That One Sin

The text

Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting.

1 Timothy 1:16 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the sermon

Some believers understand justification perfectly well and yet remain wretched because of one thing. There is a sin in their past — a blasphemous word, a betrayal, a vow made in illness and never kept — which seems to them to belong in a different category from every other sin, and which they cannot believe has been forgiven. Lloyd-Jones' advice to such people is bracing: stop praying about it for a moment and think.

Paul offers himself as the test case. He had been a blasphemer, a persecutor and injurious — he had tried to destroy the Church of God — and precisely for that reason he obtained mercy, so that he might be a pattern to everyone who would afterwards believe. If the chief of sinners was received, no one is beyond grace. Moreover Scripture does not grade sins in the way that we do. Joseph and David both confessed that their sin was ultimately against God; every sin is at bottom a matter of our relationship to Him, and the whole category was dealt with once for all at the cross.

The real trouble, then, is not the sin but unbelief — refusing to take the unconditional promise that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us. To go on dwelling on a forgiven sin is to call unclean what God has cleansed. The cure is to look at the old sin only as Paul did: as the dark background against which the longsuffering of Christ shines, a reason for worship rather than for despair.

Key points

• Some doctrinally clear Christians remain fixed on one past sin as uniquely unforgivable.
• Paul's own history — persecutor turned apostle — is set out as the definitive pattern of mercy.
• Scripture does not rank sins as we do; all sin is fundamentally a broken relationship with God.
• Continuing to brood over a forgiven sin is itself unbelief in God's explicit promise.
• Look back only to magnify grace, never to reopen what God has closed.

Illustrations the preacher uses

• An elderly man converted at seventy-seven, thrown into despair the morning after his first communion by the memory of a blasphemous remark made decades earlier.
• Believers tormented by a vow made during a serious illness and never fulfilled.
• Peter's vision of the sheet and the word 'what God hath cleansed, that call not thou common' (Acts 10).

Related Scripture

• 1 Timothy 1:12–15
• 1 John 1:9
• Acts 10:9–16
• Genesis 39:9
• Psalm 51:4
• 2 Corinthians 5:21
• Colossians 3:3
• James 2:10

For reflection and discussion

1. Is there a particular sin in your past that you find harder to believe is forgiven than the others? Why that one?
2. How does Paul's description of himself as the chief of sinners who obtained mercy speak to that struggle?
3. What is the difference between asking forgiveness and believing forgiveness already granted? Which do you find harder?