Already Forgiven

“Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.  So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

~1 John 4:15-16

Do you ever feel like no matter what you do, you’re never going to be good enough for Jesus? Or that you keep on doing things that make Jesus mad? Or that every time you promise to stop doing something like smoking, cussing, or getting angry and yelling, it’s the very thing you do five minutes later? When that happens, do you feel like you may as well give up on being a Christian because you just keep on doing the things you know you’re not supposed to? Do you think what’s the use, I’m a failure at this Christian thing, God is mad at me because I never do anything right? These are lies from satan, who wants us to fail so badly. But Christ paid for our sins, past, present and future and when we are covered by His precious blood, our sins, shame and regrets are already forgiven.

“This is the message we have heard from Him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us (1 John 1:5-10).”

As fallible human beings, we are going to stumble in our walk with Christ, but He is always there to forgive, and no matter what we’ve done, His love for us is not conditional on the way we act. God’s love abides in us through our belief in His Son, Jesus Christ. He will never forsake us (Hebrews 13:5-6) because of how we feel, His love is based on who He is and not on who we are. Everything about God is the opposite of what we know to be true in this world. We can never be “good enough” to please God because we live in a fallen world and we are all sinners. What we can do is accept Christ and follow Him, because that is what God looks at. When God looks at us, everything about us is seen through the lens of Christ’s blood over us. And when we are covered in the blood of His Son, we are brand new creations in His eyes (2 Corinthians 5:17).

“The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:22-26).”

Read Jeremiah 30-40; Weekend reading Jeremiah 41-52

©2018 Marie McGaha