"So many Christians professing to believe in Jesus as their Savior are still unable to be freed from their sins, because they are practicing a religious life according to their own thoughts, oblivious to the God-given gospel of the water and the Spirit. These misguided Christians are not only leading their lives of faith in complete ignorance of the righteousness of God, but they also have no desire to learn about it. Far from relying on the righteousness of God, they are just trying to observe God’s Law on their own. Given this, it’s hardly surprising that these people remain incapable of becoming sinless by believing in the righteousness of God.
Sadly, their faith is wrong. Who among you could ever keep every Law and every Word of God? No one can obey every Word of God to the letter. Just as the people of the Old Testament were incapable of observing the Law of God fully, so are the people living in this present age of the New Testament incapable of keeping the Law completely to perfection. That is why the Bible says that there are none in this world, not even a single one, who has not committed any sin. Yet even so, perhaps some of you still think that offering prayers of repentance is indispensable for faith. If you think that your sins will disappear when you offer prayers of repentance, you are completely mistaken. These prayers are nothing more than a delusion derived from fallacious thoughts. In fact, I am sure that deep in your heart you, yourself, know very well that you cannot wash away your sins just by offering these stupid repentance prayers.
Who taught you that you could wash away all your sins by offering prayers of repentance? Whoever it was that might have taught you this is in great error. Your sins are not washed away by offering many prayers of repentance; rather, all your sins are cleansed away when you come to understand and believe in the righteousness of God. The religious beliefs you are holding onto now can never wash away your sins. Your heart can be cleansed only if you believe that the Lord took all the sins of mankind upon His flesh once and for all by being baptized by John the Baptist and bore the condemnation of all these sins by being crucified to death.
This means that God, who created us humans, knew our weaknesses. It is with this knowledge that He fulfilled the gospel of the water and the Spirit, and is offering the remission of sins to all who believe in this gospel. God promised clearly in the Old Testament that He would blot out all our sins. Where do we find this promise? It is found in Jeremiah 31:31-34: “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah—not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
Paul C Jong
