The Forgiveness of Sins

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. And we'll move on to 2 Corinthians 5:14.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this, that one has died for all. Therefore all have died. And He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard Him thus no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us a ministry of reconciliation. That is, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. In the evening service at Anala, we've been working through the Heidelberg Catechism, and we came to this topic, the forgiveness of sins. And so we'll be looking at both of these passages as we consider the forgiveness of sins.

In the Heidelberg Catechism, it talks about our forgiveness and the comfort we receive from it. It also talks about our ongoing struggle with sin. And that's where we'll particularly turn to Romans 7. Let us pray before we hear the preaching of God's word. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your eternal, infinite, true word, that you have revealed yourself to us. And so Lord, we ask now, open our hearts, incline our minds towards you, that your Holy Spirit may give us understanding and that we may turn back in praise to you. Holy Spirit, grant me the words that I may be a faithful herald of the gospel message and that we may see that there is no God like you, a God who forgives our sins. We pray this all in your name, Jesus. Amen.

Well, there was once a 13 year old boy. He was a pretty ordinary kid. Nothing super special about this boy. But one day, he decided he was going to go for a swim, and he was going to swim as far as he could. And so he swam, and he swam, and he swam, freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, until he could swim no further, and he collapsed.

Four kilometres was the distance he swam. This is the equivalent of the length of an Ironman swim. And once people heard about his effort, news quickly spread: young teenage boy swims four kilometres. But why was this effort so impressive? Why did it make news around the world?

I mean, the youngest person to ever complete an entire Ironman was also 13. So why did this boy, who had only completed the first leg of an Ironman, receive such praise? Well, the truth is this young teenager, Austin Appleby, didn't just swim four kilometres. Perhaps you can recall the story from a few months ago. Austin and his family had drifted out to sea, and it was his heroic swim back to shore that saved his family's life.

No one else could have rescued them that day. His heroics were the only way. And you see, we only truly appreciate something when we realise the desperate situation. And so I want to ask you this morning, are you aware how desperate your situation is? Are you aware how desperately you need your sins forgiven?

Only when you realise what is at stake, only when you understand the full story will you come to appreciate being rescued. And so my aim today is to get us to appreciate the magnitude of the forgiveness of our sins. And we're going to do this firstly by examining sin's guilt. Secondly, we'll look at sin's forgiven, God's incredible acts for our sins to be forgiven, and then finally, we'll conclude by looking at our ongoing struggle with sin. So let's begin by looking at sin's guilt.

We live in a society that downplays sin, don't you reckon? Sin is often laughed at. I would even describe the word sin as endangered in our culture. Outside of the Bible and the church, it's rarely used. Perhaps the only other time it's used seems to be when it's used ironically.

Something like a sinfully delicious dessert menu. Sin is something that is naughty but nice, disobedient but fun. Sin is something people wink at. And our society's clowning around and apathy towards sin, I think, rubs off on us as well, the church. We can soften sin.

We can soften sin by our language. We call it an error of judgment. We can call it a weakness to improve, an imperfection that needs to be ironed out. We can soften sin by rationalising it. We categorise it as a personal trait to be excused, a lapse in concentration, circumstances which caused it.

Or we can soften sin by comparison. Well, at least I'm not sinning in that way. It could be far worse. My sin isn't that bad. And so we excuse sin.

We minimise sin. We downplay sin. We rationalise sin. And when we do this, we end up belittling God. God is the author of all things.

He made the universe, and He has authority over it. It's as simple as this. If God didn't create you, you wouldn't exist. And so as the author of your life, He has authority over your life. God intrinsically and absolutely has the right to impose obligations upon you.

Just as a designer of a computer determines its function and its boundaries, what is healthy and unhealthy, likewise God determines the health and boundaries for you. And I wonder, as you hear this, can you feel that in your gut? Something in your gut doesn't like this. You internally cry out, that isn't fair. And you think to yourself, I want to test these boundaries.

I want to see if they are good and true and right. I want to challenge God's authority. I want to challenge and question God's goodness for my life. But you see, God is the only source of goodness. Everything God creates is good.

Right? In Genesis 1, each day God creates and it is good. It is good. It is very good. Our God is good.

So what then is sin? Sin is an attack on all that is good. Sin is the active hatred of God in thought, word, and deed. Sin is deliberate disobedience against the God who has authority over your life. And so we must recognise that sin is not something passive.

