“The Lord’s Ways are not Our Ways”

Isaiah 55:6-9

9/21/08

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    In this text the Lord tells us that His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways.  And lately it seems that we have been experiencing this first-hand.  The Lord has suddenly taken Betty Jones and Emma Mau away from us to be with Himself in heaven, He has allowed the health of others in our congregation to decline, He has allowed (if not brought) various trials and hardships into our lives, and He continues to allow wars, disasters, and epidemics to plague the world in which we live.  We are told in the SIsaiah 55:6-9
“The Lord’s Ways are not Our Ways”
    In this text the Lord tells us that His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways.  And lately it seems that we have been experiencing this first-hand.  The Lord has suddenly taken Betty Jones and Emma Mau away from us to be with Himself in heaven, He has allowed the health of others in our congregation to decline, He has allowed (if not brought) various trials and hardships into our lives, and He continues to allow wars, disasters, and epidemics to plague the world in which we live.  We are told in the Scriptures that God is love.  If this is so, then why does He allow all this evil?  God’s ways seem strange and foreign to us; they don’t make sense and are beyond our understanding.  If we were asked to evaluate God’s thoughts and ways towards us based on what we observe and experience, we might conclude that He’s angry at us and wants to punish us for our sins.  But today’s O.T. text assures us that this is not the case.  If God hated us and only wanted to punish us, why would He tell us to seek Him, to return to Him, and to forsake our sins?  Why would He promise us His compassion and His abundant pardon, if He wanted to send us to hell? 
    God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways.  And today’s text shows us two very big instances in which His thoughts and ways differ from ours.  The first is that God is near, not far away from us; the second is that He abundantly forgives sin.  First, even though experience and circumstances might suggest that God isn’t around and that He can’t be found, here He tells us that He is not far away but near and that He can be found when we seek Him.  Apparently, God likes to play “hide and seek.”  I’ve used this illustration with my confirmands:  When you play “hide and seek,” it isn’t that the person who hides himself ceases to be present; he just ceases to be seen.  He is somewhere in the room; he’s just hidden himself behind some furniture, in a closet, or under a bed.  The point of the game is for the seeker to try to find the hider.  But a good hider doesn’t want you to find him.  He wants you to give up in the end.  Well, God plays this game, too, only He’s not very good at it, because He always gives Himself away.  He tells us where He’s hiding, so that it’s easy for us to find Him.  God wants us to find Him.  The only ones He remains hidden to are those who refuse to look for Him where He says He is.  And that’s man’s way:  Man’s way is to look for God where He is not.  Now, it’s not that there are some places where God isn’t present.  He is in the forests, up in the mountains, on the beach - in fact, He is everywhere, but He doesn’t reveal Himself as the compassionate and forgiving God that He is in those places.  Instead, He has chosen some specific things behind which to hide, where if we go looking for Him there, we’ll find Him.  And these things are His Word, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.  If we look for God in these places, we will find Him revealing Himself to us in His Son, Jesus Christ.  We will see His love manifested towards us in sending His Son to die on the cross for our sins.  We will hear His words of absolution and forgiveness.  We will see Him washing away our sins, as He cleanses us with Christ’s blood in our Baptism.  We will see Him feeding us with Christ’s body and blood as we eat and drink of the bread and wine consecrated in the Lord’s Supper.  But God also locates Himself in our various vocations, in the crosses we must bear, and in our death.  When we look for Him in these places we’ll see Him using us and others as instruments to provide for our needs, and we’ll watch as He works through the suffering of our lives for our good.  In these ways God is near, not far from us.  He is not a God who is “out there,” but one who has come down to us in the flesh to give His life for us on the cross, now locating Himself among us in things like His Word and His Sacraments, our vocations and our sufferings.  When we seek the Lord in these places, that’s where we’ll find Him, because that’s where He’s promised to be.
    Of course, this is not our way.  It makes no sense to the world to look for God in the specific places where He’s promised to be for us.  Unbelievers think they can find God anywhere they look for Him, vehemently denying that God could possibly be present in suffering and death.  Many Christians also have a hard time believing that Isaiah 55:6-9
“The Lord’s Ways are not Our Ways”
    In this text the Lord tells us that His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways.  And lately it seems that we have been experiencing this first-hand.  The Lord has suddenly taken Betty Jones and Emma Mau away from us to be with Himself in heaven, He has allowed the health of others in our congregation to decline, He has allowed (if not brought) various trials and hardships into our lives, and He continues to allow wars, disasters, and epidemics to plague the world in which we live.  We are told in the Scriptures that God is love.  If this is so, then why does He allow all this evil?  God’s ways seem strange and foreign to us; they don’t make sense and are beyond our understanding.  If we were asked to evaluate God’s thoughts and ways towards us based on what we observe and experience, we might conclude that He’s angry at us and wants to punish us for our sins.  But today’s O.T. text assures us that this is not the case.  If God hated us and only wanted to punish us, why would He tell us to seek Him, to return to Him, and to forsake our sins?  Why would He promise us His compassion and His abundant pardon, if He wanted to send us to hell? 
