Mighty God, we come to you and worship every Lord's Day confessing that we're sinners and we also confess that we're weak. Our hearts and our minds, they wander so quickly, Lord, even when you are addressing us with your word. We pray, Lord, that you would take away every distraction, stave every tendency in us to put up walls, to guard our hearts so that they would not be pierced by your word. Lord, we pray that we would be cut to the heart. God, that we would be brought anew to Jesus' cross, that we would love our salvation the more because of your word and how it points us back to him. We ask these things, Father, in the name of your Son, Jesus, and by your Holy Spirit, amen. Well, one of the things, go ahead and be seated. One of the things that we do differently, and I'm sure that many of you have noticed, is in little bit here in your printed liturgies, you have a public confession of sin or a corporate confession of sin. Find that when people visit us, or maybe you're visiting today, when people visit, these churches in the Presbyterian Church in America and we do this thing, it is one of the most foreign elements of our service. Seems a bit strange. A lot of times people are off put by it. And so I have labored as a minister to ask myself what it is that people don't particularly like about the corporate confession of sin. And it turns out that the best answer is because we're all sinners. Turns out that's why this aspect of our service is so challenging, and yet it's right here in Scripture. What we have in Isaiah chapter 64 is really a communal lament spoken by Isaiah the prophet. It actually began in chapter 63 in verse seven, and it had four parts. It began with a historical reminiscence of how good God has been to the people of Israel. It's followed by a complaint as to where in the world God is in the midst of Israel's distress in the seventh and eighth centuries BC. Our passage begins in verses one through seven with a corporate confession of sin. Isaiah the prophet confessing that this people, this corporate people, has fallen into behaviors that are offensive to God, and it ends with an appeal to God, the great potter, to put the people back together again. I'll give you the context real quickly, historically. See, Israel is carrying on under the burden of present judgment that is going to extend into the future and it's going to get worse before it gets better. Isaiah had told King Hezekiah of Israel that, in fact, the people would be brought into exile in the land of Babylon that lied ahead and there was no way around it. At this point in chapter 64, we have a sort of high point where the prophet pleads with the Lord that in spite of the judgment to come, he would once again be gracious to them and restore them to a place of deep communion and fellowship with him. We do this same sort of thing every Lord's Day. We confess that we, not just as individuals, but as a people, suffer from certain common sins that especially escape our notice because we do them together. There's also the reality that we are in a denomination that has in the recent past even spoken corporate public repentance for sins that we've been involved in in the past, whether it be involvement in slavery or segregation into the 20th century. And the oddity, however, is that we increasingly live in a culture that is interested in corporate repentance. Many of you have maybe even seen celebrities on YouTube or publicly perhaps repenting not only of national sins, but of their very ethnicity, if that were possible. And so the question becomes, how is what we're doing different from what they're doing? It's very important that we're clear in our mind about this because at its worst, what our culture is frequently doing is something that we call virtue signaling. Attempting to paint themselves as righteous and holy by confessing the sins of prior generations. How is what we're doing different? That's the question of our sermon today. And we're gonna consider four ways that we can get corporate repentance wrong. and we're gonna see four ways in which we can do it right and after the manner of Isaiah the prophet in our passage. So let's begin. The first place wherein we can really go off the rails with corporate confession is with the question of who the subject of repentance ought to be. See, we suffer from a common understanding in America, a common ill called individualism. How many of us might be inclined to say, I do not identify with the sins of my nation. I don't identify with the sins of our nation's past. I answer for me, myself, and I, that's it. There's a double irony about this mentality. The first of which is that mentality itself is a distinctly American mentality that you have inherited from your forefathers. It's something that you got from someone else and it reminds you of the fact that you belong to a people bigger than yourself, not that you don't. The reason I call this a double irony is because we currently live in a culture that is deeply confused about pronouns, deeply confused about what he, she, and a myriad of new pronouns to enter the scene actually mean. I say this is ironic because we as a church in America have frequently suffered from confusion about pronouns. They're just different ones. They're the words we and I. I'll set before you a challenging idea. It's that every single we is virtually an I, a corporate body living and acting and working together. And every single I, that's each one of you, is also a we belonging to peoples bigger than yourselves. This