Discerning the dark lord’s tactics
The dark lord is relentless in his attacking the saints. He has you right where he wants you if you think that you’re not going to be attacked by him. One of the ways in which he moves under the radar and sneaks in the shadows of our conscience is by tempting us to think that there is sin left unrepented of or left unconfessed in our lives.
He knows that the gospel compels us to repent and have faith (Mt. 4:17). He knows that Romans 6:1-2 says, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” He knows that Psalm 32:1-3 says, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, who sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.” Let’s be clear: the dark lord knows more of the content of Scripture than we do and he seeks to use it against us.
The dark lord loves to take Scripture out of context or to its unbiblical extremes (see the temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11). He knows that we would not fret if he came to us with wildly contrasting temptations that clearly aren’t biblical. He likes to take that which is good and distort it. One of the ways in which he does so is by taking the command of our Lord to repent and uses it to torment us with the thought that we have some sin left unrepented of.
Now, to be sure, there really might be some sin left unrepented of. We need to discern what is conviction versus what is condemnation. Condemnation has no hope. Condemnation only points out the bad and never gives you grace. There is always work to do. There is never any rest, joy, and peace in Christ. You are always under the Law. You are always to be ashamed. The Holy Spirit is always pointing out where you have failed. This is not how our gracious Lord and His Spirit acts towards us. As the hymn writer says, “When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and see Him there who made an end to all my sin.”
The Extremes He Takes Us To
One of the extremes in which the dark lord does this is by hounding us with the thought that we have not repented enough. There is something in our past that we haven’t confessed. There is something that we have only halfway repented of. Or, there is some element of something that we have not confessed in its absolute fullness.
It sounds awfully close to the truth doesn’t it? Of course we must repent and live a life of constant repenting! Of course we must confess our sins and seek to hide nothing from the Lord (1 John 1:8-10)! He will take this good and life-giving truth and use it to condemn and drain the life out of us. He will take God-centered proclamations of the gospel and turn them into man-centered efforts to make ourselves clean. This, as Paul says to the Galatians, is not the gospel!
As long as he can convince you that you cannot rest in Christ until this particular sin is drained completely dry then he has you where he wants you. He will continue to hold the law over you time after time and keep showing you that there is more to do. He knows that the law never quits condemning sinners. There is always confession that falls short. There is always repentance, even in the best saints, that falls short. There has never been anyone anywhere who has ever fully and completely repented or confessed the depths of their sin.
Take Martin Luther for example. He would confess his sins for hours upon hours a day because the law was ever before his face. The dark lord sought to convince him that there was more to do and that he couldn’t rest in the grace of Christ until he had dealt with it exhaustively.
He wants you to think that until you express absolutely every feeling, every emotion, every detail, and every instance of such sin that you are under God’s wrath. When he hounds a saint with this, he causes the saint to fret and worry about whether they have done enough. They can’t rest because if they do then they must be quenching the Spirit who must be giving them this thought.
How to fight by faith
You will forever have duties left undone if you think Jesus won’t accept you until you have dealt with everything fully and perfectly. The antidote is first and foremost to soak in the finality of the Cross. In John 19:30 Jesus cries, “It is finished.” This one Greek word, tetelestai, has a lifetime of meaning in it. Think about it. Jesus did not have to say this right before He died. Why would He exert this final portion of His physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual energy to say this one word before dying? He did it to confirm to us of His work on our behalf. As they say, “Last words are lasting words.”
When Jesus says it is finished He means it. Robert Mounce says,
“This one word summary of Jesus’ life and death is perhaps the single most important statement in all of Scripture. The word means ‘to complete,’ ‘to bring to perfection.’ Jesus had fully done the work God the Father sent him to do… But the tense of the verb, the ‘perfect’ tense, brings out even more of what Jesus was saying. The perfect describes an action that was fully completed and has consequences at the time of speaking… Because Jesus fully completed his task, the ongoing effects are that you and I are offered the free gift of salvation so that we can be with him forever.”
What does Mounce mean by this? He means that there is nothing left undone in the work of Jesus. There is nothing that we need to go and do first in order to be saved. There will never be enough confession. There will never be enough repentance. You will absolutely never feel as sorry and convicted as you should about your sin. You cannot rest in your work. You must rest and trust in the finality of the atonement of Christ for all your sin (past, present, and future).
Knowing What The Truth Really Is
We must have a robust doctrine and understanding of repentance and confession so that when someone tells us something differently we can spot it out. There is the common story that you might have heard about how the FBI detects counterfeit currency. They spend so much time looking at the real thing that when they see the counterfeit they know it immediately. We too must spend much time looking at Christ and looking at the reality of what the Bible says about repentance and confession so that when the dark lord tempts us to go back into slavery we can detect it.
Paul dealt with something similar to this with the Galatians. He knew that any subtle change to the gospel made it no gospel at all. The addition of anything to Christ and the gospel made Him no Savior and the gospel no good news. There is nothing but faith in Christ that saves us. It is out of that faith that we overflow into repentance. Indeed, faith and repentance are two sides of the same coin. That is why Jesus would say “repent and believe” and not “repent and then believe”. The dark lord will draw too much of a division between repentance and faith. He wants you to think that you must repent enough before you can have saving faith and free forgiveness (which would not be free at all!). It is another form of works-righteousness.
