The Tough Forgive

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Worship Service for October 3, 2021

WELCOME

Good day, welcome, and thanks for joining CrossPointe Community Church’s online Word worship presentation. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May They bless you this day as a result of your choosing to worship them.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Randy will return from a few days in Florida this Wednesday and will be teaching Disciple Bible Study Thursday evening.

Today, we are highly privileged as we will be celebrating the sacrament of Holy Communion. Anyone here whose desire is to live in faith and harmony with the Lord Jesus Christ is welcome to receive the sacrament.

CALL TO WORSHIP

All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ. This is what He wanted to do, and it gave Him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace He has poured out on us who belong to His dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that He purchased our freedom with the blood of His Son and forgave our sins.
Ephesians 1:3-7

OPENING WORSHIP SONGS

Great is Thy Faithfulness

Chisholm, Thomas O./Runyan, William M.

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father,
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not;
As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above;
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Jesus Your Name

Chapman, Morris/Cloninger, Claire

Jesus, Your name is power.
Jesus, Your name is might.
Jesus, Your name will break ev’ry stronghold.
Jesus, Your name is life.
Jesus, Your name is healing.
Jesus, Your name gives sight.
Jesus, Your name will free ev’ry captive.
Jesus, Your name is life.
Jesus, Your name is holy.
Jesus, Your name brings light.
Jesus, Your name above ev’ry other.
Jesus, Your name is life.
Jesus, Your name is life.
Jesus, Your name is life.
©1990 Maranatha Praise, Inc./Word Music,Inc. (a div. of Word Music Group, Inc.)
CCLI License No. 1843349

OPENING PRAYER

OFFERING

If you would like to send your offering through the mail, our mailing address is

P O Box 126
Chippewa Lake, OH 44215

I want to thank you for your faithfulness in worshiping and honoring God in this tangible way.

As we respond to God’s call upon our lives to give, let us be reminded of what Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians:

Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
II Corinthians 9:6-7

OFFERING/PRAYER SONG

My Peace

Routledge, Keith

My peace I give unto you.
It’s a peace that the world cannot give.
It’s a peace that the world cannot understand.
Peace to know, peace to live.
My peace I give unto you.
My love I give unto you.
It’s a love that the world cannot give.
It’s a love that the world cannot understand.
Love to know, love to live.
My love I give unto you.
©1975, 1980 and this arrangement ©1997 Kenwood Music.
Admin. by Maranatha! Music
CCLI License No. 1843349

MORNING PRAYER

Lord Jesus, we thank You for Your great faithfulness in fulfilling Your promise to pardon our sins. Yours is the only name under heaven by which we might be saved. We thank you for igniting in our very souls the love of Your dear name which is Holy and healing; light and life. Open our hearts, O Lord, to receive what You offer this day for the sake of Christ, amen.

Holy God, bless, we pray, this gathering of your people that we may grow and flourish in your love and grace for the purpose to which you have called us.

May we also be open to your voice in our lives that we may see with new eyes, and hear with new ears, the direction you will have us to go. We come before you in prayer, lifting to you the joys and concerns, the hopes and dreams of our lives.

Hear our prayers for those whose lives have touched us; those who are in pain (silent prayer), those who are ill (silent prayer), those who grieve (silent prayer). May we touch their lives not only through our prayers but through our lives and actions as well.

Guide us, bless us, uplift us, and hold us, for we are your children called to Your purpose in Your world. Open our hearts to Your Holy Word that we might be made whole. Hear our prayers, those spoken and those hidden in our hearts, we pray in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen.

SCRIPTURE

“The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord.
“But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know Me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.”
Jeremiah 31:31-34

When the time came, Jesus and the apostles sat down together at the table. Jesus said, “I have been very eager to eat this Passover meal with you before my suffering begins. For I tell you now that I won’t eat this meal again until its meaning is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.”
Then He took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. Then He said, “Take this and share it among yourselves. For I will not drink wine again until the Kingdom of God has come.”
He took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then He broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
After supper he took another cup of wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you.
Luke 22:14-20

And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow Him. Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ. For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body. So you also are complete through your union with Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority.
When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature. For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with Him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for He forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross.
Colossians 2:6-14

MESSAGE

The Tough Forgive

Randy K’Meyer

One aspect of forgiveness we haven’t touched on yet in this short series on forgiveness is forgiving ourselves.

I have a hunch there are many among us who have been living with guilt for the way we hurt others, and/or in many cases the way we hurt ourselves by making poor choices that are not in keeping with God’s will for our lives.

