Skip to main content

Confess and go free!

I recently came across a statement by Nate Larkin in I am Second that was like a breath of fresh air. One question that has troubled me is this. How do I move beyond merely being forgiven by God and actually begin to experience healing and growth in areas that afflict me? Nate's statement has been very helpful :
I don’t think I really believed the message of Jesus. I thought it was up to me to be good. I didn’t believe that God would forgive me. I begged God to forgive me. Every Sunday I cried and I cried, pleading to him for forgiveness, but I never really thought he gave it to me. Looking back, I see how wrong I was.

The forgiveness was already mine. I didn’t have to earn it. Every time I confessed and repented, I believe I was forgiven. But I couldn’t get past forgiveness into healing. I was fixated on forgiveness, unaware that what I needed most was healing, the healing that comes when we confess our sins to one another….

Healing comes when we confess our sins to another, pray for each other. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but healing always comes. I was fortunate enough to find some other broken Christians with whom it was safe to tell the truth. They didn’t have to raise the alarm that there was a sinner among them. They just welcomed me in as a brother.
Nate is right. Healing come through confessing our sins with one another. Most importantly,  without genuine confession we are not really willing to pay the price to honour Jesus!  Whenever the issue of confession of sins to others comes up, people always that there's no one to confess to because trust is scarce.  Does that stand up to scrutiny? 

It seems to me that this all a question of vantage point. If the issue is seen from the perspective of the person struggling with sin, then the imperative for them should not be trust but truth. What stops  you revealing that you are struggling with a particular sin to another Christian is not there's no one to trust, it is that you don't have a sufficient appreciation of what Jesus has already done for you through his death and resurrection. We must keep central that that Jesus has purchased our forgiveness and taken away all our shame. There is no condemnation for all who are in Jesus Christ. We know the verses, but do we actually live by them? The more we accept the finished work of a Christ the easier confession becomes. 

The other hindrance to confessing our sins to others is that we don't want to be like Jesus at any cost. We want Jesus plus everything else. We may not admit it to others publicly but we know that deep down that we love the darkness because within us are remnants of our sinful nature. There is something in us that pushes us to reject confession because at a deeper level we don't want to be healed from sin and give up everything. There's a degree to which we love wallowing in our sins regardless of how knowledgeable we are of what Jesus has done . Most importantly we live in a sinful world which is constantly pulling us away from focusing on Jesus and what he has already done for us. 

Rather than denying this we need to accept that we cant help but do God on our own terms. Too often there’s no genuine desire to become like Jesus. We may kid ourselves that we love Jesus, but for many of us it is more of having affair with Jesus rather than a deep commitment of marriage to Him. If change is to happen God needs to change our hearts so that we can unreservedly love and trust him. The process of being a Christian is a process of dying to ourselves. And that is an impossible task without constant prayer and work of God the Spirit.  As we pray and surrender to him we begin to ask people to pray for us for things that we are really struggling with. Spiritual maturity is when our public lives converges with our private lives in honour and adoration of Jesus in how we think and act. 
Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2013

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Do Not Be Anxious

Do not be troubled if you are poor - Christ Himself had no place to lay His head. Do not let the prospect of future hard times make you anxious about how you will endure, for "you will not be ashamed in evil days, and in times of famine you will be satisfied." God has said (Psalm 37:19) therefore, you must believe it. Do not be overly concerned with securing provisions for old age, for by all appearances, you may not live to see it. It is more than likely that you will reach your journey’s end sooner than expected. Your body is frail - it is already declining, greeting decay as its mother before it has even fully entered the hall of this world. The supports of your earthly tent are being loosened little by little. Take courage, O my soul, for soon the devil, the world, and the flesh will be crushed beneath your feet, and you will be welcomed into eternal mansions.   But even if the Lord prolongs your days to old age, He who brought you forth from your mother's womb will n...

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...