We turn now in our study of the Word of God to Luke chapter 11 and this would be the seventh message on this wonderful opening section of chapter 11 under the title, 'Lord, Teach Us to Pray.' Let me read it to you.
'And it came about that while He was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, 'Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples.' And He said to them, 'When you pray say, ‘Father, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.’'
Now there is a parallel to this particular instruction in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 6, which our Lord gave many months before this in His ministry in Galilee. Many months later we find our Lord in Judea moving toward Jerusalem and toward His death and again the issue of prayer arises among His disciples. And He goes back to the same pattern, the same model of prayer that He had taught them much earlier. He teaches them how to pray. And as we've been saying, this isn't in particular a prayer to be prayed, but it is a way to pray all your prayers. It is a pattern for prayer. They needed to learn how to pray from Jesus as John's disciples needed to learn how to pray from John because the kind of praying that was being advocated and being taught and being demonstrated in Israel was a far cry from the kind of prayer that God wanted. It was vain, endless repetition. And Jesus spoke of that in His Sermon on the Mount, that endless repetition of the scribes and Pharisees who thought to be heard by God for their much speaking. Jesus said, 'When you pray, don't pray that way, don't pray publicly, don't pray proudly, don't pray calling attention to yourself so as to appear holy. Go in your closet and pray quietly and pray this way.' It was apparent that the lessons about how to pray needed to be taught to those who were following Jesus. They could find no better teacher than He for they had listened to Him praying and knew that He prayed in a very different way than what they had always heard. And so they asked to be taught and He teaches them and all of us how to pray.
We finally come, in flowing through this prayer, down to verse 4 and this wonderful statement, 'When you pray, say,” among these other things, “and forgive us our sins.' Here is Jesus, God in human flesh, telling us to ask for forgiveness. God is not a reluctant forgiver, nor is Christ. This is at the very heart of our praying: Ask forgiveness. This assumes that we need it and that God gives it. That basic assumption is the heart of the Christian gospel. We need forgiveness and God provides forgiveness when we ask. The forgiveness of sin, of course, is the greatest need of every soul, since unforgiven sins expose the soul to divine judgment and guarantee eternal punishment. We need forgiveness more than we need anything else. That's why the gospel can never be directed at matters that are peripheral. It's not about fixing your life. It's not about making you happy or prosperous. The gospel is a message about forgiveness and it therefore involves the fact that you understand your sin, you understand something of its nature and its consequences. There is a desperation that comes to the heart of one who understands the nature and consequence of sin so that that person looks eagerly to find, if in fact forgiveness might be available. And only, only from God our Father is that forgiveness available and only from Him is it possible, for all sin is a violation of Him and only the one violated can render the forgiveness.
This request assumes that we need forgiveness, such as we need bread. Bread deals with our physical life, forgiveness deals with our spiritual life. Forgiveness is the most important, but bread comes first because if we're not sustained in life, we can't even ask for forgiveness. We can't get to the spiritual needs unless we're alive. And so providing our physical sustenance allows us to live that we may seek our spiritual sustenance.
We understand this is the gospel here at this church. We've preached this through the years. In fact, I..I've preached primarily on the gospel all the years of my life. And yet I don't hesitate again to rehearse it, particularly in view of the fact that we are gathered around the Lord's Table. The issue here is about forgiveness. As I said in the little message I gave in the concert, there's only one problem in the world. It's not a difficult thing to sort out the issues of the world. There's just one problem, it is sin. It is sin. And it's not difficult to know what sin is because it's defined in the Bible. We know precisely and exactly what it is. We also understand that all have sinned and that no one is exempt from that indictment nor is anyone exempt from that potential judgment and punishment. It is a universal human problem. It is the cause of all that is wrong in this world and in this created order. And if you come to understand that the single problem is sin, and then you understand that the single cure is forgiveness, and then that there's only one who can forgive, God, you understand the message of the gospel.
God does not simply forgive, however, by looking the other way; does not forgive by just being indifferent toward our sin. He does not forgive by being soft. In fact, let me give you an understanding that I think is important to hold on to and it is this: Every sin ever committed by every person who has ever lived will be punished, every sin. No sin ever committed will go unpunished. I don't know if you've ever realized that, but that is in fact the case. Whatever a man sows, he also reaps. In Exodus 23:7 God says, 'I will not acquit the guilty.' In the prophecy of Nahum verse 3, there is an unequivocal statement, 'The Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.' And in Romans 1:18 it says, 'God's wrath is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.' No sin ever committed by you or me or anyone else who ever lives will go unpunished. All sin will be punished.
Scripture describes the relationship between God and all of humanity as a relationship of hostility. God is not the friend of sinners. He is their enemy. God hates sin and He hates the sin that has made man His enemy. Psalm 7:11 says, 'God is angry with the wicked every day.' Psalm 5:5 says, 'He hates those who do iniquity.' This is what the Bible calls enmity, or hostility and all sinners are essentially in the same boat. No one escapes that indictment. Whether you violate what you might perceive to be minor points of God's law, or not, you are as guilty as one who violates perhaps the more major commandments of God and does so more frequently than you do because James 2:10 says, 'If you've offended in one part of the law, you've broken all of it.' And the real truth anyway is that no one's sins are minor or trivial. All sin is against God and all people are born sinners. “There's none righteous, no not one.” They're all alike; they're all gone out of the way. They're all corrupt. They are all born with an insatiable lust for sin. They started out that way. “In sin did my mother conceive me,” says the psalmist. He's not talking about an illicit relationship or an illegitimate birth. He's simply saying from the moment of my conception I was a sinner. This is the desperate condition of humanity. We are spiritually dead, Ephesians 2:1, we are under God's holy anger, Ephesians 2:3, and we are without hope, Ephesians 2:12. This is a desperate, desperate state that man is in.
On the other hand, as wretched and sinful as we are, God is the absolute opposite, perfectly, infinitely, absolutely, flawlessly, thoroughly holy and righteous. And because of that, every sin has to be punished. His justice can only be satisfied by the full and complete punishment of every violation of His law and the due penalty determined is infinitely severe. It is eternal damnation. And nothing that we offer to God, nothing we do, religiously or morally, can ever change that. We have no capability to satisfy the justice of God, no ability to remove ourselves from under a just judgment. You might say that the predicament of the fallen sinner, all humanity, is as bad as it could be. Everybody is a sinner and the looming sword of God's judgment hangs over our necks. We are children of wrath, enslaved to sin; children of Satan without ability to love God, obey God, know God or please God. And the situation virtually is irreversible from a human perspective. We are accountable to a holy God whose justice must be satisfied. We are guilty sinners incapable of doing anything to satisfy that justice. And any hope of being justified, being made righteous before God seems completely impossible. In fact, to make matters worse, listen to what God Himself says. Proverbs 17:15, 'He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.' God says it is an abomination to justify a sinner. It is equal to declaring an innocent person guilty. In Proverbs 24:24 we read, 'He who says to the wicked, 'You are righteous,' peoples will curse him, nations will hate him.' It is not right, says God, to declare wicked people righteous. Again and again then, God declares that we are sinners and then repeatedly forbids anyone to declare a sinner righteous. Now this paints the picture of our problem.
But now for some good news: Scripture tells us God does exactly what He says you shouldn't do. We can't do it but He can. God does justify the ungodly. He does justify the ungodly. He does what He explicitly forbids us to do. It says in Romans 4:5, 'God, who justifies the ungodly.' How does He do it? Verse 7, 'He covers their sins.' Verse 8: 'He does not take into account their sin.' How can God do that? Cover their transgressions, not keep the record of their sins, justify the ungodly, how can He do that? How can He grant such forgiveness without compromising His own justice? How could He grant such forgiveness without compromising His own holiness and righteousness? How can He forgive sinners without breaking His own Word?
Well you know the answer, don't you? Our sins have already been punished, for God Himself made Jesus Christ the substitute who bore our punishment for us. That's the gospel. Forgiveness is man's greatest need because unforgiven sin has the most massive implications, certainly in time but vastly more importantly in eternity. Forgiveness is man's greatest need. Nothing even comes close to it. It determines heaven later and blessing here and now. We need bread and we recognize God as the source of our physical sustenance, but we need spiritual sustenance far more and to stay alive or to come to life spiritually requires forgiveness, forgiveness. And so we come then to this petition in verse 4, 'And forgive us our sins.' This comes to grips then with the greatest need. This presents to us the fact that the most bleak and horrific and apparently irremediable dilemma of our sin and its consequence has a solution. Here is Jesus, God of very God Himself, telling us forgiveness is available.
Now remember, as we've gone through this prayer and we've blended it with the Matthew prayer to get all the elements of it, we've seen God as the focus of everything: God as the source in the term 'Father,' God as sacred in the expression 'Hallowed be Thy name,' God as sovereign in 'Thy kingdom come,' God as superior in 'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' God as supporter or supplier, 'Give us each day our daily bread,' and now we come, number six, to God as Savior, God as Savior, 'And forgive us our sins.' We'll then see God as shelter in leading us not into temptation, and finally when we look back to Matthew, we'll see God as ultimately supreme.
