Category: Thoughts

Introduction

In churches across America this week, there will be a time set aside to repent of your sins.  A time to confess your sins.  A time to seek God’s forgiveness.  But is this the pattern for addressing sin in the New Testament?

Before we answer that question, let’s talk about why this matters.  If you believe that you are completely forgiven, if you believe that there is no separation between you and the Father, and if you believe that you cannot stop the flow of love and grace that God is extending to His children, then any suggestion that God is holding your sins against you goes against all that we believe about our right standing with God.  Complete forgiveness, no distance or separation, no stopping the love of God are clear teachings of the New Testament.

When we suggest that confession, repentance, and seeking forgiveness from God are necessary for believers to get close to or stay close to God, we undermine all of these promises.  The cross worked, and any teaching of our current or besetting sins separating us from the Father is taking us back to an old covenant system of condemnation and separation; an old covenant system of sin management.

I have heard it preached this way.  Think about your human relationships.  When we sin against each other and don’t own up to that, there is a distance created in our connection.  (This is absolutely true, by the way.)  But the preaching illustration continues that it is the same with God.  Just like in human relationships, our fellowship with God is damaged by our sin.  A distance from God is created by our sin.

But this illustration completely misses a critical point.  Our life with Jesus is NOT like any human relationship.  It is founded completely upon His grace.  He is beyond gracious to us in every way.  Why?  Because our sin was taken care of at the cross.  Christ paid the price for us.  There is no more sacrifice, offering, repentance, or penance required of us once we have believed the gospel message of Jesus.  And teaching that there is more required adds a heaviness to our walk with Jesus that steals our joy.

Jesus said in many places that He came to make our joy full.  How can we be joyful, how can we live at peace, how can we experience His rest when we are taught to always be looking over our shoulder for where we are messing up?  Jesus taught what He taught, Jesus said what He said, and Jesus promised what He promised to bring us joy, peace, and rest.  He did not come to bring us angst, sorrow, or condemnation.

Do believers commit sins?  Yes.  Do I sin?  Yes.  And when I do, I agree with God that it is a sin.  This post isn’t about sweeping sin under the rug.  I am sorry when I sin.  I am sorry that I did not live into my new identity in Jesus.  And I am thankful that I have an Advocate in Jesus Christ who has paid the price and that sin is already forgiven.  There is no hand-wringing or promise of deeper commitment required.  Growing in grace is what helps us mature and grow into walking more and more in line with who we are in Christ.  Growing in grace helps us cooperate in godly ways with Christ living His life through us.

If anything in this introduction has cause a “uh?” or quizzical reaction, please stick with us for all five parts to this series.  There is a lot to unfold and maybe a few things to unlearn.  But I believe it will illuminate one more beautiful aspect of our freedom in Christ.  So back to our topic at the top; why do church leaders embrace this confession, repent, and seek forgiveness practice?  We will talk about it next time.

The grace movement that is on fire across the globe is not a new fad, a passing fancy, a new twist on Scripture.  It is actually very old – but wonderfully good – news.  The message of our new identity in Christ and the power of living into our new righteous self has been around for a long time.  I believe when we let the Bible speak for itself, the grace message we preach is the message of the New Testament; as attested to by many throughout the history of the church.

The passage below is from the book He That is Spiritual.  It was written in 1918 by Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of Dallas Theological Seminary.  If you take the time to process through the English of that day, the excerpt reads like it came straight from your favorite grace teacher today.  Listen to Chafer’s explanation, written over 100 years ago, of our freedom from the PENALTY and the POWER of sin.

 

The theme under consideration is concerned with the death of Christ as that death is related to the divine judgment of the sin nature in the child of God.  The necessity of such judgments and the sublime revelation that these judgments are now fully accomplished for us is unfolded in Romans 6:1-10.  This passage is the foundation as well as the key to the possibility of a “walk by the Spirit.”  By the death of Christ, the penalty for sins committed was paid for all men, and the power of sin was judged and broken for the children of God.

