Confession
From the Series: Ritual
Speaker: Joel Schmidgall
Date: November 8, 2009
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Transcript
NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH
November 8, 2009
Rituals: Confession
Joel Schmidgall
It’s good to see everyone! How ya doing? Welcome to everyone watching over at Ballston, I miss you guys today. Welcome to everyone at our Georgetown location, welcome to Kingstowne and here at Ebenezers. I’m excited about this weekend, we continue our ‘Rituals’ series. We are rediscovering truths in the ancient practices. Today, I want to talk about the ritual of confession.
I was talking last week with a friend and we were talking about this subject of confession. He started talking about his life and we ended up talking about the group Alcoholics Anonymous, so AA as you know is across the United States. It is a 12-step recovery program for those who are involved a little too much with alcohol. It peaks my interest. It intrigues me because God and confession are so involved in this program. So I thought, ‘What better way to learn about confession than to go to an AA meeting?’ So, last Tuesday, I showed up at Club Metropolis in D.C. with 40 others who had struggled with alcohol. I sat there and you start with introductions, and being the only guest there, I was a little nervous, but stood up and confidently stepped forward and said, “My name is Mark Batterson and I’m an alcoholic!” First they start with the 12 steps and they go through that, and then the facilitator just starts calling on people. He keeps getting closer to me and I’m getting nervous and thinking, ‘What can I say?’ I’m not an alcoholic so I can’t stand up and lie but I can’t stand up and say, ‘I’m not an alcoholic,’ because everyone’s heard that story, right? Yeah, right! You are in stage one, brother! I started thinking of other addictions, maybe I could share something, and I’m thinking, ‘I love food and I eat way too much,’ but I’m skinny and they’re not going to buy that. Luckily, they didn’t call on me. But they went around to different people and I was amazed at this environment that I was in. I heard about a guy who had been struggling at work and anger had overcome him at work and he just shared openly and honestly about some of his struggles. Then it went to a guy who shared about a couple months ago, he relapsed a couple of months ago, but he said that’s ok because it’s about standing back up again and keeping going. He said that every single day and every single week I struggle and I go 24 hours at a time just trying to make it through. He said, “I want a drink right now,” and people are nodding and getting into it; and I’m in this environment and I’m amazed at how welcoming and how freeing it was just to sit with 40 strangers and hear people confess. There was no pretense in the room. There was nothing fake about it. People were who they said they were. They share these things and I’m thinking this is amazing! What an incredibly welcoming and freeing environment. I remember the facilitator ended with a simple statement that really stuck out to me. He said, “If you are honest about anything, then anything can change.” And I sat there believing that, looking around and believing that change will happen in a lot of these people.
In many ways, the church has built an environment that is completely contradictory to what I just talked about. That our darkest sins and secrets are darkest in the church, or they are darkest around other believers, and we feel like we have to be someone. Or maybe more, we feel like we have to show the best side of us at all times. It’s not that we can’t be who we are, it’s that we feel like we constantly have to be the best of us around other Christians. Part of that is really a positive and healthy thing in the sense that we need to challenge each other and spur each other on and we need to sharpen one another and make each other better and live lives that we know we can, but then there is another part of it that is completely dysfunctional and incongruent with the way that Christ lived his life and interacted with other people. When Christ got around certain people, you could not hide anything from Jesus. And if you tried, He would call you out. He would embarrass you, He would make things known, He would expose you. So let me just remind us of something today. We are a community of sinners. We have all messed up, we have all sinned, we have all lost our cool, we have all lost control of our lives, and it is good to sometimes remember that. Grace is the same, in all of these rows, in all of our workplaces and in all of our circumstances. We can learn a little bit from what we just heard.
Many of us, including myself, are too prideful to be able to step out and admit our weaknesses. Admitting is tough, it’s tough to cross over that line, but if we do, amazing forgiveness and healing and a wonderful freedom waits on the other side.
I John 1:9 says: If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We don’t just received God’s grace by hearing it in a sermon. We don’t just receive it by reading our Bible. We don’t just receive it by believing it. How do we receive it? IF, IF you confess your sin. The word for confess here in the Greek means to say the same, to admit or declare oneself guilty of what one is accused. But it is more than just saying you are sorry once for a sin. The verb is a present tense verb, so more accurately, you could say, if we keep on confessing our sins, He is faithful and just. So it is a continuous action, not just a one and done.
