1 John 1:9 "Why Confess?"

 1 Peter 5:7 Cast all your care on Him, because He cares about you.

 1 John 1:9  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

 

God desires to carry our burdens.  He cares about the things that weigh us down and keep us separated from Him.  Sin is an awful heavy burden.  The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death.  The Bible also tells us that the soul cleansing blood of Jesus washes away our sin.  Through the death and resurrection of Jesus we are forgiven and restored to right relationship with God.

Even though through Jesus we are forgiven, we still struggle with the burden of sin. The experience that many Christians have is that even though we have been changed from people who like and enjoy sin into people who hate sinning, we still continue to sin. I do not want to excuse this fact or make light of it, but it does us no good to pretend.

We live in a fallen, broken world, we are constantly surrounded by evil influences, and we are weak willed people; so, even though we believe in Jesus and have accepted His death as the punishment for our sin and have turned to Him for forgiveness and new life, we still struggle with sin. 

Because we still struggle with sin, God made a continuing provision for sin.  The Bible tells us, “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  This rich promise was given to the church -to Christians.  It reminds us of the fact that Jesus has already paid the penalty for sin –in that sense, God made provision for our forgiveness once and for all, and for all time.  The penalty has been been paid, and we have been forgiven.  Yet, Christians are specifically instructed to confess sin as it occurs.  We should probably seek to understand what this means and why it is such good news.

 

There is a very good reason God wants us to confess our sin.  It’s because unconfessed sin turns into baggage that we have to carry around with us.  When we sin and do not confront it, and do not repent, and refuse to confess it, we end up with a load of guilt and shame and bitterness and anxiety and fear.  God doesn’t want that for us.  God wants us to unload those kinds of burdens.  We unload by confession and repentance.

Now, don’t misunderstand.  God doesn’t need to hear our confession so that He knows what we’ve been up to.  He already knows every wrong thing and every right thing we’ve ever thought or said or done.  Our confession doesn’t change God, and it doesn’t change God’s mind, and it doesn’t change God’s opinion of us.  Our confession changes us.

When we are humbly confessing our sin to God, something happens.  In order to truly confess, we must examine ourselves.  In order to realistically examine ourselves, we need to quit pretending to be people we’re not –we need to let our defenses down, we need to take our masks off.  In order to confess, we need to be brutally honest about ourselves before God.  And it is in the context of humble honesty, with no pretense and no defense that a relationship with God begins to develop.  And the relationship is what God desires.

When we confess our sin, God forgives our sin.  But He does even more.  He cleanses us from unrighteousness.  Unrighteousness is a result of participating with the enemy.  Sin defiles us.  The defilement of sin is a continuing burden even after we have been forgiven.  Forgiveness takes care of the guilt -but the cleansing is what takes care of defilement.  God doesn't just forgive, He cleanses and restores.  He carries the burden.  That's how much He cares.

Micah 6:8 "Walking Humbly With God"

Micah 6:8 

He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?

--> For the last couple of posts, we have been looking at Micah chapter 6.  This was written to the Israelites concerning a general attitude that seemed to develop concerning sin and what God actually desired of them. 

Under the Old Covenant, you remember, sins were forgiven through a process of animal sacrifice.  The people would come to temple and through the priest, make sacrifices.  That was God’s law.  It has always been God’s law that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.  It’s not because God is a bloodthirsty God who delights in gore.  Its because God wants us to be aware of the awfulness of sin.   

--> 

The Israelites were willing to make whatever sacrifices at the temple were necessary in order for them to get off the hook for their sins, not necessarily because they wanted to quit sinning, but simply because they didn’t want the punishment for the sin that they knew for certain was coming.  They really didn't understand why sin was a problem or what God actually wanted from them. 

--> Since they could always go to the temple and make sacrifices, they didn’t think sin was that big of a deal.   

