Latest / The OneCry Podcast / #242 Lifting Life's Greatest Load (Part 1 - Freedom Through Confession)
Transcript
- 0:00So God has this spiritual pain.
- 0:08The Bible calls it the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
- 0:13And that spiritual pain is God loving you enough to say what you're doing is wrong.
- 0:21It's going to cause problems.
- 0:23It's going to hurt you.
- 0:25It's going to hurt others.
- 0:27And that pain is going to, that spiritual conviction is intended to sit there on your
- 0:35soul until you do something about it.
- 0:38Welcome to the One Cry Podcast, a nationwide call for spiritual awakening.
- 0:44The goal, accelerating the movement of God through sharing revival truth, stories, and
- 0:50reports.
- 0:52Well, welcome to the One Cry Podcast.
- 0:55I'm Kyle Reno with my partner in crime, Bill Ellef, on the other side of here.
- 1:00How you doing, buddy?
- 1:01I'm doing good.
- 1:03Good to see you, my friend.
- 1:04And great to be with all of our folks who are listening.
- 1:08And you know, it's cool, Kyle, as we have folks now listening all over the place.
- 1:15And we're so grateful for that, for anybody who takes time to listen to a couple of...
- 1:22What you're really saying is you're very surprised.
- 1:26I am.
- 1:27I'm shocked.
- 1:28Shocked and honored.
- 1:29Yeah, absolutely.
- 1:30Well, man, listen, it's a privilege to be a part of this with you, Bill, specifically,
- 1:37but with our listeners, we are.
- 1:38We're grateful for a few minutes here to just listen to what God's saying to His church
- 1:44and to followers of Christ all over the world, and specific in hopes of seeing revival and
- 1:50awakening.
- 1:51You know, there's nothing new under the sun, Bill, that there's proven patterns and ways
- 1:57in which God works.
- 1:58And, man, we're watching that.
- 1:59We've been in some great seasons here in the past, Made to Pray, that we walked through
- 2:04several weeks ago, and for an extended season.
- 2:08And great reports, man, of how God is helping people approach Him in prayer in ways that
- 2:16He's answering and responding.
- 2:17And Kyle, can I give a cool story real quick?
- 2:19Yeah, I do.
- 2:20Yeah, because I know you also kind of walked through that with your whole church, with
- 2:26our series on prayer that we did a few weeks ago.
- 2:29Yeah.
- 2:30Well, just a cool story.
- 2:31As of this last Sunday, this is a story that came out of our faith family here, and teaching
- 2:37our people how to approach the Lord through the Lord's prayer, and one part of it is partnership
- 2:42to see His kingdom come.
- 2:45And we've helped our people see some ways to pray consistently for the kingdom of God
- 2:51to come in certain ways.
- 2:53One is in the salvation of the lost, obviously, and we even gave away for us to partner together
- 3:00in that.
- 3:01We put some Far From God cards out and put just the first name of people that we're going
- 3:07to start praying from now to Easter for them to come to Saving Faith in Christ.
- 3:11They put it on a cross that we had in our worship center.
- 3:15Our staff prayed over it that Tuesday, 6,000 something names were on the cross that we
- 3:22prayed over, bro.
- 3:23It was powerful.
- 3:25So seven days after we did that, they were back in a Sunday worship gathering.
- 3:29They had two different experiences.
- 3:30One, I had a mom, you'll get me crying now, I had a mom grab my hand as I was walking
- 3:36by and say, Kyle, she's coming.
- 3:39I said, well, who?
- 3:42She said, my daughter's coming today.
- 3:45So I put her name on the cross last Sunday, Kyle, she's coming today.
- 3:51And I hugged her up.
- 3:53She hadn't come before.
- 3:54It's a grown adult daughter that's far from God.
- 3:57Seven days before that, she had put her name on that card and we put it on the cross, prayed
- 4:02for it.
- 4:03And just so happens the next Sunday, her daughter texted and said, hey, I'm going to come to
- 4:07church with you today.
