Hello and welcome to One on One. We are so pleased that you've chosen Christian programming to be in your homes and we are honored and blessed that you have chosen us, Buddy and Veronica McLaughlin, to come and to break the bread of life with you and bring the good news. And yes, it is the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There's wonderful technology and just wherever you're from, thank you, thank you, thank you for allowing us to share the Word of God with you.
The plant seeds into your life to remind you of God's mercy, his love, his grace, just the goodness of God. It's so wonderful to get a talk to the multitudes about the goodness of God. It's truly our hearts and we are definitely in the great commission in Mark 16. Jesus told his disciples.
He said, go into all the world and tell them about me. Tell them about the good news. Tell them that I am risen, that I am the hope, I am the way, I am the life, I am the forgiveness. And that's what we're going to talk about today, forgiveness.
And forgiveness is sweet, isn't it? It is, oh, it's so sweet. And I've lived it. I mean, I have received it for all the reasons that no one should receive it.
God took me under his wing and gave me that beautiful forgiveness, that mercy that was given. He spoke at Easter about how Jesus came and died, suffered on that cross for me, for my sins, and for all the multitudes of others who have received them into their hearts. But you've heard her testimony. You probably can tell a lot better than I can because she lived it the other end of it.
I lived the very self-serving, deceitful end of it. And it was a life that has been carved out of years of living by my own set of rules and with alcohol and drugs driving the direction of my life. And I finally found myself in a church service where my misery had become so evident to me and my misery had become so evident on my family because they were living in the bondage of the sin that I was compelled to continue to do that I thought could just be justified because it was just the way that I was. It's a sad story.
It's nothing to be proud of. But the wonderful thing is, is that going through that, Veronica had me where I needed to be to receive the mercy and the grace and the forgiveness that we just mentioned to you because it's wonderful when you can finally cast away all that sin and you can replace it with joy. You can replace it with peace and you can replace it with hope where before I was just living in a, like a hamster in the cage, just going around and around and around and sometimes I'd stumble and fall and get tripped up and flop around the wheel for a while and then get back up and run some more. And the problem was is that I have so many people that loved me.
So many people that wanted me to do well, to be a part of my life, that wanted me to blossom and to take the talents and gifts that God had given me and use them for good, not for self-serving purposes, not for self-fulfilling reasons. But it's so easy to find yourself caught in that hamster wheel and you get in there and then all of a sudden you don't want to say, hey, I was wrong. This isn't as pleasing as I let on like it is, but the next time I do it I'm going to have to get all the gratification that I've been trying to get from all the other failures in my life, from all the other sin that I perpetrated, from all the other things I got through and was just as empty as I was before, but you keep convincing yourself, hey, I'll get back on that hamster wheel. It'll be different the next cycle that I go around and hey, if I trip myself up and I can tell you, I trip myself up a lot of times and I remember calling up on the precious name of God, asking the Lord to forgive me, saying, God, if you'll help me through this, if you'll get me out of this, Father, I'll live for you.
And I really meant that when I was saying it, but the Lord of the world and He would get me through it and He would let me get cleaned up, dust it off, get myself centered again. But in the Lord of the world, the ease of me doing as I wanted, the satisfaction of the flesh, of knowing that that big thing that I was looking for was in the next party, was in the next girl that I would meet, was in the next situation I would be exposed to. That's where I was going to find true happiness and direction. And it never happened.
It never, ever happened. All I did was drive everyone that cared about me away from me. All I did was push the boundaries to see how far people would go to find out where that edge was when they would finally say, look, enough of you kind of thing. And I know some of you are hearing what I'm saying now, enough of you because I just don't want to put up with this anymore.
You know, all these things happen in our lives and we take control of it and we're looking to fill our lives with the lusts of the flesh, with the lusts of self-refillment, of finding some type of gratitude in the excuses that we make for the inappropriate things that we're doing and we're involved in. And that has been so true. There was a man in the Bible and his name was David. And the one thing that I loved about David, I loved so many things about him.
I guess the one passage in the Bible that drew me to him to the degree that it did to understand who this man really was was when the Lord said of him that he is a man after my own heart. But then it went on to say, except in the matter of your eye, the hitite, except in the matter. But he said he was a man after his own heart. I always kind of felt like I had a good heart.
