How Does Forgiveness Work In Believers?

COLLEEN TINKER

The question of repentance and forgiveness in a believer’s life comes up frequently among former Adventists. If Jesus died once for all, if we are saved on the basis of His death and resurrection, and if He paid for all our sins—past, present, and future—are we supposed to repent when we sin? Furthermore, how does this repentance and forgiveness work in personal relationships?

I recently received an email with these questions:

When I was growing up, Mom stressed the importance of asking God to forgive our sins in case we died in our sleep. If we had confessed everything, then all our sins were covered.

As a new believer, I want to understand how forgiveness works now. Is it a “blanket” repentance? Or is it a conscious repentance, meaning I know I did something wrong and ask for God’s forgiveness? Are there Scriptures to read? I have some family issues which I tried to resolve, but the person isn’t going to forgive me even though I apologized. I also gave it to God to solve. 

I was hoping you could explain this situation further for me to process it.

This letter is not unique. When we become believers after Adventism, we not only have to learn that Jesus has done all we need and that our one command is to believe in Him, but we also have to UNLEARN the deeply embedded view that we learned in our former religion—that we have to remember and confess every wrongdoing or else lose our chance at salvation.

I will try to explain how I have come to understand this issue of repentance as a believer. First, that Adventist teaching that all our sins have to be confessed before we sleep so they’re covered if we die is a horrible heresy. It’s important to remember that it came from a false prophet, and it was a teaching promulgated on UNBELIEVERS. Adventists do not have the gospel, and the idea that we have to remember and confess everything we think is a sin is an idea that grows out of misunderstanding our true nature but believing that we can actually DO something that will ensure we are saved. 

In the first place, it is impossible for us to remember every single sin we commit. In the second place, when we are not born again, we can’t even KNOW which behaviors and internal reactions are sins! We are spiritually DEAD! So Adventists identify “sins” as the things EGW spoke against—and if you think about it, every single aspect of life, according to EGW, is a sin unless we deny any feeling of pleasure or joy or trust. Adventism makes us introspective, always examining ourselves, focussed on our behaviors and feelings and evaluating our spiritual health. It teaches us to feel guilt even for things God gave us to enjoy. It is entirely inside-out and upside-down. 

So, when we hear and understand what Jesus actually did, that He fully atoned for all of our sin—that He Himself was the propitiation for our sin—and the sin He atoned for was not just our bad behaviors and twisted desires but our actual spiritual DEATH—when we trust Him, He fully pays for ALL of our sin. The evidence of that reality is that He gives us His Holy Spirit as a pledge—a guarantee—that we are His eternally. (See Ephesians 1:13,14; Romans 3; 2 Corinthians 5:1–9, etc. ). In fact, He literally brings us to life, and we pass from death to life (Jn. 5:24). He transfers us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Col 1:13).

That new birth, that new life that He gives us, is palpable, and we know we are different. It is the result of our trusting in HIM. We trust His death, burial, and resurrection, and He makes us His and literally teaches us, through His Spirit, to know that God is our Father (Rom. 8:14-17; Galatians 4:4). We literally become alive and adopted, born-again children of God. 

Cannot Be Unborn

Once we are born again, we can’t be UNBORN any more than we can be unborn physically. This fact is what He wants us to know, and it’s part of the reason He gives us His Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a guarantee, a pledge, that everything He promises His children is OURS. He convinces us of the reality and security we have because HE saved us!

Yet we still have the body of flesh with a law of sin in it. (Romans 7—followed by the amazing Romans 8—describes this reality.) We still do things that we don’t want to do—and those things include the messiness of how we relate to abusive and difficult people in our lives. But now, our sins are not flowing from a dead spirit, a heart that is darkened by sin. Now, we are alive and sensitive to God because God Himself indwells us. Now He convicts us when we sin—but He doesn’t make us feel cringing guilt or shame. Conviction is different from guilt and shame. Of COURSE sin is sin—but when we are spiritually alive and sealed by the Spirit, we don’t fall back into spiritual death when we sin. Now we realize, because God indwells us, that something is “off” between us and Him. God helps us recognize two different aspects of our sins: He shows us when we act according to the flesh instead of according to trusting Him to care for us, and He also shows us when others are sinning against us—when they are unsafe, and when their continued interaction with us results in their sin increasing. 

