About Me

My photo
My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, June 14, 2015

1 John 1:9 “How Do We Forgive Ourselves”

Way back before Lent we entered into our mini sermon series on forgiveness  by asking how we can forgive others when they hurt us. But this week we are going to flip the question, instead asking, how can we forgive ourselves when we hurt others.
When we are in relationship with others, we tend to hurt them from time to time. But after we wrong someone we have a choice to make - or rather a series of choice. First, we need to decide if we will humble ourselves to say “I’m sorry” or not. Second, if we choose to say “I’m sorry” we have to decide how we will say it and how we will respond to the one we have hurt.
Because we are all in relationships, we need to learn how to say “I’m sorry” - yet it seems that for some of us, these can be the hardest words to ever utter. They admit our shortcomings. They make us vulnerable. So some people avoid admitting that they have hurt anyone in life, refusing to say “I’m sorry”, and eventually causing even more pain. 
But others choose to say “I’m sorry”. After examining the distant that they are feeling from someone close to them and considering the part they have to play in creating that distance, they begin to ask how can I be reconciled to the one I’ve wronged? Reconcile is a difficult word. It means restoration of friendship or relationship. But such simple definition can trick us into thinking that reconciliation is easy - which is far from the truth. Reconciliation is difficult because it is beyond our control. We cannot make someone we have wronged restore relationship with us - we can only put our best foot forward. We can only control our part in seeking the reconciliation, not if someone else will it accept it, what terms they may present, or the timing. And that is hard to swallow. When we say “I’m sorry” to another person, we cannot expect the automatic response to be “I forgive you”, especially if we have deeply wounded someone. Forgiveness, like healing, takes time.
So why would we want to take the risk of saying “I’m sorry”, not knowing if the other person will accept our apology or not? Because right relationships matter to God. I often tell people that for Christians, our relationships with God and others are linked together. When we are feeling closer to God, when we are in right relationship with God, after confessing our sin and seeking to restore our relationship with the Holy One, we are usually in better relationship with the people who are important in our lives. The reverse is also true. When we seek to be reconciled to those important people in our lives who we have hurt, we often find ourselves growing closer to God. It is very difficult to love God and hate our neighbor, or to love our neighbor and be estranged from God.
We are meant to be loving, truthful, and kind to one another, but when we slip into the sin of selfishness, putting our needs and focus first, we are bound to hurt other people. I can think of no sin that is a private sin, for many times such sins end up unintentionally hurting others and most certainly hurt God. This is why we are told in today’s scripture verse to confess our sins. When we confess our sins earnestly to God, God meets us with grace and purifies us. This doesn’t mean that we will never make a mistake or sin again, it simply means that God, through Jesus Christ, intervene on our behalf. While we do not know if another person will accept our apologies, we know God will. According to Pastor Adam Hamilton, we must talk about sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation all together when he states, “But the process of forgiveness begins with our awareness and understanding of sin, for if we are not aware of our sin, we go on living self-absorbed lives hurting others. So the purpose of preaching and learning about sin is to open the door to healing!”
A caveat, however. Our confession to God and apologies must be sincere. How many of us have seen a little child hurt another person, only to have the parent demand that they say they are sorry? While this is certainly teaching a good skill, the child often half heartedly says “I’m sorry” without admitting what they did wrong or how it hurt another person. This is a bad trait we carry into our adult relationships. Making statements such as “I’m sorry, but….”, or making an excuse with our apology, or gloss over your mistakes, or seeking to place blame on the other person. Part of apologizing is thinking about and stating what you wish you would have done differently. Thinking about how you can seek through not only words, but also actions, to be in right relationship, as you answer the question, will I do my best to not harm this person in this way again?
But what if the wrong or the burden lies in the past? Too many of us are carrying around loads of unconfessed and unforgiven sin against other people. How can the burden of guilt from such instances be removed? Through prayer. And through seeking a right relationship with God through confession. If the person you have wronged is still living, try to seek them out and reconcile. I was reading a book this week and approaching death in the hospice program from a chaplain’s perspective. In one of the vignettes, the chaplain tells of a woman who was estranged from her brother for twenty years, but wanted to be reconciled to him before she died. Not knowing how to do so, she wrote him letter, essentially saying, I forget why we are estranged, but I am sorry that I continue to hurt you by keeping my distance. Before she died, he brother wrote back, saying he too, did not remember why they were estranged, and wanted to be in relationship again with her. When we confess our sins to God and others, we lighten our load and lay the burden of our guilt down. Part of the reason we pray a corporate prayer of confession each week is to get us in the habit of confessing and to remind us that we have fallen short in our relationship with God and with other people.
But what if the person we have hurt is no longer living or will not forgive us? Then take it to God in prayer. We may not be able to have the relationship with the person we once had, but we can ask God to keep us from committing the same sins against people in other relationships. We still need to lay the burden of guilt down. As long as we have tried our very best to restore the relationship and have earnestly repented, we can be assured of our pardon. 
The journey of seeking forgiveness for wrongs you have committed against others is not something we should enter into alone. Just as there are no private sins, there too are really no private confessions. For too often, we confess our sins to God alone, we do not have accountability from other people, which we deserpately need. This is why we need the Church. I’ve heard far too many people tell me that they are not good enough, too bad or too broken to come to Church. But the Church is for sinners. The Church exists to support one another on this journey towards forgiveness because we’ve all been there. We need a place to put what God has touched our heart with into action. To practice reconciliation. To seek to lay our burdens down. To both ask for and accept forgiveness.
I can think of no better way to end my time with you than with this sermon. To say I am sorry for the times you feel that I have not made the right decisions. To say I’m sorry for not being the pastor that some of you wanted or was able to fulfill your every expectation. But I ask that you do not carry any un-forgiveness you may be feeling towards me into your relationship with Pastor Tim. God has given you a clean slate - a fresh start. Embrace it. Learn from him. Love him and Brittany. And let him be the pastor God has called him to be. 

