Practicing Faith: Confession

Hello again and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is a joy to have you once again in the conversation as we really continue now this journey that we have started off on practicing faith,
looking at ways in which we might conceive of things that are intended to help us become more aware of God’s presence in a way that are invitational.
And I think that as we started our conversation last week with that idea of prayer and what a prayerful attitude in life might look like,
we continue on this week with a new topic.
We’re looking this week at the idea of confession.
And before we get there,
you know, I just think it’s worth noting if you didn’t join us for the conversation last week, maybe pause this,
jump back over and listen to that because I do think it lays some foundation for what we’re going to be talking about this week.
And I would also maybe add that as we make our way forward,
make note of the fact how even last week’s topic of prayer has its own mirror in our worship service.
There’s an element to worship where we intentionally take time to pray and even different kinds of prayers.
I’d also point out that there is in worship a form in our own tradition of confession,
that we intentionally in that moment of our week intend to lift up ourselves to God in a way that is honest and vulnerable.
And as we do that in worship,
Clint, I think we have a scriptural and even more broadly sort of Christian tradition mandate to do the same in our every day throughout the course of our lives.
And so we now turn to this idea of confession and what it means for us as those trying to follow Jesus Christ.
Yeah, and I think most of the people listening will be somewhat familiar with the idea of confession.
And Michael, our tradition is, as you know, well suited to have this conversation.
Presbyterians are steeped in the idea that humans are flawed creatures,
that we have a predisposition towards sin,
that we are unworthy of God’s righteousness because of our sin.
And we bring much of that understanding into our worship service.
However,
I think maybe consequently the average Presbyterian is probably most familiar with what we could call corporate confession.
The idea that when we get in church together,
we will often have a prayer or something in the sermon or liturgy that recognizes that we struggle,
that recognizes that we’re all sinful.
But maybe it’s less common for Presbyterians to practice a kind of personal confession,
either with someone else or even privately,
that takes stock individually of where am I struggling in my life?
What sins do I find myself repeating?
What sin seems to come up again and again in my life and why am I struggling in those particular areas?
And that’s a scarier conversation.
It’s a much more personal conversation.
It demands a level of vulnerability.
And I think, though, that without exception,
every great spiritualist and every great spiritual tradition within Christianity has an element of confession.
In other words,
our mothers and fathers in the faith have unanimously believed that one cannot make progress as a spiritual follower of Christ without coming to this choke point of dealing with the sin in our life,
both internally and externally.
And so I think while maybe not the most comfortable conversation we’ll have during this series,
in some ways, this is one of the most important.
It is.
And, Clint, there’s a bit of a minefield that we’re navigating here because confession is,
as you’ve already named,
intimately connected with an awareness and recognition of sinfulness.
Confession would not exist if we didn’t recognize this state that humans find themselves in.
And that is where we find the minefield,
in my view, is because this idea of sinfulness has so many different paths that go through it,
whether you grew up in one Christian tradition or maybe you grew up outside of any faith tradition.
There’s all of these assumptions.
There’s all of these presuppositions about what sinfulness is.
You have some groups that go in picket funerals calling people sinful in their posters.
And there’s other people who go on national television and call out the nation for its sinfulness.
And there’s other people who speak to us in sort of this self-help kind of language and say that you need to throw off this idea of sinfulness,
that that’s just hurting your ego.
And you need to sort of try to be your best self.
And all of these are trying to find ways of navigating around what is the thing at the core of humanity that is broken.
Because we do share this sense that we’re not wholly knit together,
that we can’t, if we’re honest,
find ourselves to be without error,
that we know there’s something deep down that’s not quite the way it’s supposed to be.
The ancient church or St.
Augustine called that the heart that was unable to find rest.
It was just this sense that we aren’t quite settled until we find the place in which God desires to dwell within us.
And I think that minefield is important,
Clint, because some people are hesitant to turn to confession because they feel like it’s masochistic.
And what I mean by that is they feel like it’s an exercise in beating themselves up.
And many people have this unfortunate internal narrative that does that well enough by themselves,
that you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror,
you think bad thoughts about the way that you look.
You see a way that you perform in your job or in your family,
and that reaffirms the story that says you’re not good enough,
you’re a bad person.
And when we talk about sin, Clint,
we don’t mean to emphasize those narratives.
We’re not saying that humans should practice negative self-talk and that you should be anti-yourself.
That’s not at all what the Reformed tradition has in mind.
There’s a far more grounded and reasoned understanding that we as humans are not capable of at oneing or atoning for ourselves.
We can’t make it right.
We rely upon God to do that.
And we recognize that that is on some level what it means to be creature,
that humans were made by God.
So for us to aspire to be perfect is to aspire for something that was never attainable,
that God intends for us to be creature.
And God planned for a way to redeem us,
to save us is the way that we might say it in the Christian tradition.
And so as we turn to this topic of sin and what it means to confess,
I think I just want to make that point right away.
That don’t let the following conversation emphasize what we don’t intend to emphasize.
It’s not about how bad you are.
It’s about recognizing honestly the part that’s broken so that God can be at work in that place.
And again, I think our tradition helps us there,
Michael, in that we assume that the struggle of sin is a universal one.
In other words, there is no person on the planet who is not affected by it.
