Transcription
For being an ever presentent help in the time of trouble, in the time of need, thank you. Every believer today can cling to that phrase: You are our help. The answer is on the way. You heard us the first time we prayed. You already know what you're going to do, and how you're going to do it, and when you do it, we will stand amazed and know that You had a better plan than we did. Your answer was better than our prayer. Thank you, Jesus, for that. And the whole church said, "Amen."
Let's read together from Psalm 25. I think I asked them to let us start with verse number one. Are you ready? "To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in You; let me not be ashamed, let not my enemies triumph over me. Indeed, let no one who waits on You be ashamed; let those be ashamed who deal treacherously without a cause. Show me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; on You I wait all the day. Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, for they are from old. Do not remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions; according to Your mercy remember me, for Your goodness' sake, O Lord." And then verse 11: "For Your name's sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity, for it is great."
Thank you. You can be seated. Let's see what the Lord has to say about this. This stood out to me. Ten minutes before I walked in this sanctuary, I just saw this for the first time in my life. Verse number six: "Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your kindnesses, for they are from old. Do not remember the sins of my youth; according to Your mercy, remember me." He's asking the Lord to remember two things and forget one: remember how good You are, O Lord; remember Your kindnesses, Your mercy; and remember me through Your kindness and Your mercy. But, O Lord, don't remember my youthful sins. And then, as he went on, verse 11, it just pops up again: "For Your name's sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity, for it is great." And I just—I'm telling you, it has stunned me. Because in all of these writings, David was glorifying God, praising God, acknowledging God's kindness, mercy, and goodness. And then something rose up, and he remembered something he did. Something was eating at David right here. I don't know where this psalm is in relation to his sin with Bathsheba; I didn't have time to check that out. But there's something that's bugging David—something other than Bathsheba, I think. Something that a pure-hearted young man stumbled into in his youth, and now he's regretting it for the rest of his life.
If you listen, it seems that more and worse sins are being committed by younger and younger people. This is a horrible day. Did you hear what I just said? Younger people are committing more horrible sins than ever before, because sin is thrown in front of them. Sin is easily accessible. The internet sees to that. Handheld devices see to that. Television, advertising, movies—it's everywhere you go. Marijuana is readily available, and lots of friends do that. All you got to do, as I've said before, is just when you pull out today, go down to the light there, and when it turns red and you sit there, just breathe in and see if you don't smell weed. You can go to any intersection and smell weed. Driving down the road, you can smell it. We don't have skunks in this area—that's weed. And look at how our standard of morality has dipped. Vulgarity? Oh, the language! The language that people in Congress use, that people in leadership use, that athletes use. Oh, how low we have gone, how far we have fallen. The morality—everything is sexual, everything is an innuendo of that which offends the conscience of a saved person. And it happens when we're young. We do things when we're young that scar us for the rest of our lives.
Young people wonder why their parents nag. It's because they are being nagged. Your parents are being nagged by something they did and wish to God had never done and can't undo. So they stay after you, and they stay on you, because they love you, and they don't want you to suffer what they're suffering, or to have to constantly deal with something in the past. I can bring up a name here, and most of this congregation will be able to relate—not the younger ones—Monica Lewinsky. How would you like to be known everywhere you go as the woman who—she did it when she was 21 years old. She did it under the influence of a powerful man in a powerful place. And for the rest of her life, now she'll have to deal with that reputation. That's what sin does. That's what young sinners will have to experience for the rest of their lives. That's why the Bible is constantly, lovingly warning people about sexual immorality, about sexual sins. That's why preachers—real preachers—do that too, when they know that most people don't even have, or society doesn't have, the same conviction about purity and virginity and morality that it used to have. We have to preach it anyway, because this Bible teaches it and preaches it. Paul said, "Do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one with her? For the two," he says, "shall become one flesh." Anybody that engages in sexual relations outside of marriage—they don't teach this, they don't want kids to know it—but an emotional bond takes place. And so for people who have slept around for years, and young people who go from one party to another and sleep around, they don't realize that they are giving a piece of themselves away, and they are emotionally stamped. It's like the image on a coin; you can't get rid of it. And the school system won't tell them, and they try to hide it from the parents, and all the time we're damaging this generation. Paul says, "Flee sexual immorality. Flee! Run!" Isn't that amazing? Run from it. "Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body." That tells me that there is something different about sexual sins. It has a lifetime of emotional drag with it. It's the most alluring thing to us. Young men, young women, they see it portrayed on screens; they don't realize that the people from Hollywood and other places—you know, New York runways, models—these are foul people who are blind, they are immoral, they are dangerous.
