Unmerited Favor (16 page)

• The blood sacrifices of animals covered the sins of the children of Israel for only one year, and the process had to be repeated every year (Hebrews 10:3).

• Obeying the law could not and did not give the children of Israel the power to stop sin in their lives. The law has no power to make anyone holy, just and good.

• The children of Israel were robbed of their confidence in the goodness of God because they were always looking at themselves to see how well or poorly they performed (i.e. self-conscious).

• The children of Israel could not have an intimate relationship with God because their unrighteousness put distance between them and God.

• The children of Israel could not enter the holy of holies (where the presence of God was). Only the high priest could, and that only once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:2, 14).

• The children of Israel were under the ministry of death (2 Corinthians 3:7).

Under the new covenant of grace...

• God imparts righteousness to man through the finished work of Jesus (Romans 4:5–7).

• God will by no means remember your sins (Hebrews 8:12; 10:17).

• Believers don’t have to depend on their self-efforts to receive God’s blessings, because Jesus fulfilled every one of the requirements of the law on their behalf (Colossians 2:14).

• Believers can enjoy God’s blessings and undeserved favor because Christ became a curse for them on the cross (Galatians 3:13).

• Beholding the loveliness of Jesus and His finished work brings about inner transformation, which produces good works that are motivated by God’s love (2 Corinthians 3:18).

• The blood of Jesus has removed the sins—past, present and future—of believers, completely and perfectly, once and for all (Hebrews 10:11–12).

• Sin has no dominion over believers (Romans 6:14), as the power of Jesus to overcome temptation kicks in when they are conscious that they are righteous in Christ apart from their works (Romans 4:6).

• Believers can have a tremendous sense of confidence and security in Christ because they are now looking to Jesus and not themselves (i.e. Christ-conscious).

• Believers can enjoy a close, intimate relationship with God as their Father because they are made righteous by faith in Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:17; Romans 5:7–9; Hebrews 10:10).

• Not only can believers enter God’s holy presence, they can also come boldly to His throne of grace to find mercy and grace in their time of need because of Jesus’ perfect atonement (Hebrews 4:16).

• Believers are under the ministry of Jesus’ abundant life (2 Corinthians 3:6; John 10:10).

Chapter 13: How Unmerited Favor Is Cheapened

Several years ago, when I was in my study reading the Word and just enjoying the Lord’s presence, He asked me this question: “Do you know how grace (unmerited favor) is cheapened?” With that one simple question, He began to reveal to me how believers today are cheapening His grace (unmerited favor).

Let me just make this clear from the onset: The grace (unmerited favor) that you and I enjoy today is NOT cheap. To call grace “cheap” is to directly insult the cross of Jesus Christ! Grace, God’s undeserved, unearned and unmerited favor, is so valuable that it is priceless. You cannot buy it, achieve it or earn it. Something that is priceless can only be given. And that is exactly what God did—He gave you His grace (unmerited favor), His righteousness, His goodness and all the benefits and blessings of the cross as gifts to be freely received when you received Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.

If you ever feel unsure if God really loves you or if He sees any value in you, just look at the cross. Look at the price that God paid to redeem you and the sacrifice that He made to save you. At the cross is where you will find your assurance of His love and desire to bless you! My friend, you must know this so that you don’t disqualify yourself from receiving all that He has for you.

Wrong Believing Cheapens God’s Grace

Unfortunately, there are some believers who are cheapening grace and the finished work of Jesus because of their wrong beliefs. Wrong believing always leads to wrong behavior. If you believe wrong, you will inevitably live wrong. Conversely, when you start believing right, you will live right. For example, when you start believing that you are righteous in Christ, you will start to live righteously. Everything you do will stem from the revelation of your righteous identity in Christ. This is a powerful truth. There is no point in merely addressing wrong behavior— we want to go after its root cause and address the wrong beliefs that have led to the cheapening of God’s unmerited favor.

When you believe that you need to do something to earn God’s forgiveness so that He will bless you, that’s cheapening the grace of God.

