Message Info:
- Text: 1 John 1:5-10, NASB
- Series: Basic Spiritual Disciplines (2024), No. 3
- Date: Sunday morning, July 7, 2024
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ You know, it goes against our human nature to admit when we’ve done something wrong. And I think that’s why it’s such a rare thing for anybody to confess what they have done. I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s a rarity. You know, in all the times that I’ve asked who made this mess or who broke that, the culprit has almost always been not me. You get so tired of hearing that.
Not me was always my most rebellious student when I was teaching. Not me is my most problematic child. Not me is the biggest troublemaker in Washington. It’s always not me. We don’t want to admit when we’ve done something wrong. And it seems like the bigger the infraction, the bigger the crime, if you will, the less likely somebody is to acknowledge that they’ve done something wrong.
You look at the history of the 20th century. You look at some of the worst people who have ever walked the face of this earth. Some of those who have committed the biggest crimes. And you will not find a long list of people who have acknowledged their crimes. I’m talking the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Mauls, the Saddam Husseins. They all went to their graves maintaining they did nothing wrong.
That’s why the story of the man that I read about this week was such a rarity. there’s a man who went by the revolutionary name of doik who was the the leader of the main he was the the head of the main prison in communist cambodia in the 1970s he was a brutal man who stood out even even among one of the bloodiest regimes that’s ever existed they don’t get a lot of press because hitler and stalin and mal they killed more people just in terms of numbers but in terms of percentages, you can’t really come close to what communist Cambodia did, killing a third of their citizens in just a three-year period. And even as brutal as that regime was, this man, Doik, stood out. He was the head of the prison. Throughout the time that he was over that prison, 17,000 prisoners came through there, and fewer than 10 are known to have survived. And his name was on all of their death warrants.
He personally had a hand in killing a lot of those people. Beginning in the 90s, something changed with Doik. He became a Christian while he was in hiding. When some reporters figured out who he was, they went and interviewed him. He confessed to his crimes. He admitted the things that he had done and asked for forgiveness.
People in Cambodia couldn’t believe. I read an article just this week talking about they could not believe that out of all the leaders who were involved in that in their country, Why would this man take responsibility when so many people were steadfastly, you know, they went to their graves and said, I did nothing wrong. Why would this man confess to everything he had done? He ended up standing trial. He died in prison, I believe, in the middle of his trial in 2020. Why would this man take responsibility?
Why would this man confess what he had done when nobody else in his government did? When so few throughout history ever have, why would he? And folks, I think it’s very simple. I believe it’s very simple. Because he did have that conversion, because he did come to Christ, he understood the reality that you can’t cover up what God already knows you’ve done. If you believe in the God of the Bible, if you believe in the attributes that the Bible teaches about him, that he’s all seeing, he’s all knowing, he’s all holy, you can’t hide from him the things you’ve done.
And so even somebody who is guilty of mass murder, as difficult as it was to admit it said, I was wrong. I wish I had never done those things. Didn’t try to justify it. Didn’t try to excuse it. Said, I wish I’d never done those things and asked for forgiveness. And one Cambodian Christian talked about the difficulty of extending that forgiveness.
He said, if you recognize what Jesus has done for each of us, how dare I not extend that forgiveness? And this is someone whose family went through that man’s prison and didn’t come out on the other side. But the difference between him and so many others is that he came to that biblical understanding, unfortunately too late, not too late for him, but too late for thousands of others. He came to that biblical understanding that you might as well be honest with God about what God already knows. And I think that’s an example to us of what confession is and what confession ought to be. This morning, that’s what we’re going to talk about, is what the Bible says about confession, and specifically confession as a spiritual discipline.
And this is one that honestly, when I came into this series on spiritual disciplines, I did not have on my list. But I saw it on some of the lists. I’ve told you about the lists I found online and some of the items that people listed as spiritual disciplines were just goofy. And I just, we’re going to set those aside. This one I had to look at a few times because it fit all the criteria of something that I was looking for, that it benefits our spiritual growth.
It turns our attention to Jesus and following Him. It’s taught and modeled in Scripture. All of the things that I listed out for you that first Sunday that we got into this series, it fits all of the criteria. And it made me realize we as believers should live a lifestyle of confession, of confessing to the Lord quickly what we’ve done so that we can have things resolved with Him. So we’re going to be in 1 John 1 this morning. It’s one of many places, kind of like prayer last week, there are many places we could go in the Scriptures that would talk about prayer.
