Summary
Day After Day: The Holy Spirit's Daily Forgiveness
"It's okay." "We're good." "It happens." "No problem." These are gracious phrases between neighbors when someone bumps a cart in the grocery aisle or forgets a small errand. But they are never the words the Holy Spirit speaks over sin. Sin is not a minor mishap to be waved off; it is the fundamental break between the Holy God and unholy creatures, and it requires a far weightier word from God himself.
The Apostle John wrote 1 John 1 into a church already being unsettled by the seeds of what would later flower into the Gnostic heresy. These teachers claimed that matter is evil and spirit is good, so what the body did need not implicate the soul. The result was both rampant immorality and a flat denial of sin itself. John answers directly: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" 1 John 1:8.
Are some sins worse than others? Scripture answers yes and no. Jesus himself speaks of "a greater sin" John 19:11, and the New Testament makes such comparisons many times over. Yet James 2:10 reminds us that whoever keeps the whole law but stumbles in one point has become accountable for all of it, and Galatians 3:10 pronounces a curse on everyone who does not abide by all that is written. The law is a unit; to break it anywhere is to be a lawbreaker. So while distinctions exist, no transgression is "no problem" before God. Every sin separates the unholy from the Holy One and makes us worthy of eternal condemnation.
To this biggest of problems we need a different word — a word with gravitas, and that word comes from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is sometimes called the shy member of the Trinity because he constantly points away from himself to Christ John 16:14. But he is also the chatty member of the Trinity, for he is the one who inspired all of Holy Scripture; "no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" 2 Peter 1:21. There is no wordless Spirit. He never works around the Word; he works through it.
That word, in the very next verse, is pure gospel: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" 1 John 1:9. The forgiveness announced here was purchased at the cross, where the Son bore the wrath our sin deserved. As Psalm 103:12 sings, "as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us," and God himself promises in Hebrews 8:12, "I will remember their sins no more."
This is why Luther confesses in the Small Catechism that "in this Christian church he daily and richly forgives all my sins and the sins of all believers." The Spirit promises to be where his Word and Sacraments are: in the absolution at the start of the service, in the hymns that echo Scripture's promises, in the preaching and teaching of the Word, at the baptismal font, and at the Lord's Table. There he calls, gathers, enlightens, sanctifies — and forgives. Not "it's okay" or "no problem," but something infinitely better: "I forgive you, fully, for the sake of Jesus Christ." And he keeps coming with that word, "Day After Day" after day after day.
Video citations
- "Day After Day" 5-22-22 — What you open your Bibles, please, with me for our study today to the book of first John, the first chapter. If you're using a Pew edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find that in the New…