March 12
“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)
If we really want to have a completely clear conscience before God and repent of ALL of our sins, not just the sins we want to give up but all the sins that God wants us to give up, we must develop the habit of honestly and carefully allowing the Lord to examine us and convict us of sin. That is one of the wonderful roles of the Holy Spirit, our Wonderful Counselor. We must develop the habit and mindset of asking Him to show us our sin and remove any hurtful way from us. We must ask Him to show us not only the sins to confess but how we ought to repent from them. Our repentance can be so feeble at times, and the flesh, no matter how sincere we are, is weak. We have to have His help and grace to see our sins and repent of them. Even the desire to do so is a gift from Him, I believe, and one that we should seek in prayer regularly.
We have sins that we aren’t even aware of. We need to be regularly engaged in examining ourselves and our motivations. We need to ask the Lord to reveal sin in our lives. We need to listen to others and seek the feedback of others, without defensiveness and justification and excuses, so that we can see what our sins really are and repent of them.
A few days ago I described my own journey from being focused a lot on doing things for the Lord instead of trying to understand what was going on inside of me and the motivations of my heart. There was impurity there that I did not see, and as a result of difficulties, the Lord has changed my focus to desiring to be pure in heart and pleasing to Him above just about everything else. I can now say I desire Him and His fellowship more than accomplishments and things, and this is a major shift for me. I think that there was much sin there in my heart that I was unaware of because my focus was wrong.
Once my focus became being pure and pleasing, I began to see more and more of my sin and hate it more and more. I began to see how disobedient and self-willed I really was. I began to see my sin nature as more evil and more selfish than I had ever imagined it was. I am much more mindful about who is in control of me, the flesh or the Spirit, and when I am in fellowship with the Lord and when I am not. In short, there was a lot more to confess and repent of once I began to focus on it and prayed daily to overcome it. Wanting to know our sins and wanting to get rid of them is a crucial, indispensable first step to true confession and repentance, I believe, yet this is so difficult.
Finally, we discussed how feelings of unworthiness can keep us from repenting and how a proper focus on Christ’s righteousness and not our own, along with a reminder that it is only by faith that we are made acceptable to God, can help encourage us to confess our sins to God no matter how awful we may feel about them.
Our incredible, amazing, merciful, just God has given us an opportunity of a lifetime: to confess and repent of our sins and find forgiveness. How seriously we take this and how diligently we work at this will make all the difference in our lives and the lives of many others.