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| Pen drawings illustrating Psalm 31 (32), "Harley Psalter" (England, 11th c.) |
“Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding;
who must be fitted with bit and bridle,
or else they will not stay near you.”
— Psalm 32:10
Confession, in the double sense of confessing your finitude and sins and praising your Creator, is your proper act, living as God’s creature wounded by sin. To confess to God is to draw near to God; it is to do what you are made to do, what is good for you in the deepest sense. For, as the psalmist says, “It is good for me to be near God” (Ps. 73:28). Through confession, you will be happy, you will stay near God.
Confession of your sins is necessary because, to the extent you are not yet wholly healed, you will not stay near God (although you can never go where God is not)—you will stray from him. Like the psalmist’s horse or mule, you will wander off on your own, led to and fro by your disordered desires. When you do this—and you will not stop needing to pray “forgive us our sins” until that Day when all things are renewed—you will be turning away from the One who is your life and turning toward the nihil, nothingness. You will hate life and love death. As Augustine puts it, to the extent your desires remain disordered, “you will not be content with being like God by his gift, but you will want to be what he is by your own right, so you will turn away from him and slither and slide down into less and less which is imagined to be more and more.”*
Yet your Lord who loves you will not let you wander off into nothingness without calling you back to himself, without gently checking you and drawing you near by means of some “bit and bridle.” So when you feel the tug of his reigns, do not resist, but turn your face toward him. When you hear his voice, do not harden your heart, but humble yourself and draw near him in confession.
When the Lord draws you up short with the truth of your sin, be quick to confess, like David, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Sam. 11:13). You will not like to hear the Lord say to you, as he said to David through the prophet Nathan, “You have despised me” (11:10). Nor will you like hearing that by your sin “you have utterly scorned the Lord” (11:14). When the light of truth exposes the sordid secrets of your heart, you will be tempted to hate the truth. (After all, David could have silenced the prophet as easily as he had disposed of Urriah.) But God will enable you to bear the truth if you, by his gift, turn toward him and allow his light to shatter your darkness. When you stand in the light of truth by confession, you will be near the Lord who “is in the light” (1 Jn. 1:7).
You have been redeemed in order that you might freely stay near God. On your own, you were enslaved by sin and strayed from God, but through Christ you have been set free so that you might “live to God” (Gal. 2:19b). Now, living to God is what Christ does, for “the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God” (Rom. 6:10). By God’s gift, you can say with Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). Christ lives in you because “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6). By the gift of the Spirit, you share in the life of the Son, who is "in the bosom of the Father" (Jn. 1:18, Gk).
Therefore, “live by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:16), so that, like Christ, you will be “obedient from the heart” (Rom. 6:17). To the extent “Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19), you will seek only “to behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple” (Ps. 27:6). Living by the Spirit, you will stay near to God out of love.
When you confess to God, you will know his forgiveness and you will manifest your joy in “great love” (Lk. 7:47). You will anoint the Lord Jesus with the ointment of the works of love and praise from a true heart, and you will bathe his feet with the tears of confession. You will not stop kissing his feet or asking him for “the kisses of his mouth” (Song. 1:2).
* Augustine, De Trinitate 10.5.7. I have altered the quotation to the second person.
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