I felt like I could express love and compassion to people and that I really cared. But you know, I really cared more about me because I let other people suffer, Veronica, for the things that I put them through because of my self-serving ways. And you were exposed to that on the front lines for a couple of years and you know how disruptive that can be. That's what sin does.
And sin can wrap you in. I remember my grandfather preaching a sermon about a circus entertainer and he had a boa constrictor. He was a pet and he had to act. And the boa constrictor he would allow him to wrap himself around him totally from head to toe in front of multitudes of people.
And he could hear the people go, ooh, and ah. And then the circus entertainer would say, release. And the boa constrictor would release and people were just amazed. He did this year after year.
And then one day he did the circus act and the boa constrictor tightly wrapped around him and he said release. And he got tighter. Release. And he got tighter.
And he died in front of all of those people. That's what sin does. When you play with sin, you think that you can get by with it for a little bit, but then it constricts you. It takes the life out of you.
And then it becomes very heavy upon you. You know, David is my favorite in the Bible. I can relate with David because he's a crazer. He's a worshiper.
And it also intrigues me where the Lord would say, he's a man after my own heart. You know, I said, God, you know, I want to be that person after your own heart. I want to love you like that. I want to pursue you like that.
I want to be in your presence like that. But then there was a flaw. There was something that happened is that he said, except for the matter with Uriah the Hittite. And that was when David allowed sin to come into his life.
And that sin became so heavy upon him that he had to confess. But the sin was that David was in the palace and he had sent out all of his mighty men to fight the battles for him. That was the first mistake. You know, you've got to be on the front lines.
We as Christians, we've got to be on the front lines. We can't be lax about anything that the enemy is doing in the world right now. If we set back, the enemy will take charge of ourselves, take charge of our families. We have to be on guard all the time.
We're warriors. And we have to stand on that front line. Galatians 6-9 tells us, don't be weary in well-doing or don't be weary in fighting because you're going to reap and do season if you don't faint. So we were really born for war.
We were born to fight for the right. We're crusading for the right. So was David. He was a great warrior.
But he was in the palace and he was tempted because he saw a beautiful woman bathing on top of the houses. And we were there in Jerusalem in that old temple and we can see that the houses were built below and on the rooftops they would come and gather. They would have dinners. They would have parties and sometimes they would bathe there.
So David was tempted and he would go out on his palace and look out of the window and see Bathsheba who was married to Uriah, one of his top men. And he started lusting after her and he called for her to come into him and committed adultery with her and now the sin was heavy. And now it even progressed. But that's what sin does.
It progresses. And you start playing with it. It starts tightening up. When you say release it just starts tightening up.
And so then when they had slept together she became pregnant with his child so he tried to cover that up. And so he had Uriah come in and he said you know you need to be with your wife and he's like oh no I'm a man of integrity. My men are out on the field. You know this is a man of integrity to say they're out fighting for you and I can't be here in the comforts of my own home.
He's trying to cover up that sin and it didn't work. And then he told another one of his men you put Uriah out in the hottest part of the battle. You know he got him killed. And you're saying this is a man after God's own heart who is weaving all of this and manipulating and doing things that he shouldn't do.
It doesn't mean that even with us after we love God we're not perfect. There are sometimes that we're going to miss it. And when we do we hope that we don't miss it as badly as David did. But when we do we have to be in the place that we repent.
That we say we are sorry because there's a heaviness that comes over on us. I've seen people in sin and when you were in sin there was a heaviness. There is an oppression that you just you trudge through each day. You don't have that joy.
You don't have the content and the peace. I've seen women who have gone and seen that have lived wonderful lives for the Lord. And then the next time I see them they look 20 years older and believe me we as women we don't want to look older. We want to have the glory of the Lord shining upon our faces.
And when that glory is gone you can see every little wrinkle every heaviness that pulls us down. I know that my grandmother she went on to be with the Lord when she was 83 years old and her face was beautiful. She had the glory of the Lord. She was still glowing as the Lord was taking her home.
And I thought that's living in the glory of the Lord. But then when you live in the sin and you have that heaviness there's a look of sin that you know is on people and David had this heaviness. And he told us about this heaviness in Psalms 32 we believe that this psalm was written when he was going through this sinful state with Bathsheba. And he said blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven?
Whose sin is covered? Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity and those whose spirit are not in deceit. For when I kept silent my bones grew old but there it is. We just grow old prematurely because of sin.
We're decrepit and we feel like it. I know my groaning all day long for day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. He was so dry.
