God Is Faithful to Forgive Your Sins
As saints who still sin, we regularly have need to be restored in the knowledge that we are forgiven and cleansed before the Lord. The Lord lifts us out of the guilt and defilement that we bring on ourselves. He assures us of his faithfulness to forgive and cleanse us once and for all, based on the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. — 1 John 1:9
When our lives are under a great amount of stress, it is easy to fall back into the mindset that our acceptance with God is performance-based. The best of saints struggle with this problem. Do you experience the sense of guilt that you are never doing enough to please God? Is there a lingering fear that maybe God does not love or accept you?
Stressful times can lead to the resurrection of old addictions and struggles of the past.
Most likely, those sentiments arise in connection with certain sins in our lives. Maybe it is that same sin you have struggled with for years without the deliverance you thought would be given by now. Maybe it is because you struggle with how little your devotion is to the Lord. Maybe the experience of constant failure has become overwhelming.
What may actually be happening to many believers in times of uncertainty is not stronger devotion to Christ but rather the resurrection of old addictions and struggles of the past. Stress and anxiety have a strange way of prompting us to reach for old idols. Those idols always have been and still are death to us, and yet we grab them for relief. Through it all we wonder, does the Lord still accept us?
In 1 John 1:9 God provides ongoing help for those who are already forgiven of all their sins.
At times like this, it is good to meditate on the promise of 1 John 1:9. The Holy Spirit inspired these words to reassure believers who are confused and struggling over the continued presence of sin in their lives. Here, God gives his prescription for how we can respond in faith when we find ourselves doing the things we do not want to do, or neglecting to do the things he wants us to do (see Romans 7).
In this remarkable promise, God provides ongoing help for those who are already forgiven of all their sins.
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Of the Danger of Too Many On-Line Sermons
On-line preaching can be tremendously helpful. But it brings with it a few dangers. Watch out for false and novel teaching. Watch out for the temptation to find a teacher, any teacher, any teacher at all, who agrees with you and goes against what others are telling you. Use your resources wisely. But do not let your resources take you out of faithful Christian living in your local church. Do not daydream about having a legend for a pastor or feel the urge to reshape your pastor into your favorite conference personality. Be grateful for faithful teaching, but do not assume that simply consuming content has sanctified you.
Preach the word! The Lord commands it. The body is blessed by it. The sermon is a good and necessary thing for the life of the believer.
In today’s world, the believer has access to more of the preached word than ever before. We can read books of collected messages. We can stream our favorite Bible teachers. We can turn on RYM Radio and hear teaching all day long. We can Google the Internet (I hear that’s what the kids call it), and find videos of pastors of small churches we will never hear of in any other way.
But, as a pastor, one who preaches weekly (and hopefully not weakly), can I warn you of a danger or two in too much on-line sermon consumption? I’m quite grateful for the resources that the Lord has placed at our fingertips, but I fear that some believers may move from being helped to being harmed by their consumption of material on-line.
I Know a Secret
One danger of on-line sermons that I think we would all agree on is the risk of consuming false teaching. This is more likely when a believer is listening to a pastor or scholar about whom they know nothing. If you are listening to a message or reading an article written by someone whose scholarship is not being checked by others, you run the risk of novel and even dangerous teaching.
One of the attractions of many an on-line message is the fact that it teaches you something you have never heard before. It is possible to run across a man who is translating the Hebrew of Genesis for himself and saying things about what it means to be human that no faithful teacher has ever taught. If a believer is not careful here, he or she may come away with a damaging, false belief that was all the more dangerous for feeling like it was something secret that no other teacher has brought forth.
I’d bet that you have heard of the problem of Gnosticism in the early church. Among the dangerous beliefs of the Gnostics was the ego-boosting belief that they possessed secret knowledge that was not available to the general public. It was easy for folks to love the fact that they were let in on the stuff that other, ordinary people could not grasp. See any similarities to how some folks feel about that special teacher they have found on-line?
Choose-Your-Own-Doctrine
Do you remember choose-your-own-adventure books? These were popular before video games took the idea to a whole new level. A reader would follow the story of a hero until a particular turning point: enter the cave or climb the mountain? The reader would turn to a different page of the book to find out what happened to the hero depending on the choice the reader made for the hero. Perhaps the cave contained a dragon. Perhaps the mountain led to a castle and a princess. The point was to give the reader a sense of adventure by being able to pick the kind of story he or she wanted to read.
