If the blood of Jesus is not enough for all of your sins, then it's just not enough. If the blood of Jesus can't make you righteous once you've accepted it, then it can't really do anything.
I have to confess that when I made this statement last week, I didn't know whether it was true. Not that I didn't believe it, I just wasn't sure if it was scriptural. But it is, and let me show you how.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:17-21, ESV)This is the astounding thing: Jesus became sin so that we could become righteousness. Paul says this rather simply here, but it's a baffling thought. Jesus, who was without sin--the only human being to ever live a perfect and sinless life--became sin itself upon the cross. He was the last sacrifice. Jesus became what God abhors in order to defeat sin forever. From the point of Jesus's death, there is no need for sacrifice as required under the Mosaic law. Rather, the only requirement is to believe and give your heart to Jesus, whose sacrifice and blood defeated death forever. He is our neverending sacrifice.
This is the paramount achievement of Jesus Christ, that he defeated the power of sin. You see, sin had power because it is contrary to God's nature. God is righteous and without blemish. He cannot abide sin because His nature will not allow Him to abide it. God can't do anything contrary to His nature; He can't lie, He can't hate (except sin, He hates that), He can't renege on His promises. And He can't tolerate sin. So this is why Jesus became sin--Galatians says he became "a curse for us"--and suffered the rejection of God, so that sin could forever be defeated in him.
Since sin was defeated in Jesus's death, sin is no longer an issue. Paul says in this verse in 2 Corinthians that "anyone [who] is in Christ...is a new creation." Those of us who are believers have received new identities. We are not sinners saved by grace; we are simply saved by grace. The old identity we had as members of a cursed race, that identity of hostility to God by virtue of inheriting Adam and Eve's curse, that identity is gone once we accept Jesus. Remember this: when God looks at us, He sees Jesus every time. God never tilts His head to look around Jesus and to see us for what we were; we are new creations, and He sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ each and every time He looks at us.
This is the most important thing you will learn as a believer, and so I want to reiterate it. Since we are new creations, "the old has passed away." God sees us as Jesus, He sees us as righteous, because that is just what we are. Our identity is completely new, and our old identity is completely gone. We can never have that identity back; the blood of Jesus makes sure of that. So even when we mess up, even when we sin, God still sees the righteousness of Christ.
This was God's plan from the beginning, and the only way it could be achieved was for Jesus, perfect Jesus, to become sin and bear the wrath of God. Once God poured out His wrath on Jesus, who had become sin, He had no more wrath to expend. Don't hear what I'm not saying: there will be judgement, just as the scripture describes. But for those who have received Jesus and are covered in his blood, God's wrath is abated because Jesus took it all.
There are people out there, many of them believers, who can not accept this. There are Christians who believe that, if you don't live the life described in the scriptures, you'll pay for it on Judgment Day. These Christians are well intentioned and love the Lord. I think they are motivated by both a desire to please God and a crippling insecurity. The first motivation is sensible, but misplaced. The second motivation is senseless, but ubiquitous. Every Christian I know either has been or is seriously insecure. It's not because they're Christians; it's because they're humans. But this insecurity in our flesh is contrary to the security in our spirits. That is what Jesus makes perfect in us: our spirits. This flesh will always be corrupt, no matter how much I try. That doesn't mean that our lives as believers shouldn't be lived for the Lord, or that we shouldn't make efforts to live out the spiritual reality that we have been made perfect. What it does mean though is that failures in the flesh do not equal failure in the spirit. As a believer, my flesh cannot damn my spirit, just like my flesh cannot save it.
I truly believe that many well meaning Christians just plain miss what Paul is spelling out in this passage from 2 Corinthians. They don't think that they are new creations because they don't feel like new creations. They continue to live with shortcomings; their flesh continually fails them. When Jesus defeated sin, he did not eradicate it from Earth. What Jesus did was he defeated the power of sin. "Death, where is your sting?" Jesus defeated the death of the spirit: separation from God. He defeated the power of sin to curse us and separate us from the Father. Jesus's sacrifice, and our acceptance of it, does not make life perfect, it makes us perfect in our spirits.
So this is why I can say with confidence that, if the blood of Jesus is not enough for all of our sins, it's not enough for any of our sins. If his blood can't cover sins past, present, and future, than it isn't any use. Jesus did not become some sin; he became sin, period, and to imply that his single sacrifice was not enough for all of my sins is to mock his sacrifice. Paul says that Jesus became sin "so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." In Jesus we become the very righteousness of God! We become his most distinctive identifying characteristic! And this is not our doing--it's in Jesus. We become, in God's eyes, His only son, His righteous and perfect one. And this is what we are, always.
(Update: make the time to listen to this message (first one on the page title "He Loves Me") for a fine word)
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