Hello and welcome back. We are on week nine together of our journey with Jesus and I sure hope that you're finding this helpful. I want to remind you again, give some feedback. Feel free to get in touch with me, ask questions, make requests, all that sort of thing. We want this to be a really helpful guide for you and a helpful tool for you and whoever you're walking with to really grow in the Lord. We've been looking at what it's like to be adopted, to be a child of God now and getting to know the Father a little bit, getting comfortable with him. And this week I want to kind of pause on our journey into the heart of the Father and talk a little bit about our responsibility now as sons and daughters of God.
We looked at the story of the prodigal son a couple of weeks ago. I prefer to call it the parable of the loving father who is really the star of that parable. But the prodigal on his way home, you remember the speech he had all worked up in his heart and his mind, you know, I've sinned against heaven, against your name. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. We looked at that in terms of him not really understanding the heart of the Father because the next thing he says was, I'm not worthy to be called your son. Would you take me in as one of your servants? Now, if he would have really understood the heart of the Father, he would have known that's not going to be an option for the Father.
He will never treat one of his sons like a slave. He'll never view you as anything less than one of his sons and heirs of the whole kingdom. But on the son's part, what restored the relationship was what we'll look at today called the gift of repentance. There is a gift. We tend to think of the word repentance, maybe you get pictures of some old school monk with that, you know, the whip and he's beaten on himself and, oh, I'm horrible. I'm such an awful sinner. And we think of confession that way.
Maybe if you grew up Catholic or in another, you know, circle of the faith that believes that, you know, you confess and then you have to do some penance because of what you did, that the word confession and repentance both come with a certain negative tune to them, if you will. What I want to share today is that actually repentance, confession is the greatest gift we have. Remember the thing the son was carrying that kept him from really embracing the father's heart and the father's love was shame. He knew in his inner man, I've really done wrong. I blew it big. I took this incredible gift that my father gave me and wrecked it.
And he was carrying shame. You could really just see him, you know, shoulders hunched over and not looking in the eye of the father. That's shame that's talking right there. And the father's communication to us us is shame off of you, not shame on you, shame off of you. You have nothing to fear in me. You're not going to carry this thing, this weight of all of what you've done for the rest of your life. But then we have a tendency, even if we don't know God, whether we know God or not, we have a tendency to punish ourselves and carry that shame, which Jesus already carried on a cross.
He long since crucified that way back to the beginning of our walk together. Remember, shame was crucified with Christ and any shame that we carry. It's already dead and gone. So why pick it up again? Today, I want to share with you about this gift that God's given us, how to reconnect our inner man with the heart of God in a way that we now have taken ownership of what used to be and we throw it in the sea of forgetfulness, just like God's already done. So if you have your Bible with you, open it up to 1 John chapter 1. And I want to read you a really powerful truth here out of this letter.
John says, this is the message we've heard from him and announced to you that God is light and in him there's no darkness at all. So just imagine this in the presence of God, you're in a room and there's so much light in that room. There's no shadow, nowhere to hide in this place. You can't, there's no place casting a dark spot where you can get away from it. A little intimidating, isn't it? And that's why many of us run from God instead of run to God. And he goes on, he says, so if we say that we have fellowship with him, but we walk in the darkness, we lie and we don't practice the truth.
Why? Because if we're trying to hide in the dark, then we haven't yet stepped into the light where God is. Remember, God already knows. God's already seen the sin before we committed it. God already knew the thought before we thought it. He already knew all of those things that we would do even after we came to our new wide open faith that we have in Christ. And yet he chose us and adopted us anyway. So what we want to do is be a people who step into the light. And here it comes here.
But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all unrighteousness. This is a practice. So the first thing that gets restored if we walk in the light is that we have fellowship with one another. Remember, we haven't just been adopted. We're not an only child of the Father. We have this family of believers who all have the same experience. We all acknowledged our fault. We said, yeah, I need help. I've got issues.
I'm wrecking my life and the lives of those that I love and the lives of everyone around me because of my sin. And I needed some help with this thing. And that's how we came to salvation. And the good news is the entire community of the faithful is made up of people who have come to that understanding. So when we walk in the light, in other words, we live in the place of truth telling, of truth seeking, of truth living. We live in this place where we're not going to pretend anymore. We won't manipulate anymore.
No more masks and facades. No more pretending like everything's okay when it's not. No more church face. If you're, you know, I don't know, maybe you're listening. You've been in church for a while. Maybe you're new to it. You may notice that there are some who can tend to be a little plasticky in their faith. You know, you come to church on Sunday morning after having a horrific week where your best friend died and you just blew it big time in sin. Somebody asks you, hey, how you doing? Oh, I'm great.
