[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
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[00:00:19] Yeah. So I'm going to preach now. Just we're changing our service up just for a change. I'm going to preach now and then we're going to go into after preach, we're going to go into communion and then we're going to have a longer worship time after that. So, yeah, there's plenty more worship through singing, sorry, song worship later. But let me start with a little story.
[00:00:39] When I was in year six, now that was a very long time ago, a very long time ago.
[00:00:47] I was quite a good student at that age at least. Anyway, I was quite good with maths and science and our school got some computers now. Okay, now you have to picture this was a long time ago, right, when computers were these big hulking things and you didn't have them in your hand and stuff like that. And we had a computer in a library, was the first computer that we got. And then we had a computer room and there were two computers in there.
[00:01:17] And I was quite a good student. Maybe I was a little bit of a teacher's pet, but I was quite good at computers. I had the same computer at home as well and I got to be trusted to use them without supervision.
[00:01:31] These were expensive computers and one day, I've got no idea why, I can't remember, it was a long time ago, but one day I printed out loads of stuff and I can't remember why at all for the life of me, but I just remember I printed out loads of stuff. And back in them days, printing was expensive.
[00:01:52] You had paper was expensive, ink cartridges and a printer. Well, I don't know, it was one of those that went along, the printer.
[00:02:02] Anyone remember or am I that old? No, there are some. Yeah, great. And it was expensive and I can't remember if I did it. I think I probably did it on purpose for something that I wanted.
[00:02:14] But I knew that I'd done something wrong and I think my immediate reaction to doing something wrong was I'm going to pretend that I didn't and see if anyone notices.
[00:02:28] And guess what?
[00:02:29] Someone noticed.
[00:02:32] And so I was hauled up before the teacher and I got in trouble for that. Rightly accused.
[00:02:39] Now, I wouldn't be making a clever statement in saying that. I reckon everyone here can empathize with me, sympathize with me at some point in your life. We've all done something that we know is wrong, right?
[00:02:54] And that's one of the common characteristics of humankind, right? We all do things that we know are wrong and that's followed up with a feeling of guilt, we've done something wrong. A feeling of remorse. I wish I hadn't done that.
[00:03:12] And a feeling maybe potentially of shame, of, oh, that thing of knowing that someone else might know that you've done something wrong. We have these feelings in us when we've done something wrong. This is the guilt that we have.
[00:03:28] But guilt in itself isn't just a feeling.
[00:03:31] Guilt is also this kind of legal status. Do you know when we break a law, transgress a law, sometimes your Bible might use that word that we can.
[00:03:43] That's also something that we're guilty of, guilty of breaking a law. And we can break a law without having the feelings of guilt.
[00:03:52] I don't know. Would you hazard a guess at the most common law that's broken in the uk?
[00:03:59] I don't have to. It's like everyone knows it's speeding. Why? Probably because most of us speed most of the time. I looked up the stat. There was 2.3 in 2023. One year, there was 2.3 million speeding offences recorded in the UK.
[00:04:17] I wondered. It's probably 10, 50 times the time, 100 times the times it's broken. And we often break this law and we often do it without feeling guilty.
[00:04:28] Maybe we set own internal speed limits that we say that's the one that we're not going to try and go past, but it doesn't stop us being guilty, if you see what I mean.
[00:04:40] So guilt is kind of that feeling, but also breaking our law. But sometimes there's also laws that aren't civil, aren't UK laws. But there's also other laws that we know that we've broken. There's moral laws, things that we know innately in ourselves.
[00:05:01] So, for example, lying, lying against someone else is not breaking a UK law, unless you're lying to a policeman or in a court of law.
[00:05:11] You can lie to your parents or other people around you, and that's fine.
[00:05:17] But there's something in us, I would say, that most people acknowledge that lying is wrong, that we're breaking some sort of a relationship or law in internal law.
[00:05:30] And so, yeah, we feel guilty of that.
[00:05:34] So we are all guilty of breaking laws.
[00:05:39] But my task here this morning is not to make you feel more guilty, Right?
[00:05:44] I don't want to make you feel more guilty.