I used to have a friend in Bible college, we would go sit down for lunch and we’d be ready to pray and he would just start eating, and we’d asking him what’s going on, and he’d say, ‘I covered all this month’s meals earlier this week, so I just prayed for them all, so I’m good to go.’ We laughed. Only if sin worked like that! If tonight, we could just cover everything, ‘God we come before You and ask that You would cover the rest of our sins for the rest of our lives and we’re good to go.’ It doesn’t exactly work like that though because it is relational. There is a continuous on-going effort in relationship. So when it says that we are forgiven, it means two things. One, legally, it also says that God is a just God, so when there is sin, there is also punishment. But Jesus came and died on the cross, paying the punishment for our sins, so He forgives us of the penalty of our sins. Number two and more importantly is relationally. God comes to bridge the gap, to close the lines so that we can again come into this intimate and this deep, this vulnerable relationship with God. When we come before Him and we lay these things out, He is faithful to respond.
Adrian Rodgers says confession is to be the habitual practice of the believer. In other words, when is the last time that you stopped and prayed and confessed to God? When is the last time you stopped and you realized the wrong and the sin in your heart and you prayed and you laid it at God’s feet. If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just, ‘to’ meaning, ‘in order that’ we confess in order that we can be forgiven of our sins and cleansed from all unrighteousness. So, God promises two things, one, forgiveness, and two, a cleansing. He promises to forgive, to remove sin, the remittance of guilt. When I said earlier that it is a continual verb, if you keep on confessing. That means a continuous relationship, it doesn’t mean that you continue to confess the same sin over and over. No, we confess it once and God let’s go of it, He releases it. But some of us like to hold on to things. We like to live in shame and in guilt, but God forgives and we hold on. The Scriptures says I have forgiven you.
Romans 8, therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Let go of that stuff. We have no right to hold captive shame and guilt that is not ours. We can’t horde guilt. God says, ‘That is mine, I’m going to dispose of it.’ If you’ve confessed a sin 100 times, that’s 99 times too many. The more biblical approach would be to confess a sin once and then to thank God 99 times for his forgiveness in your life. His forgiveness is ongoing.
Second, He cleanses us and purifies us from the dirt and the filthiness. He takes away the unrighteousness. II Corinthians 5:21: God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God. Not only are we challenged to confess our sin, but we are challenged to confess our righteousness. Most of us are reticent of the sins that we need to confess, but we are clueless about the righteousness that we must confess before God. We forget that righteousness has been credited to our account. Why do we stay so focused on the negative in our lives and in our confession when God says, ‘I have replaced that with righteousness in your life.’ I feel like there is this erosion of the Christian arsenal that we have in confession. I’m talking about something really complicated, this is going to blow you away. Ready? Bible memory verses! Genius! In meeting with people and counseling with people, I find myself more and more recommending that they spend some time in a passage of the Bible. Maybe they need to take a week or a month and just live in this chapter. You need to memorize a couple of these verses. If you are struggling with knowing God, then go in and pull out the prayers of Jesus and memorize those and pray them and confess them to God.
Romans 8, we are more than conquerors through Him who loves us. Isn’t this what the Psalmist does? David, one of our favorite Psalm, Psalm 23, The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie in green pastures, He leads me beside still waters, He restores my soul. I love the language of it. He guides me, He leads me into righteousness for his name’s sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff comfort me. And David gets his confession on and he lays it out there. We forget, we get so focused and so self-centered. We think it is all about us and confessing what’s wrong with us before God before we can have a relationship with Him, but what about confessing the exchange that He has made? He says you are a righteous people, confess that you are righteous, that He is your leader and your guide and your comfort and your forgiver and your restorer and your redeemer and your Savior and your friend, that He is with you. God, we thank You that You never leave us or forsake us. It says that He is with us even until the very end of the age. We need to confess the righteousness of God. It is a shedding of sin and putting on righteousness. The old has gone and the new has come.
I love the way Richard Foster says it. He says that without the cross, the discipline of confession would be only psychologically therapeutic. I’m not talking about five steps to feeling better about yourself, but he says so much more. I love this part, he says that confession involves an objective change in our relationship with God and a subjective change in us. It is a means of healing and transforming our inner spirit. Amen. What I’m saying is that the heart of our life in God is more than confessing our sin, it is confessing his love for us. In a relationship, it does wonders if you can simply go to the other person and admit that you are wrong, right? We all know that. The problem for most of us is that we are not wrong, ever! Come on! Neither Nina nor I are ever wrong, what a combination! But it can do wonders if you are able to come and confess things that are wrong. You are ahead of most people if you are doing that.
But there is a second step to this, a more important step. If I come to Nina and apologize and say I’m sorry and that I shouldn’t have said that and I shouldn’t have treated you that way and ask her to forgive me, there is a second part that takes it to the next level. Will you forgive me? I love you. It’s the positive portion of confession. The first doesn’t matter without the second. You can’t get the first if you don’t have the second. The first always comes before the second but the second is the piece that matters most. Isn’t that what our heavenly Father wants from us?