is a totally biblical way of viewing things. You will even see the nation of Israel from time to time speaking with first person singular pronouns. Listen to this passage from Numbers chapter 20 verses 18 to 19. Adom, that is Israel's neighbor, however said to him, that's all of Israel. You shall not pass through us or I will come out with the sword against you. Again, the sons of Israel said to him, we will go up by the highway, and if I and my livestock do drink any of your water, then I will pay its price. Who do you suppose that I is? It's the entire corporate people of Israel. Isaiah, even in this passage, teaches the same message. Isaiah speaks as if he and his countrymen had actually walked through the waters of the Red Sea with Moses, as if they were there when God appeared in these mighty events on Mount Sinai. Isaiah 63, 4, 3, and 5 says this, when you, that's the Lord, did awesome things we did not expect. He's referring to the Exodus events. You came down, the mountains quaked at your presence and you were angry for we sinned. We continued in them for a long time and shall we be saved? See what he said? Isaiah says it's virtually as if we were all there at the Exodus and we've been doing the same thing since our fathers have ever since. Grumbling, doubting in the Lord's provision. We're one people. extended through time. George Marsden's commentary, or rather, excuse me, biography of Jonathan Edwards, it observes that the first American Revolution was not the American Revolution. The first American Revolution was the Great Awakening in the mid-1700s. With this Great Awakening came a mentality in the Christian religion that Christianity is mainly a me and God thing, just me and God doing our thing together. It needn't necessarily involve any longstanding church affiliation. Me and God can walk this course perhaps alone, increasingly became an American mentality. Friends, when Christians have this mentality, it should not surprise you that we live in a culture Where people think that my gender or my sexuality, that's just a me and my partner thing. No one else has anything to say about it. It's my individual choice. The reality, however, friends, is that our gender, our sexuality, all that we are belongs to a corporate we, a family, a church, and a nation that is bigger than ourselves. The way that we identify ourselves is not ultimate for the way our neighbor identifies us is of equal and paramount significance. We ought not to be surprised that we suffer from the particular evils that we do today as a culture. It is the fruit of all the eyes in this room and in this land forgetting that we're also a we and everything that we are belongs to one another. The second error that arises with respect to the subject of sin is not just this individualism, but it's the tendency of our society to embrace alternative, purely elective communities as if they were our primary societies. These elective, alternative communities differ from the fundamental communities in Scripture because they lack objective boundaries and longevity and formal leadership, and they're really easy to enter and to leave. See, real corporate communities have objective boundaries and longevity, real leadership structures, and they're difficult to leave. We'll see that the biblical communities that all of us belong to inescapably are our family and our state and our church. And I'll note something about the objective parameters of these things. What is the most common? boundary of a nation or a state? It's usually a water boundary. Here in America, we've got the Atlantic on the east, we've got the Pacific on the west, the Rio Grande in the south, and St. Lawrence in the north. Water boundaries are one of the most common boundaries of nations. You know, the same is true of the church. How do we know who our Christian brothers and sisters are? They've passed through certain waters as if exiting the world and joining a community called the church. They're the waters of baptism. Even families are demarked by passing through the broken waters of the womb, objective boundaries. But we live in a culture that increasingly does not identify with those objective communities that God has defined. For example, we have communities like the gaming community here in the United States of America. I don't know if there's a community you could imagine with fuzzier boundaries than the gaming community and exactly who's in and who's out. The longevity question is certainly high. I don't know if gamers will exist in 10 or 15 years after everybody does virtual reality, and maybe they won't even be called gamers anymore. They'll be called virtuals. Who knows? Who are the formal leaders of the gaming community? That is a question mark if ever there were one. But see, this is why our culture finds themselves so frequently empty, for belonging to things that don't last, belonging to things that have very little meaning. Let me tell you the truth about the subject of corporate confessions of sin. The truth is that we belong to objective societies, our families, our state, and our church. And the scary thing is that we participate in their sins, whether we like it or not. If you don't believe that God really regards nations as something to which we all belong, just read Isaiah. In chapter eight, you'll see him addressing the nation of Syria. In chapter 10, the nation of Assyria. In chapter 13 to 14, the nation of Babylon, Moab, Cush, Egypt, Tyre, and of course, Israel herself. For many of us, the thought that we were somehow