What If You Sin?
While this topic at first may not seem to relate to divine healing, I can tell you that MANY Christians “disqualify themselves” from healing because they do not understand the concepts put forth in this discussion. If you see yourself as an unworthy, undeserving, sinful little worm, you aren’t going to think that you should receive divine healing. You’ll have the attitude, “I don’t deserve healing, so if God in His mercy decides to heal me, it’s better than what I deserve. If He doesn’t heal me, I don’t deserve it anyway.” If that’s how you’ve been seeing things, it’s time for you to renew your mind with God’s Word, find out the truth, and never let that falsely humble religious mentality hinder you from receiving anything again! If you’ve had trouble receiving from God, this discussion may be exactly what you need.
If Jesus wanted you to get what you deserve based on YOUR track record, He wouldn’t have gone to the cross! He would have just let you get the punishment that your sins deserve! His mercy spares you what you deserve, and His grace gives you better than you deserve. Once you’re born again, you’re righteous and you DO “deserve” all of God’s blessings, including healing – not based on YOUR track record but based on Jesus’ perfect righteousness that is yours as a gift (Romans 5:17).
The moment you receive Jesus, God becomes your heavenly Father.
But what if you sin?
If you sin, God is still your heavenly Father. That doesn’t change one bit. Thank God, sin does not make you an orphan. God is still your heavenly Father after you sin just as much as He was before you sin.
When I was a much younger Young, I did quite a few things that displeased my earthly father. Despite that, he did not cease to be my earthly father. Sin did not change my relationship to him. He was my earthly father just as much after I sinned as before I sinned.
Nothing in this book promotes sin or encourages trying to “get away with it,” but be assured that if you DO sin, God is still your Father. In fact, you cannot sin your way out of His fatherhood. The one thing you could ever do to stop God from being your Father would be to renounce Jesus as your Lord. Only receiving Jesus made God your Father, so only rejecting Jesus could ever make God cease being your Father. As long as you have not rejected Jesus, God is your Father as much as He ever was, even if you’ve sinned a lot!
You don’t get into the kingdom of God by not sinning, and you don’t stay in His kingdom by not sinning! You get into the kingdom by faith and you stay in the kingdom by faith. Sin did not stop God from becoming your Father when you came to Him through Jesus, and sin will not stop God from continuing to be your Father now.
OK, but now what about your fellowship with God? If your earthly father sends you to your room, you are still related to him but you lose fellowship with him for the time being. However, the way things work with your heavenly Father is different. Your earthly father never lived in you and went everywhere you went, but your heavenly Father lives in you and goes wherever you go.
But what if you sin?
If you sin, God still lives in you and goes everywhere you go. There is no such thing as “being sent to your room” spiritually and having your heavenly Father refuse to talk to you. In fact, if you’re in sin, you and He really NEED to be able to talk to one another so that He can help you get out of sin and stay out of sin in the future.
If you sin, the three Persons whom you need the most – the Father, Son and Holy Ghost – do NOT catch the last train for the coast the day that you sin! Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would abide with you forever (John 14:16). Forever is a long time! Forever means that He doesn’t take off on you just because you sin. Jesus and His Father abide in you, never leaving or forsaking you (Hebrews 13:5).
You must remember which covenant you are under! There is never a need for a New Testament believer to plead as David did in Psalm 51:11, “Don’t cast me out of Your presence! Don’t take Your Holy Spirit from me!” He WON’T! You have a much better covenant than David had. God does not cast you out or take His Holy Spirit away from you if you sin!
Some people quote Isaiah 59:2 to try to prove that your sins DO separate you from God, but that was under the Old Covenant! You have a much better covenant.
The moment you receive Jesus, you become the righteousness of God in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21). You don’t just HAVE righteousness, you ARE righteousness. You are so righteous that your picture should be in the dictionary next to “righteousness” so that people can see what righteousness looks like! In fact, you will not be one bit more righteous in heaven than you are right now. You can’t improve on perfect righteousness, and you have perfect righteousness – as if you’d never sinned at all!
But what if you sin?
Before you sin, you are the righteousness of God in Christ. After you sin, what are you? Correct answer: The righteousness of God in Christ! That doesn’t change at all!
“But wait,” you might think, “surely sin did SOMETHING to my right standing with God!” But it didn’t.
Here’s what you need to remember: When you first received Jesus, did what you received depend on how little or how much you were sinning? No, of course not! So what makes you think that everything that was freely given to you now depends on how much or how little you’re sinning? That would mean that it’s harder to walk in God’s blessings when you’ve been walking with Him for a long time than it was to walk in His blessings the day you got saved. That makes no sense. Everything God gave you in Christ was by grace, not by your merit. It’s STILL by grace and not by merit even if you’ve walked with Him for decades!
