Confessional

Recently, I was asked why it is that we take time in our worship service to confess our sins.  "If we have accepted Christ we know that our sins are forgiven," my friend stated.  "Why is it, then, that we take time in the service each week to remember that we are sinners again?  Isn't that focusing on the wrong thing?"

These are great questions and this can often be a confusing part of the service.  Indeed, if you have accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior and believe in Him, your sins have been forgiven and you are washed clean in the sight of God.  This is a once for all action, but it doesn't mean that we are instantly sinless in our lives.  You and I (and probably everyone else) knows and understands that no matter what amount of belief, faith, work, or whatever else in our lives will make us perfect.  But God is perfect and He calls His people to Be Holy as I am Holy.  (1 Peter 1:16).

So we are imperfect, and God calls us to be Holy.  As believers in Christ, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit that works in our lives on many levels.  One of these is the process of "sanctification," a big word that points to the process of a Christian becoming more like Christ.  This is an ongoing life process, a transformation that will be completed only in the consummation of all things when Christ comes back.  In the meantime, as faithful followers of Christ, we are to be open to this work of the Spirit.  This is where the time of confession comes in during a worship service.

As we come into the presence of Holy God, we see ourselves reflected there and we see ourselves for who we really are.  Imperfect.  We could sit in the despair that this brings, knowing that there is nothing that we can do to save ourselves, to make ourselves right before God.  Our Heavenly Father knows this too and He did something about this!!  He gave us His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  If you believe in Jesus, you have claimed this gift of grace.  And so the time of confession calls us to remembrance of this.

Not only that, through the prompting of the Holy Spirit, God calls us again to a posture of repentance knowing that we are redeemed in the blood of Jesus, for those things in our lives that still draw us away from God.  In this, we are called to confess those things to God both privately and corporately.  For some, this could be where it ends.  We say we are sorry and then move on.  But truly this is only half of this moment in our liturgy.

Ephesians 2 says, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

Rejoice friends, we who believe are not those that are dead in our sins, but we have been made alive in Christ!  In this posture of repentance we are able to lay our sins before God and through this repentance we open our hearts to the work of the Spirit to help us in our weaknesses, those things that we have confessed, that we may be strengthened in our walk and continually transformed into the likeness of Christ.

The time of confession is not a time to focus solely on our brokenness or to put us down again as sinful.  This special time is to bring us through our sins, to lay them at the foot of the cross, and then to remind us once again of the truth in which we are to live our lives.  WE ARE FORGIVEN!  And it is in that reality that we continue to worship the Lord on Sunday morning, and every day of our lives.