Spiritual Disciplines: Confession
Sermon Number 11
March 9, 2008
John Ortberg tells the story about the time he and his wife Nancy bought their first piece of new furniture: a mauve sofa. He explained it was more the shade of Pepto-Bismol, but “mauve” sounded better.
The furniture salesman warned John and Nancy that this is not a good color to get when you have 3 young children. However, the Ortberg’s believed they could hand the situation and their children, so they purchased the mauve sofa.
From that moment on, the number one rule in the house was ‘don’t sit on the mauve sofa. Don’t touch the mauve sofa. Don’t play around the mauve sofa. Don’t eat on or breathe on, look at or even think about the mauve sofa.’
The rule was similar to the prohibition in the garden of Eden not to eat from the forbidden tree. “On every other chair on the house you may freely sit, but upon this sofa, the mauve sofa, you may not sit, for in the day you sit thereupon, you shall surely die.”
Of course, you know what happened next, the FALL.
One day a stain appeared on the mauve sofa. It was a red stain, a red jelly stain.
So, Nancy, who had chosen the mauve sofa and adored the sofa lined up their 3 children in front of the sofa; Laura, 4, Mallory 2 ½ and Johnny, 6 months. She asked the children, “do you see that? That’s a stain. A red stain. A red jelly stain. The man at the sofa store says it is not coming out. Not forever. Do you know how long forever is? That’s how long we’re going to stand here until one of you tells me who put the stain on the sofa.”
Mallory was the first to break. With trembling lips and tear filled eyes she said, “Laura did it.” Laura passionately denied it. Then there was silence, for the longest time. No one said a word. The children had never seen their mother so upset. They wouldn’t talk, because they knew if they did, they would spend eternity in the time-out chair.
John explained he knew they wouldn’t talk, because he was the one who put the red jelly stain on the mauve sofa, and he knew he wasn’t going to say anything. He would find a safe place to confess.
We actually have a similar situation in our home. We have two very off-white sofas. We are not allowed to sit on them, we cannot eat on them, and in fact, one has been sat in so much, that we are not allowed to sit on that sofa, we need to sit on the other one. We have scotchguarded that sofa and fortunately when Debbie’s sister spilled grape soda on it, it came off.
Have you ever been there? You made that stain, you committed that sin, you messed up somewhere along the way. You see, the truth is, we have all stained the sofa. Some of the stains are small and barely noticeable. But some of them bleed through the entire fabric of our lives. They are the stains we regret in the wee, cold hours of the night as we lie in bed staring at the ceiling, wishing we could go back in time and relive some moments and get things right.
All of us will have to log some time in front of the sofa. However, strangely as it seems, many of us struggle with living in the reality of God’s forgiveness. It seems that we can intellectualize God’s liberating forgiveness, yet the reality of it, doesn’t really work its way into our everyday living.
This inability to accept the reality of forgiveness is the reason that God has given us the practice of confession. Sometimes people wonder, ‘If I’m a Christian and God has already forgiven me, why should I have to confess?’ It’s a good question.
Confession is not primarily something God has us do because He needs it. God is not clutching tightly to His mercy, as if we have to pry it from His fingers life a child’s last cookie. We need to confess in order to heal and be changed.
Confession also is not simply a God accounting procedure where we confess our sin to God and the sin is moved from the debit side to the credit side. When we do confession the right way, it helps us grow and become more and more transformed into Christ-likeness.
When we practice confession well, we are liberated from our guilt; and we will be less likely to sin in the same way in the future. Sin begins to look and feel less attractive.
There are two audiences we come before when we seek confession. In James 5, James has been telling the people to offer prayers for one another and which can bring healing to those who are sick. Then James said, “... confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” (James 5:16).
James gives us one type of confession - confession to one another. One point to keep in mind is that James was speaking to Christians confessing to Christians. The belief is that we can offer forgiveness and help the person to move forward in their relationship with others and with God.
When we confess to one another, we find our burdens can be lifted as we find comfort from a spiritually mature brother or sister in Christ. This helps us to not commit the sin again; and to find freedom from our sins.
A second type of confession comes when we confess to God. We see this occurring many times in the Scriptures, with one of the more famous confessional statements occurring in 1 John 1:9, where we read, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
It is one of the great statements of the Bible. For we realize that IF we confess our sins, God will hear our confession, then He will forgive us, but not only will He forgive us, He will also cleanse us from our unrighteousness. This gives us the opportunity to move back to our relationship with God, which was broken because of our sins, and is now restored, because of our confession.
When we move through the process of confession we have a greater opportunity to experience the power of forgiveness. John Ortberg describes confession as a process instead of it being a one time only event. In fact, Ortberg says there are 6 steps to confession.
The first step is . . .
PREPARATION
We begin by placing ourselves into the care of the Spirit of God and ask Him for help. Confession can be dangerous is we ignore this step. Because if we are left to ourselves, we are prone to self-condemnation for things we should not feel guilty about, or we gloss over the ugly stains of sin which demand our attention.
There was the story about Charles Steinmetz, who was a genius electrical engineer with G.E. in the early 1900’s. After he retired, Steinmetz was asked to return to G.E. to help pinpoint a problem with a group of machines which the current engineers could not fix. Steinmetz walked around the machines for several minutes, never touching them, then he took a piece of chalk and placed a ‘cross’ at a very specific spot on one particular piece of machinery.
When the engineers disassembled that part of the machine, to their amazement it turned out to be the precise location of the breakdown. Steinmetz sent an itemized bill to G.E. ~
Making one cross mark: $ 1.00
Knowing where to put it: $9,999.99
The hard part of self-examination is knowing where to place the mark. Psalm 19:12 states, “Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults.”
