How Do I Know I Am Forgiven?

The Gospel is a hard thing to believe in because grace is a hard thing to believe in. Getting everything for nothing does not jive with our natural sense of arithmetic. We are creatures bent upon atoning for our own sins and mistakes, even if we define "atonement" as "covering up what we did wrong and making sure no one finds out about it." Yet, in the face of an omniscient God, we know that we cannot cover up or hide anything from Him. We are rendered helpless. For many Christians (myself included), our response is often to work up a "good guilt" over our sin. Even if the sin does not make us feel guilty, we (wrongly) believe that by making ourselves feel guilty, then we can contribute to our atonement. If you ever watch people in confession or in the moments before the Lord's Supper, often this is what you'll find. By working up "good guilt," we make ourselves feel better about the atrocities we have committed before a holy God.

But this is not an act of faith. By working up "good guilt," I am not believing in the sufficiency of Christ. I am not trusting and resting in His forgiveness and acceptance. Rather, I am trusting in my own feelings of guilt over sin. There's no faith in that because it is fundamentally self-centered.

Yet, in the same way that God sees our sin, He also knows our weaknesses. He knows our tendencies to substitute for or add to grace (any addition to grace nullifies it totally...). As a result, our Father has left us with (at least) three ways to know that we are forgiven. 1 John 5:6-8 says this, "6 This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. 7 And it is the Spirit who bears witness, because the Spirit is the truth. 8 For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement."

Did you catch the three? They are the Spirit, the water, and the blood. What are they? Well firstly, the Spirit is the Holy Spirit, that personal Regenerator and sanctifying Advocate of the Gospel. He is the presence of Jesus Christ in us, promised by our Lord and delivered to the Church on Pentecost. The Spirit is simply life! Secondly, the water is the cleansing of the Gospel by which our sins are removed from us as far as east is from west. This washing is closely connected with the Spirit. The vivifying Spirit regenerates; the cleansing water regenerates (Titus 3:5). We witness this cleansing in the act of baptism where the purification from sin is signalled by the application of water. Thirdly, the blood is the means of fulfilling a broken covenant. It is reconciliation of two formerly estranged parties. As God did with Abraham in Genesis 15, so He has done with us. He has made (literally 'cut') a covenant of grace with His Church and has been the dispenser of that grace, even at the cost of his very self in the Son. This blood came from the side of that Son, blood which we receive at the His altar through the cup of salvation in Holy Communion.

These three factors exist both within us (the Spirit) and outside us (the water and the blood) in order to minister to those who doubt that grace could be true. These three have both objective and subjective realities, the former making sense of the latter. The Spirit uses water (baptism) and blood (Eucharist) to point us not to "good guilt," but to Christ. He came to earth by the water and blood of a virgin's womb. He passed from this earth by the water and blood of a martyr's death. He sent his Spirit by water and blood to testify of His person and work. By this Spirit in the water and the blood, we can know we are forgiven.

God takes seriously the means of grace. The Spirit uses them to assure us that we are forgiven. When I lack that assurance, I must flee to these means. Like Luther, I must remember the Gospel in two critical Latin phrases: baptizatus sum ('I am baptized') and hoc est corpus meum ('This is my body'). By these means, I am wrenched out of my own self-centeredness and made to believe in Christ, the object of our faith. He is the only real way that I can know I am forgiven.