- 4:09So I actually could see where I was preaching from.
- 4:11I could see that mom and that daughter.
- 4:13So that's one story.
- 4:14You know, at least she took that step, which, you know, the Spirit of God is moving in that
- 4:18powerfully.
- 4:19The other is, after one of the gatherings, I have this young lady come up to me.
- 4:26My assistant joins us in this conversation and she says, two years ago, I was hearing
- 4:32you preach the message.
- 4:34And in her own words, she's saying, and I knew it was, I needed to respond, but I didn't.
- 4:41And I walked, I walked out the door and she said for two, this is what she said, Bill.
- 4:45She said, for two years, I thought about that day, every day, every day.
- 4:53She goes, I came again today, she goes, but this time I didn't walk out.
- 4:59I walked down here to you.
- 5:01And so I asked her about her relationship with Christ.
- 5:06She didn't have one.
- 5:08She's born again.
- 5:09Right.
- 5:10Well, I'm looking over, I'm looking over her shoulder and I'm seeing this couple that's
- 5:13out there and I'm connecting the dots going, I think that might be her parents.
- 5:19I think so.
- 5:20I leave her with my assistant who's praying, we're talking, I walk up to where they are
- 5:25and the mom looks at me, she goes, is, did, did what I think just happen?
- 5:30And I said, well, that that's your daughter.
- 5:33She said, yeah.
- 5:34I said, well, if, if what you're thinking is, was she just born again?
- 5:37And yes, she was.
- 5:40She goes, I put her name on that cross last week.
- 5:43Last week.
- 5:44Wow.
- 5:45Wow.
- 5:46Wow.
- 5:47And you just watching.
- 5:48And I'm like, you know what, Lord, this prayer thing, there's something to it.
- 5:51There's something to this, that you're a God that hears and cares and moves.
- 5:56And so isn't it fun, bro, to be a part of it?
- 5:59It is.
- 6:00And, and, you know, this is what revival and spiritual awakening is all about, is people
- 6:08getting saved and saved from their sin, saved from two years, just, just think of this,
- 6:16two years of conviction, just sitting on this girl's heart and the pain of that.
- 6:25And then the release of that.
- 6:28And honestly, it's kind of what we're talking about today, because Kyle, we want to talk
- 6:34about for the next few weeks, how to lift the load from your soul.
- 6:41You know, there's a, there's a story I love about, I mean, it's just true factual account
- 6:48that there was a potato factory in Idaho, believe it or not, who they, they, they had
- 6:58guys who are lifting a hundred pound sacks of potatoes and putting them on trucks and
- 7:05whatever.
- 7:07And so believe it or not, we have a government agency that studies these things, of course,
- 7:15that our taxpayers pay for and call OSHA.
- 7:20And so they came in and they, they did this like six month study because all of these
- 7:26potato factory workers were having terrible back problems, like this is, like this is
- 7:34a hard thing to figure out.
- 7:36And they, they did this report and this is the actual words from the report.
- 7:40They said, the spine is a sensitive mechanism.
- 7:45Over time, improper lifting can cause irreversible damage that can lead to permanent injury.
- 7:53Aren't you glad we paid millions of dollars for that?
- 7:58But when I saw that, I thought, you know, as, as sad and as humorous as that is, our
- 8:08souls are the same way.
- 8:09I mean, our soul is a sensitive instrument, right?
- 8:16Our mind, our emotions, our will, our, our spirit.
- 8:21And over time, if, if the wrong kind of pressure is put upon it, it causes a lot of pain and
- 8:30a lot of injury.
- 8:33And and where we feel that is in our conscience, our conscience.
- 8:38If you would say it like this, now that's just a human term.
- 8:42It's not a, well, it is a biblical term, but the idea is a conscience is the part of you
- 8:48that knows you, right?
- 8:51Conscience means the inner knowing of you.
- 8:54And so Paul came in, in Acts 24, 16, and he made this amazing statement when he was defending
- 9:04himself before some people.
