What 1 John 1:9 Really Means

I consider 1 John 1:9 to be the most misunderstood and misapplied verse in the Bible.  Everyone seems to think he understands what it means, and I think almost everyone is wrong.  However, failure to understand this verse has led to teaching that undermines people’s faith for divine healing.  They get the idea that they cannot be healed until they get “right with God” by confessing their sins before receiving healing.  In fact, some healing teachers have actually come out and said that if you have unconfessed sin in your life, it will stop you from getting healed.  One wonders how the multitudes got healed in Jesus’ ministry – was there really no one in those crowds who had unconfessed sin?  The whole idea that healing won’t be yours until you get your unconfessed sins “under the blood” is not true, but we will have to do a complete proof of what 1 John 1:9 really means to cancel this common conjecture.  Once you see what John is saying – and NOT saying – you will realize that ALL your sins (past, present and future) have been dealt with by Jesus’ blood.  You don’t need to do any work to improve on that already-perfect situation.

Here’s the verse:

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

The nearly universal understanding of this verse is, “When we sin, we are no longer right with God, but if we own up to these sins before God, he will forgive us and restore us to right standing.”  Supposedly, at that point, you are in a position to receive healing and other blessings from Him again.  The trouble is, that can’t be what it means because that explanation contradicts so many other verses, as we’ll see shortly.  Determining what the verse DOES mean turns out to be even harder than just realizing what it DOESN’T mean, and we’ll look at various ways of trying to explain this verse and why all but one of them fall short.  

For the sake of completeness, we need to examine the immediate context of the verse, so let’s look at the last 5 verses of 1 John 1 together before commenting on verse 9:

1 John 1:6-10:
If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

The first thing we should get out of the way is whom John is addressing here.  Was this passage written to believers or to unbelievers?  In the context of 1 John as a whole, it was definitely written to believers.  1 John addresses “fathers,” “young men,” and “little children,” all of whom are clearly believers.  The difficulties in trying to interpret 1 John 1:9 correctly have led to one “workaround” where the first chapter was supposedly written to members of the Gnostic cult (who like modern misnamed Christian Scientists, did not believe in the reality of sin) while the rest was addressed to believers.  We should dismiss that theory without hesitation.  Did you ever write a love note to your romantic interest where you spent the first 10 phrases addressing the Christian Scientist cultists in the town where your romantic interest lives while the rest of your letter was written to the one you love?  No, of course not, and John didn’t do that either.  No one would write a single letter like that.  Paul didn’t spend the first chapter of Galatians addressing the problems at Corinth.  If you had two audiences, you would write two letters.  That’s just common sense.  So this entire letter, including chapter 1, was written to believers.  Chapter 1 was written to make the BELIEVERS aware that the Gnostic cultists were phonies who did not have the truth in them.

The fact that 1 John does not start with a typical self-identifying greeting is sometimes used to argue that this is a unique book that has more than one audience.  However, Hebrews also dives right into doctrine and its author never identifies himself in the entire book!  That doesn’t mean that the book had multiple audiences.

Though John wrote to believers, John was not hinting that BELIEVERS would say that they had no sin.  John would not refer to believers as not having the truth in them.  Not having the truth in you places you in the same position as the devil, as John heard Jesus say (John 8:44): “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

Now let’s examine some of the difficulties involved with interpreting this verse, especially interpreting it the way that almost everyone does.  Hold on, it’s going to be a wild ride!

Does Sin Make You “Not Right with God?”

An Old Testament verse is sometimes preached to promote the idea that Christians who sin are no longer “right with God” and are blockaded from receiving from Him until they confess their sin.

Isaiah 59:2:
But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.

Here’s another one that gets used sometimes:

Psalm 66:18:
If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me:

The trouble with this is that it is only an Old Testament concept that sins separate you from God so that you can’t even be in His presence.  A thick veil had to be in the temple to separate sinful people from the presence of God so that they would not die.  When Uzzah touched the ark of the covenant, his sinful nature encountered the presence of God and he fell dead instantly.  However, when Jesus died, the veil in the temple was supernaturally torn from top to bottom (Mark 15:38).  This indicated that man did not need to be separated anymore from God’s presence, which would no longer dwell in a building or a tent but within believers.  As a believer, you are the righteousness of God in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21).  You are right with God.  Romans 3:26 says that God is the justifier of a person who believes in Jesus.  If you are justified, you are no longer guilty in God’s sight, so He does not have to hide His face from you, the New Testament believer.  His ears are always open to the cry of the righteous, and in Christ, you are ALWAYS the righteous.

What you are doing may not be right, but it does not stop you from being right with God.  As a Christian, you have received the gift of righteousness (Romans 5:17).  When something is a gift, it is granted irrespective of your merits or works.  Otherwise, it would be a paycheck, not a gift.  What you received on a gift basis does not get taken away from you on a works basis.  That’s the beauty of grace.

Does Sin Break Your Fellowship with God?

An old “explanation of the difference between relationship and fellowship” goes like this: “When you did something wrong as a child, your father sent you to your room.  You did not lose your relationship with him because he was still your father.  But you lost your right to fellowship with him because you were in your room and he wasn’t.”

However, that is still the Old Testament concept from Isaiah 59:2 cited above.  According to this “reasoning,” God cuts you off from being able to talk to Him if you mess up.

This would mean that at a time when you MOST need to talk with God because you’re struggling with sin, God says, “Fend for yourself and get your act together on your own, and then we can be on speaking terms again!”  This puts your access to His throne on a works basis, which is a Law-based concept, not a grace-based concept.  “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).  The Bible teaches that your access to God is based on the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19), not your good behavior.  The blood of Jesus does not get un-shed just because you sin!  In fact, your sin is the very reason Jesus shed His blood for you in the first place – so that you could be redeemed from sin and its punishments and have access to God in spite of it!

God promises the believer the right to come boldly to His throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16).  If you’re struggling with sin, you are in a time of need.  Thank God, you can go to Him and get help.  Even as an earthly parent, say that your child were shockingly honest and came to you and said, “I’ve been having a lot of impure thoughts about Sally Ann at school, you know, the one who always tests the limits of the school clothing policy, shows all that she can get away with, and wears outfits designed to call attention to certain body parts.  Now Sally Ann is making moves on me, and I’m having all kinds of impure fantasies about her, and I daydream about trying some of the things suggested by the porn websites I’ve been visiting.”  Would you tell your child, “Go away – don’t even talk to me until you’ve completely stopped going to those websites and stopped having impure fantasies about Sally Ann. I’m not available to help you until you clean up your act?”  I hope not.  What makes you think that God, who is a far better parent than any earthly parent, would treat one of His children that way if His child came to Him with the same plea for help?

The New Testament talks about our fellowship with God and with His Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3) and with the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14).  These statements are not prefaced with conditions that you have to behave a certain way to qualify for that fellowship.  So if you sin, you haven’t violated the qualifications for fellowship with all three Persons of the Trinity.  The only qualification for that fellowship is being saved.  If you’re saved, you haven’t lost that fellowship.

1 John 1:6 says, “If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:”.  So does it mean that the moment we sin, we’re lying if we say that we have fellowship with God, because now we don’t?  No, the idea is the same as in verse 8 and verse 10 (which we’ll look at later), where the person who denies that he has sinned is not really saved.  In the rest of 1 John, the person habitually walking in darkness is considered a sinner, not a saint.  There are other verses along these lines such as 1 John 3:10: “In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.”  The theme is similar to what Jesus said about knowing people by their fruit.  The unsaved person who lives in darkness does not know Jesus, and that is why he would be lying if he said he had fellowship with God.

The very next verse, in fact, shows that fellowship is not dependent upon sinlessness.  1 John 1:7 says that if we walk in the light, we have fellowship one with another.  John then says that the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.  So the people he is talking about are sinning, but because they’re washed in the blood of Jesus, they still have fellowship.  (If they weren’t sinning, there would be no sin to have the blood of Jesus cleanse them from in that verse!)

Many believers interpret “walking in the light” to mean “not sinning,” but that explanation leads to a contradiction.  It would cause verse 7 to mean, “If we don’t sin, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.”  What sin?  If you aren’t sinning, there’s no sin for the blood of Jesus to cleanse!  So “walking in the light” cannot mean “not sinning.”  Because of the way walking in the light appears to mean being saved and walking in darkness appears to mean not being saved in the rest of 1 John, I would take it to mean knowing Jesus.  That would make more sense – if you know Him, His blood cleanses you from all sin.  That would be consistent with the rest of the New Testament.  You may realize, though, that this already directly contradicts the traditional understanding of 1 John 1:9, which is that if you sin, you aren’t cleansed from that sin until you confess it to God, at which point you get cleansed.

I can give you another irrefutable proof that God does not stop fellowshipping with you when you sin.  Hebrews 12:5-11 tells us that God corrects His children when they sin.  If God isn’t on speaking terms with you when you sin, how can He talk to you about your sin so that He can correct you?  That would be impossible if you had no fellowship with Him.

In passing, every now and then someone comes up with a message or a song that says that when God sees you, all He sees is the blood, not your sins.  The logical conclusion, whether they’ve thought this through or not, is that God doesn’t even know about it when you sin.  Hebrews 12:5-11 refutes that idea also, as it would be impossible for God to correct a sin that He doesn’t know about.  However, He will deal with you based on Jesus’ blood as opposed to giving you what your sins deserve.

It’s easy to prove that Jesus doesn’t go off speaking terms with you when you sin.  In Revelation chapters 2 and 3, He commands some pastors to repent.  So He’s still speaking to them while they’re sinning.  Also, that proves Jesus knows about it when you sin; otherwise, He could not command certain pastors in Asia to repent of sins He didn’t know about!

I’ll prove both points again yet with Philippians 3:15: “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.” So God knows where you’re falling short in your attitude, and He’s still on speaking terms with you because He reveals this shortcoming to you!

Does Confessing Sins Get You Forgiveness for Them?

Now let’s deal with 1 John 1:9 itself again.  On the surface and outside of its context, this verse appears to support the idea that you are not forgiven for a specific sin until you confess it to God, at which point He forgives you and cleanses you.  However, that concept is in direct contradiction to many other Scriptures, and we know that the Bible cannot contradict itself.  So let’s go over numerous reasons that the rest of the Bible does not support the idea of confessing a specific sin to get forgiveness for it.

Confessing Sins Is Not Part of the Plan of Salvation

With all due respect to the printed “sinner’s prayers” that you see in tracts and evangelism training materials, confessing your sins is NOT a requirement for salvation.  The only confessing required for salvation is the positive confession that Jesus is now your Lord!  I didn’t confess my sins when I gave my life to Jesus!  I didn’t even know the half of the sins I was committing.  I was doing plenty of things that I didn’t even KNOW were sinful at the time!  So you cannot expect an unbeliever to confess his sins, and God doesn’t expect it either.  In fact, being SORRY for your sins is not even part of the plan of salvation!  I wasn’t sorry doing for doing what I thought was fun; all I knew was that I did not want to go to hell, and if I did not turn my life over to Jesus, that is where I would have ended up.  So it is unnecessary to make a sinner say, “Dear Jesus, I am sorry for my sins.”  I was a lot sorrier for my sins AFTER I received Jesus and I realized that much of what I was doing was forbidden by Scripture.  But I didn’t know the Bible back then to know what Scripture had to say about much of anything.