And I think those of you who have watched children,
you do not have to teach a child to be selfish.
You do not have to teach them to want their own way.
You do not have to teach them to be angry.
We have a predisposition toward self-centeredness and a natural way of harming relationships with others that comes with us.
It simply arrives when we enter the world.
And so while this is a universal experience,
we each have some personal experience with it.
And I think the downside of a conversation like this,
if not done well,
is that we are moving in themes that can produce or at least connect with guilt.
And most of us carry some sense of being guilty or feeling guilty about something.
And guilt is not a bad thing in that it moves us to confession.
But once the confession has happened,
once that moment of recognition that I am struggling or have struggled or have made this mistake or had these failures,
then the idea is confession is the moment that we are invited to let go of the guilt.
And so we want to acknowledge that guilt exists,
and guilt has a purpose,
but the purpose is not to continue to beat us up for things that we’ve done wrong or failed to do,
but in the exact opposite sense,
guilt is to move us toward the moment that we no longer need it.
And one of the wonderful invitations of confession is to let go of guilt,
which is much easier said than done,
but is one of the great promises of this thing that we call confessing.
And living in guilt,
I think of guilt as sort of being a mire,
like a bog that you get stuck in it.
It sucks you down.
And one of the effects of a person who lives in rampant guilt is that they can’t be honest,
they can’t be objective about what the truth is in their life.
If you’ve ever been there yourself personally or you’ve known someone who’s just sort of caught in that quagmire of,
“I can’t do anything right.
I’m not a good person,” their actually guilt isn’t moving them forward.
It’s pulling them down.
Guilt,
in a positive, healthy sense, should move us towards confession,
and confession is at its core telling the truth about yourself.
And guilt that doesn’t move you there is not helping.
We should, as Christians,
be able to say even some difficult things about ourselves if they’re true,
if they connect with reality.
And I think that’s one of the beautiful things that happens in worship.
I had a conversation once with a person,
I think I had written the call to confession that week,
and they just mentioned something about how,
yeah, that confession was kind of hard to say.
I heard myself saying it,
and it kind of hit me.
And whenever we pause to say things that are true,
but yet difficult, I think that is the right force.
That, you know, yeah, as I reflect on that,
that kind of hits me between the eyes.
That is the kind of confession that moves us closer to the saving grace of God.
It reminds us of the part of our heart that does need mending.
And if we can be honest about that claim,
if we can actually identify those things and name them in a healthy and positive way,
we’re now moving forward in this spiritual practice of confession.
Yeah, I heard a pastor once say that the idea of grace is to leave our sin behind and not drag it behind.
And I think there’s tremendous wisdom in that.
And what I appreciate about confession,
Michael, is I think you’re exactly right.
It invites us to a moment where we tell the truth,
the truth that we know about ourselves,
the truth that we understand through our relationship with God,
about God and us.
And I’ve said this before,
and I’ll say it again very briefly.
When we left the Catholic Church in the Reformation for theological reasons,
we left the Catholic practice of confession behind.
And there would be lots of things we could squabble about in the way that that’s practiced.
But I will say,
I regret that in this sense.
I admire about the Catholics that they have a moment where they go in to a room or a confessional and they say,
“Here’s the things I know are true about myself.”
I didn’t tell the truth.
I’ve been dishonest.
I’ve struggled with lust.
This thing or that thing,
I kind of took advantage of somebody
and I cheated a little bit on this transaction or whatever it was.
And while I appreciate our public confession,
the idea that you go before a priest or a pastor or someone in the faith
and you tell them what you know about yourself
but what you try to make sure no one else really knows about you is a powerful thing.
And I have often wished that Presbyterians had a kind of way to practice that corporately.
But as we move into this conversation,
I guess part of the idea is that we can practice that privately.
Yeah, Clint, I know that you’ve experienced this far more than I have in my shorter time in ministry,
but it is always almost, not awe-inspiring,
that’s not the right word,
but there’s a moment of pause for me when someone comes in
and practices with deep humility,
confessing something that’s true of them.
And by nature of this vocation,
that happens.
If someone comes in and says,
“I’m an alcoholic,” or “Things at home aren’t going well.
My marriage is on the rocks,”
or people who have come to me and said, “You know,
I don’t know what to do.
My children just seem to be out living wanton lives right now,
and I don’t know what to do about it.”
And there’s a kind of shame and guilt that often comes with that confession.
But yet, Clint,
the humility that it affects in that moment is unbelievable
because it does cut against our pride when we are forced to come to another and say,
“Yeah, this is true.” And the thing that I’ve always wanted to say in those situations but it’s never helpful is, “Hey, listen,
we’re on the same boat.” It may not be the same situation,
but we all cannot throw the first stone.
We are all implicated in these things.
And so,
you know,
this practicing of humility in an individual sense,
I think really connects us with the broader community
because everyone in that community is sharing the same concerns.
We are living in the same place.
It may not have the same name for each of us,
but friends, I can tell you with confidence there is not a single person,
if they were humble enough,
who could not point out their own brokenness.
Yeah, so I have a little bit of a sports background,
and one of the things that I used to do was wrestle.
And one of the things I always appreciated about wrestling is being an individual sport,
there’s no place to pass the buck.