So it's really a prayer that affirms the glory of the nature of God. And here we find that God is a forgiver of sinners. How wonderful this truth is. Sin has made us guilty. Sin has brought us under eternal condemnation. We stand on the brink of judgment justly. But there is hope. There is hope. Forgiveness is offered by God, who by nature is a forgiving God. Whether you're reading the prophets of the Old Testament or the apostles of the New Testament, you will find God our Savior, God who is eager to forgive, God who desires to remember sins no more, remove them as far as the east is from the west, bury them in the depths of the deepest sea. “Who is a pardoning God like Thee?” writes the prophet. But what is called for here is the necessity to ask, which means to admit that one is a sinner, which means to affirm that God can and will forgive on the basis of the substitutionary death of Christ, who bore in His own body our sins on the cross, 1 Peter 2:24.
Confessing sin then becomes essential, doesn't it? And this is the big barrier. You know, you've seen this through the years in the people you deal with. I see it as well. The big barrier is to recognize one's sinful condition, to redefine one's self in terms of utter wretchedness. We spend our whole lives trying to build a good self-image. We spend our whole lives trying to convince ourselves and everybody around us that we are basically good people. And all of a sudden to reverse that entire diagnosis and explain to ourselves and to everybody around us and particularly to God Himself that we now have come to a new understanding in which we now see ourselves as wretched, sinful, utterly incapable of any good that honors God, that is a huge, huge transition. It's that self-denying, self-hating that Jesus called for again when He said, 'You have to deny yourself in order to come after Me.' Confessing sin is essential. First John says in chapter 1, 'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.' But there's no forgiveness where there's no confession. In fact, that verse really describes a kind of person; the one confessing is the one being forgiven. Or to say it another way, people who have been forgiven are people who are by nature confessors of sin. It's not something you do once; it's a way of life.
This can be said about all who have been saved, all who have been rescued. They understand themselves to be sinners. They understand that there is forgiveness with God made available through the work of Christ and they have come, understanding their sinfulness, to seek that forgiveness. Therein lies the confession or the penitence, the repentance that is so essential.
So as we look then, for this morning anyway, briefly in preparation for the Lord's Table, as we look at verse 4, I want you to just focus on the term 'sins' there. This is the problem. This is the problem. Before we talk about the forgiveness, which is the solution, I want you just to look at a little more at the problem. 'All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,' Romans 3:23 says. 'There's none righteous, no not one,' Romans 3 earlier in the chapter says. And that sets up the situation for everything that's wrong in the entire world, every single thing. Sin disturbs every relationship in the human realm. Every human problem that exists between people, no matter what that relationship may be, every problem comes from sin. Sin has stirred up all chaos at every level in which chaos exists, whether it's in a marriage, or whether it's between nations.
Sin waits to attach every baby born into this world. Sin is the current monarch of the world. It rules the heart of every man, woman, boy, and girl. Sin is the lord over every human soul. Sin literally has contaminated every living person at every level: mind, will, affections, emotion, and conduct. Sin is the degenerative power in the human stream that makes men susceptible to disease, to illness, to injury, to death. Sin is the culprit in every broken marriage, every disrupted home, every shattered friendship, every argument, every battle, every conflict, every war, every pain, every sorrow, and every death. It is what Joshua 7:13 calls, 'That accursed thing, that accursed thing.' It is powerful. It is pervasive. It is sinister. And it will send every soul into hell and we're incapable to do anything about it. You can take all the New Year's resolutions you want to take. You cannot overcome your sin by making personal vows as a sinner, as a non-believer. We who are believers can take steps in self-discipline and in commitment. Because we have the Holy Spirit in us and the truth of God reigns in us through His Word, changes can be made.
But the unregenerate man can't pick himself up by his own bootstraps. Jeremiah 13:23 says, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin..the color of his skin? Can the leopard his spots? Then may you also do good who are accustomed to doing evil.' You can no more do good when all you do is evil than somebody can change the color of their skin, or a leopard can change his spots by wanting to. Sin dominates the mind, it dominates the will. It dominates the affections. It dominates the emotions. It defines us as in the kingdom of darkness, under the rule of Satan. It brings us under the eternal wrath of God. It makes life miserable. We are born unto trouble. We are subjected to vanity or emptiness. We have no peace, for there is no peace to the wicked. And millions of us die routinely day after day after day.
This is man's deepest need. He is a hopeless, helpless sinner. And here the word 'sins' is instructive for us. It is the word hamartia. There are a number of ways to define sin. One of the best ways is to look at the words that the Greek language uses. You don't see them in the English, although there are varying English words: sin, debt. Matthew says, 'Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.' Transgression, trespass, iniquity. Let me just give you five of the Greek words that perhaps will help to give you an understanding of the character or nature of sin.
The word used here by Jesus in this account in Luke is the word hamartia. It is a shooting word and it means to miss the target, to miss the mark. Then sin is a failure to hit God's standard. Sin is a failure to meet the requirement. And what is the standard? Well, Jesus said it in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount, 5:48, 'Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.' The standard is absolute, holy perfection, the very perfection of God. That's the standard. That's why also in the Sermon on the Mount earlier in that chapter, Jesus said to the Pharisees..or to the people rather, 'Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you're not going to be in My kingdom.' They were the most superficially, externally, religiously, ceremonially, righteous people around and they didn't come close to the standard, they missed the mark. The standard was established long ago. You find it in the book of Leviticus, 'Be ye holy, for I am holy.' And if you're not as holy as God is holy, you missed the mark. You missed the mark. It's not about relative goodness, it's about absolute holiness. It's not about being better than somebody else. You can always find somebody worse than you are. It's about absolute holiness. That's the mark. Miss that mark and you need forgiveness, and everybody does.
There's another word used in the New Testament for sin, not only hamartia, but parabasis, para-basis. It literally means “to step across.” Sin is going over the line. The borders are there, the barriers are there, this is right, don't go beyond it, stepping across the line, the line drawn between right and wrong, between good and evil. Sin steps over that line. And we all enter in to the forbidden territory, the forbidden territory of thought, or word, deed, action. Gta india setup free download for windows 7. We've all been there. We all go beyond what God has established as His perfect standard.
So we miss the mark. We step over the line. A third word used in the New Testament is anamia. Namia or namos means “law.” A is called the alpha privative. It negates it. It means “lawlessness,” “lawlessness.” Sin is then breaking God's law. It is rebelling against God. And it is the primary act of the proud, selfish sinner. A man kicks against the law of God because he wants to go his own way. Like the old soldier in Kipling's famous “Mandalay,” who said, 'Ship me somewheres east of Suez where the best is like the worst, where there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.' We want to live like that, apart from the law of God.
Sin is severe. It is missing the mark, stepping over the line, rebelling against God. Now, that brings us to words that are used also in this text, but in particular in the Matthew account of this prayer. In Matthew 6:14 and 15, Matthew uses a word that is translated in the New King James 'trespasses,' forgiving our trespasses, and in the NAS it's translated “transgressions.” The Greek word is paraptōma, paraptōma. It's a fourth word used for sin and it means to slip, stumble, tumble, fall. Sin then is literally lacking the self-control necessary to stand up. It means being out of control. It means being swept away by impulse or passion so as to be out of control. You understand that kind of image. People fall down, stumble, trip and fall because they lose control. That's one way to describe sin. It is a loss of control. That's the word “trespass” or “transgression” used in Matthew 6:14 and 15. This points to our impotence; it points to our inability.
We miss the mark. We miss the mark regularly because we can't reach the standard of perfection. It is utterly impossible for us. We step across the line all the time because we cannot restrain our evil hearts. We rebel against the law because we're driven by sinful pride. We stumble and fall because we have no self-control. We are impotent.
And then there's one other word, the fifth one. It is also the one used in Matthew 6: 'Forgive us our debts.' And you find it here in 11:4 of Luke in the second statement in verse 4, 'We ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.' And here it is used in its verb form as a synonym for sins, 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others,' here called debts. This is opheilēma, opheilēma. It means “a debt.” What is this saying about sin? It is saying every sin you have ever committed has put you in debt to God. You have defrauded God of what He is due and what He is due is righteousness and obedience. You have defrauded God. You have violated His will. You have rebelled against Him. You've stepped over His line. You've missed His mark. You have stumbled and fallen. And all of that has caused you to incur a debt with God, a debt that will be paid, that must be paid. And that's why it's synonymous with sin because sin by definition is a missing of the mark. By definition it is a crossing of the line. By definition it is a stumbling and a falling. By definition it is an act of rebellion.
But the effect of all of that is to incur a debt with God, a debt that must be paid, that must be paid. So when you come to God, Jesus says, say to God, 'I have missed the mark. I have stepped across the line. I have rebelled. I have tumbled and stumbled and fallen. And I have incurred a massive debt that I can't pay. Does this remind you of the Matthew 18 text, Jesus teaching about the man who came and owed an unpayable debt and fell on his face and asked forgiveness? And he was forgiven. This is the attitude that is required in this petition. This is all we ever ask from the sinner. But this is the part of the gospel that's so disturbing to people. Even seemingly Christian people find this too hard to incorporate in their gospel presentation. But this is essentially what our Lord is saying. 'Come and confess you have fallen short, you have missed the mark. Come and confess you've stepped over the line. Come and confess that your whole life is one great act of rebellion, stumbling, tripping, falling. Come and confess that you have incurred a massive debt before God that you could never hope to pay. And what do you do about it? Astonishingly and amazingly: How about this? Ask Him to forgive it. There is no way God could have been more gracious than that, absolutely no way. Just ask Him to forgive it. That's all.
