In Acts 13:38, Paul stands before people who know their sin and their history, and he announces something shockingly personal: forgiveness has a Name, and it’s being offered right now. Not as a vague optimism, but as a settled verdict for anyone who will receive it through Jesus.

Bold Forgiveness, Not Borrowed Hope

There’s a difference between hoping God might be willing to forgive and hearing that forgiveness has been proclaimed. Paul isn’t selling religious self-improvement; he’s declaring a finished gift. That means you don’t have to tiptoe toward God with a résumé in hand. You can come with honesty. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Faithful and just—God’s forgiveness isn’t God ignoring wrong; it’s God satisfying justice through Christ.

And notice how personal this is: forgiveness is “through Jesus.” Not through a better week, not through stronger willpower, not through outgrowing your past. When your heart starts rehearsing yesterday’s failure, answer it with the gospel: “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace” (Ephesians 1:7). Riches—not scraps. If grace has riches, you don’t need to live like you’re rationing mercy.

Freedom the Law Could Not Finish

Acts 13 goes on to contrast what the Law could not accomplish with what Jesus does. The Law is holy, but it can only diagnose; it can’t resurrect. It shows you what’s crooked; it can’t straighten your heart. That’s why piling on rule-keeping as a rescue plan always ends in either pride or despair. Paul’s message implies: stop trying to get clean enough to be welcomed. Come to the One who cleans.

This is the gospel’s backbone: “For God has done what the law was powerless to do… by sending His own Son… He condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). Jesus didn’t negotiate with sin; He condemned it. So you’re not trapped in an endless cycle of penance and fear. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). No condemnation means you can stop punishing yourself and start obeying from joy, not panic.

Proclaimed Forgiveness Changes Your Voice

A proclaimed forgiveness doesn’t just quiet guilt; it gives you words for others. Paul didn’t keep this announcement private—he heralded it. If Jesus has carried your sin, then you don’t have to hide your story. Your testimony becomes a doorway for someone else’s hope. The gospel is not a secret for the spiritually tidy; it’s good news for the spiritually desperate.

And it starts in your everyday conversations. Peter calls believers to be ready: “Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). That hope is not “I’m doing better,” but “Jesus has forgiven me.” Today, let forgiveness shape your tone—gentle with sinners, firm against sin, confident in Christ. “Let the redeemed of the LORD say so” (Psalm 107:2). Say so—with humility, with gratitude, and with courage.

Father, thank You for proclaiming forgiveness through Jesus. Help me receive it with faith, walk in freedom, and speak of Christ boldly today. Amen.

Surely God has that to say to the pure in heart which He cannot say to the man of sinful life. But what He has to say is not theological, it is spiritual; and right there lies the weight of my argument. Spiritual truths cannot be received in the ordinary way of nature. The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14). So wrote the apostle Paul to the believers at Corinth. Our Lord referred to this kind of Spirit-enlightened knowledge many times. To Him it was the fruit of a divine illumination, not contrary to but altogether beyond mere intellectual light. The fourth Gospel is full of this idea; indeed the idea is so important to the understanding of John's Gospel that anyone who denies it might as well give up trying to grasp our Lord's teachings as given by the apostle John. And the same idea is found in John's first epistle, making that epistle extremely difficult to understand but also making it one of the most beautiful and rewarding of all the epistles of the New Testament when its teachings are spiritually discerned. The necessity for spiritual illumination before we can grasp spiritual truths is taught throughout the entire New Testament and is altogether in accord with the teachings of the Psalms, the Proverbs and the Prophets. The Old Testament Apocrypha agrees with the Scriptures here, and while the Apocryphal books are not to be received as divinely inspired, they are useful as showing how the best minds of ancient Israel thought about this matter of divine truth and how it is received into the human heart.

The way which He dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil that is to say, His flesh. - Hebrews 10:20

If we rightly understand our natural condition, it is not only one of bondage to evil, but it is one of separation from God.

Parts of the Divine character are always beautiful and sweet to every human heart when it thinks about them. Parts of the Divine character stand frowning before a man who knows himself for what he is; and conscience tells us that between Him and us there is a mountain of impediment piled up by our own evil. And Christ comes, the Path-finder and the Path; the Pioneer who breaks the way for us through all the hindrances, and leads us up to the presence of God.

For we do not know God as He is except by Jesus Christ. We see fragments, and often distorted fragments, of the Divine nature and character apart from Jesus, but the real Divine nature as it is, and as it is in its relation to me, a sinner, is only made known to me in the face of Jesus Christ. When we see Him we see God. Christ’s tears are God’s pity, Christ’s gentleness is God’s meekness, Christ’s tender drawing love is not only a revelation of a most pure and sweet brother’s heart, but a manifestation through that brother’s heart of the deepest depths of the Divine nature. Christ is the heart of God. Apart from Him, we come to the God of our own consciences, and we tremble; we come to the God of our own fancies, and we presume; we come to the God dimly guessed at and pieced together from out of the hints and indications of His works, and He is little more than a dead name to us. Apart from Christ, we come to a peradventure which we call a God - a shadow through which you can see the stars shining. But we know the Father when we believe in Christ. And so all the clouds rising from our own hearts and consciences and fancies and misconceptions which we have piled together, between God and ourselves, Christ clears away; and in this way He opens the path to God. It is only the God manifest in Jesus Christ that draws men’s hearts to Him. The God that is in Christ is the only God that humanity ever loved. Other gods they may have worshiped with cowering terror and with far-off lip-reverence, but this God has a heart, and wins hearts because He has, and so Christ opens the way to Him. He not only makes God known to us, and not only makes Him so known to us as to draw us to Him, but in that likewise He, by the fact of His Cross and Passion, has borne, and borne away, the impediments of our own sin and transgression which rise for ever between us and Him.