The requirements for salvation are in Romans 10:9-10.  Believe that Jesus rose from the dead and declare Him to be Lord with your mouth.  There’s nothing about sorrow or confessing sins in there.  So already we should see that 1 John 1:9 cannot be talking about how to get saved, as you do not confess your sins to God to get saved!  In other words, confessing your sins to God does not cause Him to forgive all your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

Most printed sinner’s prayers also say, “Forgive me for my sins.”  However, that is not part of the plan of salvation either!  Your sins are forgiven automatically when you make Jesus the Lord of your life.  At that point, you are in Christ, and you are now righteous and forgiven.  Forgiveness “comes with the package” when you are born again; you don’t have to ask for it specifically.  You just walk in the light of it.  Do you have to pray, “Please let me go to heaven” as part of your salvation prayer if you want to go to heaven?  No, that comes with the package automatically as well.

Besides, forgiveness is not received by asking for it anyway – if it were, a lot of sinners would be forgiven.  After all, sinners sometimes ask God to forgive them.  But sin is only remitted by the shedding of blood (Hebrews 9:22).  Sin cannot be remitted by prayer, even sincere but misguided prayer.  Jesus, not prayer, is the solution for sin.

Judas Iscariot confessed his sin and was sorry for his sin, but neither of those facts saved him!

Given that confessing your sins was not a requirement for the remission of your sins when you first got saved, it would be logically inconsistent to insist that confessing your sins is required for their remission now that you ARE saved.  If you didn’t have to enumerate your sins one by one to obtain forgiveness the day you got saved, what sense does it make that you have to enumerate sins one by one to get forgiven NOW?  Obviously, the traditional understanding of 1 John 1:9 has some serious problems, and we’re just getting started!

Someone else will probably argue that the Lord ’s Prayer includes a petition for forgiveness for sins.  That prayer was before the cross and before people could be washed clean of their sins once and for all by the blood of Jesus.  (The Lord’s Prayer is not a Church Age prayer.  For example, you are already delivered from evil because you’re a Christian, so you would not ask God to deliver you from evil.)

Someone else will probably argue that no one prays, “Lord, forgive all the sins I’m going to commit today or tomorrow.”  But such a prayer would be unnecessary anyway, as the next topic section proves.

You Are Already Forgiven!

Are you forgiven for all your sins when you receive Christ, or later when you confess them one by one?  If you are not forgiven until you bring them before God individually, the following Scriptures cannot be true, because they state that your sins ARE forgiven – Christ HAS forgiven you.  You HAVE (right now) forgiveness for you sins because you HAVE redemption through His blood.  This is not something you’re going to get or are qualified to get if you pray and ask God to give it to you – it is something you already have.  The verses below prove this beyond question.

Ephesians 1:7:
In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;

Ephesians 4:32:
And be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.

Colossians 1:14:
In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:

Colossians 2:13:
And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;

Colossians 3:13:
Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.

1 John 2:12:
I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name’s sake.

So is your forgiveness in the future tense or in the past tense?  As a Christian, it is definitely in the PAST tense.  You ARE forgiven right now.  You have PAST tense forgiveness for all sins, past, present and future.  (How can this apply to future sins?  Well, all sins were future sins relative to the cross, after all, so that’s not an issue for God.)  Colossians 2:13 does not say, “Having forgiven you all PAST trespasses.”  The trespasses that were forgiven are not qualified by any time element, so we are on safe ground to assert that ALL trespasses are really ALL trespasses, not just past ones.

What about the original Greek?  Is forgiveness a one-time finished act or an ongoing one?  In the three verses above where it says that Christ forgave you, it’s the Aorist form of the verb.  The Aorist and the Imperfect could both indicate ongoing action, but only the Aorist would ever indicate a completed one-time action.  However, the Aorist CAN refer to ongoing action too (it really tells you just about nothing about the timing of anything), so its usage doesn’t “prove” that an action was one-time, but if the Imperfect were used, it would disprove that it was one-time action.  Greek grammar has a lot of nuances that we won’t get into, but the Imperfect tense would have been more appropriate if Paul meant that Christ “has been forgiving you” or “continues to forgive you.”  In particular, the Aorist indicative usually, but not always, indicates momentary past action, and that is what we find in Ephesians 4:32 where Christ has forgiven you, Colossians 3:13 where Christ forgave you, and Colossians 2:13 where Christ did things “having forgiven you” .  Thus, the likely, though not definite, meaning of these verses from a Greek perspective is that forgiveness for the Christian is, to use the grammatical term, punctiliar.  It all happened at once – as soon as you received Jesus, you received forgiveness.  It is not an ongoing thing.  It is not like mortgage payments that pay a debt off a little at a time.  God’s forgiveness for your sins appears to be a momentary past action.  That means that it’s DONE!

However, even in English, we can sometimes use a “momentary” word instead of an ongoing one to describe ongoing action.  For example, “I attended Deafening Din Worship Center for ten years.”  The sense is that “I was attending Deafening Din Worship Center for ten years,” but most people would use the simple past tense in this case.  This can happen in Greek, too.

So is there any way to be sure that the three verses above refer to one-time forgiveness for all sins?  Actually, there is!  Where 1 John 2:12 says that our sins are forgiven, the Perfect form of the Greek verb is used.  This does indicate completed action, not ongoing action or future action.  We know that the Bible can’t contradict itself, so we see that the forgiveness of our sins was a completed action, not something that is ongoing for the Christian.  The only sense in which forgiveness is ongoing is that you have ongoing forgiveness for your sins the same way that you have ongoing eternal life – because of a completed past action that settled the matter forever.  Nothing remains to be done.  You do not have to do anything to stay forgiven any more than you have to do anything to stay born again.

To sum this up, there were three verses above where the Greek tense COULD be taken as one-time or ongoing, but there is one verse where it was definitely one-time.  The only logical conclusion is that the forgiveness of sins MUST be a one-time event.

People sometimes put out the challenge, “Show me one place in the New Testament where it says that future sins are forgiven!”  As far as I’m concerned, I just gave you six verses that prove it.  If your sins WERE forgiven, they ARE forgiven and WILL STAY forgiven in the future.  Forgiveness is granted, not earned.  But I like challenges enough to give you even more verses!

The following verses show that your forgiveness is tied to a one-time finished work that Christ did for you and NOT to anything NEW that either you or He has to do in the future if you commit a sin today.

Our sins are ALREADY purged; they don’t get purged when you confess them:

Hebrews 1:3:
Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;

The redemption Christ wrought was eternal, not needing any further action to make it effective today for a believer’s sins:

Hebrews 9:12:
Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.

There is no more need for periodic sacrifices now that Christ offered the final sacrifice ONCE:

Hebrews 9:25-28:
Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others;
For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:
So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.

As far as your right standing with God goes, you have it forever if you are in Christ (and stay in Christ) because His sacrifice for sins was done ONCE for everyone forever:

Hebrews 10:10-14:
By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins:
But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God;
From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool.
For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

If you are perfected forever, you don’t need to confess individual sins to get perfected today.  No more action or offering is required for the forgiveness of sins:

Hebrews 10:17-18:
And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.
Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.

So the claim that 1 John 1:9 means that you are NOT forgiven until you “fess up” contradicts all these other Bible verses.

I am aware that some people (even famous ones) preach that forgiveness is like healing – it’s legally yours but it doesn’t become real to you until you receive it.  Is that how they preached Jesus in Acts?  NO!  They preached forgiveness of sins by getting saved!  The moment you are brought out of darkness into light is the moment that you are forgiven!

Acts 26:18:
To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.

When you get saved, do you have to pray to be brought out of darkness into light?  No, you already are.  Do you have to pray later that God will deliver you from Satan’s power and into God’s power?  No, that has already happened.  What about receiving your inheritance – when is it yours, when you pray to receive it?  No, it is already yours once you’re saved.  You might not know about it all or enjoy it all, but it is legally yours anyway.  When are you “sanctified by faith” (made righteous)?  Do you have to pray to RECEIVE righteousness after you’re saved, and only then it becomes yours?  No, you become perfectly righteous the instant you receive Jesus.  This is all part of your “salvation package” – right along with forgiveness of sins.  When you confessed Jesus as Lord, did you have to pray a separate prayer to be born again after that?  No, it was automatic.

You might not walk in the LIGHT of any of these things – but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have them.  Even our denominational Christian friends who think that they are dirty, rotten sinners have the same perfect righteousness as Jesus!  They are not actually dirty, rotten sinners; it’s just the devil’s bad theology that makes them think that they are.  It’s not a matter of them needing to pray to receive righteousness, but rather acting on the righteousness that they already have!

Forgiveness and Righteousness

You can’t possibly be righteous if you’re not forgiven for all your sins!  Nor can you be declared forgiven for ALL your sins unless you have perfect righteousness.  Forgiveness and righteousness go together.

You Are the Righteousness of God in Christ

You already have perfect righteousness.  We saw that already in 2 Corinthians 5:21, which is so bold as to say that you ARE righteousness!  You now are what righteousness looks like.  You can grow in faith, you can grow in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, but you cannot grow in righteousness.  You will not be any more righteous in heaven than you are right now because you have perfect righteousness as a New Testament blood-washed child of God.  You cannot possibly have a righteousness that is more righteous than the righteousness of God, which is what you have and “are” according to the Word.

If you are the righteousness of God in Christ, and then you SIN, what are you then?  Correct answer: The righteousness of God in Christ!  That didn’t change when you sinned.  If you’re only the righteousness of God in Christ when you’re not sinning, what good is grace?  You might as well go back under the Law of Moses as the Galatians were trying to do.

Did you become righteous by not sinning?  Of course not!  You received the gift of righteousness when you received Jesus (Romans 5:17).  If it’s a gift, it’s by grace, and thus it’s totally not based on your own merit.  You can’t earn New Testament righteousness; you can only receive it.  If good works didn’t MAKE you righteous, how can they be necessary to KEEP you righteous?  That makes no sense.  Titus 3:5-6 makes it clear that we are not saved by works of righteousness that we have done.  If you didn’t become righteous by NOT sinning, how can you become unrighteous by SINNING?

Yet the popular interpretation of 1 John 1:9 implies that if you sin, you become unrighteous – you supposedly lose your right standing because of your works.  That absolutely negates the grace of God and establishes a works gospel similar to what Paul warned the Galatians about.  You see, if you believe that if you confess your sins to God, He cleanses you from all unrighteousness, you have just stated in so many words that sinning makes you unrighteous as a believer!  Sadly, there are actually churches that teach that you DO lose your righteousness every time you sin and have to get re-saved!  And they reach the even more awful conclusion that if you die between the time you sin and the time that you confess that sin, you’ll be eternally lost because you are unrighteous again until you are cleansed from that unrighteousness through confession.  Yikes!

You ARE righteous as a believer.  Therefore, you cannot be “cleansed from all unrighteousness” AFTER you are saved, because you don’t have any unrighteousness!  How righteous is the righteousness of God in Christ?  It’s perfect, and it’s granted to you as a believer.  So the idea that 1 John 1:9 means that if you confess your sins to God, God THEN cleanses you from unrighteousness has to be wrong.

