Douglas Wilson “How to Lose Your Joy”

thank you all Let's uh give thanks to God gracious God and Father we thank you for your goodness to us we commit this time to you I pray your Holy Spirit would be encouraging and admonishing us as needed I pray father that you would instruct us from your word we pray in Jesus name amen so my topic the topic I've been assigned is how to lose your joy like we Le need lessons right well to come into the kingdom of God to be made a citizen of Heaven is an occasion of Joy the man who

finds The Treasure of the Kingdom goes out and sells everything in a spirit of Joy it says in Matthew 13:44 Faithful Servants are invited to enter into Joy Matthew 25:23 the Angels told the Shepherds that they brought Tidings of great joy Luke 2:10 Christ wants his followers to live according to his word so that his Joy might remain in us and that this Joy might be full John 1511 when the gospel came to Samaria there was great joy in that City we are told in Acts 88 the kingdom of God is among other things joy

in the Holy Ghost Romans 14:17 Joy is supposed to be part of our Baseline Norm Joy is to be part of our Baseline Norm now here's the challenge we live in a fallen world we live in a world that wants to get in the way of that we get we live in a world where sin as Chesterton says the devil fell downhill uh we sin by sinning downhill uh what what could be done with joy well anything valuable as Joy most certainly is is anything valuable is going to be counterfeited and we can see this

in a current presidential campaign which is supposed to be a campaign of Joy which It Isn't So nobody nobody uh sets up up an operation in their basement to counterfeit Brown shopping bags with a little Safeway logo I worked for days on this um nobody counterfeits Brown shopping because they're not that valuable they do counterfeit uh Federal Reserve notes because you can get something valuable in exchange for them they counterfeit uh so anything valuable is going to have a knockoff anything valuable is going to have counterfeits but the kingdom of God is a kingdom of

the real thing Joy has been brought to this world the angels announc to the shepherd this these are Tidings of great joy this should be the Baseline for for us so then that being the case why are so many professing Christians so miserable if this is all about Joy if the gospel is the good news the Glad Tidings the great Proclamation if that's what the gospel is why are the people who are characterized why are the people who have accepted that gospel characterized by misery well some of it is the result of poor teaching found

in pietistic moralism which teaches Christians that a long face is somehow an ethical disinfectant you're if you're mumbling along you must be pure this is an attitude that you see on display in Matthew 6:16 where Jesus rebukes those who want to be seen as fasting uh they disfigure their faces they they go around uh glum because they want people to see that they're fasting that is a pietistic and legalistic moralism then there's the more understandable mistake that thinks that we are allowed to be unhappy when we are mistreated or persecuted for the faith we were

minding our own business we were just wanting to be good Christian people all I want to do is provide for my family all I want to do is bring up normal kids is that so B is that so wrong well yes in this era that is an outrage and you might find yourself mistreated or persecuted over that but the Lord directly contradicts this excuse he says in Matthew 5 11 and 12 blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake rejoice

and be exceeding glad excuse me rejoice and be exceeding glad for is your reward in heaven for so for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you so Jesus says expressly that when you are reviled when you are persecuted when people tell all kinds of lies about you and their lies they testify evil against you falsely he says in that day rejoice and be exceeding glad that is an occasion of Joy your salvation from sin is an occasion of joy and being reviled because you've been saved from sin is another occasion for Joy so

Jesus Takes that excuse away from us so how is it then that Christians lose their Joy where does it go why is this happening the answer is that when when we sin God spanks us that's the answer when we sin God spanks us us and one of the ways he spanks us is by taking away our joy he says in effect I'm not going to let you have that sin in your life and the joy I give you in your life at the same time those two things are inconsistent you can't hang on to your

sin of this particular nature and the joy that my spirit has provided you those two things cannot be held together now many uh when David repents of his great sin with bash Sheba and the sin of uh taking uh her husband out he he prays restore unto me the joy of thy salvation it was not possible for David to have the joy of his salvation and that sin clung to at the same time that was not possible now some people think that there in Psalm 51 he is uh when he says take not thy Holy