involved in the past crimes of our nation is very difficult. Perhaps a better way to think of it is like this. The past crimes of our nation are involved in you and me. What do I mean by that? The very language we speak points us to. some of the crimes and sins that we have been involved in historically. Words themselves, including racial slurs. Why do they even exist? Why do you even know them? But that you belong to a particular people. Different sayings, many of which are totally godless, are in your mind right now, like this one. God helps those who help themselves, as if we were the initiators of this salvation. If that were the case, we wouldn't begin with a call to worship in this church. Rather, you, the congregation, would maybe call the minister down to preach to you. It's not what we do. Why do we know lyrics of songs that we never even tried to learn? Guilty confession here, I know every single word to Coolio's 1995 hit, Gangster's Paradise. How do I know this? It's just some Americana, friends. Isaiah said this, would you ever say this? When called to be a prophet, he says, woe is me for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips. I cannot help but to be stained in my very vernacular by the people to whom I belong. Is that a challenging thought for you to say the same? You can look on YouTube, and there are these videos. They're actually tongue-in-cheek, but an interviewer goes around in different countries and asks the citizens if there's any country on planet Earth that they just can't stand. Turns out when you ask Scottish kids that question who are four and five years old, they'll answer, I don't really hate any country, except the English. Where did this come from? It's been hundreds of years since those nations have gone toe to toe in a battle with one another. And yet they belong to a corporate people. And therefore, corporate peoples are appropriate subjects of confession of sin. So let's move on to another question. Who is the ultimate recipient of any corporate confession of sin supposed to be? The ultimate recipient. In one respect, a lesser recipient that should be acknowledged are those who have been directly harmed, perhaps, by the sins of a corporate people. It could be a foreign nation, it could be conquered and mistreated peoples, it could be individuals wrongly incarcerated, or frankly, it could be society itself as we are often self-harming. but none of those are the ultimate appropriate recipients of a corporate confession of sin. One of the very worst trends that we have seen in our land, and again, you can get online and see this done, is when individual members of some corporate people go, maybe even get down on their knees and attempt to repent for the sins of their nation's past to individual members of some mistreated society. Specifically, you can see people, maybe individual white men and women, apologizing or bowing down, perhaps, to individual native or black Americans, repenting of and confessing the crimes of America's past. I will note that Jesus, who was a Jew, never once bends his knee before a Samaritan who had been historically mistreated by the Jewish people and attempted to repent for the nation's crimes to individual Samaritans. You can imagine if that burden were incumbent upon us to repent to every potentially historically wronged people individually on behalf of America, what an impossible burden that would be. Jesus says, for example, before you go to worship, if you remember that your brother has something against you, go and reconcile with him. If your job were to reconcile with every individual of a people group whom America had historically wronged, you would never make it to the altar to worship, would you? It's one of the simplest ways that we can infer that that cannot be the nature and the manner in which we would engage in corporate confession. Also think of this, if that were the burden laying upon you and I, we would never be able to have peace that we had been forgiven. For no matter how many people to whom we confessed our historic errors and crimes to, there would be always more. Just the same, there would be no way that a historically wronged people could ever definitively give forgiveness because there would always be more people to expressly forgive. You will note, therefore, that Isaiah's confession of sin acknowledges the primary party whom Israel has wronged. The sin is confessed to their covenant Lord and their God. And if we fail to remember that focus of corporate confession, we will get everything wrong. In fact, if we fail to acknowledge God as the ultimate recipient of confession, because the ultimate object of offense, then we will always be confessing symptoms of our sin problem, rather than the depths of sin itself. I think a very helpful way to understand this, particularly in our context, is with Israel's own history with slavery. We know that Israel, for example, was in bondage to Egypt. Most of us know that story. And they experienced deliverance by God through Moses. This is even alluded to in our passages we have already read when God did great things in the past for Israel. As a result of this, God made a law for his people saying that the king shall not cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses. This has a literal and a metaphorical application. God was saying, do not ever as a nation become Egypt's vassal, her national slave again, perhaps to gain horses or military support and power. Metaphorically, this law requires that no Israelite king