Forgiven Sin

Saying farewell to yesterday might be a challenge for some, but not for the numerous New Yorkers who bid a traditional farewell to 2023 in Times Square ahead of the big New Year's Eve celebration. At the 17th annual Good Riddance Day Thursday, bad memories were burned – literally.

Good Riddance Day is inspired by a Latin American tradition in which New Year’s revelers stuffed dolls with objects representing bad memories before setting them on fire.

In Times Square, attendees wrote down their bad memories on pieces of paper. "COVID," "Cancer," “Our broken healthcare system,” “Spam calls and emails,” “Bad coffee,” and “Single Use Plastics,” were some of the entries.

Every December 28, this event gives people the opportunity to write down everything they want to leave in the past and destroy any unpleasant, unhappy, and unwanted memories – so that they can toss them into an incinerator and watch them vanish.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What painful experience, memory, or consequence caused by sin would you like to leave behind in the New Year? This is a reality for the believer “Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!” (Lam 3:22-23). With Paul we can say “Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13).

Imagine an old European city with narrow cobbled streets and storefronts as old as the city itself. One of those weathered storefronts has a sign hanging over the door: The Mercy Shop. There's no lock on the door because it's never closed. There's no cash register because mercy is free.

When you ask for mercy, the Owner of the shop takes your measurements, then disap­pears into the back. Good news—he's got your size! Mercy is never out of stock, never out of style.

As you walk out the door, the Owner of the Mercy Shop smiles, “Thanks for coming!” With a wink, he says, “I’ll see you tomorrow!”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The writer of Lamentations said that God's mercies are "new every morning" (Lam. 3:23). The Hebrew word for "new" is hadas . It doesn't just mean "new" as in "again and again," which would be amazing in and of itself. It means "new" as in "different." It means "never experienced before." Today's mercy is different from yesterday's mercy! Like snowflakes, God's mercy never crystallizes the same way twice. Every act of mercy is unique.

In an issue of CT magazine, author Jordan Monge shares her journey from atheism to faith in Christ. She writes:

I don’t know when I first became a skeptic. It must have been around age 4, when my mother found me arguing with another child at a birthday party: “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” By age 11, my atheism was widely known in my middle school and my Christian friends in high school avoided talking to me about religion because they anticipated that I would tear down their poorly constructed arguments. And I did.

Jordan arrived at Harvard in 2008 where she met another student, Joseph Porter, who wrote an essay for Harvard’s Christian journal defending God’s existence. Jordan critiqued the article and began a series of arguments with him. She had never met a Christian who could respond to her most basic questions, such as, “How does one understand the Bible’s contradictions?”

Joseph didn’t take the easy way out by replying “It takes faith.” Instead, he prodded Jordan on how inconsistent she was as an atheist who nonetheless believed in right and wrong as objective, universal categories.

Finding herself defenseless, Jordan took a seminar on metaphysics. By God’s providence her atheist professor assigned a paper by C. S. Lewis that resolved the Euthyphro dilemma, declaring, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.”

A Catholic friend gave her J. Budziszewski’s book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that “love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person.” The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love.

At the same time, Jordan had begun to read through the Bible and was confronted by her sin. She writes:

I was painfully arrogant, prone to fits of rage, unforgiving, unwaveringly selfish, and I had passed sexual boundaries that I’d promised I wouldn’t …. Yet I could do nothing to right these wrongs. The Cross looked like the answer to an incurable need. When I read the Crucifixion scene in the Book of John for the first time, I wept.

So, she plunged headlong into devouring books from many perspectives, but nothing compared to the rich tradition of Christian intellect. As she read the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and Lewis, she knew that the only reasonable course of action was to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If I wanted to continue forward in this investigation, I couldn’t let it be just an intellectual journey. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). I could know the truth only if I pursued obedience first.” I then committed my life to Christ by being baptized on Easter Sunday, 2009.

God revealed himself through Scripture, prayer, friendships, and the Christian tradition whenever I pursued him faithfully. I cannot say for certain where the journey ends, but I have committed to follow the way of Christ wherever it may lead. When confronted with the overwhelming body of evidence I encountered, when facing down the living God, it was the only rational course of action.

Editor’s Note: Jordan Monge is a writer, philosopher, and tutor. She is also a regular contributor to the magazine Fare Forward and for Christianity Today.

