Deleted Scenes: Confession is good for your soul

I was at a gathering of pastors and church leaders recently where we gathered into small groups to pray for one another. A pastor in my group was talking about some of the struggles in his ministry, and in the process confessed an area of sin in his life. It wasn’t your typical failure (sexual or financial), but it was sin nevertheless. His honesty was refreshing and you could tell this was not something he had shared with many people before. He was at a place where he wanted to bring this into the light and turn from it.

Confession is something we Protestant Christians struggle with. We’re skeptical about some of what we see among our Catholic friends, where the typical model of confession doesn’t appear closely aligned with the New Testament. However, we Protestants often err in another way. We seem to think that confession is just between us and God, and that there’s no need to share our brokenness with anybody else. After all, Jesus alone is our mediator. We don’t need anyone else to stand between us and God and mediate forgiveness, because that’s the work Jesus has accomplished. That’s 100% true, but I think it misses the point of confession to another human being. The point of confessing our sins to another person isn’t because it’s necessary for forgiveness, but because by bringing our sin into the light with a trusted believer, we are living with integrity and accountability. 

There’s something really powerful about this and I’ve experienced it firsthand. In the summer, we worked through the New Testament book of James as a church. This is what we read in the very last section: “therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16). It seems that healing and personal confession are connected in some way in this verse (not that every sickness or illness is due to sin or shame, but perhaps it is more often than we care to admit?) Could it be that bringing everything into the light leads to freedom in various ways? We see that in Acts 19 as well. During Paul’s ministry in Ephesus, an interaction between some false exorcists and a demonically-possessed man became known. The result was that the name of Jesus was held in high honour and “many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done” (19:18). These were believers who had continued to secretly practice sorcery and other forms of magic. However, after confessing this pattern, they brought their scrolls together and publicly burnt them. The result of this confession and repentance was that “the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power” (19:20). Again, confession led to the breaking of bonds and to increased freedom in Christ.

The other important aspect of this is that confession cultivates humility. This is what we talked about on Sunday. We said we want to be an “Inside Out” church that prioritizes the heart over image. We said a significant element in that is humility. We need to live with a heart posture of humility, acknowledging our deep need for grace. We see in Matthew again and again that those who approached Jesus in this humble way were the ones who gained access to his presence and power. We said that those who are truly blessed in the Kingdom of God are those who have this heart posture. Confession is one of the best ways to cultivate humility of heart. In confession, we put down the mask and let someone else see what’s really going on inside of us. We make known our dependence on the power of God because we’re finally admitting to ourselves and others that we can’t do this on our own.

In line with this, I want to encourage you to take on a new practice, assuming you don’t do this already (if you do, that’s great!). I encourage you to find one or two Christians who you trust and to enter into a relationship of accountability with them. These are people you would check in with regularly and confess your struggles to. Ideally, they would do the same with you, so that humble confession is reciprocal. You don’t need to go on X and tweet out your daily confessional or take the stage at church every Sunday and let the world know how you sinned that week. But to have a couple of Holy Spirit-filled people who you can bring everything into the light with is a vastly underrated spiritual practice. This is a practice I have tried to maintain in my life, and it has made a huge difference in terms of living in freedom.