As you know, I like to preach on sermon requests, unless I forget what they are first.  This one came to me in one of the church-building hallways after services.  A member here asked me to preach on forgiveness, especially forgiving oneself.

This request does not surprise me one little bit.  I’ve been hearing similar concerns from Christians for decades.  It’s been true in Texas, true in Illinois, and true here.  I’ve even seen aspiring hymnists wanting to write hymns about the subject because it’s such a struggle for them. 

When I see the topic come up so much, it tells me that a lot of Christians feel like they don’t have good solutions to the problem.  We all know that Christians rise from the waters of baptism to walk in newness of life.  However, what do we do when guilt from the old life keeps intruding into the new one?  For that matter, how do we handle it when we start accumulating sins in the new life too?  We know that Jesus forgives our sins, but sometimes we don’t feel forgiven.  This morning, then, let’s consider what it takes to make peace with the past.

The first thing that we must do is PUT THE BURDEN IN THE RIGHT PLACE.  Here, let’s look at Ephesians 2:8-9.  One of my primary rules in studying the Bible is always to seek to explain the text rather than explaining away the text, and this passage illustrates the importance of doing so perhaps better than any other.  When I was growing up, I never heard this verse cited in church without somebody following it with “But you still have to be baptized!”  The only people I heard quoting it approvingly were people from the denominations.  I got the impression that this was a denominational verse instead of a church-of-Christ verse.

Sadly, it is no less dangerous for us to turn away from the whole counsel of God than it is for others to do so, and the consequences of our minimizing this passage are obvious.  It shows up in two main places:  in all the faithful Christians who are scared to death that they aren’t good enough to go to heaven and in those who are so caught up in their own guilt that the forgiveness of Jesus doesn’t register.  You know what both of those things are?  They’re symptoms of believing on some level that our salvation is from ourselves.

In fact, if we’re being perfectly honest, both of those things are symptoms of a desire to boast in ourselves.  We want to be good enough on the day of judgment, and we want to have been good enough that we don’t have those regrets in our past.  The problem is, though, that we know that we have failed and continue to fail, so we suffer beneath all this fear and guilt.

There’s only one way out of the trap.  It’s to put the burden of our righteousness on Jesus.  Of course we failed in the past!  It’s why we became Christians in the first place.  Of course we will continue to fail!  Otherwise, we no longer would need His grace.  We cannot hope to save ourselves or boast in ourselves, but He can and will redeem us.

Second, we must EMBRACE RENEWAL.  I like the way Paul puts this in Colossians 3:9-10.  It’s a passage that highlights both kinds of renewal.  The first is the spiritual change of clothes that is so prominent in Ephesians and Colossians.  When we obeyed the gospel, we put off the old self and put on the new self.  We are different people now than we were before we were baptized.  All the evils that the old self did were left in the water.

However, renewal for the Christian is not just a one-time event.  It’s a continuing process.  We have put on the new self, past tense, but we are being renewed, present tense.  In context, Paul discusses our renewal in knowledge, but this is not the only kind of renewal we experience.  In Lamentations 3, Jeremiah observes that God’s mercies are new each morning.  We are constantly renewed in knowledge, renewed in righteousness, and renewed in every one of His great blessings.

When we look back, then, on one of those sins that gives us so much guilt now, we must ask if God has renewed us since.  Are we still practicing that sin?  Is our heart such that we would do it again if given opportunity?  If so, we absolutely should feel guilty!  We need to repent and get our hearts and our lives right with God.

However, for the Christians who can’t forgive themselves, that’s usually not the case.  They usually experience such agony over their past sins because they have repented, aren’t practicing the same thing, and don’t want to. 

If that’s where you are, guess what?  Those sins don’t belong to you anymore.  You’re a different person.  You’ve been renewed.  You’ve been renewed in your knowledge, renewed in your heart, and most of all, renewed in God’s grace.  Those sins have been removed from you as far as the east is from the west, and it doesn’t make any more sense to feel guilty about them than it does to feel guilty about the sins of a stranger.

Finally, we must LEAVE THE PAST IN THE PAST.  Paul makes this point in Philippians 3:13-14.  It’s interesting that contextually, Paul is talking about forgetting the good things that were part of his life before Christ.  He was working on leaving behind things like being a Pharisee of Pharisees and blameless according to the Law.

However, these kinds of unpleasant memories are joined to guilt over past sins by a common thread of regret.  The devil was whispering in Paul’s ear that it would have been better if he had gone on being a wealthy, honored Hebrew of Hebrews.  Likewise, he uses even our sorrow for sin as a tool to drag us back into the past. 

