"The Authority To Forgive Sins"

Hi there, this is long Solomon and I like to welcome you to our program today. You know it's a tremendous honor that God is given to us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's word as it is uncompromising and straightforward and I'm so glad you tuned in to listen and be part of that. Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio and now let's get to the word of God were continuing this morning and are serious in the life of Jesus Christ from the gospel.

Luke and I will begin this morning by asking your question, what is the greatest problem of mankind now immediately on my carcass menus a lawn that is really much too heavy a question for 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Some people would say world hunger.

Maybe some people would say poverty your crime or economic issues like the national deficit here in America or nuclear weapons or whatever is very interesting. However, we turn to the Bible that we find a very different answer than any of these that I just said the answer. God gives us in the Bible is very simple. He tells us that the greatest problem of mankind is soon you see soon as the central theme of the Bible from cover to cover. The Bible begins in the book of Genesis by telling us about sin entering the human race through Adam and Eve and in the Bible ends in the book of Revelation by telling us about God's plan to eradicate sin once and for all from his creation and in between every page in between deals with the issue of mankind soon and God's response to it. So the answer to the question, what is the greatest problem of mankind.

God's answer is soon have a second question for you. What is the most distinctive or the most unique thing that biblical Christianity proclaims to this world.

The answer to that question is that the most distinctive thing that biblical Christianity proclaims to our world is that sin can be forgiven is that God is interested and anxious to forgive your sin by sin and everybody else's sin was willing to come to him the way he tells them to its true that Christianity offers us a noble way to live. It's true that Christianity offers us great behavioral models to pattern our life after men like Abraham, Moses, David and Paul women like Mary and Ruth and Deborah, but the essence of Christianity is not noble ethics and the essence of Christianity is not giving us great behavioral models. The essence of true Christianity is that God is offering to forgive our soon and he's made a way to do it and still remain holy himself in the process. And Jesus talks about this in our passage for this morning and so I want to talk to you about in a message entitled the authority to forgive soon before we look at the passage in Luke five it would help us if we understood why sin is a problem. So let's talk for just a moment about what is the problem with soon.

There are two reasons I'm going to give you Matt.

I'm sure there are more, but there's two I'm going to give you this morning.

Reason number one is. Sin separates us from God. Here in Isaiah 59. I want you look it says verse two but your iniquities have separated you from your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear you see friend. Sin severs us from God and that's why for so many of us, God seems so far away so distant, so remote, God is not remote. God is not far away from you and all, but he feels that way and he seems that way because sin has erected a barricade between you and God.

And if we don't fix that barricade sometime during this life a we spend our whole life feeling alienated and isolated and distant from God.

Missing the things that he wants to do in our lives and we don't fix it before we eventually die we go out into eternity separated from God and God has no choice but to send us to a place where people live estranged from God for all eternity. A place the Bible calls hell. Sin separates us from God. That's a problem that's a problem that is unfixable by any human being.

And that's a big problem. The second problem was sin is that sin produces guilt in the book of Genesis. I like you to turn back to the very first book of the Bible Genesis chapter 3. Sin produces guilt.

You know there is false guilt in our world there are many people who grew up in families where mom and dad got divorced and his children. They felt guilty that somehow it was their fault that mom and dad got divorced. If you grew up in a situation like that allow me to tell you it is not your fault that is false guilt. You have no business carrying it. It's not your fault.

There are some of us who grew up in homes where we were molested or abused, either physically or sexually, and many times people grow up feeling like it must be their fault. Somehow that this happened to them if that's you, may I say to you that's false guilt. It was not your fault you were not responsible for the but many people in the world would have us believe that all guilt is false guilt. That's not true. There is real guilt also in our world. Real guilt comes when our conscience tells us that we have offended God and done something that's wrong that is real guilt that is genuine guilt and it is part of the psyche of what sin produces in the human spirit. Would you look in Genesis chapter 3.

If you remember Adam and Eve were told they could need of this tree in the middle of a garden. Now I don't know what I had apples on oranges or the pomegranates wanted it just says in the Bible to have fruit, but whatever the fruit was does make a bigger difference. What makes a difference was God said don't eat all of it and they ate of. They disobeyed God and something very radical happened in Adam and Eve psyche that it never happened before. It's guilt. I want to see in verse eight it says in chapter 3 verse eight then man and his wife Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day God would come to the garden every day in the cool of the evening to walk with man and talk with man, but this state was very different because it says on this day. Verse eight. They ran and hid themselves from the Lord God among the trees of the garden, and even never done that before ever. Something had gone radically wrong inside Adam and Eve they were feeling something they had never felt before. What they were feeling was guilt because their conscience was registering the fact that they had offended God and disobeyed him separation from God. Genuine guilt. These are two of the big problems that sin brings into a life. That's the bad news. God wrote the Bible tell us the good news and the good news is that God has made a prescription for dealing with soon he's made a way to reconcile us to God when sin is separated us. He's made a way for us to get rid of the guilt once and for all, not just to sublimate it with drugs are sublimated with sex or sublimated with alcohol or sublimated with therapy but to get rid of it. Jesus talks about the five so let's go there and look showing chapter 5 the events that happened here happened in the little town of Capernaum around the Sea of Galilee, and they happened in Peter's house.

Luke doesn't tell us that the Matthew dogs and so this Takes Pl. in Capernaum. Verse 17. One day as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law would come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and from Jerusalem and they were sitting there and the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick, and so Jesus began healing people. Well, it didn't take long before there was a huge crowd gathered a mob almost. They packed in the house like sardines. They spilled out of the house into the street. The crowd was so large and so pressing that people can hardly even move.

The Bible tells us it was, like Circuit City just before Christmas at this place and so this is the situation that's important for us to understand if the rest of what happens here is going to make sense. Verse 18 it says and some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat on a stretcher and they tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. But the