I had a guy that came to our church who used to always say, too blessed to be stressed. You know, it just felt like, I know that you want to just press in for joy and I know that you want to be positive in your outlook. A little bit of real wouldn't hurt either. Let's walk in the light together. Let's build each other up and support one another as we overcome all of what we used to be together with Christ. But it says here that the gift of walking in the light, this is the place where the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all unrighteousness. It doesn't just happen.
It happens when we stay in the light. Think of it like radiation therapy is to cancer. Unless you get the cancer, the tumors under that beam of radiation, which is a kind of light, until you get it under that light, it's going to stay there. And what we've done is we've said we're stepping out into the light, no more hiding in darkness. Let the sun shine in and get rid of all of this old stuff, this stuff that's killing me, this stuff that on the inside is ruining my joy. It's robbing me of my peace and instead filling me with anxiety and fear and all this other stuff. And we're saying we're going to live in the light, walk in the light, and let that blood of Jesus cleanse me from all that stuff that I brought to the table.
It's like the prodigal coming home, and this was in your devotions. Prodigal coming home, he still smells like pigs. Well, here's the bath. This is the blood of Jesus Christ now cleansing us, washing that smell right off of us. So if we say that we have no sin, we're deceiving ourselves, he goes on to say, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, here it is, this is the gift of confession, which is part of the gift of repentance. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So this is why we call it the gift of repentance, the gift of forgiveness. Back to that prodigal son, he comes home, he's smelling like pigs again. Now you could stay in the house and smell like pig a long time, and the others might love you enough to be willing to put up with that smell. But isn't it so much better to say, you know what, I'm taking a bath, and I'm getting the smell of all that stuff that I used to be into right off of me, so that I smell like royalty again, so that I'm restored, and I look and live like I'm restored to the proper place where I've always been, which is a son of God, which means I'm a prince, an heir of salvation together with Christ and all of his other kids.
That's what we're after with this gift of repentance. So walking in the light, it's a lifestyle choice. Contrary to the judgment that's often made about Christians, the church community is not a community of hypocrites. It's a community of people who have been willing to acknowledge their sin and willing to say, I need help. Like, I never understood the whole thing since my beginning of my walk with God, why people say all those hypocrites that go to church on Sunday. And I get it. There are some who do live a double life that go to church.
There's some that's, you know, on purpose, in other words. There are Pharisees among us. There's no question about that. But the overwhelming majority of people who are in a Bible-preaching, Jesus-loving, Spirit-honoring church are there because we recognize we need Jesus. We need him to change us. We need his help to overcome this old way of living that wrecked us and come into a new way of living that restores us. And that's what the community is all about. And it's made up of people who all say, I'm going to trust that you're walking in the light.
I'm walking in the light. That's what gives us fellowship with one another. And we're going to watch each other grow. And we're not going to recognize each other. After a few years, we're going to be so different, so much more like Jesus on the outside, because he's already that on the inside that we're hardly even going to know what we used to be like. It's going to be when you share your testimony 10, 15, 20 years, 30 years from now, you're going to speak of yourself like, I don't even know who that person was. It's like a story I read in a book somewhere.
It's so foreign to me, but it all begins with this one thing. We got to be honest. We got to be honest. You know, it's amazing. I struggled through this a little bit when I was new in the Lord. I used to love going out drinking with my buddies. We'd get a pitcher of beer and we'd talk. I say a pitcher, but it was a continuous pitcher of beer that we'd refill. And we sat around the table and after three or four pitchers together, we would be gut level honest and talk about absolutely anything, no verbal filter, no sensor on our lips.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we have that kind of a culture in the church? Because we become so transparent with the Father. We have no fear because his love has cast out our fear. We have no fear of judgment from God. Therefore, we have no fear of judgment from any of his saints. Wouldn't it be awesome to just be able to relax among the people of God? And if we say something that's off, not feel like, oh man, the hammer's about to drop or, you know, we fall into sin or we may be, we have this term, here's a Bible term for you, backslide, which means we begin to live a little bit more unrighteously than we had been living up to.
Like we came to the certain standard of living and we're kind of a little bit more back to what we used to be. And instead of being afraid that everybody's going to find out that right now I'm kind of going back to some of my old ways, we're bold enough to say, hey, everybody, I'm struggling right now. My old man, my old self is trying to pull me back into some habits that I really don't want back in my life, some old addictions or old ways of handling things. Wouldn't it be awesome to be in a community that lived that way? Well, I got good news for you. It's made up of each of us individually saying, I'm going to walk in the light.