Unless you’re Chuck Norris, Googling yourself is rarely a pleasant experience. Finding information that is confidential, intimately personal, or personally identifying on a Google search results page is truly horrifying.

Besides the social media accounts that you may have left on “Public settings” or the shopping records that were leaked when a retailer got hacked, there are even more nefarious methods that could land your data on the most popular search engine on Earth. And in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing—every online photo, status update, social media post, and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

Now, Google has introduced a new privacy feature that enables users to scrub their personal information from web searches. The new “remove result button” enables users to request that pages containing their phone numbers, home addresses, or email addresses be removed from appearing in searches.

Users may also request the removal of results containing their social security numbers, bank account and credit-card numbers, and medical records. Users also may remove information that is “outdated” or “illegal.”

Google said in a statement, “It is a way to help you easily control whether your personally identifiable information can be found in Search results.” Google stressed that the tool is designed only to allow users to better control the accessibility of their most personal information, and not to censor more general web content.

Although Google cannot remove content from websites it does not control, it accounts for over 80% of all web searches, so having Google remove the offending page from their results greatly lowers the page’s search visibility.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The web is a place where information lives forever and nothing ever is forgotten. This should be a reminder to everyone that God’s books record everything: words, thoughts, deeds (Rev. 20:11-12). The only way to “remove result” is through confession (1 John 1:9) and the grace of God which applies the expunging effect of the blood of Christ (Col. 2:11-15). New Years is a good time to remember that God can give us a fresh start every morning (Lam. 3:22-23).

What does it mean when the Bible says that we have been pardoned by God? Here are two classic definitions from American legal history:

First, in 1833, Chief Justice John Marshall, in a landmark decision, described a pardon as “an act of grace … which exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed.”

Second, in 1866, the Supreme Court gave another famous definition of a pardon: “a pardon releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense … A pardon removes the penalties and disabilities and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.”

Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig offers this as a marvelous description of a divine pardon. “‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation ….’ The pardoned sinners’ guilt is expiated, so that he is legally innocent before God.”

In the early 1950s teenage Lyle Dorsett and his family moved to Birmingham from Kansas City, Missouri. They were outsiders, often labeled Yankees by peers. But one summer evening in 1953, Dorsett was walking to his house after work and decided to take a shortcut through the campus of then-Howard College (now Samford University).

He was immediately intrigued by the sight he saw: a large tent on the football field featuring a magnetic preacher. As Dorsett drew near, he could hear evangelist Eddie Martin preaching on the parable of the prodigal son, calling other prodigals to come home. Dorsett said, “I knew I was the prodigal and … needed to come home.”

Martin asked those in attendance to return the next evening. Dorsett came early, and this time was seated near the front. When the call came, “the evangelist led me through a sinner’s prayer. I confessed my need for forgiveness. While being led in prayer, I strongly felt the presence of Jesus Christ. I sensed his love and forgiveness as well as his call to preach the gospel.”

Shortly thereafter, Dorsett and his parents joined a local Baptist church. However, 18 months later, Dorsett’s family moved back to Kansas City. On his return, gradually he drifted. During his time in college, he embraced a materialistic worldview. He received a Ph.D. in history but despite professional success, he began to drink heavily and became an alcoholic. His wife, Mary, who became a Christian after their marriage, began to pray.

One evening, he stormed out of the house after Mary asked him not to drink around the children. He found a bar and drank until closing. While driving up a winding mountain road, he stopped at an overlook and blacked out. The next morning, he woke up on a dirt road at the bottom of a mountain next to a cemetery not having any memory of the drive.

Dorsett cried out to God, “Lord, if you are there, please help me.” At that moment, he recognized that the same presence he had met in Birmingham was with him in the car and loved him. The prodigal son had finally, truly come home. He said, “Although I made countless mistakes, the Lord never gave up on me.”

God then called Dorsett to full-time ministry, ordination in the Anglican Church, and eventually to the Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, where he had first heard God’s call to preach.

He concludes,

Over the years God has proved to be a gentle Comforter—like when Mary underwent massive surgery for cancer, and when our 10-year-old daughter died unexpectedly. Certainly, the most humbling and reassuring lesson is his persistence in drawing me to himself. And it was he who pursued me and sustained the relationship when I strayed in ignorant sheeplike fashion, doubted his existence, and then like the Prodigal Son deliberately moved to the far country. And it is all grace—unearned, undeserved, unrepayable grace.

