If you have a Bible this morning and you want to read our scripture reading, we're going to take a reading from Psalms, from Psalm 130 this morning. 130th Psalm. And we're going to likely focus on just the first few verses of that Psalm, but we'll read the entire thing since it's short. Psalm 130, beginning in verse 1. Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee. that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning. I say more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. In this reading today, again, we're gonna focus on the first four verses, I think, of this reading today. The title of our message this morning is Forgiveness from the Lord. Forgiveness from the Lord. The last number of years, and I've remarked about this a number of times on Wednesday night and perhaps Sunday mornings, I feel as though the lens through which I'm reading the scripture has been altered. And one of the things that is most prominent as I'm reading the scriptures that comes to my attention is just the character of the Lord, who He is. And at times, As I study the Word and I see His activity and see His words, it's almost bewildering to study Him. I'll say this, and I think all of you know this, but God and all of His good attributes is infinite. There's no end to His goodness. So whatever depiction that you have of a certain character quality of His, whatever that is, so you think of something very simple like the love of God. And we use all these examples to describe what His love is like. And so we have this conception in our minds of this is how big it is, and this is what it's like, and this is the nature of it. And we should do that. We should seek that out to know that. But recognize that as deep as your heart and mind goes, doesn't even touch the surface of how good that God is. And I am grateful for that. I'm grateful that because He's pretty magnificent in my mind, I think, to me, and to think that that is just a drop of water in the ocean of how deep and good that He is, is almost bewildering when you know that He is so much more than what you can imagine. And one such thing that is almost bewildering that we're gonna try to talk about today is God's forgiveness. God's forgiveness. Everything that, so I think, and I'm not saying this isn't a good thing, Very often we devise our understanding of Him based upon what we've lived and experienced ourselves. So likely all of you have forgiven people. Some childhood slights or childish slights you have forgiven people of. Others may have experienced some life-altering harm and have thus been required to exercise forgiveness. Yet that even doesn't paint an accurate picture of the depth of God's forgiveness to the human race. The more that I see in the Scriptures and through life experience Our nature, our sinful proclivities, the more it is bewildering to me that God did not discard us and start over. The Old Testament, the writer said, what is man that thou art mindful of him? You and I, We see little ants. We see little tiny creatures. And there is a whole ecosystem of things that go on within the ant world by nature. We don't bother with them. We don't worry ourselves with whether they're getting fed or whether they're thirsty or whether the hierarchy of the queen ant is fair and just and equitable. because it is beneath us. We would say there are higher things, there are more integral things in the world that are going on than the ant world. And yet the truth of the matter is that it would be more just and right, more logical for us to concern ourselves with the insect world than for God to concern himself with the human world. Because we're talking about a matter of value. And God is to us exceedingly higher to us than we are to the insect world. So no doubt you and I would think we were doing a favor if a Cheeto fell from our lunch and instead of picking up, we just say, you know what, the ants can have it. You know, if something fell and we're doing them a favor, we're giving them lunch and dinner and done my duty to the ant world for the next year. And yet God does a lot more than let the crumbs from His table fall upon us. As I see God like this, it compels my heart to exalt Him higher than the day before. That the more I understand who He is the infinite loving kindness that He displays to mankind, the more that He is exalted and high, the more I feel a compelling in my soul to just worship who He is and talk about who He is and rejoice privately with Him about who He is. And that I am allowed to be a benefactor of His goodness. I praise Him this morning that I know the Lord. One such way of knowing Him is to understand better His forgiveness of sin. God's forgiveness is very, very unique. Very different from man's forgiveness. Every sin that has ever committed in the history of the world has been against God. Think about it. We like to think about, if I do something wrong to you, that you're the primary wronged being in the transaction. If I steal something for you or say something bitter or hateful about you, then I think, you know what, they're the victim to my sin. And so I must go to them and make it right. But David in his, one of his deepest hours of despair in Psalm 51, he acknowledged in verse three or four, he said, Lord, against thee and thee only have I sinned. And I think what he was trying to express and what he had done is that yes, he had sinned against Uriah, yes, he had sinned against Bathsheba, yes, he had sinned against the kingdom of Israel, but the harm which he had done to them dwarfed the sin that he had committed against God. And it is because God had given him everything, his life, his breath, Being exalted as king, God has providentially worked in his life to bring him to the point that he was in so that he could be a vessel and a conduit of God's grace, not only to Israel, but to all the world. And