Frankie Mazzapica - A Comforting Word for Those Who Are Overcome by the Guilt of Sin
Thank you for tuning in today. My name's Frankie Mazzapica. The title of today's message is, "A Comforting Word for Those Who Are Overcome by the Guilt of Sin," a comforting word. I don't know if any of you have ever been there. I've been through many of these seasons where I've done something, I've said something, and I feel so guilty about it. Sometimes, I can kinda shake it off and just say, "Lord, I know that you have endless mercy. I know that there's nothing I can do that can shake that mercy." in Lamentations chapter 3, verse 22, it says this, that "the Lord's mercy is endless and his love is forever. Every morning you wake up, it is new and fresh every day".
Did you know when you woke up this morning, the mercy of God on your life is so new, it's so fresh, it's as if you've never needed mercy before? Every time I quote that scripture, I always like to say, imagine you bought a gallon of milk earlier this week and then you had some cereal, and the next morning you woke up and the milk was new, as if you've never taken a drink before. That's how God's mercy is. Every time you open up your eyes, his mercy and love for you is brand-new. He doesn't remember. Every time you say, "Lord, I'm sorry for my sins," he's saying, "I forgot your sins". In the very same moment, "I'm sorry," "I forgot".
But then there's sometimes where I can't shake that off quite as easy. It kinda sits there. It's like this burden of guilt. Sometimes, what I'm feeling happened years ago, sometimes it was yesterday, but there's this overwhelming burden of guilt. I've got some scriptures that I wanna kind of springboard off of. The first one is in Psalms 51, verse 17. It says this, "The sacrifice that I desire," this is what the Lord is saying to those of us who have committed sins. It says, "What I desire from you is a broken spirit. For I will not reject a person who has a broken and a repentant heart". He's looking at you and he says, "Are you sorry? Are you remorseful"?
Then it's done. He goes on to say this in Psalms 34, verse 18. It says, "I am close to the brokenhearted". Have you ever just, you're just, "I am close to the brokenhearted and I save those, I look for those, who have a crushed spirit". The enemy has several arrows that he shoots at us, these arrows sent to crush us and pierce our soul. And a lot of times, it's doubt. He'll just shoot it, where you're just doubting everything that you've ever heard about God. He'll shoot an arrow of unforgiveness where you can forgive anybody except for that person. He'll shoot an arrow of temptation. I'm not tempted by this. I'm not tempted by that. But that tempts me. But there's one arrow that seems to be sharper than them all, and that is what we're talking about today: the guilt of sin.
Let me build on those scriptures that I shared with you. I got three major points. The first one I'm gonna talk about, a guy named Manasseh and the degree of his sin. I know we've all done some stupid things, every single one of us. We have sins that we need God to forgive. But I find it highly doubtful that any of us have ever committed the sins that Manasseh has. I wanna talk about the consequences that he experienced, and then I wanna talk about God's response to his cry. Manasseh was a son of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was a godly man but he died, and his son Manasseh took over. But he was only 16 when he took over. Now, nod at me if you have a job. Just kind of nod at me. And even if you don't have one right now, you've had one before, just nod at me.
Imagine your boss is 16 years old, 16. He's coming in with a flat brim hat. "What's up? What's up"? Big, old tennis shoes and the laces are undone, coming in with a baseball jersey. "What's going on around here"? And then he looks at you and says, "What's your problem? What are you looking at? Guess what? You're fired". Imagine, a 16-year-old kid. Now, some of you are like, "Hey, I'm 16. Watch it". My son's 16, I love him. If he was my boss, I'd go play in the street. Not gonna have it. Manasseh, 16 years old, completely ignored everything that his father taught him, ignored the whole thing. And so, he became so sinful that he would go into the temple of the Lord and make animal sacrifices and worship Baal, which is a sinful, evil, demonic god. He'd bring shrines into the temple. He would kill animals and sacrifice them in the temple.
Imagine someone sneaks into this church at 2 o'clock in the morning and starts killing animals and pouring the blood everywhere. I'm sorry, it's gross, but just stay with me. Starts laying statues down. This is what Manasseh did. He brought in fortune tellers, crystal balls, doing seances in the temple. To go further, he took his own sons, sacrificed them in fire to these sinful gods. I don't know what the degree of sin. And then the Lord backs up and he says, "There's gonna be consequences for this". Sin has consequences to those who just continue to sin flagrantly. I'm not talking about a mistake. I'm not talking about these moments where we go, "I cannot believe I said that. I cannot believe I did that".
