Karen’s idea resonated with me – that there’s a difference between confession and condemnation.
I grew up in a church culture where sin was talked about a lot, but nobody said what it was. So I would try to confess, but I figured that if I hadn’t lied to anyone that day, and hadn’t done the few other things I knew were “bad” (Killed anyone? Nope. Check.), then I was an okay person. Still had a nagging sense that something was wrong, though. I just couldn’t confess enough to make that feeling go away. So I tried general confessions, specific confessions. Maybe I was missing something. Maybe I had performed the unforgivable sin! What was the unforgivable sin? So little information available to my 10-year-old world. There was no way to get it right.
Imagine my relief as an adolescent, then, when someone told me that God not only loved me in the cosmic sense, but also had great affection for me as a person. Thought I was the icing on the cake. The gnawing feeling had been the result of a belief I had held that he was distant, sober, unamused, angry. Growing into a new belief redeemed my experience of God from one of fear into one of excitement.
At that point, I was also relieved to learn that sin can be anything we do. It’s not just the big bad ten, but it can be all the stuff that looks good but is done for the wrong reasons. That made so much more sense to me.
At that point, of course, I went into a flurry of thinking that everything I did was sinful, that I couldn’t ever have the right motives, that I would need a complete personality overhaul (which I then attempted to accomplish). But this was also based on a continuing attempt to get it right and thereby please a God who I still wasn’t quite sure wasn’t scary.
So what I’ve been thinking lately is that we may have sin issues (for lack of a better term) on multiple fronts. And God’s not stressed about that. He’s faithful to show us, if we’re willing to listen, the specific stuff He’s inviting us out of and into. And confession is the place where we accept His invitation. We say, “Yeah… I’ve been trying to do that on my own, apart from You. I’m not sure if I’m even capable of doing differently. Will you transform me?” Or something like that. Suppose it depends on the specific situation.
Anyway, there’s no getting it right, or even attempting. It was only natural that we would formerly be sinning. Now that we are coming to believe, it’s also only natural that we would be overflowing with goodness and peace. We’re in a transition. In the places where we’re still stuck in the old path, we confess and ask God to continue His work of transformation. There may be grief or joy in this exchange, but if it’s despair and self-hatred, then we’re not confessing and believing so much as we’re committing to get it right on our own. |