he had taken these gifts that God had given him and allowed them to be weaponized and used for selfish gain and sin. and because he had trampled upon the graces of God in his misuse of his own life and his own self, he felt that in what he had done, the harm even in the loss of life of an innocent man had dwarfed what he had done to God himself in taking advantage of the gifts God had given him. So everything that we do Every sin that we commit, rather, is against the Lord. Now what is unique about the Lord further is that God sees everything that we do. Aren't you thankful that we don't see the fullness of each other's sins? What a grace that is. Have you ever learned if somebody's sin and you wanted to extend forgiveness. And yet the power to do so in your heart eluded you. You couldn't. There was always this grudging, there was always this evil thought that you would want cleansing, listen, for us to forgive as God forgives, takes the grace of God given to us. So if you ever desired to forgive, only based upon what you saw or knew, and yet the ability to do so, you just couldn't do it. Because, In moments, unexpected moments, naturally those thoughts of bitterness and hatred, those thoughts of evil towards the person would rise up in you against your own will. They would just come naturally. And that's only based upon the things we know about each other. But imagine the depth of the bad thoughts that you've had. Imagine the secret wickedness that you've performed. And every bit of the way, God saw it. He knows those corridors of your heart that have darkness, just absolute darkness. Doesn't he? He sees it all. And no one is immune to it. We're all that way. God sees everything. God's forgiveness. Therefore, it is quite extraordinary that God has anything to do with us. It's extraordinary that God has anything to do with us. We have this terrible tendency, and I've mentioned it before, to be dismissive of our sin and to enumerate the sins of others. God doesn't do that. He just sees them all. And they're weighed in the balance properly. Always. So not only is God's The threshold of sin that he is both aware of and must endure in us is very high, higher than ours is towards one another. When he extends forgiveness, it's like nobody else's. It's greater. So think about that. He knows more than anyone else about all the depths of sin and the motivations for it. and yet his forgiveness is greater than anybody else's. So what does that say about him? You see, God's forgiveness is not based upon restitution or getting paid back. So he's not looking. I think a lot of the world, and it could be the natural inclination of our heart to say, Lord, if you will forgive me, I will do this. That's not how God operates. He doesn't need anything from you or I. So He's not sitting and counting and saying, you know what? And yet, that's very often how our forgiveness works. is that we will forgive one another if the person will return in their attitude towards us back to normal. We want fellowship to be rekindled, and so sometimes it can be our tendency to say, you know what, I'm going to extend forgiveness because there's a benefit to me, and that is we can return to normal relationship. God's forgiveness is not based upon his need of that. He doesn't need to be repaid for anything. God's forgiveness is not dependent upon the severity of the action committed against Him. There's a lot of places we could go with that, but think about this. Much of our forgiveness is extended to sins against us that we find tolerable, the effects tolerable. The harder the sin is against us, the more wicked, the more painful, and listen to me today, God feels the pain of sin against him, he feels it. God is not immune to feeling. He is a God of feeling. and he feels those things more than we feel those things. And so we cannot make God this personalityless, emotionless man with a long white beard sitting in heaven immune from the feelings that are elicited from people who sin against him. He feels that, and just like you feel sins of people closer to you, we are, as his creation, made in his image. We are his, as Paul wrote about the philosophers in Acts 17 in a very general way, we are his offspring, we are his creation, made in his image, designed to glorify him. And because of that, God feels it when we sin against Him. There is pain and there is sorrow that emanates in the heart of God because God has a heart. And in the same way that compassion flows from his heart, sorrow, as Jesus demonstrated as he looked over Jerusalem, that was not some circumstantial product to teach us a lesson, it was a real feeling God had towards people who rejected him. He felt anguish in his soul towards the people who sinned against him, and God still feels that way. And yet what is amazing about God is that the severity of the action against him does not impact his ability to extend forgiveness. That's amazing, it's amazing. I've read, I've heard before of just awful things that have been done in the world. Awful things in war-torn areas, There's been recent news things that I'm just driving in the car and they're so, listening to the radio, and they're so terrible that I can't handle the thought of them so I have to turn it off. Because to think that people, young children, young people, older people, whatever, have experienced such a depth of pain and sorrow and hurt that was maliciously caused towards them or imposed upon them. Those things are so terrible and I'm so weak that I can't handle the knowledge of them without being impacted in my daily life. And yet, God sees it all. He sees it. And he calls the same way to the perpetrators of those heinous things that he calls to the perpetrators of the little white lie. And that is repent and come to me. And God can forgive. He has the amazing capacity. So I'll say this, this morning in case you're