We live in a confessional culture. It’s been called the "Urge to Purge." Or even "Psychic Bulimia." I can remember back when Phil Donahue was shocking. But these days the things people have to display to get on Jerry Springer or Sally Jessie Raphael hardly raise an eyebrow in the culture. We’ve gotten so jaded that the heavily hyped disclosures in magazines celebrating celebrity rarely get much more than a yawn. The only movie stars, musicians, or politicians who get criticized for revealing their addictions, weaknesses, foibles or faux pas are the ones who have had the temerity to stand up for traditional morality. The only sin that can’t be forgiven is the idea that forgiveness might actually be necessary. Aside from that, the more bizarre and pathetic the behavior being admitted, the better. Confession, it seems, is now seen less as good for the soul than as good for publicity. Thomas Robert Dewar's sage observation that "confessions may be good for the soul but they are bad for the reputation" is quaintly passe. Increasingly the quest for fame calls for infamy.
And this strange reversal about the nature of confession has even invaded the church. The act of confession in many cases has become a formal assurance that people are basically O.K., that no real transformation of the heart is necessary. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together asked “whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness." Now, more than fifty years later, I’ve attended countless meetings with fellow pastors about how to attract Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers and so on back to the church. One of the ideas being floated is leaving the confession out altogether. “That puts people off,” they say, “It gives them a negative feeling about God.” Or "they already feel bad enough."
And believe it or not, I can understand that. The night before I became a Christian, I spent about 2 hours talking to the man who was my pastor me during the first half of my Christian life - the first 8 years. I had a lot of questions... like, did I have to believe in a 6-day creation. But the most important one, I think, was, “Did I have to say I was a bad person?” And John said, “No, all I had to say was that I needed God.” I don’t think I really started to understand sin and confession until at least a couple of years later. I thought being a sinner meant being a bad person, and I didn’t think I was. All I knew was that I was starving to death.
I was really lucky to get John as my spiritual leader. Because most of the people I met later at the Baptist seminary where I studied were convinced that people had to start with a conviction of sin before they could come to a saving knowledge of God. And in a way that’s true.
But if you’re brought up in a culture that (1) defines sin as ‘bad things that you should be punished for’ and (2) doesn’t think people should be punished for anything but intolerance or, maybe, murder, how can you even identify the need that drives you to God as ‘conviction of sin’? Hunger, yes, emptiness, yes, need, yes... but guilt?
Some people are so wounded that they cannot bear to face their own sense of guilt, because it is not safe. Life has taught them that love is conditional, and that confession will be met with punishment and shaming, rather than cleansing and renewal. For these, the initial embrace of God’s people does, indeed, need to be gentle and affirming. But in order to grow, eventually we must all face our own internal demons - we all have them - and turn them over to God to deal with.
Psalm 32 is one of the great penitential Psalms. One of the greatest gifts David gave God’s people was to teach us how to repent. Because no matter what it is that we have done, or said, or thought, or felt, I doubt that any of us can outdo King David. He seduced a woman and then killed her husband to keep from being found out. And yet as soon as he saw what he had done, David brought it to God, saying in Psalm 51, "You desire truth in our inmost parts," and "create in me a pure heart, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." He knew that God alone could create that clean heart, that it was not within his power to cleanse himself. And later in Psalm 139 David said, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me..." For he knew that there might be other areas of his life about which he was deceiving himself. Being honest with God often entails going back and retrieving more forgotten items from the back of our mental storage bins.
But Psalm 32 is a particularly good one for the beginner. It’s really a primer on penitence, the ABC’s of contrition. It takes us through three basic lessons on confession.
The first lesson is on Why. Why confess?
What is the reason for us to confess our sins in the first place? Other passages throughout Scripture tell us that confession is necessary to produce holiness, which is the state of being in right standing with God, constantly submitting our failures and weaknesses to God, not just once but through an ongoing, daily process. But this psalm tells us that confession is needed for something even the newest Christian can understand. Confession preserves and restores health.
H. Newton Maloney, in Living the Answers, tells the story of Hobart Mowrer, a much respected professor of psychology at the U of Illinois. Eventually he was even elected to the Presidency of the American Psychological Association. Yet in his personal quest for psychological stability he continued to be a failure. In fact he assumed his role as president a year late, because he was hospitalized with clinical depression at the time he should have taken office. After years of battling with the weight of this depression, Mowrer finally was restored to health through a remarkably simple process. Mowrer had all but given up on besting the beast when he found aid from what was for him an unlikely source. The chaplain at the hospital where he was staying counseled him extensively and ultimately agreed with a fellow minister that Mowrer's depression stemmed from the guilt of sinning. Their advice: "Confess your sins, and you will get well." Struck by their words, Mowrer decided to act. When next he attended his home church, First Presbyterian of Urbana, IL, he rose to his feet and confessed the sins he had long suppressed. This initial action was followed by two more events. First, Mowrer validated his confessions by attending to the necessary restitution each incident demanded. Second, he got well.