You Have an Advocate, and It Isn’t YOU

1 John 2:1:
My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:

So if you sin, the burden is not on YOU to clear your name in the court of heaven by “owning up” to your sins before God so that you can be forgiven.  There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5).  Even some Spirit-filled believers get this confused and think that they have to be their own mediators in the courts of heaven to clear their names, or that they have to stand between God and man themselves (“Spare thy fierce wrath on our nation, O God,” etc.).  That job is taken.  If you sin, which John does not advocate, your Advocate takes care of matters for you in heaven without any need for you to represent yourself.  His blood always keeps you cleansed from all unrighteousness.

A Tougher Standard?

If you met the worst criminal in town, would you tell him that he could be forgiven for all his sins if he would receive Christ?  I hope so, because it’s true.  I’ve preached this in a couple prisons (as a visitor, not as an inmate).  We seem to have no trouble believing that if a criminal receives Christ, all his sins will be washed away.  We don’t expect the criminal to confess all his sins before he can be forgiven for them, do we?  You could be there all day and he would surely miss some sins that he’s done that he doesn’t even know are sins yet or else has forgotten about.

What gives us a right to impose a tougher standard on Christians than on sinners so that it is easier for a sinner to be forgiven for his sins than for a saint?  Are we saying that all the sinner has to do is receive Jesus to be forgiven for everything, but then once he’s saved, he has to confess sins one at a time to be forgiven for them?  That just doesn’t make any sense.

Only Innocent Blood Remits Sins

If you teach that confessing your sins to God is how to get them forgiven, you have established a new doctrine contrary to the Bible’s teaching that only the shedding of blood grants remission of sins (Hebrews 9:22).  No one in either covenant ever got his sins forgiven by confessing them to God.

If an unbeliever goes into a booth and confesses his sins to another human being, does that grant him forgiveness?  If the traditional interpretation of 1 John 1:9 is right, we could all line up outside the confessional waiting for our turn to confess our sins and receive forgiveness, since we have established this doctrine – after all, 1 John 1:9 does not even mention receiving Christ as the basis for forgiveness.

“No,” some would say, “don’t go building a straw man and then knocking it down with that confessional argument.  1 John 1:9 says that you have to confess your sins to God, not to a so-called priest.”

The Confession Is Before Men

But 1 John 1:9 never says that you confess your sins to God – the words “to God” are not in that verse, even though it is almost universally interpreted that way.  And if we look at the context in the verses before and after verse 9, we see that John is actually talking about your confession before men, not before God!

1 John 1:8-10:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

This passage clearly speaks of people who are saying to other people that they have not sinned (verse 8 and verse 10 – the 2 verses directly around verse 9).  Do these verses make it sound like they’re telling God that they haven’t sinned?  I don’t think so.  In this context, verse 9 should be understood to be talking about a person who admits to other people that he has sinned.  He acknowledges the reality of his sin, unlike the cultists in verse 8 and verse 10.  He professes (acknowledges) that he has sinned.  He agrees with God that he has sinned.

I think of verses 8 through 10 as an Oreo cookie.  You have one “light” verse with a “dark” verse on each side.  Someone may point out that the word “say” both in the Greek and in English, in verses 8 and 10, is not the same word as “confess” in verse 9.   That does not stop the verses from fitting together.  The things some people say in verses 8 and 10 are lies that do not agree with God.  Thus, homologeo (to “speak the same thing” or “confess” in verse 9) fits because you are agreeing with God, who says that all have sinned (Romans 3:23).  What is said in verses 8 and 10 is NOT the same thing that God says, it’s the opposite.  People who claim sinlessness are NOT “speaking the same thing” as God, so homologeo would be an inappropriate word to describe disagreeing with God.

If a man kills someone and then yells for the city to hear, “I have just killed a man!”, do you think that man is forgiven because he confessed his sin?  Of course not!  Was he cleansed of all unrighteousness and forgiven for his sin because God was faithful and just to do it?  No!  The idea of being forgiven just by admitting wrongdoing is unknown in Scripture.  Righteousness comes only by being in Christ.  Only bloodshed remits sin, not confession.  A person who admits that he has sinned and receives Christ is forgiven, whereas people who claim they have never sinned believe they don’t need a savior.  Such people are in error and are still unrighteous.

Someone suggested that James 5:16 proves that we must confess our sins, but you should note that James did not say that you should confess your sins to God, either!  Instead, he talked about confessing sins to each other, which is not the same as confessing your sins to God.  So that further hurts the argument that 1 John 1:9 is about confessing sins to God!  There’s another problem, too.  The word “confess” is a single word in English, but the Greek word for confess in James 5:16 DOES imply an admission of guilt – the “last 2 minutes of the TV crime drama” kind of confession while the Greek word for confess in 1 John 1:9 NEVER means that kind of confession anywhere it is used in the Bible – it is a confession that “says the same thing” or “agrees” with something. (See the section Two Kinds of Confession below for more on this.)

Someone also suggested that our need to confess sins is also proved by Acts 19:18 (“And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.”)  But no one made them do this, and they weren’t forgiven because they did it.  They were already forgiven believers.  Furthermore, that undermines once more the idea that we must confess our sins to God to be forgiven, because the people in Acts did not confess their sins to God; they confessed them to the others who were present who got to see them burn their occult books (which is still a good idea – don’t sell them on the internet to ensnare someone else in the devil’s works).  We’ll also see shortly that the Greek word translated confess in James 5:16 and Acts 19:18 isn’t even the same Greek word used for confess in 1 John 1:9, which really weakens any argument based on those two verses.

God knew that there would be un-Christian, unscientific “Christian Science” cult people who would claim that you really haven’t sinned.  So God put these verses in the Bible to warn us that these people are deceived when they claim that sin is not real and that they haven’t sinned.  That is the point John makes here.  He is certainly not establishing a new doctrine of forgiveness by confession, which would contradict the rest of the Bible.

It Didn’t Work for Judas

Judas confessed that he had sinned by betraying innocent blood.  He even threw back the monetary reward he got for betraying Jesus.  Did that save him or grant him forgiveness?  NO!  He still went to hell.  He was a thief all along; his greedy action before Jesus’ arrest was not a momentary lapse one day like Peter’s three denials.

A New Gospel?

If confessing your sin can remit it, we have established a new gospel that does not require receiving Jesus or the new birth, as those are not mentioned as prerequisites to having your sin cleansed in this verse.  Surely John is not introducing an alternate plan of salvation that works by mere confession and does not involve confessing Jesus as Lord.

Two Kinds of Confession

There is actually a textual difficulty with trying to use Acts 19:18 and James 5:16 (see above) to make an argument about 1 John 1:9.  Two different Greek words are both translated confess in English.  The word exomologeo is translated confessed and confess in Acts 19:18 and James 5:16.  But the word used in 1 John 1:9 for confess is the different word homologeo (literally, to say the same thing, i.e., to affirm) as opposed to confess or “own up” to something as a criminal would – that would be a case of exomologeo, one meaning of which is “acknowledge openly.”  Even exomologeo is used in ways that don’t refer to a criminal version of “confession” but we do see it used that way in the verses below.  (The word translated from the Greek word exomologeo is underlined in both cases.)

And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins. – Matthew 3:6

And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins. – Mark 1:5

But interestingly, the word homologeo in 1 John 1:9 (as opposed to exomologeo) is never used to indicate criminal-style confession – which is what most people think “confess” means when they read 1 John 1:9!  Better equivalents for homologeo (sometimes used in Scripture) would be profess or acknowledge.  Greek study aids will tell you that the primary meaning is to “say the same thing as another” – after all, homo means same and logeo means word or speech.  Just so that you know I’m not making this stuff up, below are the 25 other places in the Bible where homologeo, the word translated confess in 1 John 1:9 is used.  See if you can find a single one of them that means “admit to” or “own up to ” or “fess up to” the way people think it does in 1 John 1:9.  I’ll warn you in advance, you won’t find any, because for starters, there isn’t a single case where SIN is mentioned along with CONFESS in any of these other verses!  In each case, the translation of homologeo is underlined.

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. – Matthew 7:23

Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. – Matthew 10:32

Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. – Matthew 14:7

Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall [homologeo appears here again but it is not directly translated into an English word] the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: – Luke 12:8

And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. – John 1:20

These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. – John 9:22

Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did [homologeo appears here but it is not directly translated into an English word] not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: – John 12:42

For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both. – Acts 23:8

But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets: – Acts 24:14

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.  For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. – Romans 10:9-10

Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses. – 1 Timothy 6:12

They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate. – Titus 1:16

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. – Hebrews 11:13

By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name. – Hebrews 13:15

[Now these next verses should carry some extra weight because they show how John used homologeo himself in his same letter!]

Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: (but) he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also. – 1 John 2:23

Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. – 1 John 4:2-3

Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God. – 1 John 4:15

[Here’s John again in another letter:]

For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. – 2 John 7

I hope I’ve made my point.  When we follow the sound advice to let Scripture interpret itself, we have to conclude that confess in 1 John 1:9 means to profess or acknowledge, as opposed to doing a “confession” as the bad guys usually do at the end of whodunit shows on TV.  I look at it this way, we are acknowledging the fact that we sin, as opposed to dredging up and “outing” individual sins.

I think the context in verse 8 and verse 10 strengthens the idea that John speaks of acknowledging that you have sins as opposed to confessing something in particular that you did wrong.  In the context, verse 8 and verse 10 do not speak of specific sins, so there is no reason to conclude that verse 9 does either.  John contrasts those who profess to others that there is no sin in their lives to those who profess to others that they do have sin in their lives.  Only those who profess that they have sinned can be saved, as those in error who believe that they have not sinned have nothing to be saved from (in their minds), so they would not think that they need Jesus’ payment for their sins.

John Didn’t Contradict Himself

John, the writer of 1 John 1:9, could not have believed that your sins are not yet forgiven, because only 13 verses later he himself said they were in 1 John 2:12 cited above.  If your sins ARE forgiven, you don’t need to confess them to get forgiveness and cleansing from unrighteousness.

In verse 1 John 1:7 (see above) John said that if we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ God’s Son cleanses us from all sin.  Again, it is BLOOD, not CONFESSION, that cleanses sin.  Now if the blood of Jesus Christ already cleanses us from all sin, why would we need another cleansing from sin that supposedly comes from confessing our sins to God, a cleansing that is unrelated to the blood that Jesus shed?  That doesn’t make sense either.  Was Jesus’ one-time blood sacrifice sufficient to buy us forgiveness or wasn’t it?

“Walking in the light means not sinning,” someone might conjecture.  “You’re only still cleansed if you’re walking in the light.  Otherwise, you need to be cleansed.”  But that can’t be true because John said that if you walk in the light, Jesus’ blood cleanses you from all sin.  If you’re not sinning, Jesus’ blood has nothing to cleanse you from, and then the verse doesn’t make any sense!  No, as a believer, you are in a continuous righteous state because of Jesus’ shed blood – even if you sin.

You’d Never Be Totally Forgiven

If 1 John 1:9 really means that no sin is forgiven until you confess it, you will live in a state of being constantly unforgiven, unable to receive anything from God.  Why?  Because as we grow in Christ, we are constantly learning that things we are doing are sinful when we never realized it before.  Since we would not confess sins that we don’t know are sins yet (and there are sure to be some), we would ALWAYS have some degree of unrighteousness, so we would always be walking around with unconfessed sin.  No Christian would really be walking in total forgiveness and cleansing if this were the case!  No one could be righteous if that were the standard for cleansing!  So we can be sure that John didn’t say that sin is only forgiven when you confess it.