When you come off the mat and someone has just torn you apart,
you don’t get to say,
“Well, the coach told me the wrong thing,” or,
“The referee did that,” or,
“My teammate wasn’t good enough today.”
You have to take ownership,
and it’s deeply humbling to say, “Well, that person,
at least in this moment,
was better than I am.”
And you have to confess that,
and confession does that for us.
When we practice confession,
it is an opportunity for us to sort of put aside
all of the blaming that we can do to protect ourselves,
and we have to say,
“Okay, it wasn’t the website’s fault.
I went there.
It wasn’t the bartender’s fault.
I ordered the drink.
It wasn’t my spouse’s fault.
I yelled at them and was unreasonable.”
And it forces us to that moment of acknowledgement,
and we are facing something that is true,
that we have tried to keep ourselves from facing.
And I think the great benefit that confession offers us is that humbling moment of admitting,
“I was wrong,” because that’s hard.
But it’s only in admitting it that we are then able to try and understand it,
to try and correct it,
to take account of it and learn from it,
until we are willing to learn from our mistakes,
we are simply doomed to repeat them.
And confession gives us that moment to try and listen in our sin for a better path forward.
Sin, the word sin, means to miss the mark,
to be off track.
And confession is the moment where we try to recalibrate our sights and get on track.
And I think in that sense,
it’s a moment of truth-telling,
Michael.
It’s facing something that we understand to be true,
maybe something,
especially something,
that we wish wasn’t true or that we have tried to hide even from ourselves.
You know, it was a while ago,
Clint, but I became aware of through an article that I read,
a website that was made,
and people would go to this website and they would write anonymously confessions,
things that they had done,
things that they were guilty,
felt guilty for.
And it was just this wall of everything that you can imagine would go in an anonymous board like that.
And I think I have two thoughts connected to that.
And the first is,
that even anonymous kind of confession does bring with it a kind of catharsis.
The writer that was reflecting on this just talked about how it gave people a space to say the thing that they were bearing in silence.
And that alone can be a powerful tool.
But your original point,
I think, is a helpful one.
And I want to just lift out that doing that in relationship,
a healthy relationship with a real person, does have meaning.
And I don’t want to discount that idea of anonymous confession.
Maybe even for you,
that’s not going to a website,
but that’s going to your journal and journaling.
That’s good.
It’s good to be honest in print.
But there’s also something about the kind of truth telling that affects within us real humility.
And I don’t know that that kind of humility comes about in the anonymous frame.
I’m not sure that when we journal something that we plan on sharing with no one,
I’m not sure if that gives us the same kind of opportunity to practice the kind of humility that confessions should bring about.
There’s something different when you go to your counselor or to your pastor or to a friend who can be trusted or to a spouse that can be trusted.
And you share this thing that you know is hard to say and likely hard to hear.
Because in that moment,
there is a kind of lowering yourself.
I think of Jesus and Philippians who lowered himself so that we might see what salvation looks like.
It looks like that sort of self-giving.
And self-giving is not always easy.
Sometimes self-giving is giving up those things that we’ve been holding onto.
The things that we are afraid mean something about us that others couldn’t accept or sins that we think are unforgivable.
And clearly,
Clint, you don’t just go share incredibly humble things in incredibly public places.
You don’t go to Facebook and post that thing.
Or you don’t go in front of a congregation and you name that on a Sunday morning.
That’s probably not a healthy way to confess.
But there are meaningful and very, I think,
soul-healing ways of practicing this kind of confession with real people.
Yeah.
You know, Michael, I think that people who had the experience of, say,
growing up in a dysfunctional house where there was something that was kept secret,
innately almost come to understand the power of a secret.
And it is generally a negative power.
The idea of we have to keep it protected.
We can’t let people know.
Nobody can really know what’s going on in our house or in myself.
And there is a tremendous burden that is released when one finally is able to share that secret.
When the alcoholic admits,
“I’m an alcoholic,” when the woman who lives under abuse tells someone and makes a commitment to address that situation,
either by removing herself from it or by working together,
when the couple comes in and says to a counselor or a pastor or whoever it is,
we’re really struggling to hold things together.
And in the moment that that secret is kind of out there,
it erases some of the power it has over us
and allows us to really begin to deal with the issues instead of putting our energy into keeping the secret.
Now, the flip side of that,
and you’re exactly right,
is secrets are not just to be shared willy-nilly,
especially if they have the potential to do some harm.
You want to make sure that that is done in a way,
and particularly with a person that you trust.
It’s relationally unbalanced to dump that stuff at the feet of people who don’t know what to do with it,
who may not be able to be trusted with it.
And so,
confession, I think, should be done carefully,
thoughtfully.
And I think you are 100 percent right.
One of the most powerful things we can do is to bring another person into our struggle.
It’s good for us.
It’s good for them.
It’s that accountability and that support is vital,
but it has to be done in the right way with the right people.
And that should be thought through carefully.
I think that’s one of the chief goals of any parent is to try to help their children practice this thing that we call confession,
to admit that the child did something wrong and to try to make amends for it.
And on its surface,
that’s an incredibly simple arrangement, right?
Child, just say, “I’m sorry.
Say what you did wrong.
Ask for forgiveness.”
But anyone who has had a child in your life knows it is not that simple.
And children, in some ways, are more honest about it than I think we are.
They have a physical visceral reaction against it.