That's exactly the point that David, the psalmist, makes in verses 3-4. In these two verses, David is essentially saying that as long as he refused to bring his mistakes - his misdeeds - his sins - to God, he was miserable. His silence before God made his life nearly unbearable! Look at what he says in these verses:
"My bones wasted away." This may be metaphorical - but it can also mean actual, literal, physical deterioration. This should be a real wake-up call for us. When we talk about the effects of sin, we normally talk in terms of spiritual deterioration, possibly emotional or mental damage. And David does hint at that in the second part of verse 4, "My vitality failed as with the dry heat of summer." But let's also take the psalmist's lead here and not forget about the physical devastation that can come from mental and emotional disorder. This may be a surprising idea to some people. But if you think about it, you've likely experienced it yourself. I know I have. If you know you’ve done something wrong, if gnaws at you. It may keep you from sleeping, destroy your appetite or digestion, and who knows? Maybe even ulcers and headaches and heart attacks? And that’s even without knowing God, and knowing not only THAT you owe him, but WHAT you owe him. And of course if you do, that makes the effects that much worse. If you know, absolutely beyond any doubt, that something, some piece of your life is not pleasing to God; or if you know that some action or habit or thought in some way has damaged yourself or others, or damaged God’s reputation, you carry that with you each day. To keep all those feelings inside and hide them, to carry that burden around with you rather than laying it before God - isn’t it physically taxing, a gnawing feeling that saps your energy, your enthusiasm, your motivation? Make no mistake about it: when a Christian sins, God -` through the conviction of the Holy Spirit - will make absolutely certain that he or she knows about it! Not that all illness is caused by unconfessed sin, mind you - but all unconfessed sin IS hazardous to your health.
What is the reason for confession? In a word, it's survival. We all know you can’t make it through eternity without confession and forgiveness, but you can't even survive in this life - at least not as a productive member of the Kingdom - without it.
Our second lesson, after "Why?" is, obviously, How.
Once you’ve decided to do some soul searching and bring your shortcomings before God, what do you do with it? David gives us directions in verse 5. David finally realized that the reason he was so drained - physically and spiritually - was that he was hiding from God, and that he needed to admit his failures and weaknesses. It's amazing how "getting something off our chest" makes it easier to breathe, isn't it. And the way he goes about it teaches us something important about sin, and about also about ourselves. In this verse, three different words are used to describe evil thoughts and deeds. In many English Bibles - KJV, NIV, RSV - they are translated as "sin," "iniquity," and "transgression," in that order. In others the words are sin, guilt, and wrongdoing. But whichever you use, those three different words in Hebrew represent three different levels, three aspects of the basic wrongness that plagues every human being in the world.
The first level is the word which appears here as, simply, "sin" [h’tah]. This refers to individual, specific acts of wrongdoing. The literal translation is “to miss the mark,” to make a mistake. These are the actual things we do (or don’t do), sins of commission and sins of omission. When we talk about "sin" or "evil" this is often all the farther we go. Yet these are actually only the obvious, external signs of what is sometimes called our "sin nature," what Paul calls “the flesh”, that part of each one of us that pulls us toward doing things that are wrong or harmful. “Sin” in this sense is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. And if all we talk about are the specific identifiable acts of sin that we've committed, we’re leaving far more important stuff simmering away under the surface.
Which brings us to the next word, "transgression" [‘avon]. This is the second level of sin, and it refers to a basic attitude of rebellion. It's a word for a mind that's already made up to sin. And as such, it's more serious and actually more dangerous than just the individual sinful actions that you or I might commit. Because sins, or sinful actions, are one-time events; but "transgression," a condition of mind that is favorable towards sin, is continuous. It's a self-centered orientation; it's a decision to ignore God - at least to some extent - as we go about our business. One can be filled with ‘avon’ without any visible ‘h’tah’ to show for it.