- 9:08He said, you know, I, I exercise myself, gymnasio is the Greek word.
- 9:15I exercise myself to always maintain a clear conscience between God and man.
- 9:25In other words, in two directions.
- 9:28And I work at this, I exercise myself to make sure there's nothing between me and God and
- 9:37nothing between me and anybody else.
- 9:42And, and I want to tell you something, Kyle, what we're going to talk about the next couple
- 9:47of weeks, a few weeks here on the OneCraft podcast is going to be unbelievably practical
- 9:57and helpful because this is where we live, right?
- 10:02I mean, we live with the ravages of sin and, and dumb mistakes and naive mistakes and just
- 10:11all the things that we do that separate us from God and keep us from the joy that He
- 10:19has designed for us to experience.
- 10:22Now, I want to take today, you know, this passage well, Kyle, Psalm 32, and Psalm 32
- 10:33is David talking after he had committed the sin with Bathsheba, the great dark season
- 10:45of his life was when he took his eyes off God and put his eyes on, on another God and,
- 10:53and he committed a grievous sin, several grievous, that led to several other grievous sins.
- 11:01And he comes and he repents of that and, but he writes this in Psalm 32, now listen
- 11:08to this.
- 11:09How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
- 11:15You think about this girl that came to you Sunday morning, Kyle, and gave her life to
- 11:20Christ.
- 11:21How blessed is the man or the woman to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity and whose
- 11:28spirit there's no deceit.
- 11:31And then he gives a little travelogue.
- 11:34He says, when I kept silent about my sin, when I didn't deal with it, my body wasted
- 11:41away through my groaning all day long, day and night, your hand was heavy upon me.
- 11:48My vitality was drained away as with a fever heat of summer.
- 11:53But then I acknowledge my sin to you and my iniquity, I did not hide.
- 11:58I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.
- 12:02And you forgave the guilt of my sin, the guilt of my sin.
- 12:09Therefore, let everyone who's godly pray to you in a time when you may be found and we'll
- 12:16look at the rest of this here in, in just a minute.
- 12:19So there's something that all of us need.
- 12:23Every single person listening today needs what, what David is describing here.
- 12:31And I just want to, I want to point these out to us and, and Kyle, feel free to just
- 12:35jump in anywhere you want to.
- 12:38First of all, we need the blessing of full forgiveness, right?
- 12:45Now we got a problem.
- 12:46All of us have a problem.
- 12:48And the problem is that all of us sin and fall short of the glory of God, right?
- 12:55And sin separates us.
- 12:59Sin is us saying to God, God, I want to be in charge.
- 13:02And we walk away from him.
- 13:04And honestly, we've separated ourselves from God and from his presence and everything flows
- 13:12from the presence of the Lord.
- 13:14And so we, we lose all of that, right?
- 13:17And everything, and then we start when we're separated from his presence, we, we start
- 13:24doing all kinds of dumb things, all kinds of succession of sins occurs.
- 13:31That's what happened to David.
- 13:32He just one night, he looks over, sees Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop, and he lets that just
- 13:41fester in his soul.
- 13:43And then he calls for her and commits adultery, and he starts trying to hide it, which leads
- 13:50to the murdering really of her husband and lying and deception and, and everything.
- 13:57And so this whole string.
- 14:00And so David says, man, how blessed are you when look at these things?
- 14:07He says in verse one, when your sins are forgiven.
- 14:11In other words, when it's not that you haven't sinned, but that you come clean before God
- 14:17and you received his forgiveness and his cleansing, and when your sins are covered, they're just
- 14:26covered.
- 14:27Now, all of us have had a moment where we owed somebody something.
- 14:33And it's a wonderful thing.
- 14:34If somebody comes in and says, man, I'll cover that debt, I'll just cover it, I'll take care
- 14:39of it.
- 14:40And you say, man, I don't, I don't deserve that.
- 14:42I know, but I love you.
