God Never Just Forgives Sinners

About how often do you think about or remember the gospel? How often do think of the significance of those moments where Jesus hung on the cross? Once a month during the Lord’s Supper at church? Once a week? Only after you talk with non-Christian co-workers? How about after you sin?

I’ve been noticing that the gospel message often sits in the passenger seat of my life, when it should be in the driver’s seat. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy spending time with God everyday, getting to know Him better. God’s grace is very precious to me and His holiness awesome to me. But the other day I realized that I am a Christ-follower who often forgets and takes for granted the means by which I am even able to follow Christ.

This last week I came face to face with my own sin again. I blew it. What is more, I realized that there were still depths and recesses of sin in my own life that had not yet come to the surface. So what did I do? I started confessing my sin and asking God for forgiveness, grace, and mercy. I tried to call some passages to mind that speak of God’s grace towards sinners. Despite confessing and refreshing my mind with God’s grace, I still didn’t feel right. My heart just wasn’t getting it. So I started contemplating God’s holiness and just how badly I fall short of his standard, with the hopes that this would awaken my heart to joy of God’s grace.

Even after all this I still didn’t feel right. I was praying and filling my mind with the truth, but something was missing. So as I was calling out to God to impact my heart and make me feel the weight of his holiness and his grace, it finally hit me. All of this time I had been looking for the grace of God and the assurance of his forgiveness, but I was missing the most important piece – Christ!

It dawned on me that in my mindset for the last little while, I had been treating Jesus as merely the door through which I came to salvation, and not the continuing foundation for my daily battle against sin. I was looking to experience the grace of God and longing to take my sin seriously as God does but forgetting that both of those things cannot be had except through the Jesus Christ, specifically.

Jesus on the cross is the only place where the holiness, justice, anger, and fierce wrath of God meet together with the sweet mercy and grace of God for sinners. As Christians we often do one of two things to try and kill the gross feeling of our sin. One, we interpret God’s grace to mean that he overlooks our sin completely and says it’s ok. But this doesn’t make God’s grace greater or stronger. It makes it cheaper, and it minimizes his holiness. Two, we accept that God is absolutely holy and disgusted by our sin and then flounder around trying to confess and repent properly so that we can experience his grace again. But this doesn’t make God’s grace greater or stronger either. It too makes it cheaper because it’s no longer free and must be earned through a polished and detailed confession, and a legalistically performed repentance.

How do we uphold in our hearts the fierceness of God’s hatred of sin and sinful people and the infinite and endless power of his grace to save sinners? By focusing on Jesus Christ crucified. You see, grace though freely offered to us cost God infinitely. He poured out the fierce anger and righteous indignation he had stored up for us, as sinners, upon Christ, his holy and beloved Son. He crushed him with his wrath for our sin! God never overlooks sin; someone must receive the punishment. God never just forgives sin; someone must be hit with his holy fury because he is just and righteous. That someone was Christ, in our place!

Two questions should help us see the incredible impact this truth has on our daily lives. One, how often do you sin? Two, how often do you remember the gospel? The two should be inextricably linked together. Every time you sin, your longing for grace from a holy God should drive you back to Christ crucified. We should be plunged heart, soul, and mind back into the gospel no less than every time we sin and hopefully more! Hopefully every time we do what’s right, or enjoy fellowship with God and others, or eat food or have water to drink, or even breathe clean air – all of these are things we do not deserve because of our sin yet enjoy because of God’s grace through Christ crucified.

So join with me in this! The next time we find ourselves in that place of realizing our sin or having disobeyed God again, pick up your Bible and open it to 1 John 2:1-2. In those moments we will read it, and meditate on it and chew on it in our hearts.

“But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense – Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Preach it to your soul everyday! Rejoice and give thanks! And spread the good news!