Micah, in this passage, points out to the people, and to us, that although God instituted the sacrificial system, He was never actually interested in their sacrifices.  What He really wanted from them and from us is a relationship.  He wants an authentic, day-to-day, ongoing relationship.  

-->  

What we have seen so far is that if we have a right relationship with God it will affect both our outward actions and our inward character.  A right relationship with God will always lead us act justly, to do justice.  Also, a right relationship with God will produce in us the quality of mercy.   

--> Now, we are looking at the third and final thing that Micah lists as God’s requirement: walking humbly with God.  The obvious key to understanding what Micah is trying to teach here is the word humble.  But, as we will see, the word walk also has implications for us.

--> There are three basic ways in which the concept of humility is used in the Bible.  The first use of the word humble is to describe the condition of poverty.  When people are poor or deprived or needy, they are humble –they are not fancy and frivolous.  The second use of the word humble has to do with abasing oneself, lowering oneself.  It is the opposite of arrogance.  Arrogance puffs up and calls attention to itself.  Humility lets others get the attention and the glory.  And the third use of the word humble has to do with submission.  Like when a soldier, for instance, submits to the authority of a commanding officer.  It has, in a sense, to do with understanding our rank, understanding and accepting where we fit into the scheme of things.

All of these things are loosely connected, and they all have some implications for what Micah is telling us.  A right relationship with God involves our admission of spiritual poverty, admitting that we need God.  A right relationship with God involves letting go of our pride and arrogance –giving God the attention, giving God the glory, instead of trying to glorify ourselves.  And a right relationship with God involves submitting to God.  It involves understanding exactly who we are in relationship to God.  When Micah tells us that the Lord requires us to walk humbly with God, he is implying all of this.

-->  

In a sense, though, it is impossible to walk with God if we don’t submit and give up our arrogance and recognize our spiritual need.

--> We are either walking humbly with God, or we’re not walking with God at all. So, perhaps, the bigger understanding we need to have of this passage has to do with that other word: walk.

 

-->  

The Hebrew word used for walk here, halak, is loaded with implications for us.  It means to move surely and steadily.  It means to keep apace.  It means to go along side.  It means to move forward.  All of these are descriptions of what it means to walk with God.

--> Walking with God means that we going where God is going.  We aren’t going off in our own directions following our own whims and desires.  It means we are keeping apace with Him.  That means we don’t stop unless He stops.  It also means we don’t run ahead of Him trying to find the path on our own.  If we are walking with God, we are walking beside Him, letting Him choose the direction, letting Him open the right doors, letting Him close the wrong ones.  

We often get in trouble over these things don’t we?  Don’t we try to figure things out for ourselves and get way ahead of God and try to push open doors that God doesn’t want open?  And at other times don’t we see God’s open doors before us, and refuse to go through them.  Don’t we sometimes dig in our heels and sit down to rest, or maybe even lay down and go to sleep instead of walking along side of God?  And what happens when we do this?  Does anything good ever come from our insisting on doing it our way?

-->  

At the point we insist on our own way, we get out of step with God –we actually quit walking with God, and we lose benefits of walking with God.  When we are walking with God in close relationship with God, His closeness comforts us and gives us assurance and hope.  When we are walking with God, He opens the right doors and we don’t have the anxiety and worries and fears about making the right or wrong choices in life.  But when we intentionally quit walking with God, when we say "no" to God, or when we refuse to go through the doors He opens, or we insist on going through doors He didn’t open –in other words, when we demand our own way, we left are on our own.  We’re not on left our own because God got angry at us and abandoned us, we’re on our own because we quit walking with God and started walking in some direction other than the direction God is going.

-->

The bottom line is this.  We were designed to have fellowship with our Creator.  Since sin interfered with that, God made a way for our sin to be forgiven.  But, if we then refuse to actually walk with God and have fellowship with God, we are missing the point entirely.