We have all found ourselves stuck and trying to troubleshoot a problem on our computers, smartphone, or other electronic devices. According to multiple studies, one of the biggest time-wasters in the workplace are computer-related malfunctions.

One study found that the average person spends 22-25 minutes a day trying to fix a computer-related issue. The estimated cost to larger companies in the US is somewhere in the ballpark of $4000.00 a minute. One easy solution for many of these issues could be as simple as turning off your device.

Over half of computer problems technicians deal with can be fixed with a simple reboot. The reason that computers often fail is that they have systems processes continually running behind the scenes. These processes leave behind an electronic footprint that takes up memory (RAM). When you turn off a computer or smartphone, these programs and processes end, allowing you to start on a clean slate with a faster and more efficient working device.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The same principle can apply to the Christian life. Through confession and forgiveness, God’s grace allows us to “reboot” our lives and begin “new every morning” (Lam. 3:22-23).

As we age, many of us become distressed about our inability to recall names, words, or ideas as quickly as maybe we used to. But according to a new study, perhaps there is good reason for us not to be so upset.

Drs. Ryan and Frankland summarize, in an article on SciTechDaily.com, “Changes in our ability to access specific memories are based on environmental feedback and predictability. Rather than being a bug, forgetting may be a functional feature of the brain, allowing it to interact dynamically with the environment.”

Even so, what we think of as “forgetting” is not a permanent state of being.

Memories are stored in ensembles of neurons called ‘engram cells’ … and forgetting occurs when engram cells cannot be reactivated. The memories themselves are still there, but … it’s as if the memories are stored in a safe but you can’t remember the code to unlock it.

In other words, as a way of adapting to new circumstances, our brains automatically learn to prioritize certain memories and allow others go into cold storage. This cognitive adaptation, though occasionally embarrassing, has an upside.

In a changing world, forgetting some memories can be beneficial as this can lead to more flexible behavior and better decision-making. If memories were gained in circumstances that are not wholly relevant to the current environment, forgetting them can be a positive change that improves our wellbeing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God wants us to be free from the crippling bondage of our former mistakes. Even a God whose memory is eternal and infallible, promises “I will remember their sins no more” (Heb. 8:12).

Jen Wilkin writes:

When my parents entered their latter years, they took up a new hobby: keeping chickens. At the height of their enthusiasm, they tended 21 chickens in a hen house—20 chickens, that is, and one noisy rooster. Roosters crow and crow. They crow every morning, and they crow all morning. They crow to announce another day, but they continue crowing as long as it is called “today.”

Roosters make a notable appearance in the Bible. All four Gospels record Peter’s famous three-time betrayal of Jesus punctuated by the crowing of a rooster, just as Jesus had prophesied. All three synoptic Gospels say Peter “wept bitterly” at the sound.

Our senses are powerful memory holders. Smells … tastes … sounds, too, attach themselves to memories. I imagine what kind of memory the rooster’s crow evoked for Peter. Every dawn after that first terrible morning of betrayal, the proclamation of his bitter guilt would have rung afresh in his ears. Carried in the crowing would have been the memory of his colossal failure. Whatever his relationship had been with Jesus, whatever his calling, it appears to be finished.

“I’m going out to fish,” he announces to his companions (John 21:3). They fish all night and catch nothing. But just as day is breaking, a sound ripples across the water. A voice. The announcement of a miracle: Try the other side of the boat. Recognition dawns. As the others haul in fish as fast as they can, Peter hurls himself into the sea and thrashes toward shore. There sits Jesus, serving up a fresh breakfast menu: Restoration. Forgiveness. It is finished.

I wonder, as the two conversed, could Peter hear in the surrounding countryside the sound of roosters? I can’t say. But … I suspect that every morning thereafter, Peter affixed a new memory to that clarion call. The sound of homecoming. Fear not. Glad tidings. Each day, the sound that had announced new-morning guilt now spoke a better word. All hail the rooster, that fine-feathered herald of forgiveness, that megaphone of new-morning mercies.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). What memory of past guilt announces itself to you at every turn? Friend, hear the annunciation of your emancipation: Morning has broken, and with it, fresh mercy.