Short Accounts and Staying Fessed Up

Ever hear people say, “You need to keep short accounts with God” or “You need to stay fessed up?”  What they mean is that they think you will still be in an unrighteous state if you don’t confess every sin, so you’d better do it quickly!  But I hope that you’ve seen enough Scripture here to know that your righteousness has nothing to do with whether you’re sinning or not, so these Law-based concepts do not apply to the believer today, even if your church teaches them.

Receiving Forgiveness for Individual Sins?

Another attempt to resolve the difficulty of 1 John 1:9 is to state that forgiveness is yours just as healing is yours, but you must receive forgiveness on a sin-by-sin basis as you would receive healing on a sickness-by-sickness basis.  In light of Acts 26:18, that seems dubious.  Let’s look at what that verse says you have as a believer.  When you get saved, are you turned from darkness to light?  Yes.  Are you turned from the power of Satan to the power of God?  Yes.  When do you receive your inheritance?  When you get saved.  So when do you receive forgiveness of sins?  When you get saved.  If you have received forgiveness of sins, why do you need to do it again?  (The many verses quoted earlier in the “You Are Already Forgiven” section would also seem to settle the issue of whether or not you are already forgiven, but this verse in Acts is further confirmation.)  If you have to receive forgiveness on a sin-by-sin basis, the implication is that you’re walking around unforgiven for anything you haven’t confessed, and then how could you receive anything from God?  Also, there’s no way you will come up with a total list of things you did wrong as a sinner to confess on a sin-by-sin basis, so you’d always have some unforgiven sins if that’s how things work.  Under our better covenant, why would we have to confess sins on a sin-by-sin basis after we get saved when we didn’t have to do it with the sins we committed before we got saved?  As previously discussed, that makes it harder for a saint’s sins to be forgiven than for a sinner’s sins to be forgiven!

Repent and Receive Forgiveness?

Worse yet, some conclude that you receive forgiveness for a sin when you repent of it.   Aside from the problem above (your sins are already forgiven), this conclusion is even farther off the mark because the word “repent” does not even appear in 1 John 1:9!  Repenting to receive forgiveness is based on something that is not even in the verse at all.  So there is no reason whatsoever for such a conclusion other than having a predisposition to it.  Repentance simply gets sin out of your life, which is valuable, but only bloodshed provides forgiveness (Hebrews 10:22).

License for Licentiousness?

If you don’t have to confess your sins, and you’re already forgiven for them, does this grant you a license to sin?  The Bible is rather clear on this matter in Romans 6:1-2: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid.  How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”  So no church should be treating sin casually by teaching that it doesn’t matter if you sin anymore because you’re forgiven anyway.  Ask any “fallen” minister if sin still matters.   Romans 6:15 repeats the point: “What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.”  Anyone teaching the REAL grace of God will preach this also rather than promoting a “who cares, so what?” attitude toward sin.

If You’re Pre-Forgiven, Why Repent of Sin Anymore?

You don’t repent of sin to get forgiveness – you get forgiveness by receiving Christ.  You repent of sin to get sin out of your life!  Sin still has a price tag in this life.  You want to get as far away from it as you can so that you don’t pay that price.  Repentance is still a New Testament concept – Jesus commanded believers in most of the churches in Asia to repent in Revelation chapters 2 and 3.  He said before He ascended to heaven that repentance and remission of sin should be preached everywhere starting at Jerusalem (Luke 24:47).  So repentance is still a valuable New Testament concept.  By the way, repentance is turning from sin, not beating yourself up or wearing sackcloth and ashes to prove how sorry you are.  Despite the fact that many “Sinner’s Prayers” say something like, “I am sorry for my sins,” the New Testament never teaches that being sorry for your sins is a condition for salvation!

Also, repentance is not the same thing as remorse.  Judas committed suicide because he was remorseful, but he did not repent.  He still ended up in a state where it would have been better for him if he had never been born (Mark 14:21).

Familial Forgiveness?

Because 1 John 1:9 is so perplexing at first, some theologians have attempted to explain it by establishing two kinds of forgiveness – a legal kind and then a “familial” kind, claiming that you have “legal” forgiveness but have to get “familial” forgiveness by confessing individual sins.  I understand that this is a difficult verse, but trying to establish two kinds of forgiveness is even more confusing.  I don’t see any distinction taught anywhere else in the Bible between “kinds” of forgiveness or “kinds” of cleansing, or that receiving Christ grants you partial or conditional forgiveness of one kind but not another.  I don’t see anywhere where you can mess up your forgiveness so that you need more.

Soulish vs. Spiritual Righteousness?

Others have tried to solve the difficulty by claiming that there are two kinds of unrighteousness, spiritual and soulish, and that getting saved takes care of spiritual unrighteousness, while confessing sins gets rid of soulish unrighteousness.  Again, this attempt to resolve the verse leads to even more trouble (in my opinion) when it comes to other verses, because one would have to “parse” the rest of Scripture to see which verses refer to spiritual righteousness and which refer to soulish righteousness.  I cannot find the concept of a separate soulish righteousness anywhere else in the Bible, so it is too much of stretch to think that 1 John 1:9 refers to an important hidden truth about soulish righteousness that is nowhere to be found outside of that one verse.

Soul Forgiveness and/or Bodily Forgiveness

Another “try” to skirt the difficulties of 1 John 1:9 is the idea that you already have forgiveness in your spirit (at least this much is obvious from the earlier barrage of “you’re already forgiven” verses cited earlier in this discussion), but when you confess individual sins, you receive forgiveness in your soul and/or your body.

Let’s start with the soul part.  One could hypothesize that maybe “saying the same thing” (homologeo) as God about your sin will cleanse you from a guilty conscience and make you “feel” forgiven.  However, you would be intruding into the realm that is already taken care of by Jesus’ blood – we are to be sprinkled from an evil conscience (Hebrews 10:22).  We do not “confess” away an evil conscience to get relief from it.  Go back and read the section You Are Already Forgiven and notice how forgiveness is tied to bloodshed, not confession.

Even less tenable is the idea of receiving forgiveness, which is something spiritual, in your body, which is unspiritual and unable to grasp anything spiritual.  You could receive healing in your body from the consequences of sin (the curse for breaking the Law), but I really can’t see what else would happen if your body “received forgiveness.” And bodily divine healing comes from your spirit.

We also run into the same problem in the previous section.  We would now have to parse the Bible to determine which verses refer to spiritual forgiveness, soulish forgiveness and bodily forgiveness, which seems to me to be a fruitless endeavor.  God commands you to forgive others, but He doesn’t break that down and say that He wants you to forgive their spirits and their souls and their bodies.  Would anyone seriously say to an offender, “I forgive your spirit, but now something else will have to happen for me to extend that forgiveness to your soul and to your body?”

You can experience forgiveness in your soul by coming to a biblical understanding of the forgiveness that is already yours because of Jesus’ shed blood.  But I see nowhere else in Scripture where confessing your sin leads to ANY kind of forgiveness, whether spirit-forgiveness, soul-forgiveness or body-forgiveness, whatever you think they are.  Given the lack of corroboration elsewhere in Scripture, the idea that 1 John 1:9 is the only place that splits “forgiveness types” is a tough sell.

Flesh Cleansing?

Because 1 John 1:9 is such a tricky verse, another “device” I’ve read to explain it is that your spirit is pure and clean when you are in Christ, but John just meant that God is cleansing you from unrighteousness that has crept into your flesh.  But I can’t accept that explanation for two reasons.  First, the verse still says that God forgives you as well as cleanses you if you confess your sins, so if you still hold that confessing (meaning admitting to, supposedly) a sin is what gets your flesh cleansed, you are still stuck concluding that the same action gets you forgiveness (which is actually yours already as a Christian), and the interpretation problem isn’t solved at all.  Second, your flesh will ALWAYS be unrighteous anyway!  It is not confession, but the return of Jesus, that will fix that situation!  Your flesh is not, and never will be, born again, and it will never be righteous!  The whole nature of your flesh is that it cannot be “cleansed” and made righteous.  You have a natural body that will never be “the righteousness of God in Christ” in this life.  Oh, if only it could!  That would mean the end of sin in your life forever, as even an unrenewed mind wouldn’t have to choose between following your supposedly righteous flesh and your righteous spirit!

But wait, you might think, what about 2 Corinthians 7:1?  “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.”  If you take this verse at its apparent face value, even then it only strengthens the argument that 1 John 1:9 does not teach that God cleanses your flesh, because one principle you learn in Scripture is that God will not do for you what He told you do yourself.  For example, if I suggested that 1 John 1:9 said that if you confess your sins, God will resist the devil for you, you would know that my teaching was bogus because God tells YOU to resist the devil – so He isn’t going to do it for you.  Likewise, if He told YOU to cleanse yourself of filthiness of the flesh, He isn’t going to do that for you, either.

Now I said that for the benefit of those who insist that this verse must mean that you can be cleansed of unrighteousness in your flesh.  But that actually can’t be what the verse means anyway.  It doesn’t say that your unrighteous flesh can be cleansed and made righteous!  It only says that you can cleanse yourself from the filthiness of your flesh.  If you go outside and roll around in the mud, you can cleanse yourself from the filthiness of your flesh – but your flesh is still unregenerate and unrighteous and you can’t change that even if you take a long bath.  It will probably want to go roll around in the mud again!

It also can’t mean what it appears to mean at face value because your righteous new spirit has NO filthiness anyway.  So something must be different from what it appears to be at first, because Scripture, to say nothing of Paul’s writing in particular, can’t contradict itself.

The whole idea that you are to perfect holiness gives us another key insight into this verse.  This is talking about an earthly holiness – walking in the light in front of other people.  It can’t be talking about your intrinsic holiness, because your spirit was created in God’s image in righteousness and true holiness (Ephesians 4:24)!  Your spirit is not filthy and never will be if you are in Christ.  What I believe Paul is saying here is to deliberately turn from things that your flesh and your previously dead spirit wanted and pursue the things that God wants.  At least this would not be the only case where Paul talks like that.  Recall his exhortations to put off the old man and put on the new man.  This was written to born again people whose old man is GONE – who were righteous new creations in Christ.  Believers do not have an “old man” and a “new man” inside them duking it out for supremacy.  The old man is GONE and you are a new man.  So Paul COULDN’T be telling you to literally put off someone who is already dead and gone.  What he was exhorting was that we as believers put off the DEEDS of the old man and instead follow the DEEDS of the new man.  Likewise, he exhorts us to put off the “old man” deeds that our flesh and our old dead spirit wanted to do.

My point is strengthened when you read the verse carefully.  Not only does it not say that your flesh can be cleansed from unrighteousness, it really doesn’t say that your flesh can be cleansed at all!  Paul doesn’t tell you to cleanse your flesh.  He tells you to cleanse yourself from the filthiness (this would represent deeds) of the flesh.  Put them off.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could cleanse your flesh so that it wouldn’t be unrighteous and it would stop gravitating toward sin and walking by sight?  It certainly would, but that just isn’t available in this lifetime.  Your current mortal body is not born again and never will be.  That is why you will have to get a new body.

You may not agree with what I think is my reasonable take on this verse, but if you don’t, you’ll have to come up with a better explanation of what is admittedly a difficult verse.  (If you have difficulties with some of Paul’s statements, consider that even Peter said that some of Paul’s writings were hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16).  If Peter had issues, don’t think that you’re spiritually weak just because you encounter some statements from Paul that make you scratch your head until you really sit down and analyze them rigorously.  Even then, I don’t think you’ll ever know for sure what baptism for the dead meant at Corinth.  If such things were important for us to know, God would have told us.)

