Tag Archives: confession

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What if I Can’t Forgive Myself?

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One of the things I will often hear from people is, “I know God forgives me, but I can never forgive myself.” Or, “I know ___ blank forgave me, but I can’t move forward. I’m stuck and can’t forget what I did.”

Our past continues to creep up on us and doesn’t stay in the past, no matter how much we’d like it to. 

In Genesis 3, we understand how God wants us to deal with our past and the things that keep us stuck. I’m so thankful to Chuck DeGroat for pointing these out. 

When Adam and Eve sin, God comes and asks 4 questions: 

  • Where are you?
  • Who told you? 
  • Have you eaten from the tree?
  • What have you done?

What gets us stuck, and keeps us stuck, is we start with the 4th question: What have you done? And that is all we focus on or answer. But there is more happening in us and around us that God wants us to face. 

And most importantly, God doesn’t start with “What have you done?” So, it is a good idea to start where God does. 

In these questions, we find what is broken in our lives, the shame we carry, and the way forward. 

Where are you? This is the question about hiding. God isn’t confused about where Adam and Eve are, and He isn’t confused about where you are. He is asking about where we are internally. Why? He wants us to know where we are. 

What do you use to hide? It might be your personality, jokes, work ethic, or something else. But all of us do something to hide whenever we feel exposed. Part of forgiving myself is seeing what I use to hide and keep people at arm’s length. 

Where did this come from?

Somewhere in your early life, you probably learned what it means to be safe and secure in relationships and have continued to do that again and again in your adult life. But as one of my mentors says, “What worked for you as a little person works against you as an adult.” We need to see what we do to hide, where that came from, honor how that protected us in life, and see how that can keep us from freedom now. 

But this hiding might also be the brokenness we carry and our secret sins. 

Who told you? This helps to identify who told us about our nakedness and our shame. 

What are the voices that have gotten us to where we are? This isn’t about blaming but about identifying our past. 

Have you eaten from the tree? This question helps us to identify what we did. 

What Adam and Eve did, and our tendency now, was to blame someone else. This is another way of staying safe and distancing ourselves from what we did. We have less ownership and guilt if we can say it was someone else’s fault. 

Ultimately, this often leads to regret, shame, feeling forgotten, guilt, and bitterness.

But God won’t let us stay there. He patiently moves forward and asks, What have you done?

As I said, we usually start here, but God doesn’t. We need to get to this question, but this question isn’t the starting point. God wants us to get under the hood of our lives and ask deeper questions before getting to what we have said or done. 

But in the goodness of God, He doesn’t leave us standing there with what we have done. He helps us to name it and move forward to freedom. 

In 1 John, John writes to his church struggling with sin and seeing themselves correctly.

There was a group in his church that, when it came to sin and struggles, though they didn’t sin, they weren’t sinful (or as bad as our culture talks about it), and there were no consequences to their sin. It didn’t do anything or harm anyone.

Now, no matter what you think of sin, you do things wrong. There’s a good chance that in the last hour, you’ve done multiple things wrong. You may not call them sins. You might call them mistakes or failures or missed opportunities. But (and this is crucial) if we don’t see them correctly, we will miss God’s grace and forgiveness. And if we don’t see them correctly, we will end up with regret, shame, guilt, and eventually bitterness.

This is why John points us to confession in one of the most famous verses in the Bible.

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

Confession is being honest with yourself and God about who you are and who He is.

Confession is being honest with yourself and God about who you are and who He is.

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It is seeing yourself through the lens God sees you, which is the only path to freedom.

This path takes us from comparison, being the victim, and even moping around. It takes us to freedom because, through confession, we can let go. We can drop our bags of sin, guilt, shame, and regret.

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How to Fight Your Sin

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We all struggle with something.

We all sin or have some emotion we wish we didn’t have. We carry regrets and shame from past hurts, relationships, or other experiences we hope to eliminate. But for some reason, they hang around. 

We often wonder, am I made new? Has God forgiven me for that? Why do I still struggle (Romans 7:15)? Why do I do what I do?

How to stop doing the things you wished you could stop doing.

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Throughout Scripture (Romans 8:13; Galatians 5:24; Colossians 3:5), we are told to crucify our sin, to put it to death.

But what does that look like?

Right before Galatians 5:24, Paul has two lists: a list of sins (vs. 19 – 21) and a list called the fruit of the Spirit (vs. 22 – 23).

In vs. 19 – 21, there is sexual immorality (which is all sex outside of the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman), impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these.

What is interesting about this list is that Paul seems to put them all on the same level and says, “Living in these will keep you from God” (see the end of Vs. 21). 

What Paul says, though, is these are not occasional sins. In vs. 16 – 17, he describes these as overwhelming, all-encompassing desires that you cannot control the longing of. They are your identity. These things about us follow words like “always” and “never.” I always worry, try to control things, and care what others think. I can never stop this or that. 

Those things slowly become part of our identity, which we carry as part of ourselves. 

For each person, vs. 19 – 21 is where the battle happens. And make no mistake, we all have something. 

But how do you put them to death?

This is where the fruit of the Spirit comes in vs. 22 – 23 of Galatians 5 and the freedom promised to us in Romans 8. 

I love that Paul calls them fruit. It gives this picture of a farmer, of gradual growth; a farmer, not the fruit, does that. The fruit doesn’t make itself grow; God does. Fruit does grow. Not always at the rate we expect or think it should, but it grows.

How God works in our lives.