“No, I’m not going to say sorry.
No, I didn’t.
No, it’s their fault.”
And the parent is often pulling your hair out because,
“Come on, kid.
Just say the words.
All I want you to do is say the words.
I can’t make you mean it.
Just say the words.”
And yet the child will fight and fight and fight.
And that same dynamic,
I think, lives in all of us.
Children are just more honest about it.
That moment comes where you know,
“I made a choice.
I did a thing that I shouldn’t have done.”
And yet everything within us is just pushing us towards self-defense.
“Well, if they hadn’t done that.” Or,
“I didn’t have all the information.”
In hindsight, it’s 2020.
And one of the things that I’ve found over and over and over again,
when people come in struggling to confess,
they’re trying to find a way to make it a one-way street.
It was all the other person.
And, you know, the truth, in my experience, is nearly always,
it’s a 50/50 street.
You have some part in it.
The other person had some part in it.
And I think what we do with children is we try to help them get through the practice of it.
I’m not sure that they often mean it,
if at all.
But the practice of admitting that thing then leads us to a place
where our heart can really be in it.
Where someday we can look and say,
“I know the pain that I caused.
It hurt me.
It hurt you.
It hurt us.
I’m sorry.
Can you forgive me?”
And that practice of confession, then,
not only does it loosen the bonds
that the sin holds on us, Clint,
it enables us in this creative window to experience resurrection,
to experience new life,
to experience a possible path that didn’t exist before confession.
And we might, as Christians, talk about that as forgiveness.
Yeah, and I would say that in most of the places,
in my experience, both personally and pastorally,
most of the places people are stuck in their lives,
the vast majority of those places have something to do with confession and/or forgiveness.
The great choke points in our spiritual growth almost always have to do with coming to terms with our own sin
or being able to forgive someone else of theirs,
and often both simultaneously.
And we will get into some specifics in a moment in terms of how does one practice confession
and what does it look like.
But as we do that,
the idea that there are,
I think, two mistakes that we make,
Michael, in regard to our sin,
and one is to be unconcerned with it.
We know our sin.
We’ve often lived with it for years,
and there’s a sense in which we can come to sort of rationalize it.
We’re used to it.
It’s not that big a deal.
You know, the sins of other people surprise us.
Ours seem kind of normal and not that big of a problem.
And so I think on one hand we can be flippant with our sin.
We can say, “Oh, yeah, we’re all sinners.
I’m stubborn,” or, “I get mad.
I fly off the handle.”
“Oh, I say things I don’t mean.” That’s just the way I am.
And we can make excuses and rationalizations for ourselves.
On the other hand,
we have experiences with people who just embody the guilt.
It’s like,
“Oh, yeah, I know Jesus forgives other people,
but I’m so much worse.”
“Oh, he can’t forgive that.”
Somehow my sin feels bigger than everyone else’s,
as if God is able to love and give grace to everyone else.
But I’m on the other side of the fence.
That stuff is not attainable for me.
And I think what confession does is allows us the path to find the path in the middle,
to be honest and take our sins seriously and to experience confession as a doorway to grace
and to know that we are truly forgiven and truly loved.
And it seems to me that,
you know, that is the great promise that confession offers us,
is to find that place in the middle where we are honest and hopeful,
and to embody both of those things in that moment where we are met by and compelled to tell the truth.
Yeah, Clint,
in J.R.R.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series—I’m not a huge fan.
I haven’t read all the books.
I don’t know all the lore.
But one of the things about that series that is interesting to me is the concept of the ring.
And if you think of it,
the people who wear that ring are possessed by it.
It changes the way that they act and behave in the world.
And I think sometimes we get overly fixated on what our sin means in our relationship with God.
We allow the guilt to be sort of all-inclusive,
and we begin to think that there’s nothing that we can do that will make it okay,
that we become sort of trapped in this cycle of guilt.
What we fail to recognize is that one of sin’s greatest powers over us is not to just make us feel a particular way,
is that a sin that we’re unwilling to name and let go of,
take off in J.R.R.
Tolkien’s world, that sin has a way of controlling us.
The secret that never gets told has a way of repeating itself in our life in subtle and oftentimes subconscious ways.
But when we live with wounds that haven’t healed,
those wounds manifest in ways that we almost never see coming.
And I think I’ve seen it in my own life.
I’ve seen it in other people’s lives.
The problem of sin,
I’m trying to say,
is that if we don’t move beyond it,
we will always be mired by it.
And the problem is,
we’re mired by it in ways that we didn’t see coming.
We may be restless and we’re fighting with our spouse,
and it feels like that fight has something to do with what they did,
when the truth is,
we’re dealing with guilt about something that we did,
what we did last night.
And what we need to recognize is that the only way constructively to move forward,
the only path that leads us into the forgiveness that is on offer in Jesus Christ,
Clint, is the willingness at some point to take off the ring,
to let go of the sin.
And I think that’s hard for all of us,
but I think different personalities struggle with that in different ways.
Yeah. And so having talked about what confession is,
and we hope maybe made a case for why it matters,
let’s talk about how we practice it.
As Presbyterians, again,
if we were Catholics,
this would be a simple part of the conversation.
There’s a format for that and a kind of ritual for that.
For Protestants, it’s a little bit more open-ended.