here and you're one of the roadblocks that Satan has placed against you is that sin in your life at times past that there's things you've done, there's things you've said, even for prolonged periods of time. It wasn't just a mistake. It was a deliberate act of malicious rebellion to hurt others and to hurt God. I want you to know about God that He is so great that the severity of your sin does not affect His capability to forgive. That's why the Scriptures leave us these drops of mercy, these stories that go into You know, for so much of it, it's amazing to me how at times in the scriptures, God can skip hundreds of years and not say anything. And then he can talk about the thought somebody was having, that detailed. Why the difference? Why 400 years of silence? Why hundreds of years of not saying anything, and then He zeroes in like a surgeon and begins to just bring out all of this information about the thoughts and the activities and the details of the person's sins. And if one of those reasons has to be that God is trying to reveal to all of us as Paul writes in his letter when he says, listen, God saved me to be an example to all that would believe hereafter, that they could see that he was a blasphemer and a persecutor and injurious. And yet God desired to show him as a tablet of mercy and grace as to the depth of God's forgiveness extended to the greatness of man's sin. And I want you to know this morning, God extends mercy with no boundaries. That's how His forgiveness is altogether different than our own. God's mercy is immediate and complete. That's amazing. So let's just use some little example. If I do something and I hurt my wife and she confronts me about it, and yet tensions are still a little high, you know? And you do extend verbal forgiveness, but there's residual resentment that's still there. And it takes us a while to warm up to each other, right? maybe a few days where you're just still mad. You're still withholding a degree of forgiveness, and to be honest, we can get to the place where if they do anything in that little period of time that resembles what we forgave them for, it's gonna quickly, that reminder's gonna quickly fly out of our mouth, right? And what that can show, it can show a number of things, but one thing that it can reveal about us is that we've not really forgiven them. God is not like that. When God forgives, it is immediate and full. Isn't that wonderful? So think of it like this, sometimes Satan can can confuse us, our own hearts and minds based upon what we observe, and our own forgiveness towards others can make us think, okay, I'm gonna go to God, I've been a rebel, I've been rejecting Him, whatever the thing is, this is the deliberate sin I've committed, I'm gonna go and ask for His forgiveness, and so you get down, and it washes all through you, and we may talk about that from the, I haven't got to the text yet, that it may, You may be in a place of deep contrition and you're calling out to God for forgiveness and there is a relief that God is just, that he's been faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from unrighteousness, but it almost feels like we've got to ramp up into a better relationship with him over time. But you know what? Because we tend to forgive on a sliding scale that's really based upon our memory. Right? That I'll forgive you, and then as your offense, I forget the pain of the offense, I tend to feel better about you. But as long as the memory of what you've done is fresh upon my mind, I'm not as forgiving. That's the amazing thing about the Lord. The Lord doesn't have some, you know what, now I'm gonna just ramp it up, and I'm gonna allow them to get close to me. When God forgives, he forgives. It's complete. It's done. He's ready to move forward. I'm thankful the Lord's forgiveness is that way, but when, under what condition does the Lord forgive? And I think that's where the psalmist hits it right, right here. He begins the psalm by saying, out of the depths, Have I cried unto you? Now, one of the things you find all throughout the scriptures, and I thank anybody who's been on the ocean very much, I haven't a whole lot, but definitely enough to know this, that one of the pictures in scriptures when it talks about being on the water is it's communicating to us the instability. That it is this powerful force, and for all of the inventions man has come up with, as large as these vessels are that move goods back and forth from nation to nation. Listen, if there is a vessel on the ocean and the ocean is determined to capsize that vessel, there's not a lot can be done because of the power of the ocean. That's true now and that was especially true back then. And so, when it teaches us that a double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways, like the book of James tells us, that he's tossed to and fro, like the water, that we're unstable and we're going back and forth. Hear what the psalmist is crying out, he's saying, out of the depths, I'm crying out to you, Lord. I'm in a place of instability, I'm in a place of need, I'm in a place of fear. You know, With a tornado, you can hope it's gonna be over in a minute. That's the nature of them. In a hurricane, you can find solid ground. But on the ocean? What do you have to cling on to if the very vessel that you're riding upon can be capsized? Nothing. You're just hoping and praying that God's providence would intervene because there is nothing in yourself or upon anything that you can grab a hold of that can give you stability against the force that is facing you. And so the psalmist is in this place where he's saying, out of the depths I am crying out to you. And I wanna say for a moment that listen, very often as human beings interpret those moments in the depths, we look at them as negative things and yet God has sent them as these droplets of grace to