become like a Pharaoh himself and enslave his own people through burdensome taxation and impossible, impossible requirements. Sadly, if you know Israel's history, you know that's exactly what happened. Solomon followed David and what he did was levy a high tax of his brothers. He multiplies horses to finance continual expansionist wars. And his son Rehoboam even increases that enslavement of his brethren. So therefore in first Kings chapter 12, we read about what the people said to Rehoboam, the son of Solomon. They said, your father made our yoke hard. A yoke is something you place on an animal to control its movements, and it's a sign of slavery. Your father made our yoke hard. Now therefore, lighten the hard service of your father's and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you. The king answered the people harshly. My father Solomon made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you as scorpions." Well, if you think of Israel as a United Tribes or a United States of Israel, 10 of those states decided they didn't like it and they decided to secede from the union. And Israel in the time of Isaiah was a divided people into North and South, Israel and Judea, because of this continued problem. Isaiah, however, assesses it differently than our culture would. Isaiah says that this problem is really a problem with God before it is a problem with our neighbor, and it is so important for you to understand this so that when we engage in corporate confessions of sin in this church and in all of our churches, we know who the ultimate offended party is. Isaiah says to his people who want to become slaves to Egypt again in his day so that they can have military support and deliverance from the empires in the east, he assesses it this way. Therefore, thus says the Holy One of Israel, since you have rejected this word and have put your trust in oppression and guile and have relied upon them, Therefore this iniquity will be to you like a breach about to fall, a bulge in a high wall whose collapse comes suddenly in an instant. You see what Isaiah said? It's when we cease trusting in the Lord that we begin trusting in oppression, trusting in the mistreatment and enslavement of our brothers. But it starts with mistrust in our God. See friends, when we understand that that is the root crime involved in our historic sins, then we can begin to see that we're not far from them as individuals or as a culture today. And one of the problems with the way our culture confesses these past crimes is they think they're not involved in them anymore. Let me ask you a simple question. Why did the British Empire want to tax America without representation? It's very simple. They were trying to maintain a world empire, which, by the way, had done so much good, and they reasoned, we're under such a crisis and such pressure to maintain what we are, someone else is gonna have to pay. That's trusting in oppression. When the American people, our fathers, engaged in a slave trade, They reasoned we're in a crisis trying to colonize, manifest destiny, fight a revolutionary war, fight a war of 1812, fight a Spanish-American war. There's no time for emancipation. We're going to have to rely on someone else to pay. That's trusting in oppression. when the tribal peoples of the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and West Central Africa sold POWs and their countrymen into slavery. They too reasoned, we are at war, we're in a crisis, and someone else is going to have to pay. When you understand that that's the mentality that lies at the basis of these sorts of crimes, you can note that when we confess them as a reality of our historic people, we are confessing something that is still a problem today. It's just a little more secretive than it used to be. How many of you know that we have a national debt that is running close to $31 trillion? Do you know what that is? It's called trusting in oppression. It's us saying as a people, we have a crisis of healthcare, education, military expenses, and guess what? Someone else is going to have to pay. And we are as much as selling generations of future Americans into a bondage and a personal debt. Right now, I think it is, every American person has a personal debt sitting on their head, $37,000. beyond all of your normal daily expenses. See, when we confess the real crime and we confess it to the real object of our crime, we see that we are not far from the sins of our fathers. If I were to voice one disappointment with our PCA repentance on slavery and segregation, it's that there's no acknowledgement of our present trusting in oppression in the form of such a burdensome debt. It's really remarkable that for all of the talk about systemic injustice in our land, no one ever talks about that problem of debt. You know, when our money gets inflated and is worth one-tenth of its current value, guess who pays? It's not the wealthy who have a ton of it. It's those who don't have much of it at all, their dollars being turned into cents. If there's some sort of injustice going on in our land, that certainly counts as one. So again, to state our point, unless we understand our weakness, the general broad crime, our corporate confessions of sin will be like self-righteous assertions that thank goodness we're not subject to that problem anymore. But when we understand the true object, the heart of the crime, they make that much more sense for us to speak every Sunday. Well, the third matter of consideration would be this. What is the proper content