When you believe that
you
need to do something to earn God’s forgiveness so that He will bless you,
that’s
cheapening the grace of God. And the problem with that is that it will rob you of a strong sense of security in the goodness of God toward you. In the previous chapter, we saw how the Bible clearly states that
all
your sins—past, present and future—have been forgiven at the cross. If instead of accepting Jesus’ work on the cross as complete and final, you think that it is not enough and insist that YOU need to play a part in securing your forgiveness, you are undermining what Jesus accomplished at the cross. And once it involves
your
doing, once it is not based completely on God’s unmerited favor, your forgiveness can never be secure. In turn, you will find it hard to expect God to be gracious to you. You are likely to live life with an expectation of God’s judgment coming on you instead of His unmerited favor operating in your life.

Do We Need To Confess Our Sins To Receive Forgiveness?

You may have been taught different things about what you need to do to receive God’s forgiveness. For example, when I was an earnest young adult, I was taught that I had to confess all my sins in order to be forgiven. I loved the Lord and wanted to be pleasing to Him in every way, so I ran as hard as I could with this teaching. I was told that you had to keep “short accounts” with the Lord, which meant that once you sinned in thought or deed, you had to confess your sin as soon as possible, so that you could always be “right with God.” I did not want to spend even one minute not being “right with God,” so whenever I had a wrong thought, I would confess that sin immediately. I would cover my mouth and whisper my confession
every time
I felt that I had failed.

I took this teaching very seriously and ended up confessing my sins
all the time
. When I was talking to my friends, I would stop mid-sentence to confess my sin if I realized that I had said something I shouldn’t have. During meal times, I would confess my sin when a bad thought slipped into my mind. Even when I was playing soccer, I would stop to whisper my confession when I caught myself shouting angry words at my opponents! Can you imagine how weird I appeared to the people around me? They had no idea why I was always whispering into my hand. I was trying my best to keep short accounts with the Lord, but I was actually being a bad testimony to my friends, who thought that Christians were strange.

The constant, unceasing confession of my sins made me so sin-conscious and so aware of every thought that I believed that there was no more forgiveness for my sins, and that I had lost my salvation. The enemy took advantage of my sin-consciousness and constantly put me under condemnation. The oppression was so heavy that it came to a point where I felt that my mind was about to snap! I went to the elders of the church that I was attending then but they offered no relief. Some encouraged me to keep on confessing my sins, while one elder actually told me that I
had
lost my salvation! Can you believe that? It was a dark and terrible time for me, and even though I was confessing my sins out of a sincere heart, I was sincerely wrong. Confession of sins did not liberate me. It just made me so conscious of sin that I almost went over the edge.

This teaching on the confession of sins has caused so much bondage and oppression in the church. Sincere, well-meaning believers live in fear that they have not searched their hearts diligently enough to discover and confess every sin that they have committed. As such, they believe that they must forfeit their fellowship with God and His blessings. But in reality, there is no scriptural basis for this teaching! Ephesians 1:7 explicitly states that the forgiveness of sins is “
according
to the riches of His grace [unmerited favor].” Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the forgiveness of sins is according to the confession of our sins. Nowhere! My friend, here is the truth of the matter: The forgiveness of your sins is established on unmerited favor. You cannot earn it with your confessions.

The forgiveness of your sins is established on unmerited favor. You cannot earn it with your confessions.

Instead of receiving forgiveness by grace, some Christians have made it into a law that no man can ever keep perfectly. If you believe that you are not right with God unless you confess all your sins, then let me ask you this: Have you confessed
all
your sins today? Have you confessed your worries? Have you confessed “whatever is not from faith” since the Bible considers anything that falls into that category a sin?
¹
Have you confessed every wrong thought that you had in the last five minutes? When was the last time you made a confession? How short are the accounts you are keeping with the Lord?