When people are not born again, they tend to react badly to us when we are alive in Christ. Our attempts to be open and to make things right are often rebuffed because they don’t want to see the truth about themselves. Often when we try to fix things with unbelievers, the relationships become even more difficult or hostile because we are now in two different kingdoms. Sometimes we have to draw clear boundaries about what we will and won’t discuss, and sometimes we have to draw clear physical boundaries as well. And in these hard “places”, the Holy Spirit begins to help us understand how to apply His word to our situations. 

For example, I have realized that there are times when, as Jesus told His disciples, I have to “shake the dust from my feet” and leave a place or a person when they refuse to receive the truth. I have an obligation not to cast my pearls before swine. Now, I realize that the context of these commands involves the gospel—but when we are trying to make something right because we believe that we must be relating in truth with another—but they don’t want to be relating in truth—I have to let it go and entrust the situation to God. If I keep trying to reconcile with them, it will only drive them towards deeper sin against me and especially against God. 

Paul told us that we are not to be “unequally yoked with unbelievers”, because what fellowship can light have with darkness (2 Cor. 6:14)? That verse is not referring to Adventists refusing to marry non-Adventists. It is referring to any close, sharing relationship with an unbeliever who does not share our belief and fear of God and who does not want to know or honor our love for Him. We can’t be “close” business partners, or deeply linked to unbelievers who have different goals and loyalties than we have for Christ. So, just because someone has a rationalization for their bad behaviors toward us doesn’t make it right for us to restore a relationship with them if they are unsafe or unrepentant. 

Our Sin Doesn’t Divorce Us From Jesus

Now, when we sin, the Lord convicts us that we have sinned. This sin, though, doesn’t remove us from Him. We are still His and have His Spirit in us. But when He convicts us that we have sinned, that realization puts a “block” up between us. Intimacy is restricted because we feel convicted that we have withdrawn or turned away. We repent in order to allow our heart to be vulnerable again. We give up our right to defend ourselves and allow Him to be our defender. Repentance now is a means of learning to trust Him and to depend on Him instead upon our old habituated self-protections. 

I believe that Jesus gave us the image of a marriage to describe His relationship with the church partly so that we will realize that, when we sin, we don’t become divorced from Him. Instead, we learn to trust Him and to become transparent with our own sin and to grow as we trust Him. He cleans us up and helps us to stop focussing on trying to be good and instead to trust Him to love and purify us (See Ephesians 5:22–33.)

Now, as a born-again believer and as part of the body of Christ, when we encounter a person who is not open to repairing a relationship with us, it’s not our “job” to become what they want us to become. As unbelievers we tended to do that: to try to please them so we could be restored to some sort of “closeness”. But as believers, we answer to the Lord Jesus. He shapes us and determines our identities. We yield to His direction. We can’t compromise truth to accommodate a defensive unbeliever—or even a defensive believer. 

Instead, we trust God, and we give up our right to get even. We let go of our expectations for the relationship and entrust it to God, asking Him to deal with the other. We give up our “right” to have from them what they should have given us and trust Jesus to fill that place in our hearts with His own care, and we entrust the other into His hands. He knows how to deal with them, and He also knows how to give us what we need with or without them in our lives.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting and going on as if the past didn’t happen. We have to remember so we don’t let ourselves get hurt again. But we trust God with the one who doesn’t want to acknowledge his sin. Even if an abuser does acknowledge the sin he or she committed against us, they still may not be safe for a restored relationship. In such cases, we can still keep boundaries up while entrusting them to God and giving up our right to either get even with them or to have them relate to us the way we want them to. 

We let God carry the burden of retribution, and we trust God and accept the losses by entrusting ourselves to God. He will fill our lives, even if there is a hole where we lose a rebellious or unrepentant loved one. 

I recommend this article by Gary Inrig. It is excerpted from his book Forgiveness (available online), and it addresses biblically and sensitively the situation of having a person in our life who refuses to acknowledge their sin against us: When There’s No I’m Sorry. 

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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