Why Do We Need Ongoing Forgiveness?

One of the questions that I’m asked from time to time, and one that I also have asked many times concerns why a Christian needs to continually confess our sins if we have already been forgiven. Many of us have the vague notion that we need to confess our present sins, but don’t really know why. Sure, 1 John 1:9 (a letter written to believers) encourages confession of post-conversion sin, and certainly Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses…” but many people do so without any clearer reason than that they are commanded (Of course, doing something because God has commanded it is never an insufficient reason, but it is better if we can also know the reason for the command). 

 

Various reasons for confessing sin have been given.

 

A common answer that I’ve heard throughout my years in the church is that we must continually confess our sins to stay in fellowship with God. That is, if we sin and don’t confess it, God won’t answer our prayers and we will feel in our souls that we are distant from him. The verse commonly cited in support of this view is Ps 66:18 – “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”

Any asset that this answer is in providing a reason to confess sin becomes a liability in a host of other areas for theology and Christian living.

The biggest problem for this view, is that it has a split view of fellowship with God. Part of our fellowship with God is found in our justification by grace, while the other part of our fellowship is found in our ongoing confession of sin in the life of sanctification. God becomes schitzophrenic on this view. When one wonders whether he/she is in fellowship with God, there’s no definite unqualified ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this question.

 

Scripture, however, speaks definitively on this question. The believer has unqualified peace and fellowship with God (Romans 5:1). It does not qualify the answer the way that those who dichotimize justification and sanctification do. Typically the qualification goes like this:

 

If justification refers to the past work of God declaring the believer righteous and forgiven of sin and sanctification is the present work of God making the believer righteous, then all the work of forgiveness is past. Declaration is done. God is now in the business of gradually making us what he really said we are — righteous.

 

Aside from the many other problems with this view of justification and sanctification, by dichotomizing what God says we are from what we actually are, it puts the gospel in the past. The gospel justifies us (calls us holy) while the law and our obedience to it sanctifies us (makes us holy). But Scripture does not present God as participating in “divine fiction”: calling something what it is not. Rather, it presents God’s word as effective and powerful. His declaration that we are righteous doesn’t simply declare us righteous; it also makes us righteous. By saying that it is so, God makes it so. His Word makes it true. When God speaks reality must listen.

 

So we are not simply called righteous, we are righteous. We are righteous by a continuous declaration of forgiveness spoken over us. This is also why we must continually confess our sin. Sanctification is simply a life of ongoing justification. And so ongoing confession is necessary.

 

Lest some think that I’m speaking strictly as a Lutheran on this matter, pay attention to what is perhaps an uncharacteristic moment for John Calvin in which he speaks of sanctification according to the gospel rather than law-keeping. According to Calvin we need to be repeatedly acquited of sin because we are repeatedly sinning.

 

Therefore, God does not, as many stupidly believe, once for all reckon to us as righteousness that forgiveness of sins concerning which we have spoken in order that, having obtained pardon for our past life, we may afterwards seek righteousness in the law; this would be only to lead us into false hope, to laugh at us, and mock us. For since no perfection can come to us so long as we are clothed in this flesh, and the law moreover announces death and judgment to all who do not maintain perfect righteousness in works, it will always have grounds for accusing and condemning us unless, on the contrary, God’s mercy counters it, and by continual forgiveness of sins repeatedly acquits us (Institutes II.14. 10).

  

According to Lutheran theology forgiveness of sins is found in the Lord’s Supper. In partaking, we do not simply memorialize the death of Christ and remind ourselves of our past forgiveness. Rather, forgiveness is new and fresh, because our sin is new and fresh. Confessing our sin is the acknowledgement that we are just as much in need of justification now as ever.

 

When we don’t confess our sins continually we don’t acknowledge to God that we are still sinners. Sin becomes a thing of the past, dealt with in the past. The forgiveness God speaks in the present is not other than that which he spoke in the past. It is the regiving of the promise of that was first spoken. The gift of forgiveness is always new and always needed. It is ours now just as it was before. Ongoing forgiveness means we still need the gospel today no less ”than when we first begun.”

 

There is still more to the story. Because Christians often relegate justification entirely into the past they forget that our need for ongoing forgiveness is borne out of the fact that the justification we have now is the eschatological judgment of the future. Justification is judgment. God has pronounced his judgment on us and in Christ we are found righteous. The judgment of the future has been thrown into the present. We live in the rupture of two ages. Not to confess sin continually is to live only in the future as though the future judgment wasn’t simply thrown into the present. It is to think that the future isn’t future anymore but only present. We must all stand before the judgment seat. While Christians have nothing to fear on that day because of Christ, the judgment has not yet come. Our works are not through and it is on our works that we will be judged (2 Cor 5:10). The fact that the future judgment is given into the present does not render irrelevant our present sin. We remain both saints and sinners (simul justus et peccator). Possessing the future does not make all present action irrelevant. As Luther wrote: “If the world should come to an end tomorrow, I will still plant a little apple tree today.” If the judgment should come tomorrow we should still confess our sin today.

 

Each time I confess my sins it is a renewal of my baptism. A fleeing to Christ again. Those who do not confess their sin continually are fleeing not to Christ but fleeing to that one time that they fled to Christ. Thus they are not receiving forgiveness they are participating in a mental excercise of remembering that initial forgiveness which was to be the start of what would be received again.

 

In spite of what I’ve said here I don’t think I’ve answered the question of whether someone who does not continually confess sin has final forgiveness before God. I’m not sure that it can be answered. I suppose that we should have a bigger problem with the question than with the lack of answers to it. The question is bad one. The proper one is why is someone who has been promised final forgiveness not confessing their sin? I think I have answered why we need ongoing forgiveness but this is different from the question that a question that asks, “How much can I get away with?” As with much of sinful behavior, Scripture doesn’t tell us just exactly where the parameters of sin are for a believer. And its a good thing, too (Surely you can see why Scripture wouldn’t answer a question like this.). The problem is not that there isn’t an answer to the question of how little ongoing forgiveness can a person get by on. Rather, the problem is in asking the question in the first place since any answer would grant license to avoid confession and need for forgiveness as well as undermine the purpose of forgiveness in the first place. Forgiveness is for those who are desperate and needy – those who have no other recourse but to cast themselves on God’s mercy. Thus confession and forgiveness is simply incompatible with answering the question of how little of it a person can get by with. So the question is best dealt with – not by giving a satisfying answer, but by dissolving the question. It’s simply the wrong question to ask about forgiveness. It’s akin to questions like: how little can I love my wife and still really love her?; and how few laughs can a comedian get and still be funny? Blame the question not the answer.