Similar to the draw of novel and dangerous doctrine is the temptation to pick and defend your own favorite teaching. Sometimes people will have a particular point of doctrine they want others to agree with. Instead of examining faithful teaching of faithful teachers, the eager learner will scour the Internet for the one teacher who says it just the way they want to hear. Want to find that Calvinist who dunks on your Arminian friends, no problem. Want to find that Arminian preacher who makes your Calvinist friends look like cold-hearted robots, piece of cake. Want to find somebody who interprets a particular passage in accord with your strange preferences? This one might take a bit more work, but the Internet is a big place, and lots of people have said lots of crazy things over the years; so it can be done.
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BREAKING: Us Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade in Historic Ruling
Now that abortion policy can be directly decided through the elected branches of government, and politicians can no longer invoke the judiciary as an excuse for inaction, abortion-related legislative and lobbying efforts are certain to increase dramatically across the country, with the issue prioritized even higher by activists and voters alike.
WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) – The United States Supreme Court finally issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Friday, upholding Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, overturning Roe v. Wade, and delivering the pro-life cause its most transformative victory since Roe unleashed nationwide abortion-on-demand in 1973.
Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion of the Court, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The ruling declares Roe “egregiously wrong from the start.”
“Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.”
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito continued.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a concurring opinion stating that he would not have overturned Roe but would have left the Mississippi ban in place. The Court’s three Democratic appointees dissented.
The long-awaited ruling was teased in early May when Politico published a leaked draft of Alito’s opinion, which sent shockwaves across the political spectrum, with pro-lifers tentatively rejoicing, pro-abortion politicians and activists lashing out in anger, many speculating that the leak may have been intended to pressure judges to flip their votes (or to incite hatred and threats against them), and all parties wondering if it was the final decision or subject to change.
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Even Calvin Had a Team
For Calvin, the call to be a Christian pastor was a high and holy calling — but it was also a most challenging vocation, not to be lived in isolation. Ministers of the gospel flourished as they experienced communion with Christ through his word, were empowered by the Holy Spirit, and enjoyed the precious gift of godly colleagues in ministry.
ABSTRACT: Many who know John Calvin as a brilliant Reformed theologian do not yet know him as a model of pastoral collegiality and accountability. Under his leadership, ministry in sixteenth-century Geneva often happened in plurality and community. In particular, four regular meetings fostered Calvin’s vision of collegial ministry: the weekly Company of Pastors, Congrégation, and Consistory, and the quarterly Ordinary Censure. Through these institutions, the city’s pastors prayed together, studied together, encouraged and exhorted one another, and labored for the advance of the gospel together. Their model of ministry offers an enduring case study for pastoral practice, especially in a day when many pastors feel discouraged, isolated, and perhaps on the verge of burnout.
In a New York Times article from August 2010, Paul Vitello describes the serious difficulties faced by many Christian ministers in the United States today.
Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could. Public health experts . . . caution that there is no simple explanation of why so many members of a profession once associated with rosy-cheeked longevity have become so unhealthy and unhappy.1
During the past decade, researchers have probed various factors contributing to the poor mental and physical health of America’s professional clergy.2 Some factors commonly identified include poor pastor-church alignment, lack of resilience, lack of self-awareness, unresolved conflicts, heavy workloads, unreasonable expectations, financial pressure, and loneliness or isolation. Though no single aspect is usually decisive, the cumulative effect of these tensions and troubles frequently produces high levels of stress that force pastors to question their vocation, or cause them to leave the ministry altogether. Pastoral work often becomes “death by a thousand paper cuts.”3
Thankfully, a variety of helpful resources are now available to support and encourage pastors who are burned out, bummed out, or burdened with congregational ministry.4 One important resource for pastoral health and flourishing that is frequently overlooked in contemporary discussions, however, is the history of the pastoral office — the practices, convictions, and institutions that Christians in the past have adopted to nourish and strengthen gospel ministers. As we shall see, a historical awareness of the pastoral office can provide a broader perspective and a refreshing draught of wisdom as modern-day Christian ministers live out their vocations in ways that are pleasing to God and sustainable for a lifetime of faithful and fruitful ministry. This present essay offers a case study of the model of ministry created by John Calvin in Geneva from 1536–1564. As we’ll see, Calvin recognized the unique challenges faced by faithful gospel ministers and created practices and institutions to promote pastoral collegiality, accountability, and spiritual vitality.5