So let’s start at the simplest end,
which is just the laundry list,
is just to simply say,
in the context of reflection or prayer,
to simply say, “I know that I have sinned in these ways.
I was short with my wife.
I took something.” Whatever that would be in your life,
mine would be a different list.
And to just simply list them,
literally to say, “I did that.
I did that.
Oh, I felt bad.
I felt envy.
I felt jealousy.
I judged that person.
I jumped to a conclusion.” Whatever,
though, I’m carrying a grudge.
And it’s not so much in that first step to try and work on anything.
It’s to simply say,
“Let’s tell the truth about some of what’s in me,
some of the mess that is my spirit.
Let me be honest about getting it started.” And I think,
you know, Michael, that’s a good first step.
I think we would both argue that there need to be following steps.
But it seems to me that simply listing the things first is not a bad place to start.
Yeah, I know that I certainly have had many relationships with people
whose relationship to sin did seem to be one that was very possessive.
They very much struggled to even do that first task,
to just recognize and to say the thing.
And I want to be very clear,
if you’re joining us in this conversation,
and maybe this speaks to you and your own personality,
I think there’s a sense in which, for those individuals,
they want to confess.
There’s a desire to do it,
but the act of simply putting the pencil to paper
has more meaning than what may just seem to be there.
That kind of task,
the saying that this is admittedly true,
is more than just admitting that thing.
It’s admitting a truth about who you are as a person.
Maybe it’s something that you took with you from childhood.
Maybe it’s a story,
or maybe it’s a thing that happened to you.
Maybe it is a lifelong goal that if I don’t achieve this,
then it means this.
Or whatever it is,
we often allow our sin to take upon it a meaning
that is so deeply tied to our identity that it controls us.
And if you’re one of those individuals,
I think this is the place to start.
The journaling is a good place.
Maybe you’re not a writer.
That’s fine.
Go buy one of those cassette recorders or get an app on your phone, whatever.
Say it.
Record it.
You’re not going to share it with anybody.
You don’t need to.
The point is to let that come out of you, to externalize it.
And if you’re one for whom this is a struggle,
that may sound easy,
but once you turn on the record or once you get that pencil down,
it is going to be a struggle.
But it is a spiritual struggle.
It is a faith practice kind of struggle.
And if that’s where you need to start,
hear from us today.
That’s a good place to start.
And we’re not trying to be flippant and certainly not trying to beat anyone up.
But with some humor,
I think I would say to all of us,
if we approach prayer and the idea of confession and find ourselves thinking,
“Well, I don’t really have anything to confess.
I haven’t done any wrong.
I haven’t harbored any grudges.
I don’t really have anything to take account for.”
Our tradition,
the weight of Christianity,
almost the whole of Scripture
and everything else within the faith would say,
“Let’s raise the possibility we’re not being 100% honest.”
Or we might be a little bit deluded in that moment.
And so understand that when you make that list,
you’re not doing something that everyone else on the planet couldn’t do.
And it may be difficult.
It may be one thing to start with.
If that’s not been a regular practice,
it may be only a couple of things.
But the important thing is that that list then becomes our guide.
Because the next step of confession is to begin to try and make amends with that,
to say, “What is it in that behavior?
Why would I have done that?
Can I understand why I felt jealousy when something good happened for my neighbor?
Can I understand why it made me so angry in this moment?
Why was I tempted to take something that didn’t belong to me or to…
Why did I need to be seen as the one with all the answers or with some sort of success?
Why do I care what other people…”
And it is in that second layer of conversation that I think real growth,
the seeds of growth are planted.
The confession and the getting things listed is a good starting point,
but I think it’s in that next step,
which is very difficult to begin to listen to.
What is at stake in these things for me?
If my sin is lust,
why is it that I keep coming back to that?
What triggers it?
Where did it come from?
And to begin to understand…
And, Michael, I want to just be very careful here.
Those can be deep and painful processes for people.
And there are some of us who have things in our life that we will bump into very early in that process
that may push you in the direction of counseling.
It may push you in the conversation with a pastor.
That demands a great deal of humility.
And if you are finding yourself encountering long-standing and deeply painful patterns,
I would urge you to think seriously about inviting someone else into that conversation
because it is very unlikely that any of us in those moments
are going to be able to unpack that on our own.
We will almost always need the extra voice and encouragement of a wise mentor to help us navigate that.
That’s really well said,
Clint, and I think I can only add by illustration
to say that one of the temptations in the first step that we described of just getting that sin out
is that you might be a little bit too close to the surface.
And so the thing that you might think of is,
I don’t know, I went to the store and I stole a pack of gum or I stole a thing of gummy bears.
And often the way that our sin manifests is we think, yeah,
I didn’t steal a TV.
I didn’t steal a boat.
I just stole some gummy bears.
And we think that’s a small thing.
I’ll confess that.
And what you might be tempted to do is think that the act of taking the gummy bears is the thing that needs confessed.
And there’s a sense in which it does.
Certainly there’s a business.
There’s a place that you took money from in that exchange.
It did something to your own soul to take something that didn’t belong to you.
But the question I hear you asking us for in this another level,
Clint, is what about that experience?
What does that have to say to me about my own brokenness?
Why did I do that thing?
Is it because I’m not grateful for the things that I do have?
Is it because I wanted in some way to inflict harm on another person because I took that?
