Higher Obedience

I really should be reading stuff on second language acquisition or working on my anglicismes assignment, but it’s a grey Saturday. Instead, I’d rather think about confession. I usually would prefer doing assignments than having to think about confession, let alone actually confessing my sins. It’s not something I’m prone to do, it’s not natural for me to want to confess sins, so assignments looks more interesting or at least, easier to deal with than confession.

But confession is good. It’s more than merely ‘good’, I just don’t have the words. I remember that as a teen I’d “confess” my sins (that is, I believed that confession was the ‘reading’ of a list of sins to God) every night and I couldn’t believe how a person could fall asleep without going though that kind of confession. I suppose it wasn’t a bad thing for me to go to God and tell Him the sins I’d done during that day and ask for His forgiveness, but confession has taken on a different meaning or depth maybe in the last few years for me.

Confessing my sins to God (that is, acknowledging that God is in the right and I am in the wrong about a bunch of stuff I’ve thought, said and done), can be easy. I don’t see God and I don’t have a great enough fear of Him and understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, so that makes confession seem easier. I do realize that my sins are always done in rebellion against Him, no matter who else is involved, but confessing to God often seems easy. At other times, confession is tough and doesn’t want to get out of me, but those times aren’t as frequent as the other times.

Confessing my sin to the person I’ve sinned against is one, tough thing. But when my sin is just between me and God, I’ve found that confessing those sins to a trusted sister (well I’m a girl eh) is like being put through fire to be refined. For me, it’s so much more demanding to confess to a human being than to God. It should be the other way around, but I’m obviously a human being and a great sinner. So I’ve discovered a bit more, how that kind of confession is good and healthy for me. It’s not that my friend has the authority to forgive my sins, but having to humble myself before that other human being provides me with a proper shame and repentance that should accompany confession… such things, unfortunately aren’t necessarily with me when I only “confess” to God. It’s no fun to have to confess, once again certain sins to someone who keeps me accountable, but it’s helped me a great, great deal to deal with certain sins.

Anyway… those are some of my thoughts.