Stopping the Devil from Working in Your Flesh?

Another explanation is that confessing sin stops the devil from attacking you in a way that your sin allowed and stops him from working through your flesh.  But if confessing sin were a way to stop the devil from working in your flesh, Judas Iscariot would not have hung himself.  Judas confessed his sin to the priests but the devil still worked in him.  1 John 1:9 is about confession, not repentance.  Repentance, not mere confession, is the way to stop the devil from working in your flesh.  Judas did not repent; he was merely remorseful when he confessed his sin.  Remorse doesn’t stop Satan.  Repentance does.  Confession does not “close the door to the devil.”  Repentance does.  And repentance is never mentioned in 1 John 1:9, so that verse cannot be about closing the door to the devil.

Receiving Sin-By-Sin Forgiveness?

The way some people teach forgiveness is that God provided it in Christ, but you must receive it by faith on a sin-by-sin basis.  This is not the case.  The only way you “receive” the forgiveness that was already provided is to receive Christ.  Total forgiveness is part of the package.  To me, this teaching would be like saying, “You were made holy, but you won’t really be holy until you explicitly receive holiness.”  No, you got holy the moment you got saved.

Just to clear up any confusion about holiness, there are two kinds of holiness – holiness in status and holiness in conduct.  People bound by tradition think that holiness in conduct results in holiness in status, but actually the opposite is true – it is your holiness in status in Christ that leads you to holiness in conduct.

Again, thinking that we need to receive sin-by-sin forgiveness is like saying, “You got the legal right to go to heaven when you received Jesus, but you don’t actually get to WALK IN that right until you say, ‘I receive the right to go to heaven.’”  No, there is no need to receive that right, as it is yours automatically upon receiving Jesus, just as total forgiveness is.  However, some people get an understanding of God’s forgiveness for different sins at different times (see Notes on Acts 26:18 for more about this).

Releasing the Forgiveness in Our Spirits into Our Flesh?

Another attempt at explaining 1 John 1:9 is the idea that confessing sin “releases” the forgiveness you already have in your spirit into your flesh.  That is easily proved to be another dead end.

First, your flesh is unspiritual, and thus incapable of receiving spiritual things like forgiveness.  You can receive physical healing from your spirit into your physical flesh, but you can’t receive the fruit of the spirit into your physical flesh so that your flesh suddenly wants to walk in love.  You will have to mortify the flesh and its desires until you go to be with Jesus.  Your spirit will never be better than it is now, but neither will your flesh!

Second, you don’t have forgiveness in your spirit anyway because your spirit is not forgiven!  Yes, I said that, and I assume it shocked you if you haven’t figured that out already.  Your spirit has no forgiveness to give out to your flesh!  That doesn’t mean that your spirit is going to hell, so don’t panic.  Your born-again spirit has never sinned!  Only your unrenewed mind and body are party to any sins you’ve committed.  Therefore, your spirit has never needed forgiveness and never will need forgiveness.  Your born-again spirit is righteous, not forgiven.  Because you are the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21), it is no more correct to say that your spirit has forgiveness than to say that God, who has never been party to sin either, has forgiveness.  Your current spirit is the same one you will have in heaven, and no one will see you as “having forgiveness” in heaven because no one will see any need for forgiveness in you.  Now this doesn’t mean it’s wrong to say that “you” are forgiven because “you” in total consist of a spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Which gets to the third point.  The only forgiveness you need must be for your soul and body, and you already HAVE forgiveness, as proved above, with no need to have it “released from your spirit.”  God already “released” it the instant your spirit was born again.

What Does 1 John 1:7 Mean?

It’s easy to overlook the fact that 1 John 1:7 contradicts the traditional interpretation of verse 9.  Two verses earlier, John said this:

1 John 1:7:
But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

You can debate what “walking in the light” means, but another reason that it clearly refers to a believer is that Acts 26:18 shows us that the unbeliever walks in darkness, and when he receives Christ, he is brought from darkness into light.  Once you are a believer, the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses you from all sin!  You do not get cleansed when you repent or when you confess your sins – you are already cleansed from all unrighteousness!  Paul reminded the Corinthians, “You are washed” (1 Corinthians 6:11).  When did they become “washed?”  When they repented of the individual sins they were committing?  NO!  They were washed, sanctified and justified “in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”  The washing was accomplished by getting saved by calling on name of the Lord Jesus, not by confessing or repenting of individual sins.  For us as believers, this cleansing does not depend on our works any more than being saved in the first place depended on our works.  We are saved and forgiven by faith, not by works.  We don’t earn salvation or forgiveness.

A Verse 9 Contradiction

If verse 9 really means that when we own up to our sins before God, He cleanses us from all unrighteousness, how does that even make sense?  I confess SPECIFIC sins to God, and then I am cleansed from ALL unrighteousness?  But the traditional interpretation would have to change this verse to say, “I confess my sins to God, and then I am cleansed from the unrighteousness associated with those particular confessed sins.  I won’t get cleansed of the other ones until I confess them too.”  If I’m cleansed from ALL unrighteousness, there’s no reason to confess anything else after that.  So the traditional interpretation contradicts what the verse actually says.

What Does Baptism Represent?

Baptism represents the washing away of your sins and your resurrection with Christ.  However, a believer only has to be baptized once.  There is nothing in Scripture that encourages re-baptism if a believer has sinned.  Baptism represents a ONE-TIME cleansing and so it is only done ONE TIME.  That is because you are cleansed ONE TIME when you receive Christ – ALL your sins are washed away, including the ones that you haven’t yet committed.

Fessing Up to Restore Relationship?

If you believe that you as a believer must “fess up” to restore a right relationship with God, let me ask you this question – did you have to “fess up” to every individual sin to get a right relationship with God the moment you got saved?  No!  So if you NOW need to confess individual sins to restore a right relationship with God, you have made it harder for a BELIEVER to have a right relationship with God than for an UNBELIEVER.  You’ve also created a horrible works system where your relationship with God is now all about YOU being diligent to ferret out all your sins and get them confessed and “under the blood” right away.  That leads you to a Law-based treadmill, not freedom!

Who Is We?

The traditional rendering of 1 John 1:9 assumes that it was written to believers, so “we” means believers.  I agree with that for the reason cited early in this discussion – John’s letter was written to us as believers, not to heathen cultists.  He warns believers against heathen cultists who deny the reality of sin.

However, verse 8 and verse 10 also use “we.”  These verses define cultists who are not believers by the fact that they deny the reality of sin.  Does this mean that some believers denied that they had ever sinned?  No, the opposite is true – those who deny the reality of sin are not believers to begin with, and that is John’s point.  The “we” is thus understood as a literary device as opposed to an obviously wrong statement that “we” as believers could say that we have no sin. The letter was still written to Christians, but John warns Christians about cultists who may live among them.  He refers to such people elsewhere in his letter as those who started out with “us” but did not continue with “us” – they exposed themselves as phonies.  John warns that those who get into a sin-denying philosophy of men are going outside of Christ, echoing a similar warning he gives elsewhere (2 John 9).

James and Forgiveness for the Sick Person

The most common passage put forth to “disprove” that our sins are already forgiven is James 5:14-15.  “If he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him” seems at first like a slam-dunk refutation of the idea of forgiveness of future sins.  After all, how could a believer’s sins be forgiven when the elders minister if his sins were already forgiven when he received Christ?  That doesn’t make sense, does it?  Furthermore, it would make sense that the healed person MUST be a believer because James says “IF” he has committed sins, he shall be forgiven – if the person were an unbeliever, it would be a foregone conclusion that he had committed sins!

Yet we know that the Bible can’t contradict itself, so with a decent number of verses that say that our sins ARE forgiven, we have to question whether we have misunderstood those verses or the one in question.

I hold that the command for “any among you” is for believers and unbelievers based on the context of the entire book of James.  At first it seems that James must only be addressing believers, because he uses the phrase “my beloved brethren” three times, and that phrase is used exclusively to refer to believers, as one author who promotes healing in the atonement points out.  But how many times do Bible writers refer to believers as adulterers, even if allegorically (James 4:4)?  In fact, Scripture is clear that practicing unrepentant adulterers CANNOT be believers (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).  James twice addresses those who murder (James 4:2 and James 5:6).  Scripture is clear that practicing murderers CANNOT be believers (1 John 3:15).  How about addressing saints by calling them sinners (James 4:8)?  The boasting businessmen later in James 4 seem self-willed and it would be dubious at best to assert that they were believers either.  The letter was written to “my beloved brethren” but James deals with a “mixed bag” of people in his letter which would seem to include those among the “twelve tribes” to whom he wrote who were not Christian brethren.  The letter starts by addressing the twelve tribes, though James immediately greets “brethren” in the next verse.  Does this have to mean Christians, or does he refer to brethren in the sense of fellow members of the twelve tribes?  I believe the latter, though I know that’s not a traditional take on James.  But do you believe that the people killing each other were really James’s beloved brethren in Christ?  I don’t!  I believe that they were brethren as far as their Jewishness was concerned, but they certainly weren’t all brethren in Christ.

Could James really call unbelieving Jews brethren?  He wouldn’t have been the first to do it!  Peter did it in Acts 2:29 and Acts 3:17.  It appears that Stephen did it in Acts 7:2.  Paul did it in Acts 13:26, Acts 13:38, probably Acts 22:1, Acts 22:5, Acts 23:1, Acts 23:5 and Acts 23:6!

If that isn’t clear enough, consider James 5 itself – the very chapter under consideration!  The first 6 verses (James 5:1-6) refer to rich, selfish oppressors who hold back wages fraudulently.  Can anyone seriously think that James is addressing believers in those verses?  It is plain that James did not think so, because he said that they condemned and killed the just (verse 6), not that they were the just!  Again, if they killed the just, they’d be practicing murderers who do not have eternal life (1 John 3:15)!  Now consider the last 2 verses (James 5:19-20), where he says, “If any of you err from the truth, and one convert him, Let him know that he which converteth the sinner from the error if his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.”  So this seems to refer to someone among the group to whom the letter was written who was an unbeliever whose soul was headed for the second death!

So I believe that James 5:14-15 applies to believers and unbelievers, and that the if covers the case where the person requesting ministry is an unbeliever (the believer’s sins would already be forgiven).

But what about the fact that a favorite Greek scholar cited by faith preachers (one whom I admire too) stated that James’s command is for the church today, not just for the dispersed 12 Jewish tribes, and that to say otherwise proves that you are “utterly ignorant of Greek” (in his words)?  A careful reading of his context shows that the issue he was addressing was that James was for the church age, for all groups of people and not ONLY the dispersed Jews, which I affirm myself in another objection reply.  However, I believe that James addresses a mixed bag of saints and sinners in his letter and that his letter therefore would be appropriate throughout the church age for saints and sinners to heed.

Notice that he asks if any among you is sick.  Among in Greek is the general-purpose word en that can mean in, with, by, among, and other things.  It’s a general-purpose preposition that occurs roughly 2,800 times in the Bible.  It’s never translated of.  If James were only speaking about believers calling for the elders, he should have said, “Is any of you sick?” rather than “Is any among you sick?”  A person could be among Christians without being one himself.  No one would ever get saved during a church altar call if it were impossible for Christians to have someone unsaved among them!