So, if you are saved, but are somehow missing the intimate fellowship, the personal relationship –if you have believed in Jesus and trusted Him for salvation, but are not truly walking with Him, how do you get your life back on track?  How do you reconnect with God?  How do you figure out where He is and what direction He is going so that you can walk with Him?   

Listen carefully now, because I’m going to tell you.  Are you listening?  Do you want to know where God is, so you can start truly walking with Him again?  You will find God waiting for you at the point where you last told Him "no."  

Micah 6:8 "Love Mercy"

Micah 6:8 

He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?

I want us to notice that in this passage we are not told just to act mercifully.  The previous line says to act justly or do justice –obviously, if we have a true and right relationship with God, it is going to affect our actions -but here we are not told just to act with mercy, we are told to love mercy.  God was not talking about any specific action that we do, He was talking about a character quality that He desires His children to have.  Anybody, even the coldest hardest-hearted person alive might in some circumstance be moved to pity and respond with some act of compassion.  Feeling sorry for the beggar on the street corner does not make me a merciful person.  Getting upset by child abuse does not make me a merciful person.  Taking in stray cats and dogs does not make me a merciful person.  The mercy God is talking about involves action, but goes way beyond simply feeling pity and acting compassionately, it has to do with who we are.   It is not a matter of sometimes acting compassionately, it is matter of being compassionate people. 

In the Scriptures, there are 8 different words used for mercy.   Of course, most of the words are loosely related.  Mostly, they have to do with pity and compassion.  The Biblical concept of mercy has to do with identifying so completely with someone that their problems become our problems, their feelings become our feelings.  Mercy speaks of the strongest possible type of empathy.  The ultimate example of mercy is given to us in the book of Hebrews chapter 2, verse 17, where the writer of Hebrews is explaining that the reason Jesus is such a merciful High Priest is because He took on the flesh and blood of humanity and lived among us and was subject to all of the same temptations and feelings and emotions and struggles that we are; since Jesus lived as a human, He fully understands humanity and is therefore compassionate, merciful, toward the human dilemma, the human struggle.  Jesus knows what we are going through. 

  Now, I want to take this thought one step further.  In the Beatitudes –those wonderful teachings that Jesus gave us on what the Kingdom of God is really like, Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”  In this beatitude, and, in fact in all of the beatitudes, Jesus was speaking emphatically –what that means is that Jesus was not simply mentioning that the merciful, will receive mercy from God –He was stating that only the merciful will receive mercy from God.  To put that in the negative sense, Jesus is saying that those who are not merciful will not receive mercy from God.  This is because a right relationship with God always produces the inner character of mercy.  

I want to pause for just a second and ask you to close your eyes and think of something with me.  Think back to the most recent time, the most recent circumstance in your life in which you needed God’s mercy.  Can you think of a time or a situation in which you needed God’s mercy?  I’m willing to bet it didn’t take very long and it you didn’t have to look very hard.  I believe we can all easily affirm the truth taught to us in the book of Romans that all have sinned.  We know that this is truth, don’t we?  We know that we all have done things and said things and thought things that were not of God and did not please God.  We have all sinned.  The Bible also tells us that the wages of sin is death.  Knowing that the only way to avoid the death the Bible says we deserve and guarantees we will receive, is if God grants us mercy, and knowing that the only way God will grant us mercy is if we are ourselves merciful people, I would think should produce a strong desire to love mercy and be merciful.

So, it is probably worth our while to be reminded again of what being merciful looks like in real life.  This Biblical ideal of mercy is not simply that we should pity and feel sorry for those who struggle, for those who suffer, for those less fortunate than ourselves because God feels sorry for them;  rather, it is that we should indentify with them so completely that their struggle becomes our struggle, their pain becomes our pain, because when we see things through the other person’s eyes, when we feel things through the other person’s skin, when we understand absolutely and completely why the other person is like he is doing the things he does, thinking the things he thinks, it is very difficult to be judgmental and condemning, and much easier to be forgiving, and forgiveness is what the kingdom of God is really all about.