Father, God, You say, blessed are those who are daily waiting at Your gates, the gates of wisdom. God, it's Your Word that gives that wisdom. From the mouth of the Lord comes wisdom. God, help us this morning, please, as we hear. Father, I pray that You'd help me to speak clearly as I ought to speak. Help me to unfold Your words, God. To bring forth treasures from Your storehouse for Your people. God, help us to hear. Help us to pay attention. God, may You benefit us. May You meet with us this morning and in the other classes as well. I ask for help in Your Son Jesus' name. Amen. So here we are. We're in our sixth class on how to grow. So, today we're going to be talking about confession. Confession, not in general, but in specific. And as we look at the New Testament, we see that Christians are confessors. They are confessors, one of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the truths concerning Him and surrounding Him. They confess Him. They confess His name. And they are also those who confess their sins. Those are the two things we see the Christians confess and are confessors of. So we're going to be dealing specifically with confession of sin. What that is. What does it look like? What are the benefits for the Christian? What is the need of it? We need to define our terms. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to look at one example that God has given us in the Scriptures of someone who has confessed. We need not scrounge around looking for outside of God's Word to try and come up with the definition. Let's just go straight to what God has spoken. The account we'll be dealing with is with David and Bathsheba, the sin that David committed in his confession and repentance. So, we'll start in 2 Samuel 12. If you want to turn there, you're welcome to. I have it right here. So, for the sake of time, I'll just go ahead and read. So, 2 Samuel 12, for the background, I'm sure that many of you who've read the Old Testament You're very familiar or at least you remember what happened with David and with Bathsheba. There's David. He's a king in Israel. And one day, he's on the roof of his palace and he's looking out over Jerusalem and he sees a woman bathing. And so he goes and he takes her, he commits adultery with her, and then he sends her back. She gets pregnant, and in order to cover that up, he has her husband murdered on the battlefield through his enemies. And then he takes that woman and becomes her husband. And so, we'll start off there in 2 Samuel 11, the last two verses. It says, now when the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband. When the time of mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house and she became his wife. Then she bore him a son. But the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the Lord." Now keep that in mind. God saw. No matter how much men may try and hide their sin, they try and cover it over. They may give it fair and beautiful names to avoid acknowledging it for what it is. God sees it for what it is. And He sees every secret thing. And what David did was evil in God's eyes. So God, loving David, who was a man after God's own heart, he sins a man, he sins a prophet. And this is where we'll pick up in chapter 12, verse 1. And I'm going to skip a large portion of this to deal mainly with the charges and David's confession of those charges. So then the Lord sent Nathan to David. And a lot of times, brethren, our confession of sin is going to be a response to God revealing that sin in our lives. Confession is a holy reflex that the Christian needs to develop. They need to be quick to confess. Quick to acknowledge sin. And it starts off usually with God sending a brother to point out sin in your life. Or when you're reading His Word, He'll bring sin to remembrance. Here He starts out. He sends Nathan to David. And then skipping on to v. 7 of that chapter, God says through Nathan, He says, Thus says the Lord God of Israel, It is I who anointed you king over Israel, and it is I who delivered you from the hand of Saul. I also gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your care. And I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I would have added to you many more things like these. Why have you despised the Word of the Lord by doing evil in His sight?" Now, before I go on any further, God is going to charge David with four counts. He's going to charge him with four things that he has done. The first one here is he has despised the Word of God by doing evil in God's sight. God has commanded has given commands, you should not commit adultery, is one of those. And David, by doing this, has despised God's Word. When you sin, you are despising what God has spoken, what God has commanded. So he charges them with this. He goes on, for the second charge, you have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword. So He charges him with murder. You have unjustly killed this man. You have murdered him through the sword of your enemies. The third charge, have taken his wife to be your wife. He's committed adultery. He's coveted his neighbor's wife. So He's charging him with this sin. And have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon. Now therefore, the sword shall not depart from your house because you have despised Me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife." So the fourth charge of David's sin is that God has charged David with despising him. God has charged him with despising his person and who he is. So there's four charges, and God goes on and then declares the sentencing, the judgment that will come as a result of these sins. And you can read that up to verse 13. So here we are in v. 13. We see David's confession of what God has charged him. Notice it. Then David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David, the