Confessing sins – goodchristianfiction

Have you ever had just a blah kind of day, where your mind and body both felt just out of whack or irritated, and you just couldn’t put your finger on the exact cause?

Have you ever considered that the exact cause might just be your own unconfessed sin before God? Sometimes, we get in such an easy habit of beginning or ending our prayers with a blanket “forgive us our sins,” that we forget the awesome power that can be gained from picking apart our sins before God. He knows what they are already, of course. But do we?

I started thinking about how not getting specific with God gets me stuck in the mire as I have been reading the Psalms. In these wonderful poetic prayers, the various authors pour out their sentiments to God in imagery, metaphor, and splendid detail. The more I read these prayers, the more I am struck by how helpful it is to be specific when you are talking to God.

In a world where there is often 26 hours of things to do in each 24 hour day, we often let getting specific fall between the cracks of all the materialistic things we have convinced ourselves need to be done for our existence not to fall apart. But God has all the time in the world to listen to us, no matter how long we speak. So should we.

In Psalm 32, David gives an apt description of what it feels like to be trapped in our sins: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your [God’s] hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’–and you forgave the guilt of my sin” (3-5).

David, who lived in a time without the guarantee of Jesus as intecessor, had many reasons to hide his sin from God, even though God already knew the sin. Essentially, by not confessing to God, David was only denying the truth to himself, and this denial effectively shut him off from God! How much simpler it should be for those of us who have the Great Intecessor to go freely to God to admit to ourselves the sins we have committed against Him. After all, we have all assurance through the grace of Christ that God will forgive us, whereas David did not.

Are your bones wasting away? It shouldn’t be that way for those who believe. “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered,” David begins the psalm (32:1). “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit” (32:2). The person David is describing is every Christian. We all have the right through grace to claim this state of being.

But we have to be honest with ourselves. There is no lying to God, of course, though we say those lies anyway, the things we want to believe about ourselves even though the tiny voice at the back of our mind is telling us we are wrong. Oh, to be the spirit with no deceit before the Father!

What we lose when we don’t confess our specific sins is the chance to grab what David prized most in his relationship with God, and that is the ability to feel the full joy of God, to grasp God’s righteousness, and to praise Him in full understanding of the depth and breadth of God’s goodness. David finishes Psalms 32 with just such a declaration: “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!” (11).

There is no way to get there without first stripping ourselves bare before the One who already knows. By acknowledging to Him where we have fallen, we effectively admit it to ourselves, casting off the heavy hand upon us and freeing ourselves to truly rejoice!

One of my mother’s most cringing stories from her childhood involves the time when she got caught trying a smoke for the first time and was dragged to the front of the entire congregation that Sunday by her mother (who smoked, by the way) to confess her sin.
But she never took up the habit.
My Bible reading this week included James 5, where we are reminded that we are forgivable and are therefore instructed to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. . . .”
I could be wrong, but I think it may be hard to find a church body where sins are regularly confessed amongst each other. I’m not saying the modern church doesn’t support each other. I am saying that even in a small modern church, not to mention the huge, popular churches that are the sizes of some small towns, it would be difficult to find an environment in which we could be so vulnerable. What would we do if we spent a chunk of each time together exposing the core of what makes us human? What would it do for us to hear our own sin confessed before fellow travelers, witnessing in their eyes the compassion and horror that we should feel about ourselves as we fall short of God?
What would happen, for instance, if one part of service involved everyone speaking aloud their sins of the past week, a cacophony of confession that only a God as powerful as the One we claim could understand? The idea brings to mind the gathering of the Israelites in the book of Nehemiah. The people have been scattered from their homeland under the Babylonians for generations. Finally, under the Persians, they are allowed to return to their homeland and begin to rebuild their temple and their defensive walls around the city of Jerusalem, not without tremendous obstacles. As the work is being completed, the entire community gathers to read the Law and confess their sins, standing for hours as Nehemiah leads them in this group effort at redemption.
When was the last time you were in a situation where you were made to utter something aloud that you hesitated to speak about? Why did you hesitate? When you finally said the words, how did you feel? Did the world end? Did whatever you feared actually happen, and was it as bad as you thought?
God wants us to confess our sins to Him. Through Christ, we are promised forgiveness when we truly repent, no matter what we have done. Have you truly repented of something that you haven’t said aloud to yourself, much less somebody else?
And just what is the end result of all this confession? James tells us that, too, at the end of verse six: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”
“No man is an island” as the poet says. We all function more effectively in community, even when it comes to doing one of the hardest things a human ever does, admitting when we are wrong.
Wherever two or three believers gather, He is there. Can you find just one more person of belief this week to share your confessions with, as James admonishes? Think about what kind of difference it could make for you and for the person with whom you share.