What does it mean to confess?

This question is the basis for much of the Christian life. In fact, this is how people are able to receive the forgiveness that Jesus offers. 1 John 1:9 indicates that if we will only confess our sins, then God will forgive us and cleanse us. So what exactly does it mean to confess?

Exodus 32 tells the story about the people of Israel worshipping the golden calf. Moses has been gone on the mountain receiving instructions from God and the people were restless and didn’t know what to do. Because they were scared, they went to Moses’ brother Aaron and asked him to make them a golden calf that they could worship. And he did.

Now Moses hears all this commotion and God tells him to go back down and see what evil the people are doing, so he goes. He sees them worshipping a false idol. He goes to Aaron and in verse 21 of Exodus 32 asks Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?” Moses had left Aaron in charge. Now, if Moses was expecting Aaron to talk about the great torture they put him through, then he was sadly mistaken. Aaron’s answer? Verses 22-24, “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

So basically, Aaron’s response went something like this, “I don’t know, man. These people here are crazy. They wanted a god to worship so I asked them for their gold and all of a sudden, poof, this calf appeared in the fire and they started worshipping it.”

Just for reference, this isn’t confession. Aaron is downplaying his sin and his part in the evil that was taking place around him. He didn’t own up to what he had done or the intent behind his actions. We all do this so very often as we look at our own lives. We minimize the wrongs that we have done or tell ourselves that our intentions were the most important thing, not the actual outcome. God is not interested in our minimized, half-hearted, disingenuous confessions.

So what is confession? Confession is seeing God in all His holiness, seeing ourselves in all our sin, and then calling our sin exactly as God sees it and recognizing our complete inability to change. Want a great example of confession, check out Isaiah 6. Isaiah sees the Lord in a vision. He is brought face to face with the Almighty God and here is his reaction in verse 5, “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Now that is what true confession looks like. So when we are faced with God’s holiness and with our wrongs, which response do we go with? Do we minimize our sin and try to make it sound “not so bad,” or do we, like Isaiah, cry out to God knowing that compared to His holiness we are nothing and deserve nothing more than his condemnation. Only then will we find His forgiveness waiting for us.

Kristi Burchfiel, Christian devotional author and speaker
Living in the World – Living out the Word
Check out my website and daily devotions either on my blog or on my Facebook page