You say, 'But if I confess that my life is nothing but missing the mark and stepping over the line and rebelling against God, that my life is nothing but sin, it's nothing but this continual incurring of debt as I stumble and fumble my way along. This is contrary to everything that I've trained myself to believe about myself.' That's exactly right. This is the hardest thing for the sinner to be honest about is his own wretchedness.
And you remember; I go back to it all the time, in Luke 4 when Jesus told the people in the synagogue at Nazareth that this is how they had to view themselves and they tried to kill Him. The sinner doesn't want to hear this. This is a hard part of the gospel and there's no diminishing of the one who does this. There is rather the lifting up and delivering and exalting of the one who does. The greatest of men came under the consciousness of sin. Read of David's confession in Psalm 32 and Psalm 51 as he poured out his soul in contrition, penitence and confession. Hear Peter cry to the Lord Himself, 'Depart from me for I am a sinful man, oh Lord.' Or hear Paul say, 'I am the chief of sinners.' Or hear the publican in Luke 18 pound his breast, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'
Now Jesus taught us all to pray like this, all of us, which refers us then to the universality of the problem. Nobody escapes the problem. We all have the problem of sin. We all have the opportunity then to ask forgiveness. But, you know, we wouldn't even do that unaided because it's part of our fallenness to be blind to this, not only blind to the fact of available forgiveness, but blind to the need of it, blind to the desperate need of it. And so to help us, God has placed the Holy Spirit into motion and John 16:8 says, 'The Spirit convicts the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.' The Holy Spirit comes into the unawakened heart, into the dead heart and helps it become alive to the reality of sin. The Holy Spirit prods and prompts and convicts the heart, John 16:8. A little later in that same chapter, it says, 'And then gives the truth.' The Holy Spirit comes to awaken the sinner to his sin and then to awaken the sinner to the gospel.
But no one is ever going to be forgiven who doesn't come and ask. Now we're talking primarily here about that forgiveness that comes at the point of our salvation, but this has application as well to those who are already believers, for we have to come back again and again and again — Don't we? --
routinely and ask for forgiveness. We have received judicial forgiveness in the broad, sweeping and general sense at the time of our salvation so that Romans 8 says there will never be any condemnation. No charge will ever stand against us for we have been completely forgiven. But there's another level of our life with God that requires a relational forgiveness. As we sin as believers even though that sin in the big picture of justification has been paid for by Christ, in the reality of fellowship with God it interrupts and so it has to be dealt with as well. And we'll talk more about that next time, the distinction between those two. But what Jesus is saying to us here is the best that could ever be said to us, our greatest need can be met, our greatest dilemma can be solved, our greatest fear can be ended, our greatest disaster, eternal hell, can be avoided if we just ask, if we just ask. Let's pray together.
We ask together, Lord, forgive us our sins. We ask because You've told us to. We thank You that most of us have come in that initial time of penitence and confession and we've asked for forgiveness and received full forgiveness by faith in Jesus Christ. But there are some here who have not, some who have been up to this point either ignorant or unwilling to ask for forgiveness. Oh God, how we pray the Holy Spirit would come now and work in their heart to convict of sin and righteousness and judgment, to show them the horror of their true condition and the fearsome and eternal consequences of it. And may they be compelled, driven to plead for forgiveness, knowing that You wouldn't have told us to ask if You weren't prepared to give.
You are a saving God, a forgiving God who loves to deliver sinners from hell. And we thank You that You stand ready to forgive all who ask and that no one who comes would ever be turned away. And for those of us who are Christians, we have been forgiven in that forensic sense, that judicial sense. But like Peter who didn't need to be bathed completely because he had already been, we need to have our feet washed. We too confess our sins and ask that You would wash our feet for they, even though we are among the forgiven, they have become dirty as we have continued to live in this fallen world. Forgiveness is necessary, we know, before we can partake of the bread and the cup. If we were not sure of our justification, if we were not sure of our confession leading to sanctification, we would then bring great judgment on ourselves. So, Lord, we do confess and ask for Your washing and Your cleansing, whether it's the whole washing of justification or whether it's that foot cleansing of sanctification that keeps the relationship all that You would want it to be, Lord. Do whatever cleansing work needs to be done in such a way that we can take of the bread and the cup in a manner that discerns Your body and glorifies You and brings to us blessing and not chastening.
I want us to go back to 1 John chapter 1. We have launched out on a study of the epistles of John, 1, 2, and 3 John. Chapter 1, of course, is critically important as we have been learning. And some number of weeks ago we started into a discussion of the subject 'confession of sin, a certain proof of salvation.' It is the purpose of John in this epistle to offer proofs of salvation, to offer tests by which a true believer can be distinguished from the false. One of those is the confession of sin. 'If we say,' says verse 8, 'that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His Word is not in us.'
There is a distinct line drawn between those who are true believers and those who are not. The false deny their sin, the true confess it. In fact, that really is the glory of the gospel, isn't it, at its heart, the glory of the gospel, the value of the gospel is that it provides complete forgiveness of all sin for the sinner who embraces the gospel. And the forgiveness that God provides for us is so comprehensive that it removes from the believer all defilement, all shame, all guilt, all punishment forever and replaces it with righteousness, security and eternal reward. This is the gift of forgiveness. It is inviolable, it is irrevokable, nothing and no one can cause the forgiveness of God granted to the believer to be taken back, to be rescinded. No one can talk God out of it, or change His mind, or successfully bring up an accusation against that believer that would cause God to cancel that forgiveness. The consummate promise that we cling to with regard to that is found in the eighth chapter of Romans, verse 1 starts that chapter by saying, 'There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus..there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.' If you are Christ's, there is no condemnation for you.
At the end of that chapter in verse 28 we read that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. God takes everything and works it to the good of those who belong to Him. There is no condemnation, there is only good on behalf of those who are Christ's, God sees to it, because that's how He planned it, 'For whom He foreknew He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.' Whoever it was that He chose in eternity past He determined would come to the very image of Christ in eternity future. Whoever He chose He will bring to glory. Whoever He chose to be in the image of Christ will realize that reality. And whom He predestined, in verse 30, He called and whom He called He also justified and whom He justified, these He also glorified. There is no condemnation of those who are in Christ, there never can be any condemnation of those who are in Christ because God takes everything that happens in our lives, good-bad and indifferent, and works them to our good. And that is because in the beginning in eternity past He chose us for salvation to be conformed to the image of His Son and He will bring that to realization in eternity future so that all He predestined are called to salvation. They are then justified and they are to be glorified. If all of this is true, and it is, verse 31 asks, 'If God is for us, who is against us?'
If God has so determined that our forgiveness is irrevokable, inviolable, cannot be cancelled, never to be removed, if that is true that God is for us in that sense, who successfully can be against us? If God didn't spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all,' in other words, if God gave the gift of His Son to accomplish this eternal forgiveness, 'then will He not also with His Son freely give us all things necessary to the preservation of that forgiveness?' That is to say, if He gave the greatest gift, His own Son in death, to secure our forgiveness, will He not give us whatever lesser gift is necessary to sustain that forgiveness. Verse 33 says, 'Who will bring a charge against God's elect?' Paul is saying, 'Who can successfully bring an accusation that sticks? God is the one that justifies, there is no higher court, there is no superior judge and if we are acquitted by God, if we are declared righteous by God based upon the work of Jesus Christ, there is no higher court, there is no successful accusation that can stand against us. Who can condemn us?, verse 34 asks. 'Christ Jesus is He who died, yes rather who was raised and who's at the right hand of God who also intercedes for us.' No one can bring a successful accusation against us before God because as the judge of all the earth He's already rendered His unchangeable verdict. No one can come with any successful accusation before that throne of God because we have a lawyer for the defense, Jesus Christ, who is our advocate, who is at the very right hand of God interceding for us. Because of these realities, he asks the question, 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword?' And skipping down, 'In all these things,' in verse 37, 'we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. I'm convinced that neither death nor life, or angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created things shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'
What all of this is saying is that when God forgives your sin, it is absolutely permanent. Back in Romans chapter 4 verses 7 and 8 taken from Psalm 32 say, 'Blessed are those whose sins or lawless deeds have been forgiven and whose sins have been covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account.' We are blessed because God will never take our sins into account. The Old Testament says, 'He's buried them in the depths of the deep blue sea. He's removed them as far as the east is from the west,' that's infinity, 'And He remembers them no more.' Galatians 3 tells us that Christ having borne the curse for us, we are no longer under the curse of sin, freed from that curse because Christ became a curse for us.
If you are a Christian then, all your sins for all time have been forgiven. Ephesians chapter 1 reminds us in verse 7 that we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace. And He has much more grace than we have sin, Romans 6 says, 'Where sin abounds grace does much more abound.'
There is no way a forgive person can then be reversed, as it were, out of that condition of forgiveness and held before the judgment bar of God to pay ultimately for his own sins. I just want to make it very clear that all our sins are forgiven and yet in spite of this gracious, merciful generosity on God's part toward all of those who repent and embrace Jesus Christ we are still, according to 1 John 1, we are still known as Christians because we continue to confess our sins. And that is what verse 9 is saying, if we are confessing our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And we looked at that in some detail and pointed out that is not a command, that is a statement of fact. True believers are habitual confessors who therefore demonstrate that their sins are continually being forgiven. We are still known as penitent. We are still known as eager to repent, as confessors of sin.