You know he was so empty. You know people who were living in the world as we call it. They're looking for something in drought. They have no, they don't have the water of the spirit.
I acknowledge my sin to you and my iniquity and I have not hidden. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin, Sila. For this calls everyone who is godly shall pray to you and Tom that you may be found surely in a flood of great waters they shall not come near him for you are my hiding place. But he just wraps it up really in a nutshell where he comes and he's saying you know I was growing old.
I was heavy. I was brittle. I didn't have anywhere else to go. I had to ask forgiveness of my sin and you are my hiding place.
We see him go all through this in this seven verses where he repents to the Lord that he can actually be there in the shadow of his wing again. You know it's sad to hear that he knew that all along but he tried humanly to change the outcome of sin. And we can't sin by definition as a holy act against God. And until we ask forgiveness of our sins we are going to bear that burden.
We're going to carry the weight of that and I love the way David expresses that. I mean his vitality was gone. I mean you know it wears you down. And then she must think of Bathsheba.
I mean she loved her husband and he was an honorable man but when the king summons you you know bad things can happen when you disobey the king. So she didn't have a choice but to come so David put another human being in a terrible position and took advantage of her and took advantage of one of his soldiers just because he could. Yes. Bottom line then when he realized that this guy was such a man of integrity that he would not even help David with his absurd plan of trying to disguise what had happened that David would have him killed.
You know that's kind of the pathway of sin. One lie leads to another, one deception leads to another and in the end what happens someone gets hurt. Many people get hurt. There's always more than one person involved when you are living in sin.
There are people in the peripherals who are paying the price and you are the reason for that and until you release that when people ask me hey you know buddy one day you're a party animal and the next day you know you're going to church what happened to you. Well all I can tell you is that my life changed. The peace and the joy is I described to Veronica I've never seen the skies so blue. I've never heard the birds so clearly.
I had never enjoyed breathing the fresh breath each morning and I look at her and said you know why didn't you tell me it was this good well thank goodness she's a Christian didn't beat me up because I really deserved it because she had told me over and over again only my ears didn't want to hear because it didn't satisfy the sin that was in my life that was driving my life because I didn't want to admit it was wrong just like David didn't want to admit he was wrong. He tried to make it right and there's no way to make it right but the first verse says it all blessed is he who's transgression is forgiven whose sin is covered blessed is he. Now I understand what blessed means even in our home we have the word blessed in many places because that is such a connotation of what God did in our lives. He blessed me with forgiveness.
He blessed our family with wholeness. When I gave up the sinful way of my life it restored our family. It allowed us to start a ministry. It allowed us to do things for the one who loved us that much David.
God said was a man after his own heart. Wow a man after his own heart. You know I want to be a man after God's own heart. We've got to earn that and we earn that by loving God loving our family by loving all the things that God tells us we need to be involved in and engaged in for his good and for his glory that we don't make it all about us we make it all about him we remember in the latter days of David's life when he knew the Lord was going to be calling him home he wanted to build a temple it was his heart to build a temple for God for something everlasting that people could see of his love for God but God said no you're not going to do this and you know what he did he didn't get angry he didn't say well God you know I'm trying to do all these things for you now you want to let me do this and throw a David temper tantrum he didn't do that he provided and prepared the way for that temple to be built by his son Solomon.