There are many places we can go in Scripture that talk about confession, but this is a good place to start. 1 John 1, and we’re going to look at about six verses this morning. Once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, and if you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible here with you today, it’ll be on the screen for you as well. This is what the Apostle John wrote to the early Christians, starting in verse 5. He says, this is the message we have heard from him and announced to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. And you may be seated. The bottom line, the thing I think John wants us to understand here, is that we cannot continue to embrace sin and pursue fellowship with God.
And so many people’s theology, you’ll see it on Facebook, you’ll see it on TikTok, you’ll run into it out and about. So many people’s theology today is built around trying to harmonize the two. The pursuit of God and the embrace of sin. Of why it’s okay to do things that God said no to and it still be okay. But God’s word is very clear. We cannot continue to embrace sin and pursue fellowship with God.
They’re not going to work. They don’t fit together. We’re not growing spiritually in our walk with God and growing in our walk with sin at the same time. And this goes back to verse 5, what he says about God being light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Some people have wondered, why does God get so worked up about sin? One of the most blasphemous articles I’ve ever read was published several years ago in Christianity Today, talking about God being a drama queen because He can’t let go of sin. but folks it’s it’s not just holiness is not just what god does it’s who god is you understand that distinction holiness is not just something he does it’s not something that he picks up and says oh it’s monday I guess it’s time to be holy again it’s who he is and so when we reject holiness we’re not just rejecting things that god likes we’re rejecting the essence of who god is at his very core of who he is he is light and there is no darkness to him and we’re talking in spiritual terms There is nothing sinful about God. God is incapable of sin.
God is incapable of acting outside of His own nature. And so the things that He’s told us are sin. God can’t do that. When we choose to sin, we are choosing to embrace something that is the opposite of God. That’s why holiness is such a big deal, because it’s who God is. And so if we go to verse 6, and if we claim to pursue God and we’re pursuing sin at the same time, John says we’re lying.
That’s not the pastor saying that. That’s not Central Baptist Church saying that. That’s the apostle John who walked with Jesus and knew better than anybody. He said, if we say that we have fellowship with him and yet we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. He’s telling us there’s a choice to be made there. There’s a choice to be made.
It doesn’t mean, and we’ll get to this in just a moment, it doesn’t mean that you as a believer will never sin, but it’s talking about a question of lifestyles. That if we are pursuing a lifestyle of sin, if we are pursuing the things that God has said no to, because they dishonor him, because they will hurt us, because they’ll hurt other people. If we are pursuing those things and we’re saying, oh, but I’m walking with God, one of those statements is not true. And he says, the truth is not in us. We have a choice to make. As a believer, we can cling to God or we can cling to our sin, but we can’t cling to both.
If, however, we’re pursuing our fellowship with God, verse 7 tells us that we can walk confidently in that pursuit of God, knowing that the blood of Jesus continues to cleanse us. That’s why it says there, if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses present tense cleanses us from all sin this is not saying that we earn that cleansing by walking in the light if we could walk well enough in the light to earn that cleansing we wouldn’t need that cleansing what this is saying is you can continue on pursuing that that walk in the light knowing that when you mess up what he talks about in verse 10 you know we can’t say we have no sin but knowing that as you pursue God even when you slip up even when you mess up slip up makes it sound like an accident. Even when you momentarily lose your mind and choose to sin, if your overall trajectory is you’re walking with the Lord, you can walk confidently knowing that the blood of Jesus continues to cleanse you. The cleansing that we receive from the blood of Jesus is not just a one-time thing. It was good for all sins, past, present, and future, which is not an excuse to go on embracing a lifestyle of sin. He’s already dealt with that. He said, you can’t pursue both of these things.
But I know without even having to ask, because I know my human nature, and I’m assuming yours isn’t that much different, I would suspect that everybody in here has had those days where you’re saying, I want to serve the Lord, I want to follow Him, I want to walk with Him, I want to do what He expects of me. Dear Lord, why did I just do that? And it’s because our sin nature gets us. We talked about it in James on Wednesday night. That sin nature rises up in us and Satan knows exactly what lures. And we are responsible for giving into those temptations.
But we don’t have to have the fear that when we stumble, we don’t have to walk in fear that if we let God down enough, that the game’s over. If we’re walking with Him, the blood of Jesus continues to cleanse us from all sin. And that’s important because John tells us in verse 8 that we’re going to continue to stumble into sin. If we say that we have no sin, again, he’s talking present tense. I’ve heard people say, well, this is talking about before salvation. He’s writing to believers.
