So Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and this ritual of placing ashes on the forehead can be traced back into the Old Testament. When the people of God were convicted of their sin, when they knew they had been disobedient to God, they would mourn their sin by sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Look at Daniel 9:3-6, not only do we see them sitting in sackcloth and ashes, but they confessed their sin to God through prayer. So ashes became a sign of confession and sorrow and today they remind us that we are sinners who on our own are nothing without God and they remain for us a sign of confession and repentance. Since ashes are a sign of confession and repentance, today is a good day for us to look at the spiritual discipline of confession.
Confession is not just presenting a list of our known failures and sin to God. Confession begins with a time of self examination and reflection. We need to ask God to shine his light into our hearts and lives to show us those areas that need to be cleansed, healed, forgiven and changed. Self examination and reflection are important because while we can all list certain sins in our lives, the truth is that we need to look deeper. We need to ask God to point out the areas in our heart and life that he is not pleased with, areas that we may not even be aware of and those areas where we simply live in denial. We also need to dig a little deeper and ask God to show us why we may struggle so much with certain sins and what the root causes of those sins might be. So confession isn’t just sitting down and making a list of what we know is wrong with us, its starts by being willing to ask God to point out all our attitudes and actions that are not in line with His will.
Taking time for this kind of spiritual introspection isn’t easy. It’s hard to ask God to show us areas of our life that we may not want to acknowledge and sometimes it’s hard to just sit quietly and wait for God to reveal to us words, actions and attitudes that we would rather not admit to, but we need to take this time. We can’t change our hearts and lives until we know what needs to be changed. We can’t just admit in general terms that we are sinners and then expect the reality of that sin to change we need to be clear about what our sins are which means setting aside time for reflection and prayer.
Not only does confession require time for reflection, it also needs to include sorrow. Are we truly sorry for our sin? Does the reality of our sin bother us? Does it cause to grieve? Do we understand how serious our sin is and how much God hates our sin? Now let’s be clear that God does not hate us, but he does hate our sin. This past Sunday night we began our confirmation classes and one of the youth gave us this question, does God hate us when we sin? As I read that question I wanted to shout out, NO. God does not hate us, God will never hate us. God loves us. God loves us deeply and unconditionally and eternally, but God does hate our sin and the reason God hates our sin is because it is our sin that pulls us away from God and the life he wants for us.
Think back to Adam and Even and when sin first entered into the picture. The first thing sin did was separate Adam and Eve from God. They ran from God and hid, their sin separated them from God and sin continues to separate us from God and God doesn’t want that separation, God wants relationship. So God hates our sin because it separates us from him, but God also hates how sin distorts our lives and relationships with one another. Again, think about Adam and Eve, after sin entered the story they were ashamed of how they looked so they made clothes - sin destroyed their self image. And then they started blaming each other for their problems so we see that it is sin that destroyed our relationship with one another. When God looks at this situation he hates how sin destroys us and our relationships, and he hates how our sin separates us from him. God hates sin and we need to hate sin and the consequences of sin. This isn’t self hatred; we don’t hate ourselves, we simply hate those things that work to destroy us and pull us away from God.
When we begin to see our sin the way God does, it will cause us to grieve and then hopefully turn away from it, and turning away from our sin is also a part of confession. True confession can’t just be acknowledging all those things that are wrong in our heart and life and then going right back to them, there needs to be a conviction and a determination to live a new life and this is what we call repentance. To repent means to turn and that’s what we are talking about here, turning away from sin and this is probably the most difficult aspect of confession because many times we don’t want to turn away from sin. If we are honest with ourselves, there are times we don’t want to turn away from our sin and it’s during these times that we need to just acknowledge this and ask God to change our heart so that we will have the desire to turn away from sin. At times our prayers of confession might just need to be, God give me the desire to turn away from my sin, give me the desire to live a holy life because right now I don’t have that. If that is where we are right now, its ok, that kind of prayer might be the first step in confession and it might be the first step in a deeper, stronger more disciplined life of faith.
So confession is an examination of our conscience. It’s taking the time to reflect on our hearts and lives and looking at ourselves with the eyes of God. It is trying to see sin the way God does which will lead us to genuine sorrow and the desire to turn from our sin, or repent. Once we get to this place the question is, is there a right way to actually confess our sin? Do we confess our sins to God or should we confess our sins to one another? The truth is that there is no one right way to confess sin. While we do not need to confess our sins to anyone but God, the Bible makes clear that confessing our sins to one another can be helpful. In John 20:23 Jesus says If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. This verse assumes that people were confessing their sins to one another, which leads us to ask why there might be value in confessing to one another, what benefit could there be?
One reason we might want to confess our sins to someone else is because if we only confess our sins privately to God we run the risk of not taking our sin seriously or not taking God’s forgiveness seriously. When we confess our sins to another person, we are confronted with them in a powerful way because we have to verbalize them and when we finally say something out loud it becomes real to us and something tangible that we have to deal with. When we simply keep our sin to ourselves and just confess to God it can become easy to ignore or sin and just move on, but confessing to someone else helps us deal with the reality of our wrong attitudes or actions.
Alone with God in prayer it can also become easy for us to doubt God’s grace and love and forgiveness. In the silence of our own hearts and lives we might think that our sins are so bad that God could never forgive them, or when it comes to certain sins which we wrestle with over and over and over again we may begin to wonder if God even wants to forgive us, but just as talking with others can help us take our sin seriously, talking with others can also help us take God’s forgiveness seriously. We might need to hear someone say, you are forgiven. We might need to hear someone say to us, God forgives you. Hearing those words can be powerful and there are times we need that human voice offering us love and grace. Imagine how powerful it must have been for people to hear Jesus say, your sins are forgiven. Hearing those words can be just as powerful today, and there are those times we actually need to hear them if we are going to accept God’s grace and move on to a stronger life and faith.
So confessing to one another can be a good thing, but if we choose to confess to others, we need to be careful about those we seek out. We need to choose people who are spiritually mature and sensitive to God and to us. While anyone can hear a confession and offer forgiveness in Jesus name, we need to seek out people who can keep confidence and this is something we need to be aware of if people come to us seeking to confess. If people confess to us, we need to make sure that we do not repeat what they tell us. Nothing breaks down trust and faith and community like gossip so we need to be wise in those people we choose to confess to and we need to be careful when people confess to us. While we don’t have to confess to any other person, there is value in sharing with one another and it can become a powerful tool in helping us accept God’s grace and moving forward in a more disciplined life and faith.
So confession is not just making a list of our sins and presenting it to God, it involves reflection, meditation and getting our hearts in line with God. Confession means we take our sin and the effects of our sin seriously and tonight we will have several different opportunities to confess our sin. This entire time of worship is to be a period of self examination and reflection. We will confess our sin to God through prayer, the reading and reflection of scripture, the singing of hymns, the moments of silence, the sacrament of communion and the imposition of ashes. As we confess our sin to God both individually and together, let’s stop pretending that we are more than we are, or better than we are and let’s stop making excuses for our sin and learn to confess to God our sin and our deep need for God’s grace, mercy and love.
