Confession

I got a great question from someone. I pulled their name and posted the question and my reply.

Q: Pastor Todd,

The reason I am emailing you is because I have a concern with the way Iconfess my sins. I hate to be legalistic, but here is my concern: I see more and more how important it is to fall at the knees of God and confessmy sins. I am quite loyal at admitting that I am a sinner and have fallenshort of the glory of God and ask for His forgiveness. I worship anddwell in His grace.

However, I find it hard to recall the sins that Ihave committed. At the end of the day, I am not real sure what I didwrong. I feel I would grow closer to God by understanding better where itis that I fall short. Then, I could have more directed prayer for myweaknesses.

So, I end up just asking for forgiveness in a very general way. I understand that God desires a pure heart, and I come to Him with a sincere heart asking for forgiveness and I feel that brings Him joy. Again though, it just seems more real to come humbly when I admit my actual sins.I know this is kind of a big topic, but any thoughts you have would be appreciated.

Thank you,
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Reply: Thanks for your note. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. You ask a great question and I wanted to take some time to think, do a little reading and pray before I responded.

I appreciate your concern about confession. If that is an essential part of our relationship with God, and I, like you, do believe it is, then we want to be as genuine, real and complete as we possibly can be. And our concern over that isn’t necessarily the same as “legalism”, but rather a genuine desire to have an honest relationship with Christ. I admire you in your desire to have that.

At the same time, I don’t think you need to concern yourself too much if you are able to have a “complete” laundry list of our sins. Frankly, if we take seriously Luther’s admonition that all sin is the same, and that even our “thinking” about committing sin, then frankly there is no way that any of us can accurately catalog our sinful thoughts and actions.

Beyond that, however, I sometimes think of sin and confession in a different, perhaps more wholistic way: Sin is our actions that break the wishes and commandments of God. But sin is also a condition, a state of being that we are all born into. Because of sin and our sinfulness, we live in a broken relationship with God that ONLY Christ can restore through His actions, and not because we deserve it. (I know that you know this, I’m just formulating my thoughts…sorry…)

When we confess, I think it’s good to confess the things that we have done, and I think it’s ok to move into the “general” when we can’t remember what we’ve done because God remembers.

But I think even more importantly is for us to confess the broken relationship we feel. That broken relationship, which our sinfulness causes, is the root of our human condition and the cause for the “sins” (actions) that we all do. That expression is more about the root of our relationship with God than the individual actions that we do that are “sins.”

Am I making sense in the distinction?

Basically what I’m trying to say is that we confess both:
A) The sins we commit that we remember and those that we don’t and cannot remember.
B) Our sinful nature that causes us to want to be “in charge”, to literally be God of our own lives, and which causes us to do the sins that further break the relationship.

We live in a “chicken and egg” scenario. We sin because we are sinful. We are sinful because we sin. You’re absolutely right that God desires a “pure heart”, but it is only Christ that can make that heart pure. Only Christ can break the cycle, and our confession is less about a what we did and more about admitting our role in the cycle, our dependence on Christ and for Christ to reach through the cycle to us. After all, in Psalm 51:10 the writer confesses “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” This confession is about the heart, not about our sinful activities.

So you are right…direct your prayer, but my advice would be to direct it towards a whole relationship, not just a longer and better list of your sins.

Ok, now I’m starting to ramble. I have no idea if this makes any sense. I would be happy to discuss this further with you by e-mail or “live” if it would be helpful. Thanks for your question though. It was good to think about. I’ll on Mission Jamaica tomorrow through April 1 so won’t be available to reply until I get back.

Take care!

Peace,

Pastor Todd.