Sin is not a lesser degree of goodness in us or an imperfection we're not responsible for. Sin is not an old computer that's slowing down. No. Sin is the virus that is corrupting and destroying that computer. And that's why God, in His wisdom and providence, determined that the consequence of sin would be death.

In Genesis 2, God announced to Adam that if he ate from the forbidden tree, he would surely die. Death is the appropriate and necessary consequence of sin for at least two reasons. Firstly, we've seen that God as the author of our life has authority over it, and so He has determined it. But secondly, when we oppose God's law, when we oppose His very nature, sin attacks goodness and life and produces only evil and death. Pastor Barry Cooper said this about sin.

What makes sin so truly heinous is that we receive the most extraordinary gifts from our creator. Life and breath and everything good we enjoy, and then we wield these gifts as weapons to try and depose him and seize his throne. When we sin, we are effectively trying to kill the very one who gives us life. End quote. Can you see?

Can you see why it is necessary for a good and holy and righteous God to eradicate sinners? Any virus that a computer contracts must be eradicated, otherwise its destruction will spread. And so God cannot, nor should He, tolerate sin. God cannot simply overlook sin, and He does not. God says this about Himself, that He will by no means clear the guilty.

He will not excuse sin away. Every sinner is liable before God, and His justice requires that this sin be punished. We have a massive problem. God will not overlook your sin. God will not overlook my sin.

He requires perfect obedience. And so if you were to stand before God tonight, could you say that you have lived a perfect obedient life, that you are blameless before Him, that you've always loved God perfectly with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength? You've loved your neighbour as yourself. In fact, you've loved your enemies every day. You've never bent the truth, never gotten angry, never had a selfish thought, never retaliated, never despised an enemy.

It was April Fool's Day a few weeks ago. I'm not sure if you fell for any jokes or any jokes were played on you, but a British writer and physician, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this was a few centuries ago, he once played a practical joke on 12 of his friends. He sent them all a telegram which simply said this, flee at once. Everything has been discovered.

Within twenty-four hours, all 12 of these men had fled the country. No context was required. They knew they were guilty of something. But our situation is no joke. We cannot flee. We cannot run.

Our every sin incurs a debt before God that we can never repay. We must stand trial before our holy God as guilty sinners. We're like people who foolishly tried to swim to New Zealand and now are stuck in the middle of the ocean. We're helpless. We're unable to swim back.

We need someone to rescue us. That is our only hope. That is the only way. Our situation is bleak. And so although society and although we ourselves might try and downplay sin and belittle God in the process, our situation is desperate. We are guilty before God and deserve death.

But just like the only way to see the bright shining stars at night is if the night is dark, similarly, our guilty state is the necessary dark backdrop which makes God's work of forgiveness shine all the more brightly. And so that's where we're going to turn our attention to now, sin's forgiven. And to do this, we're going to examine just one verse, one sentence from scripture. 2 Corinthians 5:21.

If you do have your Bibles, I encourage you to have it open. 2 Corinthians 5:21. Let me read it for you. It says, for our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. You see, sometimes the forgiveness of sins is portrayed as a one-sided mission.

That the sympathetic love of Jesus caused Him to come to earth to appease His angry father's wrath. But the first words of this verse condemn that error, and instead they reveal the very heart of the triune God. It says, for our sake. He, that is God, the triune God in His good pleasure, acted for our sake. God in no shape or form whatsoever is required to act for our sake, for the sake of the guilty, rebellious sinner. But in love, God acted.

In love, the Father sent His only Son to earth. And so we must see that the mission to forgive sins is a unified work of the triune God. And so next, what did the triune God do? It says, He made Him to be sin. Now this is not claiming that Jesus Christ became a sinner who transgressed God's law and became guilty like us.

Rather, Jesus Christ became sin in the sense that He received the sinner's punishment. In the courtroom of heaven, He stood in the place of sinners and received their guilty sentence. For our sake, at the cross, God was pleased to lay on Jesus the iniquities of us all. And this is the only way God could pardon sin and at the same time satisfy His justice. A perfect substitute was needed to stand in your place.

And the next phrase describes why Jesus alone is qualified to be our perfect substitute. It says, Jesus was a man who knew no sin. This is the indispensable condition that Jesus must meet. He must be guiltless. He must be blameless.

He must be perfect and free from sin. If not, then He would stand in our position, liable like us, guilty. But Jesus did not live like us. He lived a blameless life and scripture portrays this time and time again. It says in Hebrews 4:15 that He was tempted in every sense just as we are, yet without ever sinning.