of a corporate confession of sin? And we can go so wrong on this. One grave error is that some people are glad to speak a corporate confession of sin in church in place of individual confessions of sin. The specific crimes that we've committed against our neighbor. Honestly, I think I see this all over our cultural, secular attempts to confess our nation's past. I see it too often as an excuse to not confess a single personal sin of the present. And it's frightening. Isaiah begins his book with an indictment of the people of Israel in chapter one, verses 11 and 15 and 13. There he tells the people that God is displeased with all of their sacrifices, many of which For sacrifices of repentance for national crimes, God says, I don't want anything to do with it. Because in fact, you're engaging in these acts of worship as mere outward participation, as mere nominal practice. Because you're neglecting to confess your real sins and your real crimes and you're using these things as a show. Very similarly, we live in a culture where Isaiah could say they display their sins like Sodom. They do not even conceal it. Woe to them. We live in a culture and in a nation that wants to repent of what we did in the past and yet parade in pride the sins and the errors that we embrace here in the present. One of the worst things we could do is just focus on the sorts of sins that are already widely denounced and everybody agrees that they're wrong. and neglect confession of those sins that the Bible marks out as just as problematic. I'm gonna tell you something really important right now, friends. Take this in. Do not ever let someone tell you that the biblical prophets focus on sins and crimes of injustice, systemic oppression, and they do so to the exclusion or the neglect of personal sins of debauchery, personal sins of engagement in perversion, It's not true. See, if you went to the word in a naive fashion and just used a concordance to find injustice or find those other sorts of sins, you would indeed find greater reference to injustice. But here's the problem. The number one crime indicted by the biblical prophets is idolatry. And friends, that wasn't just a matter of having little trinkets in your house that you bowed your knee to. Every idolatrous act of worship, every type of worship committed to Baal is always a type of worship marked by indulgence in mind-altering substances, indulgence in sexual sins and perversion, indulgence in these things that our culture wants to speak nothing about. Isaiah describes the situation in Isaiah 57, three and five, but come here, you sons of a sorceress. He's speaking to Israel. who inflame yourselves among the oaks. They would worship idols among the oaks and under every luxuriant tree who slaughter children in the ravines and the fruit you can imagine of worship involving temple prostitutes would be unwanted children and indeed what are we but a culture that slaughters our children just the same for the sake of convenience and a lifestyle with no parameters. The truth, friends, is that a corporate confession of sin that is pleasing to God and the true object of every sin has got to proceed from a spirit of contrition, a preparedness to acknowledge the full breadth and depth of our sin individually and corporately. It cannot be limited to what is popular. You look at Isaiah's full-orbed example in our passage. Isaiah speaks in a way that is almost mind-blowing when he says that all of our acts, all of our acts are like a stained rag, and he doesn't mince words. He says all of our deeds are like a menstrual rag. It's rather offensive. We have to confess the full-orbed nature of our offense. Every confession of sin doesn't need to mention everything. It could be rather long if we did that, but every confession of sin must proceed from a disposition that is prepared to acknowledge our whole sinfulness before God. The final question we've got to answer is what is the purpose of corporate confession of sin likened to what Isaiah does? What did Isaiah mean to accomplish in speaking this corporate confession of sin? In publicizing the sins of Israel, not only to her contemporaries and her neighbors, many of whom she had wronged, but publicizing it for 2,700 years and counting of readers of it, you and me. What did he mean to do by that? What does our culture, do you suppose, mean to accomplish in these displays of confessing our past crimes? What do you think they're getting at? The sad truth is that too often, it is to do the thing highlighted in the title of this sermon, it is to virtue signal. I'll tell you something wild. This is a crazy thing we do in our minds. You can ask yourself if you do it. Sometimes we confess our sins and our crimes thinking that by doing so we can distance ourselves from that person who sinned yesterday or even five minutes ago. We can count ourselves to be righteous and holy, unlike that person over there that sinned against you years before. Or just a moment ago, ironically, we use our confessions of sin as a secret exercise to distance ourselves from them. You ever done that? One way to ask yourself if you've ever done this is if you think after confessing your sin, someone owes you something, that you get credit for that confession of sin. This is weird, this is curious, to confess our sins, that we've done wrong, that we've been evil, and now we want credit for that, that we're righteous, we're good, we're better, maybe we healed ourselves just by eking out that confession. Very sadly, I think that is exactly what