- 14:43And I got it.
- 14:44I got it covered.
- 14:45Right?
- 14:46So the Lord Jesus, when we deal with this, the way we're going to talk about in the next
- 14:51few weeks, he says, I'll cover this.
- 14:55I've done something that will cover your debts and, and your sin will not be imputed to your
- 15:03account.
- 15:04Okay?
- 15:05In other words, it won't be on your account, it won't be on the ledger book anymore.
- 15:10And this girl that you talked about, this, this story of her coming and being born again,
- 15:19what happened in that moment at that altar was her sins were covered.
- 15:23Her sins were forgiven.
- 15:24God says, I got this covered.
- 15:27And I covered it by the cross of Calvary.
- 15:30And and it's no longer on your account.
- 15:35And when that happens, there's this huge blessing, this huge relief that comes when our sins
- 15:43are, are forgiven.
- 15:46But here's, here's the truth.
- 15:49Christ has done everything necessary so that our sins can be forgiven.
- 15:56You can embrace that by faith, or you can ignore it.
- 16:01Right?
- 16:02You can just, you can never come to Christ and apply what happened on the cross to your
- 16:09account and to your life and never trust him to save you and forgive you and cleanse you.
- 16:17Or you can try to do that yourself and, and it will never work.
- 16:22So how, how blessed to have your sins forgiven.
- 16:27But secondly, look at this.
- 16:29We need the blessing of decreased deceit.
- 16:34There's something, there's a phenomenon about sin that we need to understand.
- 16:38David said it like this.
- 16:40He said, how blessed is a man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity and whose spirit
- 16:46there is no deceit.
- 16:49Now when we sin, something starts happening.
- 16:55And the first thing that we do is we start lying.
- 16:59We just start lying.
- 17:00We don't even recognize it as lying, but this deceitful spirit, because we know that it's
- 17:07wrong and we know that we need to cover ourselves.
- 17:12And so we, we commit all kinds of lies.
- 17:14We lie to ourselves.
- 17:15We say, oh, that wasn't all that bad.
- 17:18It's not that big of a deal.
- 17:19It won't hurt anybody.
- 17:21You know, everybody else does it.
- 17:23We come up with a thousand different lies and excuses.
- 17:28We lie to others.
- 17:30Oh, that wasn't me.
- 17:31I didn't do that.
- 17:32You know, here's a husband who's, who's committing some sin and he just, every day he's saying
- 17:39to his wife, I didn't do that.
- 17:41I don't, I don't ever do that.
- 17:43I don't ever watch pornography.
- 17:45I don't, and he just lies, lies, lies.
- 17:47And so what you're doing is, here's this sin that you've committed, but then you add
- 17:52to that, the lies that you keep committing, and then that makes you feel worse.
- 17:58And then you try to find some relief over here and you commit another sin.
- 18:01And it just, it just keeps snowballing exponentially.
- 18:05And the worst thing is that you, you lie to God and you're just saying to him, God, you
- 18:13know, I'm, you're just acting like nothing happened.
- 18:16And Kyle, one time years ago, there was this phase back in the seventies of this stuff
- 18:23called friendship bread.
- 18:25And I think it's still around, but you would take, you know, our wives would take this
- 18:30kind of dough starter and you'd, and you'd, you'd put it in the kitchen and, and you would
- 18:36feed it and you'd put stuff into it every night and this dough would grow.
- 18:42And then you could just, it just keep growing and you'd pull sections off and cook it, you
- 18:48know, and eat it.
- 18:50And so she was a young wife, we were just married, you know, and somebody gave her some
- 18:57of this stuff.
- 18:58And she, I think she kind of over, over fed it to her.
- 19:02I don't know what she did, but I came in one morning and that dough was all over the kitchen
- 19:10counter.
- 19:11It was like the dough that ate Chicago.
- 19:13I remember that old movie, you know, the blob that just kept growing and growing and took
- 19:19over cities.
