Forgiven yet confess

As I have said many times, the Christian life is a life in tension because we are saved but not yet able to find true relief and peace this side of heaven. Tonight's 2 Bible verse will illustrate my point.

Colossians 3:13
"bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive."

1 John 1:9
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse of from all unrighteousness."

So we are a forgiven people yet we must confess our sins? That is a huge tension in the Christian life and something that we must contend with on a daily basis. Simply put we must be broken and repentant before the God who has already forgiven us and shown us grace and mercy.

It is amazing and beautiful to know and live in the fact that when we give our lives to Jesus and have faith and trust in His death in our place, we now stand forgiven and holy before God. We now can live a confident life in Jesus knowing that even though we are not perfect and will continue to sin and struggle with our flesh, we will someday stand before God forgiven and welcomed into heaven as a child of the King. Being forgiven and being seen by God the Father as His holy child is something that the Christian must never forget. This will then drive us to take this amazing news and go and tell the world.

But being forgiven and standing before God as holy and blameless does not mean that we are done and perfect. We still sin and fall and that means we must continually confess our sin to God and be a broken and repentant man before Him. Sometime I would love to write about true repentance but for my point tonight we need to understand that we must confess our sins continually and with a brokenness that needs Jesus to forgive us at that moment. That means that every time we sin even if it is the little white lie, we need to confess and be broken and repentant about that sin before God.