Forever Forgiven

[beloved]

Until a believer can rest in the finality of the cross, they can never have real peace, great faith, boundless love, or be free from the power of sin over them. If you have trusted in Jesus as your Savior, you will make it to heaven, but if you don't understand the finality of the cross you will live your life in oppression, fear, and swayed toward the very sin that God has made you free from.

Peter 1:3-4
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. Through these He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature an escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

So many Christians start out with Jesus Christ and his finished work on the cross, then they go looking for "deeper" revelations, or are taught by other well meaning preachers and teachers that Jesus got them saved but now we must live a perfect life to stay in God's favor and make it to heaven some day. But 2. Peter 1:3 says that we have received everything we need for life and godliness; that we've already been given the promises. It is therefore not our good works that get us somewhere with, or something from God, but Jesus finished work. Through God's glory and goodness he has given us power to escape from the corruption of sin, and has given us his promises by faith, and faith alone. We get saved by grace through faith, and we walk out the Christian life the same way. Not by our strength and goodness, but by His strength and goodness; by faith in who He has made us in Christ Jesus.

We need to truly know and believe that Jesus sacrifice on the cross was enough though. Otherwise we will never be able to rest in God through faith and will forever be trying to accomplish things in our life through the work of our flesh. Human nature cannot change human nature. That is why God places his nature within us. He made us new creatures in our spirits. Now we can live our lives holy and free from sin through living out of our new nature. How? By faith in Him and who He has now created us to be! In fact, the Bible teaches us that if we are caught up in sin, it is because we don't understand what Jesus really did for us.

2. Peter 1:9
But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.

But just because that verse says our past sins, doesn't mean that we haven't been cleansed from all our sins; past, present, and future. In fact, if we haven't been cleansed from them we are doomed and Jesus accomplished nothing, and our faith in him accomplished nothing. But God be praised that when Jesus was on the cross, God placed EVERY sin of EVERY person for ALL time upon Jesus and poured out His wrath upon him for all those sins that would ever be committed by anyone. ALL OF YOUR SINS WERE IN THE FUTURE WHEN JESUS DIED, SO ALL OF YOUR SINS FOR YOUR WHOLE LIFE WERE PAID FOR THEN. You just received payment at some point in your life making it in affect for you.

It's like this, if your Father died and left you his estate in his will, it is your estate. But if you never attend the reading of the will and receive what has been left you though whatever process your state requires, you will never have possession of that estate. It is the same with salvation. Salvation belongs to every human being! But they have to hear that it belongs to them and receive that gift of inheritance. If they don't, they will never possess it; neither in this age nor in the age to come.

If I buy you a ring and never tell you, you will never possess it. God's hand is holding out the "ring" to every human being. But they have to reach out and take it to receive it. They can refuse it. But if you have received God's free grace given to you in the blood of His Son, you have received eternal redemption (forgiveness of your sins). It is an accomplished thing.

Colossians 2:13-14
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us ALL our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; He took it away, nailing it to the cross.

You see the Bible tells us that sin is the transgression of the law. Colossians tells us here that the written code (which contained any and every sin that we could possibly commit) was taken away and nailed to the cross. God placed every sin on that cross and punished Jesus in our place. Jesus paid for ALL sin, for all time, for every person. Our part is to believe and tell God so.
Once you do that, you are forever forgiven because forgiveness only comes through Jesus blood. If you haven't yet, put faith in Jesus blood shed for your sins today and tell God so. Receive God's free gift!

[beloved]

Until you rest in the finality of the cross, you will never experience the reality of the resurrection.

Satan has done a masterful job of keeping the Christian world preoccupied with the thing that God has dealt with once and for all- sin- and ignorant of the thing that God wants us to be preoccupied with- life! This in no way means that we are to minimize what Jesus did on the cross. Thank God for that! But it is only when we understand that the ultimate goal of salvation was the restoration of life that we can truly appreciate the purpose and meaning of Jesus Christ's death for us on the cross. He came that we might, "have life and have it more abundantly". If we are caught up in sin, we will never live an abundant life, because all that sin can produce is death. But we must put faith in who God has made us, not on our fleshly nature (will power) to keep us from sin. When we change what we believe about ourselves, our behavior will change as well; when we see sin for the lie and destruction that it is, it will no longer hold sway in our lives. We will see what life really is; we will understand what is the good life- one that doesn't include living in sin. My husband once told me that the difference between an alcoholic and someone who isn't addicted to such things is an alcoholic's life is about drowning memories and a non- alcoholic's is about making memories. I ask you, which one is the good life? What do you drown your memories and hurts with? I choose to make good memories with good people and family. I have no interest in the other because I see it for what it is- a waste of life.

When we hear the good news of the Gospel and put faith in it, our sins our taken away, our spirits are made alive in Christ as he comes to live within us, the Spirit of Christ seals us- marking us as God's. We are sealed until the day of our redemption when God carries us away to heaven.

Ephesians 1:13
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.

Once we see that the goal of salvation is the raising of dead men and women to life, it is easy to see why Christ had to deal with the sin issue once and for all. This is exactly what the New Testament teaches from beginning to end. for example, notice these verses from three different writers:

Romans 6:10
The death He died, He died to sin once for ALL; but the life He lives, He lives to God.

Hebrews 9:26
But now He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of Himself.

I. Peter 3:18
For Christ died for since once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit.

The message of God's complete, 100 percent forgiveness in Christ has been a controversial, mind-boggling subject for nearly 2000 years. To prepared the way, God gave Israel the law of Moses with its sacrificial system. Even though these sacrifices were God ordained, no one was ever made right with God through them. Instead, they were merely a picture of Christ and His finished work on the cross in our behalf:

Hebrews 10:1
The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming- not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.