I would stand here today and say—first I was going to say to the young men, then I said, well, why not the young women? Then I said, why not everybody? Pornography is crack cocaine for the eyes. And if you ever get involved in it, there's a great likelihood you'll get hooked on it. To me, those that distribute this kind of material are as guilty and criminal as those who produce fentanyl and bring it across the border. We ought to organize the Army to keep pornography out of our society the way we're trying to do to keep fentanyl and all the other drugs out of our society. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. There is a first impression that will take your breath away, but it will remain with you as long as you live. And I'm just thinking that maybe David—pastor, you don't think David looked at pornography? I don't know what David looked at. I know David was a man, and we find that out when he gets to be king. But there were things—there were things that aided David for the rest of his life. And that's when he comes to the Lord and says, "Lord, remember how kind and merciful You are, and remember me in Your mercy, but don't remember what I did when I was a boy, when I was a young person, when I was foolish and lost and immature." That's the sad part about it, see. And that's why parenthood is so important. You've got to stomp your feet, you've got to remind, you've got to nag. And that's what I'm doing right now as a pastor. I know there are more pleasant things to talk about, and certainly more things to shout about. But you know, you can't just bypass this dangerous emotional drug of pornography and sexual immorality, because it affects us even after we are saved.
See, the Bible is addressed to believers. The Bible—does everybody understand that the Bible was not written to the world? It wasn't written to sinners. It was written to the church. It was written to Israel. It was written to believers. And these warnings are there to believers. I passed a church the other day, and out front it had a sign, and that sign said, "All are welcome." I'm good with that. "All are God's children"? Don't know if I believe that. "All are equal"? I know I don't believe that. Well, that's a church's way of trying to be relevant and fit in and let people know, "We don't care what you think, what you believe. We're all one anyway. Everybody's welcome, no matter how you live." Well, you know, I would say that you're welcome here no matter how you live—but not all of us are saved. And like I said a few Sundays ago, we're all God's creation, but we're not all God's children. There are two kinds of people in the world: saved and lost. That's it. Saved people who know Jesus, who've had their sins forgiven and washed away, who belong to Him forever. And lost people whose eyes are blind and who are eaten up with sin and live under condemnation. You can't argue with that, because Jesus taught it. When Jesus went to the Pharisees one day—they were always trying to trick Jesus—and Jesus said, "You Pharisees will cross oceans to make a disciple, to make a convert, and when you do, he is twice the child of hell that you are." Child of hell! Jesus looked at another group and said, "You are of your father, the devil." Paul said those that don't know Christ are sons of disobedience. So there are two families in the world: the family of the saved, whose Father is God Almighty; and then there's the family of the lost, whose father is the devil. And they do not know the light, they do not know the truth, they are lost. But what I'm trying to get across to you is that these scriptures that I've read to you were not written to the sons of the devil or the sons of darkness or the children of hell. They couldn't understand it if you gave it to them in pictures. This is for the church of the living God. I'm preaching to the saints of the most high God. And I'm telling you that in these waning days, these last days, when darkness is getting darker, and Satan's power is encroaching, and the church is compromising, and the gospel is forgotten, and real spiritual leadership is non-existent, and the authority of parenthood has been stripped from the family through the school system and the government—and while all sins are right, folks, it's a feast of sin. Any kind of sin, a smorgasbord of anything. And we are lessening and deadening the sensitivity of young hearts and souls and minds to the lifelong danger and scarring of sin. Surely not one parent in here just handed your teenager a phone and said, "Happy birthday!" Surely there are some restraints, some filters, some rules. No, don't tell me you just gave your teenager an iPad. "But I trust my child." Then you're not as smart as your child. I know my child wouldn't—don't you ever be that foolish. Your child will. Your child probably has, but you don't see it because you have blind parental love, and you think that you've done such a great job that