Confessing My Facebook Sins

I'm not Catholic, but this is funny no matter who you are.

HT: Catholic Memes

Eyes To See

HT: Holy Fathers

Pulling Up the Bitter Weeds

A Prayer for Riding Ourselves of All Bitterness and Resentment by Scotty Ward Smith - A prayer we can ll pray, and need to pray. (Hebrews 12:15, Job 5:2, Ephesians 4:31-32)

Dear heavenly Father, these Scriptures cut to the chase and bring conviction to our hearts. We are your beloved daughters and sons, but today we are also your “busted” daughters and sons; for resentment comes to us as quickly as someone steals our parking place, or eats the saran-wrapped piece of cake we hid in the “frig,” or fails to include us in some social event. It’s amazing how quickly a little slight can launch us into a big spite. Have mercy on us, Lord, and grant us fresh grace, thicker skin and bigger hearts.

But Father, being slighted is one thing, but being assaulted by the betrayals and failures, deceit and lies, attacks and abuse of others, is an altogether different matter. These aren’t things to shake off, but deep wounds, broken hearts, and incredible pain to bring to your throne of grace. You’re not calling us to denial, but to yourself. Have mercy on us, Lord, have big mercy; and grant us wisdom, strength and tons of grace.

Father—through the power of your Holy Spirit, the truth of the gospel, and the gift of community, don’t let our appropriate anger morph into destructive revenge. Don’t let our raw hurts become a band of vigilante marauders, not just bent on getting even, but upping the ante—repaying harm for harm, evil for evil, and death for death.

Don’t let our vulnerable hearts become gardens for the planting of roots of resentment and bushes of bitterness; and keep us from medicating our pain foolishly. Father, as Jesus has forgiven us, so help us to want to forgive others. Write stories of redemption and restoration with the ink of our hurt and your grace. So very Amen we pray, in Jesus’ tender and triumphant name.

Missing Confession

The Mark of Christianity That is Disappearing from Our Worship by Trevin Wax. I think he is right.

It is puzzling to see one of the defining marks of a Christian’s identity quietly disappear from a church’s worship.

I’m speaking, of course, about confession – a time when the church comes together as a repentant people, and asks God to forgive and cleanse, to renew and restore, to inflame our cold hearts and fill us with overflowing love.

Confession is one of the defining marks of a Christian because it is linked to repentance and faith. When we confess our sins to God, we are agreeing with God that our sin is something that needs to be forgiven. We are recognizing that our sin hurts us, hurts others, and most importantly, hurts the heart of God.

Confession is the expression of repentance in which we name our sin for what it is, turn away from sin, and turn toward a merciful God. The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is not that the non-Christian sins and the Christian does not, but that the Christian sins and repents, while the unbeliever hardens their heart toward God – either by refusing to admit the sin or by trying to deal with the sin in some other way.

As a part of corporate worship, confession has historically been near the beginning of a service. Once we have been summoned to worship God, and once we have seen and begun to experience His presence, we are like Isaiah – falling on our knees before a majestic and holy God, amazed when seeing the brightness of His glory, ashamed when seeing our sin for what it is. Before we can move forward in worship, or move outward in mission, we fall down in repentance.

Scripture never requires a time of confession near the beginning of a service. The Lord’s Prayer leads us to ask for forgiveness near the end, not the beginning. Making confession a requirement in every worship service could give the impression that God is constantly angry with us and we can only approach Him after doing penance. This would lead us back to the medieval image of a God whose favor we must somehow earn, rather than the God of grace whose favor is freely received through the merits of Christ and His righteousness.

Today, however, the more pressing problem is not the idea of a God who is perpetually angry, but a shriveled god who is shallow and nice. If we don’t see God taking sin seriously, we won’t take it seriously either. And once we stop taking sin seriously, repentance loses its power. No surprise, then, that confession falls away, and the one thing for which all Christians should be known – repentant faith – is something we no longer express together in public.

My hope is that the practice of corporate confession will make a comeback – whether in a time of silent prayer, corporate confession, or songs that plead for mercy. After all, we are not in a posture to receive God’s Word until we have first renounced our sin.

A confession of sin renounces any attempt to justify the sin; we humble acknowledge our sin and its sentence. At the same time, we humbly place ourselves in the hands of a mighty and merciful Savior. He is the One who grants repentance, and He is the One in whom we trust.

What Jesus Does With Your Sin

Love this! -  6 Things Jesus Does With Sin by Jared C. Wilson

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”– John 1:29

John the Baptist commands a beholding of the sin-taking-away Lamb. What do we see in this beholding? How exactly does Jesus take away our sin?

Here are 6 things Jesus does with sin:

1. He Condemns It.

Jesus puts a curse on sin. He marks its forehead.

Romans 8:3 – “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.”

Jesus says to sin in no uncertain terms, “Sin, you’re going to die.”

2. He Carries It.

Like the true and better scapegoat, Jesus becomes our sin-bearer.

1 Peter 2:24 – “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

2 Corinthians 5:21 – “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

3. He Cancels It.

He closes out the account. (Even better, he opens a new one, where we’re always in the black, having been credited with his perfect righteousness.)

