There was a Pastor and a Paedophile who turned up to church one day. There was a pause in the service for people to confess to God.
The Pastor looked across at the paedophile and said the following prayer in his heart. “Lord, I just wanna thankyou that I’m not like him. He sets the boundary mark for sin and how bad we can be, and I haven’t even come close to it. He makes me ill on your behalf, and it’s a real pastoral concern that he’s here : do you think I need to ask him to not come? For the kid’s sake I mean. We’re all good people and we probably aren’t edgy enough to look after someone like this. Maybe I could recommend him to Ponsonby Baptist?”
The paedophile wasn’t looking anywhere. He just felt like crap and broke down into tears. He couldn’t face God, let alone the front of the church. As he wept from his gut, unable to close his gaping mouth from the agony inside he prayed, “Jesus, have mercy on me for I am a sinner!”
And which man went away righteous in God’s eyes that day? Which man went away made right with God?
It’s a powerful story that Jesus told in Luke 18. It says it all.
It tells me how the cosmic pecking order needs to be understood. It gives me insight into the way I am meant to relate with God.
Last week we looked at adoration and I think there were two enduring themes that came out of that : the first was how to practice this throughout the week in our normal spaces, the second the idea of how we can interrupt the stuff that’s happening in the throne room. It’s the invitation to us. And how we really wouldn’t say stuff the way we pray if we really connected to this throne room and holiness. Would we have the guts to even approach? And yet this is what we are invited to do.
But remember isaIah’s response when he saw this place? “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I come from a people of unclean lips!”
His first reaction is to be caught up in sorrow and distress! His reaction is fear and trembling not just because of his own sin, but because of the sin of the people he belongs to! He’s beside himself in fear for he is found to be unholy in the light of perfect holiness.
Tonight we look at confession. The confession of our hearts as we approach God. Because it is in confession that the floodgates of God’s mercy open to pour out lavish boundless love upon us. It is in confession that we can enter that throne-room and leave with his blessing.
Confession is obviously about speaking and naming our sins and acknowledging our state of sin.
I want us to consider what we mean by sin. I think we’ve done this before, but if your mind’s anything like mine, it doesn’t hurt to do it again.
WHAT IS SIN?
I think I’ve given a number of different definitions over time but I would like us to consider it a little differently tonight. In the past I’ve said things like it is “doing things that are not God honouring” or “doing anything outside the commandment to ‘Love God, Love people.’” And these are good for providing a measuring stick for our own actions. We can say easily well, that was a sin, and that wasn’t. And that’s good. But I think there’s something deeper than that. I think the actions are an expression of this deeper thing.
Sin can also be general category, not just specific actions. If we talk about sin with a capital S it is helpful for us to understand what it means to be a sinner. We are people who are caught up in Sin. In this horrible tension of wanting to do good but also being driven to do what serves us best in our brokenness. Many sins are actually expressions of the condition of Sin.
I think this is what can tie Isaiah to his people. He identifies his Sin with the Sin of his people, through the expression of having unclean lips, which I suspect is less to do with telling dirty jokes and more to do with “Praising God with our lips” but living lives that are less than praiseworthy.
We are all caught up in this Sin. All of us. The category puts us on a level playing field. We’re all suffering from the same condition. Murderers are no worse than a liar for instance. Because regardless of how the disconnect is expressed, it’s the disconnect that Jesus wants to address.
And so when we confess our sins, I also wonder if it’s helpful to confess our Sin. Sin being a reference to the internal disconnect we have from God. If we confess this, then we begin our journey to righteousness.
My issue is this, that confessing one sin but not another isn’t going to make us righteous. Maybe it helps, but maybe it’s also unhelpful. Sometimes we can feel smug that we’ve gone and confessed a certain amount. We use that as a smoke screen. We can hide behind it. And it’s not that we’re hiding from other people, it’s often that we’re hiding from ourselves.
But in it’s complete sense, the category of Sin, we can cover everything.
So how does it help? It is no small thing that confessing sin was a big response to the kingdom of Heaven being at hand. Confession is the natural response to the immanence of God. And it usually precedes great things in God’s kingdom.
The 1st testament and church history show several cases where great movements of God, great revivals have taken place when people stopped to confess their sin.
Indeed Nehemiah is famous for this. Jerusalem was under Persian rule and they were trying to rebuild their city. But this displeased the Persians and by force they stopped this. Nehemiah asked about this, he was in exile in Persia acting in the very privileged position of cup bearer to the king, where he asked about how things were going in Jerusalem. It was bad news and we pick up the story in Nehemiah 1:3:
“When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.
