“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
1 John 1:9 is a powerful promise to cling to day after day after day, and really, a promise that should inform our prayer lives every day. If we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
That’s good news. We don’t ever have to fear confession of sins before God, because he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. When you realize that, when you know that, when you know that God forgives you of your sins and cleanses you from all unrighteousness, when we, that’s the condition here. Verse nine says, “If we confess our sins,” so when this happens, when we confess our sins, we experience his forgiveness.
May the confession of sin be an ongoing part of our relationship with God and in this we will experience forgiveness and cleansing according to His faithfulness.
This Verse Wants Us To Be Cleansed Through Confession
As we confess our sins, we experience cleansing. There’s obviously a sense in which this happens when we put our faith in Jesus as the savior of our sins, but there’s also a sense in which this happens on an ongoing, continual basis in our relationship with God.
Where when we fall again into sin, when we turn from God’s ways to our own ways, that we confess that to God quickly, and we experience the forgiveness that Christ has bought for us. So in our regular time in prayer, on a daily basis, not even just daily, but throughout the day, this should be a regular part of our practice.
Whereas we read God’s word, that we just ask God to open our eyes, convict us of ways we have sinned, ways we are sinning. When we do sin, that God would convict us and we would just immediately confess it. That confession of sin would be an ongoing part of our relationship with God. And in this, that experience of forgiveness and cleansing would be an ongoing part of our relationship with God.
1 John 1:9 Wants Our Eyes To Be Open To All Our Sin
So we pray, God, even now, then maybe for a time after this podcast episode of prayer ends, we pray that you would bring to our minds and hearts any and all unconfessed sin, any and all sin that we may not even see. God, open our eyes to see where we have sinned against you, how we are not following your ways, sins of omission, things we have done that you have told us not to do, with thought, desired, said, done, and sins of commission.
Things that you have called us to do that we are not doing, we are not thinking, that we are not desiring, that we are not saying. Oh, God, we need your grace continually and we praise you for it. We praise you that you forgive us of our sins and you cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So help us to be a people of honest confession on a continual basis, and in this, a people who experience deep grace and walk in your gracious forgiveness and cleansing, as a moment by moment, day-by-day reality.
We praise you for the good news of 1 John 1:9. We praise you, Jesus, for making it possible, for your death on the cross for our sins. And we pray this in your name, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
