January 03, 2013
Spare Me the Details
Homosexual marriage is not a visual I want stuck in my head and it has
me thinking about Catholic priests who listen to confessions on a regular
basis. I wonder if the priest can then get the ‘sin-stuff’ of others out of his
head, or if it resurfaces and replays like a bad movie. I can’t help but think
that listening to the depravity of man might somehow affect one’s own moral
conscious. Or maybe the sinner simply confesses a sin, without going into the
details. “Therefore confess your sins to
each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a
righteous man is powerful and effective.” (James 5:16 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Did you know that confession is as important as Jesus Christ to your salvation? Of course if Jesus had not died for us and been raised to eternal life we would have no hope at all. But neither will we have any hope if we do not confess. Trying to have Jesus without confession is like trying to cry out for help without a voice. Nothing is hearable. Nobody will help.
-----But I never really got into the “need to confess every sin I’ve done” thing. Before I fully surrendered my teen-life for this quasi-adulthood I now live, I had come to appreciate the overwhelming complexity of even the conscious details of my actions, thoughts, feelings, inclinations, etc. And those are merely the tip of the iceberg of all the details making up my mind and emotions and their ongoing working. I knew there was no possibility whatsoever of tracking down my every flaw to mentally stamp it, “Has been confessed.” Therefore I knew that the Biblical concept of confessing sin was not an item by item thing.
-----I confess that I am flawed and God is not. In fact, I propose that there is some degree of flaw with every thought and feeling I have, whether it be in its supporting logic, the associations it forms with my other thoughts and feelings, how I express it, etc., etc., etc. I am not saying that there is no right in me. I know my thought that Jesus is the Christ is itself perfectly true and without flaw in its simple statement. But when I begin to ponder the full extent of what “Christ” is, for example, my thought is found to be short of all that God knows it is. Well, that’s a flaw.
-----So, I specifically confess everything which is riding my conscience in truth. (I also confess my conscience being ridden by things not wrong according to God’s Word.) But I understand that confessing specifics is less for my coming clean before God and more for combing rat’s nests out of my psychology. What I consider my honest confession to God is that I am flawed in ways far, far beyond my own recognition and understanding, therefore I always accept Him and His Word as truth and myself as a stumbling, weak, errant little creature who will cross into the winner’s circle by only being carried.
-----Then my confession must be validated by rejecting anything of mine which does not agree with His communication to us. So my proposition that there is some degree of flaw in everything of this temporal life (except God’s activities in it) is supported by the fact that the more flaws I reject all the more flaws surface to reject. Even my rejecting flaws starts to get flawed. So I must take rejecting sin to be as much an attitude in general as an action toward specifics.
-----Then if I were a priest, I could not hear the confession of a person who finds homosexuality to be acceptable before man and God. Purposefully limited confession is not confession. One does not have Christ without dying to himself, which precisely engages true and complete confession. Otherwise, by refusing to confess homosexuality or any other flaw, even the most minute, the actual statement made is that I judge the Word of God to be flawed. Ascribing error to God can happen only by judging Him, which can only occur by moral and spiritual superiority to Him, and all of that is blasphemy. Uh-oh! Real confession is kind of important! I could only tell such a person to go away and think truer until he can confess his all according to God's words.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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