Acknoweldgement, Confession, and Forgiveness

Acknowledgement, Confession, and Forgiveness
“If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
1 John 1:1-10
The fundamental question we must ask is this, “Do we see God from the perspective of man, or do we see man from the perspective of God?”  In today’s culture, we strive to reconstruct God from our perspective.  We formulate our views of God and then rewrite the Scriptures to conform Him to what we want to believe.  In the end, we do the very thing that Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden: we make ourselves god by conforming God to our beliefs.  Inherent in our sin nature is our ability to make God less holy than he is and to make ourselves more righteous than we are. Instead, we need to approach the Scriptures with humility and surrender.  We need to allow scripture to confront, change, and transform our view of God and our view of ourselves.

This begins with the understanding of God’s holiness.  In verse 5, John compares the holiness of God to light and darkness.  When John affirms that God is light, he affirms that God is absolutely holy and untainted by any hint of sin.  In the original language, the statement is emphatic.   It reads, “In him is not darkness, not one.” Our sun is so bright that looking at it for any length of time will blind us.  Yet, even our sun has “dark spots.”  However, with God, there is no dark spot, no hint of sin.  He is perfect in His character and His actions.  Because He is holy, He cannot be associated with sin. Therefore, to have fellowship with Him, we must be pure.  However, we are tainted by sin.  We disregard His word and violate His moral law.  So steeped are we in our sin that we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are worthy of heaven (vs. 8).  But this only reveals our self-deception and the reality that we are blinded by our sin.  The eternally fatal error of people is the failure to recognize how sinful we are. The first step in obtaining forgiveness and eternal life is honest acknowledgment.  We must be honest with ourselves and with God that we are sinners by birth and sinners by choice.

Even if we acknowledge our sins, how can we stand before a holy God?  For a sinful man to stand in the presence of a holy God invites certain and eternal damnation (see Isaiah 6:5).  Instead of finding comfort, we find terror.  Yet God has provided a way for us through Christ.  Christ “is the propitiation for our sins” (2:2).  In other words, He paid the penalty for our sins so that we are no longer condemned.  This brings us to the second important step in obtaining eternal life.  We must “confess our sins.”  This means that we acknowledge that we are sinners and recognize our need for salvation.  This confession is not only the admission that we are sinners, but it is interwoven with repentance, which expresses the desire to turn away from sin and live according to God’s standard.

In response to our acknowledgment and confession, God is willing to do the unthinkable.  He is willing to forgive us our sins and completely remove the taint of sin from our lives.  We no longer stand before a holy God condemned; we now stand before Him free from judgment and accepted as His children.  No matter who we are, what we have done, or how badly we have sinned, we can still obtain forgiveness from God.  To receive forgiveness, we only need to acknowledge that we are sinners unworthy of salvation, openly confess our sins to God, and ask for His forgiveness.  When we do so, we can be assured that we are entirely forgiven.  When we start to see ourselves from God’s perspective, we have taken the first step to realizing our hope in Christ.