Proclaimer Blog
Do you confess your sins – and not just in theory?
I am in the middle of preaching a little series of five sermons from the so-called Penitential Psalms at our home church (get them here) and it is doing me good (whether or not it is doing good to anyone else). I am tackling Psalms 32, 38, 51, 102 and 143.
When preaching Psalm 32 to start the series I was struck by how many of us take confession of sin for granted in our Christian lives. Of course we confess our sins, we think. But do we actually make a regular, even daily, discipline of deliberate, intentional, specific confession of sin to God?
I am ashamed to say that for me this is a discipline that has fallen by the wayside, and – having preached about it – I thought I would do well to put it into practice. It is doing me good. I am trying at the end of each day to set aside a few minutes to confess my sins aloud to God my Father. Often I find that my first thought is to wonder if I have much to confess. I sit there with my mind a sort of complacent blank. But as I ask God by his Spirit to show me more of my heart, it is not long before I am convicted of all sorts of deep and ugly things in my heart. I want to be one ‘in whose spirit there is no deceit’ (Psalm 32.2), and if I am to be that kind of man, I need to let the Spirit search my heart day by day, and to reappropriate with wonder and joy, the forgiveness the Lord Jesus has won for me. Psalm 32 teaches that the blessing of forgiveness is intimately connected with the practice of confession, and I commend it to you.