- 19:20And, uh, but that's the way sin is, you know, you just think, well, it's just a little deal.
- 19:27It's just no big deal, but if you don't deal with it, the spirit of deceit just keeps growing
- 19:34and growing and growing.
- 19:37And David says, man, you don't understand the blessing of being a man in whom there
- 19:44is no deceit.
- 19:45Your yes is yes, your no is no.
- 19:48You don't have anything to cover.
- 19:51You don't have anything to hide, you know, and the incredible blessing of that.
- 19:58And then here's, here's the one that really gets me.
- 20:03And that's the blessing of removed conviction.
- 20:08Now, Kyle, uh, I had a guy one time who said to me, he wanted some counsel.
- 20:16I said, great.
- 20:18He said, brother Bill, I just, I just feel so guilty.
- 20:21I feel so guilty.
- 20:22I feel so guilty all the time.
- 20:24I just feel guilty.
- 20:26And I knew his story and I knew it was going on and I looked him right in the eye and I
- 20:29said, well, you know, you know why you feel that?
- 20:32He said, why?
- 20:34I said, you're guilty, you're guilty.
- 20:39You got sin and you're lying and you're doing all this stuff and you're not finding God's
- 20:47remedy for that.
- 20:49And that guilt that you feel, that's a wonderful thing.
- 20:53He said, no, it's not.
- 20:55I said, no, no, it's a wonderful thing.
- 20:58Guilt in our soul is like pain to our body.
- 21:02So if you take your, if you take, God has designed it this way, he's designed your body
- 21:07so that if you take your hand and you put it on a hot stove, that there are nerves that
- 21:15send you an immediate message that says, take your hand off the stove, you idiot, right?
- 21:25And that's a really good thing.
- 21:28It's telling you, pain is telling you to make an adjustment, right?
- 21:33Quit doing that.
- 21:36And so God has this spiritual pain.
- 21:40The Bible calls it the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
- 21:45And that spiritual pain is God loving you enough to say what you're doing is wrong.
- 21:54It's going to cause problems.
- 21:56It's going to hurt you.
- 21:57It's going to hurt others.
- 21:59And that pain is going to, that spiritual conviction is intended to sit there on your
- 22:07soul until you do something about it, right?
- 22:11And so don't get upset about that.
- 22:15Rejoice that God loves you enough that he would, he would bring that to your soul.
- 22:22Now David talks about this in this passage.
- 22:25And there was emotional pain, physical pain, and spiritual pain.
- 22:33Look at this.
- 22:34He says, he says, blessed, he said, when I kept silent about my sin, this is verse three,
- 22:47when I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.
- 22:57Kyle, I don't know if you've ever met a groaner.
- 23:01Just a groaner.
- 23:02I was, I was, I was at my grandson's basketball game the other day, little, little there like,
- 23:10I don't know, second grade or something like that.
- 23:14And there was a kid out on the court and he was, he was really a good basketball player,
- 23:20but that guy groaned for 60 minutes.
- 23:24He was just, everything was everybody's fault.
- 23:27He was pointing to everybody else he'd fall down and, and he just, he was just upset about
- 23:32it.
- 23:33He was just groaning all day long, but you know, some people grow up and they never get
- 23:38out of that, you know, and they're just groaning.
- 23:41Or some people are in such emotional distress that they just, you just hear them sighing
- 23:49all the time.
- 23:51Now we can misdiagnose that.
- 23:56We can say, well, it's my stress.
- 23:59It's my schedule.
- 24:01It's my problem.
- 24:03It's my relationships.
- 24:05It's my wife.
- 24:07But it may be that the emotional distress and deterioration that you're feeling is just
- 24:15your sin that's undealt with and the conviction that's coming upon your soul.
- 24:23And I've seen this whole cycle, Kyle, I know that you've seen this as you counsel men.
- 24:31And that is we sin, if you just imagine a spiral going down, we sin, and God brings
- 24:39this wonderful thing called guilt because it's wrong.
