So I tweeted a couple days ago that there’s a way to do a weekly confession of sin that actually makes things worse rather than better. And there were a few questions. So here are a few thoughts on the matter.
First, the Bible verse: “For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.” (2 Cor. 7:10). In other words, you can have two different guys come into your office (say you’re a pastor) or two different kids sit down to talk to you (say you’re a parent), and they might both be sorrowful, sad, in tears and make confession to you about some particular sin in their life and ask for forgiveness. And on the surface both situations may look entirely identical, but Paul says that one guy will be forgiven, cleansed, saved, while the other guy is actually closer to death. Now that’s the principle, and I believe worldly sorrow is even more likely to creep in whenever you schedule repentance, like say, a weekly confession at the beginning of the service. Now I happen to believe that the dangers inherent in the planned weekly confession are to be preferred to not planning it at all. There are other dangers on the other side, and given the full biblical witness, I’m convinced that weekly, corporate worship should normally include a confession of sin and assurance of forgiveness. But, the Bible says to watch out for worldly sorrow, a kind of false repentance that actually produces death. There’s a way to do confession of sin that actually makes everything worse.
Second, there’s a deep down human nature sin problem that people have that wants all the glory. This is the self-god problem. I want to be my own god, my own lord, the master of my own fate. And this translates into being your own savior, your own deliverer. And we are so sophisticated with this idolatry that we can twist perfectly good things into a moments of self-worship. And confession of sin is just as good as any other, if not better. So there we are called to remember sin, called to remember our sinfulness, and the self-god doesn’t mind lots of vague guilty feelings. Lots of vague guilty feelings are an opportunity to be magnanimous, to bear up under it. And the advantage is that vague guilty feelings are completely worthless as far as getting rid of them. Jesus died for particular sins, particular offenses, specific transgressions, but guilty feelings hover and cloud and remain ambiguous. And if you have a fairly distorted picture of God as the great angry Zeus in the sky, then you have vague, generalized guilt coupled with a vaguely angry God, always rather annoyed with all the stupid people and all their stupid sins. So what a weekly confession serves up is a big pile of mud and invites all these false, distorted versions of confession and who God is to lumber into the room. This doesn’t mean that everyone just gets morbid and depressed (they might), they might actually have some kind of false version of joy. But what the absolution, the declaration of forgiveness becomes isn’t a release, a promise of free grace, it becomes, rather, a sort of pep-talk. Of course that’s not what the words mean. But if sin is vague, and God is vaguely mad, then when the pastor says joyful words, the only way to grab joy is to assume that you’re just supposed to feel joyful and try your best to force it. And this is just old fashioned self-righteousness, the surest way to Hell. Continue Reading…