you've prepared your child for the world. Oh, oh, my friend, you better wake up. You better wake up, because Satan is determined to drag you and your offspring as low as he possibly can. And so everywhere we turn now, everybody's doing what's right in his own eyes. And just to make sure that Satan keeps his clutches around the throats of our children, we have had the government move in and take the authority of the home away from mom and dad and put it in the school system, which is as rotten and dark and demonic as it can possibly be. It is Satan carrying out his plan, his ideology, through a system we call education. And families are being ruined. And children who have had these transgender surgeries are ruined; they are scarred for the rest of their lives. And Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts that we used to trust now take our kids on these camping trips, and of course they indoctrinate them with all of the ideas that are totally contrary to the holy word of God. "In the beginning God made them male and female." And at least for now, that whole movement has been stymied—that transgender, woke junk has been stymied for now. But I told you last week, don't get comfortable, because Satan knows his time is short. And once he gets past these little barriers, these little humps and bumps in his road, he's coming back with a vengeance, with a fury. And that's why we better not abdicate the throne of prayer, and we preachers better stand our ground and preach the whole counsel of God. And we cannot afford to compromise and come out with little silly, weak, watered-down, milk-toast slogans like, "All are welcome, all are God's children, all are equal." No, we've got to stand up and say, "You are not my brother unless you've been washed in the blood of Jesus. You are not going to heaven unless you have repented at the foot of the old rugged cross." "But we're all human. This is our big global family." Wrong. Might be your global family, but I belong to another world, and I'm a citizen of another place. And I don't belong here. I won't be here much longer anyway, and I'm ready to get out of here, if you want to know. I want to go home. The whole problem we believers have is that we're homesick. We get up every day with homesickness, and we don't even realize it. We get up and think, "I want this to be a good day." We get up and think, "Lord, what's going to happen today?" You know, we vacillate in the uncertainty of this world, and all of that is because we are homesick. My heart is already in heaven. My feet are on the earth, but my heart is in heaven. I want to go where there's light and purity and righteousness and Jesus. But we've got to fight this fight of faith, and you have to understand: every one of us—ah, there might be one exception or two up here in the choir—we did something when we were young that we wish to God we'd not done. Can I get an amen? And so the devil is going to always point to that scar, and we're going to say, "Lord, don't remember that. Remember me in Your lovingkindness." We're sitting here today because of the lovingkindness and mercy of the Lord. You know that, don't you? But I just can't get over this: "Lord, remember Your lovingkindness, and remember me in Your lovingkindness, but please don't remember the sins of my youth."
But I want to say this morning to every female who has made that mistake, every female that lost your purity in foolishness—now you're saved. And I want to say to every female that might have had an abortion, and I could go right on down the line—every female that is the victim of some kind of divorce you didn't want, a divorce you wanted a happy Christian family, but here you sit. I want to say to every man that has done what men do, and every man who wishes to God he could be twelve again and not do what he did, or even farther back—or everything, every bit of pain you've ever caused someone in your life. Maybe you messed up your marriage, you were unfaithful, but you did it when you were in sin. Listen to the preacher: there is forgiveness with God. Amen. And when I say that, I just wonder sometimes if we really understand why we just said "amen." We sometimes say "amen," but there's just a little bit of—just a tiny bit of—"but, but, but I'm different, but, but, but I knew better, but, but..." No. Either you believe what the Bible says, or you doubt it. And if you doubt it, you can't receive it. There is forgiveness with God. I don't care what you did. And it may haunt you for the rest of your life. Sometimes I think that I'm probably too—I make this too personal, because I've mentioned this a half a dozen times lately. This past Tuesday morning, I woke up for no reason at an early hour thinking of something I did when I was a teenager. Now that could be nothing but the devil. He knows how to stir it up. It wasn't God. God doesn't remember it. And it was the devil, and he does that to keep you shackled, living