We generally buy into the fact that God forgives our sins. It is harder to believe that God forgets them. This devotions looks at if and why God forgives and forgets.
Nuggets
- God will forgive our sins if we confess them to Him as Sovereign God.
- Jesus has to be our Redeemer because we couldn’t — and can’t — redeem ourselves.
- God does not withdraw the results of sin – poverty, crime, disease, death just to name a few – after we are forgiven.
- Mercy doesn’t negate or dilute God’s laws and commandments.
- God has forgiven us and forgotten about our sins, but we haven’t forgiven ourselves.
- We don’t have to feel guilty once we have asked God’s forgiveness.
Does God Really Forgive and Forget Sin?
We generally bite on ourselves for our sins. We know God forgives us, but can we really believe that He forgets our sins?
We don’t. Why would He?
Let's Put It into Context
“Keep your servant from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me. Then I will be free of guilt and innocent of great sin” (Ps. 19: 13 NLT)
Sin is when we disobey God and break one of His laws and commandments. It is an attitude that encourages us to exercise our free will and not follow God. Temptation is that period of time between conception and execution of doing what is sinful.
When we sin, we need to repent. Repentance is expressing sorrow for breaking God’s laws and commandments. But it is not just feeling sorry for doing those things. It is making the commitment to changing ourselves through obedience so that we no longer do the wrong things. Obedience means to hear and carry out the instructions that God gives us.
Grace is a free and unmerited gift from Heavenly Father given through His Son, Jesus Christ that enables salvation and spiritual healing to believers. Because of God’s infinite grace, He devised the plan of salvation that made Jesus our Redeemer in order to forgive us of our sins.
Forgiveness is when God pardons us because we have broken His laws and commandments. We accept the pardon by letting go of the guilt and remorse that we feel because we have done something wrong. It is a conscious decision to accept His forgiveness.
This pardon brings us salvation. Salvation is the deliverance from the consequences of sin. This deliverance is necessitated by the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which made everyone sinners.
To read a related devotion, click on the appropriate button below.
God Forgives Sin
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I Jn. 1: 9 ESV)
The Holman Bible Dictionary defines forgiveness as “an act of God’s grace to forget forever and not hold people of faith accountable for sins they confess … it is, first of all, the gracious act of God by which believers are put into a right relationship to God and transferred from spiritual death to spiritual life through the sacrifice of Jesus.”
Look what First John 1: 9 says. “If we confess our sins …” (I Jn. 1: 9 ESV). God will forgive our sins if we confess them to Him as Sovereign God.
Not if we clean ourselves up first. Not if we are good, kind people.
To read a related devotion, click the button below.
How else do we know this? “But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Rom. 5: 8 NLT).
While we were still disobeying God and breaking His laws and commandments, God Sent His Son Jesus to be the Redeemer of mankind. Jesus was born of a virgin, making Him 100% God and 100% man. He gave His life on the cross for us so that His blood could pay the price for our sins. Because of God’s great might and power, Jesus rose from the grave, conquering death and paying the price for our sins.
That brings up another point. Jesus has to be our Redeemer because we couldn’t — and can’t — redeem ourselves.
We are redeemed because of Jesus’ blood. We’ve talked about the blood before.
- Atonement is all about the blood.
- Jesus’ blood provided the atonement – not the obedience, not the sacrifice – the blood.
- Jesus’ blood purifies us so that we can be forgiven (Heb. 9: 22).
- Since Jesus’ blood purifies us, it is nothing we do or don’t do – we can’t work or earn our way into heaven.
According to the Holman Bible Dictionary, expiation “emphasizes the removal of guilt through a payment of the penalty, while propitiation emphasizes the appeasement or averting of God’s wrath and justice.” If expiation is the act of atonement, the act was dying on the cross. To die, Jesus had to shed His blood.
The removal of the sin (and guilt) makes us clean. Cleanness in the Bible refers to disciples being holy and pure. This was the original state where Adam and Eve were before the original sin. Through grace, we can again be pure – body, thoughts, and desires.
God know our hearts are not pure because we still have sin in our lives. Human nature is not clean. Our hearts will always be wicked (sinful) because of our human nature (Jer. 17: 9) – unless ask God in our hearts to purify us. Only God can remove the sin in our lives.
God’s notion is that purity comes from the heart. It is more who we are – our character – than what we do. It is where Jesus and the Holy Spirit live within us.