- 24:45And then, and then he brings his conviction, if we're believers, he brings the conviction
- 24:51of the Holy Spirit, which the Bible, Jesus said, I'm going to send the Spirit and he
- 24:56convicts us of sin and of righteousness, how far we're falling from the righteousness
- 25:02of God and the judgment that comes from that.
- 25:06So we sin and that brings legitimate guilt and that brings conviction.
- 25:12And the problem is we feel real crummy with that conviction.
- 25:18And so if we're not careful, we go look for relief.
- 25:23And so we eat something, we drink something, we smoke something, we dive into some distraction
- 25:33that's a further sin, which causes further guilt, which causes further conviction, which
- 25:40we look for further relief.
- 25:42And that spiral just goes down and down and down and down.
- 25:46And at the bottom of it is what I would describe as real depression, real spiritual.
- 25:54Now depression can, has different sources at times, but my contention and my experience
- 26:03has been in counseling people that if you go back and take care of the root problem,
- 26:10which is the sin, and you start dealing with your sin appropriately and rightly, so often
- 26:18the guilt lifts, the conviction, of course, lifts because God has no intent to just leave
- 26:25that there forever.
- 26:26It's there to bring you to repentance.
- 26:29And then the depression lifts and there's joy.
- 26:32And that's why, you know, David says how blessed is a man who experiences this.
- 26:38So it can bring emotional deterioration.
- 26:41Secondly, it can bring physical deterioration.
- 26:47You know, when you're mowing a lawn on a hot summer day and you get through and you
- 26:53are just slap dab, here's how they say it in Mississippi, slap dab worn out, and you
- 27:01are just gone.
- 27:03That's what Paul, David is describing when he says, when I kept silent about my sin,
- 27:10my body wasted away and my vitality was drained as the fever heat of summer.
- 27:19Now you just think about this.
- 27:23You think about people and your own life and you're just tired all the time.
- 27:30You're just tired all the time and there can be physical reasons for that, but there can
- 27:36also be emotional reasons for that.
- 27:40There can also be spiritual reasons for that.
- 27:44You know, an unclear conscience, there's something between us and God.
- 27:52There's something between us and our mate.
- 27:55There's something between us and somebody else can lower our physical resistance and
- 28:02produce weariness and depression.
- 28:06Every doctor understands this.
- 28:07I mean, they talk about, quote, stress causing, but what if the stress is unresolved sin in
- 28:15our life that we're just not dealing with and the convicting hand of God's spirit.
- 28:21And then there's what I would call spiritual deterioration.
- 28:25Look, this is so incredible.
- 28:27He said, my vitality was drained because your hand was heavy upon me.
- 28:36Now Spurgeon says this, I love this phrase.
- 28:41He says, God's hand is very helpful when it uplifts, but it is awful when it presses down.
- 28:49Better a world on the shoulder like Atlas than God's hand on your heart like David.
- 28:56What a statement.
- 28:58And that's true.
- 28:59And again, it's good.
- 29:02It's a good pressure, but God puts his heavy hand upon us because he knows that there's
- 29:09stuff between us and him and stuff in between us and other people.
- 29:14And if we don't get it right, if we don't resolve that, then we don't have his presence.
- 29:22We don't have his life.
- 29:24Our life is aborting the testimony that it should be giving to a watching world, particularly
- 29:30if we know Christ.
- 29:33And so this, when my conscience is not clear, I feel spiritually disengaged, right?
- 29:43And I seem to have little connection to God, little hunger for his word, no concern for
- 29:49others, a growing selfishness.
- 29:53I quickly turn to my favorite sins for temporary satisfaction.
- 29:59And sadly, I'll expend what little energy I have on seeking relief.
- 30:06All the while, the resolution for my problem is not the lack of pleasure or the stress
- 30:12of work or the irritation of others, it's that my soul is not at peace with God.
- 30:20Now, we can respond to that several ways, right?
- 30:26We can ignore it.
- 30:27We can excuse it.
