Do you remember how you felt when, as a child, you did something your parents warned you not to do? Did you try to talk your way out of trouble? Did you blame something or someone else? Maybe you felt like Adam and Eve did when they first sinned by eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were ashamed and afraid and hid from God.
Many Christians do the same thing with God when they sin. God has given us who believe in Jesus as our Savior the gift of the Holy Spirit, who convicts us when we sin. The guilt we feel makes it hard to lift our heads to heaven without feeling that God is frowning at us, preparing to strike us with righteous judgment.
Is this feeling legitimate? Is God really waiting to punish or forsake us when we sin? Does He feel love toward us in those moments?
Crime and Punishment—and Forgiveness
Humanly speaking, these anxieties are natural. When we disobey an authority, we most often face rebuke or punishment. If a police officer catches you breaking the speed limit, for instance, you can expect a hefty fine and a mark on your driving record. Experiencing the conviction of the Holy Spirit, we might feel that our sin has made the scales of justice unbalanced. In a vacuum, this feeling is true. A price must be paid to account for our sin, which God cannot tolerate.
But in His amazing love, God forever balanced those scales of justice when He sent His Son, Jesus, to live as a perfect Man, sacrifice His life, and resurrect from the dead to redeem and save all who call on His name (Romans 10:13). So, we who believe in Jesus don’t have to fear that we’ve lost God’s love when we sin. We are washed clean of all our sins—past, present and future—by His perfect blood shed on the cross.
Loving Discipline
Though our sin no longer condemns us to eternal punishment, it still can leave us with consequences. Sometimes those consequences for disobedience are natural and immediate, like suffering a painful burn after ignoring your parents’ warning not to touch a hot stove. Other times punishment is necessary to prevent a greater future consequence.
Experiencing the conviction of the Holy Spirit, we might feel that our sin has made the scales of justice unbalanced.
When the Holy Spirit convicts us, God actually demonstrates great mercy, leading us away from harm, because “He who keeps instruction is in the way of life, but he who refuses correction goes astray” (Proverbs 10:17). But to most people, this truth sounds backward because society is slipping further from parental correction in favor of self-deifying individualism. As a result, discipline, no matter how gentle and understanding, has been made to feel unjust.
In reality, discipline—particularly God’s discipline—is love. The Holy Spirit inspired King Solomon, the wisest man on Earth, to write this truth in God’s Word: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lᴏʀᴅ, nor faint when you are punished by Him; for whom the Lᴏʀᴅ loves He disciplines, and He punishes every son whom He accepts” (Proverbs 3:11–12, NASB).
The writer of Hebrews quoted Solomon and added,
It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. For the moment, all discipline seems not to be pleasant, but painful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness (Hebrews 12:7–11, NASB).
God doesn’t discipline us for some sadistic purpose. “He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness” because we are His beloved children (v. 10, NASB).
Unfailing Love
The discomfort of discipline is not the end of God’s work in us. He doesn’t just expose our sin; He offers matchless forgiveness and grace, loving us without interruption, regardless of our iniquity.
He doesn’t just expose our sin; He offers matchless forgiveness and grace, loving us without interruption, regardless of our iniquity.
Jesus taught God the Father’s love through the parable of the prodigal son. This young man broke his father’s heart by demanding his inheritance and promptly wasting it all, ending up in the company of the pigs he fed to earn just enough to survive. Once the beneficiary of his father’s wealth and love, the son wished he could return home. Perhaps assuming his father would not love him like he used to, the son sought his father’s mercy, hoping to be hired as his servant.
But the father provided the love and forgiveness the son never could have expected:
When he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his servants, “Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” And they began to be merry (Luke 15:20–24).
Our sin does not catch God off guard. Because He created each of us, aware that we are born with a sin nature, He is fully prepared to deal with our transgressions. In fact, God reveals His perfect character and displays His glory in our failures because His grace is sufficient for each of us, and His strength “is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
If you question the certainty of God’s love because of your sin, doubt no longer. Nothing you do—“neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing”—can ever separate you from the love of God (Romans 8:38–39).
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