I’ve had people commit offenses against me and rather than admit that their actions were hurtful, they would turn on the charm or try to be extra helpful. It doesn’t work for me. I suspect that wouldn’t work for you either and I know it doesn’t work for God. To confess means to speak the same thing as. When I sin, God doesn’t want to hear about how tired I was or how difficult the circumstance. He doesn’t need me to do penance of some sort. He simply wants me to call the thing I did a sin. In that way, he and I can get on the same page and find reconciliation. When I admit that I’ve sinned, I cast myself on his mercies trusting that he’ll catch me. This abandonment of one’s ego into the hands of another is the reason that it’s tough for people to admit they’ve sinned. When a person refuses to acknowledge their fault, they cling to an artificial sense of worth. They retain their self justification and try to make the other person feel better by attempting to “make it up” to them. Such an approach does permanent damage to the relationship until the sin is confessed.
Roy Hession writes in his very helpful little book, The Calvary Road:
Some may be inclined to question whether it is right to call such things as self-consciousness, reserve and fear, sins. “Call them infirmities, disabilities, temperamental weaknesses, if you will, ” some have said, “but not sin. To do so would be to get us into bondage.” The reverse, however, is true. If these things are not sins, then we must put up with them for the rest of our lives; there is no deliverance. But if these and other things like them are indeed sins, then there is a Fountain for sin, and we may experience cleansing and deliverance from them, if we put them immediately under His precious Blood, the moment we are conscious of them. And they are sins. Their source is unbelief and an inverted form of pride, and they have hindered and hidden Him times without number.
We need to admit to God, to ourselves and to our spiritual family that we’ve sinned. We must stop minimizing and compensating or we’ll never be free. Growth Groups are a great way to begin to live in transparency with other believers. If you have other ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
In close, I leave you with this very substantive popular Christian song by Francesca Battistelli: