’m forgiven in Jesus Christ. People looked at that and said, well, isn’t that convenient? And they look at people like David Berkowitz, and they look at people like, he went by the name Comrade Doik also.

They look at these two men and others like them, and they say, well, isn’t that convenient? You can do whatever you want in life, and then you just claim that the blood of Jesus magically cleanses you, and isn’t that convenient? It shouldn’t be that way.

It’s very easy to look at somebody who’s committed these grievous, heinous sins that we would all be horrified by. It’s easy to look at somebody like that and say, well, the blood of Jesus shouldn’t apply there. There shouldn’t be forgiveness for them.

But if we’re honest with ourselves, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that we all fall short of God’s holiness. And if we’re honest, we’ve all had those moments where whatever our sin is, and I doubt anybody in here has been a serial killer or committed genocide. Please don’t make me have to go on the news someday and say, well, I just thought they were nice and quiet.

You know, they were always nice at church. Nobody, okay. I don’t think anybody’s along those lines.

But still, we all know we’ve fallen short. We all have those moments where whatever that sin is, and yes, it’s not genocide, we still think, is there any way God could forgive this? Especially something we would look at and say is relatively simple.

But you ask forgiveness for it enough times, and you think, man, am I even trying? Can God forgive me the 50th time? Sometimes my attitude gets me in trouble.

I ask God for forgiveness for it, just like I did last week. And the week before, and the week before, and the week before. And so sometimes that lying voice tells you, he can’t forgive you.

look at how many times you’ve already asked for forgiveness, and it’s like you’re not even trying to change. But our forgiveness is not based on what we can accomplish. So if you today are sitting here and thinking in the back of your mind that there’s something God can’t forgive, or if you’ve ever been in a place where in your mind you think, well, there’s this thing in my life God can’t forgive, I want to assure you, not based on what I have to say, but on what God’s Word says, that He can forgive you.

that you can find forgiveness whatever you’ve done. And so this morning we’re going to be in 1 John. I told you last week that we’re going to spend several weeks going through some of the assurances, some of the things that God through the Apostle John told us we could know for sure and we could be confident in.

We’re going to be in 1 John 1 and look at one of these being the fact that He can forgive our sins whatever they are. Now, once you get there, once you get to 1 John 1, if you’ll stand with me, if you are able to, as we read from God’s Word together. 1 John, if you’re using your phone, there’s a link in our bulletin where you can just click on it, or it’ll be on the screen here for you.

But 1 John 1, starting in verse 5, it says, This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.

My little children, these things I write to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the whole world.

And you may be seated. I told you that we’re going to be talking about some of the things He’s written so that we may know. He’s written some things in the book of 1 John so that we can be confident in what God is doing and has done for us.

And one of these areas is forgiveness. The people that John wrote to struggled just like we do. Now, we read about people in the Bible and we think because they’re in the Bible, they were these super holy people.

And, you know, it’s almost like they floated down on a cloud and they didn’t have the same struggles. It’s not true. It’s not true.

Even the Apostle Paul, you’ve heard this before probably. The Apostle Paul considered himself the worst of all sinners, the chiefest of sinners. You read about the people in 1 Corinthians, some of the things that Paul had to write to that church to straighten out.

That’s definitely a group of people who were struggling with sin. You look at all the heroes of the Bible. You look at Moses, you look at David, you look at Abraham.

They all struggled with sin. The people that John was writing to were just like us. Now their world looked a little bit different, or a lot different I should say.

But human nature has not changed. Technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t.

And so he was writing to people who struggled with sin. When you’re reading this, you’re reading a letter that was written to a group of people who share your struggles. But here, as he’s writing to them, he does a couple of things.

First of all, he affirms the seriousness of sin, but he also reassures them that their sin can be forgiven. Now, both of those are important because in too many Christian circles today, the answer to sin is just to downplay it and act like it’s not that big a deal. That’s why we have the squishy middle when it comes to Christianity. I’m saying, well, you know, that’s not as big a deal as it used to be.