What Does It Mean To Confess?
In 1 John, the apostle John is writing to people who have been infiltrated by false teachers. He seeks to show them what it means to be truly saved. It’s only true Christians that admit and confess their sin. Christians do not think they are without sin. They are to declare, acknowledge, and to say the same thing about their sin as God says about their sin. They are to confess their sin not merely for confession sake but to express their need for Jesus on their behalf. This is the ongoing lifestyle of the believer. It is not a one time thing. This tells us that there is always something to confess and repent of. We are deceiving ourselves and being deceived if we think we have confessed and dealt with everything.
Like a sound apologetic argument, we can actually use the dark lord’s attacks on us against him. He says that we must always be confessing our sins and we can agree. He says that there is sin left undone and we can agree. It’s the very fact that we can’t confess everything that we must rest in Christ on our behalf. It’s the very fact that we can’t repent of everything to the fullest extent that we must look to Jesus to find peace of mind.
Now, to be sure, we must not use this as a biblical excuse to not confess or to shirk our Christian duty before God. Trust me, the dark lord will use this also to deceive you. We must deal with sin but we also must know when we simply cannot do enough and we must lay down and rest at the Cross.
The Holy Spirit knows our frame. He knows that this is a lifestyle that lasts a lifetime. He doesn’t put believers on a “doomsday” countdown clock which tells us that if we don’t deal with everything exhaustively then we are inevitably going to fall under God’s displeasure and harsh discipline.
How God Looks Out For Us
Think about how God speaks about this in the Old Testament. Leviticus 4 is a chapter that is all about sacrifices for sinners who sin unintentionally. There are those who may not even realize that their actions or thoughts were actually sin and yet God provides a sacrifice for them. Wouldn’t it be horrible if we were only forgiven for the sins we knew of? Calvin talks about these sacrifices as follows:
Moses does not refer to those transgressions into which we are ensnared, when we are led astray by the appearance of rectitude, so as to think ourselves without blame; but to those of which we take no heed, and whereby our minds are not pricked; or to those sudden falls, wherein the infirmity of the flesh so stifles the reason and the judgment as to blind the sinner.
And isn’t Christ the ultimate fulfillment of Leviticus 4? Isn’t He the true sacrifice? Isn’t He of so much more worth and value as a substitute on your behalf? Doesn’t He give you a positive righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21)? Oh, Christ is capable of covering all your sins! He is enough for you! He has ended the war. He has taken away your guilt and shame. He no longer points the finger at you but welcomes you with open arms.
Why does this matter to you in the midst of such a daunting and exhausting fight? Because God knows your frame. He knows that there is always sin that we leave undone. He knows there is a grand difference between our actively running away from Him (like Jonah) and our negligence, ignorance, or just flat out spiritual exhaustion. Our Lord knows that we can’t bear to see all of our sin all at once. He knows we can’t repent of everything at once. He knows that repentance itself is not our restitution or atonement. He knows that we cannot merely focus on the faults and the failures in our lives. Where would be the good news in that? Besides, we are built up in faith when we take our eyes off of ourselves and place them about the righteousness we have in Christ.
The Path of the Gospel
This is where the dark lord attacks. He tries to do anything to take your eyes off of Christ. In Psalm 73, he almost had the psalmist forsake God and the covenant community by taking his eyes off Yahweh and placing them upon his circumstances and the world. It was when the psalmist returned to the temple that his sight of reality was restored. The same is true of us in our spiritual warfare. When we take our eyes long enough off God and place them upon us there is a temptation to do away with the gospel. Satan doesn’t want us to see the grace we have in Jesus. He doesn’t want us to realize that our sins are dealt with in Christ. He doesn’t want us to realize that Jesus is enough for us. He wants us to either do nothing with our sin or try to do everything with our sin. That is no salvation at all!
As always, the path of the gospel is a narrow path with ditches on either side. The dark lord lassos us from either side trying to pull us down into either extreme. He will either make us hound ourselves with condemnation until every aspect of the totality of our guilt is dealt with (as if that were somehow possible) or he will tempt us to ignore it all and continue to live as if we have no sin. Do not let the dark lord hire you to be his own co-accuser against you.
He will dress himself as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14) and make it sound as if he is the Holy Spirit. After all, he knows the Spirit will convict us concerning sin (Jn. 16:8). He wants to sound like the Spirit so that we fear the thought of saying “no” to the Spirit if we seek to stop and rest in Christ. He will tempt us to think that we are quenching the Spirit (1 Thess. 5:19; Eph. 4:30). But think about this, would Jesus invite us into a salvation of Sabbath rest (Mt. 11:28-30) and simultaneously say that we must always be on the sin-hunt in our lives? No, my friend. He wants you to rest. Trust Him. He will bring you to conviction in His timing and He will help you to confess and repent. You can rest in Him.