Growing up as a child in church, I often heard that Jesus died for my sins, but I had little idea what that meant. Maybe you’ve also been wondering what the big deal is about Jesus. Or if you’re a Christian you likely already know what Jesus having died for you means, but do you regularly reflect on this?
Without a deep understanding of what Jesus did for you, you will always feel like there’s something missing. Yet, God wants you to receive the full truth of what Jesus did and then let it impact your life.
I understand how easy it is to continue through life not really thinking about Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection except on Sundays or at Easter. However, today, we are going to think about it.
In today’s post, we are going to focus on what is meant by the term ‘Jesus died for your sins’. Let’s go!
In Genesis, the first man and woman, Adam and Eve had nothing separating them from their Creator and Father, God. They daily experienced a great awareness of God. But they disobeyed God’s command and sent the whole of humanity plunging toward death. The result was total separation from God. All of us proceeding from the first man and woman were therefore born with this separation from God. In its place we experienced a heightened awareness or sense of darkness, bad or evil – we call this sin. To put it into fewer words, we were born with a sin nature.
Whether or not we were aware of particular sins that we had committed, such as lying or stealing, sadly that did not change the fact that we had this sin-nature. In a nutshell, I am saying that no matter how good or bad our outward actions were, at the core we were still sinners and sinners could not be truly reunited with God.
Now that we have understood the bad news, let’s consider the good news. What does it mean for Jesus to die for our sins?
1. One With God
Firstly, the result of Jesus’ death was that the barrier of sin preventing us from being reunited to God, was taken away. Humans could once again access their Creator. In fact, the main reason for Jesus becoming a sacrifice was for the purpose of us being called back into family relationship with our Father. Ephesians 1:4-5 is a great scripture which speaks of it being in God’s plan before the creation of the world to adopt us as His family through Jesus Christ.
But how exactly did Jesus do that? Well, for us to be accepted by God He required perfection and that was never going to happen because sin made us imperfect. However, Jesus, (God in flesh) was perfect and when He was crucified. His blood was the perfect and full payment for our sin. Jesus’ body and blood was given in exchange for us.
First Corinthians 6:17 lets us know that whoever has chosen to be joined to God by believing in that sacrifice of Jesus, has in fact become one spirit with God. If you are a believer then you are one Spirit with the Lord. That’s good news!
So what does ‘Jesus died for my sins’ mean? Friend, if you truly believe this, it means you have access to God, you’re part of His family and you are joined to Him!
We can meditate on this truth when we feel trapped in cycles of sin or unhelpful behaviours.
2. New Nature
Another result of Jesus’ death was the change from our old sin nature to our new righteous nature. This is a good’en! Those religious bones in your body are about to cringe as you read this. If you have received Jesus in your life, you have not only been made righteous, you are righteous! Not because you prayed this morning, or you have done good deeds this week. No. You are righteous because Jesus’ death was a direct exchange, where he took on everything you were and you took on everything he was. Whilst you were a sinner, Jesus was righteous and he exchanged your sin for his righteousness. Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just telling you what the Bible says. Read 2 Corinthians 5:21.
Now let’s reflect on something we talked about earlier. Do you remember how we said that no matter how good a person’s actions were outwardly, it could never change their sin nature? Well God has made it that way even in our new nature. Our new nature is one of righteousness and now, no matter how bad our actions are, they cannot change our righteous nature – who we are at the very core.
If God has declared you righteous, just choose to come into agreement with His word and let your actions flow out of this truth.
This is something I’ve been learning to do over the past few years. Instead of focusing on sin with the intention of eradicating it, I began focusing on who God is and who I was in my new righteous nature. Over time, sinful desires have lessened almost effortlessly. How is that possible? The answer is found in Isaiah 26:3, God keeps us in perfect peace when our minds are stayed on Him, because we trust in Him.
Before we move onto the final section, in summary, Jesus dying for our sins was firstly to reunite us with our heavenly Father and secondly to change us from being sinners by nature, to being righteous through Christ’s nature. Keeping a focus on both of these will cause us to walk in freedom from sinful actions.
3. Delivered from the power of sin
Lastly, what does ‘Jesus died for my sins’ mean? It means you and I have been delivered from the power of sin. We mentioned previously about the fact that we have been given a new nature and I want to point out that this deals with sinfulness at its core. Although our human nature still has the desire to sin, our new spiritual nature has already overcome sin.
“For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace [Jesus Christ].” Romans 6:14
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. Romans 8:2
You could exchange the word grace for the name Jesus Christ (John 1:14, Titus 2:11) and this shows us that the work of Jesus has actually made us free from the power of sin, but it’s still up to us to put these scriptures to work in our lives.
Similar to what I described above, I am learning to celebrate and glorify Jesus’ work, rather than giving my focus and my attention to ‘trying to stop sinning’. Here’s the difference: whatever we consider and give attention to, our hearts become more softened to. As a result, the more I give attention to Jesus’ overpowering sin, is the more that his victory becomes my personal victory and living a sinless life actually becomes effortless.
Please don’t get me wrong, I have not arrived! However, I am on a journey and have seen victory in some areas simply through applying the truth of God’s word to my life.
So what does it mean when we say ‘Jesus died for my sins’? We only covered a small part of it in this blog post. To sum up, it means that we became reunited to God, our old sin nature has gone and we are now made righteous before God, and we have been delivered from the power of sin, which we can experience when we glorify the work of Jesus.
If this has been refreshing and freeing for you to hear, be sure to share it with someone else who may need to hear it.
© 2023 Word and Freedom