"Can God Really Forgive Me?"
Some of you might not know all the details of my spiritual resume, I’ve been part of a lot of different kinds of churches. There’s a pretty long chapter where I used to be Anglican. Yeah, I know—a Lutheran pastor with an Anglican past—hide the beer! Kemper, Ryan, Chris & Joanne, Kim and I used to all go to the same very traditional, liturgical little Anglican church. We loved it. But my absolute favorite part of the entire liturgy was a section known as the "Comfortable Words." Every Sunday, right after we all told God how much we had messed up during the week, the priest would say, "Hear what comfortable words our Savior Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him." And then he would hit us with four absolute powerhouse verses of Scripture, starting with Matthew 11:28:
"Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you."
Eventually, my theological wandering brought me to the Lutheran church. I fell in love with the raw depth of Lutheran theology, the focus on the cross, and the beauty of unresolved tension. But the first time I read through the Lutheran Divine Service liturgy, I was disappointed the Comfortable Words weren't there. We just didn't do them. I felt a little cheated.
But when I was geeking out on liturgical history in my seminary days, I stumbled across a massive historical plot twist. It turns out the Comfortable Words weren’t originally Anglican at all. They were a product of early Lutheran reforms.
I had just assumed Thomas Cranmer invented it out of thin air for the Book of Common Prayer but he didn't. He got the idea from the early German liturgies. Right after those newly reformed congregations confessed their sins, the pastor would proclaim what they called the evangelical comfort—the promises of the Gospel. It was the same list of Bible verses we read.
So, pretty cool, I left the Anglican church thinking I was leaving the Comfortable Words behind, only to find out they were sitting in our Lutheran family tree the whole time.
I love hearing these verses every week because it shows an understanding of how the human brain and heart work. Every week we’re going to show up at church, drag our heavy consciences in with us, listen to the pastor talk about how we all sin this way or that, I make sure everyone knows they’re forgiven—but the human heart is still tempted to spiral. Wondering, "Did God really forgive me? Sure, the pastor said it, but does it really work for me? He doesn't know what I did on Tuesday night. He doesn't know the thoughts I had in traffic on the way here. Isn’t God getting tired of forgiving me for the same thing over and over?"
We don’t usually admit it out loud to other people. We don’t want anyone to know our secrets. We’re experts at filtering our lives to look good. We’re careful with our public images to make sure everyone thinks we’ve got it all together. We want everyone to see the shiny, highlight-reel version of our lives. But we know the real truth, and it can make us feel like a fraud. We assume if anyone saw the unedited, raw footage in our heads, we'd be instantly canceled. Even by God.
So, to all that doubt about whether you’re really forgiven or not, I’m not going to offer a self-help pep talk. You don’t need a nice, sentimental poem or a heartwarming story to make you feel fuzzy inside. You need the heavy artillery of the objective Word of God.
So, the plan is always the same: you confess your sin. The pastor absolves your sin. And God’s word steps up to the mic to silence the accusations and noise lingering in your head. The words of comfort—the promises of Christ’s word directly from God’s word.
These days the word "comfortable" means cozy. Like a nice memory-foam mattress, a hot cup of coffee on a rainy day, or a broken-in pair of Hoka sneakers. But in the 1500s, comfort meant something a lot more robust. It comes from the Latin confortare, which literally means "to strengthen thoroughly" or "to give fortitude." The Comfortable Words aren’t sentimental words trying to make us feel pampered. They’re strengthening words for when we feel weak.
I thought it’d be good to spend a few weeks digging into them.
So the first of these historic Comfortable Words, 1 John 1:5–2:2. This was written by one of the original twelve disciples—same guy who wrote the Gospel of John. He’s older and wiser— writing as a pastor to a group of churches that have been infected by some incredibly toxic false teachers. He’s trying to protect them from some spiritual snobs who had slipped into the congregation claiming to have special, VIP spiritual knowledge. They claimed to know secret things about God, while completely denying the seriousness—or even the existence—of sin.
John completely knocks down their facade in verse 5:
"This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." 1st John 1:5
This is where John likes to start. He begins with light. John doesn't just say God has a light, like He turned on a flashlight so we can see better. He says God is light. There are only two categories in reality… God, who is light, and everything else. It’s like our solar system… there’s the sun, and then there’s everything that needs the sun, reflects the sun, gets life from the sun—light is the only way we can see, and it exposes everything.
In biblical language, God is light, and light is truth, holiness, absolute purity, and life. The absence of light is darkness. Darkness is deception, hiddenness, evil, rebellion, and death. God is light and there’s no darkness in Him—also, His light destroys darkness completely… that’s how light works. So, because God is absolute marvelous light, the best move for you and me isn’t to try and find a way to hide our darkness and sin from Him. It’s a joke to think we could. How can a man made of dirt hide in a white room that doesn’t have any shadows? The question is whether we’re going to be honest with God who sees every hidden corner of our lives.
