Are we forgiven by God of our sins because we repent of those sins? Or does repentance and faith follow in response to a genuine encounter with the forgiveness of Jesus Christ? Capon provides some insight:

We are forgiven for one reason only: because Jesus died for our sins and rose for our justification. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess, to wake ourselves up to what we already have. We are not forgiven, therefore, because we made ourselves forgivable or even because we had faith; [faith] is not a transaction, not a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness… We are forgiven solely because there is a Forgiver. Nothing new is ever done to achieve anything. It was all done, once and for all, by the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world – by the one God, in the Person of the Word incarnate in Jesus. We may be unable, as the prodigal son was, to believe until we finally see it; but the God who does it, like the father who forgave the prodigal, never once had anything else in mind.

- Robert Farrar Capon