An inmate caused a mild drama in the Nigerian High Court after a judge acquitted him of all charges against him, but he refused and demanded to go back to prison. Instead of the usual jubilation that follows any ruling of "discharged and acquitted," the inmate in question headed straight back to the prison. He was intercepted by a prison guard who reminded him he was free to go home. To the chagrin of eyewitnesses, he said he was going nowhere, demanding to be allowed re-entry into the prison.

The calm of the court premises was shattered by the freed prisoner's shouts and pleas to be allowed to go back to prison, as he thrashed about and struggled with several prison officials. According to eyewitnesses, it took the effort of over six prison officials, court workers, and policemen to get the freed inmate out of the court premises.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That's a picture of us all. We have been set free in Christ, but we often find ourselves returning to the prison of our old way of life and behavior. Healthy Christians remind themselves of their settled status in God’s courtroom. We have been "approved by God" (1 Thess. 2:4) and “set free” (Rom. 6:18-22).

For about five dollars you can buy a four-inch plastic bobblehead Jesus that bounces on a metal spring and adheres firmly to the dashboard of your car. One advertisement for this product says you can “stick him where you need forgiveness” and he will “guide you through the valley of gridlock.”

The dashboard Jesus has become a cultural phenomenon. In the song “Plastic Jesus” Billy Idol sings, “With my plastic Jesus, goodbye and I'll go far, with my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car.” Paul Newman sang it in the movie Cool Hand Luke. The words begin, “Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car.”

To lots of people, Jesus, church, and Christianity are cultural trappings but not life-changing realities. Author Josh McDowell warns that many people today see Jesus “like a plastic statue on a car dashboard—smiling, robed, a halo suspended above his head.” But that superstitious or sentimental view of Jesus is a myth. Jesus of Nazareth was no plastic saint. He’s a real-world kind of Savior.

It’s not important whether you have Jesus on your car’s dashboard, but it’s vital to know he’s living in your heart. He isn’t plastic, he’s powerful. He’s not small, he’s infinite. He’s not a good-luck token. He’s the risen Lord of time and eternity.

Via their Twitter account, the St. John Fisher Catholic High School of Peterborough posted a picture of a book that was returned to its library. How long had this book been out of library circulation? At least 32 years, according to the anonymous scofflaw seeking amnesty. An attached note read, “Sorry, just 32 years overdue. Call it Catholic guilt.”

Chief of administration Rosie Roe was the one who opened the package with the long-lost book, and was disappointed that the guilty party remained anonymous. She said, "It was a real surprise when I opened it and saw what was inside, I thought it's a real shame they didn't leave a name because I was at the school at that time and wonder if I know them.”

It’s not clear whether the anonymous former student was motivated more by guilt or by the book’s subject matter. It’s title: Manners Make a Difference. The school will not return the book to library circulation, since its content is quite outdated, and after calculating that the fine would be approximately $1100 dollars, the school announced that “all is forgiven.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It’s never too late to come to God with your long covered up sins and mistakes. He is always ready to forgive and release you from penalty through the work of Christ on the Cross.

Pastor and author J.D. Greear writes:

I remember a Muslim asking me when I lived in Southeast Asia, why would God need somebody to die in order to forgive our sin? He said, "If you sinned against me, and I wanted to forgive you, I wouldn't make you kill your dog before I forgave you. Why would God require some kind of sacrifice to forgive?"

Here's how I answered him:

Choosing to forgive somebody means that you are agreeing to absorb the cost of the injustice of what they've done. Imagine you stole my car and you wrecked it, and you don't have insurance and or the money to pay for it. What are my choices? I could make you pay. I could haul you before a judge and request a court-mandated payment plan. If you were foolish enough to steal my $1.5 million Ferrari (No, I do not actually own a Ferrari), you might never pay it off, and you'd always be in my debt.

But I have another choice. I could forgive you …. What am I choosing to do if I say, “I forgive you”? I'm choosing to absorb the cost of your wrong. I'll have to pay the price of having the car fixed. ... You have no debt to pay—not because there was nothing to pay, but because I paid it all. Not only that, I'm choosing to absorb the pain of your treatment of me. ... I'm choosing to give you friendship and acceptance even though you deserve the opposite.

This is always how forgiveness works. It comes at a cost. If you forgive someone, you bear the cost rather than insisting that the wrongdoer does. And that is what Jesus, the Mighty God, was doing when he came to earth and lived as a man and died a criminal's death on a wooden cross.