And the irony is that many of us make matters worse by hanging on to the guilt of what we have done because we feel like by languishing in guilt, we are somehow making what we have done wrong, right. Yes, there are many Christians who can justify forgiving others, yet find no justification for forgiving themselves, because we believe instead that there is a price, some form of life-long penance, that we must pay. Carrying a load of guilt around and/or exacting penance will not change the past, it will only cause us emotional pain.

Many people have the tendency to punish themselves by replaying their sins over and over.

James Garfield was a lay preacher and principal of Hiram College before in l880, he was elected president of the United States, But after only six months in office, he was shot in the back with a revolver. He never lost consciousness.

At the hospital, the doctor probed the wound with his little finger to seek the bullet. He couldn’t find it. They took Garfield back to Washington, D.C. Teams of doctors tried to locate the bullet, probing the wound over and over. In desperation, they asked Alexander Graham Bell to see if he could locate the Bullet and he too failed. The president hung on through July, through August, but in September he finally died—not from the wound, but from infection. The repeated probing, which the physicians thought would help the man, eventually killed him.

So it is with people who dwell too long on their sin and refuse to release it to God. ¹

Carrying guilt and/or exacting penance will not damage us, but quite often can inflict emotional pain on others.

In his book, Dealing With Damaged Emotions, David Seamands writes about a young minister who once came to see him. He was having a lot of problems getting along with other people, especially his wife and family. Seamands recalls:

I had already talked privately with his wife; she was a fine person, attractive, warm, affectionate, loving; and totally supported him in his ministry. But he was continually criticizing her, scapegoating her. Everything she did was wrong. He was sarcastic and demanding, and withdrew from her advances, rejecting her love and affection. Slowly but surely it began to dawn on him; he was destroying their marriage. Then he realized that in his weekend pastorate he was hurting people through sermons which were excessively harsh and judgmental. Finally in desperation, he came to see me. At the beginning of our interview, he met trouble like a real man; he blamed it on his wife! But after a while, when he became honest, the painful root of the matter came to light. While he was in the armed forces in Korea, he had spent two weeks of R & R in Japan. During that leave, walking the streets of Tokyo, feeling empty, lonely and terribly homesick, he fell into temptation and went three or four times to a prostitute. He had never been able to forgive himself. He had sought God’s forgiveness and with his head, believed he had it. But the guilt still plagued him and he hated himself. Every time he looked in the mirror, he couldn’t stand what he was seeing. He had never shared this with anyone, and the burden was becoming intolerable. When he had returned home to marry his fiancée, who had faithfully waited on him all those years, his emotional conflicts increased because he could still not accept complete forgiveness. He couldn’t forgive himself for what he had done to himself and to her; so he couldn’t accept her freely offered affection and love. He felt he had no right to be happy. As A. W. Tozer put it, the young minister was living in ‘the perpetual penance of regret.’ ²

There comes a time when we need to be able to forgive ourselves and then get on with life. I pray that time is now. For being able to forgive ourselves will change the direction of our and others lives for the better.

How can we forgive ourselves?

First, recognize the problem. I have not forgiven myself so I am in bondage.

Second, we need to be honest with ourselves. We need to own our wrongdoing before we can forgive it. Remember last Sunday, we said before we can forgive another person we must blame that other person. In this case, we need to blame ourselves.

(By the way, if we are in a situation where we continually mess up and we can’t stop, then perhaps it is time to get some help. That’s what our Friday night group is all about. It exists to help us search our souls, to get honest with God and ourselves to admit we have a problem controlling some area of our lives, to find forgiveness and throw off the shackles that bind us.)

Third, it can be very helpful to write down all of the things that we have done wrong. By the way, this works much better when we actually write with pen and paper, rather than word processing.

Fourth, and most importantly, accept the forgiveness God in Christ provides.

One of the most remarkable promises in the Old Testament is found in Jeremiah 31:31-34, which ends with the phrase: “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

The forgetting of our sins by our Creator will begin, Jeremiah tells us, when God cuts a New Covenant with His children. And Jesus said, “This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). The forgiving and the forgetting of our sins was offered to us through the blood of Christ.

You see someone has to pay for our wrongdoing. Amazingly, God offers us a choice. We can choose to pay with our very lives, or we can choose to have Jesus pay that price with His life.

“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians (5:21).

Fifth, we need to reaffirm our trust in the scriptures.

As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.
Psalms 103:12

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1

It was for freedom that Christ set us free.
Galatians 5:1

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
II Corinthians 5:17

Sixth, we simply must pray. Here is a sample prayer you can use as a guide.