our life because he knows that in the depths is where mankind cries out to God. In those hardships, I wanna say that again this morning, if you're lost today, oh, the thing that God could give you that would be the greatest grace of your life is to put you in a place where you're in the depths, where you are in pain and anguish and sorrow over sin of your own and of the rightful, just judgment that God will serve out on those who have never repented of sin. It is not to run from those things, those realities, because there's a remedy and there's a hope that can be found, especially when God crushes the heart of somebody to the degree that they see they need to cry out. The problem today, I think, with the environment around lost people, especially in the Lord's churches, is that there's not enough conviction of sin, sorrow, and brokenness, almost an obsession over what I have done against God and how that I am a rebel against God. And listen, all the self-loathing in the world is no replacement for a God-sent sorrow upon you and I. We can point out all of our flaws. People can beat us down and tell us how terrible we are. That's a worldly sorrow that lead us to death. But there is a God-sent sorrow, an awareness in the soul where we are crushed and broken that only God has the power to give us. And what is necessary in the hearts of lost people that don't know God is for God to crush the heart What is necessary for God's people to often draw near to Him? What if all the comfort and ease that we have sought all of our lives from the worldly pains and discomforts, what if all of that has by effect taking us out of a condition whereby it is self-evident to us that we need God? Or what if all the financial security has had a side effect What if all of the comfort that in every, listen, I'm a type of person where I'm very detail-oriented and any time that there's a, there's a, there's a, there's an interruption to my, the harmony within, I see something, I try to find a way to fix it. Make life a little more easily streamed. But what if by so doing, I'm creating ease and Zion and in my own heart, And that's depriving me of that need I have of the Lord. His help, His grace, His mercy. The psalmist here is crying out of the depths. Now listen, when people get in the depths, they respond all number of ways. And it behooves us to pray for those we love, not that God would deliver them from the depths, but that they would see His presence in the depths. Very often, the natural compulsion is just to pray, God, deliver them, help them. Don't allow them to experience this. And maybe out of good intentions, those are our prayers, but a more informed biblical prayer is, Lord, please, I know that you are in this. You do not allow anything, any harm to come upon any person without purpose and providential, eternal intention. And so I know that your arrangement of these things that we perceive as unfortunate events, that we pray in our flesh for deliverance, but God, rather than deliverance, I pray that they would see your providence and purpose. Please, Lord, in the depths, orient their heart towards you. That is what is needed. If this life is what the Bible says, just a vapor that's here for a moment, here for a day and gone in a moment, if there's an eternal weight of glory that is beyond comprehension in the next life, that this life and all the pains and sorrows will be met with a greater experience of grace, Then in the depths, let us cling to the hope that is in Christ and in God. And what is he refining us and them into amidst the depths? No matter how deep the sorrow gets down, notice the first thing that he cries out in the depth is, Lord! Lord. Now, I wanna confess something to you here. I read this one day, I don't remember when, and it always stuck with me. My children have a tendency, when I get home for the day, sometimes, you know, you have a long day and you're just exhausted, maybe a little grumpy, and you're just wanting something pleasant to greet you at the door. You know what I mean? And I get there, and sometimes before I can shut the door, there's a serious grievance one has against another brother. And it is full of all the passion the world has to offer as to the wrong that person's done. So sometimes in levity I'll say, hi dad, how are you doing today? To try and get them to recognize, hey, when it's about you, there's a tendency to gloss over the greeting. I think our greetings to the Lord when we go to Him in prayer, I found them to be more important than I initially thought. How did I begin my prayer? When I'm in that wrong self-life place, I get to the point, this is what I want. All the while removing from my thought who in the world I'm talking to. talking to God. And though I can be close and feel this intimate connection with Him, there ought always to be this humble understanding tucked in reverence as to who am I speaking to. And if you begin your prayer with reverence, articulating fully, this is who I'm talking to. There is a life that has been breathed into my prayers just recognizing to him who he is and what he has the power to do. It's fascinating to me that as Solomon began his great prayer there in the temple, he began with, Lord, an acknowledgement of his God's, now, he was the king, of Israel over a nation who had accumulated at this point untold wealth so much that the Queen of Sheba was amazed at what she had seen, saying, only the half has been told. And yet this sovereign, this king, over a nation of great prosperity and power, as he stands before the temple and he begins to kneel himself, The first thing that he does is put himself in the lowered, humbled position, and God as the Lord Sovereign on high, who he is. Lord was not a title that we use today often as a synonym to God. It was an acknowledgement of his power, of his kingship, of his sovereign. He is the