Only perfect Jesus sacrifice was enough to take away our sins. It was and is a finished work. There will be no more sacrifices. There is no need! Jesus paid for EVERYTHING that is sin at one time, for all people, for all time!

John 1:29
Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

Hebrews 10:10-12
And by [God's] will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this Priest had offered for all time once sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God.

Jesus is in a resting position in heaven, seated at the right hand of God interceding on our behalf that we will become one and accomplish the commission he has given us here on earth. We will never do that if we don't understand the finality of our salvation; our deliverance from sin. Relentlessly the New Testament hammers home the message that Jesus Christ offered Himself as one sacrifice for all time. When will we believe it and get on with what we have been called to?

Jesus said in John 19:30 "It is finished!" He did not say, 'to be continued.'

Why do we as Christians try to water that down? Why won't we believe Jesus? Repeatedly in the book of John Jesus tells us that if we believe we will have eternal life. Eternal means eternal, not intermittent, not gradual, not partial, not temporary.

Did Jesus accomplish what he came to accomplish or not? Or did he die in vain? Was he too weak to finish your salvation?

No! He began your salvation, he keeps your salvation, he finished your salvation! Accept it, believe it, live it!

[beloved]

Have you ever gone to church on a Sunday and left feeling like God loved you and was a good God, then returned to church the following Sunday and left feeling like a worm that God hates because you don't live up to his expectations of you; because you haven't been good enough to be loved and accepted by him? Has this ever left you feeling confused about God and the Christian faith? Do you know why? It's because you can't have it both ways. You can't mix the Old Covenant with the New, and you can't live under the law and under grace. The mixture of wrath and grace is so frequent across the board in most denominations within the church that I don't believe most Christians understand or have a good foundation of what Jesus really accomplished for them. They don't understand God's heart toward them. If you don't start with the foundation that Jesus was slain before the foundations of the earth because of God's great love for us; if you don't start with the fact that God is love and God is good all the time, you can't fit all the pieces of the bible together and make sense out of them. If you don't understand covenant, you can't understand the bible, nor Christianity. To most Christians surprise, Christianity is not about law keeping. We should keep the law, but our right standing with God is not based upon our law keeping. When you understand the heart of God toward us, the bible will begin to make sense to you. We can see it in the light of what it really is and what it means: Great hope, good will from God toward us, real and final salvation!

Jesus said you can't put new wine in old wine skins or the skins will burst and the wine will run out all over the ground. What did he mean by that statement? He meant that you can't mix the Old Covenant with the new. Paul put it this way, "if it (salvation/righteousness) is by works, than no more grace, and if it's by grace than not more works."

We cannot keep the law of God perfectly. In order to be in right standing with God, we must be perfect; we can never sin. This leaves us in a bad state because human nature is not perfect by any means. Even on our best days we sin several times a day. It is impossible for us to not sin. So, God remedied our situation since it is not His will that we should perish. For God to be just he had to bring due punishment for sin, in order for him to be just he also had to provide mercy and forgiveness for our sins because we can't help but sin. God remedied this by making us perfect through forgiveness.

Most of the church is continuously preoccupied with sin; with every thing they say, think, and do all day long, every day. They try by the strength of the flesh to fix the flesh. The problem however is that the flesh cannot fix the flesh; just as a dog cannot will himself to be a cat. Our fleshly nature is sinful! However, if you are born again, you do not have to live by your fleshly nature. You can live by your born again nature, which cannot sin. We cannot sin in our spirits because our spirits have been made new creatures in Christ. We can learn to walk in that nature by renewing our minds to who we are in Christ. When our soul and spirit agree we live holier lives effortlessly. This is all good news, but what is better news is that this is possible because Jesus took care of our sin so well that we cannot lose our salvation. We can sin on the outside, in our flesh, and still be perfect on the inside, in our spirit. Our spirit remains perfect because all of our sins were forgiven the moment we received Jesus as our savior- past, present, and future. Because all of our sins have been forgiven, there is no more wages of death for our sins. We will never be separated from God again because the higher law of forgiveness has released us from the law of sin and death- Paul calls it the law of the spirit of life which has made us free from the law of sin and death. Does that mean we won't suffer consequences for our sins? No! We will suffer the consequences of our sins here on earth. If we "sow to the flesh we reap corruption". However, it does mean that we are freed from the wages of sin which is spiritual death (separation from God). If you sin you will suffer the consequences of your actions. God told us, "God is not mocked, whatsoever a man sows, that also shall he reap", but our sins no longer are a barrier between us and God. The blood of Jesus has purchased us back from death and bought our acquittal from eternal death.

Christ died for all your sins before you ever committed a single one. When he died all your sins were in the future. When you received Jesus as your Savior, you received his sacrifice for all your sins. When you received his sacrifice, you received pardon for every sin you would ever commit; otherwise salvation is a farce. You do not turn away God's wrath from you by your works, Jesus turned away God's wrath from you and made you righteous at the same time.

I. John 2:2
He is the one who turns aside God's wrath, taking away our sins, and not only our but also the sins of the whole world.

Jesus paid for all mankind's sins at one time for all time. He did not leave one person out. He paid it all in full for you! He even paid for the sins of the whole world. He even paid for the sins of every person that is in hell now! Why are they in hell then? Because they did not believe. God provided a way of forgiveness for all of them. God provided payment for all of them, they didn't receive it; believe (trust in, rely on) it. They didn't believe in (trust in, rely on) Jesus as their savior, payment, propitiation, sacrifice. That is what Jesus meant when he said, "he that believes shall be saved, he that believeth not is condemned already."

Why did God pay for all your sins? "He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus." (Romans 3:26)

He did it to be just. He did it because he loves you. Let it be a settled fact within your mind that you are forever forgiven! You are safe within His arms of love!