I came to realize something while reading some scriptures that never occurred to me before. I don’t know why I had never thought about this before, perhaps because I was sure that I understood the topic before. But, it seems imperfectly.
Here is the matter. When I repent, the Lord says that my sin is forgiven and forgotten – completely. I had always looked at it in this way: God says He will forgive my sin, but I can’t be trusted in the same way afterwards. After all, that is the attitude I was raised with. God forgives, but He doesn’t really forget. But I just came to the realization that reasoning is completely false.
God utterly and entirely forgets your sin because it doesn’t matter, its not important. The purpose of the repentance process is to sin, to repent, seek forgiveness, recognize the atonement of the Savior and move on. The Lord does not keep a balance sheet, does not reckon our righteousness by the sins we didn’t commit. The atonement was meant to allow us to clean the slate by putting the sins we repent of behind us. In this way we can build our knowledge and faith without having to carry the burden of our sins as a counterweight to spiritual progress.
His actions toward us is governed by where we are in our progression, which is mapped by our accumulation of knowledge and faith at any given time. By the way, I believe the greatest faith that we can muster is the faith required to forgive ourselves, and by extension, others. If we never sin, we will never advance in righteousness. If I am looking for a baptism of fire (or holy anointing as some understand it) having never received it, it is not because of a payment for sin still outstanding, or because God has not forgiven me yet. It is because I am not ready yet. I have not obtained sufficient faith or knowledge, or the timing isn’t right, or? But it is not because I am under some ban because of a sin I committed, repented of, but haven’t suffered sufficiently for.
This was a revelation to me. It may just be common sense to everyone else, but if that is the case, why do we continue to judge ourselves and other people entirely on our past errors or mistakes? Why can we forgive others (or so we say) but not forget. Why do we tend to think we are not worthy of God’s grace? If it is true that we project our beliefs into our judgment of other people’s behavior, are we not then projecting the belief that we are unforgivable onto them? The gateway to forgiving others is forgiving ourselves. If we can forgive ourselves and believe that we are worthy of a second or third chance, then we can begin to really forgive others fully. If Christ tells us to forgive others 70 times 7, well then, He will forgive us 80 times 8.
Repenting, turning away from the things of the world and facing God, ….Oh, that’s the easy part. Its the forgetting part that I struggle with.