But what about the previously-mentioned argument that “IF” proves that the subject was a saint?  That argument does not hold water, unless you believe that there are saints today walking in sinless perfection.  I’m not, are you?  So the IF would apply equally to anyone!  Unbelievers sin.  Believers sin.  There is no real possibility that the subject, saved or otherwise, has not sinned!  I believe that the point is that if the sin led to the sickness, and the person is not already a believer, that sin will be forgiven so that the unbeliever can be healed.  This would not apply to the believer who is already forgiven as the many Scriptures cited above prove, hence the need for the “if” clause.   This verse can only mean giving the person a pass on the sin for the purpose of healing to suspend the law of sowing and reaping for it, as it certainly does not establish a new doctrine that you can get all your sins forgiven and thus be saved by having elders lay hands on you.

So James’s command would certainly apply to believers in the midst who are sick, but it would also apply to “any” among the twelve tribes being addressed, including rich oppressors, boasters, murderers, adulterers and so on.  In other words, ANYONE can be healed by calling for the elders of the church, even an unbeliever.  But an unbeliever would not be forgiven yet, and healing is for forgiven people, so how could that work?  Because if the person has sinned, he will be forgiven when he comes to the elders, at least for purposes of receiving healing.  If the sin had anything to do with making him sick, God will give him a free pass on the matter.  I believe that this clears up the “IF” conundrum in James’s command.  Calling for the elders is for believers and unbelievers alike, but receiving forgiveness when the elders come is strictly for unbelievers.

This is NOT establishing a new doctrine that you can be born again by having an appointment for the elders to anoint you.  James doesn’t say that the person will be born again and go to heaven because someone prayed over him.  Now, you ask, how could such a person be forgiven without becoming a Christian?  Ask the people in the New Testament whom Jesus forgave who were not born again.  ALL the people that Jesus pronounced forgiven during His earthly ministry were still sinners who weren’t born again!

Moreover, Jesus’ authority to forgive sin to allow healing has been delegated to His church!  He said, “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:23).  That has to be one of the more difficult Scriptures in the whole Bible to make sense of, but I think it fits this context.  Now again, that doesn’t mean that you can grant access to heaven by forgiving sins because as Jesus also said, you must be born again to see the kingdom of God.  You cannot do anything to force someone else be born again; the individual must make his own surrender to the lordship of Christ as a matter of his own free will.  But you can minister the way Jesus did so that people who need healing are forgiven so that they can be healed.  In fact, it would seem to be necessary to do that to minister as Jesus did, because He said Himself that healing was a sign that someone was forgiven (Luke 5:17-26).

I realize that the idea of ANY kind of forgiveness being offered by a Christian rather than being received by an individual through Christ may seem foreign, but it wasn’t foreign to one Bible writer – John, who wrote in 1 John 5:16, “If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.”

There is little context around John 20:23, but what little there is seems to fit my point perfectly.  Jesus had just breathed on His followers and told them to receive the Holy Spirit in John 20:22: “And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:”.  You can never make an ironclad point through punctuation, which was added by the translators, but it’s interesting that the translators put a colon there and not a period, which makes verse 22 flow directly into verse 23.  So at seems that the translators indicated that receiving the Holy Spirit would allow forgiveness to be ministered the way Jesus did it when He ministered by the Holy Spirit.

So it would seem that part of our “priesthood” as believers is to minister forgiveness and healing in Jesus’ name to those who need it.

I go into a lot more detail on John 20:23 in the discussion Temporary Cancelation of Sin’s Consequences Through Intercession.

Maybe you don’t like my take on John 20:23, but if you don’t, I challenge you to tell me what on earth that verse DOES mean!  It certainly does NOT mean that Peter was the first pope (how could he be? – he was married!) and that he had the sole right to forgive sins on the earth, as verse 22 says that Jesus breathed on them, so whatever verse 23 is talking about, it was for ALL the disciples, not just for an individual one.

The other “explanation” is that James is talking about a believer getting forgiveness in his soul and body as opposed to his spirit.  (This line of reasoning was mentioned above.)  That is too convoluted for me.  I think it’s easier to explain that the act of obedience in calling for the elders will give an unbeliever a “pass” on the temporal effects of the sin he has committed.

So I don’t see any other rational explanation of the subject’s sin being forgiven other than the case where the subject is an unbeliever, who would need forgiveness to receive healing.  Sickness is part of the curse for breaking the law, so you would need to be forgiven for a sin to avoid having to remain under the curse, including sickness, which would be the penalty for the sin if it hadn’t been forgiven.  A person under the New Covenant can offer this kind of specific forgiveness, though not blanket forgiveness for all sins, to someone who is not yet born again.

Thus, James’s “if” refers to an unbeliever, and James 5:14-15 does NOT prove that a believer’s sin needs to be (or can be) forgiven subsequent to salvation.  This leaves my rendering of 1 John 1:9 intact.

Simple Simon Explanation

Another popular “proof” that your sins, including future ones, are NOT already forgiven, involves Simon the Sorcerer.  The “proof” is that Simon was truly saved, but Peter then directed an already saved man to pray that God would forgive him!  This (allegedly) proves that believers, like Simon, still have to ASK God for forgiveness, and that 1 John 1:9 shows that you still must ASK for forgiveness.

Acts 8:13:
Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done.

Acts 8:18-24:
And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles' hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money,
Saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.
But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.
Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.
Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.
For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.
Then answered Simon, and said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.

You will see some lively debate among theologians about Simon.  Some have proposed that he was considered saved but he actually lacked true “saving faith,” so Peter was right to act as if he were an unbeliever.  I cannot accept that for two reasons.  First, the clear testimony of Scripture in verse 13 is that Simon believed.  If that isn’t true and it was just Luke (the author of Acts)’s opinion, then you can’t trust anything else in the Bible – it could all just be the authors’ opinions.  Second, he was baptized, and an unbeliever would not want to be baptized, nor would Philip have knowingly baptized an unbeliever.  After all, we correctly use Acts 8 to show that the baptism with the Holy Spirit is an act distinct from the new birth, and we cite that believers were baptized in water and LATER baptized with the Holy Spirit.  If we call into question the salvation of the people baptized in water in Acts 8, we’ve just ruined THAT argument.  We can’t have it both ways!

So Simon WAS saved.  So along comes Peter, who tells Simon to repent, and even MORE shockingly, to ask if God MIGHT forgive him!  There’s a unique statement – wouldn’t God forgive anyone who came to Him and asked for it?  What reason could there be for him NOT to be forgiven?

I think I can straighten out this mess for you.  Whatever Simon’s actual status with the Lord might have been in verse 13, Peter didn’t think he was saved.  Peter could have MISTAKENLY considered Simon’s conversion false (the Bible says it was real), or Peter, who taught that a person can lose his salvation, could have concluded that Simon had walked away from Jesus after being truly converted.  After all, this is the same Peter who talked about people who once knew the way of righteousness, who turned from the holy commandment and ended up worse than before:

2 Peter 2:20-22:
For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.
But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.

Whether Peter considered Simon to already be apostate or believed that he was never saved to begin with, he seemed to address him as an unbeliever.  For starters, he said, “Your money perish with you!” which would not be something you would say to a fellow believer, would it?  You probably wouldn’t tell a believer that he was in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity either, but that’s how Peter addressed Simon.  You probably wouldn’t say that a believer, who is the righteousness of God in Christ, has a heart that is not right before God, but that’s what Peter told Simon.  If Simon was still saved, Peter wasn’t convinced!

Whether or not Simon WAS still saved when Peter addressed him is inconsequential.  Peter assumed that he wasn’t when he told him to pray to see if he could be forgiven.  So this seals the case that Peter did not think he was telling a believer that he needed to pray for forgiveness.  But if he was not telling a believer to pray for forgiveness, the entire Simon argument (that it proves that believers still need to pray to be forgiven in 1 John 1:9) falls apart!

The “if” as far as Simon being ABLE to be forgiven again would have been because Peter was unsure of whether Simon was a Christ-rejecting reprobate who was beyond redemption or whether he was merely a false convert initially who had never really been in the kingdom.  We are sure with the benefit of our Bibles that Simon was initially saved, but Peter did not have that divine perspective in writing at the time.  He saw no fruit to indicate that Simon was really saved, and he assumed that he wasn’t.  He didn’t tell a believer to ask for forgiveness and see if God could grant it.  Besides, the “if” there would cancel the 1 John 1:9 argument itself – 1 John 1:9 makes a definite statement about being forgiven and cleansed from all unrighteousness.  There is no “if” about things in 1 John 1:9 other than “if” we admit to having sinned.

What About Luke 6:37?

Luke 6:37 tells us, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”  Does this mean that God forgives us after we forgive others?  If so, we’ve established a new doctrine of salvation that makes the blood of Jesus meaningless, one in which there IS remission of sins without atonement.  An unbeliever could simply forgive others and then God would forgive him even though he isn’t born again!  It is clear from the rest of Scripture that God’s forgiveness is always based on the sacrifice of innocent blood, not on someone just forgiving someone else.  So that can’t be what Jesus meant.

Besides, it’s hard to expect someone to forgive others from the heart if he himself is still unsaved – with a sinful nature.  We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19), and part of love is walking in forgiveness.  We forgive because He forgave us, not to get Him to forgive us!

The statement in question parallels other things Jesus taught, such as “give and it shall be given,” which is actually the very next thing He said after Luke 6:37.  We see a key there that when you give, MEN shall give to you.  Jesus is speaking of your interactions with other people, not with God.  If you don’t judge others, others won’t judge you.  If you don’t condemn others, others won’t condemn you.  If you forgive others, others will forgive you.  This is simply the law of sowing and reaping.  It is clearly not an alternative means of obtaining forgiveness from God.  It’s talking about obtaining forgiveness from men.

So Luke 6:37 does not mean that you as a believer aren’t forgiven yet.  If you think that’s what it means, you must also believe that you obtain forgiveness by your works of forgiving others, and perhaps the “cult watch” sites should do a write-up on YOU for presenting a plan for forgiveness that doesn’t even involve Jesus’ shed blood!

What About Mark 11:26 and Matthew 6:14-15?

Mark 11:26 and Matthew 6:14-15 are sometimes cited as a disproof that you are already forgiven for all your sins.  The first says, “But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.”  The second says, “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

I will not dodge the issue as some do by pointing out that Mark 11:26 is not in some original Greek manuscripts, and thus not even in some translations for that reason.  Even if we could throw out Mark 11:26 (and I wouldn’t), Matthew 6:14-15 IS in those manuscripts and it says the same thing, as you can see above.  So we have to tackle Mark 11:26 head-on rather than explain it away on technical grounds.

People quote these and say that these verses prove that forgiveness is conditional – that you are NOT forgiven just because you are saved, and that in fact if you don’t forgive others, you’ll stay unforgiven yourself.  They also say that this proves that forgiveness is received SUBSEQUENT to salvation because based on these verses, there is a possibility that you as a believer will still not receive forgiveness!

This would be an alarming state of affairs for a born-again believer, as it would make your eternal destiny completely insecure.  It would be up to YOU to forgive everyone, and if you didn’t, you’d be unforgiven yourself, which would mean that you’d have to go to hell after all!  Is your salvation really that fragile?

