Liturgy: Inhabiting the Story of God
Confession and Repentance
As we adore God through our call to worship and praise, we behold his moral purity. As we consider our own lives by comparison we are led to a sense of our own unworthiness and moral failure. So we come before God together to deal with it, saying or singing a ‘confession’ together.
What we do in this part of the service is often called confession (admitting you have done wrong). But it is more accurately repentance: turning away from wrong attitudes, thoughts and actions towards godly ones. We are both acknowledging our sin, asking God to forgive us and asking him to help us turn from it and live the life he has called us to. Reformer Martin Luther famously wrote that When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
[1] Being a Christian is about continually turning away from sin towards Jesus. Every moment we choose to trust God and obey him, we turn away from sin, doubt and death and towards godliness, belief and life. Each day we are led by God out from darkness to walk as children of light
.[2]
This is why we do a time of repentance every week at church—because we don’t simply repent when we’ve done something particularly bad—we repent all the time. The repeated pattern of repentance on Sundays forms in us a habit of repentance during the rest of the week. And we repent both individually and together (“we have sinned”) because human sin affects everything—not only individual thoughts and actions but relationships, communities and institutions. As God’s gathered people we repent together, because turning from sin towards Jesus is what it means to be God’s people.
Repentance is countercultural. There are several prominent ‘stories’ in our culture when it comes to guilt, with their different storytellers. The ‘guilt deniers’ make light of our sin. “Believe in yourself. You’re a good person. You’ve probably done nothing wrong, and dwelling on it isn’t going to help you, in fact it might even be psychologically damaging.” But this sweeps injustice and evil under the rug, and is dangerous because it leaves us guilty before a holy God but pretending we are fine. On the other hand the ‘self-atoners’ tell us to make up for our sin. “Sure, you’ve done wrong, but you can fix things if you live better from now on.” But does this really deal with our guilt or our sin? Can good deeds cover over the damage caused? And what about the attitudes in our hearts driving our sinful actions?
True repentance doesn’t deny guilt nor pretend we can self-atone. We come to God in humility, knowing we have done wrong and that we don’t love him or others as we should. But we come in confidence knowing that he will forgive us and help us to live for him.
After saying or singing the confession, we are assured of forgiveness, e.g.:
This is how we know we are forgiven:
If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness.
This is the good news.
Thanks be to God.[3]
The words of assurance are read by a leader, but they come from God. For everyone who repents and trusts in Jesus for forgiveness, these words are true, and help assure us that we are really forgiven. So often we can doubt that God will really forgive us, but here in the Scriptural words from God spoken by our brother or sister, we can be sure. Is there anything more comforting than knowing that God loves us and forgives us, even in the midst of our failure to love him and others? Doesn’t that make you thankful to God?
The means of forgiveness is the cross of Jesus. It is not our effort that makes us right with God, as if we could work off the debt. Neither is it God’s injustice, as if he would fail to deal with sin justly. Rather God takes sin and its consequences upon himself in the person of his Son and for those who believe there is forgiveness.
Confession and words of assurance belong together. Confession without assurance of forgiveness leaves us stuck in our sin. Assurance without confession blinds us to our sin. But when taken together we both see God’s grace in forgiving us and we have the means to move on and live the life he has called us to. This is the regular pattern of the Christian life we’re training one another in every time we repent and receive forgiveness—that we receive God’s grace to us and then empowered by the Holy Spirit live lives that tell the story of God’s grace.