- 30:29We can shift it.
- 30:31We can blame others.
- 30:33We can medicate it.
- 30:35We can reject it, or we can respond to it God's way.
- 30:42Now, Kyle, we're covering a lot of ground here, and we're going to be on this for several
- 30:48weeks.
- 30:49So let me just pause right there.
- 30:52I know I've kind of dominated the conversation, but what does this bring up your heart and
- 30:59mind as we're talking about this?
- 31:01Yeah, well, I'm grateful for how God pursues us in the midst of it and doesn't let us just
- 31:07continue to live in our brokenness and sin.
- 31:11And then that passage, you know, I was thinking about, and we've all had it, I'll say to every
- 31:16listener we have, everybody, a statement I heard a long time ago, and I think it's true.
- 31:22Everybody needs freedom from something.
- 31:24Yeah.
- 31:25And that might change in every season of your life.
- 31:28There's big breakthroughs in that, but man, we're still under construction, that we are
- 31:33being set apart and sanctified.
- 31:35Every season calls for nearness to the light so that you might see what's truly going on
- 31:40in your mind, your emotions, your motivations, and all those things.
- 31:45But here's the thing about darkness, deception, it's like drowning.
- 31:52It just sits on a person.
- 31:55And I can't tell you how many times I've sat across from someone and we're trying to
- 32:01work our way around the real issue.
- 32:04Right.
- 32:05And specifically, a lot of times, I meet with men like, and I know, and God knows, and he
- 32:10knows that we're not ever going to get there until we finally get what's in there out.
- 32:16Yeah.
- 32:17But that man, me being the man, you being the man, every person's a listener, man or
- 32:22woman, until we're willing to do with what's in there, what God says, we'll survive maybe,
- 32:32but we'll never thrive.
- 32:35And it will cost us on every level, and it's costing us joy.
- 32:38And the other side, so darkness, deception, all that, it's like drowning, it's just barely
- 32:42staying above water.
- 32:44But the truth is this, living in the light is freedom.
- 32:49Yeah.
- 32:50Yeah.
- 32:51There's nothing like, there's nothing like being a clear conscience before both God and
- 32:56man.
- 32:57Yeah.
- 32:58And this is why David comes at the end of the psalm, and he talks about, he's talking
- 33:05about the blessing of it, because he's on the backside of finally coming clean, you
- 33:12know, about his sin.
- 33:14But then he says, man, how blessed, how blessed, how blessed, when I didn't, when I kept silent
- 33:18about it.
- 33:19Yeah.
- 33:20This is what happened.
- 33:22Listen to this verse, and we'll tie a bow on it here.
- 33:24He says in verse five, I acknowledge my sin to you, and my iniquity I did not hide.
- 33:32I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.
- 33:38And then this little phrase, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
- 33:44So next week, we're going to talk in depth about how we do that.
- 33:50We're going to talk in depth about how we clear our conscience with God.
- 33:55And then the following week, how we clear our conscience with other people, because
- 34:00a lot of us have got a lot of junk that's sitting in there that needs to be resolved.
- 34:10And so I hope people will track with us for several weeks here, because this is really,
- 34:18really the heart of it.
- 34:20This is the heart of revival.
- 34:21When you see God moving in revival and spiritual awakening, you start to hear people getting
- 34:28honest about their sin, because it's got to be dealt with, right?
- 34:34And it's just in the heart of why they're unrevived and why they're far from God is
- 34:39just the sin, whether they're lost people who need their sins forgiven initially, or
- 34:46they're believers who've temporarily walked away from God's presence.
- 34:53So, well, Kyle, let's pray this in a little bit.
- 34:58Why don't you lead us through that?
- 35:00Yeah, Lord, just even in my spirit right now, I'm just thinking, and the best time for repentance
- 35:07is right now.
- 35:08It's right now.
- 35:09And so I just pray for each and every one of us, Lord, for every one of our listeners,
- 35:15that we would no longer keep silent, that Lord, that we would do what Your Word says,
- 35:20that we would confess our sin to You.