Lord has also taken away your sin. You shall not die. So notice, the first thing in this confession, this admission of guilt, is how simple it is. How short it is. He does not go into some grandiose sermonizing and begin to write out this poetical list of confession of the charges that God has brought against him. It's just a simple acknowledgement. I have sinned against the Lord. Now, if we'll skip ahead in your Bible to Psalm 51. Psalm 51. takes place after Nathan comes to David. And we see a further fleshing out of David's confession. In the moment, it was just a simple acknowledgment, but now he goes on to further confess this sin to God in a more thorough and proper manner. So, Psalm 51, verse 1, for the choir director, a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him after he had gone in to Bethsheba. Be gracious to me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness, according to the greatness of Your compassion. Blot out my transgressions." Now notice this, I'll emphasize this. Blot out my transgressions. wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions and my sin as ever before me." So confession, as we see here, involves taking ownership of the guilt. It involves taking ownership, responsibility for the evil actions committed. David here is not shifting blame. He's not blaming Bathsheba and says, well she shouldn't have been bathing in her backyard where I can see her or something or whatever it was. He wasn't blaming circumstances or things external to him. No, he takes the guilt and says this is my sin. I own up to it. True confession will involve taking ownership of your sin. You are the one that has committed it. You are the one who is guilty and you have no excuse. You will not try and offer excuses like Adam who just blamed his wife. Notice that. He takes ownership. And then he goes on to say in v. 4, "...against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified when you speak and blameless when you judge." You see here now that he is confessing back to God what God has declared to him. God said, you have done what is evil in my sight and you have despised me. And David is acknowledging the truth of that. He says, God, you're right. Against you I have sinned. He's recognizing that his sin has been against God. He's recognizing that his sin is indeed an evil thing. Confession is not simply like the guilty criminal that gets caught in the act and says, yeah, I did that. And then he's just laughing about it, saying, I wish I had done more, or I enjoyed what I did. There's no contrition in the heart. There's no recognizing of the evil. There's no grief over it. But we see here that David, as we read the rest of the psalm, is a man who is contrite. And he realizes the evil that he's done. And he realizes the offense that it is against God. True confession will involve contrition. It will involve acknowledging your sin to be what God has declared it to be. So we see these things. So, let's look at this. It's a simple acknowledgement of sin. It's not necessarily reciting back of all the specific sins committed. He just confesses the sin that God has charged him with. There's times when confession for sin can be something just as simple as I have sinned in response to the charges brought against you. When your conscience brings it up. There's not always a necessity to go back and just recount every single thing you've done as you confess to God. Now why is that important? Or there are some who have a more sensitive conscience and they kind of make God out to be, I've committed, I've been in sin for this period of time and I've committed like 4,321 sins in that time and I've got to confess every single one and put a date on every single one and a time on every single one. And it becomes this laborious, burdensome thing where they feel like I have to confess every single little thing before God will have mercy on me, before God will have, pity on me and forgive those sins. And if there's sins that I don't confess, well, God is not going to forgive those because I have to confess every single little one. But brethren, we see here that David, he just acknowledges I've sinned and all this. The year-long period deals with Bathsheba. He says, I've sinned. And he acknowledges it, and God immediately forgives him in that. He wasn't waiting for a complete, thorough resuscitation of everything. So confession of sin can be just, in general, acknowledging of guilt. We see that it is taking ownership for that sin. We see that it is acknowledging what God declares it to be. And we see that it is acknowledging an offense to God. And that's not to say, I have on that sheet, it's not to say that confession of sin will always be general. There are times when confession of sin will be specific. We see Isaiah in Isaiah 6, when he sees the Lord high and lifted up on the throne, and he says, I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips. We see that there is a specific confession of sin. Job, when he saw the Lord, he said at the end of that whole discourse, God speaking to him, he says, I've spoken of things that were too wonderful for me. I've spoken of things that I didn't understand. It was a specific confession of speaking wrongly. So there are times when confession of sin should be general, and then there are other times when confession of sin should be specific. Specifically naming that sin. So I have a definition here. And then we'll move on. So, to summarize, confessing sin means that from the heart, a heart of contrition, you acknowledge your sin generally or specifically, agree with God as to its sinfulness and evil, and take responsibility and ownership for it. I'll say before I move on that confession of sin without repentance is a mockery of God. I'm assuming that repentance is going to be the end of your