we have going on in our world today. It even plays off the tendency to only confess those sins that are popularly acknowledged and thus to identify ourselves as righteous. I'll let you know something. If you commit grand theft auto and you confess that crime, that confession will not be sufficient restitution. If you confess to being unrighteous, you cannot expect that to be grounds for people to view you as righteous. Isaiah gets this. He gets it better than most people do. And like a fallen man, just like us, he doesn't even get it as much as he could or should. Isaiah says this. All of us have become like one who is clean and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment. There is no one who calls on your name, who arouses himself to take hold of you. Look at Isaiah. This, all of us, isn't just him and all of his contemporaries. It encompasses the whole history of Israel, going back behind Isaiah, to Solomon, to David, to Joshua, to Moses. It is a confession that even their best and most righteous deeds are still tainted with that sin and that evil, which has been there from the beginning. Isaiah even says that there is not a single person who calls on your name, which is a curious thing to say, because what is he doing in this corporate confession of sin right here, but calling on God's name? The only way to understand Isaiah's words is as a confession, that even their best deeds, even confession itself is not a righteous thing that we do to somehow obtain a new status by our own strength of will. Confession itself cannot make us righteous. With every confession, there is an individual rebelling, wandering of mind, insufficient sorrow, partial conviction, and a sinner who's still gonna come out on the other side of that corporate confession of sin to make him or herself known again. Isaiah's confession is that I am impure at my core. My people is impure at its core. So that even this confession of sin is tainted with offensive impurity. So I'm gonna ask the question again, what do we mean by doing it? What's the point? Pastor Brandt, you might say, you have already expounded so many ways to do this wrong. We can get the subject wrong. We can get the recipient wrong. We can get the content wrong. And even the aims of our heart are wrong. So why in the world are we doing this? It's as offensive as a stained rag. Well, the biblical answer to even present here in Isaiah is we confess our sins from and with a view to union with Jesus Christ. Maybe at the beginning you didn't like the point in this sermon that every I is a we and every we is an I, that proverb rubbed you the wrong way. Well, now you're gonna love it. Friends, if an impure people can't make a pure confession of sin, then here is the paradoxical situation we're in. The only person who can make a pure confession of sin is the person who never committed one. And if every I in this room can't be a we, can't experience union with Jesus Christ, then we ought to quit this whole business of worship right now. Because it will never be acceptable in the sight of God, but there's good news. That the pure and holy God in the second person of the Trinity, assumed human flesh, and He performed what only God could in His purity, and only man should in His defilement. And He came leading us in our confession of sin. Did you know He did that? We read in our New Testament reading today, very craftily, very thoughtfully, Matthew chapter three. There we read that John the Baptist was calling the whole nation of Israel out to engage in corporate repentance, confessing their sins. And do you know who comes out to engage in that act of worship? The eternal sinless son of God, Jesus Christ. And when John the Baptist meets him, he says, no, no, you shouldn't be here. You ought to be baptizing me. But Jesus says, what? It is fitting to fulfill all righteousness. Jesus participated in a baptism of repentance, not because he had any individual sins for which to repent, but because he was owning the sins of a people. He was owning yours and mine right then. And let me tell you something about Jesus. His corporate confession of sin was the only one in human history that was really meant to own and to embrace sin rather than to disassociate with it, which is the practice that we are inclined to engage. It was the only confession of sin in human history that was not in any measure or degree a virtue signal. Jesus, friends, not only went and engaged in this act with his baptism of repentance, but here is the good news. He taught us that we can confess our sins in his name and with the help of his spirit so that it can be genuine and pleasing to the Lord. When we confess sin in a little bit, the good news is we're not doing that alone. We're led by the head of the body of Christ, Jesus Christ. and it is for that reason alone that it's pleasing in the sight of God. I'll tell you right now, if you confess your own sins, if we confess the sins of our nation, our family, or our church, and we don't do it in Jesus' name, it is a farce. It's a virtue signal. It's a game. Second thing that we're doing every time we come here to worship the Lord and confess publicly and corporately is we are coming and asking to taste that payment and that cleansing of conscience that Jesus purchased for us. See, Jesus, unlike us, He looks at our sin for what it really is. He knows the depths of how offensive it is to God because He is God. He knows what it really deserves. And in his baptism, first with water, then with fire in his passion, he assumed