potentate. He is the emperor, the king. He is the one that is the creator of all things. He is the one in charge on top. and we are beneath. And so when the words rolled forth from their mouth and they would say, Lord, it was this acknowledgement of how little they were and how great that he was. And the psalmist cries out to the Lord, Lord, hear my voice. You know, you don't have to say these words, but the attitude of heart must be present for God to extend forgiveness. You may not call him Lord. You may not say, hear my voice. But the attitude of humility that is inherent to this psalm is necessary for the spirit of all of us as we go to the Lord in prayer. Now look at what he says in verse three. God does mark iniquities, kind of, right? He knows about them all. But God has a capacity to do something that I don't know, well I know, that without God's help we cannot do. He can know sin, know something has transpired, and because He has extended forgiveness, hold absolutely no animus against the person who has committed the sin. I think that's a greater miracle than knowing something and forgetting it or choosing to forget it. It's knowing it and that it is so forgiven that it can be as though it had never occurred. One way God knows it all, but he doesn't keep that record to be used against us. And if he did, who could stand before him? Nobody. He says, but there is forgiveness with thee. Very often what people will do to try to, so if somebody comes to you and they're drowning in guilt for sin, A very natural reaction to that is to try to minimize what they've done. It's not that bad. Or it's okay, the consequences have played out and it's all worked out in your favor. But in an attempt to help somebody drowning in guilt, very often what is done is minimize the significance of sin instead of magnifying the extent of God's forgiveness. I love the fact that John Newton, the writer of Amazing Grace, who was a slave ship captain, if you ever read his biography, you read things about him, what you'll find is he was a terribly sinful man, horribly sinful man. The things that he did are leave us just, it's unconscionable the things that he did against other people. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people died horrible deaths because of him. I love the fact that on his gravestone to this day is, I am a great sinner, but Christ is a great savior. It is not the minimizing or being dismissive of his own sin. It is actually saying, no, this is what I am. But what I am at the depth of sin cannot be compared to the magnification of who he is and the extent of his salvation. And so the psalmist here is not dismissing his own sin. He's saying if you marked sin, nobody would have hope, but you extend forgiveness because of who you are. I'm thankful today. that with the Lord there is absolute forgiveness of sin. And that what He wants is people, listen, if you're lost today, what God wants is a humble, true, out of the depths of your soul, coming to Him in humility and sincerely asking for forgiveness. And if we're saved today, it is recognizing that that sinful flesh, that God saved the inward man, and yet this outward man is still perishing, and it's perishing because of sin, and that sin still separates us from the presence of a holy God, and our fellowship and communion with Him, and that it does not do us any good to ignore it, to put it away, to try to conceal it from the world, but it is to confront it and to allow God to speak into us and reveal to us just how heinous the sin we're committing is, that it might provoke us to the depths of the agony that would then put us and restore us into fellowship with Him. Don't dismiss sin and therefore deprive yourself of the opportunity to be reconciled with God for even a moment or for a day. One day being out of fellowship, close communion with God is not worth every day facing your sins and being forgiven day after day after day and yet being reconciled to Him. The weight of day by day living in sin adds up, doesn't it, on us? Oh, it adds up. I'm trying to close, but listen to me this morning. It adds up, and the guilt that we feel is this ominous weight that just slowly becomes a mountain, and that mountain becomes a mountain range, and the next thing you know, we're just, our spiritual life is in complete paralysis Because we're thinking, you know what, all this, and God can just forgive me like that? Yeah, He can. He can. It doesn't make sense. It's because we can't comprehend the greatness of who God is. If you're living in sin this morning, return. Return to Him and receive forgiveness. and cleansing, I felt it ironic, maybe purposeful, whiter than snow is what we sung before we started to preach, because that's what God does. He takes the blackness of sin on our garments, stained from top to bottom, and he can cleanse it whiter than snow. This morning, I'm thankful for God's forgiveness, that it is unparalleled, Incomprehensible without, I'll tell you this though, it's incomprehensible until you experience it. And then you comprehend something you don't even comprehend. Does that make sense? You experience something you don't comprehend, but now you know it really well. You know the release from guilt. Isn't that a great thing? When God has extended forgiveness and there's been cleansing, you ever got done with the prayer and felt clean? Clean, like it's all right, I'm clean. I was filthy when I bowed, but I'm clean, clean. The stench that made me fearful to be in his presence, I feel clean. And yet it's incomprehensible, isn't it? How did it happen? One moment as I was wallowing in prayer, I smelt the stench and now I'm clean. What happened? God forgave you is what happened. Praise God. He does. Thankful today for who he is, for the forgiveness that he extends. That's our message this morning. I pray it would be of some benefit to you.