Daily Manna · Day 282 · October 9
Faithful to Forgive
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
John puts a condition on the front of it, and the condition is smaller than most people make it. Not if we grovel. Not if we can promise it will not happen again. If we say the true thing. And what answers is not God's mood on the day but two words about his character. Faithful, because he gave his word. Just, which is the surprising one: not merciful in spite of justice, but just to forgive, because the matter has already been settled elsewhere. Then he goes past forgiving to cleansing, which reaches the thing underneath the thing you named. The whole paragraph is aimed at people in that church who were saying they had no sin at all.
Lord, I have said the general version of this for years. Forgive my sins, meaning all of them, meaning none of them in particular. Tonight I am saying the sentence I have been walking around. You already know it; I am the one who has not said it. I am not going to promise you anything first. Faithful and just, you said. I am holding you to both words.
And then a warning worth taking seriously. The danger for someone like you is not that you will confess too little. It is that you will go on asking for what has already been given, and mistake the asking for humility. It is not humility. Past a certain point it is a polite way of telling God his sentence did not hold.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 282 is The Simplicity in Christ (2 Corinthians 11:3).