    God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways.  And today’s text shows us two very big instances in which His thoughts and ways differ from ours.  The first is that God is near, not far away from us; the second is that He abundantly forgives sin.  First, even though experience and circumstances might suggest that God isn’t around and that He can’t be found, here He tells us that He is not far away but near and that He can be found when we seek Him.  Apparently, God likes to play “hide and seek.”  I’ve used this illustration with my confirmands:  When you play “hide and seek,” it isn’t that the person who hides himself ceases to be present; he just ceases to be seen.  He is somewhere in the room; he’s just hidden himself behind some furniture, in a closet, or under a bed.  The point of the game is for the seeker to try to find the hider.  But a good hider doesn’t want you to find him.  He wants you to give up in the end.  Well, God plays this game, too, only He’s not very good at it, because He always gives Himself away.  He tells us where He’s hiding, so that it’s easy for us to find Him.  God wants us to find Him.  The only ones He remains hidden to are those who refuse to look for Him where He says He is.  And that’s man’s way:  Man’s way is to look for God where He is not.  Now, it’s not that there are some places where God isn’t present.  He is in the forests, up in the mountains, on the beach - in fact, He is everywhere, but He doesn’t reveal Himself as the compassionate and forgiving God that He is in those places.  Instead, He has chosen some specific things behind which to hide, where if we go looking for Him there, we’ll find Him.  And these things are His Word, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.  If we look for God in these places, we will find Him revealing Himself to us in His Son, Jesus Christ.  We will see His love manifested towards us in sending His Son to die on the cross for our sins.  We will hear His words of absolution and forgiveness.  We will see Him washing away our sins, as He cleanses us with Christ’s blood in our Baptism.  We will see Him feeding us with Christ’s body and blood as we eat and drink of the bread and wine consecrated in the Lord’s Supper.  But God also locates Himself in our various vocations, in the crosses we must bear, and in our death.  When we look for Him in these places we’ll see Him using us and others as instruments to provide for our needs, and we’ll watch as He works through the suffering of our lives for our good.  In these ways God is near, not far from us.  He is not a God who is “out there,” but one who has come down to us in the flesh to give His life for us on the cross, now locating Himself among us in things like His Word and His Sacraments, our vocations and our sufferings.  When we seek the Lord in these places, that’s where we’ll find Him, because that’s where He’s promised to be.
    Of course, this is not our way.  It makes no sense to the world to look for God in the specific places where He’s promised to be for us.  Unbelievers think they can find God anywhere they look for Him, vehemently denying that God could possibly be present in suffering and death.  Many Christians also have a hard time believing that God locates Himself behind suffering and the cross.  They even go so far as to deny that He could be truly present in things like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  And we here are not immune to a worldly way of thinking, since we still have to battle our old sinful nature on a daily basis.  If we were always in agreement with the thoughts of God and our ways were always His ways, we’d never ask, “Why, God?  Why me?  Why this?”  When we ask questions like these, what we are saying is that we believe that God is far away from us, that He’s hidden Himself somewhere where we can’t find Him, that He’s abandoned us in our suffering and doesn’t care about us.  And if we fail to see Him in the places where He’s near and has located Himself for us, then He will indeed remain hidden and far away, and we’ll cease to know of His compassion and forgiveness.
    We must seek Him “while He may be found” and call upon Him “while He is near,” because there is going to come a day when He won’t be near and when He won’t allow Himself to be found.  That day will be the day when Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead.  Then there will be no second chance for those who have refused to seek Him and call upon Him.  At that time they won’t receive His compassion and His abundant pardon, but His eternal wrath and condemnation.  This will happen to them, because they insisted on their own thoughts and ways, not the Lord’s thoughts and ways.  But “Now is the day of salvation,” writes the Apostle Paul.  Our thoughts and ways lead to death, but God’s thoughts and ways lead to life.  Now is the time when God reveals His thoughts and ways in His Son, Jesus Christ, so that we might confess our sins, forsake them, trust in Him and live.  We are directed to seek God in Jesus.  In Jesus God reveals Himself as He hides behind human flesh.  There He can be found.  There He is near and makes Himself known as the compassionate and forgiving God that He is.  And so, it’s urgent that we seek Him, forsake our sins, and call upon Him now in Jesus Christ, that we might receive His compassion and forgiveness.