In our previous study we looked into this verse and into the context a little bit and we saw that John is providing one of these several tests to verify a true believer. There were those people with whom John was dealing who claimed to be in the light. They claimed to have fellowship with God. But in actuality they walked in darkness because they refused to confess their sins. They are so described in verses 8 and 10. Very different is the pattern of a true Christian. It is the pattern of our lives to be constant confessors, never denying our sin but always acknowledging our sin and always enjoying the on-going benefits of that confession and that repentance. In fact, we never come to the table of the Lord without the attitude of confession. We never come to the table of the Lord, such as we're doing tonight, without a heart searching to see if there's any sin in our lives that could cause us literally to bring chastening upon us by partaking of this table without due consideration of the confession of our sins. The godly are confessors.
We learn that throughout the Scripture. I quoted to you from Romans chapter 4, 'Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,' and I said that comes from Psalm 32. Psalm 32 is prayed by David. David was a believer. David was a justified man. David was a child of God and yet he confessed his sin. He said, 'When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me, my vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to Thee, my iniquity I didn't hide, I said I'll confess my transgression to the Lord and Thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin.' David was a believer. David was a child of God and yet when he didn't confess his sin he felt tremendous pressure. It dried up the fluids in his body. It distressed him. He ached all over. What was happening was the guilt that was flooding his mind was having an impact on his body. And then he confessed and he opened his heart. He felt the free flow of God's forgiveness and restoration. Those of us who are believers then, even though all our sins have been forgiven, are nonetheless confessors..confessors. And as I said, this isn't a command to confess, it's a statement of fact. Believers by nature do this. It is the result of the work of God in them. It is the result of the work of the Spirit in them. It is the result of the work of the Word in them, all of which convicts of sin. So even though we have been forgiven, we are very much aware of our sin, very eager to confess it, repent of it and be washed.
This is not a command in 1 John 1. But there are commands in the Bible that tell believers to seek forgiveness. Luke 11:4, what did Jesus teach the disciples? He taught them to pray this way, 'Forgive us our sins..forgive us our sins.'
Now we have a problem here. You see where I'm going? We have a dilemma. Why would I be saying, 'God, forgive my sins,' when I know He's already forgiven my sins? How am I going to reconcile this?
Well, some teachers increasingly popular, by the way today, claim that since we are already forgiven we must never ask God to forgive our sins. To do so, they tell us, is an expression of unbelief. It's an expression of doubt. And, in fact, you are calling God's Word into question. Why would you ever ask the Lord to forgive your sins when He has told you all your sins are already forgiven? And so they insist that 1 John 1:9 has nothing to do with Christians but it is an invitation to non-Christians. When I was writing the book on forgiveness, I used some illustration from the best-known contemporary proponents of this view, a man named Bob George who teaches on the radio, a popular author, he says that Christians who pray for forgiveness, quote: 'Live in daily insecurity, doubting whether all their sins are forgiven.' He and several others who teach similarly claim that the only way to enjoy your liberty in Christ is to forget your sin, forget about it all together and just embrace God's forgiveness as a fully accomplished reality because of the work of Christ and never again pay any attention to your sin.
Well there's enough truth, of course, in saying that all your sins are forgiven to confuse people with that. And, you know, that's a..that would be a great way to live, pay absolutely no attention to your sin as if it didn't exist. That's what historically and theologically is known as antinomianism, disregard for the law of God and your violation of it. Our sins are all forgiven, that's true. But to say therefore we should pay no attention to our sin and if we ever were to ask forgiveness we would be disavowing, doubting or denying the promise of God indicates that you may understand some of the truth but you don't understand all the truth. It is true that all our sins are forgiven but that's not all the truth. From the perspective of God's judgment throne, the sins of believers are forgiven..forgiven, even before they're committed and even if they're never confessed. Did you get that one? Before the judgment throne of God the sins of believers are forgiven even before they are committed and even if they are never confessed because God has said He has forgiven all our sins.
As a righteous judge, He has done that because He thoroughly and completely punished Jesus Christ for our sins. The price is paid in full and therefore God by justice cannot hold us guilty because the price has been paid.
But that's not all the truth in this matter and to say that God therefore pays absolutely no attention to our sin is ridiculous and to say that you are to pay no attention to your sin is also ridiculous and dangerous. To say that we can sin and completely ignore it and bear no guilt and no remorse and offer no confession and ask for no forgiveness will, believe me, bring down on such a person's head the discipline and the displeasure of God. The idea that a Christian should never pray a penitent prayer seeking forgiveness is unbiblical, it's heretical. So-called Christians who think they can sin and never need to seek their Father's forgiveness is seriously deceived, but that is an increasingly popular view.
Another advocate says, I'm quoting, 'You've probably heard people pray like this, 'And, Lord, we ask You to forgive us for all our sins,' but why do forgiven Christians ask God's forgiveness? Do they not believe they are forgiven? If they believe they're forgiven then why do they ask for it repeatedly? Their prayers reveal unbelief.' Same approach. A few paragraphs later he proposes what he thinks is a better way to pray. This is what he writes, 'How frequently do you hear someone pray and..Lord, I thank You that I stand before You a completely forgiven man, thank You that I am as spotless as the driven snow? How frequently do you hear people pray that?' he asks. Those words are rare but they thrill the heart of God because they demonstrate faith that a man believes God who says we are forgiven in Christ. There is no way you're going to cozy up to God if you feel He is increasingly upset with you. To feel secure you must believe that He does not hold one single sin against you.'
Here is a bold statement he writes, 'It is impossible for a Christian to ask God's forgiveness for a besetting sin the umpteenth time and then snuggle up to Him. He will feel like God's patience is being stretched to the limit,' end quote. I don't even know what cozy up and snuggle up to God means. But what he is saying is, you're never going to enjoy the presence of God until you stop thinking about your sin. And if you really want to get close to God, pay no attention to your sin. How much sense does that make? That's a happy doctrine for an antinomian. That's a wonderful conclusion to come to if you don't want to pay any attention to your sin. Very convenient theology.
But don't be under any illusions. Just because you tolerate your sin doesn't mean God does. In fact, the Bible teaches the opposite. Luke 11:4, Jesus said to the disciples, 'Here's how you pray, 'Forgive us our sins.'
You say, 'Well what do people do with that verse?' Well, those who argue against praying for forgiveness say that that verse applies to the Old Covenant under Moses' law. They say that under the Old Covenant, under the law of Moses, under the legal dispensation of the past and maybe some future legal dispensations, some of them refer to, that prayer applied. In other words, when you ask for forgiveness you got it and the next time you asked you got it, and the next time you asked you got it. And that's how it was, they say, under the Old Covenant.
Guess what? That's never how it was under the Old Covenant..never. People were saved under the Old Covenant the same way they're saved under the New Covenant. They cried out to God about their sinful condition and God in mercy forgave all their sins..that's Psalm 32, 'Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute sin at all. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.' Justification in the Old Testament was exactly the same as it is in the New Testament, as it is now..the sinner cries out to God, God forgives based upon the death of Jesus Christ. God applied the sacrifice of Christ to penitent sinners in the Old Testament even before Jesus died. The New Covenant was already in operation, though it wasn't ratified until Calvary. There wasn't any dispensation that operated like that, that if you confessed your sin it's forgiven, if you confess it's forgiven, if it's confessed..nobody would ever believe the Bible teaches a conditional salvation that comes and goes with every sin and be able to defend that biblically. There never was salvation by law. There never was salvation by works. And if they're trying to say that was some legal code that operated in time past and might operate in some time in the future, then they don't understand the role the law played. The way people were saved in the Old Testament was when they realized that they could not save themselves. No amount of penitence, no amount of confession, no amount of law keeping could overcome the fact that they could not..could not get over the just judgment of God against their sin. They needed a substitute. The substitute was pictured in the Old Testament sacrificial system. There would come one day one whose death would be in their place. This is a way they have to get around the issue.
A letter came into our ministry from someone, 'The Lord's prayer belongs to the Old Covenant,' the writer said, 'when law, not grace, was the governing rule.' Does he mean that forgiveness under the old economy was the way that was doled out one confession at a time so that's the way you became saved? Of course not..of course not. He went on to say, 'Conditional forgiveness does not apply to Christians.'
Now I'm kind of belaboring this because I want you to understand a little bit about the dilemma. People who try to say that that command to ask the Lord to forgive your sins is some legal command borrowed out of another dispensation in which salvation was on different terms, don't understand that salvation has always been on the same terms. It also reveals an elemental misunderstanding and that is that forgiveness is always by grace, never by some mechanical means. That is to say salvation is given as a gift to the penitent sinner who knows that he can't make things right with God no matter how many confessions he makes. Salvation was by grace, it's always been by grace, it's never been by anything but grace. The whole argument of Romans 4 is that Abraham was justified by grace and not by works. Penitence of the Old Testament, you can hear the cry of the penitent, Psalm 6, Psalm 32, Psalm 38, Psalm 51, Psalm 102, Psalm 130, Psalm 143 and many other places. You can't get away with turning the disciples prayer into some dispensational relic. Jesus said, 'You need to pray, 'Forgive our sins, Father.'