What a man that would love the Lord enough to allow his child to build his dream for the temple Lord when David had everything in his power that he could have done to himself in that time he obeyed God and you know why he obeyed God because he remembered what it was like when he didn't he remembered that heavy hand he remembered the weight how his bones ache how he grew old now someone starting to pick this up right now I see that you're starting to hear this and you're saying you know it sounds like my life but a lot of what you've talked about sounds like the way I've lived I want to encourage you don't have to live like that and I want to encourage you something else so you don't have to worry about what everybody else will think about you getting your act together. What was my biggest concern was what is everybody else going to think about me how can I go and admit that I've been doing the wrong thing for so long for so many years and all of a sudden turn into somebody different well I didn't turn into somebody different I just unloaded this wagon load of sin that I had set it off to the side asked for forgiveness and God said I will relieve you of those burdens if you will speak it with your lips believe it in your heart and follow my ways and not go back to the old ways doesn't matter what anybody else thinks they weren't carrying that weight I was carrying that weight they still think that that's the right way to live and the right way to go and when I know it is not the Bible tells us it's not you have that opportunity today to receive the same blessing of forgiveness forgiveness yes sweet forgiveness a saved a wretch like me can save a wretch like you if you were just asking to forgive you of your sins unload them all unload them all today enjoy the blessings that are yours through Christ Jesus allow him to be the Lord of your life to show you a better way David was no dummy he was a king and he still messed up it doesn't matter that we messed up what matters is that we asked the Lord to forgive us yes and when we do David said going on in this chapter he said you shall preserve me from trouble you know we want to really be preserved and have that hedge built around us we have God's blessings upon us when we are walking in obedience with God and not in sin you know when we are in sin there's a curse that comes upon it separates us from God but when we have that blessing of God upon us he says you will preserve me from trouble and you will also surround me with your songs of deliverance he knew what it felt like to be delivered I'm delivered his song came back up in his spirit if you're not singing anymore if you don't feel the gladness and that joy anymore then you need to check yourself and say hey what's going on here have I missed it somewhere have I mistreated somebody it's something going on and then it goes on to tell us in verse 10 but he who trusts in the Lord mercy will surround him he's telling us again God's mercy is coming to us God is so merciful he loves us he wants to forgive us he wants us to have that protection he wants us to rejoice he says be glad in the Lord and rejoice he got his song back rejoice and be righteous and shout for joy all you upright and heart now he's saying now I'm upright and heart I've laid it all down here and I am joyful again my bones aren't dried up I don't feel heavy anymore don't feel oppressed anymore just check your spirit today and say God what is making me feel this way do I need to make something right I remember a story that I just read recently and it really just broke my heart it was an heir to the throne and he had gotten into sin and one man had led him down this road and and had opened all of these doors for him and made it so enticing and then when it came that it was all getting ready to come out it said that this prince got on his knees to this man and begged him not to tell anybody and the man just boasted and said I have a prince who kneels before me that's what the enemy likes to do with us he likes to take us down a road and get us to the place then he's going to reveal everything because the Bible says be sure and we know this for sure but be sure your sin will find you out and he wants us Satan wants us to bow in front of him to say oh please please don't do this but it's too late it's going to happen and we know the evil that has been perpetrated will be revealed why because that's God's word every evil that's been done God says I will shine the light on that just as he did shine the light on David David didn't get by with it we go on and read the story about the prophet Nathan he comes to David and says you're the man who has sinned there's an entire sermon on that you are the one God revealed it to this prophet to say you've got to repent David didn't harden his heart and he didn't say oh no I'm too good for that there are many times that we even as believers we need to get on our knees once again before God buddy and we need to repent we need to say God I'm sorry for the things I've done I'm sorry for the way I've treated people I'm sorry there are things in the body of Christ that are going on that are not right and we need to apologize and we need to repent to each other and we need to repent before God and then God will bring that joy back into our hearts he'll bring that healing back into our hearts and that's what we see with David he received restoration he received deliverance and he received healing because now he's shouting for joy at the first part of the scripture he was waxed old and his bones were old but now when he laid it all out before the Lord it feels good to lay things out before the Lord buddy you know God is reaching out to you today with that same opportunity that you can put these things in your past you know it's hard for people to understand that don't know the Lord that you can be forgiven I'm telling you you look at me I was forgiven I was forgiven of a lot of sin in my life God unloaded all of that now if I want to pick it back up and run with it he's not going to stop me from running with it but it's not not mine anymore if I don't want it and I'm just telling you you can live that life a reconstructed life a joyful life a life of peace and you can have your family brought into this and enjoy the blessings blessed is the man who walks in the righteousness of God and we implore you today to make that choice to love the Lord to receive him into your life accepting as your Lord and Savior well we love you and God loves you until we see you again next week remember that God is always faithful hello everyone Veronica and I would like to thank you so much for partnering with doffsong ministries through these many years we appreciate your support your love we look forward each week to coming and being a part of your life in your homes bring you God's Word we are so humbled to receive your praise reports of salvation of healing and restoration we are excited to take this gospel across the world we know this next season is bringing great harvest for his glory thank you and remember the best is yet to come we hope this program has enlightened and enriched your life this ministry is made possible by the grace of God and your generous financial support if you would like to partner with our ministry to spread the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ right call or visit our website at www.buddyandveronica.com we look forward to visiting with you again soon until then remember God is always faithful