Welcome to the In Touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, May 19th.

Today's podcast begins an eight-part series exploring the freedom found in forgiveness.

Here's part one, laying the foundation of our forgiveness.

When you kneel before God and you ask him to forgive you for your sin, whatever it may be,

and you specifically tell him what you've done, when you ask him to forgive you of your sin,

why does God forgive you?

The only thing that motivates God to forgive us is that ultimately it goes back to God's

unconditional love for mankind. The Bible says that God is love. And because he is love, God is

always reaching out to do something. That is to bridge this gap between us and God. Because you see in the

Garden of Eden, when man sinned against God, here's what happened. The beautiful relationship that

God and man had together, there was a breach in that relationship. And there wasn't anything that man could do to bridge that gap, to make it right again.

So God is the one who had to initiate the bridging of the gap and bringing God and man back together again.

And in order for that to happen, holy God, looking upon sinful man, God had to decide that he was

willing to accept again, sinful man, and therefore bring him back in the right relationship with him.

But there was a problem. And here's the problem. If I may

describe it this way. The holiness of God is like the noonday sun. The sinfulness of man is like

the midnight, the blackness, the darkness of total darkness. You can never amount enough darkness to put out the

rays of the sun. Wherever the sun is, it drives the darkness away. So to say that holy God,

whom we rebelled against, and sinful man who chose to be disobeyed into God, can

simply come back together by the desire of man is as possible as darkness of midnight and the

brilliance of a noonday sun getting together and being compatible. It just cannot be. Did you hear that?

It just cannot be. It is a distorted. It is a totally unbiblical viewpoint to begin to put holy God and sinful man together. So when you and I come to ask the

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