Confessing Our Sins

I also believe it is vital that we confess our sins to each other. This might seem like a scary proposition for us to hear, but it is Scriptural. (James 5:16) Confessing our sins to each other can help us to walk in the light and restore us to fellowship with one another, as written in verse 7. I read an article in Christianity Today a few years back that really captures the essence of this message. It was about a group of students at Reed College in Oregon. Every year this college would have a renaissance festival that was basically an excuse to overindulge in drugs and alcohol. So this group of students somehow came up with the idea to set up a confessional booth in the middle of this fair. That sounds pretty bizarre, doesn’t it? Well, it gets stranger… The purpose of this booth wasn’t actually for people to confess their sins, but instead it became a place for the students to come and hear the confession of the Christians who ran it.

The Christians decided to confess and ask forgiveness for all of the horrible things that had been done under the guise of Christianity. They thought it would feel good to apologize, to apologize for the Crusades, for Columbus and the genocide committed in the Bahamas in the name of God, apologize for the missionaries who landed in Mexico and came up through the West slaughtering people in the name of Christ. They wanted to apologize for the many ways they had misrepresented the Lord. They could feel that they had betrayed the Lord by judging, by not being willing to love the people he had loved and only giving lip service to issues of human rights. They had spent so much time defending Christianity because they thought to admit that they had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole. But it isn’t a religious system; it is people following Christ. And the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.

The article went on to say that their outreach was well received. Their testimonies and confessions were met with tears and appreciation and overall healing. They found that many people had been hurt and had suffered from someone who had a faulty view of Christianity. Even though none of these students had been personally involved in that wounding, it was still powerful to the others that someone would take the time to apologize for the ways in which they had been wronged. (article available at http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2005/summer/4.62.html?start=1)

I share this story to illustrate the picture of the heart of confession that is found in this passage. Confession is not just about revealing our sins. As I mentioned earlier, we do not need to reveal our sins to God, because He already knows them. In the same way, the students at Reed College didn’t need someone to come and tell them that Christians are sinful and imperfect; they already knew that! Confession is about owning up to the reality that we are not able to follow Christ perfectly at all times. Confession isn’t an information transfer; it’s a relational healing.