I’m sorry if the Bible, I’m not really sorry, I don’t know why I said that, but if the Bible says that this is right and this is wrong, that’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter how culture has changed. The answer is not to change the definition of sin.

The answer is to look to the Bible’s remedy for the problem of sin. But if you go through this from the very beginning of what we read, he talks to them about walking in darkness, and he says if you say that you’re walking with God, but you’re on a path of darkness, then one of those two things is not true. You can say I walk with God, but if you’re continuing in sin, those things both can’t be true, and if you say they’re both true at the same time, you’re lying.

It doesn’t mean that we as Christians never sin. I think we talked about this last week when he said that if we’re born of God, we will not sin. That doesn’t mean that we will never have instances of sin in our lives.

He’s talking about a pattern, a lifestyle of continuing on without anything ever having changed. When we come to Christ by faith, we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit and He begins changing us. It’s inescapable that He would change us.

And for us to say, well, I belong to Christ, but nothing changed, and I’m just going to go on doing exactly what I want to. If we can, in the long term, say, I’m going to live however I want, and I don’t care what God says, it’s an indication that that profession of faith may not be genuine. All right?

We’re told in Scripture to go back and examine ourselves. I’m not going to tell you you’re lost. I’m going to tell you, go back and look at what God’s Word says and ask yourself some tough questions. It’s not about cleaning up our act.

but it’s about letting him do his work. And as he does his work, something’s going to change. Now you can walk with Christ for 50 years and still struggle with sin, but that’s the answer.

That’s the difference. Because we’re in Christ, we struggle against that sin. We don’t sin and say, man, that was awesome.

We sin and say, why did I do that? God helped me not do that. You understand the difference.

But he says, if we go on as new believers, If we go from where we were unbelievers to now we’re believers and nothing changed, we just walk embracing the same old sin, and yet we say we belong to the Lord, he says we’re lying. That’s not Jared’s opinion. That’s what the Apostle John said.

So you can take it up with him. All right? That’s the good thing about preaching God’s Word.

If you make somebody upset, you can say, take it up with him. And I didn’t write it. But he tells us sin is a serious problem.

It’s still a serious problem. And saying God is a forgiving God is not to say that sin is not a serious problem. By the way, sin is anything.

. . I’m just going to adopt the cross-timbers definition.

Sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God. I’m not going to do the hand motions, sorry. I’ll get too confused.

I see my son over there every time doing. . .

I don’t know what he’s doing, but. . .

Yeah, I’m not going to try to memorize it. I’m doing well to memorize the words. But if you’re sitting there thinking he’s talking about sin, what does he mean?

Anything we say, think, do, or don’t do that displeases God. It’s serious business and it needs to be dealt with. But the answer to it is His forgiveness.

Now the reason it’s such a serious deal is that sin always disrupts our connection with God. It always disrupts our connection with God. It’s always offensive to God.

And that’s the reason why. Sometimes we’ll convince ourselves that sin is okay because we think, well, who is it going to hurt? It may not hurt anybody in the short term, but it is offensive to God.

The reason it’s offensive to God is that it’s against God’s nature. That’s the reason it’s sin in the first place. If God and who He is are the standard of right and wrong, is the standard for what is right, then anything that is opposed to God is sin.

For example, lying is wrong because God is a God of truth. Adultery is wrong because God is a God of faithfulness. It’s all rooted in who He is.

And so when we choose to sin, when we choose to embrace that, what we’re really doing is rejecting who God is. And you can see where that would be offensive, right? Imagine if somebody came to you and said, I just hate everything about you.

Would that bother you a little bit? I know some of you say, I don’t care what anybody says about me. Deep down, that would bother me.

especially when it was somebody I cared about and did all this stuff for. That’s what the human race has done to God. It’s not just, oh, we want this option over here.

It is a complete rejection of everything God is when we embrace everything that is the opposite of who He is. And so sin is always offensive to God, and that’s why it’s always such a problem. That’s why it stands between us.