Brothers and sisters, what guilt of damaged relationships are you carrying around? Who do you need to say “I’m sorry” to? What unconfessed sins do you need to bring before God? May we leave this place, knowing that we have the support of one another as we seek to restore the relationships in our lives in need of healing - be it with God or with other people. Amen. 

Sunday, June 7, 2015

“Freedom in Christ” Gal 5: 2-15

We are now in the second week of our discussion of some of the key passages in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Remember back to a few weeks ago when we started out in the first chapter, discovering that Paul had planted a series of churches in the region of Galatia - modern day Turkey. When he left them to continue on in his mission they were doing well, but quickly a group of Judiazers came in and told the gentile Galatians that they weren’t really saved by Christ or doing Christianity right because they weren’t following all of the Jewish laws and regulations. 
Today we are a few chapters ahead but are picking up where we left off in the story. Paul is by now getting quite upset in his writing. He is now addressing the issue of circumsision. Circumsision was a sign of the covenant that God established with Abraham. God told Abraham to have all boys circumsized when they were eight days old, dedicated to God. Now the Judiazers have come into Galatia and have told the gentile Galatians that they are wrong on this issue as well. All men need to be circumsised as a sign of their obedience to God. 
Paul did not teach this. In fact, Paul refutes it - saying that circumsion was a sign of the old covenant but a new one has been formed through the blood of Jesus Christ. Remember the words we hear every time we celebrate communion together “This is the blood of the new covenant poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Thus a problem emerged in the minds of the Galatians - had Paul left out part of what they needed to do or believe in order to be saved?
In some ways we do the same thing today - coming up with a laundry list of things people do or do not do, some of which aren’t actually even Biblically based, all in the name of being a “good Christian”. But those requirements, those laws, are human made, not God intended or blessed. Other times, we’ve taken an old law, such as those surrounding circumsion, out of their original context, and say that they are required in order to obey Jesus, when in fact Jesus didn’t even really speak about the issue. 
The crux of the question seems to be how much to we need to believe in order to be Christian? Or what do we need to do in order to follow Jesus? Is it this laundry list of things, some of which change from church to church and region to region, or is it about something deeper, the heart of the issue? 
The Galatians at the teachings of the Judiazers had become so confused and distracted that they had forgotten all that Paul had taught them about the love and grace of God through Jesus Christ. Paul had come to them with a very clear message, all had sin and fallen short of the glory of God. Sin was violating God’s will and breaking the relationship between us and God. We could never do enough or believe enough to earn forgiveness from God - many people throughout history had tried and all had failed. There had never been a perfect person or prophet or king… until Jesus. God came through the person of Jesus Christ, fully human and fully man, so that we could have victory over sin. Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves - restoring our relationship with God. And that is ultimate freedom. 
But that wasn’t enough for the Judizers. It seemed too simple. So they started adding fluff around the teachings of Paul in the form of laws. It was no longer about Jesus - it was about acting right. And thus the people were back in the mindset that has plagued us for ages about trying to earn our salvation, trying to earn our forgiveness and right relationship with God.
Several weeks ago we were deep into a sermon series about God’s grace. Remember that grace is a gift freely given to us by God through Jesus Christ. We can never earn it. And it is only by the grace of God that we can be saved. 
The truth is that law and grace aren’t really compatible and that makes us uncomfortable. We start to try to prove to God how good we are, how deserving, by pointing out to God all the good things that we have done or all of the things that we haven’t done, all the while overlooking that we are a sinner in need of God’s grace. Shame on us and shame on the Galatians for buying into this lie. 
When we default back to rules all that we have done is disregarded God’s gift of grace. Its like we saw the gift, brightly wrapped before us, but refused to take off the wrapping instead saying that we don’t want to open it or that it isn’t quite what we wanted. So we return to the law - that which is tangible and we can understand, but all that we have done is brought ourselves back into bondage. 
When I was in seminary on of the classes I took was inside of a women’s correctional facility with inmates. We studied along side the cream of the crop and one time I remember getting into a conversation about why some women end up back in jail shortly after being released - its because they don’t know how to navigate life outside of bondage, life outside of regulation and rules. Brothers and sisters we are all like inmates who have been made free only to yearn to return to bondage.
The Judiazers were afraid of Christian liberty and freedom. They twisted around what Paul had taught about freedom in Christ to be about people being free to sin, but that isn’t the point at all. God set us free from sin! Through Jesus’ death and resurrection we have been given victory over sin. Christian freedom isn’t about being able to sin whenever and however we want. Its about God through Jesus giving us the power to conquer sin.
During our last confirmation class back in March one of the students asked if it really was as easy as asking God to forgive us our sins. And it really is. And then asking God to give us the power to conquer sin - but far too many of us fail to pray the second part of this prayer, thus failing to take up the gift that we are being offered. For freedom isn’t about just being able to do whatever we want, its actually true liberation from our destructive habits and that which separates us from God! Praise be to God for such a gift as freedom!

According to Michael Youssef, author of Leading the Way Through Galatians, “Christian freedom is the very heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ”. Don’t let yourself be taken away from the heart of this gospel message. Don’t get sucked back into the idea of salvation being earned through good works and following the law. Christ has already offered you that gift, if only you would open it and accept it. For if you could overcome sin by following the rules why would you need Christ? Preach the gospel of Christ, the center of our faith, first and always. We are sinners saved by grace. Thanks be to God!