Grace Party: Escape to Reality Greatest Hits, Volume 3 by Paul Ellis Read Free Book Online

made
Søren Kierkegaard the gloomy Dane. He thought his father had committed an
unforgivable sin and, as a result, his family was beyond redemption. This made Kierkegaard
a great existentialist philosopher, but it also made him a deeply unhappy man.
If you think you are beyond saving and without hope, you wouldn’t be happy
either.
    One of
the greatest sources of anxiety among believers is confusion over issues of sin
and forgiveness. Telling a confused Christian that there is an unforgivable sin
is like throwing petrol on a fire. So is there an unforgivable sin and, if so,
what is it?
     
    The bottom 10 list
     
    Here is a list of candidate sins
that I have gleaned from various sources. You may have committed one or all of
these sins, but rest assured that none of them is unforgivable:
     
    1.       an attitude that calls evil good and
good evil
    2.       a lack of reverence
    3.       being stubborn and unteachable
    4.       not loving the Lord with all your
heart, mind and strength
    5.       willful or intentional sin
    6.       unconfessed sin
    7.       unrepented sin
    8.       harboring unforgiveness in your heart
    9.       taking the Lord’s Name in vain
    10.    having disrespectful thoughts about the Holy Spirit
     
    There is some bad stuff on this
list that can hurt you. For instance, if you harbor unforgiveness you’ll end up
bitter and twisted. But it is not helpful to tell a young mother whose husband
has run off with her best friend that she must forgive him or face eternal
damnation. You might as well ask her to walk on water.
    The
power to overcome sin — and forgive the unforgivable — is not found in fearmongering.
So, in the hope of breaking a few manmade yokes, let’s review some of these
so-called unforgivable sins.
     
    Unforgivable sins?
     
    Some say that the unforgivable sin
is a bad attitude or a lack of reverence or it’s being stubborn and
unteachable. This is nonsense! Jesus didn’t suffer and die to enter us into a
reverence contest. We neither earn points for being quick learners nor get
punished for being dimwitted. Attitude is certainly important as it will affect
the way you live and whether you reign in life. But you are neither
disqualified by a poor attitude any more than you are qualified by a good one.
    Others
say the unforgivable sin is not loving the Lord with all your heart, mind and
strength. It’s putting Sunday football ahead of Jesus. This mindset leads to a
system of religious score-keeping. It’s the debits versus the credits. But God
is not counting the number of hours you put into church versus the number of
hours you spend kicking a football (or watching someone else kick a football).
You don’t qualify for eternal life because you maintain a positive or pious
attitude and we don’t love God to stay on his good side. We love him because he
first loved us and saved us and redeemed us and did everything we needed, even
while we were sinners (Romans 5:8).
    What
about willful sin? That sounds serious. Is willful sin unforgivable? Well if
Jesus can’t forgive the sins we’ve done on purpose then no one can be saved.
Happily, his best is greater than your worst and his grace is greater than your
sin!
    I’ve
heard many people say that unpardonable sins are those we neither confess nor
repent of. (This would include suicide.) They seem to forget that Jesus went
around forgiving people who neither repented nor asked for forgiveness. They
also forget that he forgave us long before they were born.
    Here is
a recipe for dead works: “I must repent and confess to get God to forgive me.”
That’s back to front. We don’t repent to get forgiven but because we are
forgiven. Repentance is how we receive the gift that has already been given in
Christ. It’s the same with confession. We don’t confess to make God forgive but
because he has forgiven us. Confession helps us to receive the grace he has
already provided.
    What
about