Well how are we then to understand this apparent contradiction? Simple, really, they're two kinds of forgiveness..two kinds of forgiveness. It is true, as I said, that all our sins are forgiven insofar as the judgment of God is concerned because He meted out that judgment in Christ. It is true. It is also true that we need to continue to ask the Lord to forgive our sins. Both are true, both are taught in Scripture. I'll show you how they harmonize if you'll turn to the thirteenth chapter of John, and this in the words of our Lord Himself. John chapter 13, it is the upper room, the familiar account of Jesus with the disciples. They're sitting at the table, nobody has provided a very important part of any social gathering like this where they're reclining at a table, and that was the washing of feet. There was apparently no servant available to do that, none of the disciples had deferred and taken the humble place to do it on behalf of the others. Jesus manifesting again His own humility as well as seeing in this a very important lesson, verse 4 says, 'Rose from supper, laid aside His garments, took a towel, girded Himself around, poured water into the basin, began to wash the disciples' feet and wiped them with a towel which He was girded.' The most menial of all tasks. They wore sandals. The roads were either dusty or muddy. You didn't recline at a banquet without properly washing your feet. This was the commonest of courtesies done by the lowest of servants. But no one did it, so Jesus did it. And it provides an opportunity to help us to understand these two kinds of forgiveness.
He came to Simon Peter, said to him, 'Lord, do You wash my feet?' I mean, Peter understood that this is ridiculous, what are You doing down there washing my dirty feet? It ought to be the other way around.
Chapter 1: Love Pain Forgiveness (2001 Zip Code
Jesus answered and said to him, 'What I do you do not realize now, but you shall understand hereafter.' It will become clear to you in a while.
Peter said to Him, with his usual brashness, he doesn't even hesitate to command Christ, 'Never shall You wash my feet! Never!'
Jesus answered him, 'If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.'
Whoa! Simon Peter said to Him, 'Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.' I want a part with You. I want a relationship with You. Wash everything, Lord, everything.
But Jesus said to him, and here is the lesson, 'He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean. And you're clean.' Boy, that's so insightful. Here is the distinction in an unmistakable analogy. Bathing..Peter took an appropriate bath before he came. He was basically clean, he didn't need his head and his hands, he didn't need to be literally doused. He had just accumulated dirt on his feet. Bathing illustrates one kind of washing, one kind of forgiveness. It illustrates the forensic forgiveness of justification. That is to say it indicates those who are justified by God as being declared free from the penalty of sin, free from the penalty of sin forever. You've already been justified, you've already been declared righteous because even though Jesus hadn't died yet, Peter had already been justified before the cross God applying the cross before it even took place. You have already been declared free from the penalty of sin forever by God who has His justice satisfied through the sacrifice of Christ. So bathing illustrates the forensic forgiveness of justification, washing illustrates the fatherly forgiveness of sanctification.
He says you're clean. You appear before God as clean and righteous. You are free from the penalty of sin in your justification. But then there's the matter of your sanctification and you need to be continually washed from the presence of sin and the power of sin. You don't need to be justified again, you just need to be being sanctified. And it is in that fatherly sense, it is in that sanctifying sense that Jesus tells us..Say to the Father..Father, forgive us our sins.
You're not doubting justification. You have been justified before God. You have been set free from the penalty of sin. But be honest and realistic and though you are set free from the penalty of sin, you have not been delivered from the presence and power of sin and while you don't need to be justified again, you need to be continually washed. Sin needs to be confessed and forsaken as a regular pattern of life, not before a judge who will otherwise condemn us to hell, but before a Father who will otherwise chasten us. And that too is clear from 1 John 1:9. We go on confessing, and He goes on forgiving and cleansing.
The on-going confession does not bring justification, the on-going confession is related to sanctification. The forensic decision regarding our freedom from the penalty of sin has been made, it's inviolable, it can't be reversed, we pointed that out. The fatherly concern for our holiness and our sanctification is related to the on-going confession and forgiveness. In Christ we have forever satisfied the judge. He will never be displeased. But God as Father is displeased when we behave sinfully.
Now to point this out is to clarify the issue. There are two kinds of forgiveness..judicial forgiveness, or forensic forgiveness. The forgiveness that was purchased in full by the atonement that Jesus Christ rendered on our behalf. That kind of forgiveness frees us from the threat of eternal punishment, eternal condemnation and that's why those who are in Christ Jesus are not under condemnation, Romans 8:1. It is the forgiveness of justification. But then there's not just the judicial, there's the paternal forgiveness. This is granted by God not as judge, but as father. He is still grieved when His children sin. Yes we are justified, but He also wants us to be sanctified, to be conformed to the image of Christ. He is pleased with that justification. He is displeased with the breach of sanctification. Forgiveness of justification takes care of judicial guilt, but it does not eliminate fatherly displeasure. We have been delivered from the penalty of sin by justification, but we haven't been delivered from the presence and the consequences of sin. That is an on-going process and that's why we are always confessing and always being forgiven and being cleansed. Your justification is a fixed and settled reality. Your sanctification ebbs and flows dependent on how you deal with the sin in your life. You are covered with the righteousness of Christ that pleases God and settles the issue of your eternity. In terms of punishment, there never will be any. But the sin in your life, in your humanness, displeases the loving Father, retards your sanctification which also displeases Him and muddies up the image of Christ which you and I are to manifest.
Are we supposed to believe that because Jesus Christ atoned for our sins God no longer cares about our sins? Of course He cares, why do you think the Bible is full of commands? What do these people do with them? What do they do with all the commands to holiness? One Christian confused about these things sent an e-mail, 'Are you saying to me..are you saying God will become angry with His own children? If we're clothed with Christ's righteousness, how could God even see our sin? And if He can't even see our sin..that's a quick conclusion to his point..if He can't even see our sin how could He ever be displeased by it? I thought God was never displeased with any Christian because He accepts us in Christ as if we were as righteous as Christ and He's well pleased with His beloved Son. Besides, if we believe God gets angry with His own children when they sin, can we honestly say we believe He's forgiven us in the first place?'
Boy, people have gotten confused about this. The answer to that last little question that he offers in that e-mail is God does get angry with His children, He gets very angry with them. And to show you that, I want you to turn to Hebrews chapter 12. God has to be angry with sin, I don't care whose sin it is, because it violates His holiness. To say that when God looks at you He sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ is symbolic language, in a sense, it's forensic language. It doesn't mean He's ignorant about your sin. There isn't anything God doesn't know. Listen to Hebrews chapter 12, 'You have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, 'My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you're reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves He..what?..He disciplines.'
And some of these guys say, 'Well, that's..that's discipline in the sense of instruction and training.' Well, you've got to read the next line. 'And He scourges every son whom He receives.' That doesn't sound like training. That sounds like punishment. 'It is..verse 7..for discipline that you endure, God deals with you as with sons for what son is there whom his father does not disciple? But if you are without discipline of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.' You're not even a child of God if you're not under divine discipline because every child of God is going to feel divine discipline, he's going to feel the scourge of God on his back or her back because God is concerned about your holiness. And if you're not being disciplined by God, you don't belong to God, you are illegitimate.
Furthermore, verse 9 says, 'We had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. You respected your father because he had a holy standard, if that was the situation. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seen best to them, but He disciplines us for our good that we may share His holiness,' that's sanctification. God sees your sin, God is displeased with your sin, God disciplines you because of that sin, scourges you because you are His child and He cares about you progressing in holiness. And if all of this was with some warm and fuzzy training, verse 11 wouldn't make any sense. 'All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful.' Whatever it is God is doing is sorrowful, it's a tough experience. 'Yet to those who have been trained by it, it afterwards yields peaceful fruit of righteousness.' That's what God is after, the two key words..holiness and righteousness connect to sanctification.
Now this is not shear punishment with no goal but the administration of holy justice, the death of Christ took care of that. But this is discipline and while it is without ultimate judgment, it is not without elements of punishment necessary to any corrective. In fact sometimes the punishment can be so severe that the person dies. In the Corinthian church there were some people who were weak and some were sick and some were dead because their sins were manifest at the Lord's table, remember that? There's correction in this discipline. There's correction in this chastisement and it is based on God's displeasure over sin. Listen, get this in your mind, God always has the same response to sin, always the same response, never has any other response than the response of displeasure, righteous indignation whether it's a non-believer sinning or a believer sinning. God's reaction is always the same because perfect holiness is always offended by iniquity. But He is particularly offended by it in one of His own children because He longs for that child to be in the image of His holy Son. There is a punitive component in His discipline. There is an element of shame in His discipline, words like scourging, chastening, rebuking all contain the idea of disapproval, punishment in a parental sense, even fatherly indignation and fatherly anger. It is not the wrath of abused justice, it is the wrath of abused grace.
