Should We Ask For Forgiveness After We Are Saved?

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A good place to go, if you're going to think about something along those lines, is the Lord's Prayer. So the disciples come to Jesus, essentially ask

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Him to teach them to pray, and the way that He teaches them to pray is He teaches them to say,

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Lord, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. All right,

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Tim, the question for today's episode is should we ask for forgiveness after we're saved? This is one of those errors that people make as it relates to forgiveness, when they basically only have a category for justification, and they don't really have a strong category for sanctification.

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So in some sense, it really makes a whole lot of sense that if God forgives us of our sins in justification, all of them, past, present, and future, if He died on the cross in order to forgive us of all of them, then it would seem logical that in that respect, because all of our sins have been nailed to the cross and we bear them no more, it seems a bit excessive or superfluous to ask

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God to continue to forgive us because there's a sense in which we're already forgiven. We're already declared legally justified.

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We're not guilty, so why would we keep on asking forgiveness? And while that makes a certain kind of sense,

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I think as you read the Bible, one of the things you're going to find is that there's a lot more to forgiveness than all of that, meaning there's categories for judicial forgiveness in justification, but then there's also categories for forgiveness as it relates to sanctification.

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And so there's a lot of Bible verses that you could go to that are trying to navigate this topic in general, but then the short answer of that is that despite the fact that we're justified and we're forgiven, related to sanctification, there is a need to keep on asking

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God to forgive us when we sin. Okay, and so for the person who is justified, the

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Bible would still teach us that that person is going to continue to seek forgiveness for the sins that they commit after justification, right?

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That's right, yeah. So, I mean, a good place to go if you're going to think about something along those lines is the

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Lord's Prayer. So the disciples come to Jesus, essentially ask him to teach them to pray, and the way that he teaches them to pray is he teaches them to say,

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Lord, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And this is meant to be a model prayer for the disciples.

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It's meant to be a paradigm for how they should pray, and that paradigm for how they should pray is based on,

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Lord, give us this day our daily bread, right? So every day you're asking the Lord for your daily bread, and you're also saying forgive us our trespasses every day.

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So that's a normal expectation of Christian life that you should continually be asking for forgiveness.

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Now, what they say on the other side is, what's happening is that there's an attempt made, essentially, to read 1

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John in a way that's pretty narrow. So 1 John says, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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And so what they'll do is they'll go to 1 John, and they'll essentially say, well, see, it doesn't say to ask forgiveness there, right?

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So this goes along with just the preconceived notion that once you ask forgiveness once and you're justified, you're good, right?

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So they'll say, you're not told to ask forgiveness. You're just told to confess your sins, confess that you've sinned, and then thank

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God for already forgiving you. And I would say that that makes a certain kind of sense if you don't have passages like the

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Lord's Prayer, and if you don't, there's just plenty of examples in Scripture of this kind of thing actually happening.

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So the Lord's Prayer would just be a good place to go to say that, no, that should be a daily expectation that we do that.

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Well, and I too, it seems like it just kind of doesn't really make a lot of sense to stop at confessing, right?

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Well, because that's just not like, I don't know of any other, you know, we did an episode,

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I guess a few weeks ago now, where we talked about forgiveness and we fleshed out a lot of the basics of what it actually is.

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And if you think about, you know, like let's say that I, you know,

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I slap you across the face because I got angry at you, right? What the

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Bible says that I should do is I should go to you understanding that I don't deserve any sort of forgiveness from you, right?

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I'm not entitled to it, but I need to go to you. I need to tell you, hey, here's what

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I did, and it was wrong, and I wish I hadn't done it, but I did, and I need your forgiveness.

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Will you forgive me, right? And that's what God tells us to do. And then he also tells, you know, for the person on the other side, he tells them, hey, you know, forgive others because I have forgiven you a greater debt, right?

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But what I'm not supposed to do is just go to you and say, hey, I slapped you because I was angry, you know?

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So it just doesn't, it doesn't seem like that really. Like I don't, I guess if the only thing you have to do is say, hey

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God, you know, I got angry because of whatever, right?

