John Shore Christian Blog and Commentary

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Why Should Christians Confess Their Sins?

Being human, right off the bat, offers up some pretty significant challenges, right? Premier amongst them is the challenge constantly being taken up by everyone, all the time: The will to be perfect.

Each and every one of us wants to be perfect. With all of our hearts, we yearn to be blameless, wonderful, superior, without guilt, generally inspirational, absolutely sinless.

Especially absolutely sinless. That’s really the state to which we all aspire.

Boy, do we wish we didn’t sin.

But we do sin, of course. In it’s in our nature to. We could no sooner will ourselves not sin than we could will ourselves to become invisible, so that we could float around, and no one could see us, and we’d … we’d … well, never mind.

See?! Such sinners we are! (Well, I am, anyway)

Inevitably, we sin. And just as inevitably, after we sin we experience the jagged, fairly harrowing affliction of guilt.

Curse that Adam and Eve! If it wasn’t for those two miscreants, today we’d all be just as guilt-free an an apple hanging from a tree.

But, alas, that ain’t us.

We sin.

And then we feel bad about it.

And then of course we feel driven to do something to relieve ourselves of our pain and shame.

And that is where the blessed sacrament of Christian confession comes in.

We have a great God. And one of the things that makes him so stunningly, inexpressively great is that he cares so much about us. And the reason we know he cares so much about us is because (for one) he came down to earth and willed himself to be slaughtered in order to at the very least establish for us a permanent, infallible means of absolutely cleansing ourselves of the raw, grueling guilt we experience after we sin.

He saves our souls for heaven in the afterlife, and in this life he cleanses our minds and rinses clean our spirits.

Now that's a great and loving God, is it not?

Guilt. We cause it; we hate it. And confession is how we are relieved of it through our reconciliation with God.

We sin; we feel guilt; we drop to our knees; we pour our confession out to God; he forgives us our transgression; in a natural outpouring of gratitude for that forgiveness -- for that new lease on life we just received  -- we pledge to God to start representing him better than we have been; we rise up; we go on.

If you’re a new Christian, and you never learn anything else about Christ or the religion that bears his name (which you won't, of course, since by definition a Christian seeks ever greater knowledge of Christ), learn to confess your sins to God.

If you don’t know what a difference that makes, find out. Confess your sins to God. It’ll change your life, every blessed time.


Here are some Bible quotes germane to this matter:

1 John 1:7 The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.

1 John 1:9  If we confess our sins, He who is upright can be depended upon to forgive sins, and to cleanse us from every wrong.

Eph 1:7  In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace
 
John 13:8  If I do not wash you [of your sins], you have no part with Me.”

Luke 11:4  Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.