The Importance of Confession

15 Sep The Importance of Confession

It’s not quite as simple as saying ‘if you don’t confess, you won’t be forgiven.’

The reason this is true is because the cross of Christ is timeless and he went to the calvary for all sins, for all time. And when he died for you, it was before you had committed any of your sins. Imagine you have a regularly recurring sin – you wish to covercome it, but have so far failed. You confess it to God, and he forgives you. But God is also timeless and knows you will commit it again, maybe even hundreds more times. So God still forgives you knowing what your future entails. This is a divine quality, because very few people would forgive someone if they knew they would make the same mistake again repeatedly.

But the difference is that you don’t know your future. Your goal is to overcome sin, and God is gracious and forgives. Then having received that forgiveness you feel better about yourself, you feel closer to God and you continue to walk with him. Even if this happens multiple times, by confessing you maintain a relationship with God.

So it isn’t so much about being accepted by God, but about walking with Him. This happens in marriage and in family too. Sometimes our loved ones fail repeatedly, but it doesn’t mean they are kicked out of the family. But the confessing and forgiving process is good for the quality of the relationship.

So the act of forgiveness does something for how we feel about it. It is for our benefit now. It helps us walk with God.

What if we don’t confess? What if we ignore what pleases God. It doesn’t imply we are immediately kicked out of his family, but it leads to a hardened heart, to drifting away, to love growing cold. It takes us away from Him, not because He is mean-spirited, but because it changes us.  So the long-term consequence can indeed be that we fall away from God.

Confessing isn’t because God needs it as much as we need it.

So should we confess our sins, and keep ourselves up to date with God?  Most definitely.  We want to love the Lord our God and walk with Him, and remove every hindrance to that relationship, the most valuable of all relationships.