in regret, still feeling guilty. Brother, sister, you can't be a child of God and live in guilt. If you're a child of God, you've been forgiven, you've been cleansed, you've been washed. There's nothing hanging over your head. There's no condemnation against you. There's no God that's angry at you. Heaven hasn't turned away from you. You can't live in guilt because the blood of Jesus Christ has washed away all of your sins. You can have the memories, but you don't have the guilt. Does this make sense to anybody? The old King James says, "Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed." It just dawned on me—I didn't do a word study or anything—"Confess your faults one to another." It dawned on me: I'm supposed to confess my sins to God, but I can tell you about my faults. You can't help me with my sins, but you can sure bear with me in my faults. I'm not supposed to tell my sins to a priest or a person and expect forgiveness. There is only One that you can confess your sins to and get forgiveness, and that is the risen Lord Jesus Christ. But I can certainly tell you about my faults. And I have one or two. And so do you. That's why church is so very, very important. Because when we come together, and the more we get to know one another, the more we realize we're all alike. We're all just alike. All of us guys are just alike; gals, same thing. And so when we come together like this, and we all have pasts, we come together in fellowship, we come together in worship, and we realize the mercy of the Lord, the goodness of God. We aren't what we were. Praise God! I don't want Him to remember the sins of my youth. I want Him to remember me right now, in the house of God, singing praises to His name. That's how I want you to remember me, Lord.
See, real gospel preaching can convince you, and you, and you, that when Jesus saves you, He totally, absolutely, eternally redeems you. I don't care what lifestyle you used to live. Let me say it again: totally, absolutely, and eternally redeems you from your sins, from your past. It's real. You get forgiven. That means the Lord says, "It's over with. Then I'm done with it. We're done with it." You get pardoned. I think we understand a little more about pardon now, don't we? That means no matter—even if you did it, then you're never going to be held accountable for it. You're not even going to be held accountable for the stuff they find out now. In fact, nobody can touch you for the rest of your life. Wow! Wow! Isn't that an amazing thing? And we saw it with our own eyes: a president doing it to his guilty family. But now I'm talking about a holy God who did indeed pardon me from my sins. He said, "Forget about yesterday. I'll never bring you to My throne of judgment for that. Forget about today. You are going to make a mistake. You are going to sin. But My Son's blood has pardoned you from all of that iniquity." And you know the verse we all quote so often: "There is therefore now no condemnation"—now, none, now, none, right now, there's none, right now, there's none. See, every time I say it, it's a new now. Every time I say it, in half a second, it's then, not now. Then is then. Now, it's—it's then, but now is now. And right now, there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. And we know it because we walk after the Spirit. And I hate the works of the flesh, don't you? I hate flesh. I hate sin with my whole being. I want to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. No condemnation! I'm a child of God! You ever just ponder that thought? You know, when the sins of your youth come up, do you ever just—oh, ho, ho, ho! I'm a child of God! I am right now a child of God! My name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life! I have an inheritance waiting on me! I have an intercessor! Matter of fact, I love to preach this—that's why I preach it a lot—I got two intercessors! I've got the Holy Ghost inside of me. Maybe that was a little old-fashioned Pentecostal; maybe I should have said the Holy Spirit. No, I've got the Holy Ghost inside of me! Not only is He mapping out my life and guiding my steps and leading me in all truth and opening up my understanding, but He will stop every once in a while and intercede on my behalf. "Lord Jesus," He says, "take care of this." And then Jesus says, "I heard You, Holy Spirit," and He goes and talks to the Father about it. Brother, sister, how in the name of anything can we walk out of here today and be discouraged when we know that we have been cleansed and forgiven and pardoned, and there's no condemnation, and we've got two intercessors—a holy intercessors talking to each other about us? Yeah, about my children! And He said He'd take care of everything, didn't He? But do you believe God can? I do. Do you believe He will? He said He would. Then why would I not shout, "Thank You, Jesus!" The world doesn't have this kind of hope. But we've got hope in a risen Jesus.
