The Gift of Confession
Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. 2 Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. 3 While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. 4 For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. 5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin. 6 Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them. 7 You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance. 8 I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. 9 Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near you. 10 Many are the torments of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord. 11 Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.”
March 10, 2013
Psalm 32, The Gift of Confession
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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Many years ago in the dark ages before cell phones, Lillian Pearsall was a telephone operator. Once she had a customer who talked overtime on a long-distance call from a pay telephone booth (remember those?). She wrote, “Even with my friendly reminders, he refused to deposit his overtime coins. Instead he slammed down the phone, irate and verbally abusive. A few seconds later, he was back on my line – somewhat calmer. “Operator, please let me out of the phone booth – I’ll pay, I’ll pay, just let me out.” The customer mistakenly thought I had control of the phone booth’s doors and had locked him in! He gladly paid the overtime charge and with my advice gave the booth door a hefty kick to free himself.”
There is a sense in which we feel trapped by guilt when we have wronged someone else. If we want to be free from guilt it requires admitting our wrong, paying or making restitution if possible, and then going on our way, hopefully a little wiser and more humble from the experience.
We live in a time when there is little shame, remorse, or even understanding of what is right or wrong. This is partially due to the age we live in where many people subscribe to the idea: “You do your thing I’ll do mine. There are no truths that apply in all times and places. Believe whatever you want.” People go on television or YouTube and say and do things that would make a sailor blush and not only do people not feel guilty about it, they almost seem proud. The idea that what I do is my own business, that it only impacts and concerns me and not other people is simply ignorant. It’s not true. Most of our good and most of our sin directly involves, influences, and impacts other people and it indirectly influences many more. Not only that, but the scriptures teach that when we wrong another person we not only wrong them, we wrong God.
Listen to Numbers 5:5-7, “The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelites: When a man or a woman wrongs another, breaking faith with the LORD, that person incurs guilt and shall confess the sin that has been committed. The person shall make full restitution for the wrong, adding one-fifth to it, and giving it to the one who was wronged.”
There are some people who are so self-indulgent, ignorant or evil they have no sense of shame or remorse no matter what they do. Thankfully, these cases remain the exception. The dynamic present in these verses from Numbers describes what happens in a person with at least a little bit of conscience, who is open to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. First, Numbers says when we wrong another person we not only wrong them, we wrong God, we “break faith with the Lord.” As a result, we are guilty before God and we may feel guilty ourselves. The solution involves two steps. First, confess the sin that has been committed. I always liked the comic Calvin and Hobbes about a boy and his stuffed tiger friend. In The Essential Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Calvin says to Hobbes, “I feel bad that I called Susie names and hurt her feelings. I’m sorry I did it.” “Maybe you should apologize to her,” Hobbes suggests. Calvin ponders this for a moment and replies, “I keep hoping there’s a less obvious solution.” When we need to restore a relationship that we have harmed, with God or another person, the obvious solution is confessing our wrong or failure.
Secondly, as far as possible, we make restitution to the person we’ve wronged. A shoplifter wrote to a department store, “I just became a Christian and I can’t sleep at night because I feel guilty. So here’s the $100 I owe you.” He signed his name and then added a PS: “If I still can’t sleep, I’ll send you the rest of the money.”
Guilt isn’t good if we all do is wallow in it or try half-heartedly to make amends. Guilt can be good if it leads us to whole-hearted confession, repentance, and restitution. Several of the steps of AA and other recovery groups and programs are built upon this process from Numbers 5. In fact, Steps 5 through 10 are all based on the same principles. Step 5 is we “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Step 8 is we “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” These are good steps for anyone to take when we have wronged someone else and need to confess our sin. One person going through Step 5 wrote, “Because God and I have an understanding, I am free to bring my shortcomings to my Spiritual Friend. When I admit my imperfections to myself, I give myself a chance to make room for new attitudes and directions. My willingness to look beyond my defensive view, or my real or imagined hurts, gives me release from the job of carrying them around. If I can search them out and look at them, I can put them down. Learning to trust and confide in another person means ridding myself of the prejudices I’d acquired. My sponsor listened, just listened. What a relief it gave me to unburden myself and what a sense of freedom I felt.”
Confession relieves us from the crushing and destructive weight of guilt. That is what Psalm 32 makes clear. Psalm 32 begins by stating a demonstrable fact, “Happy,” or “Blessed are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” It feels good to be forgiven, which is the result of having confessed our sin. The Psalmist describes the physical symptoms of one who is carrying around unconfessed sin in verses 3-4, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” If we’ve ever sinned and known it and not confessed and asked for forgiveness, we know exactly what these verses are describing. Release, relief, restoration come when we do what verse 5 says, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” The rest of the Psalm goes on to affirm God’s caring protection, deliverance, and steadfast love that “surrounds those who trust in the Lord.” Rather than living with the torment of unconfessed sin and guilt, like the Psalmist, we can confess, be forgiven and (verse 11), “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice…and shout for joy….”