Is it because I’m not happy and I thought that that experience would make me happy?
There are so many different motivations and reasons.
And that’s what I hear Jesus calling us to in the Gospels when he says,
listen,
it’s not just committing adultery with a woman.
It’s looking at her with a lustful eye.
It’s the motivation with which why we do what we do.
These are the roots of our sin.
And now it’s not just I stole a pack of gum.
It’s I stole a pack of gum because if I’m honest,
I’m not grateful for what I do have.
I’m not grateful for the gifts that God has given me.
And now we’re starting to walk on holier ground.
We’re starting to walk in a part of us that is maybe far more comfortable.
And I just believe as we go into the process of confession,
we often do have to wait in.
We almost always do in spiritual things.
But Clint, as you go,
it will be uncomfortable.
And I hear that wise caution.
Don’t jump into the deep end,
right?
Don’t go into a place that you don’t have someone there to walk beside you.
But if you’re not getting more uncomfortable in the process of confession,
it’s likely you’re not getting closer to the truth.
In the writings of the ancient church fathers,
they talked about moral sins and venial sins.
And venial sins are often fleshly sins.
Adultery,
fornication,
sex outside of marriage, masturbation,
stealing at times, things that were sort of commonplace and moral sins,
judgment,
dishonesty.
And what people are often surprised by,
Michael, is that the ancient fathers,
almost without exception, considered the moral sins more serious,
more damaging to the soul than the physical sins.
And it’s not to minimize physical sin.
It’s not to say that that’s not sinful.
It is to say that we live in an era where in much of the church’s conversation,
it’s the exact opposite.
You can lie,
you can steal,
you can be prejudiced,
and you can harbor grudges,
but don’t have sex with the wrong person.
And we have entered into this kind of time of moralism
that makes some of these conversations more difficult.
And I don’t want to take us off on a detour here,
but it is to say that I think as we circle back to this idea
that the thing behind the sin is often where our real brokenness is
and not the act itself.
We are actually reconnecting with the ancient wisdom of Christianity.
There are those who spent their whole lives praying and reflecting
on what it means to follow Christ,
and this is what they told us long ago.
And I think we begin to maybe rediscover it in those conversations.
So if that’s a difficult and ongoing step for you,
know that you’re not alone.
We all join you there.
So let’s say we’ve done that.
We’ve accounted for some of our sins.
We have tried to examine that and see what we learn about ourselves in it.
Maybe we’ve searched for where the true brokenness is in those acts.
And then we move to this third moment,
which is to kind of make amends,
which is to say,
“Have I done damage?
Do I have apologies to make?”
We think of confession as vertical.
It’s between ourselves and God,
and that’s always true,
but it also has a horizontal component.
Have I wronged anyone?
Are there amends that I need to make in my relationships?
And again, this is a very difficult step.
If you know something of the 12-step process in terms of addiction recovery,
you know that this is an important step.
Reconciliation is a big theme in that process and in the healing journey of that process.
And it won’t be in every case.
And sometimes relationships are such that the apology,
it’s not going to be simple.
It’s not going to be,
“Well, I’ll send them a card.”
But it is to say that where we can,
we should allow that movement of confession
to move horizontally into relationships with people who might have been affected by our sin.
We should confess not only to God,
but when necessary to one another.
And again, I know much of this conversation would be uncomfortable,
but that would be the place where this,
if we’re willing to follow the process,
that would be the place where I think it would take us next.
Yeah, certainly.
And we could spend an entire conversation about the complexities of that.
What do you do when there needs to be reconciliation with a family member
or a friend who’s gone on,
who’s passed away, who you can’t go find or speak to?
Or what about an act that happened that is so great,
it schism the relationship to a point that you don’t even know how you could reach out?
There’s so many complexities,
but I think what you see is,
you see this rising action,
that when God works within us,
when God is at work forgiving our own sins,
it frees us from our own self-obsession.
It actually sets us free from this sort of gravity that our sinfulness unchecked lords over us.
And it frees us to a life that can look beyond ourselves,
Clint, that we can recognize my own sinfulness has had imprints on other people’s lives.
And you don’t throw yourself into that like anything we’ve talked about today.
You don’t just jump into the deep end of that pool without help,
without reading, without reflection.
But we also can’t avoid it because it’s difficult.
We can’t run from it because it’s complicated.
Our forgiveness we’ve received in Jesus Christ is not just for ourselves and our own eternal soul.
It is something that will transform the people and world in which we live.
That’s the nature and the gravity of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.
So as you confess what is true,
as you recognize the depth of that,
as you examine it,
it will move you towards some kind of movement outside you.
And the thing that’s rote in our interactions with children,
say sorry, say what you did,
becomes not just words,
but a true expression of our heart.
I’m sorry.
And it’s not a sorry that is built upon self-effacing or it’s not built upon personal guilt.
It’s not built upon because I’m the worst person that’s ever walked.
It’s because you have honestly reflected and said,
I recognize my brokenness and that we live in a broken world and that my brokenness has done this to you
and for that I am so deeply sorry.
And I know that I’m loved and I know that you’re loved and I pray that Christ can work to bring us to reconciliation,
to be united again despite all odds.
And this is I think where you begin to see the mystery and beauty of grace,
Clint, is that Christ can do for us and others the things that we could not imagine for ourselves.