Verse 6:
"If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." 1st John 1:6
If we say we’re all about following Jesus and then we try to hide our sin by keeping it out of the light… we’re not walking in the light, we’re trying to hide in the dark.
But "walking in darkness" isn’t the same thing as struggling with our sin. Fighting a habit, or having a weak moment and failing isn’t embracing the darkness. Walking in darkness means hiding. Trying to hold on to our sin because we like it too much. Not wanting to let go. Maybe not even admitting that it is a sin. Walking in darkness is being a hypocrite, putting on a religious mask, justifying your garbage actions, and then getting mad if anyone calls us out on it. It’s refusing to face God’s truth.
On the other hand, "walking in the light" doesn’t mean living a sinless, perfect life. None of us are going to do that. It just means living in the truth. If walking in the light meant we had to be perfect, none of us would measure up… not one. Walking in the light just means living honestly. It’s dragging our garbage out into the open and saying, "This is me. I’m a wreck. I’ve sinned. I need mercy. I can’t save myself." We bring it into the light so Jesus can cleanse us from our sin. We refuse to hide from God who already knows exactly what we did.
So we always start with the verse that cuts right through our self-delusional BS… verse 8:
"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." 1st John 1:8
Stop trying to justify your sin.
Also, notice it doesn’t say, "If we say we have committed no sins"—plural—it’s not just talking about all those individual bad choices and occasional slip-ups. It says, "If we say we have no sin"—singular. This is talking about our fundamental condition. This is getting past our actions and looking at our DNA.
We have a very specific name for this condition we’re all born into: original sin. Our Confessions define it beautifully and brutally. We’re born with an inability to fear and trust God above everything else. We all come into this world without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with DNA level concupiscence. How’s that for a fifty-dollar theological word? Concupiscence means our tendency to sin. Our fallen nature. The inward, curved-in-on-ourselves bent toward sin instead of God. It’s the constant, unyielding gravitational pull of our fallen nature. We were born this way like it says in Psalm 51:5:
"Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me."
We aren’t born innocent and then become sinners eventually when we start committing sins… No, we commit sins because we were born sinners. It is baked into who we are and what we are. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. Death came into the world because of sin… Cemeteries are undeniable proof of who the sinners are. Let anyone who is without sin prove it by not dying.
As Christians, we are both saint and sinner. We will die, but because Christ is without sin, we will be resurrected just like He was. The words of comfort point to that promise.
So we need to look carefully at ourselves in the light of that mirror. We either see that we’re sinners or "we deceive ourselves."
And God’s not kidding about this, He’s got some pretty heavy words for deniers in verse 10:
"If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." 1st John 1:10
He already told us that we’ve all sinned and fallen short of His glory. So when we try to gloss over our sin—when we play the victim, when we say, "Well, I just made a mistake," or "It’s just because I'm stressed," or "It’s not my fault… baby I was born this way, it's just the way I was brought up, or it’s my wife’s fault, or my husband, or my Zodiac sign”—we’re just playing little games with our conscience. We’re looking into the face of Almighty God and calling Him a liar. Saying He’s wrong, and I’m right. God doesn’t know what He’s talking about. It’s all just a bunch of trying to hide our sin in the dark. But God demands the truth—absolute, unvarnished, brutal honesty—bring it all into the light. He rips away our excuses, and our self-justification with His Law… leaving us standing fully exposed in the blistering, white-hot light of His absolute holiness. It’s not a place we can survive if we try to stand there on our own. That’s where Jesus enters our story.
Because God doesn't leave us stranded in the blinding light of judgment. The whole universe clicks into place when we hit verse 9. This is one of the greatest promises in the Bible:
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." 1st John 1:9
It’s not about bargaining with God. It’s not about promising to do better next week if He lets us off the hook for what we did this week. We just confess our sins. “Confess”—from the Greek word homologeo—which literally means "to say the same thing." It means we stop spinning the story. We just agree with God's assessment of us. We say, "Yep, You're right, Lord. I was wrong. There’s no good reason. I said and did terrible things."
We confess, and then it says God is faithful and just to forgive us. Interesting that it doesn’t say He’s merciful to forgive us—though praise God, He is—it says He’s faithful and just to forgive us.
How does that make any sense? How can it be just for God to forgive a sinner who committed a terrible crime? If a human judge lets a criminal walk out of the courtroom just because they admit they did it, that’s not just, that’s not justice—that judge isn’t doing their job. So, why is it just for God to let us off the hook when we confess our sin?