Spirit from me they think he's praying that he uh not lose his salvation I don't think he's praying that at all um because he says restore un to me the joy of thy salvation so he he doesn't want his salvation back he wants the joy of Salvation back so what does it mean when he says take not your Holy Spirit from me well he saw he knew that this the King right before him King Saul had sended away the blessing of God the Holy Spirit had come upon Saul equipping him to Be an Effective ruler

the dynasty that Saul had was held together by the spirit of God and then when Saul sinned against uh Samuel's instructions what he did was he sended away the anointing he sended away the anointing and his whole uh his whole Administration cratered everything started to come apart and David knew that he had sinned just as egregiously as Saul had so I think David is praying that God not take his holy spirit equipping him to rule don't take your holy spirit away from me in that sense and restore unto me the joy of thy salvation so

God God disciplines us he spanks us when we are sinning when we're clinging to known sin we're not letting go of a particular sin we can't have that sin in our hand and the joy of the Lord in the other hand you can't have those two things together if I could illustrate this this is another illustration of how you don't lose your salvation when when I was a little kid and and we were disciplined by my dad the uh uh that usually happened in the basement all right so that was the place we were assigned

to go so Dad would take us down to the basement and there'd be an opportunity for the defense which was generally pretty thin the the the attorney was not on top of his game at all and then he would discipline us spank us pray with us and then he would say something like as far as we're concerned everything is completely Square everything is restored nothing else has to be done you are welcome to rejoin us at the dinner table as soon as you're prepared to be pleasant and so you'd sit down there in the basement

listening to the Happy clink of silverware upstairs people enjoying themselves at the table and you think why am I down here in the basement it its aure Fades after a time after a time and so as soon as you're prepared to accept the The Joy a return to Joy you were absolutely welcome now before that happened before um that repentant turn happened and I'm sitting down there in the basement was I a Wilson yeah that's why I was in the basement right that's why uh my dad didn't spank the neighbor kids May felt like it

sometimes but he he never never did and so he spanks his own kids and his own kid is in the basement still being a Wilson unhappy because he's a Wilson when you sin and God spanks you that's because you're a Christian that's that's not an argument that says you're not a Christian that's an argument that says you are which we'll see in uh Hebrews in just a moment this is what David says in Psalm 32 when I kept silence my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long for day and night thy hand

was Heavy upon me my moisture is turned into the drought of Summer Sila Psalm 323 and4 so as long as David did not acknowledge his fault as long as he was not acknowledging his sin and it's apparent from The Narrative that he kept silent for any number of months right he kept silence for a long time Nathan the prophet came and rebuked him he received the rebuke which incidentally Nathan did not know he was going to do Nathan is clearly a man of Courage why because David had already had one man killed to cover this

up Nathan Nathan had no reason to believe that there wouldn't be a second one so Nathan comes and rebukes him David receives the rebuke and as soon as he receives the rebuke the discipline is lifted he's repentant his Joy is restored that's what he asks for and that's what is restored to him when I kept silence my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long and then in Hebrews 125 and6 it says and ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children my son despise not thou the chastening of the

Lord nor faint when thou art rebuked of him for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth God spanks his children and God does not spank his children irrationally he does not spank his children capriciously he doesn't fly off the handle and spank his children for no reason when he spanks his children it's for a reason and the that reason is disciplinary wanting us to learn how to let go of sin how to repent of sin how to be done with the sin God God disciplines his own and this should

be an encouragement to us God disciplines his own and this should be an encouragement to Us return to your joy so how do you do this how do you return to your joy if we've been prodigal if we've been prodal Sons prodical daughters actually prodigal or just in our hearts how do we rise up to return to the father you're sitting there staring at the pig food and the pig food starting to look good and you think this is no good how how do you rise up how do you inact that Parable how do you