Early on in our marriage, it was ‘I’m sorry and I love you.’ Then Nina would say, ‘But are you in love with me?’ I don’t know what that means, but yes. If we can only have that attitude with God. Confession, to get out of this little box that we live in. It is more than looking inside of us, it is about looking outside to God. If we merely focus on the wrong in ourselves, we miss the point of an incredible relationship with an amazing God.
When my two-and-a-half year old little girl Ella gets corrected, there are different forms of discipline that will happen. If she decides after the correction to throw a fit, then we’ll go this route, but sometimes she is able to pause and collect herself and she will come to me and say, “I love you and I’m sorry.” It gets me every time! That little girl owns me! She can have whatever she wants. Her new thing is, I’ll put her down to bed at night, and she knows, she doesn’t want to go to bed, and she’ll say, “Daddy, can we snuggle and watch baseball?” I go Obama on her: “Yes we can!” My goal is life is never to say no to that request. I have done my work as a Dad. I love it. She makes me so happy. And even when she messes up, she is able to understand and ask forgiveness and express her love. It brings joy to my heart. Isn’t that what the heavenly Father in the way that He responds to us, He knows that we are going to mess up and He knows we are going to fail and He knows we are going to blow it, but He loves it when we can come before Him and confess and tell Him we’ve messed up but we know that You still love us and we love You.
So the question is – what kind of confession is pleasing to God? St. Alfonsus Lagori wrote this: For a good confession, three things are necessary, an examination of conscience, sorrow, and determination to avoid sin. So it starts with what we historically have known as examine or self-examination. God has built within us what we know as a conscience, that little thing that squirms inside of us when we know we are doing the wrong thing. We try to suppress it, we try to get rid of it, we try to silence it, we try to hit it with a baseball bat and get it out of our system, but God says we need to face up to that. We need to face up to what is going on inside us. Search me O God and know my heart, cries David in Psalm 139. A man who failed but was called a man after God’s own heart because he came back and he confessed and he got right with God. In I Corinthians where we read the communion passage, later on today we will share communion, it says a man ought to examine himself before he drinks of the bread and eats of the cup. It is examining within us. We experience examine in a relationship, right? When we have a dispute or an argument, we usually have a time where we can look inside and examine things in our own heart. It usually starts by just replaying those things and we come up with that perfect zinger. If we get back to that argument, we’re going to nail it. Then it goes into, well, I’m going to give a sarcastic response that will completely dismantle the argument of the other person and they will fall at our feet and say they are sorry. Then reality hits us and we come back down to earth and we think about our motive, and we wonder why we said it that way. Ya know, in relationship, if I didn’t have God and if I didn’t have prayer, I don’t know where I would end up, because so many times, I have to come before God and I get redirected. ‘God, I shouldn’t have said that, my motive was wrong, I was just emotional and I just wanted to win the argument.’ Examination happens within relationship. That’s exactly what examine is talking about. We just need to do that. We need to come before the Lord and allow Him to probe and reach inside our hearts. What are does things that we have to discern are blocking our relationship with God?
After examine, there should be a form of brokenness or contrition.
Psalm 51:16-17: You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
The Puritans used to call it the gift of tears. For you at Kingstowne, you know because Pastor Chris lives in the gift of tears. We go to our staff meetings on Tuesday mornings and a cool testimony will be shared and the gift of tears has come over him in a Hallmark kind of way. My wife has the same gift. She can utilize it watching The Biggest Loser. I don’t watch that, for the record. But the idea is that repentance, that our guilt for our sins is a gift from God. Puritans, they didn’t call them Christians, they called themselves Repenters. I love that. I think we can learn a lot from that, and I think we can learn a lot from them because we have devalued the currency of grace by accepting it’s merit without knowing it’s Maker. We love grace, we love the economy of grace. I never get any negative emails when I talk about grace in a sermon because we all love, we all need it, we all want some more of it! We love grace, but we don’t like talking about the penalty that was paid for us to receive that grace. How much spiritual debt have we built up? What is our national spiritual debt at right now? It is an amazing amount, and to wipe that away, something had to happen, someone had to make a sacrifice so that our slate could be wiped clean. We don’t like to talk about the other side of it, but it’s not all bad when you come before the Lord and repent, to feel a little bit of sorrow and brokenness because of what we have caused God and how we have broken relationship with Him. The forgiveness of God is overwhelming. His goodness and his healing and his forgiveness’ should overwhelm us.
Charles Spurgeon said prayer is the falling of a tear. Our brokenness is the beginning of God’s grace. So we must have contrition and confession. At the same time, there has to be a termination point of self-examination. If not, it turns into a habit of self-condemnation. We have to be able to let go of those things. Richard Foster said confession begins in sorrow but ends in joy. So confession starts with examine, then it is followed by contrition, but it takes wings with a determination to change what we would call repentance.