I said, “O LORD God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments; let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Both I and my family have sinned. We have offended you deeply, failing to keep the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances that you commanded your servant Moses.
Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples; but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are under the farthest skies, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place at which I have chosen to establish my name.’
They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand. O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man!” At the time, I was cupbearer to the king.”
And from there a great movement of people falling in love with God took place that culminated in them being able to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. Great things were accomplished when they prayed their prayer of confession.
So to vocalise this condition of being in sin, often through vocalising the sins themselves is an enormously powerful act. It is powerful for us as individuals if we confess as individuals, but it’s also powerful as a community if we confess our wrongdoing as a community. And this is what we are currently working through at the moment as a church. We are working through a process of setting our church free. It’s a process of admitting where we have gone wrong and make restitution for this. To release us from a spirit of negativity that seems to hang around us like a cloud. It obscures our vision and makes us irritable. We can’t see a way forward so we stay still.
But in October, we as a church will be stating wholeheartedly our confession of guilt for the way we have treated both God people during our history. And as a side note, if you are or know one of those people who feels grieved and bitter about something in the church, then talk to one of the pastoral team and we’ll set up the process for you. Our community confession is a powerful statement.
What takes place during confession? Well I think first and foremost it is admission that all is not right in this world and that we are in part responsible for some of it. It’s acknowledging that something’s broken and needs to be fixed. It’s voicing pain that is deep inside and getting it out. It stops our bodies from cramping with the stifling effects of secrets.
It’s a terribly cathartic thing to do. It’s a release.
That’s one thing. And here’s some irony. It’s one thing to confess to God, it’s easier in many senses, but it’s another to confess to another person. If I said, confess your sins to God, I’m sure many of us would bow our heads and do that. If I said turn to the person next to you and tell them your sins . . .
Yet this is part of the beauty of confession. In confessing as a group for group things that we have done wrong, or a group disconnect, then we can address these issues together.
Same with our individual stuff. If we confess to another person in our community of faith, there is a mediation of the Spirit that can take place as that person expresses the grace and acceptance of Christ to you. You are forgiven by Christ, and that person can be his embrace. And there is quite a challenge for us . . . are we up to that?
James 5:16 Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.
Now in this verse there are a couple of things that we demonstrate the power and effects of confession. Confession will enable healing, not necessarily through the act of confession but by the fact that confession will bring about the state of being made righteous and that state brings about effective prayer. There’s a whole can of worms there, but in its simplest state it is clear that when we ache with unconfessed sin, it will inhibit our spirituality.
The 1st part is the interesting part though. Confess your sins to one another. What are your feelings about the catholic religious duty of confession or reconciliation as it is now called?
What do you think? I think it’s got a lot of merit. My concern with it though is that confession is two fold and this is only the 1st part of it.
To admit our sins is one thing. But to confess them is another. When we confess our sins, we are admitting them to our Holy God, and there would be no point whatsoever just saying those things to him. So what is the point? What do you think is the requirement of this admission?
You know where I’m heading here. Repentance is the response. It is the desire to work out how we are going to not sin again. That’s the hard part and I dare say that’s the part that says whether or not we care if we’ve sinned or not. Repentance will do whatever it takes to make amends.
Zachaeus after his conversation with Jesus, says this:
“Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”
I’ll give you a second to work out what that might look like in our terms. That is huge. So it’s not enough to rattle of a list of the things we’ve done wrong and then carry on doing them. It’s not enough if there is no concern to make things right and repent.
So here’s how I think it can work if we confess to one another. Accountability is one of the functions of this body of Christ.
We want healing in this world? We are to bring it. But we are wounded. How are we to restore people from the outside when we can’t do it from within? There’s a terrible weirdness how we will want to hear the terrible sins of someone from the outside, but won’t divulge our own stuff. We seem to be content to be closed off.
But there’s a practical concern. This is not the perfect community. Why would we trust each other?
And that’s the concern I have. That would be a confession I would make on our behalf. I wish we could trust each other, but it’s not necessarily how it is. There are in fact other places that you can confess that are better equipped for the repentance side of things.
If it’s too private or you feel too vulnerable, a good counsellor can actually be a great place to be brutally honest and let some of this stuff out. The pastoral staff are here to listen and assist in whatever way we can. Sometimes we might refer you on to someone who has dealt with the particular issue you are facing, because repentance can be a process that takes years.
We can confess our sins to God and we will be forgiven. But that doesn’t mean that we are going to be healed from these sins. That can take a journey of years. But to confess is really important and so we are going to move into a time of confession now.
I’ll read Psalm 32 to us and where the psalms say selah it means basically to Pause and Reflect.
Let us listen to the Spirit’s guidance as we work through this prayer of confession.