He’s saying, if we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we as believers come to a point where we say, well, good, I’m finally perfect, you are confused. Even when we get to the point of thinking, I may not be perfect, but at least I’m much better than I used to be. Be careful. Pride goes before a fall. If we say we have no sin, if we look long and hard enough, we’re going to find sin hidden back in some corner of our heart.
If we say we have no sin, we’re deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. So it’s important that we have that assurance that we can walk with the Lord knowing that the blood continues to cleanse us, Because without this continued cleansing, how could the sinners described in verse 8 walk with a holy God? How could you and I, in our sinful condition, ever hope to have fellowship with a holy God? Other than the fact that the blood of Jesus continues to cleanse us and thank God that it does. But this is a reminder to us of how seriously God takes sin and why we can’t just let it go or say, well, I’m going to embrace God with one arm and I’m going to embrace sin with the other. It doesn’t work that way.
To God, this is deadly serious, and we have to make a choice. And we come to verse 9, where he talks more about the cleansing that Jesus works in us, continues to work in us. He says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And we need to remember that Jesus doesn’t just cleanse us from the penalty of sin, but also from its power and its presence. Now, some of these take a little longer than others. At the moment of conversion, Jesus cleansed you from the penalty of sin.
There was that moment where you trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, and that was the turning point of your entire life. That was the turning point of your eternity, because before that, you were destined for hell. You were separated from God. You were under the penalty and the condemnation of sin. You trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, as your one and only Savior, because He bled and died for you on the cross and rose again to prove it. And in that moment, your eternity was changed because you went from being separated from God and destined for hell to having fellowship with God, a relationship with God, and being destined to spend eternity with Him in heaven.
And that was the change. You were no longer under that condemnation. But as John points out, we still have sin. We’ve been saved already. We’ve been cleansed from the penalty of sin. But the power of sin is still there.
That’s what sanctification is. God cleanses us. He continues to cleanse us and He continues to change us. As we go on, as we walk with Him, we should continue to be cleansed more and more where we become more and more like Jesus Christ as we go on. It doesn’t mean that we become perfect on this side of eternity, but that cleansing should continue to wipe away the power that sin has over us until we come to that glorious day where even the presence of sin has been cleansed from us when we’re glorified with Him in eternity. And when Bible teachers and theologians talk about justification and sanctification and glorification, and they’re all part of salvation, that’s what they’re talking about.
Justification means the penalty of sin is gone. Sanctification means the power of sin is going away. And glorification means that eventually even the presence of sin will be gone. And that’ll be a glorious day. Jesus doesn’t just cleanse us from one thing. He cleanses us from all sin.
It says He is faithful and He is righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Jesus is able, He’s willing, and He’s faithful to do it. He’s already made all the provision for it to happen. He’s already paid in His blood for this to happen. And now we just get to let Him work and make the change in us. But there’s something in verse 9 that we’re called to do.
It’s not something that we do to earn it or deserve it, but it’s something that he’s said this needs to happen, and that’s confession. Confession is key to experiencing ongoing forgiveness and cleansing. See, sometimes in Scripture when he talks about forgiveness, he’s talking about that one-time forgiveness of the penalty of sin at the moment of conversion. Other times he’s talking about what I read where one Messianic Jewish writer calls it family forgiveness. You’re already part of the family, but sometimes things get in between you. sometimes the air needs to be cleared and sometimes when the bible refers to forgiveness it’s not talking about your initial salvation it’s talking about things being cleared within the family you’re still god’s child but that this issue needs to be worked through for us to experience that continued forgiveness where we go to him and say you’re still my father but there’s this sin there’s this barrier between us that’s affecting the fellowship the relationship still there but the fellowship is not what it ought to be.
And we go to Him for forgiveness. It’s not because we lost our salvation, but it’s because the error needs to be cleared. Confession is key to experiencing that continued forgiveness and cleansing. I think it’s important to stop at this point and say, what is confession? We probably all know, but I want to make very, very sure that we all know what we’re talking about here. Confession is an admission or an acknowledgement of sin.
If you want to drill it down even more. It’s just being honest with God about what God already knows. The thing you did years ago that you hope nobody ever finds out about, does God already know that? Yes, He does. Does God know what I thought when you swerved in front of me in traffic last week? He knows.