I'm first going to learn how to be honest with God because if I'm not honest with the one who knows it all and I know forgives it all, I'm never going to be able to be honest around his people because somebody might say something one day that'll hurt me. When we step into that, we learn how to really walk in the light. So let's get back to the subject of confession because this is the word confession. When we say, I'm going to confess my sins, the word literally means to agree with something. So think of somebody who's been caught. They're on video committing a crime. You really don't need them to admit that they did it.
You got all the evidence against them. Their fingerprints are on the crime scene, the whole thing. They're guilty as charged, no question. But if they will confess to the crime, usually the sentence is reduced. That's how it happens in the world. Confess means to say, I agree that the evidence presented against me is true and accurate. When we confess our sins, we're confessing, yes, I am guilty as charged. I did that. I'm not trying to hide from it. I'm not going to go into a dark corner and hide in a shadow.
I confess, meaning I agree that I did that thing. Confession, by the way, also means I confess that what God says about me is true. I just want to kind of put this in there as a plug while we're talking about confessing our sins, which is the subject for today. It also means to confess the truth about what God says about me. So if God says that I am a son, if God says there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, then when I say out loud, there is no condemnation toward me right now because I'm in Christ Jesus. That's a true saying. I'm agreeing with a truth more powerful than the sin that remains in me and the things that remain in me that make me fall short.
Confessing the scriptures is so important. That's why you've got memory verses every week and why we're in the scripture so much. Confessing what the Father's heart is toward us. Confessing that, you know, I have a spirit in me now that cries, Abba. God hasn't given me a spirit of fear. He's given me a spirit that cries, Abba, Father, Daddy, that my spirit now I'm confessing. I'm agreeing with what God says about me, that Christ is in me. I'm agreeing with the word when it says that I am no longer what I used to be because I am in Christ and I'm a new creation and the old things are passing away.
All things are becoming new. That is a confession as well. So confession isn't just confessing I'm guilty as charged. It's confessing I am holy as God has made me to be holy. So I just wanted to make sure that I said that in the middle of this. But let's look at Psalm 32 for a moment because I want to give a model for what confession and repentance looks like. That when we learn how to make this a practice, and I would suggest even a daily practice in our lives, it really does become transformative.
We become more like the kind of person that we want to hang out with in the body of Christ. So if we're accustomed to people being judgy and kind of looking down at us, let's look at ourselves first and make sure that that's not how we've been relating with God. Because if we believe that God's a judge who's waiting to condemn us and waiting to get us for what we did, we're going to treat other people and present God as being the kind of God who is like that and does those kind of things. And that's not who he is at all. What we practice in secret, in other words, becomes our public expression of how we manifest Jesus or how we reveal Jesus out there, both in the world and in the family of God.
So here's a Psalm that David wrote. And David, by the way, is just a great, my pastor used to call him the Old Testament King doing a New Testament thing. The way David walked with God is an absolute model. If you've experienced, all of us, anything that we've experienced in the human experience, every emotion that's been experienced by any human ever, David himself has a Psalm about that. And there's other Psalms too that David didn't even write. There are Psalms for every situation of life. And this Psalm David wrote after he sinned big.
David served God and loved God so much. God said, that's a man after my own heart. But he also knew how to sin pretty big too. And you can read his story in the Old Testament. We will look at his life at some point during our year together. Here's a Psalm that David wrote or a song that he wrote, not for all of us to sing, but this was a love song that he wrote to God when he experienced this forgiveness. And it says this, Psalm 32, how blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, meaning connect us to our iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. There it is. How blessed is the one who lives honestly, knowing that God is there to forgive and remove us from our iniquity as far as east is from the west. When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me and my vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. That's the feeling of shame, isn't it? That's the feeling of, I messed up so big.
When we really blow it, when we do something hurtful to somebody we love, when we become abusive toward people even in our speech or in our actions, we have this sense of shame and an overwhelming sense of, I've ruined things right now. There's like a sense of loss in it, a sense of grieving and mourning for something that we feel will never get back again. That's the feeling of shame. And the feeling of shame says, go and hide in a corner somewhere so nobody ever sees your face again. We can feel that way toward others. And worst of all, we can feel that way toward God. And the feeling is just, I mean, you feel like this, right?
I feel like I'm hunching my shoulders. I'm looking down at the ground. My vitality or my life, I feel like my life has just been drained from me. You feel that way? I'm a married man. When you have a big time argument with your wife or a big time argument with your husband, you say hurtful things and you just feel so ashamed of what you've done. And until you reconcile that thing, I don't know about you, but I feel like I can't carry on until I feel like I've reconciled with the one I hurt.
