Am I Unpardonable?

I used to believe that I was special - special in the negative sense. I was convinced that I had a unique problem, an overly tender conscience and an extraordinary weight of guilt. I was a conflicted mess while other Christians seemed to have never even thought about the issue that troubled me, and if I brought it up, it seemed to roll off of them effortlessly. Was I the only broken Christian, the only kid who ever felt sick to her stomach over the idea of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?

Matthew 12:32 hung over my head like a hammer ready to strike at the moment that I had one thought about God that was at all out of place. I thought about Him nearly constantly, so that likelihood was high. And the more I thought about the issue of the “unpardonable sin” as I discovered people had taken to calling it, the more I was certain I had already committed it - that it was too late for me.

But it was frustrating to me that I was so riddled with anxiety while it seemed as though absolutely everybody else had this thing figured out and were at total peace about it. It wasn’t until I was twenty-two years old that the revelation hit me.

What revelation? Not an answer that fixed everything, but the realization that my issue was not unique in the least! I was not a special case of uncanny dejection. At the time, I was going through one of the worst bouts of doubt that I’d ever experienced concerning my own security of salvation. Sometimes, I couldn’t eat. It was hard to rest. I couldn’t enjoy life because all I thought about was death and the prospect that I would die without salvation. Life hardly seemed worth enjoying if it was to end in flames. Irony though it was, I became passionate about sharing the gospel. Empathizing with the lost that if I had been disqualified from Heaven, I at least wanted to help a few more folks get there.

In desperation, I began to humble myself and reveal my seemingly crazy problem with as many Christians as I could, often through weeping. It was humiliating, but I didn’t care - I was just so desperate for an answer of consolation. And that’s when I was shocked. Person after person began to divulge to me things like, “Oh, I knew a girl who struggled with that” or “Yes, I dealt with that in my early twenties” or “I know what you mean - the terror!”

And when I went digging on a popular Christian website, “Desiring God”, I read a pastor, John Piper, saying this:

“Someone recently asked me to venture an answer to a question — this question: What’s the most common question we get on the podcast? …And my guess, based on my experience, I would say, is this: Our most-often-asked-about question is about the unpardonable sin. And by that, I mean it in the broadest sense of the term — not only “What is the unpardonable sin (as defined in Scripture)?” but “Have I committed a sin that is so ugly, so gross, so heinous, so premeditated, so repeated, so high-handedly evil that God will surely not be able to forgive me for it?” That was my answer. That’s, in my best guess, the most common question” (Piper, 2024).

In all of the United States (and who knows how many other countries) what is the toughest question, the most common qualm about which so many Bible-believing evangelicals were asking this large platform? “Have I blasphemed the Holy Spirit? Is it too late for me? How do I deal with this insane terror?” Well, all of the sudden, I didn’t feel so uniquely broken at all.

If this is you too, please know that you are the reason I write about this subject. This is a fairly obscure topic and yet for some dear souls, it is an obscurity that threatens to ruin your life and sap the death-defying confidence that God has freely given you.

But to save you from reading the following chapters, I offer you a simple way out of this book. If you are worried about having committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then you didn’t do it. It’s that simple - short and sweet - and you have no need to continue reading.

If you are like me though, there comes a point when that answer is not good enough. The terror is too strong to simply ignore it, accept a nice saying, and hope for the eternal best. If that’s you, then by all means, please keep reading. In a nutshell, this book seeks to reassure you of exactly what that seemingly blithe and overly simplistic assertion insists: if you are worried about having blasphemed the Holy Spirit, then you haven’t done it.

Remember, “if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things” (1 John 3:20). He knows more about redemption than we do, and He knows if you desire Him. If you’re anxious about being turned away from God, my prayer is that God will use what the enemy meant for evil against me and turn it into good for you, that is, that all the accusations and weeping and depression that has permeated my life will be forged into comfort and consolation for you as God takes us both to the other side of terror until we can scarcely remember what it felt like - to the glory of our living and victorious Savior, Jesus Christ! To do this, I am sharing with you how the Lord got me through the very question that has haunted me for nearly 14 years: “Am I unparonable?”