confession in this. This lesson is not primarily about repentance, but let's assume that when we're talking about confession, we're assuming that it will be followed by repentance. It will be accompanied with repentance. So now, it brings up the question. Well, how does confession and repentance help us grow as Christians? Because that's the whole purpose of this class is how do you as a Christian grow? How, therefore, does confession of sin enable you to grow? Now, let's think, as an analogy, let's think of a garden. This garden is your soul. And God, for the Christian, He is planting in this garden beautiful plants, beautiful fruit trees. He's planting the roses of humility, and the tulips of love, and all these things, and beautiful fruit trees that's the fruit of the Spirit, and all these things. And the means of grace that we've been talking about such as worship, reading the Scriptures, prayer, these are the things that are like water, that are like fertilizing, that are like pruning these bushes with the desire in the end that it will grow into a beautiful, fragrant garden that God will delight to walk in, that God will delight to dwell in. Confession of sin. Now, let's say that in this garden native to the soil, you have weeds that are constantly springing up. You have the thorns of pride. You have the bull nettle of anger. You have the milk thistle of bitterness. And all these things growing up that are threatening two things. It's threatening to stunt and destroy that which is growing, that which God has planted there. And also, it's ruining the beauty of that garden. I mean, think about it. Who of you wants to walk in a garden that's full of poison ivy, that's full of thorns, that's full of bull nettle? You're going to be like, I don't want anything to do with that. All that junk needs to be cleared out before I'm going to go walk through that. before I'm going to delight in that. So confession, repentance, is like the constant, diligent weeding out of this garden all those weeds that are going to ruin it and potentially destroy it. So in this way, Does confession or repentance enable growth? Think about it. If you are ignoring the weeds in the garden and you're just allowing them to grow up, those weeds are going to completely overgrow everything. It doesn't matter how much you water. It doesn't matter how much you fertilize. That's not going to do anything if you ignore the weeds. The weeds are just going to grow out and choke out and it's going to all be vain anyways. You must deal with the weeds. Brethren, think of prayer, for example, when you have unconfessed sin in your life. You try and go pray. You in here who are Christians, you know what that's like to try and go pray. And you're not acknowledging sin. You've got an idol, you've got something you're holding on to, and you try and go pray, you know it's futile. You feel the futility of it in your soul because God's constantly putting His finger on that saying, saying you need to deal with that. You need to acknowledge that. You need to take care of that. Let's read Psalm 66. I'll read it. I have it right here. Think about this as confession. How confession can help. and a lack thereof will hinder these other graces. I cried to Him with my mouth, this is verse 17, and He was extolled with my tongue. If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear. When you have unconfessed sin in your heart that you're not acknowledging, it makes your praying completely void. It makes your praying completely vain. God doesn't want to hear it until you first deal with your sin. It's the same thing with reading. You try and read God's Word when you've got this sin in your life. God is not going to be meeting with you in there to fellowship with you while you've got these sins you're holding on to that you're refusing to deal with. You're trying to fellowship with God and you're reading His Word that says you should not commit adultery, and you've got this affair over here that you're not wanting to confess. It's futile. It's vain. It's a mocker. So confession clears the pipe, if you will, so that the water can flow through it. It frees up so that these other means of grace will be beneficial. And in that way, it enables the soul to grow. It enables the soul to grow. So, yeah. Yeah, that's actually what I'm about to go into. It's a good transition. So he asked. Is there a time when we need to specifically confess to God or confess to somebody else? How do you know? And that brings us into the next point on the outline. Who is sin to be confessed to? Well, brethren, since sin is always and primarily an attack upon God, a despising of God, sin first and foremost will always need to be confessed directly to God. It will do you no good if you go and confess to a person if you do not confess to God. Because God is the one that is primarily being offended. You see this in Psalm 32.5 where the psalmist says, will confess my transgressions to the Lord." He's acknowledging his sin directly to God. God is the only one that has power to forgive sin. So sins must be confessed to Him. But then, to deal with his question, well, are there times when we need to confess to others? And yes, there are. When you see this, In Matthew, when Peter is saying, Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times shall I forgive him? Up to seven times? And the Lord says, if your brother sins against you seventy times seven, you should forgive him. So the idea is that the expectation is when your brother sins against you, or if you've sinned against your brother in some way, Oftentimes it is good to go confess that to them. Now, it's tricky because there's times when you may not need to do that or there may be a specific way in which you need to go about it that is wise versus another way that wouldn't be wise