And it only can happen if we’re willing to trust that process of confession.
Sin always does damage and part of what confession and forgiveness intends to do is to undo some of the damage
or to minimize some of the damage.
And I think, Michael, it’s important there to say we should not let the exception disprove the rule.
There may be people in my life either through circumstance or through simply I’m not there yet.
I’m not able to take that step.
But, however,
I should not let that reality keep me from practicing that step in the 8 to 10 to 50 cases I could
in being short with my wife this morning.
I shouldn’t let the biggest struggle in my life in terms of confession keep me from doing all of the other confession
that may be helpful in smaller ways.
In fact, you don’t start at the top of the mountain,
right?
You start at the bottom and you begin taking easy steps and it gets harder on the way up.
And we should not let the top of the mountain keep us from taking the steps at the bottom.
And so I think that’s very important.
And then the final step, at least,
I don’t know if it’s fair to call it final.
And I’m not sure if I’d call this 4 or also number 3.
But the invitation confession then gives us as we’ve listed our sins,
we’ve named them as we’ve faced them
and tried to learn in them what we might do as we’ve tried to make amends for the things we’ve done wrong.
We also then are invited to try and change our behavior,
to try and not fish that pond that we’re familiar with as often,
to try and learn to avoid those things that we have maybe done so many times that they’re not even conscious anymore.
One of the things that we do as we face our sin,
as we confess and as we are humbled,
is that we seek to do better.
And we try to build some new paths.
And this is full of starts and stops.
Virtually no one gets there quickly.
But as we, again,
engage in this reality and in this practice of confession,
we are hopefully able,
a year down the road,
2 years, 5 years, 10 years, to be more gracious,
to be less judgmental,
to be less jealous,
less envious, or at least better able to recognize when it’s happening
and to try and keep some containment on it and not let those sins turn into damage in relationships and in other people’s lives.
You’re exactly right, Clint, and that’s well said.
And I want to point out something that you didn’t say,
which is a funny way to phrase this.
But notice that you didn’t say that I don’t want to steal as much or I don’t want to commit this particular sin as much.
It’s once again going back to that separation between moral and venial.
I think what is important in repentance,
that’s another scriptural word,
this idea of turning around,
what’s important is that it transforms not just your action so that you say,
“I want to take the bottle less.”
The end goal of confession is to remove the bottle’s power over you.
Whatever that is that is hooked into that deepest part of you that is tempted by that particular sin, whatever it is,
that is the thing that we hope to see over time transformed by grace.
And I’m not saying that there’s ever a moment in which we overcome our sin,
that there’s this wonderful moment of transformation
in which everything is always now and forever good.
We must recognize that we are just creatures living in a fallen world.
But friends,
there is a movement that happens to the soul in confession.
It makes a real difference,
a substantive difference.
You can make your way forward after years of humility and confession and the reminder of forgiveness.
And you can truly have this thing exercise less power over you than it does today.
That’s the good news in Jesus Christ.
Grace is able to overcome.
That doesn’t mean that it will be eradicated.
But that may cloud us from seeing the significant difference that this confession can do over the long term.
Yeah, and I want to put a sort of pastoral counseling note attached to that, Michael.
If you find yourself,
if any of us finds ourselves repeatedly back at the same place over and over and over again,
and feels like we are not making progress or maybe we make progress temporarily and then we’re back where we started,
I think we have to be willing to ask ourselves if this is something we can do on our own.
Anyone who has either walked the ground of addiction or known someone who has walked the ground of addiction
knows that there generally is a moment where a person has to admit,
“I’m not able to.
I’m going to need some help in order to do this.”
And the last thing we would want is for somebody to use the idea of confession
and leaving your sin behind as some sort of permission not to go seek the help it takes to do that.
So if you find yourself repeatedly circling back to where you started,
I think you have to then consider,
“Is this something that I need some help with?”
Well,
who do you think has given us all the tools?
Counseling and recovery groups and books?
And, you know,
those tools are out there and to leave them unused in the midst of a deep struggle that is beyond your control is not wisdom.
Michael,
I think we probably have an entire follow-up conversation about the spiritual practice of forgiveness.
It’s certainly connected to this,
but I think it merits its own conversation.
I think maybe the last word as I hear it is,
“What then is the impact of this process of confession?”
If I’m willing to regularly approach God and say,
“Lord, I’ve failed in these ways,”
I’m willing to explore why and how that affects me and how it’s affected others.
I want to make amends where I’ve failed,
and I want to fail less.
As I engage in that over and over again,
it seems to me that one of the things that happens is there’s a transition that happens
in which that spiritual practice begins to have real-world implications and applications.
And I wonder if we should close with the idea that part of what we do in learning to confess is learn to embody truthfulness in a broader scope in the lives that we lead.
Yeah, Clint, I think that that is given many labels in our culture.
Authenticity is a word that’s thrown around,
that being the antonym or the opposite of hypocrisy.
I think that psychologists talk about that as being an integrated person.
There’s many, many ways of conceiving of it,
but maybe the most illustrative for me is what happens when you walk beside a family as they grieve the loss of a loved one.
You often learn a lot about a person by family’s desire to share the whole truth about them.
Some families, you just get this sense.
There’s some area that we’re not going to go.
