March 10
“If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8)
Considering other reasons why a person may not repent and confess their sins to God fully and immediately, there are times when we can feel so unworthy, so ashamed of our sins, so certain of God’s dislike of us that we convince ourselves that He wouldn’t want to even see our face or hear our voice. We may think that our sin is so great that we would just be hypocrites to even confess our sins to Him and that it would be meaningless lip service that He would not want to hear anyway. We may think that we have sinned so often, so deliberately, so egregiously that it is pointless to approach God. We may feel hopelessly lost in our sins, perhaps enjoying them too much, to the extent that we would just be adding to our sins to try to confess them to God.
Let’s comment on these feelings that we may have regarding God’s thoughts about us and our sinfulness. Starting with the feelings of shame and unworthiness, I would say these are appropriate when we sin and approach God. It would be inappropriate to not feel shame and unworthiness after sinning. But we cannot miss this critical point, that it is Christ’s worthiness that makes us acceptable to God in the first place. We tend to think of severity of sins, that this one was worse than that one, and we tend to think ourselves more worthy when we sin against God in “small” ways than when we sin against Him in “bigger” ways.
But whether we think of our sins as big or small it is only by Christ’s righteousness that we are forgiven for any of them. We are never forgiven by God more readily because we weren’t “all that bad,” nor are we ever more acceptable to Him because we were “not as bad as so and so” or “didn’t do this or that.” Our acceptability and forgiveness are never apportioned to us on the basis of what sins we didn’t do or good things we did do but rather only and forever on the basis of what our sinless savior Jesus Christ did by giving His blood for us. And it is on the basis of our faith in Him that God’s forgiveness is apportioned to us.
Part of our problem is that we think too much of ourselves. We think too much of ourselves and others when we don’t sin in certain ways, and we think too little of ourselves and others when we do. We are placing too much emphasis on our performance, I believe, rather than on the performance of Christ. Those who don’t sin and are pleasing to God don’t sin because they have learned to access Christ’s righteousness by faith. Those that don’t sin in certain ways and are not pleasing to God, and those that do sin have not. More on this tomorrow.