By the way, none of y’all did that as far as I know, but God knows what we’ve done. God knows what we’ve thought. God knows what we’ve said. It’s ridiculous trying to hide it from Him. If it wasn’t so tragic, you’d have to laugh at the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. They’re trying to hide from God, and God’s asking them questions that God already knows the answer to.
And it makes me wonder how differently that story would have gone if they just confessed to begin with. Confession is just an admission or an acknowledgement of sin. Talking to the Lord and not trying to hide it, not trying to justify it, not trying to explain it away, but saying, yeah, Lord, I did it and I was wrong. It’s that simple. And why is confession so important? If he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
If confession is key, why? Why is it so important? And there are a few things that some of them are taught in this passage, some of them are taught elsewhere throughout Scripture, but there are a few reasons why confession is so important. Confession is necessary because none of us are without sin. We all have things to confess. We all have things that we need to clear the air with the Lord about.
And to be very, very clear, I am not preaching this because I know what any of them are. So if you’re thinking, is he talking about what I know? I don’t know what any of you have done unless you did it to me. And then I probably still don’t even know. Okay. I’m preaching this to you because we’re going through a series on spiritual disciplines.
And this was the next one on my list, but we all have things to confess. We all have things that for our walk with the Lord to be what it needs to be, we need to clear the air with him. And maybe you already do that. Maybe you go to the Lord every morning with your list of everything, you know that you’ve done and you clear the air with Him every morning, great, keep it up. But this is for the rest of us that maybe get a little lax with that sometimes. And say, oh, it’s just a little thing.
I don’t even. . . And we wouldn’t even say that out loud. But in our hearts, we think it’s just a little thing. I don’t need to deal with the Lord about that. It’s fine.
God understands. God understands, but you need to trust Him enough to go to Him about it and have a talk. All of us, none of us are without sin. Verse 10 says, If we say we have not sinned, if we say we have nothing to confess, John says. Okay, so you can call John. If you’re upset about it, call John.
We’ll try to find his phone number for you. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. But something else we see modeled throughout Scripture is that confession is a sign of repentance. It’s usually an unrepentant spirit that’s demonstrated by a refusal to confess that cuts us off from dealing with our sins. It’s that thought of, well, I’m not sorry, or I had my reasons. You don’t know why I did it.
And we’ll try to justify things to ourselves. We will be unrepentant about the sin and try to justify it instead. And it keeps us from confessing to the Lord. It keeps us from dealing with it. And if you’ve ever had a child that did something wrong, Or maybe you’ve been the child that did something wrong. And child and parent both know about it.
And it’s just kind of sitting there like the elephant in the room. And it’s affecting the fellowship. Still a relationship there, but it’s affecting everything. And they don’t want to talk about it because they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. Or again, maybe it was you. Nothing gets fixed.
The error doesn’t get cleared. It doesn’t get resolved until the one who’s done the wrong says, I was wrong. Here’s what I did. and then you can talk about it. Same thing with the Lord. I think you’re still His child. He still loves you. But the fellowship’s not going to be what it ought to be until you’re willing to say, until you’re willing to be repentant enough to confess it.
And then I think this one’s important. Confession is a necessary ingredient for revival. Confession is one of those things that when we see it in Scripture, we see it a lot in the Old Testament. When God’s people begin to look for their sins and they begin to confess them and they begin to deal with them and they begin to cry out to the Lord about them, revival is very seldom, very seldom is revival not far behind. Revival typically follows that.
As a matter of fact, that might just be the beginning of revival is to come to the Lord and clear the air. Because I don’t believe that we will be able to experience the abundant life that we have in Christ through the Spirit if we hold on to our sin and refuse to confess. And as we come to a close, and I really do mean that, as we come to a close, we need to know too, what does confession look like? Because when I say that word, we probably all have different pictures that pop into our heads of what that looks like. And there’s no single way that Scripture teaches us to confess things. First of all, we do confess our sins to God.
That’s first and foremost. Verse 9 is talking about confessing to Him. How do you do that? You pray, you talk to the Lord. If there’s something you know about that’s in the back of your mind and some deep, dark corner of your heart, you talk to the Lord about it. If you think there is something, but you’re not quite sure what it is, you can also ask the Lord, show me.
King David prayed that God would reveal any hidden sin in his heart. I believe that’s a prayer that God will answer. Show it to me so I can confess. We confess our sins to God. We just talk to God and acknowledge what He already knows, what we know that He knows. And as part of that confession, we ask for the forgiveness that comes along with it.
