Like Sin Never Happened
by Kenneth Copeland
I don’t usually pay much attention to television commercials, but a few years ago I saw one worth remembering. It was an ad for a cleaning and restoration company. It showed a team of people in green uniforms arriving in a green truck at a house that had been damaged by a flood. The team jumped out of the truck and went to work on the house, making everything right again.
At the end, the house looked like new and the commercial closed with these words: “Like it never even happened.”®
I got so excited the first time Gloria and I saw that commercial, I almost shouted.
“Gloria, that’s like God’s grace!” I said. “It makes it like sin never even happened!”
Grace laid our sins on Jesus and blotted them out so completely that God remembers them no more (Isaiah 43:25). Grace went to hell in our place so that we can live as citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20, "New King James Version"), not just in the sweet by-and-by but in the rotten here and now.
Grace bore our guilt and sets us completely free from condemnation so that when we, as believers, stumble into sin we don’t have to spend days and weeks feeling sorry and disappointed in ourselves. We don’t have to go around beating ourselves up for what we did and thinking that as Christians we ought to have more sense. We can simply repent!
We can come straight to God and say with boldness, “Sir, what I did was wrong. I take responsibility for it and I ask You to please forgive me.” Then, with our Bibles open to 1 John 1:9, we can thank God that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
What’s left after we’re cleansed of all unrighteousness?
Righteousness—and nothing else!
In other words, once we repent we’re like new again. We’re like that house after the green team finished with it. We’re instantly made right with God and we can get back to living in His BLESSING as if that sin had never even happened.
“But Brother Copeland, I still feel like a rat for what I did.”
Then you’re still carrying that sin around in the form of guilt. You haven’t repented.
“Oh, I’ve repented, all right!”
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