Imagining living in a large, congested city, with people crammed on top of people, animals freely roaming the streets, and without any kind of facilities for disposal of the products of human and animal digestion. The odor, filth, and disease of such a place!
The city of London, England, was very much like that in the middle of the 19th century. Several million people stuffed themselves into one square mile—and all human and animal waste was dumped in the filthy streets and nearby rivers. Makes me shudder with horror. It is possible that modern plumbing and waste disposal systems have done more to lengthen and enhance the pleasure of human life than all other medical and scientific discoveries combined.
Today, we are obsessed with the need to separate ourselves from those digestive products. We also bathe frequently, have active distaste for natural human odors, and seem to be gaining a collective dislike of touching anything that other humans have also touched for fear of picking up germs.
But with that obsession with external cleanliness, I sense a growing ignorance of what I call internal plumbing needs. And I don’t mean that we should all start ingesting bleach to get rid of our internal bacteria!
No, this is something else: It is called “confession.” Confession: a discipline of the soul, absolutely vital for human spiritual and emotional health, is being gaily cast aside as unnecessary and irrelevant to modern, sophisticated humanity.
Essentially, confession is the act of agreeing with another, particularly God, about our very human shortfalls, missteps, mess-ups, stupid mistakes, or whatever you want to call those things. Confession, the acknowledgment of what we have done—or left undone—offers the foundation for real healing and change. Anyone who has ever worked a 12 Step program knows its centrality. Steps four, five and six read this way:
- Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Be ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
What happens when we ignore the need to confess, to purge ourselves of our internal mental, emotional, and spiritual waste products? Picture people with huge weights flung around their necks or dragging behind them tied with cords around their waists. Those weights are their secrets, lies, mess-ups. Accusers line the sidelines as they walk by, hurling verbal insults, trying to trip them up.
Living with unconfessed and hidden sin is also like the awfulness of being terribly behind on bills. Accounts have been turned over to bill collectors who bombard you with calls, berating you with your declining creditworthiness, reminding you that interest and penalties keep pushing your balances to the impossible breaking point. Despair is the inevitable result.
That’s what unconfessed sin does. It builds and builds and builds until the pressure becomes unbearable and something breaks loose, almost always making everything far, far worse. Unconfessed sin provides the garden for the weeds of despair to flourish.
But the Scriptures say, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Learn to practice this discipline. It will set you free.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In