Forgiven!

IF you’re a follower of Jesus—if you’re someone who’s turned to Christ for saving grace and eternal life, for the gift of God’s adoption and redemption and justification… if you’ve come face to face with your sin and guilt before the Holy Judge of all things and then run to the Savior as your only hope for mercy and life—THEN you’re saved; you’re a child of God who’s accepted into his forever family!

If all that is true of you, then your sins are forgiven.  Period.  Your status in the courtroom of the universe is “not guilty.”  You’re acquitted for all the crimes you’ve committed against the honor of God’s name (like sins of pride, greed, lust, worry, gossip, envy, racism, idolatry, etc.).  AND you’re forgiven for those you have yet to commit; future sin is covered by God’s saving grace to all his children.

When Jesus teaches us to pray daily, “Forgive us our debts…” he’s not implying that you get “un-saved” each time you sin as a Christian and then you need to get “re-saved” repeatedly by praying the Lord’s Prayer over and over.  The forgiveness sought in Matthew 6:12 is the renewing and restoring of your already-established fellowship with the Heavenly Father through prayerful confession—in other words, the refresh­ing of a secure relationship that already exists.  To borrow from John Owen’s way of putting it, the believer’s communion with Christ may be disturbed by sin, but never our union with Christ.

So, if you’re a believer but you’re laboring under a vague sense of lingering guilt, a shadowy feeling that you’re not really-truly-fully forgiven and loved and accepted by God (maybe you even think you’re unforgiveable!), the Father wants to release you from this bondage now.  It’s urgent.  Think how wrong it is for you to languish in that dungeon of guilt:  if God were to hold your sin against you, he’d be saying that the payment of sin’s penalty by his Son at the cross was not sufficient to clear your guilt—it wasn’t adequate, not worth enough, not complete… And that CANNOT be.  Friends, if Jesus sets you free, you are free indeed (John 8:36)!  There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).  So when you stumble into sin, follow the Prodigal’s lead (Luke 15:11-32) and go home and fall into our Father’s loving, open arms!