If so, it makes Jesus’ blood almost meaningless.  Forgiveness is only obtained through the shedding of innocent blood; without this bloodshed there is no forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22)!  If Jesus’ blood was not enough to buy your forgiveness, and now you must pile on your own works to be forgiven, how does that exalt Jesus and His sacrifice?  Your forgiveness would now be a matter of YOUR WORKS.  But the New Testament is all about the GRACE and truth that came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17), not about establishing a new kind of law where salvation depends on your works after you’re saved!  If a BELIEVER had to forgive to be forgiven, forgiveness is now something that he EARNED instead of RECEIVED and he’d have something to boast of rather than boasting in the Lord.

You need to remember that Jesus was talking to the Jews, not to born-again believers.  Scripture is clear (see the many Scriptures above cited on this) that a believer is ALREADY forgiven for all his sins.  If you’re already forgiven, God can’t refuse to forgive you – that would imply that you are NOT forgiven and that you need to do something to obtain forgiveness.

I know that this practically starts World War 3 when you suggest it – but Jesus was speaking to the Jews before the New Covenant was inaugurated.  In fact, quite a bit of what He said fell into that category.  I can almost hear the screams now, “You’re telling us to throw out the four gospels as irrelevant, but Christ said to teach everyone what He taught.  You heretical Hyper-Grace deceiver!” But before you make me the new poster child on your “discernment ministry” website, hear me out and see if you don’t have to agree with some of my points after all.

Jesus Himself said that our praying would change after we were born again – we would pray in His name, which He NEVER taught the disciples to do while He walked the earth.  Nor did He ever lead His disciples to pray in tongues while He walked the earth.  But He said the day would come when we would speak in tongues (Mark 16:17) and the Bible clearly states God’s desire for Church Age believers, “I would that you all spoke with tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:5).  So we can’t take Jesus’ instructions to the Jews as the final word on how prayer should be done in the Church Age.  Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians to know their inheritance (Ephesians 1:15-23) could not have been prayed before Jesus gave us His inheritance, so Jesus could not have taught His disciples to pray any of the wonderful prayers we see in the epistles, which we can now pray for ourselves and others with great benefit.

Are we throwing out Christ’s words in red because we believe in evangelizing Gentiles?  Jesus told His disciples to only go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel!  But in the church age, the gospel is to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Gentile).  A lot changed after Jesus’ resurrection.  (You can go to the answer to the question Unforgiveness Is Itself a Forgiven Sin, So How Could It Hinder My Healing? for some more thought-provoking statements along these lines.)

Jesus taught that the only cause for divorce was fornication.  Paul added other conditions, and he seemed more lenient than Jesus, particularly about remarriage.  If we stay with what Jesus taught the Jews before the Church Age, we will contradict Paul’s instructions for the Church Age.  There was a change.  The only CORRECT answer to the debate, “Who was right, Paul or Jesus?” is that they were BOTH right.  They both HAD to be right because what both of them said on the matter is in the Bible.  However, Jews under the Old Covenant were trying to nitpick about the Law of Moses and Jesus answered them on those terms.  Paul was setting down the rules for the Church Age.

I believe that the link between Matthew 6:14-15 and Mark 11:26 actually helps point to the answer to the issue, as Matthew 6:14-15 immediately follows the “Lord’s Prayer,” which is definitely not a Church Age prayer.  Today we would not pray for God to forgive our sins, which He already has done – not even the most ardent 1 John 1:9 traditionalist can demonstrate that there is any petition for forgiveness in 1 John 1:9.  We would not pray to be delivered from the evil one because Christ has already delivered from us him and from his kingdom through the cross (Colossians 1:13, Colossians 2:15).  We would not pray to have God provide daily bread – we would instead trust in His already-provided riches in glory by Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19).  We would not pray for His kingdom to come, because it already has – Jesus said that some of those PRESENT at the time would not taste death until they saw the kingdom come with power, which it certainly did in Acts 2.  The two verses that follow the Lord’s Prayer can now logically be taken together with the Lord’s Prayer because the very next word is “for” – meaning, “in light of this, here is more clarification.”  In other words, this statement (and the similar Mark 11:26) applied to the Jews but not to believers in the Church Age.

I know it ruffles feathers when you point out that some things Jesus said do not apply to the Church, but if you think that the verses in question DO apply to the church, you REALLY introduce problems because you must teach that you can lose your salvation by failing to forgive someone else, which takes away any certainty you have of reaching heaven.  What if you’ve forgotten to forgive one other person?  According to the idea that this teaching is for the Church Age, it means that you, the Christian, will burn in the lake of fire because you never forgave your second-grade teacher for saying that you would never amount to anything!  Does that sound like grace to you?

I further elaborate on the concept of some of Jesus’ statements not applying to the Church in my answer to Objection: Jesus Said to Say, “Thy Will Be Done,” Instead of Demanding Healing.

Jesus warned the Jews that if they called someone a fool, they were in danger of hell fire.  Is a believer today hell-bound because he yelled “Fool!” at someone who cut him off in traffic?  No, the believer is justified and saved from hell by faith in Christ, not by his traffic manners.  That has changed, too.  Should we go around telling fellow believers that they will go to hell because they lost their cool when someone breezed into a parking space despite the believer’s signal to go into it?  Obviously not.  I’m not justifying yelling “Fool!” at someone.  However, you are FORGIVEN for that under the New Covenant, so you are NOT in danger of hell fire because you did it.

You have to remember that Jesus spoke to Jews who were under the Law.  The Gentiles were never under the Law.   So let me give you something else to think about.  Jesus ordered His disciples to go tell others His words.  So at first, you would expect the preachers in Acts to pick up on Jesus’ “enhanced” Law statements.  We’d expect them to warn people that even sneaking a leery peek at a woman or fantasizing about the girls who work down at the local Carnality Cavern Café made them guilty of adultery.  But that is not how they preached Christ in Acts.  They preached forgiveness.  They didn’t make a point of trying to show people who wanted to keep the letter of the Law that they were still violating the spirit of the Law.  Most of Paul’s hearers weren’t Jews.  They didn’t have the local Pharisees corrupting the Law and teaching doctrines of men instead, trying to justify themselves.

Paul did say that the Law was for lawbreakers – its purpose today is to lead people to Christ by showing them the impossibility of ever being “good enough” to not sin and make it to heaven on their own merits.  But you don’t see much “Law” preaching after the resurrection because really, the Law is for self-righteous sinners to show them that their righteousness is insufficient.  It also makes sense that there wasn’t much preaching of the Law because the Gentiles were never under the Law, though Paul said that even in their case, their consciences would tell them when they were in sin without an explicit law.

Why did Jesus preach the way He did to the Jews?  He was using the Law to show them the impossibility of ever being saved by adhering to the Law so that they would know that they needed His salvation.  In other words, “You think you can get by with this, but you’re still not righteous enough on your own!”  This dealt with the self-righteous teaching attitude that the Pharisees were promoting to the people.

Despite the accusations that tend to fly, I do NOT advocate putting the four gospels in the Old Testament section of Bibles, and I do NOT advocate ignoring everything Jesus said before His death and resurrection!  I believe Jesus when He said that the Law would not pass away until everything was fulfilled.  But then He also said that He came to fulfill the Law – and He did it!  Paul says that the Law was nailed to the cross (Colossians 2:14).  That is the reason that we don’t go out trying to preach nit-picky points out of the Law, which was never given to the Gentiles anyway.  The change in covenant necessitated a change in preaching.

What I do maintain is that we have to rightly divide the Word.  Some statements in the Law are not for us today.  They were written FOR us but not TO us.  If you’ve ever eaten lobster, you’ve violated the Law of Moses.  But in the New Testament we are told that every creature is OK to eat after we give thanks (1 Timothy 4:4) – there are no more dietary prohibitions.  We don’t have to keep the Law with its clean/unclean rules and its Jewish feast days, although we can get some insights from them.  The New Covenant changed a lot of things.  But the people Jesus addressed weren’t under the New Covenant yet, so He couldn’t teach some of what Paul did about praying in tongues, gifts of the Spirit, and so on.

Jesus Himself stated the incompleteness of His teaching to the Jews during His earthly ministry in John 16:12-13!  “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.  Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.”  We see this played out in our Bibles – Jesus did not preach Paul’s revelations about the Church.  That had to wait for Paul.

So I said all that to say this – the words Jesus spoke to the Jews about the Law were intended for the Jews – we aren’t under that Law today.  Most of Jesus’ sayings were not specific to the Law, so we should not stop reading the gospels because most of what He said DOES apply today.  In fact, the rule should be to assume that EVERYTHING He said applies with equal force today unless you can find Church Age scripture that overrides it.  In the case of Mark 11:26 and similar verses, the “death threat” for unforgiveness has been overridden by other New Covenant verses.  I’m sure I’m not the only believer who got scared reading Mark 11:26 when I was young in the Lord.  I thought that my ability to forgive others would determine God’s willingness to forgive me, which by definition meant that my salvation was in question every time there was a decision to forgive someone or not.  I had to learn some things since then about the “past tense” of my forgiveness and salvation.  The “scare verse” in Revelation 3:16 about being puked out of Jesus’ mouth was another similar case – I feared that if I was not “hot” enough, Jesus would vomit me into hell, not realizing that what He was actually talking about was firing the pastor in question, not stripping the pastor or the Laodicean believers of their individual salvation.

Because forgiveness is treated differently in the Church Age, we DO have New Testament Scripture to override Jesus’ statement to the Jews in Mark 11:26.  What He said was correct at that time, but our covenant has changed since then.  Consider that this same Jesus, before His death and resurrection, commanded His followers to only preach to the Jews, but after His death and resurrection, He commanded His followers to preach to everyone.

Matthew 10:5-6:
These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not:
But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Mark 16:15:
And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.

The quote in Matthew is in red in some Bibles because it contains Jesus’ direct words for His followers at the time, but those are NOT His words to the church today, as Mark makes obvious.

Jesus forbade some people from proclaiming that He was the Christ before the resurrection, but He never restricted anyone from doing so after His resurrection.

Matthew 16:20:
Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ.

So we have more precedent for having it matter whether you were before the resurrection or after it, as Jesus’ instructions definitely changed after His resurrection.  Jesus spoke those “words in red” in the verse above, but they were for a specific time, not for the Church Age.

However, the rules for praying the “prayer of faith” still include forgiving others, so you’re operating afoul of the rules Jesus laid down if you try to receive things from God while you refuse to forgive others.  As pointed out elsewhere in this book, unforgiveness involves a Law mindset, whereas receiving from God requires a grace mindset.  These mindsets don’t mix.  So unforgiveness can hinder you from receiving from God, whether it be healing, finances or something else.  But unforgiveness can’t hinder you as a believer from receiving forgiveness, because you ALREADY received it the moment you were born again, as many Scriptures attest.

The apostles preached that forgiveness of sins comes through Jesus Christ and what He did for us.  They did NOT preach that you need to get saved and THEN do something else so that you can actually be forgiven.  Nothing in Paul’s extensive writings tells you to “fess up to be forgiven” or “forgive to be forgiven” or anything remotely similar.  There are no instructions in his letters to the churches for believers to “get” forgiveness anywhere!  Forgiveness was not taught as a blessing that God withholds and issues on a sin-by-sin basis when you get a sin “under the blood” by your own works.  The New Testament never talks about “getting a sin under the blood” – that term is a human invention.