rise up to to return to your father remember how the prodical son returned how he spoke when he returned keep in mind keep that in mind always in mind he came home and confessed he came home and confessed his fault he came home and confessed what he had done so when a man confesses he's doing something like this a man who confesses his sins is doing this in prayer to God he names the sin that he has committed and he takes care to use the same name that the Bible uses he names the sin and

he uses the same name he does this because he's repentant and because he's turned away from that sin rejecting it entirely he thanks God for his promised forgiveness other in other words please keep in mind you don't have to beg for God's forgiveness he's promised it you don't have to beseech him as though he might not you what you do is you simply confess your sin and thank him for the Forgiveness that's already promised so he thanks God for his promised forgiveness and he resolves by God's grace to make restitution where restitution is appropriate in

other words if the sin concerned was robbing banks then you have some business to do with the banks not just with God restitution is necessary with sins like lying theft open bitterness or sexual infidelity open bitter I say I I should say something about open bitterness there let's say you've you've had a drift in apart a a a close relationship that you had got strained and you drifted apart and let's say your friend came to you three times over six months and said is anything wrong did I do anything is it is everything all right

between us and he yeah it's all right it's okay yeah and you put brushed them off um if they came to you three times asking is anything wrong and the problem was you were angry with them you were bitter against them when you get it right with God you need to go to them and tell them what the problem was because they knew that there was a problem and they asked you about it and you weren't forthcoming but let's say you have an attitude problem towards someone and you get it right after three months and

then you call them up and say I wanted to seek your forgiveness for hating you for the last three months and they had no idea you're not helping you're making things worse so don't don't take the the imperative to confess your sin as an invitation to finally vent about what it was they did right because you're going to go say I'm sorry for being so bitter over what you said that time and then you wait for them to say well I'm sorry too and then they don't and then you go home and it's 10 times

worse so that's where restitution is necessary there a couple of passages that address this imperative directly 1 John 1:9 is one of them if we confess our sins he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness now notice this if we confess our sins it doesn't say he's merciful and tender to forgive us our sins and this is why the glory of the Cross enters into this if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins our forgiveness rests upon the justice of God

it rests upon the faithfulness of God who has promised to do this thing so if we confess our sins he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness he you you you're cleaning house and what's happening is you're confessing sin and you say I'm not sure I'm going to get them all well that's all right he's faithful and just to forgive the sins that you're bringing to him and he's going to cleanse you from all unrighteousness then in Proverbs 28:13 it says he that coverthe that coverthe and forsaketh

them Shall Have Mercy if you cover your sins you won't prosper and who so confesseth and forsaketh them Shall Have Mercy now all of our sins need to be covered but it's either going to be covered by the blood of Christ which efficaciously covers them or or we're going to try to cover them by our own shifts and evasions which doesn't work that's and because it doesn't work if you're covering your sins that way you do not Prosper so we have to consider what confession of sin is not and what it is until we think

properly about this we are going to stumble and instead of receiving help from our confession we will get ourselves into a horrible mess confession of sins is not meritorious you're not putting God in your debt by confessing sin it's not meritorious to confess sin as a way of putting God in your debt is not dealing with sin it is committing another sin the context of all confession must be the free Grace of justification God Saves you God Justified you at the moment of your conversion by your your faith in him plus nothing else when you

trusted in him all all the Perfections of Jesus Christ were imputed to you and that's what made you a member of his household you're Justified you're forgiven you're cleansed everything is put right and that's why you've been adopted you've been adopted into his family and when he when he spanks you over a particular sin you lost your temper that day and you're miserable for the rest of the day because you're being spanked you're being spanked because you're a member of his household and you're a member of his household because he gave you that free free

