Hi, this is John Ortberg. I wanna ask a real personal question today. Do you ever carry inside any guilt that just festers that you can’t seem to get rid of? Is there anything you’ve done in the past? Anything that’s, uh, secret, maybe it’s kind of hazy. Maybe you try to tuck it way down inside, and yet it crops back up and it crops back up and it haunts you. And sometimes you wake up at night and you think about it and you have a hard time actually forgiving yourself or believing that you can have been forgiven by God for this. And that really is at the heart of the problem of the human condition. That’s uh, what haunts every one of us is it’s not so much the bad things that have happened to me. Those things I can deal with those just cause pain.
It’s who am I becoming? Who have I become? What have I done? And I think about those moments, we’ve been looking at crime and punishment, which is one of the great studies in this and human history arrest. Nikk has done this horrible thing as murdered paw broker, this, and even though she is a miserable old woman, he cannot carry the guilt. Something inside of us just needs relief. We need to tell somebody, and yet we can’t. And he has that moment when he tells Sonya this woman, this absolute angel, and he can’t bring himself to say the word. So he just has to say to her guest, I think about one woman with a terrible secret that just haunts her until she can’t stand it anymore. And she needs to tell her friend, but you can’t name it. And so her friend has to guess has to ask questions.
I think about a man, a good man, but is so haunted by a secret that he can only tell one other man in private and nobody else, as long as he lives. I think about somebody who goes through, uh, a difficult time where he feels so exposed and, uh, so punished and humiliated publicly, but maybe the worst part of all is just this sense internally of I can’t get over it. I can’t forgive myself. I’m haunted by what I did. And just this hot sense of shame and guilt keeps going on. How do we get past that? And this, this really is at the core of the need that we have, cuz we were made by God in this image to be people who are good people from our hearts, but we know that we’re not. And so Resnikoff goes through this very long period of time where he is confused and, and haunted and troubled.
And he finally goes to the police and he ends up in Siberia. But instead of trying to forgive himself, he tries to excuse himself, see if I’m gonna receive forgiveness, I’m gonna forgive myself. It begins with a need for real deep honesty and clarity. And for the longest time as Nikko, uh, has the hardest, uh, time doing this. And so he says, well, uh, really the woman deserved that she was alight on society or really I was kind of doing what great men in the past have done people who lead armies are responsible for the murder of thousands of people. And I, I just did it with one, but great sold men are able to do this. And so it was okay that I did this or I was really trying to help my mother and my sister who were in financial deprivation and they could have been worse off if they kept trying to care for me.
And he did not dare to be guilty. This is what, uh, dust doky writes. It was his wounded pride that made him ill. Oh, how happy he would have been. If he could have blamed himself, he could have born anything. Then even shame and disgrace. If I’m gonna experience forgiveness, I have to start by setting aside the temptation to excuse, to rationalize, to justify. I have to dare to be guilty and look what I have done openly. And honestly, in the eye when re UFF is doing this, he’s now in a prison in Siberia, he has a dream about something that comes to plague his world. Listen, in this sentence, he dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible news, strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. That sounds kind prophetic. Doesn’t it only, it is not a, uh, physical plague.
It’s not a pandemic, it’s a spiritual plague. And really it’s a picture of the sin that, uh, clouds and confuses our minds and distorts our will and messes up our world. And he struggles to come to see himself in this way and all through this, Sonya has traveled with him to Siberia. And for some reason, she keeps loving him, even though because of his tortured mind and inability to accept forgiveness, he has unable to receive that love. And then this is the climax of the whole book on what the almost at the very end he’s alone with her. And thus Eski writes how it happened. He did not know.
Now this is a picture of grace that comes to us and we cannot explain it and we cannot force it. We cannot put it on any timetable. It comes when it comes as a gift, how it happened. He did not know, but all at once, something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms around her knees. For the first instance, she was terribly frightened and she turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trumbling but at the same moment she understood. And a light of infinite happiness came into her eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and that it lasts. The moment had come. They wanted to speak, but could not. Tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin, but those sick pale faces were bright with the Dawn of a new future of a full resurrection into a new life.
They were renewed by love the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the hi heart of the other. And the primary indicator of the acceptance of forgiveness is not so much the absence of pain, pain over what it is that I have done might come and might come back and might come back. It is the ability to love. There’s a very, very profound, uh, passage words from the apostle Paul that he writes to the church at Corinth that I think get real deeply to this issue of what does it mean to be able to actually experience receive forgiveness where I don’t excuse myself, I don’t justify myself. I see what it is that I have done and I experience pain, but I recognize I am no longer that person. And the difference is hope. Now I have hope. Paul writes about how the people at Koth had been made, sorry, because of what he wrote.
But I’m not sorry that I made you, sorry, because you are sorrow led you to repentance for you, became sorrowful as God intended. And so we’re not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves. No regret. Notice the chain godly sorrow brings repentance that’s energy. That leads to salvation. That’s healing and leaves, no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. Worldly. Sorrow creates stuckness rather than repentance and brooding rather than healing and a bitter spirit rather than no regret. See what this godly sorrow has produced in you. What earnestness? What eagerness to clear yourself? What indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. It brings the energy to move towards God years ago, I had a conversation with a woman named Mary Johnson and a young man named Oche Israel. He was the man who, when he was 16 years old in a ballroom fight, killed Mary Johnson’s son. And she hated him for 12 years. Forgiveness is a long journey and it cannot be truncated. It cannot be speeded up. You have can’t put it on a timetable. She said she was part of a church. And her pastor there just said, you gotta forgive him. And she said, I left that church cuz it was so wounding to hear that.
But over time, not days, not weeks, not months but years eventually from the hurt and the hate grew healing. And then a voice you should try to connect with someone who killed your son. And much to his amazement. He heard from her, there was a prison program that could help, uh, victims. And uh, those who had hurt them together. And she said, I want to meet with you. And at first he didn’t want to do it. He said I had become hardened. Like Resnikoff like all of us do we become hardened because of what we have done cuz of what’s inside of us, cuz what we carry our hearts get frozen and her minds get confused. But then she came and met with him. And one critical moment came at the end of that meeting when she went to stand up and she could not, she collapsed. She went to hug him and she collapsed and he had to hold her up. And he said it was her vulnerability that created a vulnerability inside of me. And for the first time in 12 years, what had been hard, hard, hard, hard was softened. And the miracle happened how it happened. He did not know how it happened. He did not know. And it comes to us.
I carry in myself, anger and woundedness and confusion about what it is that I have done wrong and how I have failed to live up. And I can’t make it go away. But what I know is that I need grace and I need the kind, kind of sorrow that leads to repentance. And I’m on that journey. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t make that happen, but God can, and I can talk about it together with you and we can talk about it together with each other and we can look as honestly as possible at here’s what it is that I have done wrong. God, forgive me. God helped me. God lead me to you. And then I can be with my Sonya, my friends who speak love into me and you can be together with yours. And then little bit by little bit, our hearts are soften how it happens. We do not know. And grace comes. I pray that it comes for me and for you. I love you. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.