    This brings us to the second way in which God’s thoughts and ways differ from ours, and that is, that God forgives sins abundantly.  By nature our thoughts about God are that He is not a forgiving God, that He is a God of wrath, and that He would rather punish than forgive.  Our thoughts are that if He forgives at all, we have to earn it from Him, we have to ask Him for it before we get it, and He gives it out to us only in fractions.  But this is not the abundant pardon that God promises us in today’s text.  God’s way is not the way of wrath and punishment, but the way of forgiveness.  And that forgiveness is complete, we don’t have to ask Him for it before we get it, and it was earned by Jesus Christ alone, given to us as a gift. 
    God’s forgiveness comes at the expense of His Son, who suffered the wrath and punishment that we deserve on account of our sins on the cross.  His obedience, suffering, and death alone has earned God’s forgiveness for us.  To try to earn God’s forgiveness by our own efforts - whether it be by our love or our faith - is to try to get forgiveness another way, a way that is not God’s way.  God has given us only one way to obtain His forgiveness, and that is through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. 
    This forgiveness is all gift; it is neither earned nor deserved.  Nor does God put the condition on it that we must first ask Him for it before He gives it to us.  There are so many Christians out there who will say, “Yes, God’s forgiveness is a free gift, neither earned nor deserved,” and then they’ll turn right around and say, “But you have to ask Him for it, before you can be forgiven.”  They’ll even use the Lord’s Prayer to support their argument, as the Lord teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or they’ll quote I John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Both of these verses, they say, teach us that we have to ask for God’s forgiveness before He’ll give it to us.  But God’s way is to forgive us even before we ask.  No one asked Jesus to come and die on the cross for their sins.  And you didn’t ask to be baptized when you were just an infant.  Ask yourself then, “How many of my sins did God forgive when He baptized me?” or “How many sins does God forgive me when the pastor speaks the Lord’s absolution to me?  Yes, I confessed my sins, and God forgave me just as He promised, but was it my asking for His forgiveness that got me forgiven, or was I asking for what God had already given me?”  It’s not that God doesn’t forgive you until He hears you apologize and ask Him for His forgiveness.  He forgives you even before you ask Him.  Our way is to ask for something first in order to get it.  But God gives us His gifts first and then tells us to ask for them!  He wants you to confess your sins to Him (sins that He’s already forgiven), so that you can then hear the forgiveness that He gives you freely in Christ spoken over your sins.  In this way we are comforted, when our conscience bothers us for not having confessed every individual sin that we’ve committed.  God’s forgiveness is complete, not fractional.  He gives you 100% forgiveness, enough forgiveness to take care of all your sins, known or unknown, confessed or unconfessed, past, present, and future.  That’s abundant pardon; that’s God’s way.
    God’s thoughts and ways are not our thoughts or our ways.  “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,” He says, “so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  We may not understand some of the thoughts and ways of God and why He does what He does and allows what He allows.  Sometimes the cross and the suffering in this life cause us to wonder what God’s up to and whether He’s around or not.  But when you are in doubt about His thoughts and ways, consider what David says when he writes, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him.”  God may not reveal all of His thoughts and ways to you, but He has revealed His thoughts and ways to you with regard to His love towards you and His salvation in His only-begotten Son.  God’s thoughts towards you are thoughts of mercy and forgiveness for the sake of Christ, crucified for you.  His ways are that you confess your sins, forsake them, and seek the Lord where’s He located Himself for you in His Word and His Sacraments.  Then He will no longer be hidden to you, but you will find Him, He’ll make His love known to you, and you’ll hear the abundant pardon and peace He speaks to you for Christ’s sake.  Amen.
God locates Himself behind suffering and the cross.  They even go so far as to deny that He could be truly present in things like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  And we here are not immune to a worldly way of thinking, since we still have to battle our old sinful nature on a daily basis.  If we were always in agreement with the thoughts of God and our ways were always His ways, we’d never ask, “Why, God?  Why me?  Why this?”  When we ask questions like these, what we are saying is that we believe that God is far away from us, that He’s hidden Himself somewhere where we can’t find Him, that He’s abandoned us in our suffering and doesn’t care about us.  And if we fail to see Him in the places where He’s near and has located Himself for us, then He will indeed remain hidden and far away, and we’ll cease to know of His compassion and forgiveness.