Verse 5 says, This is the message which we have heard from Him and declared to you that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. What sin is and who God is are completely opposite. And so when we embrace the sin over here, it’s always going to put an obstacle in that connection between us and God.

Have you ever wronged somebody and the relationship wasn’t right after that until it got resolved? We all have. Or somebody has wronged us and we knew the relationship wasn’t right.

I remember disobeying my parents as a kid. I think it was a Tuesday, right? Yeah, I think it was a Tuesday.

I remember disobeying my parents as a kid. And if I thought they didn’t know yet, they probably knew. But if I thought they didn’t know yet, it was just kind of awkward until the truth all came out and was dealt with.

I mean, they weren’t screaming at me or anything, but there was an obstacle there in the relationship. When our kids sneak something they’re not supposed to, and you start trying to talk to them. And they’re just giving you real short answers, and they’re just acting funny.

There’s something in the middle of the relationship. There’s that transgression that is interrupting the connection there. That’s how it is with our connection with God.

It is always disrupted when that sin stands in between us. That’s why he said in verse 6, if we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. At the very least, even when we have those momentary lapses where we fall into sin, until we repent, there’s an obstacle there.

And it’s a mistake to just get up and pretend like it never happened and go on and think maybe God didn’t notice. Now, notice I say connection to God. It disrupts our connection.

Because depending on where we are with God, where our standing is with God, it’s a little bit different. See, sin for all of humanity has stood between us and a relationship with God. We cannot be in a relationship with God as our Father and as our friend until that sin is dealt with through Jesus Christ. But even as believers, we have fellowship with God that when there’s unconfessed, undealt with sin, that fellowship is not what it ought to be.

The relationship is still there. We don’t cease being His child every time we mess up. But there comes a time when the fellowship needs to be repaired.

So I use the general word connection here to describe both of those. But whether we’re talking about the fellowship not being what it ought to be or there being no relationship at all, sin always disrupts that connection, whatever it is, with God. And so our sin problem has to be resolved for that connection to be restored.

We can’t just go on and act like it never happened. I know people that will do something wrong, they’ll say something hateful to you or they’ll do something wrong, and they’ll never apologize for it. They just come back a few days later and start acting all nicey-nice again, and I think, okay, that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to an apology.

We’re just sweeping under the rug and pretending it never happened. We can’t do that with God. That sin is always going to be there.

The problem has to be resolved for that connection to be restored. We need a clean slate with God so that we can have fellowship with Him as believers. To even become believers, we need a clean slate or to be His followers.

We need that clean slate for the relationship to be established. That’s why He says if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. We can have that fellowship with God, and that fellowship with God is solid as we walk in the light.

But the only reason we’re able to walk in the light is when we’re empowered to do so by His Holy Spirit. When we’ve been forgiven of our sins, when we’ve been cleansed of our sins through Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit comes to take up residence, we don’t just accidentally walk in the light by chance. I’ve given this example to you before, and I think about it all the time.

I’ve never sat down and given my children sinning lessons or disobedience lessons. It’s the good stuff I have to sit down and teach them. The bad stuff just seems to come naturally.

We don’t just stumble into walking in the light with God either. That’s something He enables in us and equips us to do. And the ultimate goal is for us to walk in a way that is pleasing to God.

That’s why He said in verse 1, I’ve written these things so that you may not sin. I’ve written these things to encourage you to leave that sin behind. To know that it is possible to walk in a way that pleases God.

That’s the goal. Instead of us to be separated from God by that sin, the goal is for us to be separated from that sin by God. But you know as well as I do, that’s not something we can do perfectly. I have a bad habit of waking up on Monday morning and saying, I’m really going to be serious about Weight Watchers this week, and I do really well for a little while, and then somebody brings donuts into the house, and all bets are off, right?

I do the same thing with God. I wake up in the morning, I say, I’m going to do better today. And then I have to deal with people.

And y’all know how that goes. Y’all have to deal with people too. And the sin nature is right back there.

And sometimes even before, I can’t blame people. It’s just there. And sometimes just dealing with myself, that sin nature comes out.

