Why is confession so hard?
A while back I was riding my bike down to camp. I came up to our dining hall at a pretty good clip and hit the breaks thinking I would be cool and make a quick stop and park my bike in front of the dining hall. Instead what happened was my shoe lace got stuck in the bike chain and I ended up flipping end over end over the handle bars. I got up as quickly as my injured body could (actually it was mostly my pride that was injured) and looked around to see who had seen me perform such an amazing trick hoping and praying that no one actually had. You know in those moments we jump up and the first thing that we do is look around and try to see who might have seen us fall and whether they are laughing at us or not. There is such a sense of relief when we realize that there was no one watching us. If we’re going to be honest we all have moments like that where we fall and we fail and we jump up and hope that no one saw us failing and when we realize that no one has, there is a huge sense of relief because if no one saw no one has to know that we messed up. King David lived one major section of his life this way. He had made an error of judgement with Bathsheba which lead to even worse decisions and eventually the fall of his empire. For a whole year he lived his life covering the darkest secrets hoping and praying that no one would uncover the truth, until one day Nathan the prophet confronted him and made his sin public. After that moment you can sense such a relief in David’s life. Later he wrote many Psalms discussing confession and the sin that he had covered for so long. In Psalms 139 he says “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” David finally got the fact that confession was the only thing that brings relief. He said God get in my stuff, get in to the deepest darkest parts of my heart and test me to see if there is anything wrong there. I was reminded of this passage this past Sunday. I sat in church at Brentwood as Pastor John preached on this passage and as he gave the invitation we set there in awkward silence waiting for someone to make a move and I realized how hard confession really is. Confessing is so difficult because it requires us to put our pride aside and admit that we have flaws. We are not perfect there are things that are wrong with us; somehow we think that might be a surprise to other people. Yet ask anyone who knows us well and they can probably list 100 things wrong with us, even if we might not be willing to admit them. We were created to need community and need relationships. Keeping people involved in the details of our life breeds community and community breeds relationships and these relationships will breed intimacy and when we are willing to share our most intimate secrets God will move in our midst. If we want to have healthy relationships with our friends, with our family, with our spouse, we have to confess our sins to God and also confess our sins one to another. We admit that we don’t have it all together and it is fine because none of us have it all together!
