**45 minutes a week. How about yours?**
Our priest had 60 minutes scheduled on Saturday evenings and has added 30 minutes on Wednesdays. Our parish had grown from approximately 500 families five years ago to over 1000 families this year.
Says something about what is happening!
Yes, frequent Confession is good. Used to go every six months. Then went to every two months, then every month, now I don’t let myself go over two or three weeks. It’s amazing how aware I have become of my sins.
I understand confession doctrinally, from a different perspective, perhaps limited in context to His forgiveness of sin in His sanctification process.
For example, we are told to remain in prayer continually.
I know that when I sin, it doesn’t happen to happen when I’m in faith through Christ is all of my thinking. On the contrary, one common denominator in all sin, I’ve found, is that it always occurs independent of faith through Him.
So now comes the issue of post salvation sin and sanctification. In order for God, the Holy Spirit to be free in His immutable nature, to sanctify us, there must be something He finds righteous in us.
When we turn our thinking back to Him, (i.e. true meaning of repent, not emotional, simply turning back to Him, a brokenness in our independent thinking away from Him), then He can see our faith as righteous.
The second step of our return is confession.
I think a lot of people get confused on this point, thinking that if we apologize, God is simply being courteous in responding to us and forgetting our sin. I don’t think that is the mechanic ongoing in confession.
What I perceive is that when we sin (post salvation sin) there is a fearful expectation of condemnation in us. That expectation is because we know our Lord Christ Jesus died for our sin, and that when we are faithful through Him, He provides our salvation. I don;t find in Scripture where God jerks salvation away from us when we sin, but in our souls, our thinking processes, there is a natural anticipation, an expectation, that in a fair transaction, when we fail to remain faithful, He is not obliged to hold up the consequent end of the covenant, the deal. IMHO, this thinking is premature, because when Christ paid for all sins on the Cross, God already knew from time in eternity past, exactly who was going to be saved and who wasn’t. He still died for our sins. It was His Sovereign act in deity and in humanity to provide that propitiation for sin.
Nevertheless, in our thinking, whenever we sin, we naturally do not anticipate salvation any longer, even though once in His Royal family, we are there for eternity. Bit when we return to Him in repentence, He is free to return to us.
When we confess the sin, known and unknown, we also then have assurance from His payment on the Cross, that by 1stJohn 1:9, He is sure and just to forgive us those sins.
Confession, as I understand it, is a thinking mechanism between us and God, though faith in Christ, whereby after our repentance and confession, He is then free to continue our sanctification process and we stop scarring our soul requiring His double work in our thinking processes.
Confession is then a purely private matter between the believer out of fellowship and God the Father, through faith in Christ.
I also observe many temptations for distraction when we involve others in the confession process. For example, instead of relying 100% on God, through 100% faith through Christ alone, there is a tendency to focus on a different person when discussing our sin. That human we are discussing the issue with might afford some academic tutoring, but in no way whatsoever has authority from God to influence our very personal human spirit. We aren’t priests to the priest to the High Priest to God. Our route is to God the Father, simply through one High Priest in our individual priesthood, which only God Himself has given us, and no other.
Confession through third parties invites a counterfeit thankfulness on the part of the believer towards the priest being confessed through instead of Christ, our High Priest.
Another temptation arises for third parties to gossip regarding our sin. This promotes a worldly system of morality as a counterfeit the the system of sanctification which God has provided us through faith in Christ and allowing God the Holy Spirit perform all His work in us in accordance to His Plan.
WRT confession, I see a thinking process, which perhaps may also be involved psychologically (in the soul) which might even have physical aspects. We are told not to go to sleep while a sin is in our heart towards our fellow man. We also have provisions and allegories of the heart as being used in the soul to purify our thinking processes while we remain in fellowship with Him. It strikes me that one aspect of confession, might actually be to prevent physical aspects of renewing our mind happen in a fashion that doesn’t scar our thinking, but promotes our sanctification.
One of the worst aspects of sin, is the scarring of our thinking processes, our soul. The next time our thoughts encounter a similar sequence or environment where we sinned in the past, our scarred thinking tends to replicate the past thinking. Habits on thought are formed, in sin, as well as in sanctification. Even though God may have forgiven us, our body and thinking (soul) might still be scarred to sin, such that we have a greater propensity to sin in that area than when we never encountered the temptation earlier. In this respect, I see confession as a very personal aspect to reduce our propensity to succumb to temptation, but again only through faith in Christ.
If we use confession as an external method, for others to keep us from sin, we simply are forming a worldly counterfeit to faith in Christ, interrupting the issue before us and substituting the authority of others for our own volition.
Do you know of any other passages in Scripture which expand more upon confession than the issues strictly between God and the believer returning to Him?
When the parish does the Parish Penance Service twice a year (Advent and Lent) the place is a mob scene - lines out the door with 10 or a dozen priests hearing confessions. We have about 1800 families registered in the parish.
My priest states very clearly that if it’s been more than a month then don’t even approach the chalice. He’s not playing either, because he turns people away all the time.
I got a lecture last time, and I felt about this () big!