Indeed, the devil wanted Paul thinking about the past and wants us thinking about the past for the same reason.  He doesn’t want us thinking about the present because in Paul’s present and our present is Christ.  No matter what pretty shiny worldly things the devil dangled in front of Paul, once the apostle compared them to Christ, he saw them for the garbage they were.

So too for us.  The devil wants us to dwell on our guilt, our crushing, agonizing, overwhelming guilt.  He wants us to lose sleep over it.  He wants us to be unhappy.  However, what he does not want us to do is to compare our guilt to the grace of Christ. 

He does not want us to think about the infinite love of Jesus that led Him to die on the cross.  He does not want us to think about the infinite grace that His sacrifice made possible.  Remember too that infinity divided by any finite number remains infinite.  Jesus didn’t just love the human race infinitely.  He loved you infinitely and me infinitely too, and the grace that cleanses each of us of sin is infinite too.

It's good for us to learn from the mistakes of the past, but we must not define ourselves by those mistakes.  Instead, we must define ourselves by the grace of Christ.  None of us are or can hope to become anything more than a redeemed sinner, but that’s all we have to be because His grace is enough.

Romans is one of the easiest books to place in the chronology of the New Testament.  Paul wrote it during the three months of Acts 20:3, which happened sometime between 55 and 56 AD.  We can locate it so precisely because of Paul’s autobiographical commentary in Romans 15:22-32.  He has finished collecting the contribution for the needy saints in Macedonia and Greece, and he is about to take it to Jerusalem.

However, there is more than a touch of pathos to Paul’s description of his plans after that.  He hopes to leave Jerusalem, travel to Rome, meet the Roman brethren for the first time, and ultimately embark on the first-ever preaching tour of Spain.  Throughout his ministry, he prefers to go where others haven’t.

To say the least, things don’t go according to plan.  While in Jerusalem, he is nearly lynched by a mob in the temple.  He is arrested by the Romans as a troublemaker and is spirited out of Jerusalem before a band of Jewish assassins can kill him.  He appears before the Roman governor and is imprisoned for the next two years without a trial. 

Another Roman governor appears.  When Paul is brought before him, the apostle is forced to appeal to the emperor to keep from being remanded into the custody of the Jewish chief priests, who certainly will execute him.  He is put on a ship to Rome, shipwrecked, and rescued.  Eventually, he arrives at his destination, years after he had intended to come and a prisoner to boot.  So far as we know, Paul never made it to Spain.

At first glance, these events appear to be much more the work of Satan than the work of God.  However, we also must reckon with the other things that happened while he was enduring frustration, misery, and danger.  For one thing, the prophecy of Acts 9:15 is fulfilled.  Paul proclaims the gospel to the Jewish high council, two Roman proconsuls, and the puppet king Agrippa.  Throughout his trials, he glorifies Christ.

Perhaps the most important consequence of Paul’s travails, though, is an indirect one.  Among his companions on the journey to Jerusalem is the physician Luke, who joins him at Philippi.  Luke goes with him to Jerusalem, then, two years later, from Jerusalem to Rome. 

The Scriptures do not say what Luke did during those two years, but we can make some inferences.  In Luke 1:1-4, Luke claims to have constructed his account after hearing from eyewitnesses and closely investigating things for himself.  He was a Gentile from the Aegean, and so far as we know, the only time in his life that he would have been around people like the Twelve was during Paul’s imprisonment.  It may well be that without that imprisonment, the foremost historian of our faith would not have been able to do his work.

Today, our plans often don’t go according to plan.  When we face trial and suffering, we often wonder what God is doing with us, especially when we are prevented from serving Him in the way we wanted to.  At such times, we should remember Paul.  God’s plans for us are better than our plans for ourselves, and it may be that the most important thing about our suffering is the impact it has on someone else.  We don’t know, any more than Paul did.  All we can do is trust.

“There is no God,” the fool declares;
They all have worked iniquity;
From heaven God looks down on earth
For those who seek Him faithfully.
They turn aside in what they’ve done,
And none do good, not even one.

Do not the wicked understand
Who have not called upon His name?
He gives His foes to fear and death
And puts His enemies to shame.
When freed from their captivity,
Let Israel sing exultantly!

The fundamental question of our faith is whether the Bible is the inspired word of God.  If it is, we can rely on its contents.  If it isn’t, everything we believe in, from the creation to the resurrection, is built on a foundation of sand instead of rock. 

Not surprisingly, then, those who are opposed to the Scripture often either deny its inspiration or attempt to limit inspiration’s scope.  Those who adopt the latter approach will say that the Bible is inspired in its broad outlines, but its details are the product of human understanding and reflect the wisdom of the time in which its authors wrote.  This position seems to be much like ours, but in practice it leads to very different results.  We insist on obedience even to the commandments that we don’t particularly care for (Matthew 19:9, anyone?) because we believe they express the will of God. 