Sometimes when we’ve made a mistake, our tendency is to beat ourselves up over it, rather than confessing it and moving on. That isn’t good for us or for anyone else. It’s not healthy or helpful. Dorothy Sayers writes, “All of us, perhaps, are too ready, when our behavior turns out to have appalling consequences, to rush out and hang ourselves. Sometimes we do worse, and show an inclination to go out and hang other people.”[1] Some people may wonder what harm there is in not confessing our sins. One result can be that powerful, pent-up emotions of guilt, fear, shame and anger can come out in negative ways that hurt other people, sometimes even total strangers or family members who had nothing to do with our real issue, because we will not face up to our own responsibility.
If we refuse to confess our sins and choose instead to bury our guilt or our bitterness thinking no one else will be at risk, we’re deceiving ourselves. A number of years ago I read a story reported by the Associated Press. For 43 years Zinaida Bragantsova told people there was a World War Two bomb buried under her bed. The story began in 1941 when the German army advanced toward the Ukrainian city of Berdyansk. One night at the very start of the battle, she was sitting by the window at her sewing machine. Suddenly she heard a noise and a whistling close by. She got up and in a moment was struck by a blast of wind. When she came to, the sewing machine was gone and there was a hole in the floor as well as in the ceiling.
Zinaida couldn’t get any officials to check out her story, so she just moved her bed over the hole and lived with it – for the next 40 years! Finally, as phone cable was being laid in the area, demolition experts were called in to probe for buried explosives. “Where’s your bomb, grandma?” asked the smiling army lieutenant sent to talk to Mrs. Bragantsova. “No doubt, under your bed?” “Under my bed,” Mrs. Bragantsova answered dryly. Sure enough, there they found a 500 pound, 43-year-old bomb! After evacuating 2,000 people from the surrounding buildings, the bomb squad detonated the bomb. According to the report, “The grandmother, freed of her bomb, will soon receive a new apartment.” Many people live like that grandmother, with a bomb under their bed – a terrible secret, a great hurt, a seething anger that lays there corroding for years while everyone goes about their business. No one is safe or truly free until is removed.
Several of the songs we are singing today speak of the cross and Jesus sacrificial death on our behalf. We cannot run away from the terrible cost of the sins we need to confess. Some people don’t like to think about the terrible death Jesus endured and for good reason; it was awful, excruciatingly painful, and humiliating. Yet it was that death on the cross that makes forgiveness possible. God takes our sin and wrongdoing that seriously. God is faithful and just. God doesn’t sit idly by while humanity damages and destroys itself. The Creator provided an alternative conceived in the heart of God. 1 John tells us it is the blood of Jesus that cleanses us from all sin. Jesus’ blood, shed on our behalf, can free us from the burden of sin, relieving the crushing weight of guilt, and restoring our relationship with God and other people.
In the early church, confession and repentance was an involved process. Sin wasn’t seen as a private matter but as something that destroyed the unity of the church. People would fast and pray for the forgiveness of their sins, appeared before the church to make a public confession, and were barred from the Lord’s Supper until they gave evidence of a change of heart and were absolved. The only exception was for individuals facing persecution. They were readmitted to the Lord’s Supper so they could receive strength. In the first century, the Lord’s Supper included not only the bread and the cup, but an entire meal. As part of the meal, neighbors who quarreled made peace again.[2] Proverbs 28:13, “No one who conceals transgressions will prosper, but one who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
We all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and our own expectations. We have failures and shortcomings, but we remember the church is a fellowship of sinners who are seeking to be forgiven and to grow in living Christ-centered lives. I pray that we all will confess to God the secret and hidden sin we’re carrying today. May we be free from our sins including the delusion that our sins aren’t hurting anybody else when they’re hurting ourselves, God, and others. We who follow Jesus have the ministry of bringing God’s forgiveness to one another (John 20:23).
May we be the kind of people who listen to the burdens of another person’s heart and soul with love, mercy, and uttermost trust and confidentiality and I pray we can find a person like that for ourselves to talk to as well.
Let’s go to God in prayer.
Call to Confession 1 John 1:8-10
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
Silent Individual Confession
Unison Prayer of Confession
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry, and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.
Assurance of Forgiveness 1 John 4:9-11
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.
The Gift of Confession Psalm 32
Have you ever felt trapped by guilt after having wronged someone else?
When we wrong another person we not only wrong them, we ___________________________________________.
It is a delusion to think our sin doesn’t hurt anybody else.
When we feel guilty we should _________________________________.
Secondly, as far as possible, we ___________________________________.
Guilt can be good if it leads us to ________________________________, ______________________________________, & _______________________________________.
Confession is a gift because it relieves us from __________________________________________________.
What harm can come from not confessing our sins?
What blessing can come from confessing them and letting them go?