How to Know Whether you Believe the Gospel?
How do you know if you really believe that your sins have been forgiven once-and-for-all? A time of crisis will reveal it.
Right in the midst of your worst failures, if you can confidently declare that you are still the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, then you really believe that you are forgiven by God’s Grace, apart from your works.
God is not shocked that you still fall into sin after being saved. That’s why His word says:
“My little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin. If anyone sins, we have a Counselor with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.” (1 John 2:1-2 WEB)
If you fall into sin, you have a “Paraklétos” (helper, advocate, counselor) who is Jesus Christ. He not only declares to the Father that you are righteous, but He Himself is the reason why you are irrevocably righteous—the precious blood Jesus shed at the cross and the death He died paid for your forgiveness of sins. Perfect atonement has been made for your lifetime of sins. This is really good news (Gospel).
No true believer uses this beautiful truth as an excuse to say that it’s okay to live a life of sin because you’re forgiven anyway.
Although it is true that sin cannot cause a believer to lose his salvation, a person who says, “Feel free to sin as much as you want because you’re still forgiven anyway,” has a love for the world and the lusts of the flesh, so it’s questionable whether someone like that really received Jesus as Lord.
“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? May it never be! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer...Thus consider yourselves also to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore don’t let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. Also, do not present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin will not have dominion over you. For you are not under law, but under grace.”
(Romans 6:1-2, 11-14 WEB)
Instead, the truth of total forgiveness of sins is what keeps you from sin. By knowing and believing that you are continuously righteous, it empowers you to live out that truth.
If you are self-condemned, those feelings of unworthiness and dirtiness will only manifest as persistent sinful habits, like accepting that you are a hopeless sinner doomed to repeat your mistakes.
When you fall into sin in moments of weakness, the truth of total forgiveness of sins is your safety net. When you fall, you are not destroyed, but rather you can pick yourself up and continue walking, trusting that God will continue to transform you to live better than before.
The next time you fall into sin, take notice whether you are able to believe and confess that you’re still the righteousness of God in Christ—that you’re unchangeably as righteous as God Himself.
If you can’t, then it means you don’t believe yet—and that area of unbelief is a weakness, so just keep hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, letting it sink into your heart and become real to you.
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