That's not who we're talking about. We're talking about flagrant sins. I used to play basketball, and when somebody is playing basketball and you're guarding them, you're not supposed to touch them. That's why I played basketball and not football. In football, you got a guy with a helmet on that's saying, "I am going to kill you". As a sidebar, anytime you see someone wearing a helmet, there's a reason why they're wearing a helmet. And somewhere along the line, someone came up to him and said, "Hey, if you keep doing this, you're gonna crack your head open". And they say back, "Well, I don't wanna stop". Put the helmet on.
Anyway, in football, you can hit somebody; in basketball, if you even touch me, the whole game stops. If you touch me four more times, you're out of the game. That's the kind of game I like. Those are fouls. And then there's another category of foul. This is when the defensive player acts like a football player. If I'm going up for a shot, he sees me, and he's made up in his mind, I'm about to smack this guy. It's premeditated, he's committed to it, it's flagrant. And then, for people who continue to do this, these flagrant fouls, they don't even find themselves on the team anymore. The coach eventually says, "You're a liability".
Like, come on. People who sin flagrantly, they back up, they plan it. They say, "I'm gonna keep doing this". This was Manasseh. And the Lord says, "You can't keep living like this. There's penalties for these flagrant sins". So he has the king of Assyria attack Judah, which was where Manasseh was king. Assyria comes in, demolishes Judah. They take Manasseh, they put clamps on his hands. Now, get this. If that's not bad enough, they take a ring that would go in a cow and clip it in his nose and drag him with a chain down the street so he can be mocked. The consequences of sin cannot be measured. There's two sides of the door with sin, where the enemy says, "There's no consequences. Live as you want. If there's a God, he's so loving he'll forgive you". Then you do it.
On the other side of the door there's immense guilt, with that comes shame, where you're disgusted with yourself, and then there's these payments and there's this guilt. But watch how the Lord responds. Now, keep in mind, this guy sacrificed his kids. I don't know what you've done in your past but I doubt you've taken your kids and burnt them and sacrificed them to the devil. I doubt that you've ever snuck into a church and made sacrifices on the altar of God to demons. And so now he's in prison, and the Bible says in 2 Chronicles chapter 33, if you want to read about this story, in verse 11, Manasseh looks to the Lord and he pours his heart out and says, "Oh God, I need you".
Now, some people would back up and go, "Oh! Now you turn to God. Now. Where was your worship before? Now you turn to God". Some people would say that. Some people, if they were in Manasseh's shoes, would not even want to ask for forgiveness because their shame, their guilt, is so high. They just, they don't even wanna come to him. It's so high. See, shame is when you're disgusted with yourself you assume God is as well. Fear is when you don't know what the consequences are gonna be and you believe that God has some type of punishment in store for you. For sure any plans he has for you are gone.
So, watch how God responds. 2 Chronicles 33, verse 13, it says this, that "the Lord listened to him and he was moved by his words," he was touched by his words. Has anyone ever said something to you, it was so precious, it was so heartfelt, that your eyes watered up? You wanted to cry. For those of us who are not emotional, it's like you can feel it welling up in you. It's like they touch the deepest part of your heart, and you wanna cry. When the Lord listened to Manasseh and his cry for mercy, it touched his heart.
The Bible says in Psalms 116, verse 1, it says this, that "the Lord heard my prayer and my cry for mercy. He bent down," verse 2, "to listen to me, and because of that I will pray as long as I have breath". He bent down to listen to Manasseh. He leaned down to listen and he was moved. I don't know what you may have done in your life to where you feel guilt, but the moment you lift your chin, hell gets nervous because it does everything it can to keep your chin down in shame, to lock your jaw so you don't open it, to seal your lips like a ziplock bag. I don't know if you've ever been there, but when you wanna pray, you can't even get it out of your mouth.