    We must seek Him “while He may be found” and call upon Him “while He is near,” because there is going to come a day when He won’t be near and when He won’t allow Himself to be found.  That day will be the day when Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead.  Then there will be no second chance for those who have refused to seek Him and call upon Him.  At that time they won’t receive His compassion and His abundant pardon, but His eternal wrath and condemnation.  This will happen to them, because they insisted on their own thoughts and ways, not the Lord’s thoughts and ways.  But “Now is the day of salvation,” writes the Apostle Paul.  Our thoughts and ways lead to death, but God’s thoughts and ways lead to life.  Now is the time when God reveals His thoughts and ways in His Son, Jesus Christ, so that we might confess our sins, forsake them, trust in Him and live.  We are directed to seek God in Jesus.  In Jesus God reveals Himself as He hides behind human flesh.  There He can be found.  There He is near and makes Himself known as the compassionate and forgiving God that He is.  And so, it’s urgent that we seek Him, forsake our sins, and call upon Him now in Jesus Christ, that we might receive His compassion and forgiveness.
    This brings us to the second way in which God’s thoughts and ways differ from ours, and that is, that God forgives sins abundantly.  By nature our thoughts about God are that He is not a forgiving God, that He is a God of wrath, and that He would rather punish than forgive.  Our thoughts are that if He forgives at all, we have to earn it from Him, we have to ask Him for it before we get it, and He gives it out to us only in fractions.  But this is not the abundant pardon that God promises us in today’s text.  God’s way is not the way of wrath and punishment, but the way of forgiveness.  And that forgiveness is complete, we don’t have to ask Him for it before we get it, and it was earned by Jesus Christ alone, given to us as a gift. 
    God’s forgiveness comes at the expense of His Son, who suffered the wrath and punishment that we deserve on account of our sins on the cross.  His obedience, suffering, and death alone has earned God’s forgiveness for us.  To try to earn God’s forgiveness by our own efforts - whether it be by our love or our faith - is to try to get forgiveness another way, a way that is not God’s way.  God has given us only one way to obtain His forgiveness, and that is through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. 
    This forgiveness is all gift; it is neither earned nor deserved.  Nor does God put the condition on it that we must first ask Him for it before He gives it to us.  There are so many Christians out there who will say, “Yes, God’s forgiveness is a free gift, neither earned nor deserved,” and then they’ll turn right around and say, “But you have to ask Him for it, before you can be forgiven.”  They’ll even use the Lord’s Prayer to support their argument, as the Lord teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or they’ll quote I John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Both of these verses, they say, teach us that we have to ask for God’s forgiveness before He’ll give it to us.  But God’s way is to forgive us even before we ask.  No one asked Jesus to come and die on the cross for their sins.  And you didn’t ask to be baptized when you were just an infant.  Ask yourself then, “How many of my sins did God forgive when He baptized me?” or “How many sins does God forgive me when the pastor speaks the Lord’s absolution to me?  Yes, I confessed my sins, and God forgave me just as He promised, but was it my asking for His forgiveness that got me forgiven, or was I asking for what God had already given me?”  It’s not that God doesn’t forgive you until He hears you apologize and ask Him for His forgiveness.  He forgives you even before you ask Him.  Our way is to ask for something first in order to get it.  But God gives us His gifts first and then tells us to ask for them!  He wants you to confess your sins to Him (sins that He’s already forgiven), so that you can then hear the forgiveness that He gives you freely in Christ spoken over your sins.  In this way we are comforted, when our conscience bothers us for not having confessed every individual sin that we’ve committed.  God’s forgiveness is complete, not fractional.  He gives you 100% forgiveness, enough forgiveness to take care of all your sins, known or unknown, confessed or unconfessed, past, present, and future.  That’s abundant pardon; that’s God’s way.
