Replies

Repentance and confession, precedes forgiveness.

We too easily confuse repentance with remorse and emotion, rather than turning back and facing God directly again from when we turned away from Him to look at anything else as the object of our thinking. There also is an element of volition in changing our mind, but changing our mind in METANOIA, is also understandable as changing the object of our thinking. Instead of anything but Christ and His work on the Cross, we simply return to Him, focusing on Him as the object of our thinking.

That is the first part of believing in Him.

Next we confess our sins in judging ourselves.

If we are thinking through faith in Him at this same time, then we are thinking and knowing by faith He has already had our sins imputed upon Him at the Cross.

When we think about ourselves first before Him, we fall into arrogance.

People frequently are challenged by three different but very arrogant thinking problems when they doubt their salvation:
1) They think they had performed some sin which is just too heinous to be forgiven.
2) They keep performing the same sin, so they must not have really repented from the sin.
3) At the time of their salvation, they were fine, but later performed something so heinous that wasn’t covered by the Cross when they were first saved.

In each of these arrogant situations, the believer fails to recognize Christ had ALL sins imputed upon Him at the Cross and ALL had been judged. God knows every sin we ever committed and will ever commit, when he gives any human a created Human Spirit, imputed to the believer justifying the believer.

The first step in such arrogance is, again, by 1st John 1:9, retuning to God in repentance, then confessing all known and unknown sins to Him, then letting Him handle the situation.

Thank you for the reply. I agree that true repentance is acknowledging our sinful condition in light of the perfection and holiness of Almighty God. Sin is “missing the mark” of God’s holiness and perfection and, I agree, it is not just immoral acts but everything we do when compared to what God is. When we first put our trust in Jesus Christ as our Savior, we acknowledge we are sinners and that we cannot save ourselves. We fall upon the throne of God’s mercy and grace and he DOES forgive and makes us righteous in his sight.

I know that there are many people out there who really don’t understand that part. They think “believing” in Christ is a general thing and they trust in their Church to bring them to salvation through acts and works or deeds prescribed by their Church. This is an empty faith in many cases. Sure there are those within that grasp the truth of the Gospel and determine to stay within their faith community to live out their faith in that environment. I just think they are in a minority. So many do not fully understand the promises of God and they place more faith in their own goodness than in Christ’s righteousness to save them.

Some even say that we believe in a “cheap grace” or they call it “easy-believism”, as though we preach a shallow faith that says, “Yeah, I believe in Jesus, but I will still live the way I want.”. I know this is NOT what is meant when we say we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. It is a changed life that PROVES the faith was genuine but it is not those good deeds and refraining from sinning that saves us, but the result of a heart that seeks after God and that has been changed from the inside.

I feel so deeply sorry for people that are unable to understand this simple truth. They have been brainwashed, almost, to reject something that “sounds” to good to be true. But we know from God himself that that IS the good news of the Gospel - that Christ came to save sinners and to transform us into children of God so that we can KNOW we have eternal life.

Thanks for this article and your comments.