“A preacher? That’s great. Let me tell you a story about a preacher.”

The old man sat down at their table and started to speak. As he did Fred’s annoyance was changed to profound humility. The old man explained that he was a bastard - in the literal rather than the figurative sense. He was born without knowing who his father was -- a source of great shame in a small town in the early twentieth century.

One day a new preacher came to the local church. The old man explained that as a youngster he had never gone to church, but one Sunday decided to go along and hear the new pastor preach. He was good. The boy went back again, and then again. In fact, he started attending just about every week. But his shame went with him. This poor little boy would always arrive late and leave early in order to avoid talking to anyone.

But one Sunday he got so caught up in the sermon that he forgot to leave. Before he knew it the service was over and the aisles were filling. He rushed to get past people and out the door, but as he did he felt a heavy hand land upon his shoulder. He turned around to see the preacher, a big tall man, looking down at him asking, “What ‘s your name, boy? Whose son are you?”

The little boy died inside, the very thing he wanted to avoid was now here. But before he could say anything the preacher said, “I know who you are. I know who your family is. There’s a distinct family resemblance. Why, you’re the son, you’re the son, you’re the son of God!”

The old man sitting at Fred’s table said, “You know, mister, those words changed my life.” And with that he got up and left.

When the waitress came over she said to Fred and his wife, “Do you know who that was?”

“No,” they replied.

“That was Ben Hooper, the two-term governor of Tennessee.”

Ben Hooper experienced the liberating word. There is also a liberating word for us. Here it is. In Jesus “we have redemption. In Jesus we have the forgiveness of sins.”

If that isn’t a word that you both know you need and deeply welcome, you are just not here for the right reason. And it is my prayer that God show you today both the depth of your need and the wonder of your liberation.

As Peter Kreeft writes in Making Choices: Practical Wisdom for Everyday Moral Decisions: “Christianity comes from Christ, and Christ comes not for “the righteous, but for sinners.” (Matthew 9:13). Those who don’t know that are not yet in the market for Christianity, even though they may sit in church every Sunday. Those who don’t know that sit in church as art students would sit in a hospital, enjoying its architecture, but not as its patients. The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners. To publicly profess to the world that you are a Christian, by going to church every Sunday, is not to say to the world that you are better than they are but that you are desperately ill. The church is a lot like Alcoholics Anonymous. The very first thing you have to admit and never forget in AA is that “I am an alcoholic.” A Christian is one who knows he is a sinaholic, and he has accepted God’s cure. The stupidest of all reasons for not going to church is one of the commonest ones -- ‘I’m not good enough.’ The only qualification is to be bad enough. Does anyone refuse to go to the hospital because they’re not healthy enough?”

The two words Paul uses in Colossians 1:14, “redeemed and forgiven” say something very revealing about our situation before we are set free by Jesus Christ. Paul says that we were in prison under two different authorities. We were caught in a double bind.

On the one hand we were in prison as captives - prisoners of war in a sense. On the other hand, we were also in prison as wrong doers in our own right.

We know this from the two words Paul uses to describe what Jesus has done.

First, Paul uses the word “redemption.” “In Jesus we have redemption.”

Redemption is a great word that has fallen on hard times. We don’t use it any more except in theology and when we used to trade in our Blue Chip stamps at the “Redemption Center.” That is too bad, because redemption is the kind of word this world need very badly. To be redeemed is to be liberated!!!

The Greek word which is translated “redeemed” in apolutrosis which literally means “to loose from”. It was used for the ransoming of prisoners of war and the buying of freedom for slaves - for in the Roman Empire, prisoner of war and slaves were often the same thing.

Paul’s image here is that we were formerly bound as slaves. Jesus came, paid the price for our freedom, and enlisted us in His service. This is the same image Paul uses in writing to the Corinthians where he tells us: “We are not our own for we were bought for a price.”

Paul writes that our liberation took place through the blood of Jesus. He says the same thing down in Colossians 1:20 where he writes of Jesus making “peace through the blood of His cross.” In Ephesians we read that “Those who were once far off have been made near by the blood of Christ.”

Jesus Christ is the one who died for us. He gave Himself so we could be a part of God’s family.

But we need to be clear about what this means. Jesus paid the price for our freedom. But this does not mean that He paid the price to our captor. The cross wasn’t a bribe or a payoff. The blood of the cross is like the price an army will pay to free an enslaved country - a price of privation and suffering and blood. It is a price paid - a terrible price. However it is not paid to the enslavers. It is the price of defeating them.

God’s redemption comes from God’s Power - not from any other source. The cross reveals the power of God for salvation - not the bargaining ability of God for salvation. Satan was not enriched by the cross. He was destroyed by it. God made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Now Paul’s use of the word “redemption” carries no overtones of judgement. A person could find himself a slave or a prisoner of war through no fault of his own. But now Paul uses a second word which does carry strong overtones of personal responsibility. The word is “forgiveness.” Forgiveness says that our imprisonment was due not only to the actions of an enemy but due, at least equally, to our own fault Paul makes this explicit in verse 14. He writes of the “forgiveness of our sins.”