We know that it’s a standard we can’t live up to perfectly. It’s the goal. But we always fall short of that goal. And so resolving that sin problem is not something that you and I can do on our own. It’s just not.

And we will wear ourselves out trying. Do not come in here today and take from this message that the idea is just go out and sin less. You can’t on your own.

All right? The point of the message is that we have a sin problem that needs to be dealt with and forgiveness is available. You can be forgiven of all of that sin, But you have to go through it a certain way to find that forgiveness.

Jesus Christ is the only one who can offer us forgiveness. That forgiveness that we need so that the connection with God can be restored. It’s only available through Jesus Christ. It says in verse 2 that He was offered as the sacrifice for sins for everyone who would believe.

It says, He Himself is the propitiation for our sins. That word propitiation, I know that’s not a word we use all the time. You probably don’t send it in text messages and Facebook comments.

It’s not an everyday word. The picture here is of the Old Testament sacrifices. When an animal was sacrificed, when blood was shed and sprinkled on the altar as an offering for the sins of Israel, John says Jesus is that.

He is the offering for our sins and not for ours only, but for the whole world. The Bible teaches that for everyone who will believe, Jesus Christ is the offering. He is the sacrifice.

He is the payment in full for our sins. He’s not just the payment, as some religions will teach, for Adam’s sins so that you can go out and work off yours. No, He is the payment.

He is the offering for all of it. And I think that’s what’s left out of the equation when so many people think they look at other people’s sins and they say, well, that shouldn’t be forgivable. Well, maybe in your estimation it shouldn’t be, but it’d be.

Because Jesus Christ’s blood is powerful enough to cleanse all of it. And thank God that it is. Because I’ve probably done some things in my life that other people would look at and say, well, that shouldn’t be forgivable.

And you probably have too. He says He is the propitiation. He is the offering for sins.

And not just for a particular group of people, but for anybody in the whole world who will believe. Anybody in the whole world who will come to Him by faith. His blood was not just enough to save a few people, but His blood is sufficient for everybody.

How can I know that I can be forgiven? When that voice speaks to me and says, you’ll never be good enough. God can never love you.

God can never forgive you after what you’ve done, after what you’ve continued to show you are in your heart. God could never forgive you. The way we know that we can be forgiven is because His Word tells us that Jesus’ blood was enough.

His blood cleanses us from our sins. Verse 7 says that the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. It’s not based on how worthy I am, or how worthy I was, or how worthy I will be.

It’s based on how worthy Jesus is and what His sacrifice could accomplish. And by the way, the book of Hebrews tells us it compares all the priests standing there doing their rituals day in and day out, their offerings and their incense and their washings and everything that they did for thousands of years. And we could apply it to all the religious rituals that mankind has devised to try to deal with their problems and deal with their sin.

And the Bible says that Jesus Christ in one sacrificial act accomplished more than all of those religious rituals combined. Jesus Christ accomplished in one act what all of those combined never could. Through His sacrifice, He was able to purchase our forgiveness once and for all.

And so He wrote to reassure them and by extension us that we have an advocate in Jesus Christ. I know I talked a few weeks ago about the Holy Spirit being our advocate. These are not contradictions. They can advocate for different things.

the Holy Spirit is advocating for the needs of the believer, which by the way, the Father and Son are in agreement with that. Jesus Christ advocates for our salvation. And the Father and Spirit are in agreement on that also.

But it’s to reassure us that we don’t have to cower in fear, hoping that maybe the Father will take pity on us. When we have Jesus Christ who paid for that sin and covered it under His blood, we have Jesus Christ Himself, That Jesus, who was our offering, standing there with the Father and advocating on our behalf, saying, Father, forgive them. He is our advocate.

My little children, these things I write to you so that you may not sin. The goal here is for us to avoid sin, for us to put it behind us, to put it away from us. But he says, and if anyone sins.

Wait a minute, I thought you said that you may not sin. Yeah, that’s the goal. God also recognizes that we fall short of it. I’ve written these things that you may not sin, and if anyone sins.

We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He is righteous. His righteousness is enough for us.