To read a related devotion, click the appropriate button below.
Now, don’t think that just because God forgives us, He automatically removes the consequences of sin — spiritual death and separation from God.
God does not withdraw the results of sin – poverty, crime, disease, death just to name a few – after we are forgiven. We are going to have to deal with those until Jesus comes back for us. We’re not going to escape the punishment.
To read a related devotion, click the appropriate button below.
Mercy Comes into Play
“He has not dealt with us as our sins deserve or repaid us according to our iniquities” (Ps. 103: 10 CSB)
Mercy is the unexpected way God responds in love to our needs. Spencer stated that it “… is the intervention of gratuitous goodness. It is benevolence, bending in pity and compassion over the very creature, whose guiltiness has deserved the everlasting abandonment of Heaven.”
Mercy doesn’t negate or dilute God’s laws and commandments. It does not give us license to go on sinning after conversion. It does not mean there will be no penalties of sin when we do sin.
It means that God didn’t judge us to the extent He could have. Cross called it more of a delay of punishment.
God could have kept the consequences to sin in place. We could still be spiritually dead. We could still be separated from Him.
Instead, God says, “I know Tom, Sally, and Elaine — and all the other humans — deserve to die because they have sinned. I love them too much to see that. So — if they say they are sorry and will submit to Me — I won’t make them suffer the consequences of their sins.”
We are not entitled to this mercy. We do not deserve it.
We are guilty.
What mercies does God give us? Brown gave us a list.
- “health
- “food
- “clothing
- “home
- “friends
- “Bible
- “Sabbath
- “sanctuary
- “means of grace
- “hope of glory”
God Forgets Sin
“For I will forgive their wrongdoing, and I will never again remember their sins” (Heb. 8: 12 CSB)
Look what else the Holman Bible Dictionary said in its definition of forgiveness. They wrote, “It is also, in this divine dimension, the ongoing gift of God without which our lives as Christians would be ‘out of joint’ and full of guilt.”
We don’t have to feel guilty once we have asked God’s forgiveness. But that is hard to do, sometimes, isn’t it? God has forgiven us and forgotten about our sins, but we haven’t forgiven ourselves.
Spurgeon wrote, “Even when sin is forgiven, the memory of it often makes a man go softly all his days. It is therefore a very blessed thought on the part of our God to make the covenant to bear so much ripen our sin and our sinfulness, and especially to make it open with this unconditional promise of infinite love, ‘Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you,’ etc.”
Remember in Hell Does Have Fury, we said we may have memory on steroids in the eternal life. Things we can’t remember now will be remembered then. Memory is forever.
Smyth reminded us that “the record of our life is a line written in the book of things.” God knows everything that we have done.
Satan tries to tell us that God will not forgive that sin — or worse — He won’t forgive us. Don’t believe Satan’s lies!
When we confess our sins to God, He forgives and forgets. In my opinion, that sin gets erased from our book.
Forgiveness is also when we give up the bitterness and resentment that we feel because we have been wronged.
Making the Connections
When we ask, God forgives us because He loves us. Spencer wrote, “Mercy is that attribute in which the Deity peculiarly delights.” Because He loves us so much, God shows that through mercy.
The thing is, though, we are supposed to imitate God. But, as Spencer said, “God has trusted His world to demonstrate His other attributes, but not to demonstrate His mercy.” We can show God’s love, but we can’t His mercy.
We can’t out-mercy God or even give the same amount.
Making the Connections to Self-Discipline
We are also considering what we would say if a non-believer asked us. Here is the worksheet again. What would you tell someone about God forgiving and forgetting sins?
- What does the Scriptures say?
- What do I believe?
- Why do I believe the same/differently than the Scriptures?
- What are the talking points when witnessing to a non-believer?
Related Links
I have created a worksheet of the questions above. Click on the button below to access it.
How Do We Apply This?
- We have to ABCD.
- We have to forgive ourselves.
- We have to forget.
Father God. We know You forgive sins. It is so easy to buy into Satan’s lies that there is that one sin (other than the unpardonable sin) that You can’t forgive. Or that You won’t forgive us. You will forgive us when we humbly ask You as Sovereign God to do just that. Thank You for Your love. Amen.
What do you think?
Leave me a comment below (about this or anything else) or head over to my Facebook group for some interactive discussion.
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