Jeremiah 17:9 tells us, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Sometimes we just don’t know why we do the things we do. They come from our needs and our sinfulness. Yet, when we lay our sins at God’s doorsteps and confess our sins, we find forgiveness and cleansing.
Confession always starts with our placing ourselves under the protection of God, asking Him to put the cross mark in the right spot.
SELF-EXAMINATION
The next step is self-examination. This entails taking time to reflect on our thoughts, words and deeds and acknowledging that we have sinned. A helpful approach to self-examination is to think through various categories of sin. The lists most often used is that of the seven deadly sins: pride, anger, lust, envy, greed, sloth and gluttony. We ask ourselves where we stand in regard to each of these. Martin Luther used the Ten Commandments as a way to help him examine his life.
Confession should be specific, concrete and particular. Christian confession is what moved Bill W. To speak of the 4th of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a “fearless” or “ruthless” moral inventory.
Confession involves taking appropriate responsibility for what we have done. This is not easy to do. Often times we try to make as many excuses as we can for our actions. We end up saying, “I didn’t mean to do that, I was having a bad day.”
When we confess, it means we own up to our sins, to the fact that our behavior wasn’t just the result of bad parenting, poor genes, jealous siblings, a sugar rush from too many twinkies. Any or all of these factors may be involved. Yet, confession means saying “we made a choice, and it does not need to be excused, explained or understood. The choice needs to be forgiven . . . and the slate wiped clean.
PERCEPTION
We need a new way of looking at our sin; a new understanding of it. In many respects, sin involves denial. When we sin, it distorts our ability to detect its presence.
You see, we have this ability within ourselves to deceive ourselves. We can lie to avoid pain and hardly be aware we have done so. We can flatter or seek to manipulate others and ourselves without even being aware of it. We can ignore injustice or human need without any moral warning lights going on.
So, in this step of confession, we ask for honest perception. We want to see our sins through a new lens. We begin to see them through the eyes of the person we sinned against. We struggle to see them through the eyes of God.
Jesus spoke of this condition when He said,
3"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4How can you say to your brother, ’Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5).
When we have a log in one eye - not a twig, but something the size of a canoe - our ability to perceive accurately is affected. This is what happened to Jesus’ listeners. The people saw the sins of prostitutes and cheaters and would have nothing to do with them. They were proud of their spiritual superiority, but Jesus accused them of being legalists, who were guilty of worse sins because of their sins of omission.
If we take Jesus’ words to heart, we would take a new look at ourselves and realize our pride, arrogance, deceit, bitterness and admit we are no better than ‘those people.’ We would ask for God’s help and allow the Spirit of God to give us new eyes so we could see what is lovely and pure.
To help us gain a new perception we should ask 2 questions -
1. Why did I do what I did?
You see, we usually try to defend ourselves from guilt and the recognition of sin. Generally, we sin because of some need. Ortberg says, “sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way” (134). If we don’t meet the need in an appropriate way, we will go on sinning.
2. What happened as a result of my sin?
We need to look at what happened because we satisfied ourselves. How did this impact others in our lives. Ultimately, we need to take out the log in our eyes, so that we can see more clearly.
A New Feeling
Once we begin to better understand ourselves, a new feeling comes to us. True confession means we not only confess information, but we enter into the hurt we have caused others and we enter into God’s pain over sin.
What is important here is the fact that confession can be made, and it can be safely made in the context of grace. Feelings of remorse are no guarantee of authentic repentance, and they can be highly destructive.
EXAMPLE from Ortberg 136-137
A New Promise
Confession is not just naming what we have done in the past. It involves our intentions about the future as well. It requires a kind of promise.
As God does His work in us through the process of confession, we will feel a deep desire not to do this hurtful thing again. So we make a vow, we resolve that with God’s help, we will change. This will involve trying to set right what we did wrong, to the extent that such is possible.
This is what Zacchaeus determined to do when he said, “I will repay anyone I’ve cheated four times over, and half of all my goods I will give to the poor” (Luke 19:8).
The level of our promise helps us to know whether we are actually repenting or just attempting damage control. Is our desire to set things right, or merely to minimize painful consequences?
In his classic book Forgive and Forget, Lewis Smedes wrote,
Why should you expect anyone to take your confession seriously unless you promise that you do not intend again to foul your relationship with still more of the same unfair pain? You can give no guarantee; the best of us go back on promises. But anyone who has been hurt should expect a sincere intention, at least (68).
The Summit: Healing Grace
The final step in confession - the top of the mountain - is grace. This not just the idea of grace, but grace as a reality, being immersed in it, given life by it.
In the movie The Mission, Robert De Niro plays a selfish, vile and brutal man, named Mendoza. Even though there seems to be no hope for him, he ultimately repents, and as an act of penance, he has to carry a heavy burden which is tied to his body everywhere he goes. Mendoza begins to see life differently, that everything he has built around his life, has become a burden - to him and to those whom he has hurt. He comes to see his own helplessness and dependence.
One day on a desperate climb up a mountain, Mendoze realizes he is not going to make it and as a result is risking the lives of others who are climbing with him. Suddenly one of the tribesman takes out a knife, and Mendoza fears for his life, but instead the knife cuts the rope that bound him to his burden. He is free. He will live. The burden is gone.
The giving of the burden was an act of grace. It caused pain and hardship, but it was grace all the same. The release from the burden was an even greater act of grace. So it is with confession.
