CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD
CONFESSION
COMMUNION SUNDAY
DR. JIM DIXON
1 JOHN 1:5-2:2
FEBRUARY 18, 2007
Joan of Arc died on May 30 in the year 1431. She was only 19 years old when she was burned at the stake. She had been charged with heresy and with witchcraft. Both charges were false. Both charges were bogus and yet she was condemned. According to British records, as she died her final words were, “Jesus, Jesus.” Somehow, historians tell us, this peasant teenage girl rose up to lead the armies of France. Twenty years after her death, the Church of France declared her wholly innocent and of course in the course of time Pope Pius X beatified her and Pope Benedict XV canonized her. Today, Joan of Arc is the Patron Saint of France.
There’s not much we know about her life. She lived almost 600 years ago, but we do know she was very much aware of sin in her life, very concerned with forgiveness of sin, and historians tell us she spent a great deal of time in the confessional.
Here we are today, Christians, for the most part followers of Jesus Christ, and we too need to be aware of our sin and we need to enter the confessional. Really, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox. If you are a Christian, if you are a follower of Christ, you need to confess your sin, you need to enter the confessional. Of course, the beautiful thing is that we can enter the confessional every day by means of prayer. Whenever we pray, we enter the confessional and we’re able to confess our sins to God.
Today, as we look at the subject of confession and prayer, I have two teachings and the first teaching is this: there is no assurance of forgiveness without repentance. This is very important to remember when you pray. There is no assurance of forgiveness without repentance.
Of course, it is true that Jesus Christ is the expiation for our sins. It is true, as our passage of scripture said for today, that He is not only the expiation for our sins but also for the sins of the entire world. He has the right to forgive anyone He wants to forgive. Perhaps if you don’t repent, He will still forgive you but don’t count on it because biblically there’s no assurance of forgiveness without repentance. In the Bible, the Greek word for confession is “homologeo” and sometimes “exomologeo.” Exomologeo and homologeo have similar etymologies. They both come from the root word meaning “to confess.” We saw these words just two weeks ago when we were looking at another aspect of prayer and we saw that for the Greek Orthodox Church, the confessional, the confession booth, is sometimes called the exomologeo.
We should understand biblically that to confess involves repentance. It’s not mere acknowledgement. When you confess your sin in prayer, you’re not simply acknowledging your sin. You’re not simply making an admission of sin, but if it’s true biblical confession, you are also repenting. In the Bible the word for repentance is the word “metanoia.” Metanoia literally means “to change the mind.” If you’re confessing your sin in prayer but you’ve not changed your mind with regard to that sin, something’s wrong. Confession involves repentance. Repentance is metanoia. Metanoia is “to change the mind.” In fact, in Christian theology, in the Bible when we speak of repentance, it means “to turn away from sin and to turn towards God.” So, if we are repentant, we really want to change. If we are repentant, we really want to cease our sin. We want to start new. That’s our heart’s desire and it’s only when you have a heart like that that confession is true repentance and forgiveness is guaranteed.
That is why in Matthew’s Gospel, the 4th chapter, the 17th verse we see a simple summation of the Gospel. It says, “Jesus came preaching the gospel and Jesus said, ‘Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’” So what is the gospel? It’s a call to repentance and to embrace the reign of Christ. He is the King of heaven come to earth. “Repent! The kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” So there is no gospel without a call to repentance. Even for us as Christians who have already embraced the gospel, who have already come to the cross and have already accepted Christ as Lord and Savior, we need daily to enter into repentance for sins of omission and sins of commission, sins involving attitude, behavior, motivation. Whatever is false there needs to be repentance. It’s through this that God transforms us and we experience spiritual formation or spiritual transformation as we repent.
So, you see the message of Jesus Christ to the churches in Revelation, chapters 2 and 3. His message to the church at Ephesus was “Repent!” His message to the church at Pergamum was “Repent!” His message to the church at Thyatira was “Repent!” Sardis, “Repent!” Laodicea, “Repent!” It was almost always “Repent!” Five of the seven churches, Jesus told them to repent. So, He looks for a people who want to change, who take sin seriously and who want to turn and live a different way. Of course, for all who want to live differently, for all who want to change, for all who are repentant, Christ offers amazing grace.