That’s off limits, that that person never opened themselves to the family about that thing that happened or that event.
There’s this secret that is held.
There’s others that celebrate the wholeness of who that person was,
this goodness of recognizing they weren’t perfect, but they loved.
They got it wrong,
but they made amends,
right?
And I think that that should be our goal throughout our entire lived life,
not just as we come to the end of our life.
We should recognize the merit,
the goodness that’s inherent in the difficult work of telling the truth about ourselves is that it helps us become truthful people.
That what we do and what we say isn’t a front put out so that other people believe a lie that we tell ourselves,
but it’s rather an honest and grounded reflection of who we actually are.
And that is a gift that comes to us through the difficult practice,
the spiritual practice of confession.
Yeah. And I would say,
Michael, that by the time we get to this stage,
these things are not generally deeply painful.
We have walked the hard ground.
And when we get to the point of trying to implement these things that we’ve learned.
In other words, to take the truth that I tell God and now expand that into living truthfully,
it is less, I think, a matter of it being hard gut wrenching and more hard, difficult.
And in fact,
I think when we make some progress,
one of the things that feels to me happens is there’s humor in it.
We’re able to acknowledge,
hey, when a group of people get together,
I have this need to be front and center.
I’m going to want to tell the biggest story.
I’m going to want to be right.
I know that when there’s a vote taken,
I will run over people if I leave myself unchecked in order to win.
I’m deeply competitive and I’m willing at my worst to hurt people.
And once we know those things,
once we’ve heard those things about ourselves,
there is that sense of almost being able to laugh at,
there I go again.
Not if someone’s been hurt,
I don’t mean that.
But that sense of,
oh, yeah,
no,
I realize that I could jump in with both feet here and go the wrong direction because I’m wired to do that.
Now, some of that is more cautious.
I realize I have to be careful because I have this struggle and I don’t want to get off track.
And so,
I mean, not all of it is funny,
but I do think there are moments when I can laugh at myself because I hear that confessional voice say,
oh, yeah, you want some attention, don’t you?
Yeah, no, I don’t need the attention.
I’d rather be truthful.
Once I’ve told the truth,
then can I let that truth influence how I live?
And I think ultimately that’s the point,
right?
I mean, the point is not to just tell God that we’re sinners or even that we sin.
God already knows that.
The point is that in confession,
God is partnering with us to try and teach us a more wholesome and whole way to live our lives.
Not wholesome, more holy and whole way to live our lives.
And ultimately, that is the end goal of confession.
Right. You know,
why could you laugh about a thing that before gripped you?
Because the thing, the sin,
lost its control over you.
That’s the amazing turn that happens in confession,
is that the thing that once exercised power over you is loosed of its power,
because you were willing to allow God to do the work that God wants to do.
And, you know, friends, there’s a lot in this conversation,
some of it heavy.
I think there’s places in this where all of us,
the two people at this table included,
are going to feel the weight of at different places and different times will feel it stronger.
So however you arrive to this conversation,
I hope that on one level you feel inspired to take the first step into confession,
whatever that step is for you.
And also,
I hope you walk away hearing this simple truth.
Your guilt,
your sin, whatever you’ve conceived of that being does not need to hold you forever.
There is a practice.
There is a way in the Christian tradition for you to offer that up to a God who is powerful enough to forgive.
And we must have the faith to just take that first step.
And I promise God will be faithful to be with you.
Let me close with my favorite confession and sin story.
There was a young man that moved to Alaska and he was living on a shoestring budget.
He was very poor.
So instead of paying for the garbage to be taken out,
he began to put it in his backyard.
And it didn’t take long.
Over the course of the summer,
he had a pile of garbage and it’s stuff that is rotting and there’s animals in it and there’s bugs and all the rest.
Well, the short version of the story is he comes to find out that garbage collection was free.
That all he had to do was set it out and that the people would have come and taken his trash for him and he just didn’t know it.
So he buried it and piled it instead.
Well, that’s the invitation we have in Jesus Christ.
The garbage cleanup is free.
We just have to be willing and able to learn to set it out and be done with it and let go of it.
And as we do that,
we are invited to become different people and leave some of that sin behind.
We’ll never overcome it completely,
but we are invited to live into the reality that we already find in Jesus Christ through the cross.
And so we hope there’s been something in this has been hopeful.
Actually, we hope there’s been something that’s been a little uncomfortable,
maybe even challenging.
If you need to continue these conversations,
by all means,
let us know.
Give us a call.
Give us an email.
Talk to somebody that you trust.
We know that potentially
we are poking around in sensitive areas,
but they are important conversations for us to have.
And we will follow up with the good news on the other side of confession next week.
Well, friends, thanks for joining us for the conversation.
Wherever you are, we would love for you to share this on Facebook.
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subscribe on YouTube, give likes, all that kind of stuff that continues to help us to reach people.
And actually, there are many people in our church family who see that better when you do it.
So we appreciate that work and we recognize the many people who have continued to join us for these conversations.
Know that we’re grateful for you and we continue to be grateful for your correspondence with us.
It really continues to help us as we go along this journey.
That said,
let us practice faith,
let us confess where we have sinned,
and let us come back when we gather next week
as we are reminded about what God’s promise is to us in that.
Be blessed.
Thanks for listening.