Excuses

We take a moment in our services each week to confess our sins before the Lord because, fundamentally, this is what Christians do. We confess our sins, flatly. Plainly. Honestly. Without hesitation, and without reservation. While it’s true many of us have also been sinned against, even in ways that profoundly affect us, that isn’t what we’re primarily concerned with when we go to God in confession. When we confess our sins, we aren’t making excuses. When we pause in silence to ask the Lord to search our hearts to see if there be any grievous way in us, we aren’t doing this so that we might offer God a reasonable explanation.

Making excuses for our sin looks like many things. It looks like primarily thinking about what other people have done before considering our own actions. It looks like magnifying other people’s wrongs, while minimizing our own. It looks like reaching for all kinds of worldly wisdom that helps us psychologically or emotionally rationalize our behaviors. It looks like seeking relationships with only those who will validate your experience, your pain, your trauma, your experience, and cutting off those who may challenge the narrative you tell yourself about your circumstances. Making excuses means blame, criticism, self-righteousness, and though it feels like preserving your life, God is clear: it ultimately leads to death.

Confession, on the other hand, feels like death, doesn’t it? It is facing who we truly are in our flesh, and coming to terms with what we’ve done, what we’ve thought, what we’ve said, and the wicked heart that produced this rotten fruit. Confession, like the tax collector in Luke 18, causes us to beat our breast in godly regret and sorrow, and call out to God alone for mercy. It causes us to say, along with David in Psalm 51, Against you, God, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.

Confession, though it feels like death, leads to life. It begins the restoration process with God and with other people. It agrees with what God says about us in our sin, and it causes us to, in humility and trust, seek and find mercy and grace. Be a person who regularly confesses your sins, Christian, and you will, over time, find yourself to be a freer, more gentle, more humble, more kind, less anxious, less flustered, less self-absorbed person.

So, I ask, Christian, do you make excuses or do you make confessions?