Removed From Us

Transcript

Hello, my friend… so glad you're with me today. This is By God's Call — day 192, Removed From Us.

"As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." Psalm 103:12.

To feel the weight of this line, you need to understand the geography David is using. North and south have an end. If you travel north, eventually you reach the pole — and from there, any step you take is already heading south. There's a turning point. But east and west aren't like that. You could travel east forever, circling the entire globe, and you would never arrive at west. You would never turn around and come back. It's a distance with no end, no point of return. And that is the image David chooses to describe what God does with our sin.

Remember who this man is, writing these words? This is the same David who prayed "create in me a clean heart" after falling into adultery and murder. He isn't speaking in theory. He is speaking from his own experience — from guilt that sat like a stone on his chest, and the freedom that came when God actually forgave him. This is not the psalm of someone who never failed badly. This is the psalm of someone who failed badly and was restored.

Notice the verb too: remove. It doesn't say God hides the sin under a rug. It doesn't say He pretends it never happened. It says He removes it — takes it away, carries it to a distance that can't be measured. The sin stops being near you. It doesn't hang over your head waiting for a chance to condemn you again. It is carried off — to a distance that doesn't even exist, that's how vast it is.

And this doesn't happen in some cold vacuum. This verse sits surrounded, throughout the whole psalm, by the language of a father's compassion — as a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to us. God's forgiveness doesn't come from indifference, like someone shrugging and saying "whatever." It comes from tenderness. From a Father who looks at you and chooses, on purpose, to carry your guilt far away.

Now, here is the problem many of us carry: God has already removed the sin, but we keep going back to look for it. We relive it. We remember it. We accuse ourselves again at night, alone, with that old weight that should already be as far off as east is from west. And that, my friend, is not humility. It looks like humility, but it isn't. It's distrust of God's word. It's insisting on carrying something He already threw away.

So today I want to offer you something concrete. Get a piece of paper. Write down the specific sin that still accuses you — the one that comes back at night, the one you've already confessed but still keep carrying. Write its name. Then read Psalm 103:12 aloud over that paper. And then — tear it up. Not as a psychological trick, but as an act of faith: a physical sign of what God has already truly done, in the distance between east and west.

Stay close to God. Pray — then act. I'll see you tomorrow, my friend.