1 Corinthians 13:4-5 – “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful”
That word resentful is more directly “to count up wrongdoing,” which is why some translations of this text say that “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

Colossians 2:13-14 – “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

That last proclamation leads us into this great truth:

4. He Crucifies It

1 Peter 3:18 – “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”
At the cross, Jesus dies and takes our sin with him. Only the sin stays dead.

5. He Casts It Away

Jesus takes the corpse and chucks it into the void.

Micah 7:19 – “He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”

Psalm 103:12 – “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”

6. He Chooses to Un-remember It.

Jesus is omniscient. He is not forgetful. But he wills to un-remember our sin.

Jeremiah 31:34 – “And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Hebrews 8:12 – “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”

Hebrews 10:17 – “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
Astonishing. We bring our sin to him, repentant and in faithful confession, and he says, “What’re you talking about?”

This is how Jesus forgives sin: He condemns it, carries it, cancels it, kills it, casts it, and clean forgets it. If we’ll confess it.

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.”

Joyful Confession

"If you are truly trusting in Christ, you can’t confess a sin for which God has not provided forgiveness in Jesus.

Indeed, if you work at the discipline of confessing your sin, it should not lead to despair at all, but rather to rejoicing over the extent of God’s love to you in Christ. "

— Mark Dever and Michael Lawrence, It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), page 42

Links Worth a Look

Some links worth a look:

Our Unhealthy Obsessions With Pastors

John Chrysostom &  Justification by Faith

What Did Jesus Mean When He Said "Judge Not"

Weakness is an Advantage

Confession of Sin aa Idle, Lustful Babbling

A Primer on the Southern Baptist Convention, Part 1 and Part 2

Contemporary Confessional

The Act of Contrition Via Internet

From politicalcartoons.com

Run to Your Healing

"The cross should continually testify to us that God fully knew we would need to be justified. Therefore, unconfessed sin is actually the foolish decision to run away from our healing and growth rather than toward it. We hang on to things we believe will satisfy us, thinking we need those more than what God offers to provide...

....When people walk in honesty about their fears, shortcomings, and needs - not in thoughtless disobedience, but in grace based freedom and forgiveness - they reveal a deep understanding of the gospel. to confess our sins to one another is to violently pursue our own joy and the glory of God...and to exponentially increase our rejoicing and worship, both individually and corporately."

 -Matt Chandler, Creature of the Word: The Jesus Centered Church,  page 31 (italics in the original)

Through Confession to Authenticity

More quotes from Gospel-Centered Discipleship by Jonathan Dodson:

"The religious verbally punish others for failure to keep the rules, while the rebellious are quick to overlook one another's failure. Both are rule centered. The religious person is oriented around keeping rules, and the rebellious person around breaking rules." (Page 64)

"...confession isn't to be viewed as a ritual bargaining chip we cash in to obtain a clear conscience. Our forgiveness has already been bought in Jesus; we simply procure his purchased forgiveness through confession. This may seem abstract. Perhaps it would be helpful to think of confession in terms of authenticity.  Confessions is a verbal way of spiritually recovering our authenticity. Confession rejects an inauthentic image in order to realign with our true image." (Page 68, italics in original)

"The gospel reminds us to live authentically as his children, either through repentance or obedience. In confession, we become authentically Christian, agreeing with God about our judgment-deserving sin and trusting in his sin-forgiving grace. We return to the reality of grace, in Christ, which in turn compels real obedience." (Pages 68-69)

"The gospel coaxes us to run neither away nor past God but straight into his living arms. In the gospel, we get to live authentically as God's forgiven and accepted sons and daughters. Grace brings us to our senses, delivering us from the insanity of sin. (Page 69)

Pursuit of Fleeting Pleasures

Psalm 51 is King David's confession of his sin after his affair with Bathsheba. In verse 4 he says "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight."   The following comments on this passage come from Tony Reinke, quoting Rick Gamache's sermon “Whiter Than Snow”

I believe what David is saying in verse 4 [Psalm 51:4] is that all sin is a preference for the fleeting pleasures of the world and the flesh over the everlasting joy of God’s fellowship. This is why the Christian life is a life of repentance (like Martin Luther said), not because every time we sin we lose our status as God’s children and have to get saved all over again. Our status never changes. We are always God’s children, we are still declared to be holy even when we sin, we are still the heirs of his Kingdom.

But our sin affects our relationship with God. Our sin breaks our fellowship with God. David realizes that before he ever committed adultery with Bathsheba, he committed spiritual adultery against God. Why did he need her? Why was he willing to murder his own friend for her? It is because before David ever sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, he lost the joy of his salvation. That is why he asks for the joy to be restored [Psalm 51:12].

We sin because we forget God’s steadfast love and abundant mercy. When we are not ravished by him, we forget the superior pleasures that there are in God and give ourselves to the inferior pleasures of sin. And this is why David says, “Against you God, you only have I sinned.” He goes deep with his confession because he knows repentance is the way back to fellowship with God.