in going to do that. That's going to require discernment in the individual circumstance. But there are times when it is necessary for you to go and ask for forgiveness of a brother that you've sinned against. You've done something. You need to go and confess it. Ask for his forgiveness. Apologize. Humble yourself. So there's other times when believers need to confess their sins to the brethren or to those whom they've sinned against. Now, there's other times when maybe we haven't sinned against a brother or we haven't done anything, but instead we still need to confess that sin to somebody to just get it out in the open. When you're concealing your transgressions, let's say there's a sin you're struggling with, you're confessing it to God, but you don't seem to be getting anywhere with that. Confession can be a powerful weapon against that sin when you expose that sin to another brother that will then come and pray for you. That will then come alongside you and stand with you against that sin. We see this in James 5.15. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. And you see that similar thing in 1 John. 1 John 5.16, if anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. That can be a huge help in your walk is if you find a brother that's godly, that is wise, and you go and discreetly reveal what you're struggling with. You let him know what's going on so he can pray for you. That would be a time when confessing to someone your sin, not necessarily someone you've sinned against, but because you need help in fighting that sin. You need somebody to pray for you, to support you. So we confess sin to God primarily because He's the one whom we have sinned against, whom we have offended. And in times when we've sinned against others, we need to go and confess that sin. And then other times when we haven't really sinned against somebody, but we need help in fighting against that sin, that is when you can confess and ask for them to pray for you, to ask for their help. So now lastly, Lastly, we'll go on to the benefits of confessing sin. What are some other ways in which it helps us? So, the first one I have on here is compassion and grace from God. Confession of sin from a contrite heart will bring upon you the compassion and grace of God. I think it's interesting because When you think about who it is we confess our sins to, you're confessing it to God who is holy. It says in the Prophets that His eyes are too pure to even look upon sin. You can't even look at it. It says in the Psalms that God hates all evildoers. And yet, it is to Him, the Judge of all the earth, that we will confess our sins to. You think about that, and you think, well, what's that going to bring about? Surely it would bring about swift and immediate justice. Strict justice for those evils committed. And yet we see that God in this age, now, in this day of mercy, is instead a God of compassion. Any sinner, anyone that comes and confesses their sins from a humble and contrite heart to God will not find Him now to be a judge to execute justice on them, but will instead find them to be a father, like the prodigal son returning to his father. They'll find such abundant compassion. They'll find a father that runs out and hugs them and kisses them and welcomes them into His kingdom that welcomes them to return. His compassion is abundant. He is abundantly forgiving in what He does for those who confess. they will find grace to help them overcome their sin. God is opposed to the proud, but He gives grace to the humble. It brings about grace from God. There is coming a day, brethren, a day of judgment in which God will no longer have mercy and every man will indeed confess his sin. There's coming a day in which God will Open the books and every man is going to acknowledge his sin and there will be no mercy on that day. There will be strict justice. There will be the full punishment and proper sentence given to each person on account of their sin on the day of judgment. But now we're in a time of mercy in which compassion and mercy will be had for those who confess. So that's two of the benefits. It brings compassion and grace from God. And then the last one I have here is pardon and cleansing from sin. Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, the psalmist said. And that comes from confessing sin. 1 John 1.9 is probably one of the most powerful verses on this. It says that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins. For the Christian, that means a restoration of fellowship with God. And for the unbeliever who's coming first and repenting, it means a reconciliation and entering into that relationship with God for the first time. But it brings pardon. It brings reconciliation between the soul and with God. If you have sin that you're struggling with, you have sin that you're not acknowledging, and it's completely ruined your walk with the Lord. It's hindering your prayers. It's hindering your time in the Word. It's hindering your witness. The way to get back from that is not by going through a long series of penance. It's not by walking up staircases on your knees. It's not by rolling around in a thorn bush as some men in the past have done, but rather it's simply acknowledging that sin and immediately, when that is acknowledged and turned from and called for what it is, there's a restoration of that relationship with God. And God, in response, promises in 1 John 1-9 to bring about cleansing from that sin. Isn't that the blessed thing for the Christian? They not only want their sins to be forgiven, but they want their sins to be removed. God cleanses us from that sin as we confess it. It's the means by which God begins to work in our hearts and turn us away from that sin. To turn us away from inclinations towards that sin. It brings about cleansing from sin. So