I’ve Sinned Horribly, Is There Any Hope?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, we get emails often from people who are essentially asking the
00:00:09.240 | question, "Is there any hope for me? Is there any hope for me after I've sinned
00:00:13.000 | in a really stupid way and am now paying the price for my foolish choices?" What
00:00:17.960 | would you say to someone in that situation?
00:00:20.520 | Tony, Psalm 107 has been, over the years, a huge encouragement to me in my own
00:00:28.120 | wrestling with a sense of failure at times and wondering, "Is there a
00:00:33.200 | future for ministry or even of faith?" And probably as much as any other psalm,
00:00:39.560 | Psalm 107 has been the one that has made it possible for me to reach out and
00:00:45.800 | rescue, I think, some folks who feel like there's just no hope for them. They've
00:00:51.480 | sinned too many times or they've sinned in too horrible a way for God to have
00:00:58.000 | any future for them. So let me just share with you, or the folks that might be in
00:01:04.000 | that condition, what I meditated on yesterday. I was reading through the
00:01:09.480 | Psalms again and came to Psalm 107, which begins, "Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for
00:01:15.080 | He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever." And that's the refrain
00:01:20.200 | that comes again and again. The psalm ends, "Whoever is wise, let him attend to
00:01:26.200 | these things. Let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord." So it begins
00:01:31.120 | and it ends with the steadfast love of the Lord. And then four times, there's
00:01:36.040 | these four stories or these four stanzas where it repeats, "They cried to the Lord
00:01:44.160 | in their trouble. He delivered them from their distress. Let them thank the Lord
00:01:49.760 | for His steadfast love, for His wondrous works to the children of men." So four
00:01:54.280 | times you read that very same pair of verses. But what makes it so amazingly
00:02:01.440 | encouraging is that the situations in which people cried out to God are the
00:02:08.560 | very kinds of situations that people get themselves into now and feel hopeless,
00:02:14.160 | which is why this psalm is so hopeful. So here's one example. "Some sat in darkness
00:02:19.840 | and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and irons, for they had
00:02:26.880 | rebelled against the words of God and spurned His counsel." And I could just
00:02:33.720 | hear hundreds of people saying, "I've spurned God's counsel. I knew it was
00:02:38.800 | right and I threw it away." And that's exactly what these people are doing. And
00:02:44.440 | so you tend to say, "Well, there's no hope for them." And the next thing you read is,
00:02:48.840 | "They cried to the Lord in their trouble and He delivered them from all their
00:02:53.960 | distress." Or another one was later on, it says, "Some were fools through sinful ways
00:03:01.680 | because of their iniquities. They suffered affliction. They loathed any
00:03:07.680 | kind of food and they drew near to the gates of death." So these are people who,
00:03:14.120 | because they've acted so stupidly, they've got AIDS. Or they've wrecked
00:03:20.080 | their minds with mind-altering drugs. Or they've gotten some kind of kidney
00:03:25.000 | failure because of excessive alcohol. Or their lungs are shot for 60 years of,
00:03:30.760 | you know, two packs of cigarettes every day and they feel like, "God owes me
00:03:35.600 | nothing. There's just no hope for me at all." And that's exactly these folks'
00:03:39.720 | situation. They don't even want to eat anymore. They're at the gates
00:03:44.240 | of death. They're in the midst of affliction because they've been fools.
00:03:47.600 | And yet they cried to the Lord in their trouble. He delivered them from all
00:03:52.800 | their distresses. And therefore, the hope that this psalm brings to people who
00:04:00.280 | feel like there's just no hope is incredible. You get to the end of the
00:04:03.920 | psalm and it says, "He turns rivers into a desert." That's bad. "And he turns desert
00:04:10.480 | into pools of water." That's good. Then it says, "He pours contempt on princes."
00:04:15.040 | That's bad. "And he raises up the needy from affliction." And I think the point is,
00:04:19.920 | God is free to come down here and do whatever He has to do, whether it's hard
00:04:27.200 | things or easy things, good things or bad things. God's going to do these things
00:04:31.200 | for the sake of lifting up the upright. So it ends with, "The upright see it and
00:04:37.280 | are glad, and all wickedness shuts its mouth. Whoever is wise," and this is what
00:04:42.160 | I'd say, Tony, to whoever's listening, "Whoever is wise, let him attend to these
00:04:47.480 | things. Let him consider the steadfast love of the Lord."
00:04:52.320 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email
00:04:56.440 | your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org
00:05:00.400 | you will find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources
00:05:04.200 | from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
00:05:09.400 | [BLANK_AUDIO]