Moses is an illustration. Moses knew God. Moses was justified. And yet in Deuteronomy chapter 1 we read, 'The Lord heard the sound of your words and He was angry and took an oath saying, 'Not one of these men, this evil generation, shall see the good land which I swore to give to your fathers except Caleb the son of Jephunneh, he shall see it and to him and to his sons I will give the land on which he has set foot because he has followed the Lord fully.' And then Moses said, 'The Lord was angry with me.' The Lord was angry with me..the Lord got angry with Moses and Moses was His child. And then the Lord got angry with Aaron in the incident at the foot of Mount Sinai where the Israelites had under Aaron's tolerances built a golden calf. Deuteronomy 9 verse 20, 'The Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, so I prayed for Aaron at the same time.'
God gets angry with those that are His. Sometimes He gets angry enough to destroy them. There is a sin, even among those who are believers, unto death, we'll see that in 1 John chapter 5. Solomon..Solomon was a man who knew God and yet in 1 Kings 11:9 it says, 'Now the Lord was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned away from the Lord.' I think there were times when Jesus demonstrated this, He got angry at the disciples, righteously indignant when they refused to let the children to come to Him in Mark 10. He got righteously indignant with Peter when He said, 'Get thee behind Me, Satan.' He harshly rebuked James and John in Luke chapter 9. So the idea that God is somehow indifferent to sin because His children are committing it is absolutely ridiculous. And whenever God comes at His children in discipline over sin, there is an element in the discipline of punishment.
Listen to what it says in Psalm 89 verses 29 to 33, 'So I will establish his descendants forever and his throne as the days of heaven. If his sons forsake My law and do not walk in my judgments, if they violate My statutes and do not keep My commandments, then I will punish their transgression with the rod, their iniquity with stripes but I will not break off my loving kindness from him nor deal falsely in My faithfulness.' When God is talking of one of His own and He makes a promise, He may get angry and He may discipline but He'll never break the promise. In fact, God's discipline is the proof of His love for us. His anger over our sin and corrective punishment is the proof of His desire for our well being.
So the forgiveness..back to 1 John 1..the forgiveness in 1 John 1:9 is parental forgiveness, relational forgiveness, it's restorational. It's like Psalm 32, Psalm 51, 'Restore to me the joy of Thy salvation.' It's the kind of discipline that deals with our sin and brings us to repentance, confession, forgiveness and restored joy. It is not the washing of regeneration, that's already done. It's not the forgiveness of justification, that's already done. It isn't the bath. We need one bath and many times need our feet washed.
A Puritan commentator, Matthew Henry, wrote, 'The Christian religion is the religion of sinners, of such as have sinned in whom sin in some measure still dwells. The Christian life is a life of continued repentance, humiliation for and mortification of sin, of continual faith in thankfulness for and love to the Redeemer and hopeful joyful expectation of a day of glorious redemption in which the believer shall be fully and finally acquitted and sin abolished forever.' Beautifully said and that is why Scripture teaches us to be continually confessing our sin, continually asking the Lord to forgive us and cleanse us and He continually will do that. He is faithful and just to forgive us. Faithful because we're His and He made a covenant with us. And just to forgive us. How is He just to forgive us? Because the sins have already been..what?..paid for. He is faithful as a covenant-keeping God to His children to whom He has given the gift of salvation. And He is just when He forgives because the sins have been paid for.
One important thought I need to add. When we confess and our sins are forgiven, does that nullify all the consequences of our sin? Answer: no..no. There's no way to get back the consequences that sin created. That we can't undo. And Scripture is clear about that. When you sin there are consequences. The consequences may never ever be mitigated. David is a classic illustration of that. Sins with Bathsheba, he sins having her husband, in effect, killed. Then he comes to God and he pours out his heart in Psalm 32 and Psalm 51, literally the purest kind of penitence and confession and seeking forgiveness. And he can't get sin off his mind, 'My sin is ever before me,' Psalm 51:3, 'My sin is ever before me, it's ever before me. All I see is my sin, my sin, my sin, my sin, my sin.' That was the first consequence. Confessed, forgave but there it stayed in his mind. He's not going to forget that. He's not going to forget that he committed adultery with another man's wife. He's not going to forget that he was so passionate with that situation that he actually had her husband killed. But Proverbs 28:13 is this promise, 'He who conceals his transgression will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion.'
You can't undo what's been done. But a forgiving God will render compassion. The consequences..David couldn't forget his sin. That's the first consequence. Second consequence, the child born to Bathsheba dies. Next consequence, David's wives defiled in broad daylight by his son Absalom. Horrific. Another consequence..Absalom attacks his father, dies a horrible death riding along getting his head caught in a tree. What could God say to David? Second Samuel 7:14, God promised, 'I'll be a Father to him and he'll be a son to Me. And when he commits iniquity, I'll correct him with the rod of men and the strokes of the sons of men. But My loving kindness shall not depart from him.' I can't fix all the consequences, but I will show him My loving kindness..I will show him compassion.
At the heart of God's pledge to His children is forgiveness and compassion. If you sin, He'll discipline you. Why? To bring you to the place of confession so that your joy can be restored and your holiness and your righteousness. And then when you face the consequence of your sin, He will minister to you His loving kindness, His grace and mercy and His compassion.
The aim of confession then is not to erase consequences, it's to restore joy. And then the consequences are what they are. Your sins have consequences. They're rocks thrown in the pond and the ripples go and they touch every shore. But God does promise when you've confessed and repented that He will show you loving kindness and compassion because you are His eternal child. Your justification is settled forever. Don't cover your sin, confess it. That's what true Christians do. You've been bathed that you need continually to have your feet washed as they get dirty walking in your fallenness. If you don't confess, you'll be chastened. If you do confess, you may never be able to change the consequences but because you're God's child He'll come to you in compassion and loving kindness and minister to you. He disciplines His impenitent children because He loves them and He wants them to be holy and righteous and you can be holy and righteous even though the consequences are still painful. And while you're going through the pain of the consequences, He will flood you even if you're a broken-hearted child, with His mercy and compassion. That's why we are eager to confess our sins. We want that forgiveness, that compassion and that kindness to mitigate against the circumstances we've created.
And that's why coming to the Lord's table we are called to confession. It's a constant reminder of how important this habitual spiritual exercise is. The Lord gives us this as a reminder to look at our hearts and confess, and He also disciplines us when we don't. Take the positive and confess your sins and you won't suffer the discipline.
Our Father, as we come now to this table to partake, we do confess we are sinners. We hold nothing back. We are sinners in every sense. To be totally depraved doesn't mean we're all as bad as possible but it does mean that every part of our faculties is sinful. Nothing in our humanness escapes it. And even though we have been declared righteous before You, and freed from the penalty of sin, we're not sin from the power and presence of sin and it's still there and we still cry with Paul, 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? ' We feel like there's a corpse attached to us and it's possible to shake. So we come admitting our sin, confessing our sin and asking, O God, that You would grant us that parental, fatherly forgiveness that will cause You to stay Your discipline, that You'll give us back the joy of our salvation. And if we have sinned in such a way as to set consequences in motion, would You, O God, give us that compassion and that loving kindness and sympathy that will bear us up in the midst of those circumstances, those consequences? Clean us and wash us now as we come to this table, even as You washed the feet of the disciples as they sat at the table of that first communion service.
The following is a speech delivered by Eva Kor, opening the 'Biomedical Sciences and Human Experimentation at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes—The Auschwitz Connection' symposium, June 7, 2001, Berlin.
Dear Fellow survivors, Dr. Markl, Dr. Sachse, Doctors, Scientists, Researchers and Guests.
Fifty-seven years ago I was a human guinea pig in Auschwitz. Much progress has been made in order for us to be here at the KWI/MPS, the institute that was in charge of our experiments. I thank you for holding this symposium. I hope we can all learn from the past and begin to heal our pain.
Twenty years ago, I began thinking about the other Mengele Twins and started actively searching for them. From the time I began to the time that we made our historic trip to Auschwitz and held the Mock Trial in Jerusalem in 1985, I have mailed out nearly 12,000 letters looking for my fellow survivors. With the help of my late twin sister, Miriam Mozes Zeiger, in 1984 we succeeded in locating 122 individuals/survivors of the Twins' experiments.
I care deeply for the Mengele Twins. Even though I am the founder and the President of CANDLES, I am not a spokesperson for all the twins. I am speaking today only for myself. I know that some of my fellow survivors do not share my ideas. But, we are all here to be honest, learn the truth and learn from this most tragic chapter of human history.
My speech is divided into two parts: 1: How I survived Auschwitz and how it felt to be a child guinea pig in Mengele's lab. 2: The lessons that I have learned from this tragedy.
It was the dawn of an early spring day in 1944 when I arrived in Auschwitz. Our cattle car train came to a sudden stop. I could hear lots of German voices yelling orders outside. We were packed like sardines in the cattle car, and, above the press of bodies, I could see nothing but a small patch of gray sky through the barbed wires on the window.
Our family consisted of my father, age 44; my mother, age 38; my oldest sister, Edit, age 14; my middle sister Aliz, age 12; and Miriam and I, who were only ten years old.
As soon as we stepped down onto the cement platform, my mother grabbed my twin sister and me by the hand, hoping somehow to protect us. Everything was moving very fast. As I looked around I suddenly realized that my father and two older sisters were gone—I never saw any of them ever again.
As Miriam and I were clutching my mother's hand, an SS hurried by shouting, 'Zwillinge! Zwillinge! Twins—Twins?' He stopped to look at my twin sister and me because we were dressed alike and looked very much alike.
