SUNDAY STUDY: Confessing Our Sins
Excerpted from Jack Kelley’s https://gracethrufaith.com
Does our blatant sin interfere with our hearing from the Lord? Do you believe that we are punished for repetitive sin and perhaps the Lord doesn’t do things for us that He might if we were repentant regarding our sin?
We all sin repetitively, and while we can’t lose our salvation, we can interrupt our fellowship with God by failing to confess our sins as instructed in 1 John 1:9. During this time we may not receive the Lord’s protection from spiritual attack, we may not be able to communicate with Him, and we may lose out on blessings we would have otherwise received. This is not because the Lord is punishing us, it’s the natural consequence of living outside of His benevolent protection.
If we confess our sins God is faithful and just and will forgive us and restore us to righteousness. This doesn’t mean that we have to keep confessing to stay saved. It means that if we confess when we sin, we’ll be able to maintain a good relationship with God even though we’re still imperfect beings.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) was given in part to teach us this. During the time the prodigal son was away from his father’s household he did not share in the blessings that had been his before he left.
He wasn’t being punished for leaving, he was experiencing the natural consequence of doing so. But during that time he never stopped being his father’s son, and as soon as he sought his father’s forgiveness he was restored.
So it is with us. Once we are born again, we can never stop being a child of God. When our unconfessed sins have placed us outside of His benevolent protection, sincere confession will always purify us from all unrighteousness and restore us to full fellowship with God. Confess early, confess often. You’ll always be forgiven. The blood of Jesus has made it so.
When by faith you accepted Jesus as your Savior, He issued you a pardon that covered all the sins of your life, even those you haven’t committed yet (Colossians 2:13-14). This is not a license to sin, but is a guarantee of forgiveness.
He has given you weapons with divine power to overcome sinning (2 Cor. 10:3-5) and by faith you will.
Our sin nature didn’t die when we were born again, but continues to dwell in us. Even Paul complained that no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t behave the way he wanted to. In effect he said the harder he tried the worse he became. (Romans 7:15, 19) But then he told us how God sees us. According to Him, it isn’t we who sin but the sin nature that dwells within us. (Romans 7:20)
We received the Holy Spirit as a guide to help us act in a way that pleases God, but we still fall short. 1 John 1:8 says that if we claim to be without sin we are liars, and many of us have life long struggles with certain sins. But Jesus knew all this before the fact and agreed to pay the penalty for all the sins of our life before we committed even one of them. (Col. 2:13-14) This is how He can guarantee our salvation.
Remember, Jesus didn’t go to the cross so that bad men could become good. He went so that dead men could live.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).
Because of this, we can no longer be condemned for any reason. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him (John 3:17).
Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my words and believes Him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has passed over from death to life (John 5:24).
None of the above has required anything of you except to believe that when Jesus went to the cross, He went for you. Everything was settled for you the moment you believed that.
The fact is, remaining sin free is humanly impossible by God’s standards, because to do so we would have to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5:48). Since we can’t be as perfect as God is, we would all have been lost again within a short time, and the Lord’s death would have amounted to nothing.
To prevent this, God imputed to us a righteous equal to His own. We can’t earn this righteousness by trying to be perfect. It comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus(Romans 3:21-24). He is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he is at the right hand of God and is always interceding for us (Romans 8:33-34; Hebrews 7:25).
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