“It Wasn’t Your Fault” Isn’t the Same as “You’re Forgiven”

A follow-up to the sermon I recently shared on Romans 8:1

TL;DR: After preaching on Romans 8:1, I realized something surprising: what I had longed to hear after my church plant closed wasn’t, “It wasn’t your fault.” It was, “You’re forgiven.” Those are not the same message.

[This essay has been updated since the original posting].

This is a follow-up to the sermon I recently shared on Romans 8:1 and Paul’s declaration:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

After the sermon, a woman in the congregation thanked me for the message and asked if we could meet.

“Sure,” I said.

During our conversation, she said many of the things I’ve heard over the years since the church plant I led closed in 2021.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“COVID was hard.”

“It was a difficult time to start a church.”

I’ve heard those words many times.

And while I know people have always said them because they were trying to help, they’ve almost always had the opposite effect.

It wasn’t until after preaching that sermon—and after that conversation—that I realized why.

For some reason, the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan came to mind.

At the end of the movie, Captain Miller is dying. He looks at Private Ryan and simply says,

“Earn this.”

The movie then jumps ahead some fifty years.

An elderly Ryan stands in Normandy at Captain Miller’s grave, surrounded by his family. Hanging over the entire scene is the question that has presumably followed him for decades:

Did I earn this?

In many ways, I think I was asking the same question after the church plant closed.

People kept trying to explain why it wasn’t really my fault.

COVID.

Funding.

Church planting is difficult.

The denomination.

Timing.

Those explanations may all have been true, at least in part.

I knew the church’s closing wasn’t entirely my fault.

But I also knew I hadn’t done everything perfectly. I knew I’d made mistakes. There were conversations I wished I’d handled differently, decisions I second-guessed, and moments where I’d fallen short.

That’s what made those explanations feel incomplete.

Looking back, I realize people were trying to answer a different question than the one I was asking.

They were asking,

“Was it really your fault?”

My heart was asking,

“Will this forever be held against me?”

Those are not the same question.

And explanations don’t answer the second one.

I Needed Forgiveness

I had made commitments. People believed in me. The region had invested significant time, money, and trust in me. I felt like I had let people down.

Whether the church’s closing was entirely my fault wasn’t really the point.

Something had happened. There had been failure, there were things I wished I’d done differently, and there were consequences.

What I desperately needed wasn’t someone to tell me,

“It wasn’t your fault.”

I needed someone to tell me,

“You’re forgiven.”

Preparing my sermon on Romans 8:1 started something in me.

But it wasn’t until afterward that I realized what I had been longing to hear all along wasn’t simply Romans 8.

It was Romans 4:

“Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will never count against them.”

That was the gift I didn’t know I needed.

Not an explanation.

Forgiveness.

One asks whether something happened.

The other declares that, because of Christ, it will no longer be counted against you.

That’s absolution.

More Than an Explanation

This is one place where I increasingly wonder if progressive Christianity has lost something essential.

Its pastoral instinct is often to reassure people that what happened wasn’t their fault—that they were oppressed, marginalized, traumatized, wounded, or harmed.

Sometimes all of that is absolutely true. Naming those realities matters.

But I don’t think they always reach the deepest place in the human heart.

Historic Christianity has traditionally insisted that our deepest problem is not only outside us but also within us. We are sinned against, yes. But we also sin. We fail. We hurt people. We don’t become the people we long to be.

Perhaps that’s because most of us know the truth is rarely that simple. We know we’ve been sinned against. We also know we’ve sinned. We know circumstances have shaped us. We also know we’ve made choices we regret.

Which means our deepest need isn’t only liberation or vindication.

It’s forgiveness.

I wonder if one weakness of progressive Christianity is that it sometimes seeks exoneration where the gospel offers forgiveness.

Those are not the same thing.

Exoneration says nothing happened—or that nothing should be held against you.

Forgiveness says something happened.

And yet, because of Christ, it will no longer be counted against you.

I increasingly suspect that beneath all our explanations and self-justifications, many of us are still longing to hear the words,

“You are forgiven.”

That’s why Romans 8 hit me so differently this time.

Paul doesn’t explain why everything wasn’t my fault.

He doesn’t minimize failure.

He doesn’t erase consequences.

He simply announces:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

I think I finally understand why that verse became such a gift of grace for me.

Not because it convinced me I’d done nothing wrong.

But because it announced that Christ’s forgiveness—not my success or failure—would have the final word.

The gospel doesn’t merely explain our story.

It speaks a new word over it.

And wow, that is such good news.