'Are they twins?' he asked.
'Is it good?' asked my mother.
'Yes,' nodded the SS.
'Yes, they are twins,' said my mother.
Without any warning or explanation, he grabbed Miriam and me away from Mother. Our screaming and pleading fell on deaf ears. I remember looking back and seeing my mother's arms stretched out in despair as she was pulled in the opposite direction by an SS soldier. I never got to say 'good-bye' to her and I never got to do so because that was the last time we saw her. All that took 30 minutes. Miriam and I no longer had a family. We were all alone. We did not know what would happen to us. All that was done to us because we were born Jewish. We did not understand why this was a crime.
We joined a group of about eight sets of twins and waited at the edge of the railway tracks under SS supervision. Eight more sets of twins and one mother joined our group.
We were taken to a huge building and were ordered to sit on bleachers naked while our clothes were taken away. It was late in the afternoon when our clothes were returned with a big red cross painted on the back. Then our processing began.
When my turn came, I decided that I would not allow them to do to me whatever they wanted, and fought back. When they grabbed my arm to tattoo it, I began to scream, kick, and struggle.
Four people—two SS and two women prisoners—restrained me with all their strength, while they heated a pen-like gadget to red hot, then dipped it in ink and burned into my flesh, dot-by-dot, the number capital letter A-7063.
We were taken to a barrack filled with girls, all twins, ages 1 to 13 years old. Shortly after our arrival, everybody rushed to the front of the barrack where the evening meal was being distributed. The food consisted of a very dark, 2½ inch slice of bread and a brownish liquid they called coffee. Miriam and I looked at each other and although we had not had anything to eat or drink in 4 days, there was no doubt in our minds that we could not eat that bread because it wasn't kosher.
Then we offered our portions to the two girls who were showing us around. They grabbed it before we changed our minds, and laughing at our innocence, said, 'Miriam and Eva, you can not be fussy here. You have to learn to eat everything if you want to survive.'
After the evening meal, the two girls briefed us about everything in the camp. It was then that we learned about the huge, smoking chimneys and the glowing flames rising high above them. We learned about the two groups of people we had seen on the selection platform and what had happened to them. We learned we were alive only because Dr. Mengele wanted to use us in his experiments.
It was late in the evening when Miriam and I lay down on the bottom bunk bed to sleep. I could not sleep even though I was physically tired and mentally drained. As I was tossing and turning, I noticed something big and dark moving on the floor. I began counting—one, two, three—four…five… I jumped up from my bunk bed screaming, 'Mice. Mice.' I was always scared of mice when I encountered them on our farm in Transylvania.
'Those are not mice, they are rats. You will have to get used to them because they are everywhere,' yelled out a voice from the top bunk bed.
Before trying to sleep again, Miriam and I went to the latrine at the end of the barrack. There on that filthy floor were the scattered corpses of three children. Their bodies were naked and shriveled and their wide-open eyes were looking at me. Then and there, I realized that could happen to Miriam and me unless I did something to prevent it. So I made a silent pledge: 'I will do whatever is within my power to make sure that Miriam and I shall not end up on that filthy latrine floor.
From that moment on, I concentrated all my efforts, all my talents and all my being on one thing: survival.
In our barrack, we, the children, huddled in our filthy beds crawling with lice and rats. We were starved for food, starved for human kindness and starved for the love of the mothers we once had. We had no rights, but we had a fierce determination to live one more day—to survive one more experiment. No one explained anything to us nor did anyone try to minimize the risks to our lives. On the contrary, we knew we were there to be subjects of experiments and were totally at the mercy of the Nazi doctors. Our lives depended entirely on the doctors' whims.
Nothing on the face of the earth can prepare a person for a place like Auschwitz. At age 10, I became part of a special group of children who were used as human guinea pigs by Dr. Josef Mengele. Some 1,500 sets of multiples were used by Mengele in his deadly experiments. It is estimated that fewer than 200 individuals survived.
In Auschwitz, we lived an emotionally isolated existence. During the whole time I was in Auschwitz, Miriam and I talked very little. All we could say to one another was 'Make sure you don't get sick' and 'Do you have another piece of bread?' It took every ounce of my energy to survive one more day, to live through one more experiment. We did not cry because we knew there was no help. We had learned that within the first few days.
I remember being hungry all the time. I had a big decision to make very night when we received our daily ration of bread approximately 2½ inches. It was an agonizing decision each night when I would ask myself, 'Should I eat the bread tonight? If I do, then I will have a whole day tomorrow without any food.' The days seemed to be very long and without any food, they were even longer. While I was awake, I could feel the hunger—a pang in my stomach that sent pain through my skinny body. It was logical that I should save the bread for the next day. But If I put it under my head, by the next morning, it was gone—stolen or eaten by the rats.
I became very ill after an injection in Mengele's lab. I tried to hide the fact that I was ill because the rumor was that anyone taken to the hospital never came back. The next visit to the lab, they measured my fever and I was taken to the hospital.
The next day a team of Dr. Mengele and four other doctors looked at my fever chart and then declared, 'Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live.'
I was all alone. The doctors I had did not want to heal me. They wanted me dead. Miriam was not with me. I missed her so very much. She was the only kind and loving person I could cuddle up with when I was hungry, cold, and scared.
I refused to accept their verdict. I refused to die!
I made a second silent pledge, 'I will do anything in my power to get well and be reunited with my sister, Miriam.'
In the hospital barrack, we received no food and no medication. People were brought to this barrack to die or to wait for a place in the gas chamber. I was very ill, burning up with fever, between life and death. I remember waking up on the barrack floor. I was crawling because I no longer could walk. I wanted to reach a faucet at the other end of the barrack. As I was crawling, I faded in and out of consciousness. I kept telling myself, 'I must survive. I must survive.'
After two weeks, my fever broke and I began to feel stronger.
I decided to devise a plan that would show a gradual improvement in my condition. So, when the so-called nurse would come in and place the thermometer under my arm and leave the room, I would take it out, read it and if it was too high, I would shake it down a little. Then I would stick it back under my arm with the end sticking out. After three weeks my fever showed normal and I was reunited with Miriam. What a happy day that was!
Would I have died, Mengele would have killed Miriam with an injection to the heart and would have done comparative autopsies on our bodies. This is the way most of the twins died.
Three times a week we walked to the main Auschwitz camp for experiments. These lasted 6 to 8 hours. We had to sit naked in a room. Every part of our body was measured, poked and compared to charts and photographed. Every movement was noted. I felt like an animal in a cage.
Three times a week we went to the blood lab. There we were injected with germs and chemicals and they took a lot of blood from us.
I have seen some twins fainting from the great amount of blood that they lost. I believe the Nazis wanted to know how much blood can a person lose before it can cause death.
The experiments were in various stages and Mengele had an unlimited supply of guinea pigs in the camp. If a twin died as a result of the experiments, the other twin was injected with a phenol injection into the heart and comparative autopsies were done on both twins. When one pair of twins was lost to the experiments, another pair of twins would come in on the next transport to replace the pair who had been killed.
On a white snowy day, January 27th, 1945, four days before my 11th birthday, Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets and we were free. We were alive. We had survived. We had triumphed over unbelievable evil.
I have told you my story because there are some important lessons to learn from it: I, Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Mengele's medical experiments have learned that human rights in medical experimentation is an issue that needs to be addressed. Those of you who are physicians and scientists are to be congratulated. You have chosen a wonderful and difficult profession; wonderful because you can save human lives and alleviate human suffering but difficult because you are walking a very narrow line. You have been trained to use good judgment, to be calm, cool and collected but you can not forget that you are dealing with human beings. So, make a moral commitment that you will never, ever violate anyone's human rights or take away anyone's human dignity. I appeal to you to treat your subjects and patients with the same respect you would want if you were in their places. Remember that if you are doing your research solely for the sake of science and not for the benefit of mankind, you have crossed that very narrow line and you are heading in the direction of the Nazi doctors and the Dr. Mengeles of the world. Medical science can benefit mankind but medical science can also be abused in the name of research.
We are meeting here as former adversaries. I hope we can part as friends.
My people, the Jewish people, are hard-working, intelligent and caring. My people are good people. We did not deserve the treatment we received. No one deserves such treatment.
Your people, the German people, are hard working, intelligent and caring. Your people are good people but you should never have permitted a Hitler to rise to power.
There is a lot of pain that we, the Jewish people, and you, the German people carry around. It does not help anyone to carry the burden of the past. We must learn to heal ourselves from the tragedies of the Holocaust and help our people to heal their aching souls.
I would like to share with you my ultimate act of healing from the horrors of 56 years ago. I do realize that many of my fellow survivors will not share, support, or understand my way of Healing. There might be some people on both sides who will be angry with me. I understand that. I believe we should not go on suffering forever. This is the way I healed myself. I dare hope that it might work for other people.
I have forgiven the Nazis. I have forgiven everybody. At the fiftieth anniversary observance of the liberation of Auschwitz, in a ceremony attended by my children, Alex and Rina and by friends, I met with a Nazi doctor, Dr. Hans Münch, a former SS doctor at Auschwitz, and with his children and granddaughter.