Herein it is declared that Christians need not “continue in sin,” but may “walk in newness of life.”  “Sin shall not have dominion over you,” and we need no longer to be “slaves to sin.”  This was all brought about through the cross.  How important in His eyes, then, is the quality of our daily life; for His death not only procured our eternal blessedness in glory, but empowers our present “walk” as well.

The old nature was judged in order that God may be free to work in the believer’s daily life and apart from all judgments.  How great is His mercy!  He has already taken up the sin question and solved it for all men in the death of Christ, our Substitute.  Because of this, He can now save from the penalty of sin.  Even so, to what lengths His mercy has gone since He has also entered into righteous judgment of our “old man”!  And because of this, He is now able to deliver His child from the power of sin.

The “old man” is said to have been “crucified with Him,” and we are “dead with Him,” “buried with Him” and are partaking in His resurrection life.  All this, it is revealed, was to one great purpose, that “we should walk in newness of life,” even as Christ “was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father.”

What a deliverance and walk may be experienced since it is according to the power and glory of the resurrection!  Resurrection, it may be added, is not the mere reversal of death; it is the introduction into the power and limitless boundaries of eternal life.  In that new sphere and by that new power the Christian may now “walk.”

Excerpt from He That is Spiritual by Lewis Sperry Chafer

Animal sacrifices provided a temporary forgiveness and cleansing under the old covenant system.  The old covenant system required repeated confession and forgiveness.

But what about us today?  Is confession and seeking God’s forgiveness an over and over process for us?  What if all your sins – past, present, and future – have been forgiven the minute you believed the gospel of Jesus Christ?  It is an important question to ponder.

Hidden within the pages of the Old Testament is a promise of something better; the promise of a new covenant.  And the promise of this new covenant, this new arrangement between God and His people, has been completely fulfilled in Jesus.  And this is its fulfillment:  when we believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are immediately and forever forgiven and cleansed by the blood of Jesus.  The minute we believed, Christ’s forgiveness and cleansing – accomplished on the cross – was granted to us; was credited to us.  Not because of anything we had done, but because of what Christ had done for us.

This is such an important promise to grasp.  Many of us have been taught that some process of continual confession of sin is necessary to be in right standing with God.  Friend, the blood of Jesus Christ has eternally forgiven and internally cleansed you from your sin.  Once and done.

1. What is your reaction to this once and done idea of being forgiven and cleansed? What questions remain about your new purity?

 

Now let’s visit a passage of Scripture from the New Testament that has led to some confusion in this area, I John 1:9.  It reads, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Many Bible teachers hold this verse up as an example of repeated confession, forgiveness, and cleansing being required of us as believers.  I don’t believe this fits the context of John’s letter.

In the first letter of John’s epistles, the apostle is addressing infiltrators in the church who came in preaching a Gnostic-type message.  The Gnostics of John’s era placed a great deal of value on what they saw as a secret knowledge.  It was a knowledge that combined ideas derived from Greek philosophy, Oriental mysticism, and Christianity.

One of its tenets was a separation between the spiritual and material world.  The spiritual world is good.  The material world is evil.  So the Gnostics refused to acknowledge Jesus as God in the flesh.  Since the material world is evil, God the Divine One could not have appeared in a human body.  That is why John repeatedly emphasized in his letter this core belief of ours; Jesus Christ came as God in the flesh.

One of the outcomes of this spiritual/material divide is that the Gnostics treated sin with indifference. Since sin took place in the material world which was already looked at as evil, sin was viewed as a natural outcome of our material lives.  There was no guilt involved here.  A person could be very spiritual while doing something sinful with their mortal body because the body is evil anyway and divorced from our spirituality.

With this cultural background in mind, John seeks to make clear that prior to our conversion, we were all guilty of sin; sin was our very nature.  So let’s look at the context of I John 1 in light of this Gnostic challenge to true Christian belief.

“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5).

The contrast between God as light and evil as darkness is a prominent theme in the Bible.  The “no darkness in Him” suggests that those who walk in darkness are unbelievers with no connection to God.

“If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth” (I John 1:6).

If we say we are joined with God in His family and yet our true identity is one walking in darkness, we are lying.  Because the one walking in darkness is an unbeliever who has never come into the Light.