And that's not all a bad thing, but we don't want to stay in that place. That would be a bad thing. So here's what David did. I acknowledged my sin to you and my iniquity. I did not hide. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. And guess what? You forgave the guilt of my sin. Isn't that amazing? David had a revelation here. God's not just going to forgive my sin. That's easy enough, but he also set me free from the guilt of my sin. In other words, the punishment from God was not, I forgive you, but you're going to have to wallow in that pigsty for a little while first, and then I'll let you out.
I'm going to punish you a little bit first. I want you to feel the pain that you inflicted on other people. God said, no, no, no. There's going to be none of that here. I don't do shame in my kingdom. God's saying, I'm going to relieve you and pull that guilt right off of you as well, because I want you free. He goes on and he says, therefore, let everyone who's godly pray to you in a time when you may be found in a flood of great waters. They will not reach you.
And here's the revelation. Remember in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree that God said, keep away from that one. And when they heard the voice of God, they hid. They hid behind a bush. They covered themselves with fig leaves. They were terrified all of a sudden of the voice of the God that they loved. Up until now, they had unbroken communion with God. Now they're hiding from him. And that's been our way ever since. We've been playing this game of hide and seek with God since the beginning of time.
In Christ, the game of hide and seek is over. Why? Because we're walking in the light now. We've stepped into the light. We have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of any longer. So David goes on and he says this. Here's the revelation. You're my hiding place. Not only am I not hiding from you, I'm hiding in you now. You're my hiding place. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with songs of deliverance. The safest place in the world, when I blow it and I fall short, is in Christ.
He's going to protect me from the accuser of the brethren. That's one of the names of the devil. His nickname is the accuser. He lives always to make sure that we never forget the fault of the things that we've done. We never forget the guilt and the shame of what things we've done, what things we've thought or left undone. The devil is there to make sure that he rubs our face back in that filth that God delivered us from. And so instead of giving ear to that, we run to God.
We say, you're my hiding place. I'm going to hide myself in you because you're the forgiving God. You're the safe place of refuge for me now. I'm no longer going to run away from you. I'm going to run into you. That's a beautiful, beautiful revelation. When we know and trust that the kind of God he is, the kind of father that he is, we train ourselves like we need new reflexes. Instead of running and hiding when we blow it, we run toward him and hide in him from that moment onward.
So here's a four-step process for confessing, which remember, it means to agree with something. It means to be honest and say, I blew it. And that's the first thing. We own it. It's nobody else's fault but mine. I didn't do that because somebody else made me do it. Listen, we're no longer slaves. Only slaves do only what they're told. We are free-born citizens of heaven. Nobody can make us do anything. We own our sin. I did that. Even if somebody provoked me, I did this thing that was wrong. We own it before God.
We confess it. And I urge you to be specific. You know, we sometimes apologize to each other and we will talk about how to forgive and repent to one another in the body of Christ sometime soon. But when it comes to God, we confess it and we don't beat around the bush. We don't say, I'm sorry if I did anything wrong to God. We say, this is what I did. I said this to this person and it was awful. Lord, would you please forgive me for what I did? And we go with a willingness.
And here's a really important thing. We go to the Lord confessing our sin with a willingness to reap what we've sowed. And here's why I say that. It's not as though God can't make it all right. And he does that. I've seen God work miracles of restoration, miracles of restitution. But if we go to God and we confess our sin because we think, all right, this is my way out of having to deal with the consequence of what I did. I just stole $30,000. But if I go confess my sin to God, he'll make it all right.
And I won't have to pay that money back. That's not what this is. You can't manipulate God. There are things that when we sow, we do reap a consequence, not because God's punishing us, but because there are things that we did that have consequences in life. When we bring it to God, by the way, I have observed, God's amazing at fixing what we broke in a way that's just absolutely mind-blowing. He's able to fix what we broke. In fact, I use the number 30,000. Here's a testimony for you real quick.
I did have a man come and confess to me one time that he had embezzled 30,000 plus dollars from his business. And he had a partner in that business. He confessed to me that he'd embezzled that money and we prayed. And I mean, he was broken over it. He finally came to a place of brokenness toward God. He had just received the Lord and he'd been saved. And now he was broken over his sin. So he came and confessed that to me and he said, what should I do? And I never tell people what to do.