Matthew 5 says He fulfilled the entire law and He did not relax on one commandment. John 8:29 says He honoured and pleased His heavenly Father in everything. Philippians 2 says that He even humbled Himself and was obedient, obedient to the point of death on a cross. You see, His perfect obedience qualified Him to stand in your place and remove your guilt. And so I wonder, brothers and sisters, do you feel the heavy weight of your sin?

That unyielding guilt upon your shoulders that just doesn't seem to go away. Effort after effort is futile. Nothing brings relief. My friends, let me encourage you. Go to the cross.

Go to the cross and lay your sins there. Ask Christ, bear this heavy weight that I cannot bear. Take it, Christ, because I can carry it no further. And God promises us that He will cast all our sins into the depth of the sea. As far as the East is from the West, so far will He remove your transgressions.

What wonderful hope we have in Christ. And yet that is not the end of the story. That is not all that God is willing to do for you. Yes, Jesus takes our guilt away, but He also gives to you His righteousness. In this sense, theologians describe Christ's perfect obedience from two angles, from two perspectives.

While His passive obedience, that is His going to the cross, removes our penalty, His active obedience fulfils all God's demands. And this is what our verse concludes by saying. It says, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God, that in Him we might fulfil all of the law's demands. This righteousness is not an inward excellency of ourselves, a moral decency that now dwells in my own heart. It's a legal declaration.

Christ's righteous fulfilment of the law becomes ours. In this sense, our sin has been imputed, and imputed simply means something has been credited to you from someone else. And so our sins have been imputed, credited to Christ, and His righteousness has been imputed and credited to your account. Imagine you're a business owner, but you've been operating at a loss from the moment you began. You failed to pay a single bill.

You keep making promise after promise, but every time you fall short. Your credit rating is abysmal, and you're due to face trial for all the debts you owe. But as you walk into that courtroom, the judge asks you, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? Your case has been dismissed.

There are no outstanding charges against you. And you wonder how? How could that possibly be? And as you leave perplexed, you decide to check your bank account. And to your amazement, not only has someone paid off all your debt, but they've credited their entire inheritance to your account.

This is what happens to every single sinner who turns to Christ for the forgiveness of sins. You walk into the divine courtroom before God, but there's not a single charge that can be brought against you. Your sins have been forgiven. And so as God the Father looks at you, all He sees is the righteousness of Christ. And there's no other way to walk out of that courtroom as an innocent, blameless, righteous person but through Christ.

Scripture does some of the heavy lifting work for us. It presents some other hypothetical ways you might try to obtain righteousness and the forgiveness of sins, but it concludes that they are futile. I'll give you two examples. Hebrews 10:4 says, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. There's no other sacrifice that is sufficient, so we must rule that out.

Perhaps more relevant to our lives, Galatians 3:21 says, if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. And so you see, this rules out any form of good works or good deeds on our part. And that is why any attempt of the Catholic, the Muslim, the atheist, the Hindu, the Buddhist, or the churchgoer is futile. Our works, your works, my works cannot remove one single sin. And so I asked you a similar question earlier on, and I'm going to ask it again.

Could you confidently stand before God today, forgiven and guiltless? In fact, could you stand before God and say, God, I am righteous? Brothers and sisters, you can. You can say that. But how? How can we say that?

Not through your works, not through your deeds, not through your heart, but through Christ's righteousness alone. You can stand before God and say, I am righteous in and through Christ. Him alone. And so my friends, yes, we are guilty. What will you do with your guilt?

Turn to Jesus. Turn to Jesus and have all your sins forgiven. 1 John 1:9. It is a passage worth memorising. 1 John 1:9.

It says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That is His promise. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And so though our sins are like scarlet, we will be made as white as snow. Praise be to our God who did not leave us alone in our desperate situation, did He?

How desperate it was, but how marvellous our Saviour is who comes and forgives us of our sins. And so as we conclude our sermon, I want to close by addressing one final thing, this tension of sin's ongoing struggle. This sin's ongoing struggle in a believer's life. Our life is like a medieval castle with high walls, a drawbridge, and a moat. But from the beginning of our life, the drawbridge and the gate have been left open wide, and the hostile enemy of sin has come in and taken their place on the throne of your life.

But when we surrender our lives to Christ, He storms the castle. He kicks sin off the throne, and He establishes His rule. So while the enemy is no longer ruling, for the remainder of our lives, we must fight to banish the sinful fugitives that still remain in the castle walls. Yes. The eternal consequence of sin has been paid.

