Sin Before Forgiveness
Forgiveness—it astounds me how shy we are of talking about this word, which is so central to every New Testament summary of the gospel. But in order to talk about forgiveness, we must talk about sin. And we are afraid that if we talk about sin, we will be seen as judgmental. But if we don’t talk about it, we must try to preach the gospel without talking about the central need we all have as fallen human beings. Forgiveness! To have a conscience that is really clean—not just seared or asleep, but really free from guilt. To know that you are as acceptable to God as Jesus Christ is. To have no need to be ashamed. To receive this, not because you deserve it, but because God loves you and has paid for your sin forever in the death of Christ.
Maybe the most important thing we can do today is to recover the joy of forgiveness. That means first recovering a sense of the sinfulness of sin. We cannot communicate this to others until we have first felt it ourselves. Then we will be filled with such joy that we will not need to motivate ourselves—indeed, we will not be able to restrain ourselves from proclaiming repentance for forgiveness in his name. Good news! Good news! This is the gospel! This is good news indeed.
Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
on Taking the Measure of the Deserving & the Undeserving Poor by Martin Bordelon
33.2—March/April 2020
Lewis, Chesterton, et al. Against the Frauds, Experts & Revisionists by Vigen Guroian
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