Proclamation of the WordWhen John Calvin (1509–1564) first arrived in Geneva in the summer of 1536, the city republic had been Protestant for barely two months and faced an uncertain future. As Calvin later recalled, “When I first arrived in this church there was almost nothing. They were preaching and that is all. They were good at seeking out idols and burning them, but there was no Reformation. Everything was in turmoil.”6 Over the next 28 years (with a three-year hiatus from 1538–1541), Calvin emerged as the chief human architect responsible for building a new religious order in Geneva that prioritized the preaching of God’s word, the fourfold ministry (pastor, elder, deacon, professor), church discipline, and intensive pastoral care and visitation. Calvin’s vision for a church reformed in doctrine and practice was articulated in Geneva’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541), in the city’s catechism and liturgy (1542), and in Calvin’s expansive biblical commentaries and sermons. For the Genevan Reformer, the faithful exposition and proclamation of God’s word was one of the marks of a true church, standing at the center of gospel ministry. As he once noted, the word is the “means of our salvation, it is all our life, it is all our riches, it is the seed whereby we are begotten as God’s children; it is the nourishment of our souls.”7
One of the first steps Calvin took upon arriving in Geneva was to restructure parish boundaries in order to give priority to the preaching of the word of God. He and his colleague Guillaume Farel consolidated nearly a dozen Catholic churches and chapels into three parish churches within the city’s walls — St. Pierre, la Madeleine, and St. Gervais — and recruited six or seven Reformed ministers to serve these three urban congregations. Calvin also consolidated Geneva’s countryside parishes and appointed around a dozen pastors to serve these rural churches.
The proclamation of God’s word stood at the center of religious life in Calvin’s Geneva. In the city, preaching services included weekday sermons at 8:00 a.m., early morning sermons at 4:00 a.m. for domestic servants, Sunday sermons at 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and a catechetical sermon on Sundays at noon for children. By 1561, there were 33 sermons preached within Geneva’s city walls each week. Calvin and his pastoral colleagues shared the preaching load and rotated between the city’s pulpits. “The preacher was not the proprietor of a pulpit or the captain of his congregation: it was Christ who presided over his Church through the Word.”8 Even so, a disproportionate responsibility for preaching fell on Calvin and his more gifted colleagues such as Theodore Beza and Michel Cop, who regularly preached more than 150 sermons per year.
Calvin and Geneva’s ministers prioritized God’s word in other ways as well. The Genevan liturgy, written by Calvin in 1542, was filled with scriptural allusions and rich biblical language. The singing of the Huguenot Psalter was a standard feature of both public and private worship in Geneva. Children were required to attend catechism classes where they learned the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer — a basic primer for Christian faith, conduct, and worship. In 1555, the ministers, along with the church’s elders, also began conducting annual household visitations to ensure that all of Geneva’s residents had a knowledge of basic biblical doctrine as articulated in the catechism and were living in accordance with God’s word. Finally, during the sixteenth century, Geneva became a center for Protestant publishing, with the city’s presses printing no fewer than eighty editions of the French Bible as well as translations of the Scripture into English, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. For Calvin and Geneva’s ministers, reading, hearing, and obeying God’s word was essential for the life of the church and the spiritual health of God’s people.
Pastoral Collegiality and AccountabilityIn addition to prioritizing the proclamation of God’s word, Calvin also created pastoral institutions in Geneva to encourage the collegiality, accountability, and spiritual health of the Protestant ministers who served the city’s churches. These institutions included the Company of Pastors, the Congrégation, the Ordinary Censure, and the Consistory — four pastoral bodies that profoundly shaped religious culture in Geneva and preserved Calvin’s theological legacy for generations to come.
Company of PastorsIn the mid-1540s, Calvin began to convene the ministers of the city and countryside every Friday morning to discuss the business of the church. This institution, known as the Company of Pastors, became a fixture of religious life in Geneva thereafter. The Company, whose membership consisted of around fifteen to eighteen pastors and several professors, was responsible to monitor public worship in the city, recruit and examine new pastors, supervise theological education at the Academy, oversee the work of the deacons and public benevolence, and offer godly advice to the city magistrates. Owing to the theological stature of Calvin and several of his colleagues, the Company of Pastors soon developed a vast correspondence with Reformed churches throughout Europe, becoming a kind of hub of international Calvinism. As such, the Company served as an advisory board to foreign churches on doctrinal and practical issues, solicited financial and political support for embattled Protestants, and supplied student-pastors to foreign churches. Moreover, the Company of Pastors began in 1555 a top-secret program where it recruited and trained Reformed ministers and sent them as missionary pastors to Catholic France.
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