Looking Forward In Faith

This segment of a recent sermon, Looking Forward In Faith, preached at my church, [You can hear a recording of the sermon in its entirety by scrolling down to the SERMONS section of this page] so clearly tells me that God's forgiveness is here for me, and it's OK to move on. There are no good works which can make that forgiveness any better. I need not try to hold myself to a higher standard than God does. I need to move on and leave past mistakes and experiences behind me.

 [But oh... if it were so easy to do... I would have already done it!]

Sermon segment:
...The first step at moving out of the Cage of Guilt is to embrace the reality of the human condition the Bible describes.  “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”  By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Paul is describing the fact that none of us have arrived.  He knows, he says, that he hasn’t taken hold of the fullness of the resurrection and the righteousness it gains for us through faith in Christ, but he isn’t going to get distracted and bogged down by looking back.  Instead, he says, he is going to forget what is behind and strain eagerly toward what is ahead. 

Friends, the Christian life is about moving forward, regardless of the past.  We all have a lot to be forgiven for, I know I do, but wallowing in the mire of past guilt isn’t going to get us anywhere.  To be clear, moving forward doesn’t mean acting like the past never happened.  No, we can’t appreciate the fullness of God’s grace until we appreciate the fullness of our own sin.  But it also means that we don’t set a higher standard than God, essentially saying through our refusal to forgive ourselves, “Look God, I’m really happy about that whole death on the cross thing, and I’m glad that’s enough for you, but I have really high standards, and I just don’t think I can get past this.  I’m going to hold on to my guilt because in my eyes this sin hasn’t yet been forgiven…” and while we never probably finish the thought by saying what it is we think will end this thing, the truth is that it probably looks something like a works-righteousness scheme, whereby we imagine we’ll be free of our guilt when we find a way to make it right.  There is certainly a place for restitution, but the truth is that many, if not most of the outcomes from our sins can’t be made right, especially by creatures of relative puny power like us. 

No, the only way forward is to let Jesus Christ take care of it.  As we noted when we talked about the sexual ethics implied by the seventh commandment, the deep psychology of grace is that in Christ our failures need not define or defeat us.  There is no sin that is worse than any other, and where there is repentance we know that there is also forgiveness.  God’s promises are sealed by the cross, and His transforming and healing love will overcome all our brokenness, all our damage, all of our sin, and all of our guilt…if we will but let it. 

            If we look at what Scripture says it seems that a mark of maturity is moving forward with God.  “I press on toward the goal,” says Paul,  “to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  In fact, he continues, “All of us, then, who would seek to be spiritually mature should take such a view of things.  And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.”  You gotta love Paul!

            Of course in all of this there is the added grace that God often redeems our past experiences for His glory and our good.  We’ve talked about this many times, that God doesn’t cause bad things to happen, or need us to sin to teach us a lesson, but that part of God’s awesome power is the ability to redeem and resurrection, to bring new life to the death we have created through our own actions...