You see, once you make the forgiveness of your sins
your
responsibility and maintaining it a law you need to abide by, you will surely fail. There is no way any person can confess all their sins perfectly. You will just drive yourself crazy. If you really believe in the confession of sins for your forgiveness, you cannot just randomly pick and choose which sins you want to confess and ignore the rest. The law works in totality and the Bible states clearly that “whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.”
²
If you really need to confess your sins to be forgiven, you need to confess
every
point of failing
all
the time. Otherwise, you are still “guilty of all” for “judgment is without mercy.”
³

Are you beginning to see just how absurd the teaching about confession of sins is, and the bondage and oppression that comes with it? This is not God’s heart for you and this is certainly not based on the new covenant of His unmerited favor, which declares that all your sins and your lawless deeds, He remembers no more! And if He remembers them no more, then sin can no longer prevent you from being separated from Him and from receiving the blessings that He wants you to enjoy. So let’s have clarity on this issue: Are you right with God because you have confessed all your sins perfectly, or because of the one sacrifice of Jesus for sins forever? Which is it? You cannot believe both at the same time. You either believe in Jesus and Jesus alone for your forgiveness, or you believe in your own confession of sins for forgiveness.

Paul Did Not Write About Confession Of Sins

“But Pastor Prince, what about 1 John 1:9, which says, ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’?”

Good question. I was just about to address this verse. Every time the teaching on the confession of sins is brought up, someone quotes 1 John 1:9. Before I go into the context of 1 John 1:9, let me establish first that you cannot build a doctrine based on one verse in the Bible. The teaching needs to be confirmed and established by various verses in the Bible before it can be sound.

Now, have you ever wondered why Paul, the apostle of God’s unmerited favor, the man who wrote over two-thirds of the new covenant epistles, did not make the slightest mention of “confession of sins” to all the churches he wrote to? Don’t take my word for it. Review all the letters that Paul wrote: Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Hebrews (the author of the Book of Hebrews is not clear, but many prominent Bible scholars believe that Paul was the author, as do I). Paul wrote extensively to all these churches, and yet there was not one mention of the confession of sins in all his Spirit-inspired letters. Why was this so?

Paul had the perfect opportunity to teach the Corinthians to confess their sins of fornication when he wrote to them as they had clearly sinned. But what did Paul do instead? He said, “...do you not know that your body
is
the temple of the Holy Spirit who
is
in you...?”
⁴
He did not say, “Do you not know that your body
was
the temple of the Holy Spirit? Now, go confess your sins and restore your fellowship with God and perhaps He will put His Spirit back in you.” There was not even one mention that they had to confess their sins. Instead, Paul reminded them of their identity in Christ, and even in their failures, he maintained that their body
is
(present tense) still the temple of the Holy Spirit. Paul apparently believed that to remind believers to be conscious of who they are and what they have in Christ continually is the key to victory over their sins.

If confession of sins is so important for the church, how could Paul have left it out in every one of his letters to the churches? If our forgiveness of sins is indeed contingent on our confession of sins, hasn’t he done us a great injustice by not including this teaching in any of his letters? Don’t you think that Paul, who loved the church, would have written about the confession of sins in every one of his letters, and given us detailed instructions on how to confess our sins, if the confession of sins was truly necessary for us to experience forgiveness of our sins?

Now, all Scripture was written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Would God Himself have forgotten to include this teaching in all of Paul’s letters if the forgiveness of our sins was based on the effectiveness of our confession of sins? Of course not! Instead, we have clear and certain passages in all of Paul’s letters that state beyond the shadow of a doubt that
all
our sins are forgiven, and that our forgiveness of sins is “according to the riches of His grace [unmerited favor],” and not by our works!

1 John 1:9 Was Written To The Gnostics

Since Paul did not mention the confession of sins in his letters, we are left with only one verse—1 John 1:9—that people have used for years to justify this teaching. Now, before we carry on, remember what Miles Coverdale, who translated and produced the first English Bible, said: “it shall greatly help thee to understand scripture, if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom, and unto whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstance, considering what goeth before, and what followeth after.” When reading the Bible, always look at the context of the verses. When you take the “text” and interpret it out of its “context,” all you are left with is a “con”! So don’t be conned. Read everything in its context.

When you are reading chapter 1 of 1 John, one of the things that you need to be clear about is
whom
it was written to. Notice that in the first part of 1 John, there are no greetings to believers. If you look at Paul’s letters, you will see that it was common during those days for the author to greet believers when writing to them. For instance, Paul would write “To the saints who are in Ephesus”
⁵
or “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.”
⁶