    God’s thoughts and ways are not our thoughts or our ways.  “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,” He says, “so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  We may not understand some of the thoughts and ways of God and why He does what He does and allows what He allows.  Sometimes the cross and the suffering in this life cause us to wonder what God’s up to and whether He’s around or not.  But when you are in doubt about His thoughts and ways, consider what David says when he writes, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him.”  God may not reveal all of His thoughts and ways to you, but He has revealed His thoughts and ways to you with regard to His love towards you and His salvation in His only-begotten Son.  God’s thoughts towards you are thoughts of mercy and forgiveness for the sake of Christ, crucified for you.  His ways are that you confess your sins, forsake them, and seek the Lord where’s He located Himself for you in His Word and His Sacraments.  Then He will no longer be hidden to you, but you will find Him, He’ll make His love known to you, and you’ll hear the abundant pardon and peace He speaks to you for Christ’s sake.  Amen.
criptures that God is love.  If this is so, then why does He allow all this evil?  God’s ways seem strange and foreign to us; they don’t make sense and are beyond our understanding.  If we were asked to evaluate God’s thoughts and ways towards us based on what we observe and experience, we might conclude that He’s angry at us and wants to punish us for our sins.  But today’s O.T. text assures us that this is not the case.  If God hated us and only wanted to punish us, why would He tell us to seek Him, to return to Him, and to forsake our sins?  Why would He promise us His compassion and His abundant pardon, if He wanted to send us to hell?  
    God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways.  And today’s text shows us two very big instances in which His thoughts and ways differ from ours.  The first is that God is near, not far away from us; the second is that He abundantly forgives sin.  First, even though experience and circumstances might suggest that God isn’t around and that He can’t be found, here He tells us that He is not far away but near and that He can be found when we seek Him.  Apparently, God likes to play “hide and seek.”  I’ve used this illustration with my confirmands:  When you play “hide and seek,” it isn’t that the person who hides himself ceases to be present; he just ceases to be seen.  He is somewhere in the room; he’s just hidden himself behind some furniture, in a closet, or under a bed.  The point of the game is for the seeker to try to find the hider.  But a good hider doesn’t want you to find him.  He wants you to give up in the end.  Well, God plays this game, too, only He’s not very good at it, because He always gives Himself away.  He tells us where He’s hiding, so that it’s easy for us to find Him.  God wants us to find Him.  The only ones He remains hidden to are those who refuse to look for Him where He says He is.  And that’s man’s way:  Man’s way is to look for God where He is not.  Now, it’s not that there are some places where God isn’t present.  He is in the forests, up in the mountains, on the beach - in fact, He is everywhere, but He doesn’t reveal Himself as the compassionate and forgiving God that He is in those places.  Instead, He has chosen some specific things behind which to hide, where if we go looking for Him there, we’ll find Him.  And these things are His Word, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.  If we look for God in these places, we will find Him revealing Himself to us in His Son, Jesus Christ.  We will see His love manifested towards us in sending His Son to die on the cross for our sins.  We will hear His words of absolution and forgiveness.  We will see Him washing away our sins, as He cleanses us with Christ’s blood in our Baptism.  We will see Him feeding us with Christ’s body and blood as we eat and drink of the bread and wine consecrated in the Lord’s Supper.  But God also locates Himself in our various vocations, in the crosses we must bear, and in our death.  When we look for Him in these places we’ll see Him using us and others as instruments to provide for our needs, and we’ll watch as He works through the suffering of our lives for our good.  In these ways God is near, not far from us.  He is not a God who is “out there,” but one who has come down to us in the flesh to give His life for us on the cross, now locating Himself among us in things like His Word and His Sacraments, our vocations and our sufferings.  When we seek the Lord in these places, that’s where we’ll find Him, because that’s where He’s promised to be.
    Of course, this is not our way.  It makes no sense to the world to look for God in the specific places where He’s promised to be for us.  Unbelievers think they can find God anywhere they look for Him, vehemently denying that God could possibly be present in suffering and death.  Many Christians also have a hard time believing that God locates Himself behind suffering and the cross.  They even go so far as to deny that He could be truly present in things like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  And we here are not immune to a worldly way of thinking, since we still have to battle our old sinful nature on a daily basis.  If we were always in agreement with the thoughts of God and our ways were always His ways, we’d never ask, “Why, God?  Why me?  Why this?”  When we ask questions like these, what we are saying is that we believe that God is far away from us, that He’s hidden Himself somewhere where we can’t find Him, that He’s abandoned us in our suffering and doesn’t care about us.  And if we fail to see Him in the places where He’s near and has located Himself for us, then He will indeed remain hidden and far away, and we’ll cease to know of His compassion and forgiveness.