However, if we believe instead that not everything in Scripture is necessarily inspired, that gives us freedom to reject the hard sayings as anachronisms.  Surely Paul’s comments about women in 1 Timothy 2 and the practice of homosexuality in 1 Corinthians 6 are echoes from an unenlightened, barbaric past, mere expressions of the apostle’s own human prejudices!  Surely our wisdom has evolved beyond such things!

This perspective allows us to have our cake and eat it too.  We get to celebrate the risen Lord and cherish the hope of eternal life while also rejecting every commandment that we find difficult or inconvenient.  Only the ones that are amenable to the spirit of our own time need remain.

As convenient as this would be, though, it simply doesn’t align with what the Bible itself says about inspiration.  In particular, we must take into account Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:10-13.  Here, he makes two strong claims about the involvement of the Holy Spirit in his work.  First, the Spirit has revealed truth to him.  Second, he expresses that truth in words taught by the Spirit.

This does not mean that Paul was a Scripture-writing robot.  If inspiration deprived human authors of their authorial voices, every book of the Bible would sound alike.  This is not the case.  The Pauline epistles don’t sound like the Johannine epistles, and neither sounds like the Petrine epistles.  All reflect the personalities of the apostles who wrote them.

Instead, it describes a subtler process.  In some way, the Spirit of God worked with the spirits of the prophets, allowing scope for human individuality yet precisely expressing what God wanted to be said.  Because inspiration operated at the word level, nothing that the inspired writers recorded strays from the will of God.

Thus, we can have great certainty about what we read in the Bible.  We don’t have to wonder whether any miracle or commandment is a human invention.  None of them are.  However, it also imposes a weighty responsibility on us.  If God has said it all, we must obey it all.  To do otherwise represents a failure to honor Him.

In Romans 9-11, Paul is concerned with what I like to call the problem of Israel.  If salvation through Jesus is the triumphant conclusion of God’s plan for His people, how come the earthly nation of Israel, which had been God’s people for 1500 years, largely rejected it? 

One of Paul’s answers to this conundrum appears in Romans 10:1-5.  There, Paul notes that the failure of Israel to accept Christ is not as complete as it might seem.  In the time of Ahab, the prophet Elijah thought he was alone, but there were 7000 others who were faithful to God.  So too, Paul observes that there is a righteous remnant of Jews who did believe the gospel.

Though Paul doesn’t expand on his point, the righteous remnant is a theme throughout the Bible.  Starting from the time when God first chooses a people to be His own, they show a dismaying fondness for apostasy.  Eventually, God is forced to judge them, a tiny, faithful minority survives the judgment, they grow and prosper and become strong, and the cycle repeats itself.

This pattern begins even before the Israelites enter the land.  600,000 men saw God reveal Himself in fire at the top of Sinai and pledged themselves to Him.  Of those thousands, only two remained faithful and crossed the Jordan into Canaan.

Once they are in the land, the problems continue.  By the end of the time of the judges, Israel has been overrun by the Philistines and God’s dwelling place at Shiloh has been destroyed.  The Israelites really don’t recover until the kingship of David.

The era of the divided kingdom sees more of the same.  Though the house of Ahab and the worshipers of Baal seem so powerful in the time of Elijah, they are destroyed by Hazael, Elisha, and Jehu.  Only the righteous remnant (comprising people like the Rechabites) endures.  According to 2 Chronicles 30:11, another righteous remnant from the northern tribes comes humbly to worship in Jerusalem at the time of the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians.

The Assyrians are an instrument of judgment against the kingdom of Judah too.  The remnant of Isaiah 10:20-21 is contextually a remnant that returns from Assyrian oppression, and it is made up of both Israelites and Judahites.  As the Jeremiah 24 prophecy of good figs and bad figs makes clear, the same pattern holds during the Babylonian invasion and captivity.

There is a powerful lesson here for us.  We want the Lord’s church to be thriving and strong, and we are grieved when we see so many brethren abandon the ancient pattern for the wisdom of the age.  However, there never has been a time when God’s people were thriving and strong yet remained faithful.  The divisions that have taken place since the Restoration only confirm the rule.  Sadly, whenever the righteous prosper, they start trusting in themselves and cease to be righteous.

We should not yearn to belong to those who have got it all figured out and succeed through their own wisdom and strength.  We should yearn instead to belong to the remnant, those who cling to God and are roundly mocked for doing so, always failing, always dwindling, always defeated. 

Strangely enough, though it always looks like the remnant is about to be destroyed, it never is.  Against the odds, God’s people endured through disaster in the wilderness, captivity in Babylon, and persecution across the Mediterranean.  Indeed, they triumphed.  No matter how bad things look, if we endure, we will triumph too, not because the remnant is so powerful, but because He is.