March 5
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
Today we will continue our discussion of repenting and confessing our sins to God, specifically why it is so difficult to do this at times. Think about your own self right now. Ask yourself, “What sin have I not confessed to God?” Ask this question in your heart and wait for a minute or two for answers to come into your mind. If you are having difficulty thinking of anything, then ask the Lord to show you what sins you have not confessed or addressed to His satisfaction. If you can’t think of anything after that, you are a holy saint indeed! Or perhaps too distracted or tired.
But I suspect that for the majority of us, something will come to mind, and possibly a lot of things if we are honest and really want to know. This brings us to the first of several things we will discuss that make it difficult if not impossible to follow these simple commands to confess and repent of our sins. See if you agree with me that this is true:
Much of the time, we don’t really want to know what our sins are, and we don’t really want to give them up.
Speaking out of my own experience and what I have observed in others, most of the time we want to do what we want when we want to do it. We want to live our lives the way we want, say and do what we want, have what we want when we want it, and be masters of our own lives. And that inevitably involves sin when we are in control. If we want to be angry with someone for their offenses against us, we want the right to hold on to our anger. If we want to entertain lustful thoughts and reserve a place in our hearts for lust, we resent any intrusion that would take that away from us. If we want to entertain ourselves and spend our time on pursuits that please us, we want that right to make that decision. If we want to get rich, we want to hold tightly to the idea that it is a good and worthy pursuit, even if the personal and spiritual cost to us is very great. In short, many of us want to deceive ourselves and want to remain in our sins.
But we are not content to stop there. Not only do we not want to know about our sins and not give them up, we want God to approve of our actions and be on our side in a disagreement and punish the other guy and excuse our infractions and bless us in spite of them. We construct self-pandering reasoning that justifies our sins and persuades us that “God understands” your reasons for directly disobeying or blatantly ignoring His word and that He is okay with it! What a road of self deception we walk! And the scary thing is that we can persist in this state of self deception and make excuses for our disobedience for years and years.
In reality, I would say that this describes walking in the flesh and being blind to our sins, and those who are blind to their own sins run a great risk of becoming hypocrites and stumbling blocks to others. We are clean on the outside but inside we are full of robbery and self-indulgence. With our lips we say the right things, but with our actions we deny Him. Others are not fooled by it, and we make many people stumble because of our hypocrisy. I suspect that this reflects the state of many Christians today.
More on this and how to overcome this state tomorrow.