[00:05:48] We are all in the same boat. And so if I was doing that to you, I'd be doing that to myself as well, you know, And I really don't want to heap more guilt upon myself. What I want to help us do this morning is help us understand what we do with our guilt.
[00:06:07] What do we do with it, how do we process it?
[00:06:11] And before going further, I want to acknowledge that there's something in society. There's a tendency in our society these days to try and describe guilt as unhelpful or even harmful. A number of psychologists, especially humanist psychologists, say that guilt just leads to depression and anxiety and feelings of self condemnation.
[00:06:38] Now there's many circumstances, cases of traumatic cases where people do feel what we might call misplaced or unwarranted guilt. So things in which accidents are caused and they're not, you know, no one can be blamed for it, it is an accident. But when someone is hurt, the other people involved in that might feel just guilt for it. You maybe hear the common thing of children feeling guilt for parents divor.
[00:07:07] It's not that they've done wrong, but that somehow you feel guilt or remorse because of this situation has happened.
[00:07:14] But although that does happen and there's times at which guilt can lead to depression, we shouldn't say that all guilt is harmful.
[00:07:25] Actually, I believe that guilt is God given and it's right that we should feel it.
[00:07:32] So question is, what do we do with our guilt?
[00:07:36] So I realized I had some slides and I completely forgotten about them, but never mind. I want to go to a story in the Bible. 2 Samuel 11.
[00:07:43] If you've got your Bibles, follow along. I will put them up on the screen. Look, I had a couple of pictures and they're just a little bit funny, aren't they? And it's like, ah, you know, the dog's anyway, but There we go.
[00:07:56] 2 Samuel 11. I'm going to talk about the story of David and Bathsheba.
[00:08:01] It's a well known story. It's a story about David, who's described in other passages as a man after God's own heart. He is held up as an example really to us. But also there's times when he does things wrong. So 2 Samuel 11. I'm going to read through a bit. It says in the spring, at the time when Kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and Besheed Rabbah, but David remained in Jerusalem and one evening, David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, obviously on the top of another house. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man who came back said, she is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.
[00:08:54] Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him and he slept with her. Now in brackets now she was purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness.
[00:09:05] Then she went home. The woman conceived and sent word to David saying, I am pregnant.
[00:09:11] And the story follows up with David invites Uriah, who's Bathsheba's husband, to come back from war. He's out with the army, and he tries to manipulate Uriah to go back and sleep with his wife to cover up this pregnancy, to get himself out of a hole. But Uriah doesn't want to dishonor the rest of the army who's out there fighting. And so he. He doesn't go back home. And so David sends him back to the battle. And he sends him back with a letter to Joab, the commander of the army, of the Israelite army. And it follows up in verse 14, where it says, in the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah in it. He put Uriah out in the front where the fighting is fiercest, then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.
[00:10:04] And so while Joab had the city under siege, he put Uriah at the place where he knew the strongest defenders were.
[00:10:10] Then when the men of the city came out and fought against Joab, some of the men of David's army fell.
[00:10:17] Moreover, Uriah the Hittite died.
[00:10:23] So David committed some grave sin.
[00:10:27] We can all admit that. But how does he.
[00:10:31] How does he handle his guilt? Do you know? First, he commits adultery. And actually, when you're reading a story and reading it in light of today's language, we might actually describe it as power rape.
[00:10:45] Bathsheba certainly didn't have the ability to say no to David.
[00:10:50] And David commits this under the COVID of night. He's doing it deceitfully. He's doing it knowing what he's doing.
[00:10:58] Bathsheba gets pregnant, and then he has a problem. People going to find out what David has done. And so he tries to cover up his sin. He tries to put something above it so that other people won't find out. He manipulates Uriah, and when that doesn't work, he gets Uriah killed.
[00:11:20] And the story finishes with David taking Bathsheba as his wife. And they have the child. The child is born.
[00:11:28] And all through this, David is insistent that he's going to cover up what he's done wrong. He doesn't want people to know. And as the story closes in 2 Samuel 11, David seemingly gets away with it.
[00:11:43] There's obviously a few people that know, you know, obviously Joab, the commander of the army, maybe some of Bathsheba's family certainly.
[00:11:52] But seemingly David gets away with it. And it's not known widely.
