Your mistakes do not define you – Advent Psalm of Confession, Part 4

Confession is not easy. We can rebel at the thought of admitting even the smallest mistakes. So to help us learn how to confess, David concludes with some instruction in Psalm 32.  Here is what we should do.  First, in verse 6.

“Therefore let all the faithful pray to you while you may be found; surely the rising of the mighty waters will not reach them.

We are called to be faithful in prayer.  In the context of this psalm, David is saying we are to confess our sins to God in prayer.  Yes, God already knows what sins we have committed.  But there is something important about admitting our sin to the point where we speak it to God.  There is something powerful about being totally honest about ourselves, including our failings.  It’s the beginning to possible healing. 

When we confess to God in prayer, notice the result in verse 7,

“You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.”

Confession is act of trusting in God, who is our hiding place.  When we confess, we are being honest about our choices, and we are trusting in God’s love, grace and mercy.  That can feel risky.  But it is an act of honest love.  Of surrender and trust in God.

When we tell people the truth about our sins, when we confess to people, those people might not treat us with love, grace and mercy.  In fact, we can be so used to human reactions of recrimination that we cannot imagine that God will forgive us.  We might feel we are not worthy of forgiveness.  We might think that what we did was so bad that we only deserve pain and brokenness.  Or maybe we just aren’t used to speaking vulnerably and honestly with God, and so we struggle to confess our sins to God. 

God reminds us this Advent season that he loves us so much that he sent Jesus to become one of us, because God wants us to be people who are living restored, forgiving, without hidden sinful parts of our lives. God wants us to live freely in truth, set free to live as he wants us to live. 

God wants us to be able to sing songs of deliverance.  So we confess our sins, trusting in him. 

But there’s more. And we’ll learn about that in the next post.

Photo by Daniela Holzer on Unsplash