gift so everything has to be done in light of free justification in light of free Grace confession of sin is simply agreement it is simply agreement the word for confess in 1 John 1:9 is hamal if we confess our sins hamal which means that we are to agree with God about our sin Hama means uh same like homosexual same sex Hama is the same and Lego is the verb to speak so homo is to speak the same to say the same thing to acknowledge God calls it XYZ and so you call it XYZ he doesn't

call it XYZ and you you substitute ABC adultery for example is adultery and not an inappropriate relationship lying is lying and not creative diplomacy you were not encouraging your husband to do better but rather you were disrespecting and reviling him right call it what it is uh you do not want dishonesty to creep into your confession of sin because that's simply something else that needs to be confessed now there are three motives that I want to outline that should be sufficient to encourage us to do what we need to do in this regard and then

after I outline these three motives for confession I want to spend a few minutes on talking about what this talk is doing at this conference jovial Warrior why why am I talking about this so three motives for confession confession is required by God God requires Believers to confess their sins in an ongoing way the texts cited earlier make the point very plain to obey him in any way glorifies him and this kind of obedience is no ception so if God says I want my people to confess their sins to obey and confess your sins is

a way of obeying him in a way that glorifies him he receives Glory when his people confess their sins i' uh i' I know of situations where someone is cleaning house spiritually speaking they had a problem with shoplifting and then when they get right with God they start making restitution and and they go to shops and they say you know seven years ago when I was a student here I took some stuff from your store here's the amount of I've estimated how much it was and I've added 20% like scripture says and I'd like to

make restitution and the owner of the store the manager of the store looks at the check and looks at you looks at the check and says what religion is this now think think about that what religion is this who does this who does this well Christians do this so confession is required by God and God gets Glory I've been privileged to work with people who've had to make restitution to shops and whatever and um and invariably overwhelmingly the testimony that comes out of that is good it's a good exchange it's a very humbling exchange it

can be embarrassing but it is a it has a good impact second confession protects loved ones confession protects loved ones because aen hid his sin the nation of Israel was defeated in battle and his family was eventually executed so achen sinned all of Israel had lost at the first battle of AI and then Akin's entire family was executed we never sin in isolation however hidden we may believe the sin to be we never sin in isolation we are not simply individuals but as one scholar put it we are inter dividuals we are all connected we're

not so many isolated rocks like pebbles in a driveway rocks or different marbles we're not detached that way we are distinct from one another but we're distinct from one another the way leaves on a tree are distinct from one another we're all connected and your family is is connected to where your your spiritual health uh affects your family you cannot be carrying a 50 lb backpack around an invisible 50 lb backpack around all the time and not have it affect your family it's just not possible so confession protects your loved ones honesty before God protects

your loved ones and then third confession restores your soul confession restores your soul it makes the spanking stop God disciplines you when you are living with unconfessed sin we can see this in Hebrews 12:6 we can see it in in Psalm 32:4 because this is disciplinary and not punitive the sooner you learn the lesson and confess the better it will be for you there's a difference between discipline and Punishment when a murderer is caught by the authorities and he is sentenced to die and the magistrate the governor refuses to sign a pardon and that murderer

is executed the point is not to make him better it is not disciplinary now it might as a matter of his uh might as a matter of his uh biography make him better he might reflect on his life he might call for the chaplain he might get things right with God before he's executed but that's not the point of the execution the point of the execution is Justice the point of the execution is simply punishment retri retributive punishment parents do not do that with their children it's it's not to be retributive punishment it is disciplinary

and the the whole point of discipline is to restore relationship and what do you do when you're disciplining you do what it takes to restore the relationship so what happens is God disciplines you he chastises you to get you to let go of the thing that you're hanging on to and when you let go of it everything is restored everything when you let go of it because it's not punitive he's he's not going to say well that was a really bad Sin so I'm going to make you suffer even though you've repented I'm going to

