Streams of Living Water

Read: Psalm 51:1-19
To get a politician to say sorry, is like trying to get a chicken to fly. Sorry is the hardest word. If we find it hard to say sorry to other people, do we find it hard to say sorry to God? How do we say sorry to God for all the ways in which we sin against Him? In A. 98 of the Shorter Catechism we are told that it is through prayer, and particularly prayer ‘with confession of our sins’. Confession of sin – saying sorry to God – is a vital part of prayer. I want to ask three questions tonight about the link between prayer and the confession of our sins to God.
[A] Why Should I Confess my Sin?
The objection I’m trying to answer here is the one which would say, ‘but when I was converted, when I became a Christian, I confessed my sins and Jesus forgave them all – past, present and future. So then, what’s the point in me confessing sins which have been already forgiven by God?’ In other words, why have confession as a separate element in the discipline of prayer? There are 3 reasons why, when we pray, we must include the confession of our sins as a discrete section in our prayers:
1. My Confession Glorifies God – when we confess our sins to God, what we are saying to Him in effect is, ‘You were right and I was wrong’. We are acknowledging that God’s ways are just and righteous. We are proving what David writes in Psalm 51:4, “against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” The puritan Thomas Watson puts it well when he writes, “while we confess sin, God’s patience is magnified in sparing, and his free grace in saving such sinners.” It is as if, when we confess our sin, we are acknowledging that God is God and that we are not. We live our lives as though we were God – we make choices thinking that we know best; that I and what I want are the ultimate authority. But when we come to God in sincere confession of our sin, we are saying that there is someone who knows better than I do what is best for me. Likewise, we glorify God because when we come in confession He takes delight in forgiveness – our confession is our invitation to Him to display the riches of His pardoning mercy in us – the riches which have been won on Calvary’s Tree by the Son of God loving me and giving Himself for me. It is as the old poem says, “the fouler was the error, the sadder was the fall, the ampler are the praises, of Him who pardoned all.” And so, to go through life without confession of sin robs God both of His rightful place in our lives, and robs Him of the Glory that is due to Him for His mercy in Christ Jesus.
2. My Confession Humbles Me – the flip side of confession glorifying God is that it humbles us. It, in the language of Thomas Boston, ‘casts our feathers of pride into the dust.’ If God is on the throne of our hearts and our lives are being lived for Him and His glory, then de facto we are no longer making the decisions in our lives and we are no longer living for ourselves and our glory, We are acknowledging our sinfulness. But the world around, the world which sees assertiveness and self-confidence as being all important, will wonder why humility is a positive thing. The answer is that it is only as we are emptied of ourselves that we can be filled with Christ. It is only as a glass is emptied of dirty water that it can be filled with clean water. Clean and dirty water don’t mix – the dirty water must first be poured out and then the glass can receive the clean water. It is only as the sinfulness of our hearts is washed away through confession that we can be filled with the pure, clean presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. Only empty hands can be filled with good gifts from above – hands which are filled with one’s own possessions (i.e. one’s own good works) can receive nothing from God.
3. My Confession Relieves Me – in Psalm 32, King David runs through the impact that sin has upon him, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” David’s heart is like a pressure cooker – the pressure is getting to extreme levels and its beginning to hurt. It’s painful for the Spirit-filled Christian to have un-confessed sin in his life. To use medical language, sin is like the puss in an abscess – it builds until the abscess itself begins to chafe and hurt. Confession is like the lancing of the abscess. To use the language of Thomas Watson, “Sorrow is such a vehement pain that it will have vent. It vents itself at the eyes by weeping and at the tongue by confession.” You may have seen the geysers of Iceland, where water under extremely high pressure and at very high temperature, heated by underground magma, shoots forth as a burst of steam. The confession of our sins is like a geyser exploding before God – it is the relieving of pressure, the opening of a vent to the heart which rids it of sorrow and mourning. And so, whilst the primary reason for confession concerns God’s glory, ‘getting things off our chests’ by confessing them to God is good for us.
So for these three reasons, it is good and necessary to have confession of sin as a discrete, independent, separate, element in our prayers.
[B] How Should I Confess my Sin?
Especially when it comes to the confession of sin, it is difficult to give a how-to, since there is a sense in which confessing your sin to the Lord should be spontaneous and voluntary, rather than bound by different laws so as to make it something legalistic and heartless. However, bearing this in mind, I think there are 3 things we must remember when we are confessing our sins to God:
1. Sincerely – Confession of sins plays a large part in the language of every religion –albeit, in each religion, sin is seen in different ways. Yet, how sincere is confession of sin when it is the mind of the confessor to go from confession and commit the same sin again. Or how genuine is the confession of sin if in the mind of the sinner there is an excusing spirit, as if to suggest that there were factors and reasons which drove him towards the sin and therefore he isn’t guilty? How often when we are repeating the Lord’s Prayer do we thoughtlessly and flippantly say, “Forgive us our debts” when in fact, we don’t think we have any kind of debt to God? Rather, there must be sincerity in the confession of our sins – there must be genuine sorrow and genuine repentance. I’m not prescribing here how much sorrow we must feel over our sin, as if it is only the person who can physically weep over their sin who will find true forgiveness – all I am saying is that there must be an awareness within us of how hurtful, painful and offensive sin is to God, and how guilty we are before Him. And remember, confession of sin is being made to God – not to ourselves. Confession is not a way of surveying how we are getting on in our faith, seeing our weaknesses and vocalising them in a half-hearted attempt to pep ourselves up for a better performance next time. Rather, we confess our sins to God, knowing that it is, in the language of King David, ‘against you, you only, have I sinned.’