The reason is because Jesus Christ has already paid for our crimes. He’s already taken the punishment. God doesn’t sweep our sins under some heavenly rug, pretending like they didn't happen. This is an ongoing, active process of redeeming the world. He’s forgiving sins that Jesus fully, legally, and completely atoned for on the cross. Justice has been entirely satisfied. You confess, and God is faithful and just to keep His part of the deal.
And the correct response is to be thankful. To realize it’s a big deal for God to love you so much that He did all this to save you from being burned up in the glorious light of His presence along with all the darkness your sin has stained you with. Be thankful and walk in the light, loving and serving each other, trying not to sin up a storm all the time—and if you do, don’t try to hide it, confess it.
Chapter 2, verse 1:
"My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world." 1st John 2:1
As Christians, we obviously still struggle with sin. We don't use grace like a license to live like hell and act like jerks—contrary to how it probably looks to outsiders. We’re supposed to do our best to not sin. That’s why this verse is in there. Do our best to do what God wants us to do, and not do what He told us not to do. But, when we fail—and we will fail—God has a plan for us. Jesus is our advocate. We don’t need a defense attorney if we don’t need defending. He’s standing by, ready to take our case—it’s a promise. It doesn't say, "We might have an advocate if we pray hard enough," or "We’ll have an advocate but only if we clean up our act and try harder next time." It says we have an advocate. Present tense. Right now. From now on.
Jesus stands before the Father as your defense attorney. But He’s not making the case that you didn’t do it. He’s not hiding the evidence. He doesn't show up at court and say, "Oh, come on Father, cut them some slack, they had a tough week." No, that’s not the strategy. Instead, He presents His own case, His perfect righteousness. He points to His wounds. He offers His blood shed for the forgiveness of sins. It says He is the propitiation—another of those five dollar words. It means He takes God’s wrath for you. He takes the punishment for you. That blinding light that would destroy you and me doesn’t destroy Jesus—because He is 100% divine, He’s also divine light. But He became flesh so He’s also 100% man. And then we’re connected to Him by grace through faith. This is how He saves us. He’s the propitiation for our sins—the complete, wrath-absorbing satisfaction for God's perfect justice. You were born in sin, you spent your whole life sinning and made it worse. But because you are connected to Jesus through baptism and Communion and the words of promise, when you and your sin was brought into the light, the punishment that had your name written all over it fell squarely on Jesus and He yelled, "It is finished, justice has already been done."
Every time. Every day. Even the same sin over and over.
It boggles the mind. This is why we need those comfortable words.
So what are we supposed to do with this insane level of grace?
At home you don’t have to pretend to be a perfect, flawless person who never loses their temper or does anything wrong. When you mess up—whatever it is — don't spend three days defending your ego or justifying yourself. Confess. Have some humility. Just walk back into the room, look them in the eye, and say, "I was wrong. I sinned against you. Will you forgive me?" That’s one of the hardest sentences in the English language… and one of the holiest. That is walking in the light.
At work or school, you don't have to step on everyone else to prove how great you are—your worth was settled by a bloody cross outside of Jerusalem two thousand years ago. You’re free to love and serve your coworkers and your clients and your classmates instead of using them to prop up your ego.
And at church, we can stop playing some absurd game of religious theater. We don't have to smile and pretend our marriages are perfect, our kids are awesome, and our spiritual lives are constantly on fire. Confess. Be real. God says we should show up here with our honest, messy, broken lives, knowing the person sitting next to us is just as much of a sinner saved by grace as we are. Which makes us free to love them, free to serve, and free to fail, because who we are in Christ is completely detached from our performance.
See why we need those comfortable words?
These things are so easy to forget.
That’s why they’ve always been my favorite part of the liturgy.
Can I really believe that God forgives a sinner like me? Week after week, these words of comfort answer with an emphatic, unshakeable "Yes." These words are comforting not because they minimize how bad our sin is, but because they magnify how incredibly great our Savior is. He came to save sinners. These are the promises of Christ’s word. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Prayer
Father in Heaven,
You are light, and in You there is no darkness at all. But too often we’d rather hide in the shadows, make excuses for our sin, defend ourselves. But in Your mercy, You have called us into the light—not to destroy us, but to save us.
Lord, teach us to confess honestly. Give us the humility to stop justifying our sin and the courage to simply agree with what You have already said about us. We are sinners in need of mercy, and we thank You that Your mercy is greater than our sin.
Thank You for Your Son, Jesus Christ, our Advocate. Thank You that He already took the punishment we deserved, that He cleansed us from all sin, and our forgiveness is faithful and sure. Remind us not to listen to our feelings more than Your promises.
Strengthen us through these comfortable words until the day when faith becomes sight, sin is gone forever, and we stand before You without fear because we stand in the righteousness of Christ. AMEN