In July, 1993, I received a telephone call from Dr. Mihalchick of Boston College who asked me to lecture at a conference on Nazi medicine. Then he added, 'Eva, it would be nice if you could bring a Nazi doctor with you.' I said, 'Dr. Mihalchick, where am I going to find a Nazi doctor? The last time I looked they were not advertising in the yellow pages.'
'Think about it,' he said.
In 1992, Miriam and I were co-consultants on a documentary on the Mengele Twins done by ZDF, a German television company. In that documentary they had interviewed a Nazi doctor by the name of Dr. Hans Münch.
Chapter 1: Love Pain Forgiveness (2001 Zipper
I contacted ZDF to ask them if they would get me Dr. Münch's address and phone number, in the memory of my sister who had died the month before. An hour later, I had his address and phone number. A friend of mine, Tony Van Renterghem, a Dutch Resistance fighter, contacted Dr. Münch. Tony called him and then called me to tell me that 'Yes, he's alive, willing to give you a videotape interview.' That was July, 1993. By August, I was on my way to meet Dr. Münch.
In August of 1993, I arrived at Dr. Münch's house. I was very nervous. I kept asking myself, 'How would I feel if he treated me like nothing—the way I was treated in Auschwitz?' Dr. Münch treated me with the utmost respect. As we sat down to talk, I said to him, 'Here you are—a Nazi doctor from Auschwitz—and here I am—survivor from Auschwitz—and I like you, and that sounds strange to me.' We talked about many things. I asked him if, by any chance, he knew anything about the operation of the gas chambers. And he said, 'This is the nightmare I live with.' Then, he proceeded to tell me about the operation of the gas chambers and that when the bodies were dead, he had signed the death certificates.
I thought about it for a moment, and then I said, 'Dr. Münch, I have a big request to make of you. Would you please come with me to Auschwitz in January, 1995, when we will observe fifty years to the liberation of Auschwitz and sign a document at the ruins of the gas chambers and in the presence of witnesses about what you have told me?' He said yes. I went home delighted that I was going to have a document about the gas chambers at Auschwitz—a document that would help me combat the Revisionists who say that there were no gas chambers.
I tried to think of a way to thank Dr. Münch. Then, one day, I thought, 'How about a letter of forgiveness?' I immediately realized that he would like it. I also realized that I had the power to forgive. No one could give me this power and no one could take it away.
I began writing my letter to Dr. Münch, and friends who spell better than I do met with me to correct the letter. One of them threw a question at me. 'Would you be willing to forgive Dr. Mengele?' It was an interesting question, and I thought about it and decided that I could. Well, if I forgave Mengele, I might as well forgive everybody. I had no idea what I was doing. I only knew that it made me feel good inside that I had that power. In January, 1995, my children, Alex and Rina, my friends and I, and Dr. Münch with his children and granddaughter arrived in Auschwitz.
On January 27, 1995, we were standing by the ruins of one of the gas chambers. Dr. Münch's document was read and he signed it. I read my Declaration of Amnesty and then signed it. I felt a burden of pain was lifted from my shoulders. I was no longer a victim of Auschwitz. I was no longer a prisoner of my tragic past. I was finally free. So I say to everybody: 'Forgive your worst enemy. It will heal your soul and set you free.'
The day I forgave the Nazis I forgave my parents because they did not save me from a destiny in Auschwitz and I also forgave myself for hating my parents.
My latest thoughts on how to heal the pains of the past are different than most victims. As I understand it, most governments and world leaders bear a heavy burden in trying to keep the world at peace. In my opinion, they have failed miserably by not advocating, encouraging and facilitating survivors of tragedies such as the Holocaust to forgive their enemies, which is an act of self-healing.
Most governments and world leaders advocate and support one thing only—justice. Justice does not exist, and by demanding justice they condemn the victims to life long suffering.
Let's explore a possible scenario that could have changed things for both victims and victimizers.
All the Nazi criminals would have been encouraged to come forward to testify to the crimes they committed, in return for their freedom. The perpetrators or victimizers would also pay financial retribution for 5 to 10 years and those funds would have gone into a special reconciliation fund to assist the victims in rebuilding their lives. The victims could testify if they so choose.
The victimizers' testimonies would validate the victims' suffering.
As it is today, I still don't know what was done to us. But, Mengele could have solved this problem by testifying. Both the victims and the victimizers—by verbalizing their painful memories—could have started the healing at once.
As it has happened, the victims were silent and hurting. The victimizers were silent, hurting and hiding. The victims anguished in pain. The victimizers anguished in pain, shame, and fear of being caught. The added tragedy of all this is that the victims have passed on to their children a legacy of pain, fear and anger. The victimizers have passed on to their children a legacy of pain, shame, and fear.
How can we build a healthy, peaceful world while all these painful legacies are festering underneath the surface?
I see a world where leaders will advocate and support with legislation the act of forgiveness amnesty and reconciliation rather than justice and vindictiveness.
We have seen in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda, that victims have become victimizers and victimizers have become victims.
Let's try something new to end this vicious cycle.
I would like to end my lecture by saying that I hope this courageous gesture of Dr. Markl and the Max Planck Society becomes an example to the world of how we might learn to cope with the past. As a German friend of mine has said, 'Why can't your people and my people be friends?'
I would also like to thank Dr. Benno Müller Hill for his years of friendship and his role in pioneering this symbolic apology.
I would also like to quote from my Declaration of Amnesty: 'I hope, in some small way, to send the world a message of forgiveness; a message of peace, a message of hope, a message of healing.
Let there be no more wars, no more experiments without informed consent, no more gas chambers, no more bombs, no more hatred, no more killing, no more Auschwitzes.
Thank you.
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Chapter 2: The Voice | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | October 31, 2002 | |||
Recorded | 2002 | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 63:09 | |||
Label | Jive | |||
Producer |
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Syleena Johnson chronology | ||||
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Singles from Chapter 2: The Voice | ||||
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Professional ratings | |
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Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
Allmusic | [1] |
Chapter 2: The Voice is the third studio album by American singer Syleena Johnson. It was released by Jive Records on October 31, 2002 on cassette and November 26, 2002 on CD in the United States.[2][3] While Johnson reteamed with R. Kelly and Joel Kipnis to work on the album, Chapter 2 includes a diverse roster of collaborators including Hi-Tek, Dwayne Bastiany, Mike Dunn and Scorpio as well as duo Carvin & Ivan who contributed four songs. Upon its release, it debuted and peaked at number 104 on the US Billboard 200 and entered the top 20 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. With 'Tonight I'm Gonna Let Go', the album's lead single, Chapter 2 produced Johnson's first international top forty hit.
Track listing[edit]
No. | Title | Writer(s) | Producer(s) | Length |
---|---|---|---|---|
1. | 'The Voice'/'Intro' |
| Hi-Tek | 4:33 |
2. | 'Faithful to You' | Bastiany | 3:30 | |
3. | 'Now That I Got You' |
| Bastiany | 3:237 |
4. | 'Dear You' | Carvin & Ivan | 2:53 | |
5. | 'Guess What' | R. Kelly | R. Kelly | 3:32 |
6. | 'I'm Gon' Cry' |
| Carvin & Ivan | 3:31 |
7. | 'Is That You' | Dunn | 4:30 | |
8. | 'Tonight I'm Gonna Let Go' |
| Dunn | 3:54 |
9. | 'If You Play Your Cards Right' | Kevin McCord | Scorpio | 6:01 |
10. | 'No Words' | Carvin & Ivan | 3:46 | |
11. | 'So Willingly' |
| Carvin & Ivan | 3:46 |
12. | 'Guitars of the Heart (Happy)' | JK | 5:40 | |
13. | 'I Believe in Love' |
| 3:51 | |
14. | 'Outro' |
| Hi-Tek | 0:59 |
15. | 'Tonight I'm Gonna Let Go (Remix)' (featuring Busta Rhymes, Rampage, Sham & Spliff Star of Flipmode Squad) |
| 4:18 | |
16. | 'Joined at the Hip' | R. Kelly | R. Kelly | 3:55 |
- Sampling credits
- 'Tonight I'm Gonna Let Go' contains re-played elements from 'Sweet Green Fields' by Seals and Crofts.
- 'If You Play Your Cards Right' is a cover of the 1981 song by Alicia Myers.
- 'Tonight I'm Gonna Let Go (Remix)' samples on 'Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See' by Busta Rhymes.
Personnel[edit]
Credits adapted from the album's liner notes.
|
|
Charts[edit]
Chart (2002) | Peak position |
---|---|
US Billboard 200[4] | 104 |
US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums (Billboard)[5] | 19 |
US Heatseekers Albums (Billboard)[6] | 1 |
References[edit]
- ^Allmusic review
- ^https://www.amazon.com/Chapter-2-Voice-Syleena-Johnson/dp/B00452J4ZQ/
- ^https://www.amazon.com/Chapter-Syleena-Csjive-41815-Johnson/dp/6307336315/
- ^'Syleena Johnson Chart History (Billboard 200)'. Billboard. Retrieved July 4, 2018.
- ^'Syleena Johnson Chart History (Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums)'. Billboard. Retrieved July 4, 2018.
- ^'Syleena Johnson Chart History (Heatseekers Albums)'. Billboard. Retrieved July 4, 2018.
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chapter_2:_The_Voice&oldid=870285304'