the penalty, the real weight that our sin deserves, and he pays for it. Jesus offered his father the perfect obedience that every single one of us has deprived him of, and he satisfies the father's desire for a holy humanity in himself, And he bears the burden that our sin so deserves. He makes a real payment. He doesn't make the sort of false payment that we make when we confess sin and expect that to be sufficient. He actually bears the weight of what it deserves and repays all that it's stolen away. And we come here confessing sin because we aim to taste the Father's satisfaction with us in Christ. We come to taste that word spoken in Jesus' baptism, this is my son in whom I am well pleased, I hope you hear that today. But the third thing we come for is sanctification, that we come confessing sin, asking the great creator, the potter of every pot, to put us back together again, to conform us more to the image of Christ, to help us actually part ways with that old man and put him to death. Isaiah makes this plea. But now, oh Lord, you are our father. We are the clay. And all of us are the work of your hand. Your holy cities have become a wilderness. He confesses that they're broken because of what they've been in the past, what they are in the present. And he asks rhetorically, will you restrain yourself at these things? We come in our confessions of sin begging God to exert His omnipotent power to give us victory, victory over the sins that still have a grip on us and the ongoing ramifications that burden us. The final thing I'm gonna say about a confession of sin, if it is to be pure, in that Christian way that it can be pure in Christ, is it must accept the ongoing historical consequences of sins that we have committed. This doesn't mean that we're not forgiven. It just means that our forgiveness and its consummation comes at the resurrection. Friends, when we do things that are wrong, we don't come to this church to confess them as if they would not have continuing ramifications in our life. They often do. Isaiah puts it this way in verse nine. Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord, nor remember iniquity forever. Behold, look now, all of us are your people. He says, Lord, it's appropriate that we're going to go into exile to Babylon. It's appropriate that we're in the condition we're in. Just don't let it last forever, not even in time, not in eternity. One of the burdens I see when our culture confesses our past crimes and sins is I I see a desire to be free from their lingering consequences immediately. I share that desire. I would like that to be the case, but we can't expect it. We get it with an abuse victim. Someone who suffered abuse from another person isn't going to be friends with them immediately upon the repentance of the person who committed the abuse. And sadly, the same thing doesn't happen historically. People groups who have been wronged by other people groups continue to suffer ongoing historical ramifications of that. And it's sad, but we can't end it just by confessing our sins. We have to exercise patience too. How do we therefore heal the fissures and cracks and rifts in our society? We've got to do what Isaiah did. You gotta faithfully preach the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Exercise genuine kindness toward our neighbor and engage in prayerful patience. It's what we gotta do. If you're a believer and you're with us today, I simply say, has corporate confession of sin always been a bit irksome to you? Guess what? There's no salvation in Jesus Christ unless we can identify as a corporate entity. There's no union with him unless we're one body with the head. So let's embrace it. Maybe you're an unbeliever and you're with us and you're deeply disappointed by Christian hypocrisy. We are too. And we confess it. We beg our Lord to set us free from it. And we hope that perhaps You can look at our imperfection and say, there's a place for me there. So I'm imperfect too. The beginning of the gospel, the beginning of being a believer in Jesus Christ is confessing that we are wayward sinners. We do hope you would do that today. Do it with us today. And receive Jesus Christ, his provision, his payment. Join his church, be part of this fellowship. We hope that you will do that today. Bow your heads with me. O mighty God, we are the blessed beneficiaries of a salvation totally undeserved, unmerited, even by the confession that we're sinners, even by the acknowledgement that you are the Lord. Even that confession we know is a gift. Even repentance is a gift that you have granted us. May we never confuse it, therefore, for an inherently meritorious or good work, buying your favor. May we ever have the sense that our confession itself is only pure in the Christ whom we receive by grace alone, through faith alone. Lord, I pray that you would indeed heal the fissures and cracks in our society. Lord, many of which are our own making. God, I pray that you would heal this self-righteous tendency of our people, of our nation, and of ourselves in our worst moments, to confess sin as a virtue signal that we're righteous, contrary to the confession itself, which is that we are evil. Forgive us for these crimes. Set us free from them. Help us to acknowledge the full breadth and depth of your law for the beautiful thing that it is. Help us to acknowledge that we're sinners in the face of it. and help us to take comfort that we are saints in the blood of Jesus Christ. We ask these things in his name and by our Holy Spirit, amen.