The aspect
of this passage that stood out to me as I read it this morning was that of
confession. IF we CONFESS....he will
forgive us. Confession is an important
and essential piece to forgiveness, one that I wonder might be missing from our
vocabulary.
I don't like to confess and
I assume most people are in the same boat.
It is uncomfortable, scary, we run the risk of rejection, and we lose
control. After reflecting on the healing
service last night this idea of confession became all the more real to me. As we confess together and admit that we are
sinful we become all the more aware of our need for healing. I am so grateful for those who came to the
service last night and I pray that they in some way experienced healing
(whether that was spiritual, emotional, or physical healing).
But I am also aware that those who attended the service were a small sampling of the larger congregation. I am left wondering why few choose to come last night. I can't help but wonder if on some level our culture has tried to convince us that we don't need healing. Could it be that we exclusively tie healing with the physical?
What do you think...
The whole idea of confession has been cheapened by our culture, attached as it is to trivial disclosures by celebrities of their indiscretions -- intended not to cleanse them of anything, or to start them on a new path, but merely to "get the issue behind them" so that the spotlight moves on to someone else.
It was interesting to be reminded in Scott Manetsch's recent Sunday school class that to Catholics, confession is a sacrament. The idea of confession as something holy, something to mark a change of course in a Godly direction, seems a relic of some dim, dark past.
And yet this verse -- "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness," is how we memorized it out of the King James -- makes the holiness clear. He is faithful. He is just. He can cleanse us, because we have "come clean" ourselves. There is healing there, if we only avail ourselves of it.