Confession and Guidance

Recap

Inward - Prayer, fasting, meditation and study

Outward - Simplicity, solitude, submission and service

Corporate

practices we do together

Disipline of Confession

why is this a corporate discipline?

Come back to that

first the picture of what is confession

We are all sinners - breaking a religious or moral law. I see it more personally as not listening to God’s way for you that hurts others or yourself.

More simply put, walking away from God.

Our God, creator of all, wouldn’t let us walk away.

Some confuse this story with an angry and vengeful God, an enforcer of rules as to why we must confess and be right with God.

Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth,

At the heart of God is the desire to give and to forgive.

God has given us free will and then when we use it against him He again redeems life.

Jesus' submission set into motion the entire redemptive process that led to the cross and was confirmed in the resurrection.

Love brought Jesus to the cross, Calvery came as a result of God’s great desire to forgive, not His reluctance. Jesus knew that by His suffering he could absorb all the evil of humanity and heal it, forgive it, and redeem it.

This moment took all of the collective, past, present and future sins of the human race, all the violence, all the fear.

This is the work that makes confession and the forgiveness of sins possible.

Richard Foster highlights:

The moment Jesus cries out, Mark 15:34

Mark 15:34 NIV

And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

This was his moment of greatest triumph.

Jesus, who walked in constant communion with the Father, now became so totally identified with humankind that he was the actual embodiment of sin.

As Paul writes

2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Doing this, the greatest triumph of his ministry on earth he announced ‘it is finished’.

The French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux summed this moment up as

To shame our sins He blushed in blood; He closed His eyes to show us God;

Let all the world fall down and know, that none but God such love can show

Sometimes it is hard to connect with Jesus' actions on the cross. But I know it is true. I know this not only because of the evidence of the bible saying it is true but because I have seen its effects in the lives of many people, including my own experience.

Confession and forgiveness transform our lives. Has changed my life and brought freedom and continues to.

Salvation at the cross is both an event and a process.

The discipline of Confession assists with that process.

Ephesians 4:13 NIV

until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Some clarifying questions here

Confession = grace over discipline

Is confession a grace rather than a discipline?

It is both.

God gives grace freely, but discipline ensures we are constantly calibrating ourselves to what sin we have allowed in.

Corporate Discipline?

Isn’t confession a private matter? answer - both/and

Individual

1 Timothy 2:5 NIV

For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus,

Collectively

James 5:16 NIV

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

This is the part that I think we are less comfortable doing.

Richard Foster rightly hightlights:

Confession is a difficult discipline for us because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sins. We cannot bear to reveal our failures and shortcomings to others. We imagine that we are the only ones who have not stepped on the high road to heaven. Therefore we hide ourselves from one another and live in veiled lies and hypocrisy.

But if we know that the people of God are first a fellowship of sinners, we are freed to hear the unconditional call of God’s love and to confess our needs openly before our brothers and sisters. We know we are not alone in our sins and struggles. The fear and pride that cling to us like barnacles cling to others also. We are sinners together, together redeemed. In acts of mutual confession, we release the power that heals. Our humanity is no longer denied but transformed.

Because of this loss of confession with one another, sadly it has been my experience in my teenage years that I too had to wear a mask.

In fact, I feel it is part of my testimony when I tell others of what Jesus has done in my life that once I felt ashamed and like I was wearing a mask (this included at church), but as I come into a deeper relationship with Jesus I now feel free and able to live life to the fall. Do you have a story like that?

(sadly) I also found that when I did confess to my brothers in Christ they didn’t really know what to do with me, or more fairly, how to help.

There is no doubt that those experiences have shaped me and now I have no filter (overshare). I also take confession, accountability and follow-up very seriously.

I think it is something we all need to be prepared in, to confess to one another but also receive a confession, with no judgement and ask how can I journey with you so that you can repent (turn your life around).

In my experience, if we are not prepared to bring things into the light we will stay in the dark! missing out on the light and freedom Jesus died for you on the cross to bring transformation.

darkness is nothing else, but the absence of light.

How do we drive darkness out? obviously, we can't pick it up with a bucket and chuck it out of the window. Darkness will disappear when we turn the light on!

It is the same with sin. Bring it in the light and its power will fade. As long as it stays in the darkness, it will flourish, but when you bring it to the light, it will become powerless.

How do we bring it to the light?

By confessing! As simple as it sounds, as hard as it is to practice!

Confess your sin! Don’t believe the lie that tells you that you can do it alone. You cannot! And you don’t need to do it all by yourself, because your sin was carried by Jesus and crucified on the cross.

God is not taken by surprise when you sin, and He doesn’t love you any less. He cannot wait for us to confess our sins and to give us his forgiveness, because he loves us, and He doesn’t want us to live under the burden of sin.

From the moment you confess your sins, believe that they are forgiven. I will say that again

Believe that you are forgiven! Get up and continue your race. Don’t regret it forever. This doesn’t benefit anyone. It doesn’t benefit you, nor the others, nor God’s Kingdom!

If I can keep speaking from experience, I have also witnessed overreaction when sin is confessed or no longer able to be hidden. Which leads to casting people out instead of drawing people deeper into a relationship with Jesus.

Let him without sin cast the first stone, Jesus said in John 8. Why do we take God's seat of Judgment on people when he has given grace?

That’s another of my confessions by the way.

In the book, there is a lot more shared on how to do confession well in an individual and corporate setting.

Also, look at the bible verses.

But we need to be willing to listen to God in this space which leads us to the

Discipline of Guidance

I have to agree with Foster that much of the teaching on divine guidance in our century has been noticeably deficient in the corporate aspect. We have excellent instruction on how God leads us through Scripture, through reason, through circumstances and through the promptings of the spirit upon the individual heart. But we hear little about how God leads through his people, the body of Christ.

God does guide the individual richly and profoundly, but he also guides groups of people and can instruct the individual through the group experience.

I witnessed this this week, Craig asked those who gathered to discuss the 2024 budget to discern and write down a figure for the weekly tithe target. We did that individually and then shared the number with the group and we all came up with the same figure.

I actually love meetings for this reason. not to just talk around issues and come up with solutions.

But to create space to lay the issue before God, listen to the holy spirit and share that with one another so that we can see if he is telling us all the same thing or if we need to discern and discuss what Jesus is telling us.

If that sounds like your kind of meeting I have a council nomination here for you.

A lot of the time we forget this aspect and simply invite God into the space with a prayer at the start and end. Now God can still have His way, but if we are serious about Jesus being the head of the church then in our meetings we need to seek His opinion, especially when we don’t agree. I talked more about this last week when referring to the discipline of submission.

I think our narrow view of guidance has come from the over-saturation of the emphasis on individualism in our Western culture.

Yet when we look at the early church, they would encourage groups to fast, pray and worship together until they had discerned the mind of the Lord.

Acts 4:32–33 NIV

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all

Now, we have many opportunities to lean into this, I have already mentioned the council nominations - What would it look like to fast, pray and worship until we have discerned together all that God is calling into this role?

As Baptists we are regularly called to this discipline of guidance with our ACM, and I was very encouraged by our process with the strategic plan.

We will speak more on this when we come to highlighting our vision at the end of the month.

Next week we have Andrew Corbett speaking on our last 2 disciplines Worship and Celebration.

“What do you see?”

“What does this say about God?”

“What does this say about us?”

“What is God saying to you?”