“The glory in confession is in the mercy that flows to the one voicing it.  Whoever confesses and forsakes his transgressions will obtain mercy!  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  God eagerly forgives sin that is humbly confessed.”

If there is anything I’ve learned over the last decade of life and ministry, it is that everyone is dealing with something big.  Everyone has fallen in some way.  Everyone is struggling with sin (or willingly giving into it).  Everyone needs grace.  And yet, it is striking that most of us seem to have such a hard time admitting these things personally, with any real detail.  We tend to treat our personal struggle with sin as a thing to conceal, rather than as a thing to confess.

Several years ago, a good friend of mine counseled me with a penetrating tidbit of wisdom that I will not soon forget.  “Sin thrives in the dark, Zach,” he said.  For some time this brother had been observing me work overtime to keep secret the real nature and implications of a particular struggle of mine from those who were offering to help me through it.  I had been trying so hard for so long to manage the perspectives of others, preserve my reputation, and make it seem like I had things all under control, only to see my struggle become more intense and to find myself further isolated from real help.  I was concealing my sin and the consequences of it, and I needed instead to confess those things openly, to begin killing my sin at the root.  As long as I kept my struggle hidden I would find no victory over it whatsoever, because as my friend said to that day, sin truly does thrive in the dark.

Do you want to know how to remain enslaved to a particular sin?  Just keep hiding it.  Tell no one about it.  Only talk about your sin to the Lord.  The next time you go out for coffee with your friend from church and they ask how they can pray for you, tell them about your cousin who’s marriage is failing, or about the struggles your kids are having, or about the sins of your spouse and your need to respond to those sins in a godly manner, but mention nothing of your personal struggle.  You wouldn’t want them to think less of you, would you?  They’d lose all respect for you.  You got this.  You can handle it yourself.  You can manage this.  You don’t need help.  Right?

Whatever you do, if you want to continue struggling with a particular sin, say nothing of that sin to anyone.

If you want victory over sin, however, perhaps you would consider a few relevant biblical passages, such as the testimony of David:

Psalm 32:3-5  ³ For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.  ⁴ For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah  ⁵ I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

Selah, indeed.  Concealing sin makes the bones of a man waste away.  Confession brings forgiveness and restoration.

Or, there is the simple statement of the wise man:

Proverbs 28:13  ¹³ Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.

How straightforward is that?!  You want mercy from the Lord to forgive your sin and give you strength to overcome it?  Confess that sin openly and forsake it.

Or, consider this:

Luke 18:13  ¹³ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

Remember, as counter-intuitive as it may be, the man that uttered those words was the man who went down from the temple that day justified.  Not the guy polishing his trophies before the Lord.

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