We seem to quake about many things. In the first place, are you still afraid of your past sins? God knows that sin is a terrible thing?and the devil knows it, too. So he follows us around and as long as we will permit it, he will taunt us about our past sins.
As for myself, I have learned to talk back to him on this score. I say, "Yes, Devil, sin is terrible-but I remind you that I got it from you! And I remind you, Devil, that everything good -forgiveness and cleansing and blessing-everything that is good I have freely received from Jesus Christ!"
Everything that is bad and that is against me I got from the devil -so why should he have the effrontery and the brass to argue with me about it? Yet he will do it because he is the devil, and he is committed to keeping God's children shut up in a little cage, their wings clipped so that they can never fly!
In our churches we often sing, "Arise, my soul, arise; shake off thy guilty fears." But nothing happens and we keep our fears.
Why do we claim on one hand that our sins are gone and on the other act just as though they are not gone? Brethren, we have been declared "Not Guilty!" by the highest court in all the universe.
Still there are honest Christians, earnestly seeking the face of God, who cannot seem to break loose and find real freedom. The grave clothes trip them up every time they try to move on a little faster. Satan uses their past sins to terrify them.
Now, on the basis of grace as taught in the Word of God, when God forgives a man, He trusts him as though he had never sinned.
God did not have mental reservations about any of us when we became His children by faith. When God forgives a man, He doesn't think, I will have to watch this fellow because he has a bad record " No, He starts with him again as though he had just been created and as if there had been no past at all! That is the basis of our Christian assurance-and God wants us to be happy in it.
~A. W. Tozer~
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