Likewise, contained within this point about the sincerity of our confession to God, we confess with mouths and hearts which are blighted by sin. The longer we go on in the Christian faith, the more we recognise the sinful tendencies of our hearts. Therefore, when we come to God, we must come as those who are aware that through our sin, and because of our sinful natures, we are utterly ruined. That is the thought behind the Reformed Doctrine of Total Depravity – that every faculty of our being is damaged and defaced by sin. What an antidote to our pride, what a stimulus towards true humility it is to kneel before God aware of our utter sinfulness and unworthiness in and of ourselves! And yet, what a place of blessing!
2. Specifically – Confession of sin should be explicit and particular. In the last point we acknowledged that our whole nature has been corrupted by sin and that therefore, as Thomas Watson says, “Our nature is an abyss and seminary of all evil, from whence come those scandals that infest the world.” However, it isn’t good enough to leave confession of our sin there – saying that there is something about me in general which is sinful. Rather, it is important to go to God with specific sins. When you go to the doctor, you don’t just say, ‘I don’t feel well’, but rather, ‘I’ve a sore head’, or ‘My stomach is upset’. Only then can the doctor focus down his area of examination to a particular section of your body. This is quite a telling point, and, can be a strong indicator of your spiritual life. D. M. McIntyre, Andrew Bonar’s successor in Finnieston Free Church said, “a child of God will confess sin in particular; an unsound Christian will confess sin by wholescale; he will acknowledge that he is a sinner in general.” McIntyre here is saying that the man or woman who is truly spiritually alive, and to whom the Spirit is daily speaking, will be convicted of particular sins, whereas a spiritually dead Christian will not be aware of particular ways in which he has sinned – he’ll just mindlessly confess his sin in general. It is important then that when it comes to confession of our sins, we ask the Holy Spirit to convict us in particular areas – to show, in the language of Psalm 139 ‘if there is any wicked way within me’ and then to confess.
3. Immediately – I don’t know who it was that said, ‘keep short accounts with God’, but they were speaking the truth. As soon as we become aware that we have sinned, we must confess – we must not wait until the end of the day, but must there and then make our peace with our heavenly Father. Think about sin being like the poison of a snake – no man in his right mind would be aware of being bitten by a snake but then leaving off treatment of the bite and leaving off removal of the poison until the night, rather he would there and then go to the hospital to have the poison removed and the bite treated. In the same way, when we become aware of a sin we have committed, be it through reading the word, being confronted by another Christian or through the voice of conscience, we must immediately take it in confession to our Father in heaven and He will forgive us. If we don’t, then like as not we will either begin to feel guilt and its associated symptoms, or we will become hardened and our consciences will be blunted so that it will become easier and easier to sin again.
There are many more ‘how-to’s’ when it comes to the practice of confession, but I would recommend these three – confessing our sin sincerely, specifically and immediately, as being the foundation for a healthy life of confession and forgiveness.
[C] What Happens When I Confess my Sin?
In closing, I want to give three very brief things which happen when we confess our sins to God. Remember, the confession of sin is not a fruitless, pointless exercise – it really does have an impact and an effect. There are three outstanding effects of confession upon an individual:
1. Pardon – in 1 John 1:9 we have probably the clearest promise anywhere in the Bible concerning confession, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” That’s a promise God will keep 100% of the time – and look at the verse in 1 John 1:9, when you come to Him confessing your sins, He doesn’t grant you pardon because of His mercy, but because He is faithful and just. God can no sooner cease to be God than cease to keep His promises to forgive our confessed sin. Again, going back to Psalm 32, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”, - and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” God must forgive the repentant sinner who confesses.
2. Purifying – to go back to an analogy we used a few minutes ago, sin is like poison in the veins. Confession is like the old medical practice of ‘bleeding’ to get rid of ‘bad blood’. Confession is the getting rid of the pollution of sin in our lives. It will not feel this way to the growing, thriving Christian, but, by God’s grace, confession of sin gradually purifies us and transforms us into who God has made us to be. You want to be holy – you want to be pure – then be much in confession.
3. Prosperity – Thomas Watson wrote, “repentance is the inlet to spiritual blessings … Never do the flowers of grace grow more than after a shower of repentant tears.” It is through confession and repentance that a man comes into a closer walk, a deeper relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that the graces Jesus died to provide us with are actualized and become really ours – and that’s true prosperity – not a cheap health and wealth lie, but treasures in heaven Christ has in store for us. Likewise, confession of sin gives us great power against Satan, because when he comes to us and says, “what about this you did, and that you did, and the next thing you did”, you can simply turn to him and say, “I have confessed them already and God has forgiven them already.” By this, therefore, the accuser looses his power over you.
How great a gift confession of sin is to us as Christian believers! In the garden of Eden Adam was told, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die”, i.e. sin equals the death of the sinner. In the garden of Christ’s salvation, where Christ has died to take away our sins, we find that if we sin, we merely confess and we shall find mercy. And so, don’t skim through confession, but use it, cherish it and grow through it – and in so doing, you will know God’s blessings of grace in new and exciting ways. AMEN