Author Dane Ortlund quotes Thomas Goodwin’s statement, “Christ’s own joy, comfort, happiness, and glory are increased … by his showing grace and mercy, in pardoning, relieving, and comforting his members here on earth.”

Ortlund then gave the following illustration:

A compassionate doctor has traveled deep into the jungle to provide medical care to a primitive tribe afflicted with a contagious disease. He has had his medical equipment flown in. He has correctly diagnosed the problem, and the antibiotics are prepared and available. He is independently wealthy and has no need of any kind of financial compensation. But as he seeks to provide care, those who are afflicted refuse the care. They want to take care of themselves. They want to heal on their own terms. Finally, a few brave young men step forward to receive the care being freely provided.

What does the doctor feel? Joy. His joy increases to the degree that the sick come to him for help and healing. It’s the whole reason he came.

So, with us, and so with Christ. He does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for fresh forgiveness, for renewed pardon, with distress and need and emptiness. That’s the whole point. It’s what he came to heal.

The film Words on Bathroom Walls tells the story of Adam, a witty, introspective teen diagnosed with a mental illness during his senior year of high school. After experiencing a psychotic break at his school, his parents relocate him for a fresh start to St Agatha’s, a private Catholic school. In their first meeting, when the headmaster inquires if he is ready to join St. Agatha’s. Adam answers, "The only person that can’t reject you is Jesus, right?”

As he struggles to keep his illness a secret, Adam asks Father Patrick about the reason for confession. He responds, "Actually, telling someone our sins gives us the opportunity to admit we are flawed . . . Everyone is flawed. But admitting our flaws, that gives us the opportunity and the strength to face them. And that’s why we confess.”

At the end of the film, after discovering his need to depend on others, Adam shares, “As for honesty . . . you have to let people discover all your dark and twisty places inside because those are the people that can show you what's real, when you can’t see that yourself. It can be the beginning of everything, if you let it.”

It was one of the worst days of 23-year-old Brenton Winn’s life. But it paved the way for one of the best. He was angry at God after he relapsed from an addiction to methamphetamines. Winn knew nothing about Central Baptist Church of Conway, Arkansas, when he broke in that evening. High on drugs, Winn went on a rampage and destroyed $100,000 of church property.

Six months later Winn was baptized at Central Baptist. He said, “As I’m starting to understand how God works, I’ve realized I didn’t pick the church that night. God picked me. If it had been any other church, I think I’d be sitting in prison right now.”

Winn’s journey from a jail cell in February to a baptismal pool in September began when Central Baptist senior pastor, Don Chandler, talked to the prosecutor. Chandler knew the godly response to Winn would be to offer forgiveness rather than judgment.

Chandler said, “You can’t preach grace for 50 years without practicing it, especially in front of your whole church …This was a young man who had made some mistakes. He was on drugs and alcohol when he did what he did. But he was redeemable.”

Chandler told the prosecutor that the church would like to see Winn get help with Renewal Ranch, a faith-based residential recovery ministry. The judge, who at the time had been a board member of Renewal Ranch, gave Winn the option. He could either go to jail, potentially for 20 years, or he could voluntarily choose to go to Renewal Ranch. Winn chose Renewal Ranch.

Winn accepted Christ as his Savior after one of the Bible studies at Renewal Ranch. Winn and other ranch residents attend church at Central Baptist on Wednesday evenings. Winn chose to be baptized at the church on one of those Wednesday nights.

Winn said. “I gave my heart to Christ. I used to think it was a coincidence [that I chose to break into the church], but now I call it confirmation that God is real, and he answers prayers. I needed a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

While our life story will be different, what is true for this young man is true for every one of us. God is still working a beautiful story of grace in every one of our lives.

When Pricess Lalla Salma gave birth to a daughter named Lalla Khadija, her husband King Mohammed VI of Morocco was delighted. In fact, he wanted to celebrate. But instead of giving out cigars, he pardoned 8,836 prisoners and reduced the sentences of 24,218 others. The Justice Ministry said the pardons were a humanitarian gesture.

When God’s one and only Son was born in Bethlehem, the whole purpose was to provide pardons for condemned people. God had promised he would do so in Isaiah 55:7, “Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.”