Finally, the third level, the deepest level, of our propensity to sin is represented by the word "iniquity" [psha’]. The same Hebrew word gives us words like "twisted" or "crooked;" and "iniquity" indeed refers to a basic crookedness in our nature, our natural bent, so to speak, which leads to the attitude or mind set of rebellion against God - transgression - which in turn leads to actual, specific "sins." Notice, then, how sin has deep roots. It’s worse than crabgrass, and mowing the tops off - you should excuse the expression - just doesn’t cut it.
Notice again the words David uses: ‘Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, "I will confess my transgressions to YHWH," and you forgave the guilt of my sin. [Ps 32:5] Notice that David's plea for forgiveness doesn’t stop at the action level, or at the attitude level; but goes all the way to the very essence of his identity as a human being.
Often, in our prayers of confession, we spend a lot of time cataloguing our sins. This can be a very frustrating, negative process. On the other hand, some people often sound almost proud of how much God has had to forgive them for. But if we follow David's example in this psalm, we can realize that even though we do need to repent of individual acts that we've done - the important part of confession is the simple plea, "Lord, I confess to you that at the core I am rebellious and disobedient, and I need you to heal me and change me.”
God desires to be at work at the deepest level of our lives, and God has the perfect tools to do just that. Why don’t more of us allow God to work at that level? Maybe because it costs more... It’s not so hard to stop for a moment and rattle off a few specific lapses in a mechanical sort of way, and ask for forgiveness, and go away comfortably convinced that we've engaged in a fruitful process of confession and cleansing. It's much harder, more time consuming, more demanding, more potentially dangerous to our lifestyle to let confession go deep, to give God permission to root around in the dusty corners of our souls. But that is what real confession requires. Anything short of that is a sham, a show, a shell-game in which we try to direct God’s attention away from the real problem.
And you’ll notice that God's forgiveness runs just as deep as David’s confession. verse 5 "...and you forgave the guilt of my sin," or alternately the "iniquity of my sin" (it's the same word). God not only forgave David for the specific things he'd done wrong; he forgave David for the very iniquity, the very nature of crookedness, that led to them. That is the nature of true confession which leads to true forgiveness.
Which brings us to lesson 3, What. What does confession get us?
This is the exciting part. We've already noted two of the results of confession; and that is, (1) confession brings health, and (2) confession brings forgiveness. [1 John 1:9] But there are even greater results. Because the What that we get from confessing is actually twofold: it's both a Where - a place - and a Who - a person. David has a name for it here. It is "The Hiding Place." " You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance. [Ps 32:6-8.] The Hiding Place - the place of refuge and comfort and peace that David had been seeking, that place of rest from sin, he finally found it in the very person he had been running from. David had tried to find The Hiding Place on his own, by hiding from sin, covering it up, hiding from God. But God is not fooled - there is no hiding place from God. Adam and Eve found that out, as they tried to hide from God after they ate the apple, Jonah the prophet found it out, as he tried to escape YHWH’s call to Nineveh and ended up in a fish. And now, David finds this out, too.
David discovered that not only couldn't he hide from God, he didn’t need to! Because after he came out of hiding, and laid his sin on the altar before God, he realized that, while there may not be any Hiding Place from God, there is a perfect Hiding Place with God. "You are my hiding place."
You will find two things in The Hiding Place, two things that you can only get as you engage in an ongoing process of confession and renewal. First, you'll find safety. God protects us from getting into trouble, God gives us rest from the labors and anxieties of daily life, and God delivers us from the enemies that pursue us. And second, you'll find God's presence. That’s more than just a fuzzy feeling of God "being right here beside me." God's presence is what gives us what we need to make it through each day. God gives us wisdom, God gives us guidance. You see, it is only at the point of true confession, when we've completely opened ourselves up to God, that we are truly teachable. Only after we've stopped stuffing our sin out of sight can we be filled with the truth and wisdom of the Holy Spirit. And to top it all off, along with his presence, God gives us purpose. Once we have stopped hiding from God, we are ready to be equipped to be sent back into the world to do God’s work, to bring God’s presence and protection and power and promise to others.
We may live in a confessional culture, but we don’t have to let our culture pervert confession, rob it of its cleansing power. There is an old story about the man who wrote a letter to the IRS and enclosed five $100 bills. In the letter he admitted having cheated the IRS back in 1970 and that he had not slept well since. He closed the letter as follows: "If I don't sleep better now, having enclosed the five $100 bills, I will send the rest later." Don’t take the halfway route with God. Whatever is stuffed away in the corners of your soul, root it out and give it to God. Get the poison out of your system, let your spirit inhale God’s Spirit. Or if it’s too much for you, just point it out to God and give him permission to deal with it. You can trust him.