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The question for a follower of Jesus is, do you see growth in your life in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Do you see how God is working on your heart in those areas?

We take the fruit of the Spirit and put our sin to death from vs. 19 – 21.

This becomes a daily thing.

Crucifixion in vs. 24 carries this idea that it will be a death. It will be painful, complex, and complicated. Freedom always involves a war.

Freedom always involves a war.

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One of the best ways to walk this road is through confession. We practice confession daily, each week, at the communion table. Why? Because “when we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). 

One thing I’ve learned about God’s grace is that many times, the reason we don’t experience God’s grace and freedom in Jesus is that we won’t allow ourselves to. 

We too often choose to stay stuck in our sins. This is why Paul talks so much about the mind in the New Testament (Romans 8:5, 12:1 – 2; Colossians 3:12). The daily choices make up our lives, and that pertains to the choices we make to sin or not sin. Paul tells us that we have the power to conquer all that lies before us (Romans 8:11), but many of us live already defeated lives. 

What if, this week, you lived as if the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you? Because He does. 

How to fight your sin.

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The Goal of Spiritual Rhythms

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Sunday I started a new series at CCC called Summer Reset: Reevaluating our Spiritual Rhythms. 

When new year’s goals and resolutions roll around almost every year, millions of people make a goal connected to their spiritual life. It might be reading their Bible more, praying more, or being more generous, which is fantastic. But often we fail to move the needle in those places, or at least to the degree we’d like to see.

Many times we get frustrated with ourselves, think something is wrong with us, and then fail to reengage with God.

Have you ever asked why that is? There are many reasons this happens, but I think one of them centers on our spiritual rhythms.

Have you ever asked yourself: What is the goal of spiritual rhythms or practices? When I read my Bible, pray, give, fast, or any other spiritual practice, what am I hoping will happen?

What is the goal of spiritual practices?

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I like the word rhythm and practice because it helps me see life as a rhythm. Rhythms get the idea of movement, timing, seasons, and life in that way. Practices help me to know that I am practicing, I have not arrived. Every time I fast, feast, pray, sit in silence or join in community, I am practicing. And, if I don’t get it right (which is often) or if things feel stale (which happens), I am practicing. 

Why I like to use the words spiritual rhythms or spiritual practices.

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What is your goal when it comes to spiritual practices? To your spiritual rhythms?

If you think about the question, you will start to think of things like growing close to Jesus, growing in my faith, and learning about Jesus. And those are good answers. 

Spiritual practices are how we connect with God and relate to God. But spiritual practices also do something else; they are how we become more present to God, others, and ourselves. They reorient our hearts and lives around the things of God, which is crucial in our world that is so loud and easily distracts us. 

Spiritual practices are the ways that we become more present to God, others, and ourselves.

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This is why the goal of spiritual practices is so important. If we don’t know the purpose, we won’t understand why we need to practice them or what we are trying to experience or accomplish when we practice them. We will also miss what God is trying to do in us, around us, and in those practices. We can read our Bible, pray, take a sabbath, and miss all that it could be.

While spiritual practices do many things, I think they bring about two important things:

  1. They are about our formation, becoming more like Christ, and how we walk with Christ as his disciples, as his apprentices, alongside him.
  2. They help us to be present with God, ourselves, and others. They help us be aware of what is happening in us, what is going on in others, and what God is doing. They help us not to miss things.

As we practice them, we look for how God is forming us. As we experience difficulty or struggle through practice, we look for what God is doing in us, how we are being shaped, and who we are being shaped into. 

How God shapes you.

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Why we Need Confession and How to Practice It

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Jerry Bridges said, “Don’t believe everything you think. You cannot be trusted to tell yourself the truth.”

When it comes to our lives, few of us see ourselves accurately. We are often the last person to figure out what we’re good at, where we should spend our energies and talents, what dreams to pursue, when we’re making a poor decision or when we should act.

We think we’re good at figuring it out, but we rarely are.

Have you noticed you don’t see yourself clearly?

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That’s why perspective outside of ourselves, perspective from God and community, is so important.

Here’s why this is a problem.

We often make poor choices. We date the wrong person, take the wrong job. We find ourselves stuck in addictions that we wished we could let go of. We find ourselves spending our time with people and in places we wished we didn’t. In the end, this often leads to regret, shame, feeling forgotten, guilt and bitterness.

We Aren’t the Best Judge of Ourselves.

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In 1 John, John is writing to his church that is struggling with sin and seeing themselves correctly.

There was a group in his church that, when it came to sin and struggles, thought they didn’t sin, they weren’t sinful (or as bad as our culture talks about it) and that there were no consequences to their sin. It didn’t do anything or harm anyone.

Now, no matter what you think of sin, you do things wrong. In fact, there’s a good chance that in the last hour you’ve done multiple things wrong. You may not call them sins. You might call them mistakes or failures or missed opportunities. But (and this is crucial) if we don’t see them correctly, we will miss God’s grace and forgiveness. And if we don’t see them correctly, we will end up with regret, shame, guilt and eventually bitterness.

This is why John points us to confession in one of the most popular verses in the Bible.

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

Confession is being honest with yourself and God about who you are and who He is.

Confession is being honest with yourself and God about who you are and who He is.

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It is seeing yourself through the lens God sees you, which is the only path to freedom.

This path takes us away from comparison, being the victim and even moping around. It takes us to freedom, because through confession we are able to let go. We are able to drop our bags of sin, guilt, shame and regret.