It is the blood of Jesus that gives you access to God’s throne – not your own ability to stay out of sin. That blood purchased your forgiveness and granted you fellowship with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. They all dwell in you as a believer.
But what if you sin?
If you sin, you still have fellowship with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, all of whom continue to dwell in you. And that’s a good thing, because if sin really broke your fellowship, you would have a rough time getting out of sin on your own without Their help! They can all remind you that Jesus shed His blood so that your sins would be forgiven. As a believer today, ALL your sins are forgiven. You walk in God’s forgiveness, and Jesus’ blood cleanses you from all sin.
But what if you sin?
God knew that you were going to commit that sin and that’s why He had Jesus pay for your sin so that you could be forgiven for it! Jesus’ bloodshed would have been for nothing if no one was going to sin! So if you sin, remember that the whole point of Jesus’ sacrifice was to buy you forgiveness for all your sins – including that sin! Thank God that you are forgiven! (You do not have to add any works of your own to be forgiven – if you’re in Christ, you ARE forgiven!) Rather than doing the devil’s work by beating yourself up and making yourself miserable because you sinned, rejoice that it was just one more sin that Jesus already paid for – and you’re forgiven!
As a believer, it is a wonderful thing to walk in God’s favor and know His pleasure in what you do.
But what if you sin?
In this case, there has to be a slightly different answer, because God does NOT take pleasure in sin. He will not just send you ooey-gooey love notes from heaven if you do something wrong. He will correct you and prompt you to repent, as He did in the case of several churches in the book of Revelation. Just as any earthly parent who loves his child will correct that child, God loves you enough to correct you if you blow it! And He may be as sharp as Jesus was with some of the churches in the book of Revelation.
I know that you can start a big dust-up over the issue of whether the Holy Spirit convicts a believer of sin or not. (Fortunately, your opinion on this issue will not stop you from receiving divine healing either way.) Is it He or is it your conscience letting you know that you did something wrong? I believe that it’s BOTH because the Bible, which the Holy Spirit moved men to write, mentions a LOT of specific sins, even in the New Testament. If the Holy Spirit speaks to you through Scripture, which you should allow Him to do, He’s going to make the “specific sin” verses come alive to you along with all the others. In that way, He most certainly speaks to you about specific sins. I’ve even listed many (but not all) “specific sin” verses that Paul wrote in my reply to Objection: Teaching Grace Gives People a License to Sin.)
If you’re saved, your born-again spirit does not participate in sin – it takes your flesh and/or your unrenewed mind to get you into trouble. Your spirit that is made in God’s image will always lead you away from sin. However, your human will isn’t born again! You have to decide whether to side with the real you – the hidden man of the heart – or with your flesh. You will have that struggle every day until Jesus returns or you go to be with Him before He returns.
So your conscience will convict you if you sin. If your conscience does it, does the Holy Spirit have to do the same thing? Well, God corrects His true children (Hebrews 12:5-13). So if you sin, He will certainly talk to you about it! And Jesus will talk to you about repenting! God doesn’t just sit there and let you hurt yourself by sinning and not say anything to you about it. He loves you too much to just leave you in sin, which is always destructive. You can argue whichever way you want about the Holy Spirit’s involvement in it, but given that God and Jesus correct you, it is safe to say that you will be the recipient of divine correction if you sin! What you will NOT be is the subject of divine condemnation. You have passed from condemnation into life as a believer, and there is no condemnation for you (Romans 8:1). That doesn’t mean that there is no conviction for those who are in Christ Jesus, though!
What if you shrug off God’s correction when you sin? Does this affect your relationship or fellowship with Him?
Yes and no. Your relationship to God is still intact and your ability to fellowship with God is still intact. However, the tone of your fellowship will change. If you shrug Him off, He will keep trying to get through to you because He loves you, and He will get sterner with you. If you keep purposefully shrugging Him off, He may stop dealing with you and just let you suffer the inevitable consequences in this life of what you’re doing. Remember that Jesus even gave the promiscuous “prophetess” Jezebel at Thyatira time to repent. In other words, He dealt with her graciously about her sin. But after she hardened herself and would not repent, Jesus warned her of dire consequences if she did not stop what she was doing. (In this case, she was hurting His church, so He threatened severe punishment.) You can read about this in Revelation 2:20-23.