[00:11:59] The problem for David, the problem for us as well, is there's always someone that knows.
[00:12:07] There's always someone that knows. There's someone that sees everything, from whom nothing is hidden.
[00:12:14] And that is God.
[00:12:16] God sees it. We may think we've got away with it, we may think we've not harmed anyone, but God sees it.
[00:12:25] And David's story continues with God sending a prophet, a guy called Nathan, who comes to confront David.
[00:12:34] Nathan tells this wonderful story, one that doesn't say, that doesn't call out, David has committed adultery. I wonder how much Nathan actually knew about David's sin. But he came and he exposes David.
[00:12:50] He exposes him publicly. I don't think it's probably in a. I think it's in a courtroom or David's court, you know, of holding all his people around.
[00:13:00] And, and Nathan exposes David publicly.
[00:13:05] And what David does is he just, he comes and he says, hands up, I'm caught red handed.
[00:13:11] And he says, I have sinned against the Lord. That's the first thing that he says.
[00:13:17] Even though he's committed grave sin against Bathsheba, against Uriah, he doesn't say, I have harmed these people. He says, I have sinned against the Lord.
[00:13:32] And one of these things is that, do you know, all through the Bible, David isn't the only one that sins.
[00:13:39] All through the Bible, we get repeated stories about people sinning, committing acts of evil against other people, and they go around and try to cover things up. We go from the first sin in Eden, Adam and Eve, what did they do?
[00:13:59] They tried to hide.
[00:14:02] They tried to hide from God. I mean, how ridiculous is that? If we learn anything from these examples, we can't hide from God at all. It is pointless to pretend otherwise.
[00:14:18] And what we learned from David's story, David's confession, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, all through the Bible, is actually our guilt is wrong, principally against God.
[00:14:33] David admits that, first of all, I have sinned against God. Why? Because God as our Creator, who has made you and me, not only you and me, he's created the whole of mankind. He has created, given us an instruction of how to live. He's given us the instruction of how we are to live and work with one another, how we are to relate, how we are to behave for the benefit of one another. So when we go against that, the first thing that we've done is wrong. God is go against God's word, God's instruction. We've rebelled against him.
[00:15:12] That is the definition of sin. We've rebelled against God, but because God always knows the sensible thing is to hide and run away. No, the sensible thing is to just to admit it to him.
[00:15:31] It's like the kids caught with chocolate round his mouth and the parents saying, did you raid the biscuits in. I mean it's kind of like that, isn't it?
[00:15:40] It's God's like, I know.
[00:15:44] So we say, what do we say to children?
[00:15:47] Admit it and it will go well with you. It will go better for you if you admit it.
[00:15:53] Maybe we should learn something about that. But I think we find it hard because we've got these inbuilt defense mechanisms. We've got these things about we don't want to show weakness, we don't want to show that we can't live up to some moral standard.
[00:16:09] We don't want to admit that we've harmed someone else or broken a relationship.
[00:16:15] We don't want to admit that we can't live up to this moral standard. We're basically saying I'm a bad person.
[00:16:23] We don't want to admit that. But the Bible's teaching is that no one has lived up to God's standards.
[00:16:30] There is no one who is perfect apart from Jesus. We've all sinned against God. We are all weak in that way. And admitting guilt of doing things wrong doesn't directly lead to depression or, or anxiety or feelings of self condemnation.
[00:16:51] Admitting things that we have done wrong doesn't directly lead to things like low self esteem or constantly thinking bad or wrong of yourself.
[00:17:02] The problem is that we don't deal with our guilt.
[00:17:06] The problem is if we hold onto it and don't process it, don't do something with it.
[00:17:14] How do we do that?
[00:17:17] Well, we come to God.
[00:17:19] God's never intended for us to deal with our guilt by ourselves.
[00:17:26] He never said to us, hey, you need to work off your guilt. Like there's some scales and on the one side is all the bad stuff. And so we've got to kind of work that off to put all the good stuff on the other side. And hey, if it's balanced or it's over towards the good side, then we can feel good about ourselves. That's not what God intended.
[00:17:49] Neither do we have to pay back in some way or go to therapy.
