I was sent via e-mail a link to an article at OldTruth.com entitled “Am I Doing Enough To Get God To Forgive Me?”.

This is one of the most revealing and liberating articles that I have read in a very long time. Growing up and going to church in the pentecostal / holiness environment, I too was (and still am in many areas of life) much like the relative of the author who lived constantly with deep concerns of if he does break a commandment, what would happen to him if he were to get in a car accident and die before having a chance to do an act of contrition. Ole time pentecostal / holiness types would take the Finneyistic mindset that that person would be in eternal torment. I remember when I did sin that I would find the nearest private place to go in order to quickly confess my sins to where if i died or if the rapture came, i wouldn’t have to worry at all.

You would not believe how many ’saints-of God’; when finding out they were terminally ill, would start ‘re-confessing’ sins already confessed and forgiven, confessing for stuff that was not a sin but were afraid that they may have been wrong about it being a sin (and in some extreme theology cases felt that this may have caused the terminal illness to come upon them), and start back at childhood confessing stuff ranging from picking on fat little Joey in third grade, to asking forgiveness for not doing their chores on time, to secretly listening to Buddy Holly on the AM transistor radio while the parents gone into town to shop, to pleading the blood of Jesus for having overdue library books in high school.

Why? because they lived in a ungodly and unhealthy fear that they might die or miss the rapture if they forgot about wasting food on their lunch plate at age nine, forgot about the fight with the bully in grade school, forgot about vandalizing the desk with Billy Loves Sally using the sharp point of a compass used in geometry class. They are afraid that God will flash it up on a jumbotron screen and then reveal the hidden trap door plunging them down the chute to eternal damnation.

“I must do some ‘work’ to make myself clean again”

“I must deny myself something I want as ‘punishment’ for doing wrong in order to become ‘clean’ again”

“I must go back to the cross again and get ‘re-saved’ because via my post-salvation experience sin, I lost my salvation and must do something to regain my salvation”

‘If I really were a Christian how could I possibly sin like this?’

How does one ever feel that they do ‘measure up’ to God? Why does stinking thinking like this turn the infallible Word of God into something that makes people ‘guess’ instead of knowing their eternal security? God is turned from a sovereign being into a guessing game hoping our T is crossed and our I is dotted and that we did not forget some obscure memory and hoping we picked the right day to die that God ain’t angry at the world.

I refuse to live like this ever again. I am saved by Grace, made righteous by faith, my sins washed in the Blood of Christ, my eternal home forever secure, and loved by God unconditionally. Christ died for every sin for every one of His children at Calvary and arose on the third day to have victory over sin, death, hell, and the grave.

Sanctification is a life-long thing that we work on daily and boy do I work at this daily.