- 35:23First and foremost, every thing in our lives that might miss the mark, that's off course,
- 35:29that's walking away from truth, is ultimately and foremost a sin against You, Lord.
- 35:34So I pray for some spiritual courage for every one of our listeners to come into the presence
- 35:42of a God that longs to forgive and get honest, and get honest.
- 35:47I pray for boldness, Lord God, about the thing that we know in the dark, that we would be
- 35:52bold enough to go to somebody to share that, Lord God, to find healing from that, Lord,
- 36:00even in our lives.
- 36:01So Father, I thank You for this journey.
- 36:03I thank You that this is a non-negotiable part of a real move of God in our lives personally
- 36:09and revival in our churches, and a real move of God in our nation.
- 36:14So help us learn how to lean into Your light and Your truth by the power of Your Spirit.
- 36:20And I pray it in Jesus' name, amen.
- 36:23Amen.
- 36:24Amen.
- 36:25Man, I would really encourage now our listeners, that was a solid, solid, solid truth.
- 36:32And Bill, I'm glad you actually, I know you got a lot more to say, I'm glad you stopped
- 36:36before you stopped, because we need some time to process that truth.
- 36:41So here's my encouragement to our listeners, go and sit down with specifically the first
- 36:45part of Psalm 32, and let the Lord show you some things today, and as He reveals some
- 36:52things, maybe in your head, maybe in your heart, maybe some actions, attitudes, moves
- 36:57that you've made, motives that you have, write them down, take note, and then take next steps.
- 37:04Take it into the presence of the Lord, take it to somebody.
- 37:07And then if this was helpful to you, share it with somebody else, because it'll be helpful
- 37:12for others, man, get the word out, and then come back next week and continue this journey
- 37:17with us, because I think there's some places of freedom that's about to play out in these
- 37:21weeks in the lives of each and every one of us.
- 37:25Right.
- 37:26And Kyle, let me tell them about another resource.
- 37:30I've written a lot of this down years ago in a book called Lifting Life's Greatest
- 37:37Load, How to Gain and Maintain a Clear Conscience.
- 37:41Now we don't have this on the OneCry site, but you can get it on Amazon, but you can
- 37:47also get it on my website, Bill Elif, E-L-I-F-F, billelif.org, and I'm not in the business
- 37:59of selling books, but I wrote this down because I just kept going over and over and over with
- 38:06people because it's just so foundational.
- 38:10If you don't learn how to deal regularly, daily, and continually with your sin, you're
- 38:20never going to grow as a Christian.
- 38:22You just get this ball and chain around your legs, it's just dragging you down, and the
- 38:32scripture says, man, I just want to throw away this sin which so easily entangles me.
- 38:41And so if you think this will help you, it's very practical, you can pick that up.
- 38:51I tell you about these podcasts too, the cool thing about a podcast, you can listen to it
- 38:55over and over again.
- 38:56You don't say, man, I missed that and I never get it.
- 38:59And it could be a thing that you got two guys that you're kind of meeting with, or you all
- 39:05are growing, holding each other accountable, say, hey, this week, let's just spend 20 minutes
- 39:11and listen to this, and then let's talk about it and go from there.
- 39:16Man, I got messages like that.
- 39:18I have every year messages that I listen to, some messages that really helped me see
- 39:23some things clearly.
- 39:24So I totally resonate with that, man.
- 39:27If it's just started something, you got something percolating in your spirit, go back and listen
- 39:32to it again, share it with somebody, make it, mark it, flag it in your podcast so that
- 39:36you can come back to it at another time.
- 39:39So we're honored for the time, I would encourage you, that's a great resource, that book.
- 39:43Go to his website, go to Amazon, and start a journey with us, start a journey with us
- 39:50right here for new places of just closeness to God, freedom in our lives.
- 39:57And we look forward to being back here with you next week.
- 40:01Have a great week.