make you suffer for three more weeks that that would be to deny the efficacy of Christ's death on the cross the forgiveness was purchased by Christ on the cross the discipline is administered by the Holy Spirit to get you to understand that these two frames of Mind are fundamentally inconsistent so the sooner you learn the lesson and confess the better the better it will be for you moreover confession establishes your soul it doesn't just restore your soul to the state it was before it establishes your soul the difference between your life and the life of

your friends who are walking with God is not that you sin and they don't it's not that you sin and they don't the difference is found in the fact that they pick up after themselves they confess their sin they sinned just like you did but then they went and put it right with God right away so one of this is one of the things I go over in my uh pre-marriage counseling just routinely talking to young couples who are still star-eyed everything's going great thus far but I tell them imagine two households two homes side

by side five kids in each household the husbands work at the same company the wives are best friends they drive the same kind of minivan they um they go to the same church everything's the same except that one house is blitzed just uh chaotic and the other house is immaculate right one house is blitzed the other is immaculate in fact the blitz house they're thinking of moving to Switzerland and starting a Ministry called debris some of you will be two in the morning hey hey so the blit there's a there's a house that's just chaotic

and blitzed then you have this other house there's a Velvet Rope across the living room and it looks like Thomas Jefferson was born in there and everything everything's so squared away well the difference between the two homes is not how many things get dirty it's not the same number of t-shirts are put on in the morning in both houses the same number of breakfast bowls are used in both houses the same number of shoes are kicked off or not at the door in both houses things get dirty at roughly the same rate but in one

house they pick up immediately they keep short accounts they don't let things accumulate they don't let it accumulate and they keep so they keep short accounts in the other house they use the breakfast bowl push it toward the center of the table two days later someone moves it to the counter a couple of days later they shove it toward the sink then they put it on top of the pile of dishes in the sink and think I'll get to this on Saturday morning and then something comes up Saturday morning and just clutter clutter clutter and

I tell the young uh uh the young couples 5 years from this date your marriage is one of those two houses your marriage is one of those two houses you will either pick up after yourself you will confess your sins or you won't confess your sins if you don't confess your sin it accumulates and this is not just a metaphor for the husband wife relationship it's also a metaphor for your relationship with God so this is why we should confess our sins let me spend a few minutes talking about why I'm talking about this at

a conference on culture war and being a jovial Warrior well everybody who believes in God everybody who believes that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl is in the war you're are this is the the famous saying is you may not may not be interested in war but war is interested in you if you uh we're getting to the point where if you believe that grass is green and two and two make four you are enlisted in the war you are going you're going to be attacked you are under assault so

the war part the Warrior part is a fixed given it was not uh launched by you you didn't start it but you are involved in it if you still have any kind of Norm normal outlook on life you are a warrior but how can you be a joal Warrior when there are so many things arrayed against us how can you be a jovial Warrior when it looks so bad out there well remember the earlier point when people revile you and say all manner of things against you we have a general we have a father in

Heaven who has absolutely everything in human history under his control and we are his children and that means he assigns to us our uniform our duties our station and so we trust him and so when we trust him we should conduct ourselves according to his word now you're if you just go to a church and believe in God and Believe In traditional marriage you're a warrior how can you be a jovial Warrior well you can't be if you're not confessing your sins you cannot be a jovial Warrior if you're not confessing your sins if you're

not keeping short accounts with God it's simply not going to happen and so that's the point of this we want uh if you have if you're trying to go through go through a security checkpoint with something on your conscience you know you're I don't know 10 pounds of cocaine in your luggage and you're and you're running the luggage through the thing and you're standing there talking to the officer and your left eye starts to twitch why is your left eye twitching because you're trying to sneak you're trying to have it both ways you're you're trying

to get something by him but you've got something on your conscience you've got something to hide they they basically they've got you they've got you how many ostensibly conservative Statesmen politicians public uh public functionaries standing for Traditional Values know that if they push it too far if they get too close to taking the capital city of the enemy that the National Security Administration or the FBI or the CIA or somebody is going to roll out their browser history well they're in the they're a conservative Warrior standing there in the security line with their left eye