if that's not encouragement to confess your sin, I don't know what would be. It's that you will be guaranteed to find mercy. And God will give you help and grace to overcome that sin, to cleanse you from that unrighteousness. He's faithful to do so. But that's all I have. If anybody has any questions, feel free to ask now. And if not, then we'll just go to pray. Yeah, brother? So the question was, how important is faith in this believing that God will forgive you if you confess? It says in Hebrews, without faith, it's impossible to please God. And we see elsewhere in Hebrews 11 that by faith, the men of old gained approval. They were able to do acts of righteousness. They were able to conquer kingdoms. is an enabling force for the Christian. If somebody doesn't believe that God will forgive their sins if they confess, it's unlikely that they will confess at all. It's the very promises of God brought forth to the soul of pardon and cleansing that when acted upon, when believed, will enable a person to confess. If you don't believe that God's going to forgive you when you confess, you're not likely to confess at all. So it's very, very important that you believe what God has spoken about who He is. You see there, I think it's Isaiah. Chapter 50 somewhere where God is saying, let the unrighteous man forsake his thoughts and the wicked man forsake his ways, for the Lord will abundantly pardon. His ways are not your ways, nor is His thoughts your thoughts. Oftentimes, the things that people need to repent from is this attitude that God won't forgive me if I confess. That's the unrighteous thinking that they need to get rid of. God has promised, I will forgive. I will have compassion. Return. Repent. confess, acknowledge that you haven't kept my word. And they need to turn from this idea that, no, God's unmerciful. He's not going to do that. It requires faith to believe that it's important. Does that answer? OK. And how does it work together that we're forgiven when we become Christians, believers in Christ? All our sins are wiped away. But then that confessing Christ will remove our sins. in our own personal walk as we confess, Christ will take away our sins. How do those two work together? When somebody comes to faith in Christ at first, all their sins are washed away. And God no longer imputes their sin to them. We see that in Romans 4. God no longer credits to them unrighteousness because of their sins. But sin, if it's committed, it brings and introduces a break in fellowship with God. It separates the believer from God and not Not in the sense that they're cut off from Christ and they're going to perish if they die, but in the sense of a relational aspect. An example might be you have a family member and you sin against them and that person's grieved, they go away, and you're ignoring that thing you've done against them and trying to have a relationship with them, trying to talk with them, and they're cold towards you because you're refusing to acknowledge what you've done because you've grieved them and you're not even you're not even conscious of what you've done or you're not willing to admit it. It brings that break in. But hopefully, in that situation, you confess, and you tell them what you did, and you apologize, and you make up, and now there's a restoration in that relationship. It's similar in our relationship with God. It's that you're confessing the sin you've done that's grieved Him, and God forgives you and begins It brings the relationship back to what it was where there's fellowship, where there's freedom. Brother, two examples from Scripture. One we're going to look at today is the foot washing. When Jesus says to Peter, you're already clean, that's because they have been washed and their sins are forgiven, so to speak, for all of their positional sins in Adam. And then their feet have to be washed regularly to wash them of the sins that they will commit as they go through each day. And that's what we're dealing with here, with that confession of sin and forgiveness is on a daily basis of the sins we commit. Everything we committed prior to becoming Christians and everything that was imputed to us as sons of Adam was taken at the cross immediately as we became Christians, when we were converted. And everything else is too, But it's kind of the already not yet sort of situation we run into often that those things are already forgiven. But until we confess those sins as we commit them, that forgiveness is not actually applied. If you can see what I'm getting at there. Similarly, in the Old Testament, with the sacrifices, or the various sins that could be committed, quite often it was said, you commit this sin, even once you actually made your atonement, you would still be unclean until nightfall, or until the next day, or a certain number of days. And that's kind of a similar picture, where you had to confess your sin, make atonement for it, and Jesus has made our atonement, we don't have to do that ourselves. you're still unclean, that fellowship, as Jeff says, is broken until that confession is made and your sin is atoned for in practice, as opposed to just in history. I'm not sure of the word I want to use there, but that's what came to my mind. To me, the one way to look at it is Christ forgave us of all our sins, past, present, and future. And so those are not surprising, the ones that we in the future, but they're a surprise to us because we're not aware of them yet. So as we move forward, it's an act of obedience to ask for forgiveness for those sins. Yeah, to acknowledge it, confess it. You had something to add? I just said basically it's an act of restoration. Yeah. I mean, just in our relationship as being, you know, husband and wife, if I said against you, if I confess it to you, then I'm doing that to help restore Yeah. Yeah.