    We must seek Him “while He may be found” and call upon Him “while He is near,” because there is going to come a day when He won’t be near and when He won’t allow Himself to be found.  That day will be the day when Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead.  Then there will be no second chance for those who have refused to seek Him and call upon Him.  At that time they won’t receive His compassion and His abundant pardon, but His eternal wrath and condemnation.  This will happen to them, because they insisted on their own thoughts and ways, not the Lord’s thoughts and ways.  But “Now is the day of salvation,” writes the Apostle Paul.  Our thoughts and ways lead to death, but God’s thoughts and ways lead to life.  Now is the time when God reveals His thoughts and ways in His Son, Jesus Christ, so that we might confess our sins, forsake them, trust in Him and live.  We are directed to seek God in Jesus.  In Jesus God reveals Himself as He hides behind human flesh.  There He can be found.  There He is near and makes Himself known as the compassionate and forgiving God that He is.  And so, it’s urgent that we seek Him, forsake our sins, and call upon Him now in Jesus Christ, that we might receive His compassion and forgiveness.
    This brings us to the second way in which God’s thoughts and ways differ from ours, and that is, that God forgives sins abundantly.  By nature our thoughts about God are that He is not a forgiving God, that He is a God of wrath, and that He would rather punish than forgive.  Our thoughts are that if He forgives at all, we have to earn it from Him, we have to ask Him for it before we get it, and He gives it out to us only in fractions.  But this is not the abundant pardon that God promises us in today’s text.  God’s way is not the way of wrath and punishment, but the way of forgiveness.  And that forgiveness is complete, we don’t have to ask Him for it before we get it, and it was earned by Jesus Christ alone, given to us as a gift.  
    God’s forgiveness comes at the expense of His Son, who suffered the wrath and punishment that we deserve on account of our sins on the cross.  His obedience, suffering, and death alone has earned God’s forgiveness for us.  To try to earn God’s forgiveness by our own efforts - whether it be by our love or our faith - is to try to get forgiveness another way, a way that is not God’s way.  God has given us only one way to obtain His forgiveness, and that is through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.  
    This forgiveness is all gift; it is neither earned nor deserved.  Nor does God put the condition on it that we must first ask Him for it before He gives it to us.  There are so many Christians out there who will say, “Yes, God’s forgiveness is a free gift, neither earned nor deserved,” and then they’ll turn right around and say, “But you have to ask Him for it, before you can be forgiven.”  They’ll even use the Lord’s Prayer to support their argument, as the Lord teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or they’ll quote I John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Both of these verses, they say, teach us that we have to ask for God’s forgiveness before He’ll give it to us.  But God’s way is to forgive us even before we ask.  No one asked Jesus to come and die on the cross for their sins.  And you didn’t ask to be baptized when you were just an infant.  Ask yourself then, “How many of my sins did God forgive when He baptized me?” or “How many sins does God forgive me when the pastor speaks the Lord’s absolution to me?  Yes, I confessed my sins, and God forgave me just as He promised, but was it my asking for His forgiveness that got me forgiven, or was I asking for what God had already given me?”  It’s not that God doesn’t forgive you until He hears you apologize and ask Him for His forgiveness.  He forgives you even before you ask Him.  Our way is to ask for something first in order to get it.  But God gives us His gifts first and then tells us to ask for them!  He wants you to confess your sins to Him (sins that He’s already forgiven), so that you can then hear the forgiveness that He gives you freely in Christ spoken over your sins.  In this way we are comforted, when our conscience bothers us for not having confessed every individual sin that we’ve committed.  God’s forgiveness is complete, not fractional.  He gives you 100% forgiveness, enough forgiveness to take care of all your sins, known or unknown, confessed or unconfessed, past, present, and future.  That’s abundant pardon; that’s God’s way.
    God’s thoughts and ways are not our thoughts or our ways.  “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,” He says, “so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  We may not understand some of the thoughts and ways of God and why He does what He does and allows what He allows.  Sometimes the cross and the suffering in this life cause us to wonder what God’s up to and whether He’s around or not.  But when you are in doubt about His thoughts and ways, consider what David says when he writes, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him.”  God may not reveal all of His thoughts and ways to you, but He has revealed His thoughts and ways to you with regard to His love towards you and His salvation in His only-begotten Son.  God’s thoughts towards you are thoughts of mercy and forgiveness for the sake of Christ, crucified for you.  His ways are that you confess your sins, forsake them, and seek the Lord where’s He located Himself for you in His Word and His Sacraments.  Then He will no longer be hidden to you, but you will find Him, He’ll make His love known to you, and you’ll hear the abundant pardon and peace He speaks to you for Christ’s sake.  Amen.

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