Having repented of sin and understood, believed, and placed our trust in what God did through Jesus on the Cross to save us, we are permanently changed – for the rest of our lives we now want to live lives pleasing to God. We don’t want to go on sinning. At this point the new believer needs to become aware of two truths that may be new to him. First, there may be things God says are wrong or things God says we should do that a new believer is not aware of. Our sincere desire to please our Lord will motivate us to learn them. God informs us of the things that please Him in two ways. The first is our conscience. He has given us a sense of right and wrong. We need to listen to it and heed its guidance. But, through repeated violation of our conscience, it can become seared and unreliable as a guide. Therefore, God has given us another guide – the Bible. It contains Jesus’ teachings and other teachings from God revealed through His spokesmen, and these are our standards for godly or righteous living.  Reliance on God’s standards is extremely important. Without God’s standards for us, there would be no basis for absolute right or wrong. Whatever you think is right or wrong is what is right or wrong for you. This would lead to no common standard and what you see as right someone else could see as wrong, and what you see as wrong they could see as right. Multiply that by billions of people across hundreds of standards and you have a world void of true standards for right and wrong. Therefore, it is incumbent upon new believers to start the process of learning what the Bible has to say.

Second, though we have been permanently changed so that we want to please God, we still live in flesh and blood bodies. The flesh is amoral – it is not moral or immoral – it only wants to satisfy its desires. The will and conscience, which are subject to morality, are in our minds, and what the new believer discovers is that what we want (to please God) and what our fleshy body wants (satisfying the flesh) are often in conflict.  This struggle/conflict will remain with us until we die. Though all believers want to do right and have the Holy Spirit inside to help them, they at times will get distracted and slip and fall to the flesh’s desire and sin. But God understands this and gave us this promise – that “if we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9  This is an awesome promise to believers – and we all need it!  

The moment we realize we have sinned is the time to confess it to God so that we may be forgiven and fellowship with God restored – and peace with God maintained. If we leave sin unconfessed, it does break our fellowship with Him and will make us more vulnerable to additional sins.