As I see it, as I see it, I'm preaching too long, but I don't care. I'll be through in a minute. Don't worry about it; you can get your coffee. It's good coffee, too. There are two things I want to tell you that the Lord emblazoned on my heart this week. Really, there are two fears we have to face—two fears every day of our lives until we come to a realization of something. The first one is the fear of death. Let me read it: "Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death—hallelujah—were all their lifetime subject to bondage." You see, the bondage of being afraid to die, the bondage of not knowing what's going to happen when you die. Jesus took care of it. He became what we are so that He could be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God. You guys know I'm not an intellectual. You know that I have to think on very simple terms. In very simple terms, I've come to realize that when you truly believe that all of your sins—yes, even the ones in your youth—are gone, you are not afraid to die. Because if you're not sure they're all taken care of, then death is that step to judgment. But if you truly believe what God said, and if you truly believe that David's prayer was a real prayer—"Forget what I did, but see me now in Your love and mercy"—then death cannot hold power over you anymore. Jesus rose from the dead. Hell hates for a man to say that from the pulpit: He's alive! I just thought I'd slap a demon in the face right there. He's alive! He conquered death! He defeated the devil! He is alive forevermore! Because He lives, we live also. We are not afraid of death. Death has been conquered by Jesus.
The other fear we have is judgment. Judgment. You know, last week when I was preaching on Matthew 7:21, "Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord,'"—you remember that? Do you remember a sense of, "Oops, I'm not sure"? "Will I get up there and find out... what if I'm fooling myself?" You don't have to fear that. John said, "Love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment." Lord God Almighty! I wish I weren't in front of you right now; I would jump straight up and down: "That we may have boldness in the day of judgment!" We're not afraid of the judgment. We can stand boldly, because we stand in the righteousness of God through Jesus Christ. Because as He is, so are we in this world. How can you sit there like that, church? As He is, I am right now. He's in heaven, and I'm on earth, but I am just like Jesus. I'm the one God looks at and says, "You look just like My Son Jesus." This is some good preaching today! Wait a minute, wait a minute. There's no fear in love. If you really believe God loves you—really, really, really—and what would keep you from believing that? Remembering the sins of your youth, letting Satan always bring up the past. Tell him to go to hell, because that's where he's headed anyway, and he knows it. That's why he's working hard to take as many with him as he possibly can. He is on his way to hell for eternity. He's the one that's afraid. I'm not. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.
Oh, how much I need to quit. Stand with me right now; I'll finish while you're standing. I planned to preach twenty minutes this morning. Let me tell you what torment is: not being sure. Not being sure that thing I did—"I hear the preacher, and I hear the scripture, but oh, I did that." Torment is when you're just not sure. Faith is when you say, "He said it. I believe it. I'm free. I'm forgiven. I stand uncondemned. I am a child of God." So I'll not close this service until I at least say: if there's anybody here that has wrestled with uncertainty, don't you be ashamed to walk down here, because we all fight it at times. But you're just ready for this to be over. And you know what you did, and it seems so bad, but the preacher just told you the blood of Jesus Christ has transferred us out of the kingdom of darkness and put us in the kingdom of His dear Son. And for the rest of your life, you can say, "I'm ready to face the judgment, because He'll stand with me. I'm ready to die, because it's just a stepping stone to Jesus."
Grace, grace, God's grace. All my sin... We're going to sing it again. Anybody that would just like to walk down and say, "I want to walk out of here with confidence in what Christ has done for me"—you come on down here. I guarantee it, the Lord will touch you this very day.
Yes.
All right. Here's how we're going to leave today. If you're saved and you know it, and there's no doubt about it, and if something were to happen to you today and your time would come, you would see Jesus—I want you to lift up two hands, and I want you to open your mouth and praise this precious Jesus. Praise You for Your blood. Praise You for Your grace, Your lovingkindnesses, Your tender mercy. Thank You, Jesus, for having mercy on me. Thank You, Jesus, for Your shed and precious blood. And the whole church said, "Praise the Lord!"
The Lord see you. "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer." Amen. Go out with a smile on your face.