Expunged
I came away with another gem from my Monday morning Bible study yesterday. A fellow participant shared about her two daughters, when they were children, getting caught shoplifting. The store had them arrested and they appeared before a judge. The judge, because of their age and the fact neither had a prior criminal record, recommended 50 hours of community service and arbitration with the store’s attorneys in order to reach a financial settlement. If they did these two things to the satisfaction of the Court, then their records would be expunged.
Their mom told us she explained expungement to them this way: When anyone asks you if you’ve ever been arrested for a crime, you can honestly answer, no, because expungement means no record will be kept of your crime. It will be as if you never shoplifted. She then compared that to the forgiveness we receive through Christ for our sins.
How many of us followers of Jesus wring our hands over the sins of our pasts? How many of us continue to be full of regret? Until a few years ago, I was one of these. I could never quite let myself off the hook for things I did decades ago. God may have expunged them from my life’s record, but I had not. I still was full of regret. It was pressed down pretty deep, but it was still there. One day while reading the Scriptures, I came across these words, which I had obviously read many times before: “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.” (II Corinthians 7:10) Leads to salvation and leaves no regret. If we repent of our sins, our life’s record is expunged, wiped clean. No regret is necessary because the sins of our past are no longer a part of our record. And any sins in the future which are confessed and from which we repent (I John 1:9), the same holds true. They are removed from our record. It finally hit home to me that I was indeed forgiven fully and completely, and, thus, I could at last forgive myself.
The devil is the accuser and he is the reason for our regret. He tells us we’re not good enough because we have sinned. Don’t you just love how he tempts us into sin, and then when we do, he is immediately there to accuse us of how bad we are! There is much joy and freedom in having and living as our sins have been expunged from our life’s record; yet the devil seeks to steal, kill, and destroy that joy by reminding us of our past sin. He also takes advantage of our pride, which leads us to believe that we are being upright by continuing to hold ourselves to account. As I often asked students struggling with forgiving themselves, if God is willing to forgive you for these sins, who are you not to forgive yourself? Are you better and more knowledgeable than God?
Expungement of our life’s record. What a glorious gift! Let us embrace it with the knowledge that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2) Let’s accept the Lord’s forgiveness and live in the freedom for which he created us!
© Jim Musser 2021 All Scripture references are from the New International Version, 2011.