We are eternally forgiven in Christ. But this ongoing fight with sin is real. And so how do we face our ongoing struggle with sin? We don't have time to go through it all. I'm just going to suggest two things.

Two things which address our hearts, and I'll accompany each one with a practical application. So firstly, our hearts should contain a level of continual distress. This is where we turn to Romans 7, and Paul, as a saved, forgiven man, is distressed in Romans 7 by the ongoing sin that remains in his life. He laments in verse 17. He says, I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Is your heart distressed by your sin? Do words come out of your mouth that trouble you? Are there thoughts that enter your mind that alarm you? Do unhealthy habits persist in your life that frustrate you? True believers will be distressed by the ongoing sin in their life, but our distress is inadequate if it is not paired with the practical mortification of this sin. Because you see, Christ now reigns on the throne of your life, sin's power has been disarmed, but its remnants must be banished.

And so when your heart is distressed by sin, what should you do? What should I do when I'm distressed? Your response should be, how can I kill it? How can I kill these thoughts before they go any further? How can I eradicate these words that keep coming out of my mouth?

How can I destroy these actions? How can I cut off this habit? And be encouraged. We must remember we've been given the Holy Spirit. God has not left us alone.

And so when the Holy Spirit works in our hearts and sin grieves and distresses us, walk in step with the Holy Spirit to make a decisive action to kill and mortify sin in your life. But secondly, while we should be distressed, ultimately our hearts should rejoice. Does your heart rejoice? In verse 24, Paul, yes, he's distressed. He says, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

This body in which sin persists. Yet his distress does not lead to despair, but it leads him to joy. Joy fills his heart as he proclaims, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. For Christ has redeemed the wretched man, and Christ will deliver every believer from their body of sin. And so we can rejoice because the battle is won.

Victory is ours in Christ. And so what should we do when joy fills our heart? We remember what Christ has done for us. As joy fills your heart, I encourage you to quicken this new man. Quicken the new creation.

This quickening describes the positive act of replacing the old with the new. We replace the sin that has been mortified with the Spirit that gives life. And so through the Spirit's power, all our selfish thoughts can be killed and replaced with generous thoughts. Bitter words with healing words. Old lifeless habits can be replaced with habits that give life.

The King takes up His rule in our lives and He gets to work. He gets to work immediately restoring it. And so these two aspects, the distressed heart paired with mortification of sin, and the joyful heart paired with the quickening of this new man, they are two sides of sanctification in the believer's life. But let me remind you again, we must never get sanctification confused with justification.

Mortification of sin does not and will not produce the forgiveness of sin. Quickening the new man does not justify a sinner. It's faith. Faith in Jesus Christ's work of atonement is the only way for our sins to ever be forgiven. And so as we close, I want you to be honest with yourself.

How much do you appreciate that your sins have been forgiven? How much do you appreciate that your sins have been forgiven? Have you downplayed the seriousness of your sin? Do you think that you can somehow remove sin's guilt by your own accord, or do you recognise the desperate situation? Jesus is the only way.

Turn to Him. Turn to Him for the first time and all your sins will be wiped away. Turn to Him again and remember. Remember what He has done for you, and there is nothing left to be done. Believe in Him and instantly, eternally, you are forgiven.

Jesus did it all, didn't He? Jesus did it all. He took your sin. He gave you His righteousness. And so surrender your life to Him.

Rejoice in His victory and appreciate forevermore the desperate situation that you've been saved from. Amen. Let us pray. Oh heavenly Father, please help us to recognise the desperate situation that our sin puts us in. Wretched man, wretched people that we are, who will save us from this body of sin and death?

Praise be to God who sent Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, so that we are not eternally guilty, but that we can be eternally forgiven. That Jesus Christ who knew no sin would step into our place, that He would become sin for us and receive our punishment so that I no longer have to. That I can stand before my heavenly Father, my God, in the righteous robes of Jesus Christ and say, Lord God, I am righteous in Christ. I am no longer guilty. I have been forgiven.

And so Lord, fill our hearts with such wonder and rejoicing that when sin does persist in our lives, we remember its sting has been taken away. Its power has been destroyed. And may we seek to grow in our holiness as we follow our God, knowing that the good work that Christ began in us, He will bring to completion when we will be in heaven for all eternity with God, and sin will no longer reign in our lives. Lord, thank you, for we are helpless and have no one else to turn to. And so we turn to you and we ask, forgive us our sins.

Cleanse us, oh Lord, that we may be redeemed in you alone. We pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.