The usual word that is used for “sins” is the Greek word “amartia” which means “to miss the mark.” This carries a bit of the idea that sin is sometimes inadvertent - a wrong that is not really intended. But Paul uses quite another word here - the word “paraptomaton” which is often translated “trespassers.” This word indicates the idea of a deliberate violation of a boundary - a purposeful transgression of a definite moral law.

And Paul says that in Christ we find forgiveness - not only for our mistakes but also for our most deliberate misdeeds.

You may remember the events surrounding a Nazi war criminal named Klaus Barbie. Barbie was “the Butcher of Lyon” who was extradited to France from Bolivia where he had been living since the end of the Second World War. In an interview before his trial, Barbie announced that he had forgotten his past and the rest of the world should forget it too. He was charged with executing 4,000 people, torturing thousand more and deporting 7,500 French Jews to the Death Camps.

What Barbie was trying to do was to confer forgiveness on himself. That is impossible. Only the one who is offended can forgive. In the ultimate sense, only God can forgive because it is God, the creator of the moral law who is ultimately offended by our sins.

Earl Palmer of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle describes the necessary path to forgiveness: “Suppose you had a big argument with your brother or sister today. You run out of the door in a hurry, slamming the door in his or her face and then charge of to school. As far as you know, your brother may still be standing back there with his nose caught in the door. And you’ve injured your brother. What do you do with that? You go to school and say, “oh, that terrible. I shouldn’t have done it so today I’m going to be unusually kind to everyone at school.” That’s called Aucherism and aucherism is one of the oldest tricks we’ve used to solve our own sins. We do something wrong against husband or wife, and then we go to the office and are really kind to everyone at the office that day. They are having a collection for the American Heart Association, and we write a check of fifty dollars. We would never do that ordinarily, but having done it we say, “See what a nice person I am. I’m much nicer that my brother thinks I am (back there with his nose jammed in the door).” But the problem with aucherism is that it doesn’t bring forgiveness. I need to go to the one whom I have offended and repent.”

Palmer writes, “Asking for forgiveness admits that we cannot solve our crisis by ourselves. I have brothers and sisters and other people jammed in doorways all over the place because of me. I need their forgiveness. And, ultimately, I need the forgiveness from God, the Author and Creator of the law I have violated.

1 John 1:9 says that if we confess our sin, God is faithful and just to forgive our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And Paul declares here in Colossians that God does, indeed, forgive. In Ephesians he writes that God forgives according to the riches of His grace which He lavishes upon us. God lavishes His grace.

Do you know what that means? It means that God gives us all the forgiveness we need, and then doubles it, triples it, and quadruples it for good measure

To be forgiven means to be loosed from the penalty for our sin. But it also means to be set free from the enslaving power of sin in our lives.

Dr. Richard Hoefler in a book titled: Will Daylight Come? tells the story of a young boy who was visiting his grandparents. His grandfather gave him his first sling shot and he had a great time with it shooting at trees and rocks in the woods. He would take aim and let the stone fly, but he never hit a thing. Then, on his way home for lunch, he cut through the backyard and saw Grandma’s pet duck. He took air and let the stone fly. It went straight to the mark, and the duck fell dead. The boy panicked. He took the dead duck and hid it in the wood pile. Then he saw his sister Sally standing over by the corner of the house. She had seen the whole thing. They went into lunch. Sally said nothing. After lunch, Grandmother said, “O.K., Sally, let’s clear the table and wash the dishes.” Sally said, “Johnny said he wanted to help you in the kitchen today. Didn’t you, Johnny?” Then she whispered to him, “Remember the duck.”

So Johnny did the dishes. Later in the day Grandfather called the children to go fishing. Grandmother said, “I’m sorry, but Sally can’t go. She hasn’t finished cleaning her room.” Sally smiled and said, “Johnny said he would do it, didn’t you Johnny?” And then she whispered, “Remember the duck.”

Now all this went on for several days. Johnny did all of his chores and also all of those assigned to Sally. Finally, he couldn’t take any more. He went to his Grandmother and confessed. His Grandmother took him in her arms and said, “I know, Johnny. I was standing at the kitchen window and I saw the whole thing. And because I love you, I forgave you. And knowing that I loved you and would always forgive you, I wondered just how long you would let Sally make a slave of you.”

This is our problem. We become slaves to sin if we forget the forgiveness that we have already been shown in Jesus Christ. One purpose of forgiveness is to set us free from our own guilt.

Sin twists. Guilt deforms. Forgiveness heals.

A doctor names Richard Selzer wrote about an act of healing:

“I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of her facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh. I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor from her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. “Who are they?” I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks. “Yes,” I say, “It will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says, it’s kind of cute” All at once I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers - to show her that their kiss still works.” (From Mortal Lessons)

That young woman was liberated, to a degree, by her husband’s kindness. But Christ, the Great Physician, does much more than even this kind husband could do. We come to Him in deformity and He does much more than help us to feel good about the deformity. He heals. Lavishly.

And that is what full liberation is all about.