When we fall short, He has no shortage of righteousness to put in our account. So you need to understand today, you can be forgiven. I don’t care what you’ve done.

By the way, somebody will say, what about the unforgivable sin? The unforgivable sin appears to have been, the Bible calls it the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. That is looking at the power of God shown through Jesus Christ there in the Pharisees.

I wanted to say Philistines. The Pharisees attributing the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Son, attributing that to Satan. When you get to the point where your mind is so twisted, you’re looking at the Son of God doing these miraculous works and you’re attributing the power of the Spirit of God to Satan, your mind has gone around the bend.

But if you’re somebody who is repentant if you’re somebody who longs to be restored to God, if you’re somebody who believes in Jesus Christ, I don’t believe you can commit the unpardonable sin today. So hear me on this. He says your sin can be forgiven.

In those moments late at night when you’re thinking about what you’ve done or what you did years ago, or you’re thinking about the attitudes and the things that you find in your heart that are still there that you’re still struggling with, and that voice lies to you, that voice of fear that is a liar that she’s saying about, tells you you cannot be forgiven. You need to know that God’s word says you can. And so it’s up to us then to seek that forgiveness through Jesus Christ. Now, many times people will try to pretend they don’t sin.

Talk to people about the gospel before and they’ve said, well, I’m not a sinner. OK. The Bible indicates that that is a lie.

I want to sound like one of those those daytime shows where they do the DNA test. The Bible says that’s a lie. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. So John’s not saying that God becomes a liar.

He’s saying if we say we are not sinners, then somebody’s lying, us or God. Anybody want to take a guess who the liar is? Not God, right?

If we say, verse 8, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Somebody who says, well, I’m not a sinner. They’re lying, but they’re lying to themselves.

So the answer is not to pretend we don’t sin. The answer is also not to pretend that our sin is not a big deal. That’s another thing we’ll do. We’ll just pretend it’s not a big deal. God’s fine with it.

It’s just a little sin. He said in verse 6, if we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. We can’t tell ourselves, oh, it’s just a little whatever.

I don’t need forgiveness. All sin is offensive to God. And so instead, instead of acting like it’s not there, instead of acting like it’s not a big deal, God calls us to confess and to seek forgiveness through Jesus Christ. Now, for the believer, what this does is it keeps the fellowship open.

I realize there are people out there who disagree, and that’s okay. They’re entitled to disagree. But as I read the Scriptures, I don’t believe you stop being a child of God when you mess up.

If you’ve come to Him through faith in Christ, you are His child, and that relationship does not disappear. the fellowship needs to be restored though. Just like I would come to my parents and say, I’m sorry, the relationship is still there, but that’s what it takes for the fellowship to be fixed.

But as a believer, you can be forgiven and that fellowship can be restored to what it ought to be. Now, if you’re somebody who’s never put your trust in Jesus Christ as Savior, that’s what it takes to establish the relationship. Here, I hear different people talk about how we’re all God’s children.

I hear politicians say that sometimes. That’s not true. We’re all God’s creation.

The Bible actually says we’ve made ourselves the enemies of God. To be God’s child, to come to Him and have a relationship with Him, we have to go through Jesus Christ. We have to get that forgiveness, that cleansing, that sin has to be dealt with. And the way we do that is to understand that we’ve sinned, that sin is offensive to God and it’s separated us from Him, and to realize that’s a problem we can’t overcome on our own.

We cannot do enough to erase the sin that we’ve committed. Just doing good things does not get us extra credit because it does not deal with the fact that we’ve disobeyed Him. So that sin has to be paid for.

It has to be punished. Jesus Christ came to the cross. He was nailed to it.

He shed His blood and He died, bearing all of our punishment. Everything we deserved was poured out on Him. And He made the payment for our sins so that we could be forgiven.

And He rose again to prove it. If you understand that you’ve sinned, and you believe that Jesus did that to be your one and only Savior this morning, you can tell that to God. You can put your faith in Jesus Christ, you can ask His forgiveness, and you have it because you have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.