How Do I Accept Forgiveness

He goes on to quote Dietrich Bonhoffer, a Lutheran pastor who died during the Second World War for his opposition to Hitler who said, "Confession is the God-given remedy for self-deception and self-indulgence.” When we confess we say, “I admit to sin in my life that has kept me away from God.” We also say when we confess, “I believe in Christ.”

Good confession is an appropriate public confession. (Some things are confessed better to a safe person in a more private setting.) I did it in the presence of my teenage era church many years ago. One of the reasons that altar calls are important is that they give us a way to confess publicly our commitments and by doing it here in the presence of the church, one finds it easier to do out there in the community. By a public expression in saying, “Jesus is Lord,” we go on record as saying, “I am God’s from this point forward.”

Belief is the private side of accepting Christ’s forgiveness. Do you believe that God raised Jesus from the dead? That kind of acceptance helps us allow the work of God to go deep inside of us and affect our attitudes, habits, priorities, and actions.

To answer directly our questioner, we need to learn how to accept Christ’s forgiveness by faith, as we willfully and continuously let go of our sins to God. We must also give God our guilt and shame and let Him help us deal with it.

One reason (a big reason) is that Satan wants to keep us down, out, and under a burden of guilt and shame that Jesus wants us to be free of! Therefore, he will do all he can to keep accusing us by bringing up the past. (His conversation with God regarding Job serves as a reminder to us that he is always looking for a reason to attack us.)

A second reason is that while we can experience immediate forgiveness the residue that is left from our sin sometimes takes a while to remove. A helpful aid in turning over that residue of guilt and shame to God comes from Keith Miller in his book, A Hunger for Healing.

His frame of reference is the Twelve Steps’ concept of character defects. But it also applies to the letting go of our guilt and shame and our past.

Miller treats his defects like a poisonous snake and puts them in a bag and places them on a mental “conveyor belt” back to God. He does this often as necessary and notes, “If you take the defect out of the sack and start trying to deal with it in your mind, it will win almost every time.”

“After days, weeks, or years,” he goes on to say,” I’ve noticed that some of them are gone, and others hardly ever show up…I know that God has been at work [and] it seems that He takes these tenacious character problems only when we are entirely ready to let Him do so.”

This image has helped me tremendously over the years since I first read this book. I also believe it provides answers to the questions, “If I can’t let go does that mean I’m not accepting Christ’s forgiveness?” and “How can you forgive me, Lord, if I cannot forgive myself?"

Self-forgiveness is a choice that we have to make many times over. Think about Peter and how he felt after his denial of Jesus and that perhaps one of the effects of questions that Jesus puts him through in John 21 enables the ability to forgive himself because Jesus wants to forgive him as well.