But when you lift your chin and you say to the Lord, "I'm so sorry for my sins. I love you with all my heart," and it doesn't even matter how many times you've said that prayer, the Bible says that the Lord leans down to listen to you and it moves his heart. I don't know what you've ever done, but every time you've whispered to the Lord, he's leaned down and it's touched your heart. What's the end of the story? Well, the Lord looks at Manasseh and he touches the heart of the king. In Proverbs 21, verse 1 the Lord says this, "Just as easy as you can turn water in your hand, I can look at a king and turn his heart".
This evil king of Assyria puts a hook in his nose, drags him down the street, but the Lord hears Manasseh worship him. His heart is moved, he listened to him, and he says, "It's gonna be okay". He reaches into the heart of an evil man and he turns his heart, and the king of Assyria comes in, takes the hook out, unleashes all the clamps, and gives him his throne back in Judah. Can I just tell you? Sometimes you will have a King Assyria come in your life. You may think that there's no getting out of it and in the back of your mind you may think to yourself, I'm disgusted with myself, I don't deserve to get out of it anyway, I'm gonna be in this season for the rest of my life, I don't have people that'll fight for me, I don't have people that'll defend me, I don't have connections.
In fact, the only people that are in my life speak down to me and beat me up. The Lord says, "Hey, look. You've lifted your chin to me, you've looked at me, you've broken the lock off of your jaw and unsealed your lips and said, 'Lord, I love you.' You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go reach into an evil man's heart and turn his heart. I'm gonna look at a good man and turn their heart and point him to you and move these evil people out and raise you up". Come on, put your hands, "I'm gonna raise you up".
I read of this lady, she always needed to go across town and she'd always try to... she'd always just forbid going even though she wanted to because it required a train to get across town. But that train had to go across a bridge and she truly believed that her weight on that train would cause the train to break through the bridge, just her own weight. Now, it's carrying loads of weight, but just her weight would break the bridge. A lot of times we think, Lord, my sin, it has broken me, I feel shameful, and it has broken anything that I can look forward to in the future. I would encourage you, remind yourself of Manasseh and the train of sin that is behind him. The next time you feel guilty, the next time you think of all the things that you've done wrong, just think to yourself, my God, my sin doesn't come close to this person's sin. They've done far worse. You rescued them and even lifted them up.
Can I just say? One of the most depressing things that we can face in life is to think that we've hit our ceiling. That's a loss of hope. Hope is an expectation that good things are coming. When you don't have an expectation, that means you've lost hope. I got one last illustration. A guy by the name of Steve Wynn, he owns the Wynn hotels in Las Vegas and very, very, as you would imagine, multi, multi, multi, multimillionaire. And he owned a painting painted by Picasso, it's called "The Dream". He was going to put it up for auction and he had one last night, a charity event, where he displayed the painting before he was gonna put it up for auction. He's gonna auction it off for one, I'm sorry, $139 million. And as he was talking to the people, it was actually in his house, the charity event in his house, he misstepped as he was stepping off of the stairs, he misstepped, and his elbow poked a hole in the painting.
Everybody in the room, just like right now, froze, and he backs up and he goes, "Well, I didn't see that coming". Everybody starts laughing. He takes the painting and he brings it to a restorer of paintings and he says, "I don't know what you can do to this". It's Picasso. It's not one of those places where, you know, you go and you paint your own thing and paint by color, paint by number. It's Picasso. I don't know what you do. They flip it over and from the backside, from the inside in, they take every... you've seen canvases before, they take these little threads, it took them months to do this, meticulously just putting the threads back together again, months. Then they flipped it over and kind of tapped the paint a little bit.
Steve Wynn brought, went back to auction, put the Picasso painting up there, didn't know what was gonna happen. He knew that last time it would auction off at $139 million. He had no idea what was gonna happen. He auctioned it off for $155 million. You see, when they saw that this Picasso painting had gone through this reconstruction, they thought, how could this happen? This is a miracle. The value went up. Can I just tell you? For those of us who are carrying the guilt, how many times has the Lord forgiven us? And you can sit here right now and you know, for sure, you are stronger than you've ever been, you are wiser than you've ever been. You know the Lord more, you appreciate him more than you ever have. You are more valuable right now than you were then. Tell the devil, "Stop making me feel guilty. The Lord doesn't remember and I'm more valuable than I've ever been". Come on, put your hands together for that.