When a Christian talks about needing to get something “under the blood,” what he may really mean is that he wants to get it “off his conscience.”  But that isn’t the same thing.  ALL your sins are washed away by Jesus’ blood.  If your conscience bothers you, you either need to repent of sin that you are deliberately continuing to do or you need to realize that Jesus’ blood sprinkles you from an evil conscience concerning your past sins (Hebrews 10:22).

Are you still not convinced?  I saved the best for last.  I have two verses for you that directly and plainly DISPROVE that a New Testament believer must forgive to be forgiven in the manner that Jesus taught the Jews in the verses in question.  Both Ephesians 4:32 and Colossians 3:13 exhort BELIEVERS to forgive others AS CHRIST FORGAVE THEM!  Do you see it now?  It’s plain as day!  These verses DO NOT TEACH that IF these believers would forgive others, THEN Christ would forgive them!  They teach that Christ ALREADY forgave them, and that now they need to extend that same forgiveness to other people.  The pre-Church Age order for the Jews was (1) Forgive (2) Get forgiven, whereas the Church Age order for us is (1) Get forgiven (2) Forgive.  We got forgiven when we got saved, and now we need to extend that same grace that we’ve already received to others.

I rest my case.

What About Matthew 7:1-2?

Matthew 7:1-2:
Judge not, that ye not be judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with that measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

This has nothing to do with God forgiving you.  Jesus was teaching that if you don’t forgive others, others won’t forgive you, but if you forgive others, others will forgive you.  This has only to do with your relationships with other people, not your relationship with God.

What About Romans 3:25, Which Refers to PAST Sins Being Forgiven?

Romans 3:25:
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

This verse does say that God remitted past sins, but the context within that very verse is that He remitted past sins at the time that He sent Jesus to be the ransom for sin.  This certainly does not teach that only past, before-the-cross sins are forgiven!  It certainly doesn’t teach that God only forgives your “past sins” but somehow holds off on forgiving your current sins until you confess them one by one.  If only past sins are forgiven, it would not be a problem anyway if you sin.  Just wait one nanosecond and that sin is now in the past, making it a “past sin.”   So this verse doesn’t have anything to do with your future sins not being included when you were forgiven.

However, the verse raises an essential and easily overlooked point.  In order for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and others to be able to be in heaven now (which they are), Jesus had to atone for THEIR sins as well as those of people who lived before the cross and during Jesus’ crucifixion!  So Jesus’ blood provided payment for the PAST sins of all Old Testament believers as well as for ALL sins of New Testament believers!

Does God Unforget and Unforgive Forgotten, Forgiven Sins?

This question comes up in the light of the following story:

Matthew 18:21-35:
Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants.
And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents.
But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and his children, and all that he had, and payment to be made.
The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.
Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt.

But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest.
And his fellowservant fell down at his feet, and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.
And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt.
So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done.
Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:
Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.
So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.

Based on this story, you could initially conclude that if you don’t refuse to forgive someone else, you’re back on the hook to pay the penalty for your own sins and you’ve lost your forgiveness, and thus your salvation, so you would be turned over to be tortured forever in hell.

Aside from creating a new Galatian “gospel” where your forgiveness depends upon your works, this ignores an important distinction about how sins were handled before and after the cross.  Before the cross, your sins were covered.  They were still there, but God covered them up.  In a case like the one in Jesus’ story, your sin could be uncovered again because it was still there.  Today, however, it’s a different story.  Your sins are WASHED AWAY, not COVERED.  They are GONE!  God said that He would NO LONGER REMEMBER your sins (Hebrews 8:12, Hebrews 10:17).  As the writer of Hebrews says, there will never have to be another offering for those sins.  If your sins could come back to you, there would have to be another offering for them after they come back.  But then God would have to remember your sins.  So this parable was applicable to the Jews but not to the Church as far as the final outcome goes.

(For clarification of what it actually means for God to not “remember” sins, please read God Can’t Punish What He Chooses Not to Remember.)

One “try” would be that you can lose your salvation by renouncing Jesus, so wouldn’t that mean that you would have to pay for all those forgotten sins?  No.  Your new sins would still be enough to send you to hell, starting with the sin of renouncing Jesus’ lordship!  There is still no indication that forgotten sins can ever be unforgotten.  God will not remember what He has chosen to forget.

Again, if you’re choking on the idea that some of what Jesus said does not apply directly to the Church, please see Unforgiveness Is Itself a Forgiven Sin, So How Could It Hinder My Healing?.

Aren’t you glad that God won’t embarrass you in front of the whole universe when you get to heaven by parading your sins that He’s already chosen not to remember in front of everyone?

If God Forgets Your Sins, How Can He Correct and Rebuke You for Them?

I thought this was a decent question that needs an answer.  While all the believer’s sins are pre-forgiven, they are obviously not all pre-forgotten because Jesus rebukes those whom He loves if they sin (Revelation 3:19).  For that matter, if some of your works will be “wood, hay and stubble” that will be burned up, how could God burn up what He doesn’t remember?  Wow, this gets quite thought-provoking, doesn’t it?  This matter is covered in some detail in the discussion God Can’t Punish What He Chooses Not to Remember.  But at least when they’re burned up, God will never bring them up again or let anyone else know what you did.  Those works are gone forever as far as heaven is concerned.

And in NO CASE will you EVER receive condemnation from God for ANY of your sins if you are a believer (Romans 8:1) – not in this life and not in the world to come.  What happens when your works are preserved or burned will be done in at atmosphere of love, not one of harsh condemnation or a final attempt by the Lord to shame or embarrass you.  We know this for sure because Romans 9:33 says, “As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed” and Romans 10:11 says, “For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.”  Also, 1 Peter 2:6 says, “Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.”  The Greek word translated confounded is the same word translated ashamed in the two verses in Romans quoted above.  If God did anything at the judgment seat of Christ that would shame you, He would have to violate those Scriptures.

In this current life, God treats you as if your sins were already forgotten unless He has to correct you.   You may wonder, how can sins be treated as forgotten but still be remembered?  Paul gives us a biblical example.  He talks about forgetting the things that are behind (Philippians 3:13).  Yet He still said that he had been a blasphemer, a persecutor and injurious, ignorantly and in unbelief (1 Timothy 1:13), so he had not completely forgotten about it.  A human can’t necessarily FORGET a past sin the way you’d delete a row out of a spreadsheet.  You can, however, be in a place where that past sin has absolutely NO impact on your current life.  Some people teach, “forgive and forget,” but you can’t necessarily forget something that someone did to you – although you can forgive the person.

Given that I’ve opened up this big can of worms, I might as well address another question you might have.  (I like tough questions – the tougher, the better.)  If God forgets our sins for all eternity AND God’s Word is eternal and unchangeable AND God’s Word details David’s sins, how can David’s sins ever be forgotten?  I thought that was a pretty good question; I came up with it myself and I have never seen it answered.  But I think David is an easy case.  The “old man” David who was NOT born again ceased to exist when Jesus came and led captivity captive.  The Old Testament saints were born again at that point and were made perfect.  They were no longer accountable for anything that the “old man” had done any more than the real you today is accountable for anything the “old man” who used to have your name and body did.  When anyone sees David in heaven, no one will see him as the man who committed adultery and murder, because he literally will not be that man – he will be a new creation in Christ who NEVER did anything like that.  So he will not have an eternity of embarrassment any more than you will.  The Peter you will meet in heaven is NOT the Peter who denied Christ three times before he was born again and who tried to talk Jesus out of dying for us.

But we can take things up another notch!  Peter and Barnabas got carried away with hypocrisy, John Mark deserted Paul and Barnabas, and Paul bad-mouthed the High Priest and had to repent.  Those things all happened AFTER they became new creations in Christ and THOSE incidents are also part of the eternal Word of God.  So wouldn’t they have to be remembered forever, even in heaven?

Hebrews 12:22-23:
But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect,

Hebrews 10:14:
For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

No one’s born-again spirit has ever committed sin.  If you’re born again, your spirit is just and perfect, and it will remain that way throughout all eternity.  Any sin in your life is the result of yielding to your flesh, which is not born again.  But at the last trumpet, your unregenerate flesh will also be destroyed and you will have a new BODY that has never sinned.  So once again, the perfect YOU that is in heaven will not be considered the person who committed sins.  The perfect Paul, Peter, Barnabas and John Mark will not be considered the people who committed sins either, even though the Word of God will abide unchanged forever.  Their righteous new spirits were never party to any of those sins, so we will all see them as people who never did anything wrong – just as everyone will see YOU as someone who never did anything wrong!  The flesh that gave in to those sins will be gone forever!

What 1 John 1:9 Really Means

So my “Young’s Extremely NON-Literal Paraphrase” of the GIST of this passage from verse 7 to verse 10 would be as follows:

If we are believers – the people who walk in the light as Jesus does – we have fellowship with each other and the blood of Jesus Christ keeps us cleansed from all sin.
If we say to others that we haven’t sinned, we’re kidding ourselves and we’re lying – we aren’t real believers because you can’t get saved when you don’t think you have to be saved from anything.
If we admit (to others, as in the verse above) that we HAVE sinned, we are the real believers, and we are the only ones God forgives and cleanses from all unrighteousness, which is something that occurred when we were saved.   This is in contrast to the phony believers in the previous verse and the next verse.
If we say to others that we have not sinned, we make God out to be a liar, and we’re phony believers.

If you’re used to the traditional interpretation of these verses, this rendering of the meaning probably seems so “far out” that it’s indefensible.  But if this isn’t what John means, what does he mean?  The idea that you receive forgiveness by confessing sins is far less defensible, as there are many Scriptures cited above that directly contradict that interpretation, while I don’t know of any that contradict my reading of it.  I believe that the point is that John contrasts us (the true believers) with Gnostic cultists who have the false teaching that sin does not exist, as misnamed “Christian Science” teaches to this day.  God saw this error coming and wrote this response to it a long time ago.  There is nothing new under the sun.

I would say that 1 John 1:9 and 1 Timothy 2:15, both of which are covered in this book, are probably the most difficult verses in the Bible to interpret.  If you reach conclusions that are different from my conclusions, I wouldn’t want to get into a fight with you over them any more than I’d get into a fight over when Jesus is coming back relative to the tribulation period.  I won’t label you are heretic and I hope you won’t label me one.  At the very least, I hope I’ve given you a lot of things to consider that you might never have thought of before!

Finally, to the Healing Side of Things

If you are already CLEANSED from all unrighteousness (my point), you can go right into God’s throne room and receive the healing that Jesus laid up for you.

On the other hand, if you think that you are still tainted by unrighteousness for those sins you haven’t confessed yet, and thus supposedly haven’t been forgiven for yet, you’re going to have a tough time being bold before God to receive anything.  You’ll be back in the strength-sapping denominational “unworthy little worm” mentality, thinking “who am I to receive from God when I’ve got all this unrighteousness still to be cleansed from?”

Don’t let the devil get away with the lie that you have to forfeit healing for the time being because you haven’t been “good enough to deserve it” lately.  Based on your OWN works, you AREN’T good enough to deserve it, but JESUS has already made you “good enough to deserve it” as far as God is concerned.  Even if you’ve sinned.  Even if you’ve sinned A LOT!  If you had to earn healing by being good enough, Jesus’ bloodshed would have been a waste of time.

I’m telling you the GOOD NEWS that you ARE forgiven, and thus worthy to stand before God’s presence unashamed to receive every blessing that He already laid up for you in Christ, including healing!

See also:

Notes on Acts 26:18
Ruined Righteousness