Follow Jesus Christ

The statement “Jesus has redeemed all your sins, ‘your record is clean’” does have something in common with Jesus’ teaching. Jesus taught that forgiveness of sins is the consequence of repentance. That principle is universal. It works for any person, whether they consider themselves a believer or not. When someone repents sincerely, their past really does stop determining their present. In that sense one can say that after repentance “one’s biography is cleansed.”

The problem begins when forgiveness of sins is made the centerpiece of Christianity. Sooner or later a practical and honest question arises: what happens after the next fall? After the next deliberate or unconscious sin? If Christ’s sacrifice automatically covers not only past sins but all future ones as well, then forgiveness ceases to be a living event and becomes an abstract guarantee. And the person faces the same dilemma again, only at a new level.

Here we inevitably return to a simpler and perhaps deeper truth: forgiveness arrives as the result of personal repentance and from the loving character of God, not simply as a consequence of a sacrificed price. God forgives not because a price has been paid, but because He is Father.

The old, gradually fading notion of forgiveness is built on the assumption that the chief problem between God and a person is sin as a legal violation. In that picture it is as if a policeman or a judge stands beside the person, carefully studying a list of offenses. “If only my record were clean,” many think. Undoubtedly sins matter and often affect a person’s fate. But in Jesus’ teaching they do not occupy the central place, however hard that may be to accept.

You can imagine a different picture. Standing beside the person is not a policeman who appears only in extreme cases, but a guide or a physician of the soul. He is interested not in an inventory of mistakes but in the direction of movement. He does not read out charges; he helps the person rise to the next level of awareness. The central theme of Jesus’ teaching is spiritual growth. A person changes for the better and sins less not because they are forgiven each time, but because they gradually stop wanting what destroys them and others.

That does not mean consequences disappear automatically. The reality is that all people, including Christians, face the consequences of their actions if there is no correction and genuine repentance. Forgiveness does not cancel reality, but it opens the way to change.

The Apostle Paul felt this problem keenly. But he had to speak to people of the Roman–Hellenistic world in a language they could understand. Pagans, like Jews, were acutely concerned with the matter of sin. When Paul calls Jesus’ death a sacrifice, that resonated with both groups. Such language unified. But when Paul tried to explain a person’s inner growth, he used the image of ritual death and ritual resurrection into new life — an idea widely familiar in Hellenistic culture.

That thought sounds fresh in the New Testament because it has no direct analogue in the Old Testament. In that form it is also not found in Jesus’ own words. Paul says, “Put on Christ and do not sin any longer.” This is not a mistake or a distortion, but an attempt to express the reality of spiritual growth in images accessible to his audience. It is an honest and bold attempt, but it does not fully convey the language and emphases of Jesus himself — especially today, when the ancient symbolic systems no longer function as they once did.

At the center of Jesus’ teaching is not solving sin as a legal problem but liberating a person from the very tendency to sin through inner transformation. Mistakes on this path are inevitable. But the important things are direction and growth, not fixation on every fall. Perhaps it is time to speak of this again in the language of Jesus, as He understood it, and not only through later interpretations, even such significant ones as the theology of the Apostle Paul.