Does Grace Encourage Sin?

The message of grace is a scandal to the religious mind. The idea that the unrighteous can get off scot-free galls the self righteous. After speaking in a church about the truth that the sins of our lifetime have been completely forgiven, somebody said to me, “I believe that kind of thinking will weaken people’s love for Christ and cause them to not take sin seriously.”

Her viewpoint isn’t uncommon in the modern church. Grace scares people. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” The fear is that pure grace is dangerous. After all, if people get the idea that all their sins have been completely put away, won’t that encourage them to become carnal? Not according to Jesus.

There is a passage in Luke 7 that teaches the truth about the power of complete forgiveness. Jesus is eating in the home of a Pharisee when a woman known to have a bad reputation comes to Him. She brings a box of perfume and, as she weeps, takes her hair and washes His feet with the perfume.

The Pharisee sees this and thinks to himself, “If Jesus was really a man of God, he would know what kind of woman this is and he wouldn’t allow it.” Knowing what the man was thinking, Jesus said to him, “A moneylender had two debtors. One owed him ten times as much as the other. Neither could repay, so the man forgave them both. Which of them will love him more?”

“The one whom he forgave the most,” the man answered.

“You are exactly right,” Jesus said, “and the same is true of this woman. I entered your house and you didn’t wash my feet, but she has washed my feet with tears and wiped them with her hair. You haven’t kissed me once, but she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet” (Luke 7:44-46).

Then Jesus answered this Pharisee and every other person who thinks that pure grace encourages sin. He said, “For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (7:47). What caused this woman to love Jesus much? It was the realization of how much she had been forgiven.

The greater the forgiveness, the greater the love. That’s what Jesus said. So to teach people that all the sins of their lifetime have been forgiven will not cause them to sin. It will cause them to love Jesus more! We don’t have to be afraid that grace encourages sin because it doesn’t. (See Titus 2:11-12)

The sins of your whole lifetime have been forgiven. (See Colossians 2:13-14) The idea that the sins we haven’t even committed yet have been forgiven is an offense to some people because they’re afraid it will encourage a careless lifestyle, but that isn’t what the Bible teaches. As Jesus said, the greater our understanding of forgiveness the greater the love.

The obstacle that most people have trouble getting past in accepting the reality that all their sins have been forgiven is the idea that future sins could already be dealt with, even before we commit them. I remind you though that when Christ died for our sins, He died for all of them and we hadn’t even been born yet. If Christ could take every sin we would commit upon Himself at the cross before we had committed a single one of them, why couldn’t he forgive them in the same way? He can and He did. Your sins are forgiven. Not just some of them, but all of them.

What if every sin of our lifetime is already forgiven? What difference would that make in how we lived from day-to-day? I can tell you the difference: it would free us to take our eyes off ourselves and put them on Christ and on others. It would deliver us from self-consciousness and sin-consciousness.

The fact is that our sins have all been forgiven. That won’t cause anybody to run wild. The Apostle Paul answered that objection when he said, “If all this about grace is true, does that mean we just sin like crazy because we know it’s all covered by grace?” He answered his own question, “God forbid! How can we live in sin if we have already died to it? Or don’t you understand that every one of us who have been placed into Jesus Christ were with Him when He died? The reality is that when somebody dies, they are free from sin and we died!” (See Romans 6:1-7)

We can relax when it comes to the fear that grace will cause people to sin. It won’t do that. Instead it will cause those who understand the scope of forgiveness to love Jesus more and to take their eyes off themselves and live freely in grace.