Good Morning,
The Lord’s graciousness to us is more than we can often comprehend, and more than we sometimes recognize. As the Psalmist declares so does our heart, ““I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever; With my mouth will I make known Your faithfulness to all generations. For I have said, ‘Mercy shall be built up forever; Your faithfulness You shall establish in the very heavens.’” Yet, if we knew half of what God knows about what we think and do then it would likely paralyze our mind and soul, but that’s not the way it should be. There is a sense in which if we are willing to be honest then we’d confess that our awareness of these things is actually much higher than we would otherwise admit. Our mindset should be one of thanksgiving for grace given when we think about our transgressions. Too often however we are filled with shame, and like Adam and Eve we try and hide our sin from the LORD. This should not be. It isn’t a secret to anyone and we do damage to our relationship with God when we act like it is. Not being ready to concede the obvious is a sign of a troubling stubbornness which keeps us from experiencing the very kindness and mercy offered to us in Christ Jesus.
Where does that come from? Why do we do it?
In today’s prayer and worship help we are going to talk a little bit about why it is that prayers of confession are so central to our mental and spiritual health, and why we have such trouble offering them up to the Lord. We’ll then close with some ideas about how we can be encouraged to see the Church and her people to be the very ones designed by God to encourage us to not just repent, but do so in helpful ways.
First of all we must recognize that our knowledge of our sin comes from the simple fact that we are the ones who do it. There is no possibility for ignorance when not only is the law of God written on our hearts, but the Lord has provided us Sixty-Six Books that detail them out. The Apostle Paul speaks at length in Romans 7 about how his conscience is pricked by the reading of the Tenth Commandment. He knows when he violates it primarily because he can feel it in his heart. I don’t know how many of you have out-of-body blackout experiences, but I doubt they are so often that you have no control or awareness over the decisions you make every day. When Jeremiah was proclaiming his warning against the priests and Levites they couldn’t then be surprised when Nebuchadnezzar showed up with his armies. Part of the reason why the Lord had Moses give the covenantal blessings and cursing’s in his testimony to the people of Israel as they prepared to go into the land of promise in Deuteronomy is so that they could not turn around and then say, “Why are you sending the Assyrians upon us?”. The sign was as bright and obvious as the sun at noon on June 21.
If they missed it, it wasn’t God’s fault.
Part of our trouble comes from the fact that we are very proficient at ignoring our own sin. No one has more practice than we do at either openly making excuses to our conscience for why we engage in whatever transgression you want to name, or why we desire to do it. This whole concept is most assuredly central to Christ’s point in the log and the speck discourse in Matthew 7. It takes little time for us to point out the sin in the lives of others, “That girl shouldn’t be doing that” while we excuse something someone in our own family, or ourselves are engaged in.
Sometimes there is a sense of entitlement. We tell ourselves we deserve to sin, we need to watch inappropriate videos because we are lonely, sad, etc… and they make us feel better, or we need to take a little from the till for we have bills to pay. There is always a good excuse, or at least what we think is a good excuse. Other times it’s just that we lack concern. Apathy or laziness whatever our hearts call it we just don’t do what we are called to do. Everything under discussion in the last couple of paragraphs should scare us. There is no good to come from this because that’s how you get a seared conscience, and then no amount of law and the means of grace are going to make you feel a concern for breaking the commandments of the Lord, something that is foreign to gospel disciples of Jesus Christ. Peter wept, Paul wept, David wept, the psalmist soaks his pillow in his tears when he considers his own sin.
A soul which feels nothing is on a dangerous path.
What can be done?
Central to a penitent heart is a Christian man or woman who keeps their focus on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, especially when they pray. Paul when he wants to encourage the Hebrews to remember to lay aside every weight he calls on them in Hebrews 12:2 to, “[Look] unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” In doing this we are reminded of the fulness of the forgiveness of sins offered alone in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. Not only are we brought to consider the cost of our transgression, but we are then remember the payment in His blood. It should give us pause, and then cause us to rejoice in thanksgiving. That is the message of 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” and in 1 John 2:1, “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” There we read of the blessings of seeking the face of our Savior, something we forsake if we refuse to be honest about our own sin. As long as we put it off, ignore it, or act like it is not a big deal we will miss out on the glory and beauty of the mercy of the Lord, to our own peril. Don’t look this gift horse in the mouth. The simple message from Col. 4:2 is, “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful."
However, we are also not expected by our God to do this alone. We have been given a great cloud of witnesses in the Church to bear one another’s burdens, and we are called to run to the care of a brother and sister when despair of sin reaches our souls. If we think we can run this race alone we are sorely mistaken. We need one another, and that means being able, and willing, to trust our brothers and sisters in Christ with the depths of our hearts. That kind of confidence enables us not only to be honest with ourselves, but opens us up to forgive others as we have been forgiven.
Those who have been forgiven much, forgive much.
Here is a another read to help us think through this message:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/you-dont-have-to-hide
In Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church