Despite our right standing with him, God our Father doesn’t always approve of the things we do—things that are not right to do. We stumble in sin daily, and we grieve the Spirit when we intentionally sin against our own God-given conscience (Jas 3:2; Eph 4:30). Even though the Father loves us always and won’t boot us out of his heavenly household for wrongdoing, he still shows great displeasure at our sin.

At the Catholic high school I attended we were often encouraged to pay an occasional visit to the chaplain (or the local priest) to lay bare any sins that troubled our minds. The frequency of these visits depended on how ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ you needed to feel before being convicted to go, and they felt somewhat like formatting a hard drive to clean out the junk, over and over again.

Asking the chaplain for forgiveness relieved my conscience, but to what extent did those confessions actually relieve me of the guilt of my sin? How many visits to the priest must I make before I have assurance that God has really forgiven me?

Fortunately, this concept of confession is nowhere to be found in the Bible. Since Jesus is the only priest we need to offer our cries for forgiveness to the Father (Heb 4:14-15), his ministry makes the priestly office of the Old Testament obsolete. We do not confess our sins to human priests but to God alone because if we directly confess them to him “he is faithful and just to forgive us” (1 John 1:9).

But hang on! Don’t we also profess that all our sins are forgiven if we truly repent and place our trust in Jesus (Acts 3:19)? If this is true, then why does Jesus exhort us to ask our Father in heaven to “forgive us our debts” (Matt 6:12)? Why must we continue seeking forgiveness from God if we are already forgiven?

Juridical Forgiveness Comes from Our Union with Christ

From the moment we place our trust in the sufficient atoning work of Christ, we have complete forgiveness of sin and are free from the eternal condemnation of God (Col 2:13-14; Rom 8:1).

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