[00:17:56] That's popular these days. Working off our guilt isn't by going and talking to someone else who says that we don't need to feel that way or we shouldn't feel or hold onto those feelings.
[00:18:08] God has provided us a way to get to deal with our guilt and that's to go to Him.
[00:18:18] That's all the way through the Bible from the beginning with Adam and Eve, through the whole of the Old Testament, through the sacrificial system and then it comes into its fullness in Jesus Christ. Let me read from 1 John 1.
[00:18:35] It says, this is the message we have heard from him and declare to you, God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in a darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. And the blood of Jesus, His Son, purifies us from all sin.
[00:19:02] If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
[00:19:09] If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
[00:19:22] The way to deal with the guilt that we feel that we bear is to confess to God, to repent of his actions and seek his forgiveness.
[00:19:34] And do you know in that verse, the confession of sin, in it there is promise of forgiveness. It's not a wish, it's not a hope, it's not a maybe.
[00:19:49] It is a promise. It says if we confess, he will forgive.
[00:19:56] I don't know about you, but a lot today there's a lot of talk about the promises of God and how we should lay hold of them. We should claim the promises of God for our lives, about what he might do.
[00:20:08] But surely if there's any promise that we should hold on to, it's this one.
[00:20:15] That God's forgiveness is freely offered to us.
[00:20:20] It's without performances, without jumping through any hoops. It's without anything that we need to do apart from just to come to Him.
[00:20:30] It is the ultimate expression of God's love. Let me read just a little bit further in 1 John. Oh no, I haven't got it on the slide. Never mind. He says this is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin.
[00:21:01] We can know this forgiveness. This is the route to dealing with our guilt by coming to God in forgiveness. How?
[00:21:10] Through confession. It's one of the spiritual practices, the forgotten pathways that we're talking about. And I don't know about you, but the thought of confession has a lot of, I don't know, misunderstanding about it.
[00:21:25] I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is a little booth in a Catholic church.
[00:21:33] Don't know, maybe you've seen it on films where the priest goes in one side and someone else, the sinner, goes in the other side and the curtain's drawn so that there's no embarrassment, there's no looking at the priest and you say, forgive me, Father, for our sins. I mean, yeah, that's a lot of. There's a lot of confusion. I don't know what you think about what confession is. Don't know if you've experienced it at all with anyone else, but I think there's two parts of confession.
[00:22:03] The first is confessing to God, right?
[00:22:06] We should confess our sins to God, come before him and admit our sin, asking for his forgiveness. But there's another part which is to confess before someone else, admitting what you've done wrong and hearing them encouraging you by declaring God's forgiveness.
[00:22:25] Now, I first did this.
[00:22:30] Well, no, maybe I can't say first, but I first recently did this through the Steps course, if you don't know about it. It's a course that is set up to help people deal with negative behaviors, something that's, you know, they're trapped into. They can't find a way to deal with themselves. And it's set up to do that, to help people with it. It's been set up in the UK. It's been running for 10, 15 years. Started its run, has been run out of Christchurch, London. They've got a separate now for Steps Global and it's run all over the world, actually, in some 30, 40, no, 50 different charities and organizations that run it. We've run it here as River Church. It was probably Dartford's community church when they last run it.
[00:23:19] So just after Covid, I think.
[00:23:22] Yeah. But I know that a number of people in this church have run it on, have gone to courses online as well, and in the course of doing through, in the course of doing the course. It's too many courses, isn't it? In the process of doing the course, you get to a point of looking at what you've. Things you've done wrong, trying to face them. But you get to a point, there is a point at which you spend some time with the course leader just to confess sin and to say, look, these are the things that I've done wrong and get the opportunity for whoever's running the course just to help you, to encourage you through.
[00:24:04] And I don't know about you if you've ever done it, but the first time it was like, just weird.
[00:24:10] Have you ever done it? But it just felt weird. It just felt like, oh, am I saying the right things?
[00:24:17] You know, I'm confessing sin. I mean, this.
[00:24:20] Yeah, what's right? You know, how do you say that? Right? But, you know, am I saying the right things? Am I, you know, engaging this? Right. And things like that.
[00:24:29] But. And the thing is, you get into a thing of going, oh, is this person going to judge me about it? And forget that the whole thing is set up for someone to pronounce God's forgiveness over you.