God will love you no matter what. He will still love you if you renounce Jesus – but the fact that He loves you would not keep you out of hell. He still loves you if you deliberately cling to sin after He deals with you about it, but you will not experience the same sweet fellowship that you would if you repent. God doesn’t change (Malachi 3:6), so He does not get sweeter and sweeter as the days go by, but your fellowship with Him will get sweeter and His tone will get sweeter if you stop resisting Him!
Some people will interpret this change of tone to mean that God has not forgiven you, and that you had better confess your sin to get Him to forgive you so that He can change His tone with you. (This is based on a mistaken reading of 1 John 1:9. See What 1 John 1:9 Really Means for more on that.) However, that isn’t what’s going on. You ARE forgiven – that is not the issue. The issue is your persistence in doing something that is hurting you and/or bringing reproach to the gospel even though you are forgiven for doing it. God does not get strict with you because He hasn’t forgiven you – He gets strict with you to get your attention when His prior efforts to correct you have failed!
Healing and forgiveness are both legally yours as a Christian, but you will have a hard time walking in the blessings He has already provided if you’re having a tug of war with Him about something else. You should NOT expect your prayers for healing or anything else to be answered if you have hardened yourself and are willfully resisting His will, if for no other reason that your conscience will condemn you and you will lose any confidence to receive from Him while you are in that condition.
1 John 3:21-22:
Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.
And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.
If your heart is smiting you because you know you’re doing something wrong, you won’t have confidence toward God. God is greater than your heart and knows all things, but if you’re deliberately disobeying His commands and doing things that are displeasing in His sight, you’ll have no confidence before His presence. Actually, when you’re willfully disobedient, you probably won’t even want to be AWARE of His presence in you because you know full well what He has to say to you and you’re trying to plug your ears to His pleadings.
By the way, the passage above does NOT establish a works gospel by teaching that you can only receive from God if you keep His commandments. No one could receive anything if that were true. You almost surely did something sinful today. If sin could keep you out of God’s blessings, you would never walk in any of them – you’d be right back under the Law! John’s point could not be that if you engage in any kind of sin, you can’t receive! If that were so, the blood of Jesus that purchased your forgiveness was shed for nothing. Also, it would contradict what John said in 1 John 1:7 that if you walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses you from all sin! The sin John talks about here is not just any sin that you might be committing right now – it’s sin that you are aware of that God is dealing with you about – sin that your heart is condemning you for. A sin you’re committing that you’re unaware of (there probably are such sins!) does not cause your heart to condemn you. Your heart doesn’t condemn you unless you know that you’re doing something wrong.
Does this put you back in the same place as the traditional interpretation of 1 John 1:9 that God only forgives and cleanses you when you confess an individual sin? No, it doesn’t. You’re already cleansed and forgiven as a Christian – that is not the issue. The issue is that you are ashamed and embarrassed to approach God because you know you’re ducking Him – much as Adam and Eve ducked God in the Garden of Eden after they knew that they had sinned. God didn’t run away from Adam; Adam ran away from God. God is still greater than your heart and knows all things – He knows that He has forgiven and cleansed you even if you don’t feel very “clean” at the moment because you feel guilty that you’re resisting God.
But your fellowship with God will not have the same pleasantness if you deliberately stiff-arm Him when He pleads with you. You will still have a father-child relationship and the ability to fellowship, but it won’t be the same. In the natural, I could decide to ignore my wife or do everything the opposite of what she wants this week. I could leave my wobbed-up socks all over the floor rather than putting them in the laundry. I could leave my towel on the floor after I shower. I could refuse to take out the trash. I could refuse to do the driving some of the time. I could refuse to do anything with her that she enjoys. Now, after a week of this, she would STILL be my wife. My legal relationship to her would not have changed. The fact that I can have a conversation with her would not have changed – and you can bet that she would want to initiate a conversation! However, the pleasantness of our relationship would not be there as long as I stubbornly did the opposite of her known will. The same applies to our relationship with God. You will still HAVE relationship, but God will want to initiate a conversation that your flesh will not like. Fortunately, He loves you enough to keep trying to get your attention and steer you away from ruinous behavior, even if He has to get stern with you. “God is good all the time” does not mean that “God never gets stern with you about sin.” In fact, it is His very goodness that leads Him to deal with you about destructive behavior so that you can live better!
In conclusion, sin you’re not aware of will not hinder your healing. NO sin will change your status as God’s child (other than the sin of rejecting Jesus). But it will change the tone of your fellowship if you persist in known sin, and because your heart will condemn you, you will lose confidence to receive healing or any other blessing. Thus, if you know you’re sinning, don’t be stupid – repent! It will be so much easier to receive after you do that.
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