I think it is absolutely amazing and very telling, given what we know about the situation, that David never mentions sexual sin in Psalm 51. He’s not mainly praying that the Lord would provide him with good accountability. He’s not mainly praying that God would give him self-control and protect his eyes and his mind. Those are all good things. But David does not mention them here because his sexual sin — and every sexual sin — is the symptom of the disease not the disease. Sexual sin is a symptom of lack of fullness of joy and gladness in Jesus. It’s a symptom of a lack of being ravished by the love and kindness and mercy and goodness and beauty and excellence and majesty and glory and honor and power of God.

Signs of Repentance

From Jared Wilson:  12 signs we have a genuinely repentant heart:

1. We name our sin as sin and do not spin it or excuse it, and further, we demonstrate “godly sorrow,” which is to say, a grief chiefly about the sin itself, not just a grief about being caught or having to deal with the consequences of sin.
2. We actually confessed before we were caught or the circumstantial consequences of our sin caught up with us.
3. If found out, we confess immediately or very soon after and “come clean,” rather than having to have the full truth pulled from us. Real repentance is typically accompanied by transparency.
4. We have a willingness and eagerness to make amends. We will do whatever it takes to make things right and to demonstrate we have changed.
5. We are patient with those we’ve hurt or victimized, spending as much time as is required listening to them without jumping to defend ourselves.
6. We are patient with those we’ve hurt or victimized as they process their hurt, and we don’t pressure them or “guilt” them into forgiving us.
7. We are willing to confess our sin even in the face of serious consequences (including undergoing church discipline, having to go to jail, or having a spouse leave us).
8. We may grieve the consequences of our sin but we do not bristle under them or resent them. We understand that sometimes our sin causes great damage to others that is not healed in the short term (or perhaps ever).
9. If our sin involves addiction or a pattern of behavior, we do not neglect to seek help with a counselor, a solid twelve-step program, or even a rehabilitation center.
10. We don’t resent accountability, pastoral rebuke, or church discipline.
11. We seek our comfort in the grace of God in Jesus Christ, not simply in being free of the consequences of our sin.
12. We are humble and teachable.

Hard to Repent

So true!

"It’s hard to repent. And while it’s hard enough to repent before a perfect God, it’s even harder to repent before an imperfect human being. To admit that you have injured or neglected another person, then to go the person and say, “I’m sorry. I’m ashamed. Will you forgive me?”—to do this is mortifying. It kills us to do it. You need to be a big person to give it a serious try. That’s the paradox of repentance, says, C.S. Lewis. Only a bad person needs to repent. Only a good person can do it. "

- Cornelius Plantinga Jr, Beyond Doubt: Faith-Building Devotions on Questions Christians Ask, 242.

Hat Tip: Vitamin Z

Dare to Be a Sinner

"In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner."

      - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Deceptive DNA

"You'll never understand sin's sleight of hand until you acknowledge that a significant part of the DNA of sin is deception. As sinners we are all very committed and gifted self-swindlers. No one is more influential in your life than you, because you talk to yourself more than anyone else does. What you say to yourself is profoundly important. Your words either aid God's work of conviction and confession or they assist sin's system of deception. So it's important to humbly admit that we're all too skilled at looking at our own wrong and seeing good. We're all much better at seeing the sin, weakness, and failure of others than we are our own. We're all very good at being intolerant in others the very things that we willingly tolerate in ourselves. The bottom line is that sin causes us not to hear or see ourselves with accuracy. And we not only tend to be blind, but, to compound matters, we also tend to be blind to our blindness."

From Paul Tripp at As You Are – The Gospel Coalition Blog. Much more at the link

Admit It!

"So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: "I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where he is there I shall be also!"

                --- Martin Luther


Hat Tip:  Abandon the Reformation, Abandon the Gospel – The Gospel Coalition Blog: 

"Why I Need Jesus"

I saw this post at  SBC Voices - Why I Need Jesus  - and was deeply moved.  Almost all of what Dan Barnes says here (other than the part about being a pastor) also applies to and is true about me.

I have been guilty of telling many other people why they need Jesus, instead of sharing why I need Jesus. I know sometimes it makes me come across as a “holier than, better than and more righteous than” sort of individual. I don’t want that. I want to share with you, my friends, brothers and sister why I need Jesus.

I am a sinner. You all knew that. I have some sins that I struggle with more than others. I have the sin of pride, I try to study and learn and go, and as a result I often have a pride issue. I am not quick to admit when I am wrong, I don’t react well to criticism, even when it’s justified. I don’t like to be dismissed or marginalized, and I get very upset when I feel like someone is dismissing me with an argument/statement that is not valid. I hate proof texting, makes me crazy. It’s a result of my pride and ego, and to save me, I need Jesus.

I am an introverted, task oriented person. That means that I am not as patient and loving with people as I should be. If I am interrupted, I can become short . Being a pastor, my job is to be an under-shepherd of people, not do tasks. I need Jesus.

I sin in my actions, my lack of actions, in my words and deeds. I sin in my thought life, in my home life, in my work and in my play. I need Jesus.