“But if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (I John 1:7).

In contrast to the lost, believers walk in the Light, not the darkness.  Believers have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus provides a one-time cleansing from all sin.  (See Hebrews 9:14)

Now we switch back to the unbeliever.

“If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us” (I John 1:8).

This is another direct response to the Gnostics of John’s day who believed they had no need of Jesus as Savior because they were not guilty of sin.  John again calls them liars who are deceiving themselves because we all are guilty of sin.  But Christ has provided an answer for our sin in verse 9.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9).

This incredible promise was written as a choice offered those who are walking in darkness (I John 1:6); those who have yet to believe the gospel.

And the promise of I John 1:9 is this:  If we confess our sins – if we agree with God that here, prior to our conversion, we are sinners, and we need a savior, and that savior is Jesus – then Jesus will come to us, He will forgive us of all our sins, and He will cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  The blood of Jesus eternally forgives and internally cleanses from all sin at the time of our conversion.  This confession is a one-time agreement with God about our sin and when we agree with God in this way, He forgives, cleanses, and saves us forever.

Excerpt from Welcome to the New !!! A Study of What Christ Did FOR Us and TO Us

One of the most common things I hear from believers who haven’t yet been captured by the grace message is that they have a feeling of God as being far off.  They see God as being “out there”.  Their experience is feeling and seeing God as a distant God.  As a lady recently shared with me, “God has a lot of people to pay attention to.  I am probably off in a dusty corner of His world.”  Why would someone feel that way?

There is a myriad of reasons a person may feel that way.  I can think of at least two.  First, we have been taught, very erroneously in my view, that even after our conversion there is a separation between God and us.  We are separated from God by our limits and His limitlessness.  We are separated from God by being “down here” while He is “up there”.  We are separated from God by our sin.  But the message of the New Testament is that nothing – not our sin, not our doubts, not our fears, not even His Godness – can separate us from the love and presence of God.  (Romans 8:38-39, Hebrews 10:19-22.)

Second, when we bring an Old Testament mindset into our new covenant lives, we create a distorted view of God’s changing presence or distance.  The idea of separation is at the heart of the old covenant relationship between God and His people.  The keeping of the Law was a tenuous avenue to connect and close the distance.  God was at various times far off or came close in the history of Israel.  God showed up to be worshipped.  God showed up to warn them.  God showed up to get His people out of trouble.  And God sometimes showed up to punish them.  God’s character never changes, but His interaction with His people under the old covenant was often a shifting shadow.

Bill Vanderbush, in his book Unveiled Horizon, summarizes it well, “The old covenant was filled with the perspective of distance and separation from God and revealed in an endless list of activities that man could do to try to get close to Him.  The new covenant is filled with a perspective of reconciled union and reveals the unfathomable lengths God has gone to, to make His righteous redemption the very core of our identity as sons and daughters.”

Yes, the new covenant is the answer to “your separation has ended.”  All of the distance between you and God was erased at the cross.  God has now joined with you in your spirit.  “But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him … Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit WHO IS IN YOU, whom you have from God?” (I Corinthians 6:17,19).

Our friend, Max Lucado, once said in an interview, “Two hundred and sixteen times in his epistles, Paul talks about Jesus or God living inside us.”  I haven’t done the math myself, but this is a number we should not just fly past.  It is a beautiful picture of our united identity.  He is in you!!!  Your separation has ended!!!

Have you ever thought about how Jesus sees us, you and me, in the gospels?  When we were without hope, Jesus identified us as:

Captives who needed to be set free, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18).

Lost ones who needed to be found, “And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ … And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ … For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate” (Luke 15:6,9,24).

Sick folks who needed to be healed, “The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?’  And Jesus answered them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick’ ” (Luke 5:31).

Weary souls who need rest, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Jesus’ description of us is full of hope.  There is always hope that the captive can be set free, the lost can be found, the sick can be healed, and the weary can find rest.  All of which happened to us when we believed the gospel message of Jesus Christ.

And in a beautiful contrast, He DID NOT identify us as sinners who need to be punished!