Dear Heavenly Father, I confess there is nothing to gain by holding myself in unforgiveness and there is everything to gain by forgiving myself and beginning the process of healing. So, Lord Jesus on the basis of your word, by an act of faith, I here and now forgive myself because you have already forgiven me. I accept my forgiveness and choose to be free from all that I have held against myself. Thank you for loving me and for Your grace to move forward with You. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Lastly, as an act of faith, we destroy (burn or shred) the list we made.

Then listen as Jesus sings to you:

My peace I give unto you, it’s a peace that the world cannot give
It’s a peace that the world cannot understand,
Peace to know, peace to live My peace I give unto you.

When we are convinced that God has pardoned our sins, we have a “peace that endureth.”

Author Bernie Siegel tells of Ed, a nurse at a nursing home, who took special care of a woman who hadn’t walked for six years. She often asked him about God and death, and finally one night, she asked if he was certain that God can forgive everything. He reminded her that God already knows what we’ve done wrong and still, Edward told her, He forgives us. Then she sighed and confessed, “When I was a young woman, I stole my parents’ silver and sold it so I would have enough money to get married. I’ve never told anyone and no one ever found out. Are you convinced God can forgive me of that?”
“Yes,” Edward replied, “God will forgive you.”

When Edward arrived at work the next morning, he was told to see the administrator, who asked what he had told the woman the night before. “As usual,” Edward explained, “we talked about God and forgiveness. Why?” “At 3:00 A.M. the woman came out of her room and, with no help, walked the entire length of the nursing home, put her Bible and her teeth on the nurse’s desk, and said, ‘I don’t need these anymore.’ Then she turned, walked back to her room, laid down, and died in peace.” ³

I know it’s hard; as we have been recognizing from the beginning, forgiveness isn’t easy. But when Christ is in our lives God promises to give us the power to forgive; even ourselves.

Someone once said, “We are most like beasts when we kill, we are most like men when we judge and we are most like God when we forgive.”

And that includes forgiving ourselves.

CLOSING PRAYER

[I encourage you to pray as you feel led by the Spirit of God].

THE SACRAMENT OF HOLY COMMUNION

COMMUNION AFFIRMATION OF FAITH

Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.
Isaiah 1:18

PRE-COMMUNION PRAYER

Lord Jesus, what a privilege to be able to come before Your throne of grace and partake of this precious sacrament, in remembrance of Your atoning sacrifice on the cross of Calvary.

We confess that we do not always live our lives in accord with Your will. And we humbly ask that You would hear us as we confess our shortcomings to You now.

COMMUNION SONG

I Need You

Founds, Rick

Lord, look upon my need;
I need You, I need You.
Lord, have mercy now on me;
Forgive me, O Lord, forgive me
And I will be clean.
Lord, look upon my need;
I need You, I need You.
Lord, have mercy now on me;
Forgive me, O Lord, forgive me
And I will be clean.
O, Lord, You are familiar with my ways;
There is nothing hid from You.
O Lord,You know the number of my days;
I want to live my life for You.
Lord, have mercy now on me;
Forgive me, O Lord, forgive me
And I will be clean.
©1989 Maranatha Praise, Inc.
CCLI License No. 1843349

RECEIVE THE SACRAMENT

“The body of Christ, given for you.”

“The blood of Christ, shed for you.”

POST-COMMUNION PRAYER

Gracious God, we thank you that in this sacrament You assure us of your goodness and love. Help us to grow in love and obedience, that we may serve You in the world and finally be brought to that table where all Your saints feast with you forever. Father, we offer ourselves to You as a living sacrifice through Jesus Christ our Lord. Send us out in the power of your Spirit to live and work for your praise and glory.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

CLOSING SONG

White As Snow

Olguin, Leon

White as snow, white as snow,
Though my sins were as scarlet,
Lord, I know. Lord, I know.
That I’m clean and forgiven.
Through the power of Your blood,
Through the wonder of Your love,
Through faith in You
I know that I can be,
White as snow, white as snow,
Though my sins were as scarlet,
Lord, I know. Lord, I know.
That I’m clean and forgiven.
Through the power of Your blood,
Through the wonder of Your love,
Through faith in You
I know that I can be,
White as snow.
©1990 Maranatha Praise, Inc./Sound Truth Publishing (Maranatha! Music)
CCLI License No. 1843349

BENEDICTION

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do it.
1 Thessalonians 5:23-24

1 Roger Thompson https://bible.org/illustration/pres-james-garfield