Contemplating Confession

I was really thankful to think about the freedom of confession this week at the peacewise training.

Confess - meaning to say the same as.

Confession is not dredging up issues that God doesn't know about. It's to agree with God about how I have failed - failed to think or speak of him as is right about him, failed to love others as he desires... It's to agree with the one who made me and knows me and LOVES me already. Knows what I have done, what I will do... knows all the things that make my sin struggles hard, but also knows exactly, with penetrating pin point accuracy, what those sins are. And still loves me.

I think in christian life I can practically live as though confession is to say things that God doesn't already know... or that others don't know, or that others do know but don't understand or have the full picture and so this is scary. Or that somehow God is not really big enough to love me as the more I grasp my sin, the more I am repulsed by it, and therefore I gather more how much God must be repulsed also... but he is more so. And yet, at the same time, he knows it more deeply than I can see, and is disgusted more than I can know, yet loves me.

And forgives.

What a glorious gift he has given us in confession. To be freed from the need to pretend, hold onto reputation, as if pretending and clinging would make it less true. Like a child who hides behind his hands in hide and seek. Yet the child who says he doesn't know how to hide and needs help from parent would of course receive it.

I'm sure in the next year... and probably even in the next day or week, I will struggle again with confession - resist it's liberating invitation - redefine it as a means to condemn myself... because I will again forget that there is no condemnation for those in Christ... and will live again as though I am not in Christ, and wallow in fear of condemnation.

But God does not offer me this option as his child. Of this resistance to his gift of confession I hope he will also convict me, again and again, and free me again  from this voice of condemnation that I play on repeat.

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May I be a parent who breathes this grace into the lives of my children - so they may not, so far as it depends on me - fear the condemnation that comes with Christ-forgetting repentance.