Sinning Christians

by Dr. Ken Matto

(1 John 2:1 KJV) My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:

Today’s reading is a verse which should be a great comfort to every Christian. There are going to be times in every believer’s life when we sin, whether it is intentional or by accident, and that sin needs to be dealt with. One great tenet of this great salvation we have is that whenever we sin, we never have to worry about being expelled from the Kingdom of God because we can come before the Throne of Grace and tell the Lord all about our sin. We confess our sin to the Lord, not because it has not already been forgiven, but because it helps cleanse us and keeps us dependent upon the Lord to help us to avoid those same pitfalls in our life. (2 Sam 12:13 KJV) And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die. We see in this verse the situation with David and Bathsheba. It was about one year since David had committed the sin with Bathsheba and murder when Nathan came to him. This was plenty of time for David to repent of the sin he committed. Yet, he did not and as a result, the Lord took the child’s life but in the same statement we read that the Lord had already put away the sin of David. In other words, what David did came as no surprise to the Lord since He knows the beginning from the end in the lives of every one of His children.

It is the same with us today. Whenever we commit a sin, God gives us a space of time to confess and repent of that sin, or else He is going to set up circumstances which will bring us to our knees. Many times I have heard Christians say that Satan is the one who brings troubling circumstances into our life, this is true, but it is God who designs circumstances to play a part in the lives of His children. Maybe David thought that he was going to get away with it since he was the King or maybe that God had forgotten about his sin. It makes no matter what social position you hold in life, if you are a child of God, He will not tolerate sin in the life of His children. Basically, for two reasons: The first, is that the name of God would be blasphemed among the unbelievers; and secondly, God knows how destructive sin can be in the life of His children, and He wants to end it as soon as possible. However, if we remain rebellious and harden ourselves against chastisement, God may take everything away from us. In other words, He will strip us of everything that will cause us to sin. God will cleanse us but it will be for our own good to bring us back to spiritual sanity. God has a plan for our life and that plan does not include sin which can rip us apart. When we sin, we feel like a hypocrite when we witness to others. This is the duplicity of Satan’s method of deception. He tells us that we will have fun when we sin and then when we sin, he tells us we are a hypocrite. The place to stop any sinful deed is in the mind before it takes us down. Let us not be like David on this one occasion and keep a short account of sin. You will probably sleep better too.  (1/24/03)