What this is about
The story is told to encourage people, and the man in it did a good thing. He found he had kept money that was not his, and he gave it back. Every Christian tradition would say he was right.
The question is about the lesson attached to it. The story says God held back his Spirit for seven years because of a small, forgotten wrong, and gave him when it was fixed. If that is how God works, then anyone who prays for more of the Spirit and feels nothing has a job to do: search your past until you find what you missed. This page asks whether the Bible or the historic church teaches that.
The first way of seeing it
God gives his Spirit to sinners, and the Spirit does the cleaningThe Spirit is a gift, promised by God and given through the Gospel and baptism to people who are still sinners. He then spends their whole lives cleaning them up. Putting wrongs right is his work in a person. It is never the price of getting him. This is what the page holds.The second way of seeing it
God holds back until you have found and fixed everythingThe Holy Spirit is holy and will not fill an unclean person. If you ask and do not receive, something is in the way, and it may be small or long forgotten. Find it, fix it, and the blessing comes. This is what the page tests.What this page is not doing
It does not say restitution is unimportant. It does not argue about whether speaking in tongues is for today. It does not name the evangelist or judge him; the story is retold from memory and is not a quotation. Every modern example is made up and labelled that way.
The short answer
- Paying the restaurant was right. Zacchaeus promised to pay back four times what he had taken (Luke 19:8). Nothing here argues against that.
- In the Bible the Spirit is a gift. Paul asks: “Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” (Galatians 3:2). At Cornelius’s house the Spirit fell on everyone “while Peter yet spake” (Acts 10:44), before anyone had done anything.
- The warnings are about sin you know and keep. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me” (Psalm 66:18). For the faults you cannot see, the Bible has a prayer: “cleanse thou me from secret faults” (Psalm 19:12).
- Christians stay sinners all their lives. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8). The church at Corinth had every spiritual gift, and its members were cheating one another (1 Corinthians 1:7; 6:8).
- The Spirit does the cleaning. The old prayers of the church ask him to come and clean. They do not report that the cleaning is finished.
- Nobody could ever finish the search. A Lutheran confession of 1530, a Catholic council of 1551 and a Pentecostal paper of 2010 all say so.
- The idea is recent. It can be traced to American revival preaching in the 1830s. The largest Pentecostal church has since said: “By definition, a gift is not earned.”
Take the story apart
The story makes several claims at once. Some are ordinary Christian teaching. Some are new. Sort these six.
0 of 6 sorted.
What comes first
The best restitution story in the Gospels is about Zacchaeus, a tax collector who had cheated people. It is worth noticing the order. Jesus sees him in a tree and says, “Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house” (Luke 19:5). The crowd complains that Jesus has gone to be the guest of “a man that is a sinner.” Then Zacchaeus stands up, in his own house, with Jesus already there, and promises to pay everyone back.
The act is the same. A debt is paid. But in Luke it is what a man does because Christ has come to him. In the evangelist’s story it is what a man does so that the Spirit will come.
The rest of the New Testament has Luke’s order. On the day of Pentecost Peter told the crowd to “repent, and be baptized … and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you” (Acts 2:38–39). He calls it a gift and a promise, and three thousand people were baptized that same day. Jesus said the Father gives the Holy Spirit “to them that ask him,” and in the same sentence called the people asking “evil” (Luke 11:13).
In the Bible the Spirit comes with the Gospel, with baptism, and to people who ask. He is never held back until someone has finished going through his past.
Known sin, or forgotten sin?
There are Bible verses that say sin can come between a person and God. People who teach the “find it and fix it” idea quote them. The question to ask of each is: what kind of sin is it talking about? Sort these six.
0 of 6 sorted.
Every verse about sin getting in the way is about sin a person knows about and is holding on to. Every verse about faults a person cannot see hands them over to God. No verse says to search for forgotten sins before God will give his Spirit.
The historic churches agree that serious sin, knowingly held on to, shuts a person off from God. Cyril of Jerusalem told people preparing for baptism around the year 350: “if you persist in an evil purpose … the water will receive, but the Spirit will not accept you.” That is a real warning. But a restaurant bill from years ago, small and forgotten, is a different thing from an evil purpose a person is persisting in.
Who does the cleaning?
The clearest way to see what the church has believed is to listen to how it prays for the Holy Spirit. Here are three very old prayers from three different traditions.
| Who prays it | The words |
|---|---|
| Anglican at the start of Holy Communion | “Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit.” |
| Orthodox at the start of daily prayers | “Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity.” |
| Catholic the hymn for Pentecost | “Lava quod est sordidum.” Wash what is soiled. |
All three ask the Spirit to come and do the cleaning. None of them says, “We have cleaned ourselves; now come.” Luther put the Lutheran view the same way: the Holy Ghost is a gift who “daily cleanses and sweeps out the remaining sins.”
