What do you do when you’re so congested that you can hardly breathe? Have you ever tried using a Neti Pot? A Neti Pot looks a bit like a tea pot. You are to fill it with warm salt water then shove the spout up one nostril while tilting your head sideways over a sink. Apparently water will cascade out the other nostril clearing away the congestion. While many gush that this is a sure way to breathing easy I think I’d rather put up with the congestion than subject myself to the Neti Pot “cure.”
Thankfully I don’t suffer from nasal congestion very often so that I’ve never had to seriously consider using the Neti Pot. But there is another, more serious kind of chronic congestion that infects me...and you. My breathing becomes labored whenever I consider honestly how I treat the people around me. I think of them the way I think of my laptop: they better do what I want, when I want, or I’ll get cranky. People, of course, are not laptops. They are divine works of art. Yes, they have been marred by sin but that’s all the more reason we should patiently attend to them and care for them. When we realize just how poorly we treat others, it should lead us to ask: “How can God love someone like me - someone who gladly takes his love but is not eager to show love to others?” The answer, of course, is that God should have stopped loving us a long time ago and he should have subjected us to his fiery wrath. This truth ought to make your chest tighten and cause your breathing to become shallow – the sensation a convict must experience as he trudges to the electric chair. But there is hope! Our sermon text will teach us how to breathe easy…with Jesus. We do that when we exhale our wickedness and inhale his promises.
Did I see a few eyes grow wide when I used the word “wickedness”? Oh, sure. You realize that you’re not perfect but to accuse you of wickedness seems to be a bit over the top! The people to whom the Apostle Peter was speaking in our text may have thought the same thing. Let me set the scene. Jesus’ disciples, Peter and John, went to the temple one weekday afternoon to worship. There Peter healed a lame man. As this man jumped around the temple courtyard for joy, other worshippers marvelled at what Peter had done. But Peter made sure they knew that he had healed the lame man only by the power of Jesus. Peter then told these worshippers that Jesus was in fact the promised Messiah they had been waiting for. Yet what had they done with Jesus? They had crucified him. Of course, they themselves hadn’t done the deed. The Roman soldiers had done that and the Jewish leaders had put them up to it, but the people of Jerusalem had participated in the crime by allowing it to happen.
There are a number of spiritual truths that we can learn here. First, just because you faithfully come to worship (as did the people in our text who made time for weekday worship), doesn’t mean that you’re not guilty of “wickedness.” Wickedness is not “super bad sin.” Sin is wickedness because it’s a perversion, a bending away from God’s will. What wickedness are we guilty of? It could be harbouring a grudge. It could be sharing a bed with our sweetheart before marriage. It could be pride that we bit our tongue when we could easily have said some nasty things, not realizing that God does not want us biting our tongues but speaking words of encouragement! No, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t know these things were wrong. The people of Jerusalem may have crucified Jesus in ignorance but they still had blood on their hands. Payment needed to be made for their sin just as someone must pay for the damage to your car whether it was keyed on purpose or scraped accidently.
When we consider the sins we regularly commit, it should cause us to hyperventilate. I mean if we had to pay a penny for every sin, we would owe God $2,160 a day - that is if we sinned every other second for the 12 hours we were awake. By the end of the week we would owe him a little over $15,000 and by the end of the month, over $60,000! What would you say to a family member who was running up charges like that on your credit card? “Stop it!” you’d cry. And so our debt of sin is no laughing matter. What’s worse, sin can’t be paid for with pennies. Just as every drop of arsenic carries a death sentence, so does every sin.
What should we do? That’s what the people of Jerusalem asked Peter and John. Peter’s response was this: “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord” (Acts 3:19). Perhaps we could paraphrase Peter’s words like this: “What should you do? Just exhale your wickedness and inhale God’s promises.” The way to a guilt-free conscience has not changed. God calls you today to freely acknowledge your sins, not blaming others for them or minimizing them by saying, “But everyone else is doing it!” If you don’t want to acknowledge your sin, then you will have to bear the eternal consequences of those sins. But that isn’t what God wants for you. He wants you to repent. That is, he wants you to turn from your sins, to leave them behind and to live for him.
To be sure, your repentance doesn’t earn God’s forgiveness. For one thing it is God who works a repentant heart in you. Peter made that clear when he said: “When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways” (Acts 3:26). And besides, feeling sorry for your sins doesn’t pay for them, just as apologizing for keying someone’s car doesn’t pay for the damage. But our sins have been paid for through the suffering and death of Jesus. It’s not just Peter who taught this, all the Old Testament prophets did. Peter said: “Now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders [when you crucified Jesus]. 18 But this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer… Indeed, all the prophets from Samuel on, as many as have spoken, have foretold these days” (Acts 3:17, 18, 24).
The forgiveness that Jesus won for you is so complete that Peter described it as a “wiping away” or “obliteration” of sins (Acts 3:19). The blood of Jesus is not some worn out white board eraser that still leaves behind a faint outline of your sins so that you have to spend the rest of your life trying to erase it completely. No, those sins are gone from God’s record and they are remembered by him no more. Family members may never forgive or forget what you have done, but God has. Breathe easy with Jesus.
Breathing easy with Jesus, however, doesn’t mean shrugging off sins because they’ve been paid for. That attitude might not be a big deal at an all-you-can-eat buffet. So you took more than you could eat? Whatever. It’s not like they’re going to charge you extra for what you couldn’t finish. They’ll just scrape your leftovers in the trash and ask you to come back and do it all over again. While Jesus has paid for every sin you’ll ever commit, he hasn’t given you an open invitation to indulge in sin. What he has done is invited you to live for him. Peter put it this way when he quoted one of the greatest Old Testament prophets: “Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you. 23 Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from among his people” (Acts 3:22, 23). Jesus wants you to live for him but you can’t do that if you don’t first listen to him. Don’t make up your own rules about how to treat your enemies. Pray for them. Love them as Jesus told you to do. Don’t follow your friend’s rules about cheating. Cheating isn’t “borrowing” answers; it’s stealing and claiming them as your own. “But really, Pastor. Who cares about such insignificant sins?” God does otherwise he would not have subjected his Son to the pain and shame of the cross to pay for each of our sins.
When I first saw pictures of the Neti Pot in action, I seriously wondered, “Who would really want to run salt water through their nose?” Well those who suffer from nasal congestion do. They’ll do anything to breathe easily again. Isn’t it wonderful to learn that we don’t have to go through such lengths to breathe easy about salvation? We breathe easy with Jesus whenever we exhale our wickedness and inhale his promise of forgiveness. And because you now can breathe easily again, fill your lungs with God’s love and get to work living for him who died for you and was raised to life again. Amen.