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And then you stop there. Like I don't know like what you're even accomplishing with that.

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If you just stop there, right? Right, so yeah, so what's happening is you, confession in the

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Bible assumes that you're asking forgiveness along with it. So confession is not just an end of itself.

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You know, it's not just you're admitting something. It assumes that in every other instance. And so what's happening though is that you have individuals who are trying to make sense of what happened at justification.

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What happens at justification is God is, you know, forgiving you of all of it, past, present, future, giving you the righteousness of Christ as a free gift attributed to your account.

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So that's all happening. But then in the, you have a different category in sanctification and that's the category that's missing in this kind of calculus.

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And so essentially, a way to think about it is this. So, you know, you are

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God's enemy if you ask him to forgive you of your sins. And you know, if you repent of your sins and believe the good news, what's going to happen is

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God is going to forgive you, right? You're going to be declared not guilty. He's going to give you Jesus' righteousness as a gift.

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He's going to adopt you into his family. And so there's nothing you can do that's going to unadopt you from your family, right?

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So every time you sin, you're not just like in danger of being taken out of God's family. You're secure. Your salvation is secure in that way.

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So you're in God's family. But then like the issue is as it relates to sanctification, you still have to operate as a family member, right?

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And so, you know, if I were like my kids, they're part of my family. Whenever they sin, they're not in danger of being kicked out, right?

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Hopefully not. That's not the way it works, you know. All right, take a hike, guys, right? That's not the way it works.

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But then you still maintain the relationship, you know, from there. So you're still maintaining a relationship.

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We teach them when they sending us this, they ask forgiveness for that. That's not like if you don't ask forgiveness, you're going to get kicked out.

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It's just you're a member of the family, but this is how we maintain family relationships. And so that's essentially how sanctification works with God.

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So you have forgiveness as it relates to justification. It gets you into the family. Once you're in the family, you're secure.

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But then when you sin against God, you still need to acknowledge it and ask him to forgive you. And that's just what you do, you know, in an ongoing way, maintaining the relationship as it relates to sanctification.

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Now, what's the danger if you were to accept the premise that we don't have to ask for forgiveness after we're saved?

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We only have to confess our sins to God. What is the danger of believing something like that?

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Yeah, I mean, the danger of that, I mean, this can take two forms. It can take the form that you need to confess it or you don't need to confess it, if that makes sense.

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Okay, explain. So if God's forgiven you of all of it, right, past, present, and future, then you're free, man, you know, don't worry about it.

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Just move on, right? Put it out of your mind. But then you don't have some mechanism of restoring your relationship in that way.

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So you don't have a very clear mechanism for restoring that relationship.

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And basically, you're just walking in unrepentant sin, you know, over the course of your life. And you're not, like, you know, there's no doctrine of keeping short accounts with God in that way.

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And God wants you to confess it. And that confession is in order to, you know, bring you in a right family relationship.

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So, I mean, it'd be the same thing as, like, you know, your kid. Like, in the analogy that I'm trying to talk about, if your kid just basically just, hey, yeah,

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I'm a family member, nothing I can do separates me from this family member, but I'm just never going to ask forgiveness anymore because I'm secure.

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What you're doing is you're just, you're abusing that family relationship, if that makes sense.

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And you're not, you know, clearing the air, you know. You're not dealing with the issues that are happening in the way that God has prescribed.

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And so, I think in general, I'm always worried if someone camps out in that and they're not asking forgiveness on a regular basis because, you know, that does call into question, are you really saved if you can just kind of ignore this like that, you know?

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But then also, you know, asking forgiveness, you know, if we confess our sins to be faithful and just forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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David talks about, when I kept silent about my sins, my bones rotted, right? Like, you're putting yourself in a very precarious situation.

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It affects you, it affects other people. You're just holding on to it when you can just let go, go to God, have

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Him, you know, forgive you and move on. So, as it relates to just your operating within the family, it does keep you shackled to kind of that guilt and shame.

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You don't have a mechanism of releasing it. Okay, fair enough. This has been another episode of Bible Bashed.

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