The church settled this a very long time ago. In the year 529 a council at Orange, in what is now France, condemned anyone who says that “God awaits our will to be cleansed from sin” and will not admit that even the wish to be clean comes from the Holy Spirit.
That matters for the story. The evangelist says he was shown the restaurant bill. Christians believe it is the Holy Spirit who shows a person his sin (John 16:8). So if he was shown it, the Spirit was already with him and already at work.
The story makes being clean the condition for getting the Spirit. The historic churches say the Spirit is given to make us clean. The story has the order backwards.
How would you ever know you were finished?
Suppose the story were right. If one forgotten undercharge can hold back the Spirit, so can every unkind word you never apologised for, every exaggeration, every duty you skipped, and every hurt you caused without knowing. How long is that list? And how would you know when you had reached the end of it?
Christians have been here before. As a young monk, Martin Luther confessed his sins for up to six hours at a time, going back over his whole life to make sure he had missed nothing. His confessor eventually told him, in effect, to come back when he had something real to confess. The Lutheran churches later wrote the lesson into their confession of faith:
But if no sins were forgiven, except those that are recounted, consciences could never find peace; for very many sins they neither see nor can remember.
Augsburg Confession, Article XXV (1530).
The Catholic Church, which disagreed with Luther about a great deal, agreed about this. The Council of Trent said in 1551 that the sins a person cannot remember after honestly examining himself “are understood to be included” in his confession, and quoted the same psalm: “From my secret sins cleanse me, O Lord.”
And the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal church in the world, said it in 2010 in its own words: “By definition, a gift is not earned. If it were on the basis of a person’s merit, the unanswerable question would be, ‘What should be the extent of the person’s worthiness?’”
If only the sins you can find are dealt with, you can never know you are done. Lutherans, Catholics and Pentecostals have each said so. What you cannot remember is forgiven along with what you can.
Where the idea came from
The “find it and fix it” teaching is not ancient. It can be followed through four steps.
| When | What was said |
|---|---|
| 1835 | The American evangelist Charles Finney told Christians to write down their sins one by one with pen and paper, to send letters of confession, and to send back any money owed “and the interest.” If you feel spiritually dry, he said, it is because of “little things” you have covered up. |
| 1906 | The newspaper of the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, where modern Pentecostalism began: “they could not receive the Spirit if they were not clean.” |
| 1910 | R. A. Torrey, to people who had prayed for years without receiving: “It is sin, and if I could look down into your heart … I could put my finger on the specific sin.” |
| 2010 | The Assemblies of God: “By definition, a gift is not earned.” |
These were serious men, and they were reacting to something real: churchgoers who never paid their debts or changed their lives. But even they did not go as far as the story does. Torrey spoke of sin the seeker knew about, and said that if nothing came to light after honest prayer, the seeker should move on. John Wesley, who taught that a Christian could be made perfect in love, said that nobody in this life is free of faults he does not know about, and added: “sinless perfection is a phrase I never use.”
One more thing. The story ends with an experience, and the experience is treated as proof that the man was finally clean enough. But Paul asks, “do all speak with tongues?” and expects the answer no (1 Corinthians 12:30). The church that had the most of that gift was Corinth, and Paul called its members “carnal” (3:1).
Repentance, or an audit?
If you have ever been told that a hidden sin is blocking the Spirit, answer these six about yourself. Nothing is stored or sent, and this is not pastoral advice.
Check it yourself
Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last takes no time at all.
- 1. Read Acts 2:37–41, Acts 10:34–48 and Galatians 3:1–5. What is the Spirit given on?
- 2. Read Luke 19:1–10. Notice what Jesus says before Zacchaeus says anything about money.
- 3. Read Psalm 19:12–14 and Psalm 66:16–20. One is about faults you cannot see. The other is about sin you are keeping.
- 4. Read 1 Corinthians 1:4–9 and then 3:1–4 and 6:1–8. The same church, in the same letter.
- 5. Remember the last testimony you heard in which a blessing came after one last thing was put right. Do this one. Which came first in that story, the gift or the cleaning?
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has every passage in Acts where the Spirit is given, the strongest texts for the other side (Acts 5:32, Achan, “without holiness”), what the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican churches say in their own documents, the cases where they do say sin blocks grace, Luther and Ignatius on scruples, Finney and Torrey quoted at length, an audit to run on your own life in numbers, and the prompt that produced it all.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →