"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" -I John 1:9
Herein lies one of the verses in the Bible that deals with our greatest need as sinners...forgiveness! So how does confession relate to forgiveness?
We read about King David in II Samuel in the sad story where he forceably took Uriah's wife, had sex with her, probably against her will, got her pregnant, and then arranged to have her husband "accidentally" killed. David probably suffered from the same poisonous symptom of unbelief that we do...covering up our sin. Maybe David told himself "maybe I didn't really commit adultery with Bathsheba, I'm the King and have rights to everythin, right? After all I am a good kind, so why shouldn't I have this one thing I want. And I didn't actually kill Uriah with my hands, he just died in the heat of battle". That's the same thing we do sometimes. We tell ourselves lies to cover up our sin or make it not look so bad. This started in the garden with Satans "did God really say?", and it still invades our spiritual lives today. But like David, when we tell ourselves these lies and try to keep our sins hidden, God denies our soul true rest.
He states in Psalms 32, "When I kept silent, my bones grew old. Through my groaning all the day long."
So how does the Bible define confession of our sin? The Greek is homologeo and it simply means "to agree or acknowledge". Instead of believing the lies we tell ourselves God simply wants us to agree with Him that it is sin against him. It took Nathan confronting David with the truth and telling him he had hated God's commandments and had coveted, committed adultery, and murder.
Then David confessed, "I acknowledged my sin to You, And my iniquity I have not hidden.
I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,' And You forgave
the iniquity of my sin." -Psalms 32:5 A wonderful thing happened to David, the Gospel. He confessed and he was forgiven!
The stories we tell ourselves to cover up our sin only do one thing, separate us from a God who is ready and willing to forgive us of all our unrighteousness!