[00:24:44] And for some, I know for some they're going through that is, you know, they feel that it's a very liberating process to hear someone else just encourage you by pronouncing God's forgiveness.
[00:25:01] It can be very liberating and very like someone else has heard and that someone else has declared God's forgiveness over me, and now I'm taking that in.
[00:25:13] I read just yesterday through a book that was working through someone talking about the whole practice of Christian confession. And let me just read this bit out to you. He said, Christian confession does not just require sympathy, it requires honesty.
[00:25:30] Private confessing to God alone can deny us a sense of forgiveness if we doubt our own honesty to God.
[00:25:39] And this is where fellow believers and friends can help us break what a guy called Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, calls the circle of self deception. Says we break out isolation when we confess our sins before other Christians. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are a means of grace that I cannot channel to myself, namely the physical presence of someone else who is not me.
[00:26:06] I cannot control or distract them the way I can do that myself.
[00:26:13] And when you confess to someone else, it's an opportunity for them to actually help you understand whether you're holding on to something that you shouldn't do, whether you have misplaced guilt, whether you have something that you're getting into a world of Self condemnation and to correct that in you, to help you work through that.
[00:26:35] And when you confess to them that you hear God's love and hear God's pronouncement of you are forgiven. I was reading through a book, R.C. sproul, who writes his own thing in it of going, you know, I went to my pastor and I confessed. And he said, well done, you are forgiven. And he says, yeah, but I don't feel.
[00:27:00] I don't feel forgiven.
[00:27:03] And it's like, yeah, but have you read 1 John 8 and 9?
[00:27:07] It says, you are forgiven.
[00:27:10] And we struggle with this feeling and processing the feeling, but it doesn't change the truth that we are forgiven.
[00:27:19] And confessing to someone else will help us with that.
[00:27:26] Confession to someone else actually isn't something that's mandated in the Bible.
[00:27:32] It's helpful, but it's not mandated.
[00:27:37] You know, if you're struggling with something like that, I would say that, hey, go and find someone that you can confess to.
[00:27:44] Doesn't need to be someone a leader, just needs to be someone who, you know, that you know is mature in the faith and that can do that and can work with you in it.
[00:27:57] But confession to God is essential.
[00:28:01] We really need to confess to God, and it should be in our regular practice, whether that's a daily thing that you do, maybe the end of the day or the beginning of the day for yesterday, maybe a weekly, maybe a monthly, something that you set aside that I go, right, I'm going to set aside. I'm going to think and review what I've done, and I'm going to confess to God because primarily it's a sin against Him.
[00:28:25] We can do that alone. And I'd encourage you to do that alone, but we can also do that together.
[00:28:32] Did you know that most churches around that, around the world do it together every week?
[00:28:39] And we're going to do that today. I'm going to lead us in a prayer that we're all going to pray out together, and we're going to take communion in a way that we can receive God's forgiveness through his atoning work upon the cross.
[00:28:57] So if the band would like to come back up and if everyone would like to stand, I'm going to put a prayer up on the screen and we're going to read it out together.
[00:29:16] And while we do, I want you to keep in mind the grace of God. Keep in mind that God, who so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
[00:29:33] And that if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin if we purify ourselves from all unrighteousness. So let us read through this prayer together.
[00:29:52] Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you and our neighbour in thought and word and deeds, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate thoughts, we are truly sorry and repent of all our sins for the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, who died for us. Forgive us all that is past and grant that we may serve you in newness of life to the glory of your name.
[00:30:27] Amen.
[00:30:28] And I'm going to read out what it says in the Anglican Book of Prayer. It says, almighty God, who forgives all who truly repent, have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sin, confirm and strengthen you in. In all goodness and keep you in life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord.
[00:30:57] And as the band play and help us, and as the stewards just lead us into taking communion, maybe you might pause and just want to confess something privately to God and just receive his forgiveness, receive his love and his compassion over you. And we've got plenty of time just to press into this.
[00:31:21] Maybe you might have a word that you want to share with the church. Maybe God's saying something to you that might be helpful. So let's just press into God right now and. Yeah. And receive his grace.