twitching they've got something to hide if if you have an army of believers who have a clean conscience if there were thousands of Christians with a clean conscience they were liberated and forgiven and cleansed there's no touching them there's no touching them but if we are all trying to traffic with the world in our entertainment standards or have we still have our kids in the government schools or we we still are trying to do the splits if we're doing that there's there will be things in our lives in our browser history in in our conscience

that that will simply uh render us ineffective in any kind of up the- middle challenge so that's why I'm talking about this I'm talking about this because you you cannot run the race it says in Hebrews that we are to set aside the the sin and every weight that so easily entangles it's not just sin that ties you up it's also weight you're trying to you're trying to run Olympic times in track and field with that 50 PB backpack on your back get rid of it get rid of the weight get rid of the sin

get rid of of the Rope around around your feet be done with it and the way you and you say well I don't know it's so complicated no it's not complicated if we confess our sins he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins so that is why that's that's why this talk is here in this conference what might we do to keep from doing this this this is a straight up the middle challenge so what do we do to evade accepting it we also seek out motives for not confessing we do not want the

blow to our pride that confession of sin will bring and while it's clearly the right thing to do it's still hard to swallow and so we come up with many reasons for not swallowing first we trivial we trivialize the sin we say that the sin is too small to confess we do not want to annoy god with our petty problems but if it's big enough to mess you up it's big enough to bring to God if it's big enough to disrupt your fellowship with your wife it's big enough to bring to God if it's big

enough to interfere with your fellowship with your kids it's big enough to bring to God so there's no such thing as a trivial sin in that sense so don't trivialize it second we surrender to the sin we say that the sin is too big to confess we do this when we say that the sin is more powerful than God is and we give up all attempts to be free from it this is the counsel of despair but in Isaiah 1:18 it says God can deal with the most Crimson of sins how bad was the Apostle

Paul how bad was Saul of Tarsus he was pretty bad he calls himself an insolent man and a blasphemer he used to persecute the church he would try to get Christians to blaspheme when Christians were put to death he voted against them as he as he says indicating he was a member of the Sanhedrin so Paul was a vicious man a Blasphemous man an insolent man and God says just the man to write the majority of the New Testament there's no sin that's too big for God to deal with so don't surrender to the sin

don't say it's too big another approach is to justify the sin we do this when we say that what we did was really right the adulterous wipes her mouth and says I've done no wrong Proverbs 30:20 but if you don't like how the progressives decorate sodomy with a rainbow flag then why do you hang your own versions of revisionist flags all over your heart you think you're being firm but you're being angry and so forth you you rename the sin that's what the world does they the um sodomy is now a pride issue and they'll

that you know sexual dysphoria all these things they rename them they rename them well the reason the world is doing that is because the church is doing that in a different area on a smaller scale and it's actually not a smaller scale another thing we might do is excuse the sin oh incidentally on justifying the sin if you do something and you spend the rest of the day muttering to yourself that was really right it was really okay what I did there it was really right that's an indicator to you that it was really wrong

when someone asks you a question and you tell them the truth do you spend the rest of the day explaining to yourself how that was really right if it's really really right you don't worry about it you tell the truth and move on it's when you tell tell a lie that you tell yourself all day it was really right or we might excuse the sin we acknowledg that our Behavior was wrong but there were but we say there were extenuating circumstances Saul does this when Samuel did not arrive on time and the men were deserting

the Army 1 Samuel 13:12 uh well I did this is why I did what I did you were you were late or we say yes but she started it or true but everything happened so fast or I understand but all men struggle with this you you name the sin and then you get to the butt and then when you say butt all the Forgiveness goes out the window another device is to blur the sin we blur the sin we do this through the use of vague terms we want forgiveness for anything we might have done

