Confession of Sin

CONFESSION OF SIN

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9 HCSB).

When it comes to living the Christian life few things matter more than confession of sin. For this reason 1 John 1:9 is one of the most important verses in the entire Bible for Christians because it reveals how to remove the sin that barricades and therefore isolates us from God, others, and even ourselves. Whenever we sin it’s like building a wall between ourselves and everyone else. As long as that wall stands we can’t be as close to God and others as we would be if the wall were not present. In like manner, when we have unconfessed sin we can’t be as fruitful in our Christian living as we would be otherwise. Confession is the only explosive powerful enough to take down the wall. That means that we are capable of intimate fellowship with God and others as well as being fruitful in Christian living only when we willingly and sincerely confess our sins.

But what does confession really mean? Some people believe it means we can do whatever we want and then expect everything to be okay so long as we go to God in prayer and tell him what we did. That most certainly isn’t confession in the biblical sense because the Bible does not teach that we can sin as we please. Jesus came into this world to set us free from sin (Romans 6:22). Since we have died to sin, as Paul puts it, we certainly cannot continue to live in it (Romans 6:1-2). Instead, we are to walk in a new way of life (Romans 6:4 HCSB).Because God sees everything we do, hears everything we say, and knows our every thought, he doesn’t need us to verbalize our wrongdoings to him. He already knows them. Confession is for our benefit, not God’s.

Yet if confession doesn’t mean we have freedom to live as we please, what does it mean? Confession means that when we do sin we must acknowledge to God our wrongdoing. It is our admission that we were wrong and God is right. God is always right, and whenever our actions, words, or thoughts do not measure up to God’s standards we have sinned and need to confess. Apart from confession our fellowship with God will suffer.

But notice I didn’t say that sin destroys our fellowship with God. I am addressing Christians. Sin obviously destroyed the relationship between God and unbelievers, but for those of us who are believers the situation is radically different. Sin does not destroy our legal standing with God— Therefore, no condemnation now exists for those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1 HCSB)—but it does disrupt our fellowship with God. The Baptist Faith and Message has a section called “God’s Purpose of Grace.” The second paragraph of that section says,

All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end. Believers may fall into sin through neglect and temptation, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, and bring reproach on the cause of Christ and temporal judgments on themselves; yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.

This statement clarifies the difference between our legal standing with God and our relationship with God. Our position in Christ is secure because salvation does not depend on our works but is a free gift from God: For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God's gift—not from works, so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8-9 HCSB).If our salvation did depend on our works our legal standing with God would be changed when we sin. But when Christ died on the cross he paid for all our sins—past, present, and future—without distinction. Because of this we don’t lose our salvation every time we sin. We remain children of God when we sin the same way we remain the children of our earthly parents even when we disobey them.

Nevertheless, when we sin we do great harm. Let’s look at what sort of harm we do when we sin.

On a personal level, sin puts us in conflict against ourselves. Recall the words of Paul: For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate (Romans 7:15 NASB). Here Paul describes himself as a man who can’t get himself together. He doesn’t really understand what he is doing. He’s not doing what he wants to do. He’s doing what he hates. Clearly he is experiencing inner turmoil. Some interpreters believe Paul describes here his life before he came to know Christ, whereas others believe Paul refers to his life as a Christian. Either way, the text clearly describes how sin has produced inner conflict in Paul. Everyone experiences similar struggles. Sin takes us down a path where we can’t truly pull ourselves together and get rightly aligned. This works itself out in different ways: selfishness, self-deception, living in self-destructive ways, being dominated by shame and guilt, and in some cases it leads to self-destruction.

Sin also throws us out of kilter with creation. As Bruce Milne writes, “This is manifest as exploitation, the needless destruction of the world without thought for its created beauty or intrinsic worth. It is also manifest as pollution, the selfish and rapacious use of raw materials, contaminating the oceans and the very atmosphere, all too often in the interests of economic profit, luxury and self-indulgence.”[1]

Going one step further, sin wreaks havoc on our relationships with others. James Leo Garrett writes, “Human society under the influence of sin is a veritable network of evil.”[2] Milne elaborates quite helpfully:

Sin brings conflict and produces the great divisions of humankind. It causes racial prejudice and antagonism. It builds the great international power blocs. It creates social divisions and so leads to group and class conflict; it separates the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. It causes conflict within all human groups, whether educational, community, social, leisure or religious. It divides families and churches….

Sin also produces exploitation; we ‘use’ our neighbours. We exploit them to bolster our self-esteem, to justify our evil schemes and to support our weaknesses. We make them the scapegoat for our own frustrations and sense of guilt. This exploitation can even be expressed in open physical or psychological violence; in the male-female relationship it has been expressed historically in male domination, the use of women for man’s selfish ends, denying their essential equality and dignity…[3]

 In short, sin really messes things up. It stains everything it touches, and it has touched everything. But worst of all, sin interrupts our relationship with God. From the very beginning we see that in the Bible. Immediately after Adam and Eve sinned God approached them at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8 HCSB). Shortly afterward God expelled them from the garden (Genesis 3:23).

In addition to putting us at a distance from God, sin enslaves us. Jesus once said, I assure you: Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin (John 8:34 HCSB). Paul tells us that we have been liberated from sin through faith in Christ (Romans 5:1; 6:17-18, 22), but that doesn’t mean we will never sin again, otherwise he would not have said, Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its desires.And do not offer any parts of it to sin as weapons for unrighteousness. But as those who are alive from the dead, offer yourselves to God, and all the parts of yourselves to God as weapons for righteousness (Romans 6:12-13 HCSB).

Perhaps you find yourself struggling with a particular sin. Breaking free isn’t easy. It’s always easier in the short run to continue to give in to the sin when the temptation arises. But over time the sin grows and does more and more damage. It’s like a cancer that should have been removed when it was first discovered. We would not think of allowing a cancer to grow when immediate surgery could remove it. Why do we permit a sin to go unconfessed?

The answer must be that we love the sin more than we love God. But that doesn’t have to remain the case. We can grow to love God more. When I first met my wife Lori I didn’t love her. Outside of finding her attractive and pleasant I didn’t give her much thought for several months. But after we had occasion to spend time together while on a mission trip during our college days, I quickly began to fall in love with her. The key was spending time with her.

The same works for God. The best way to fall in love with God is to spend time with him. Set aside some time each day to read a portion of his word, meditate on what it says, and then use it to guide your prayers. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. As you develop this habit of spending time with God each day you will find that by drawing closer to God you will have a growing sensitivity to the sin in your life. God will grow more pleasant to you and sin will become less attractive. Over time you will want more of God and less of sin.