1 John 1:9

1 John 1:9 NKJV

If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

My son took our dog for a walk the other day. Taking a dog for a walk doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but it became a big deal for him. It was one of the first times he took the dog for a walk by himself where we live. We have lived here a year and we have gone on walks together and so he felt that he could do this with no problems. He started walking and thought he would just follow the path and take a short walk. The short walk ended up being a very long walk because he was not familiar with how the roads worked. When we lived in Oklahoma the roads were straight and you could count on there being blocks and mile sections. When we moved here to Arkansas we realized that it is very different. He thought that if he just turned right, then turned right, and then turned right again he should be going the right way. In Oklahoma that would have worked, but not here. Here if you turn right, the road curves enough that you may end up going left and be lost before you know it. Nathan finally saw someone else walking their dog and asked them where the entrance to our neighborhood was and they pointed him in the right direction.

My son took off with good intentions of doing his chores. He thought he knew the right way to go and thought it would be easy. Instead he ended up on the wrong path and his way was made much more difficult. Have you ever had a time when you thought you were on the right path and then you realized that you had stumbled into an area of sin in your life that you needed to deal with? Or maybe you knew you were way off course and had fallen in a pit. You knew that you were in full fledged disobedience and that the sin had become a pit that you had taken up residence in. It is very easy when we are in these sin seasons to want to give up. To feel that God must be so mad at us and that he couldn’t forgive us. The good news is that God is not like us. In our verse this week God says, “if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” God will forgive us- He wants to forgive us.

Paul, a man who wrote a majority of the New Testament talked in Romans 7:15 about how there were times in his life where he didn’t understand himself. He said that he wanted to do what was right, but sometimes he didn’t do it and instead did what he hated. We all, no matter how spiritual we are, will have sins in our life that we need to deal with. Whether we have walked away from the Lord and gone back to our old sins and need to come to repentance or whether it is the sins that we have always done, but did not recognize as sin in our lives until God gently (or not so gently) pointed it out to us. In the Strong’s concordance the word sin means to miss the mark, be mistaken, wander from the path, or wander from God’s law. The sin in our lives isn’t always blatant and obvious to others, sometimes the sins are just areas where we area little off target and are missing the mark. They could be things that we know we are supposed to do but we don’t do them, or things we know we should stop doing, but we do them anyway. We may even be on the right path, walking towards God, headed in the right direction, but we just kind of wander a little off the path and begin to separate ourselves ever so slightly from God.

God tells us when this happens that He has a plan for us. We can confess our sins to Him. We can acknowledge our sin, admit to it, and repent of it. When we do this God says He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Then he doesn’t just say we are forgiven he takes it further and cleanses us from the unrighteousness. To cleanse means to purify, purge, and to make clean. When you ask for forgiveness God makes you completely clean. He purges your sin from you and makes you in right standing with Him.
Some people take 1 John 1:9 and try and use it as a license to sin. If you are doing this then you really need to take a look at your heart and judge yourself. When you are aware of an area of sin in your life it should bother you. In chapter 1 verse 6 it says that “we are lying if we say that we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth” (NLT). Chapter 3:8-9 says, “But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning. But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil. Those who have been born into God’s family do not make a practice of sinning, because God’s life is in them. So they can’t keep on sinning, because they are children of God.” (NLT) This does not mean that if you slip up and say a cuss word, gossip about someone once, or have a thought you shouldn’t have that you are not saved. It does mean that when you do things that are contrary to God’s word, you will have a prick in your conscience. You will know that you are doing something that you need to change. You will want to repent and get right with God.

God is so good and so merciful to us. We always have areas in our life that we need to improve, places where we have started to stumble off the path. We should be always vigilant to make sure we are staying true to the path that God has us on and working at becoming better followers of Christ and better examples to the world of what a Christian is. We will mess up at times, but when we mess up we have an advocate who pleads our case to the father (1 John 2:1). Not because of our works or our righteousness, but because of Christ’s sacrifice and atonement for our sins. It is my prayer that you will judge your own heart right now. I pray that we will be like David in Psalm 139:23-24 and will ask God to point out if there is anything in us that offends him and that we will allow Him to lead us in the path of everlasting life.