“Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit.” Psalm 32:2
A Sunday School teacher had just concluded her lesson and wanted to make sure she had made her point. She said, “Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?” There was a short pause and then, from the back of the room, a small boy spoke up. “Sin,” he said. That is certainly true, but it is not something we must try to do. It is something we naturally do. As Paul tells us in Romans 3:23, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”
Sin is a burden. Whether it is sin from the past or sin of the present, it loads us up and takes away the joy that we can have in Christ. Some of us spend years dwelling on our past sins, living in regret of those things that cannot be changed. Many of us have hurt others and even ourselves and replay our mistakes over and over
and allow them to keep us from accepting the healing that Christ can give us. There is something inside of us that keeps telling us that we do not deserve God’s forgiveness, and we must hang on to our past mistakes to fully pay for them. That, however, is not the way God sees it.
Clara Barton, the wonderful founder of the American Red Cross, was reminded one day of a vicious deed that someone had done to her years before. But she acted as if she had never even heard of the incident. “Don’t you remember it?” her friend asked. “No,” came Barton’s reply, “I distinctly remember forgetting it.” Many of us can forgive others in that way. We put their offense behind us. We truly do forgive and forget. But then we use a different standard of forgiveness for ourselves. The trifecta enemy, consisting of the world, our flesh, and satan’s minions, happily remind us of our past sins. The remembrance of those sins cling to us like barnacles on a ship slowing our progress and finally growing to unmanageable proportions.
When we accept Christ He forgives us. We have told Him about our sin and asked Him to pardon us. He did, so why can’t we accept the freedom of His forgiveness? Today’s verse reminds us that it is possible to put our sins behind us. This can be a hard thing to accept for many of us. It sounds all well and good, but in reality, the weight of our sin makes it difficult to believe a perfect God can forgive.
There are two reasons why it is so hard for us. First of all, we may have accepted Christ without truly understanding the need for Him. 
The weight of our sin might remain because we don’t recognize that it is our sin that is weighing us down. We don’t realize how our past is affecting our present because we have never truly dealt with our past. We accepted Christ and understood the depth of His forgiveness, but not the depth of our sin. Second of all, we might realize the depth of our sin, but see it as so deep, so dark, that we feel it can never (nor should be) forgiven, thus cannot accept the depth of Christ’s forgiveness. Only when we realize the depth of our sin and the depth of God’s forgiveness can we let go of our pasts and live in the freedom of God’s mercy.
God assures us that He does not count our sin against us so we must take some intentional steps to make this truth a reality in our lives. So, the first step is to 
acknowledge our sin: to ourselves and to God. After we have done that it is time to fill our hearts and minds with truth. Only in the Bible is it revealed how God can soften a hard heart to accept His forgiveness. In the Word we learn about the freedom from condemnation: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8:1 We learn about the freedom from sin: “For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.” Romans 6:14 We learn about freedom in newness: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17 As we look at verses like these we see our sin, but we also see God’s plan to put that sin behind us.
How can God do this wonderful, miraculous thing of complete restoration? In the book of Isaiah he makes some very specific promises to us. “‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.’” Isaiah 1:18 and “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Isaiah 43:25 Okay, but how does He do this? Surely like a large renovated building, there will still be signs of the old building there. Surely the configuration will be similar or maybe the number of floors or maybe the outside is changed, but the inside is the same. But God does not want to renovate us. He wants to tear down the old and rebuild an entirely new person. He just want the site.
There is no resemblance to the old. All the flaws have been erased in His eyes. We are finally brand new. We are finally free. “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:36 God says that if we let Him have us we will not just be refurbished, we will be totally rebuilt. All those sins of the past are torn down and hauled away out of our sight and the sight of God. If we continue to search for them, we will not be able to enjoy the trueness of our newness. We need to put our sins where God as put them- as far as the east is from the west. We are forgiven! Hallelujah, what a Savior!
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