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Confession: An Acknowledgement
by Scott Lyons
“But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
I want to take a step back from confession to talk about sin. Without understanding sin, we cannot understand the riches of confession or why it is necessary.
Sin, comprehensively, is an offense against God. It is “missing” him, falling short of him. And as we sin, we damage our relationship with him and with the body of Christ. Herein lies the necessity of confession: our confession, through Christ’s finished work, heals these relationships.
Now God has revealed himself to us. He has done so by speaking to us, by interacting with us, and ultimately by becoming one of us. And it is in our obedience, our submission, to his words and to his Word that we understand how we are to live.
It is that simple, and yet it is not so simple.
In a fragmented world, we often choose fragmentation and dissolution, except, perhaps, in adhering to the central truth that God is love. As a result of our choice, we begin to be deceived in our understanding of who God is, what love is, and who we are meant to be. Happiness becomes our greatest good and our only justification. And we begin to pay attention to the serpent’s whisper, “Did God really say . . . that?”
So a sister terminates a pregnancy.
A brother falls in love with another man.
A sister is simply tired of this man she has married, and leaves.
A brother finds pornography free and easy and harmless. (He does not realize that his own soul has, without a fight, been enslaved to sin. Or if he does, he does not know how to become free again.)
“Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” (Genesis 3:1).
God is the one by whom all our fragmented stories are called into unity. And it is he who defines himself, sin, and us. Though we may struggle with the force of it, the sheer audacity of it, we are to live a certain way. God calls us to exchange our incredulity for trust. And when we trust him, we can follow him.
Now the church has messed it all up at various times. We have been ungracious and unloving to the sinner in the name of God, in the name of truth. And we have been too loving and too gracious to the sin in the name of God, in the name of love. We cannot love truly if we do not love the truth. When we speak the truth without love, we do not speak truly—we wound and injure and kill. And when we speak love without truth, we speak neither truly nor lovingly—we wound and injure and kill.
There is greater human dignity in identifying sin as sin—recognizing what God intends and does not intend for us as human beings—than there is in preaching a gospel of acceptance of both the sinner and his or her sin.
So sin is sin. And I am a sinner. When my brother commits adultery, I fall to my knees and pray for mercy for him and beg for mercy for myself.
We must acknowledge that God has spoken. Then, and only then, will we be able to confess our sin and so be freed from it. Brothers and sisters, we were not made for slavery:
“For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. . . . So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. . . . When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:13, 16, 19-21).
by Scott Lyons
“But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
I want to take a step back from confession to talk about sin. Without understanding sin, we cannot understand the riches of confession or why it is necessary.
Sin, comprehensively, is an offense against God. It is “missing” him, falling short of him. And as we sin, we damage our relationship with him and with the body of Christ. Herein lies the necessity of confession: our confession, through Christ’s finished work, heals these relationships.
Now God has revealed himself to us. He has done so by speaking to us, by interacting with us, and ultimately by becoming one of us. And it is in our obedience, our submission, to his words and to his Word that we understand how we are to live.
It is that simple, and yet it is not so simple.
In a fragmented world, we often choose fragmentation and dissolution, except, perhaps, in adhering to the central truth that God is love. As a result of our choice, we begin to be deceived in our understanding of who God is, what love is, and who we are meant to be. Happiness becomes our greatest good and our only justification. And we begin to pay attention to the serpent’s whisper, “Did God really say . . . that?”
So a sister terminates a pregnancy.
A brother falls in love with another man.
A sister is simply tired of this man she has married, and leaves.
A brother finds pornography free and easy and harmless. (He does not realize that his own soul has, without a fight, been enslaved to sin. Or if he does, he does not know how to become free again.)
“Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” (Genesis 3:1).
God is the one by whom all our fragmented stories are called into unity. And it is he who defines himself, sin, and us. Though we may struggle with the force of it, the sheer audacity of it, we are to live a certain way. God calls us to exchange our incredulity for trust. And when we trust him, we can follow him.
Now the church has messed it all up at various times. We have been ungracious and unloving to the sinner in the name of God, in the name of truth. And we have been too loving and too gracious to the sin in the name of God, in the name of love. We cannot love truly if we do not love the truth. When we speak the truth without love, we do not speak truly—we wound and injure and kill. And when we speak love without truth, we speak neither truly nor lovingly—we wound and injure and kill.
There is greater human dignity in identifying sin as sin—recognizing what God intends and does not intend for us as human beings—than there is in preaching a gospel of acceptance of both the sinner and his or her sin.
So sin is sin. And I am a sinner. When my brother commits adultery, I fall to my knees and pray for mercy for him and beg for mercy for myself.
We must acknowledge that God has spoken. Then, and only then, will we be able to confess our sin and so be freed from it. Brothers and sisters, we were not made for slavery:
“For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. . . . So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. . . . When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:13, 16, 19-21).