we can use the passive voice As We Lay as now I lay me down to sleep and I pray in the passive voice God mistakes were made Let The Healing begin I want to drift off unburdened by what has [Music] [Laughter] been everything is left a bit undefined or we can reassign responsibility for the sin this is the tried andrue method of passing the buck again we see the example of Adam and Eve both Adam and Eve do this the woman you gave me the woman you gave me the serpent beguiled me Adam says in

effect that three were involved in the entire tragic Affair God the woman and the Man bad things have certainly happened but it was all Downstream from God giving the woman and the woman giving the fruit Adam appeared to think that out of the three only one of them was truly in the clear luckily that turned out to be him I was doing fine I was being obedient until you came around offering me women some just ignore the sin we hope that the problem will just disappear if we ignore it long enough but if time could

Aras sin then Jesus didn't have to die if the mere passage of time were sufficient then why the blood procrastination is always an option we can put off dealing with the sin we know that the sin will have to be dealt with sometime and so we reason why not tomorrow but the Bible says that if we hear his voice today we should not Harden our hearts that's Hebrews 4:7 if if you hear his voice today and that incidentally means if there's something about this talk that's piercing your heart now then that means you must deal

with it you can't kick it down the road till Sunday you can't you can't deal with it yet another device is to hide the sin Adam and Eve sought to do this in the garden when they heard the Lord approaching in Genesis 3:8 our attempts to hide from God are make about the same amount of sense the omniscient creator of all things is approaching quick hide in the bush you've seen a you've seen a two-year-old's first fora and the hide-and seek right sitting in the middle of the living room floor doing this okay kids go

hide you know God all God knows all of it all the way down to the bottom already when pressed we sometimes embrace the sin this is simply rebellion and Defiance we say that we will not confess you'll say something like I know it's the right thing to do but I'm not going to do it whether or not it's right or wrong and this is a common response with sins like anger bit bitterness and pride anger bitterness and pride someone when if you tell a lie every time you think about the situation you think about your

lie but if someone lies about you and sprads especially if they're a former friend they lie about you and they spread it all over time town every time you think of the situation you don't think of your bitterness you think of their lie and so whenever it comes up you your attention immediately goes to them and then you but you can confess their sin all day long and your joy doesn't return because their sin is their sin your sin is your sin and someone has rightly said that bitterness is like eating a box of rat

poison and then waiting for the rat to die doesn't work so don't embrace the sin some people theologize the sin some people theologize the sin they do this when they have doctrinal or theological reasons for their refusal to confess I'm Justified so I don't need to well this is part of sanctification not justification you still need to or the corporate confession at church is adequate and that allows me to continue to use the passive voice um no don't theologize the sin and then last some decide to buy the sin this happens when restitution is required

and they see this as whatever the restitution is they see it as too high a cost to pay but of course true rest ution is not a cost at all because the cost of the sin was entirely paid by Christ the price of the The Ransom price was paid by him all of this is simply uh details that deal with your fellowship with God it's part of your sanctification not part of your justification and so in response in conclusion in response to all of the above we should all remember that the grace of God the

grace of God never means that we don't have to to confess our sins it means that we get to confess our sins this is a privilege confessing your sins is a privilege learning how to pick up after yourself is a privilege you have the privilege of living in a clean house you have the privilege of not tripping over things everywhere every everywhere you try to go this is a gift from God Walking with God is a gift from God confessing your sins it's like God saying your house is pretty cluttered let me give you a

bunch of cleaning supplies and vacuum cleaner and let me give you all these things and here let me teach you how to use them and if we say no no no I don't want to be under the burden of these things well the burden you're currently carrying is far greater far weightier far heavier far more miserable than the burden of picking up the the discipline of picking up is a get to not a got to and the the misery of living under unconfessed sin is a got to not a get to and so all of

this is the grace of God and he receives every son every daughter who turns to him in honest confession let's thank the Lord father we are very grateful for your goodness to us we thank you for your word we thank you for your promises we thank you for the gospel and we thank you in jesus' name amen amen