The churches where I grew up never seemed to have a focus on confession as part of our Sunday liturgy; when I think about it, I can occasionally remember one of the pastors adding in a sentence or two into the pastoral prayer about things that we had communally done wrong, while trusting in the words of the Lord’s Prayer to cover us all as a corporate prayer of confession. It really wasn’t until I started attending Peachtree as a senior in High School that I began to take note of the Prayer of Confession that would often be in the bulletin (and as a guilt-minded person, I would always take time before the service to offer that prayer to the Lord).
While I was in college, some of that understanding changed, and the change came from one of the most unexpected places—the campus priest, a fine Franciscan named Father Jude. I was growing in my faith and got to know Jude when he came to speak to the Presbyterian student fellowship during Lent. He talked about confession. During the course of that talk, he mentioned that the true heart of confession for him was the knowledge that God will forgive us of our sins. I’ve carried those words with me ever since: the heart of confession is the knowledge that God will forgive us of our sins.
We cannot do anything that is so heinous, so egregious, so out there that our Lord, our Creator, our Father in Heaven, will not be willing to forgive us. I’ve needed to share those thoughts with our kids when they’ve thought that they’ve done something truly horrid (which they hadn’t). I’ve needed to remind people with whom I’m meeting for counseling of those words when they believe that their lives have been broken beyond repair by their failings. And every morning, during my prayer time, I have to remind myself of those words from Father Jude, and the way in which the Psalmist said it as well, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.’ And you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
God will forgive us of our sin. The Lord does not simply desire to do so; He sent Jesus to live, to die the death of a rebellious slave, and to be resurrected again that we might be willing to have that grace that washes us clean of our sin. The hardest part of this understanding for me is not that God forgives us, but that His love is so great that He wants to do so.