As much as confession is a healthy practice, there are very unhealthy ways to express it. You just have to go on to your Google search engine and type in anonymous confessions and you will find some crazy, freaky stuff all over the place. You’ll see that some people just want to dump and run. They want to remove the guilt from their lives and let go and move on, but sometimes there should be accountability within confession, so that we don’t do the same things over and over. Transparency is not the only aim of confession. Transparency is a step above hypocrisy but it is still a step away from humility. Hypocrisy says ‘I didn’t do it’ or ‘it is not a big deal’ but transparency says ‘I did it but I’m human, so what?’ Humility says ‘I did it, I’m wrong, I’m sorry, will you forgive me, I want to change.’ There’s a big difference going from transparency to humility. Honoring God is not the absence of failure, it’s the presence of humility.
Humility finds its hardest challenge we see in James 5:16: Therefore 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. Ultimately, we believe that we have direct access to God; that He has paid the penalty for our sin, that we can go to Him and receive forgiveness from Him and Him alone, that we find salvation in Him, but this Scripture is about the prayer portion. We go and we confess to one another for prayer and for help and for encouragement and for community and for accountability. We are called to confess to those around us.
I got an email this week from an NCCer who said I could share this. He wanted to share how confession to God had changed his life. He said this:
“I have struggled with pornography since I was 10. I grew up in the church and I always understood that what I was doing was wrong. At first I didn’t want to repent and later I didn’t feel that I could and would never be able to stop. I brought the sin with me into my marriage and just when I hoped that things would get better, they got worse. I was trapped with my sin. After being embolden to take action, I spoke with my wife. Confessing to her enabled me to bring it to God and lay it down at a level I had never experienced. Additionally, crucially, my wife forgave me and became an ally in a struggle I spent almost two decades losing on my own. She was a person who knew my ugly truth, someone I could turn to for help, someone I could tell when I was worried. She loved me and this from a person I had wronged. She forgave me and she didn’t storm out. She met me where I was and our relationship changed. The best 18 months of our marriage have followed. My confession didn’t eliminate the problem, but it established an ally and a line in the sand. This sin hasn’t left me alone, but everything, everything is different. For the first time, I feel like I am being honest with God when I pray. I can feel forgiveness.”
I wonder how many stories here today could be told similar to the first half of this email, where we can sit down and talk about decades of sin or addiction in our life, something that has consumed us and controlled us for so long. My point is not this particular sin, we all have our first page, we all have our first portion of an email. Maybe it is jealousy for you, maybe it is talking behind people’s back, maybe it is cheating or deceiving or lying. It is different for all of us but we all have that first page. The big question is how many of us can write the second portion of that email? Where it talks about healing and confession, where it talks about confessing to God and to someone else, where it talks about the restoration of relationship.
Mike Foster blew me away on this point. He says we celebrate each other’s success but we identify with each other’s failures. When you can see someone’s limp, you trust them. But we censor our weaknesses when we have success. What would the gospel be if we censored the cross out of it? The gospel message is all about our failure, not hiding our pain. Confession changes the course of relationship, doesn’t it?
I had a friend for a number of years, a good friend. We’d get together and enjoy hanging out and we had like interests, but one day he did something. He confessed it to God, then he confessed it to me, and it completely changed our relationship. The relationship went from a good relationship to a close relationship, one where we could share our inner thoughts, where we could talk about what was going on in our lives, where we could pray together. He would challenge me and I would challenge him. Confession changes the course of relationships.
A lot of people here might know it through mission trips. What we do on our mission trips, a lot of times, we’ll have everyone share their story at some point on a mission trip. It is so much fun when I lead trips because the first couple of days it’s good because people share, but it’s usually day two or three that someone shares their story and they just get way too honest! You are sitting there getting nervous and it’s awkward but you know what happens though, they usually break down and share the brokenness in their life and it changes the course of that trip and it changes every person on that trip. And every night on that trip after that when we share stories, people start their stories by saying they weren’t going to share but then when the other person shared, they decided they need to share that part of their life. There is a give and take in that. Transparency breeds transparency. Humility breeds humility. When you share and confess, and when someone else does, it sucks you in and pulls you in and you can’t help but do the same. There is wonderful fruit that comes from it and relationships are changed, and God enters into this equation and we go from celebrating successes to identifying with weaknesses and finding a place where we can come out of these things.
I pray today that the ritual of confession will grip us in a new way. I pray today that Christ will get a hold of our hearts. I pray today that those of us who don’t know freedom would become acquainted with freedom. In the Scripture, it says that Jesus came to set the captives free. We usually think of physical captives, like the Israelites being taken captive, but I believe it is more than that. For those of us who are captives today, in our hearts, in our minds and in our emotions, we are captives, Jesus came to set you free. Matthew 11, He says, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laiden.” I love it, it is beautiful.
Instead of me closing this sermon, I want to ask a friend to come and share their story. I pray and I hope that it leads you into a personal place of confession.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
