This morning, I came across a chapter entitled “Personal Holiness” in the book that I’m reading. I was particularly moved by the author’s exposition on the relationship between personal holiness and confession of sin. I pretty much quoted half the chapter—only because it was hard to find a passage that could be omitted. I hope you will find time to read the following excerpt in its entirety—and find it as edifying and freeing as I did:
“Now confession of sin and personal holiness do not refer to the same thing. Confession of sin is a sine qua non of personal holiness, but it is not the same thing as personal holiness. Growth in grace is not the immediate result of a negative process. If a houseplant is knocked over, and the pot is broken, the plant must be repotted if it is to continue to grow. But repotting a plant is not the same thing as the plant growing. Without the replanting the growth will not happen, but the replanting does not automatically ensure growth.
Growth in grace depends on the means of grace established by God: word and sacrament, faithful worship, practical obedience. But if unconfessed sin is deliberately ignored, the growth will always be stunted, no matter how much the means of grace are applied. The shattered pot and houseplant on the floor can be faithfully watered and the curtains pulled back so that sunlight gets to it, but the plant is still doomed. Far too many Christian attend worship services, sing hymns and psalms, and partake of the Lord’s Supper, but they still cling to their sins, refusing to confess them. They forget that all their behavior is before the presence of the God who has said that He cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly (Is. 1:13).
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So what is true confession? A person who confesses sin is doing something like this: In prayer to God, he names the sin, taking care to use the same name that the Bible uses. He does this because he is repentant and has turned away from that sin, rejecting it entirely. He thanks God for His promised forgiveness and resolves by God’s grace to make restitution where appropriate. Such restitution is necessary with sins such as lying, theft, open bitterness, and sexual infidelity.
Scripture is very clear on the need for confession: “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy” (Prov. 28:13). And the Word is equally clear that He will surely forgive: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
We have to be careful in dealing with this area. We must first consider what confession of sin is and is not. Unless we think properly about this, we will stumble doctrinally, and instead of receiving help from our confession, we will get ourselves into a horrible mess. One of the first principles to remember is that confession is not meritorious—to confess sins as a way of placing God in one’s debt is not dealing with sin; it is committing another sin. The context of all confession must be a thorough grasp of the free grace of justification. Put it another way, confession is one of the duties of our sanctification; it is not something we contribute to our justification.
Positively stated, confession is agreement. The word for confess in 1 John 1:9 is homolegeo, which means that we are to agree with God about our sin. It means “to speak the same.” Adultery is adultery and not “an inappropriate relationship.” Lying is lying and not “creative diplomacy.”
We also have to make sure our motives for confession is right. There are many good motives, but three motives for confession should be sufficient to encourage us to do what we need to do. First, confession is required by God; God requires believers to confess their sins in an ongoing way. The texts we have considered make the point very plain. To obey Him in any way glorifies Him, and obedience in this matter is no exception. Obedience is a sufficient motive. Second, confession of sin protects loved ones; in the context we have been discussing, it protects the school. Because Achan hid his sin, the nation of Israel was defeated in battle, and his family was executed. We never sin in isolation, however hidden we may believe the sin to be. And third, confession restores the soul. God disciplines us when we are living with unconfessed sin, a truth we see plainly in Scripture. “For whom the lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Heb. 12:6). God dealt severely with David in his sin. “For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me” (Ps. 32:4). Because this is disciplinary and not punitive, the sooner we learn the lesson and confess, the better it is for us. Moreover, confession establishes the soul. The difference between an unrepentant sinner and believers who are walking with God is not that he or she sins and they do not. The difference is found in the fact that they pick up after themselves.
But we still run from God’s chastening. We do not want the blow to our pride that confession of sin brings. Confession is clearly the right thing to do but still hard to swallow. So we come up with many reasons for not swallowing.
One of the things we do is trivialize the sin: We say that it is too small to confess. We do not want to annoy God with our petty problems… Or perhaps we surrender to the sin: We say that the sin is too big to confess; it is more powerful than God, and we give up all attempts to be free from it. This is the counsel of despair (Isa. 1:18)…
We may justify the sin, saying that what we did was really all right. “The adulteress wipes her mouth and says she has done no wrong (Prov. 30:20)… And we excuse the sin, admitting that our behavior was wrong, but claiming extenuating circumstances. Saul excused his sin when Samuel did not arrive on time, and the soldiers were deserting the army (1 Sam 13:12)…
Another popular approach is to reassign the sin. We blame someone else. Consider the example of Adam and Eve: “The woman You gave me.” “The serpent beguiled me.”..
We can ignore the sin: We hope that the problem will disappear if we ignore it long enough. We hope that everything will just fix itself. We look the other way. A similar technique is putting off dealing with the sin: We know that the sin will have to be dealt with sometime and so, we reason, why not tomorrow? But the Bible says that if we hear His voice today, we should not harden our hearts (Heb. 4:7). “I know I have to seek their forgiveness sometime. Maybe later.” Another method is to hide the sin: Adam and Even sought to do this in the Garden (Gen. 3:8). They heard the Maker of heaven and earth coming, so they decided to hide in the bushes.” …
The method employed by the very proud is to embrace the sin: This is rebellion and defiance. We say that we will not confess—a common response when the sin is anger, bitterness, or pride… Or we could buy the sin: This happens when restitution is required, and we see the cost as too high to pay. But of course, true restitution is not a cost at all…
And last there are those who theologize the sin: We do this when we have important doctrinal or theological reasons for our refusal to confess. “I am justified, so I don’t need to.” “The corporate confession at church is adequate” (1 John 1:10)…
But it is impossible to make a good omelet with rotten eggs… The whole thing stinks. The enterprise is comparable to insisting on rotten eggs as ingredients and then determining to make the omelet good by improving the kitchen, firing the cook, or changing the recipe. Refusal to deal with sin as sin is folly, pure, and simple.”
Excerpt taken from Douglas Wilson’s The Case for Classical Christian Education, pages 171-175. (bold mine)
After reading this passage, I thought about how tempting it is to oversimplify the Christian faith, and how much we lose by doing so. My devotions, my attending church or small group, my trying to be loving or kind to those around me. As if that’s the crux of being a Christian.
Owning up to the sins in our life is part and parcel of being a Christian. To get past my pride—and genuinely, transparently confess my sins before God requires my understanding of what God requires of me when it comes to dealing with the sins in my life—be it those I’ve committed in the past, those I am tempted to commit today, or the ones that I fear I will succumb to in the future. So often, I am guilty of being the escape artist—as Wilson describes above. I maintain that I want to grow spiritually, and yet I turn a blind eye on the sins in my life—be it big or small. As if—as long as nobody knows about it, the sin isn’t that bad.
On the flip side, doing away with my sins in any of the ways that Wilson identifies ultimately robs me of my prospects of truly experiencing God’s infinite grace, his power to forgive, to accept me just as I am, to transform me, to deliver me from my battles with temptations to sin every day. If I were to come to my God in prayer, and dig deep, so deep that the ugliness from within me pokes its glaring face from under the ground—do I really trust my God as much as I say I do—that He, alone, holds the power to completely wipe out that ugliness? To make me beautiful again?
(I would go on, but I’ve used up 45 minutes of Nathaniel’s afternoon nap. Got a paper to write…)
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