So what do you feel like you should do? He said, I feel like I need to go to the ones that I stole from and face the music. I feel like I need to go back and do what I can to restore what I broke. That, by the way, is the heart that shows I've genuinely been broken and I'm confessing and repenting of what I've done. I have a heart to make right what I broke. That's called restitution. And it's a biblical practice, not because somebody forced him to, but because now he's carrying something that I'm genuinely broken over what I did.
What can I do to make it right? The end of that story, he went and confessed that he did that and they forgave him because he was bold and courageous enough. For one thing, he could have been put in prison for that. And for another, he was about to lose all of the friends that he had at that company who didn't know that he'd been doing it cleverly enough that nobody noticed that he'd been doing it. As soon as he was broken, I mean, he was hard crying, couldn't get the words out. They forgave him, never charged him with a crime. So God saw to it that he was forgiven there as well.
That's not always the case. God doesn't manipulate and control everybody in the world. But the point is when we go to God and we're confessing and repenting of our sin, we're not doing it to manipulate God into saving us from what we have to fix and make right here because of the people we've harmed. I just want to make sure we got that clarified before we move into the next thing. The last thing, and this is the most important part of it all, we're not just confessing our sin to God. If we're not going to be punished for what we did, which we're not, God's not a punisher. He's not a judge of all things when it comes to our life right now.
When we come to God and confess, it's because we want to be restored and we don't want to do it again. You know, that feeling of shame we have isn't all bad. It's bad if we stay in that place, but the feeling of shame means I know that I violated the, I'm made in the image of God and I violated that with what I did. And there's something incongruent. There's an old math word for you. It doesn't match up. It doesn't equal. My behavior doesn't equal who I am right now.
And I feel restless about it. I don't want to live like this any longer. That's a good thing. So what's the solution for that? Either we beat ourselves up and punish ourselves, do some penance for what we did, or we go to God and we pray. And part of your devotions this week, you're going to read Psalm 51 in which David said, create in me a clean heart of God and renew a right spirit in me. We're asking God for a brand new day. Help me to live on the outside like what's been done on the inside, oh God.
And that's the new life that we have in Christ. So one last scripture for you to meditate on. This is Hebrews 4 verses 15 and 16. And this is kind of a lifestyle practice for us to get into. And the passage is talking about Jesus as a high priest. The high priest of old was the one who was like an intermediary between people and God. We don't need that any longer because Jesus is our high priest and we have direct access to God through Christ. We can go right to the Father, right to the mercy seat, the throne of grace, the place where God lives.
So here's what we're exhorted to do, the people that receive this letter. He said, we don't have a high priest who can't sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are yet without sin. Here's the amazing thing about going to Jesus with our stuff. He's not sitting there going, I have no idea what you're talking about. He's sitting there going, oh, I remember what it's like. You think I didn't want to punch one of those Pharisees in the nose? Oh, I know what it's like to be tempted to act angrily towards somebody.
Oh, you think I wasn't tempted with those beautiful women that were around me. I lived as a man. I was tempted in every way that we've been tempted. Jesus has been there and he experienced. You think Jesus could say to us, you think, I don't know what it feels like to want to turn my back on God because I don't like the way that he's leading me. Did you ever hear what I prayed in the garden of Gethsemane about passing this cup on to someone else? Jesus has been tempted in every way.
Now he never caved to it. That's the only difference between him and us. We all cave. He never caved, but he's not sitting up there as some judge like, I don't know what your problem is. He's sitting there as a sympathetic man, the God in heaven who's saying, I get it. I understand what you're tempted with. Therefore, it says, let's draw near with confidence to the throne of grace. Let's be confident that Jesus is waiting for us there, that he understands what we're going through. He's not there to sit in judgment over us, but instead he's saying, come with confidence to my throne because you need grace right now so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need.
He's there waiting with grace for us, which is divine power to do the will of God. So we find ourselves sinning the same way over and over and over again. What we need to train ourselves to do is over and over and over again, go to this throne of grace. So is it even conceivable that if we would come before God for the thousand time with the same sin that he's going to turn us away? No, in that moment, he's all the more eager to make sure that we understand that we've been forgiven and he's going to give us the grace, which means the ability to overcome. So eventually as we grow and as we walk with God, these things that we keep tripping over and stumbling over, they'll no longer be stumbling blocks.
But it happens when we stay in the light, walk in the light with him, let him help us overcome those things. And then eventually we're not going to recognize this by the time he gets through with us. Amen. Have a glorious week, enjoying the gift of confession, enjoying the gift of repentance. It may not be a wearisome thing for you, but I pray that you will look forward to confession as much as you look forward to the next joyful experience of worship you have. Amen. I love you guys. Have a great week in Jesus.