And we see that fellowship restored. Sometimes Scripture tells us to confess to those we’ve wronged. This might even be harder. Matthew 5, 23 and 24 talk about God’s people taking their gifts to the altar. This was specifically talking about the temple, but he says, if you’re presenting your offering at the altar and there you remember that your brother has something against you, you’ve done something to your brother that he can hold against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go and first be reconciled to your brother and then come and present your offering. Sometimes we are called on to go to somebody that we wronged and confess it.
And that is not fun. I’ve had to do that. If you’ve ever had to do that, you know what a bitter pill that is to swallow when you first go to swallow it. But especially if the other person is a believer and you’re able to reconcile and work through it, what’s on the other side of it makes the bitter pill worth it because the fellowship is so much sweeter once the air is cleared. Scripture teaches us to confess to those we wronged. We confess to each other.
James 5. 16 says, Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. A word of caution. That doesn’t mean you have to tell everyone you meet everything you’ve ever done wrong. That is probably not a wise application of this passage. But if there are people in your circle, people in the church, people around you that you trust, people that are spiritually mature, there is definitely some benefit to talking to those people about the things you struggle with. not because they’re going to shame you, not because they’re going to judge you, not because they’re even necessarily going to be able to fix it.
But we can encourage each other and we can challenge each other. We can hold one another accountable. There’s something beneficial of being able to talk to somebody else. We can talk to the Lord anytime. But there’s something beneficial about a brother or sister who’s there in flesh that you can talk to about what you’re struggling with. We can confess corporately.
We see examples of this when God’s people would, as a group, recognize the wrongs that they’ve committed. The two clearest examples I think of in Scripture are in Ezra 9 and 10 and Acts 19. In Ezra 9 and 10, the people of Israel, including the leadership, had broken numerous laws of gods, including the law about the priests not marrying foreign women. And it wasn’t that God wanted them to be racist, it’s that those foreign women worship foreign gods and would turn the leadership of Israel away from the true God and toward these foreign gods. So God said, don’t do it. And they found all these loopholes and reasons why it was okay.
When Ezra read the law, the people were convicted and as a group, they began to confess. There’s this scene where Ezra is confessing at the end of chapter nine, confessing the sins of the nation. And then the people at the beginning of chapter 10 come behind him and begin to cry out and confess too. And it led to revival. There’s a moment in Acts chapter 19 where the people of Ephesus began to be converted to Christ.
And as a group, they began to confess their previous dalliances with witchcraft and the occult. They began to burn their books. They began to cry out for forgiveness. And that was a moment of revival in that church. Sometimes, and I don’t have anything in particular in mind, but sometimes it’s necessary for God’s people to confess corporately when we’ve sinned corporately. And then the very last thing I want to share this morning is we do it directly.
We confess directly. 1 Timothy 2. 5 reminds us that there is one mediator between God and man. So when we say confess, the only high priest you need is Jesus. The only mediator you need is Jesus. You don’t have to come confess to me. Now, in light of James 5, you can. And as your brother in Christ, I’ll be glad to try to encourage you and challenge right direction.
But understand, any benefit you get from confessing to the pastor or whatever you call the leader of the church, the only benefit you get from that is the same benefit you get out of confessing to any other believer in James 5. Coming and talking to me about your sin doesn’t do anything extra special to get it off your record. You have one mediator between you and the Father, and that’s Jesus Christ. The best thing to do. I mean, it’s important to talk to those you’ve wronged.
It’s important to talk to others who can help you, but the most important thing you can do is go directly to God. Because even when we’ve sinned against each other, even when we’ve sinned against somebody else, ultimately it’s a sin against God. And He’s the one we need to deal with. And thankfully, we get to deal with God directly because Jesus did open that door for us to have direct access to the Father anytime. Because Jesus suffered, bled, and died to pay for your sins. And I think one of the most beautiful pictures of that is that at the moment Jesus died, there was the veil in the temple that stood between the outer part of the temple and the most holy place, the holy of holies, where God himself was said to dwell.
Only certain people could go in, only at certain times of the year, and only for certain reasons. There was literally a curtain, a wall of curtain between the people and God. And when Jesus died, when Jesus said, it is finished, that curtain was split in two from top to bottom. God ripped that curtain in two because Jesus gave us direct access to Him.
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