January 11, 2008
What is it?
John Doe was an elder in the church in another town when he had an affair with a married woman. After divorcing his wife he remarried and moved to our community where he became active in my church. It became evident that this new marriage was not the picture of happily-ever-after. One day, knowing I needed to be compassionate, I ask John how he was doing and he said, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I know most of this is my fault. God warned me, but I didn’t listen and now I’m paying the price. I can’t help it…I just like women. I need to have a woman.” Well, oookay now. Is he expecting a listening ear, making excuses for his behavior or is he just a guy on the prowl? Maybe this is confession and repentance. I don’t know what reaction he expected me to have, but if I were Catholic I’d recommend he find a priest and hit the confessional ASAP.
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Gail;
-----I sensed an element of confession in this man’s communication with you. The church so institutionalizes everything the Bible tries to just incorporate into the normal way of life that we may simply not recognize its principles when we encounter them. The Catholics have a place to go and a priest waiting to hear your dirty deeds, and then to assign you some ritualistic task as punishment. At the church I attend, the whole congregation reads a little piece together that is the confession of some specific sin. My guess is that most people believe you go to the preacher, or to an elder, a counselor, or just to someone whose spirituality you respect highly and trust deeply. Confession has acquired such an institutionalized quality for many of us.
-----But I have always been mostly convinced that confession is simply going to the person whom you harmed and telling them what you did. It is simple, and it is useful. It gets the matter off your conscience, while at the same time introducing a new set of facts to be considered in your mental address of the situation thereafter. Of course, those facts are that the person you harmed now knows (relieving fearful suspense), some solution between the two of you has probably been reached, and hopefully, forgiveness has been dispensed. This is all good for you. Good for the other person is that he is then able to mitigate the damages. Always it enables everyone to pray concerning the circumstances, and to pray more specifically. I believe all of this is much of what is in James 5:16.
-----I also believe that confession is very much the admission of particular areas of sinful nature in your life coming from an outright honesty with whoever may cross the topic having a need to know. This is harder to do. The practical benefit of it becomes that others can still have that brotherly relationship with you, but with an increased ability to better guard what is valuable. There are also benefits that pour out from scriptures dealing with help, encouragement, teaching, counseling, exhortation, etc. And again, prayer is enabled, more specific prayer. This may be closer to what John Doe was doing with you.
-----Having a hard time being quite that open about my bad habits, I at least continually admit that I do sin. I believe that to be the most diffuse form of confession, permeating our thinking about relationships with God and others, and penetrating into the basic level of how highly we may or may not think of ourselves. Although it keeps an awareness in my soul that I have specific bad habits I need to overcome, it fails to engage possible help and prayers from others. But it also shelters against possible damage by others. Some folks are not mature enough to deal beneficially with such information. In fact, their areas of sin may chemically react with someone’s confessions in a very corrosive manner. In this way good reputations can be damaged by copious chatter and gossip.
-----Confession is not a small concept. Nor does it institutionalize effectively. From the tad that I read in your blog, it strikes me that this man was doing confession. But neither can one tell if it was just a ruse for an attempt to stir around with a stick in search of flame. He knows.
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