That hymn “Amazing Grace” is said to be the most beloved hymn in the Christian world. All of you have sung it. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found. I was blind but now I see.” Those words were written by John Newton. John Newton was a slave trader in the 18th century along the coast of Africa. He was the captain of a slave ship. For years he lived a debauched life. He made a living by the buying and selling of human flesh. He was guilty of the sin of racism. By his own confessions which he wrote, he dealt in the buying and selling of 20,000 slaves. Yet he had a miraculous conversion experience as he encountered the risen Christ, and he gave his heart to Jesus. He repented. He repented truly and he confessed and he was forgiven by the amazing grace of Christ. His life was transformed. He went on to become a minister in England, a pastor, and of course he wrote the great hymn “Amazing Grace.”
Then John Newton joined with William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce was a member of Newton’s congregation. John Newton was Wilberforce’s pastor. He joined with Wilberforce, who was a member of the British Parliament, and he joined with William Pitt, who was the Prime Minister. Together they brought down the institution of slavery in England. They brought about the abolition of slavery. It was all prompted by the amazing grace of Christ.
There is a movie coming out this Friday called “Amazing Grace” and it’s the story of William Wilberforce and John Newton and William Pitt. It comes out this Friday and it’s awesome. Barb and I have seen the movie and when the movie was finished, we looked at each other and we both had tears in our eyes. We were so moved. I really recommend this movie to you, and I hope you will want to support it. It’s by Walden Media and a great film.
William Wilberforce was a brilliant man and devout Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. And amazingly he ascended to the British Parliament at the age of 21. His good friend, William Pitt, even more amazingly, ascended to the position of Prime Minister of all England at the age of 24. And together, along with John Newton, they shook the foundations of their culture and their nation. They were greatly used of Christ.
William Wilberforce wrote a wonderful book called “Real Christianity.” I recommend that book to you. Wilberforce argues that if you’re really a Christian you’ve got to fight against sin in your own life and in society. You’ve got to take sin seriously. Bob Beltz, one of our founding pastors, has just rendered Wilberforce’s “Real Christianity” into contemporary English and that book will be available in Inklings down the road.
I want you to see this film. Of course, the Parliament in Britain abolished slavery in the year 1807. John Newton lived to see that day. Wilberforce lived to 1833 and in the remaining years of his life he continued to fight against the foreign slave trade and even against slavery as it was practiced here in the American colonies. Of course, here in the United States, here in America, slavery continued and it was not abolished until after the Civil War.
It was in the year 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War that an organization was founded here in America called the Ku Klux Klan. It was founded by former Confederate soldiers and they took the name Ku Klux from the Greek word, “kuklos,” and that word means “circle.” The Ku Klux Klan, or the KKK, or the Klan, hated Jews and they hated Roman Catholics. Most of all, they hated African Americans. They hated blacks. They burned crosses in the front yards of African Americans. They tortured and abused them. Of course, incredibly, in the decade of the 1920’s in the United States of America, there were two million American citizens who were members of the KKK. It’s a tragic fact of American history.
In the 1960’s, the Mississippi Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was led by Thomas Terrance. Thomas Terrance torched Jewish synagogues and he torched headquarters for the NAACP. He hated African Americans. He was apprehended, incarcerated, and there in prison Thomas Terrance was given for the very first time in his life a Bible. He read the Bible all the way through, and his heart was broken. Thomas Terrance, the former head of the Mississippi Knights of the KKK gave his heart to Jesus. Right in prison, he gave his life to Jesus. He repented and he was forgiven because that’s the amazing grace of Christ. Thomas Terrance began to lead Bible studies and he did that for years within the prison.
John Newton received the amazing grace of Christ because he repented. Thomas Terrance received the amazing grace of Christ because he repented. So, understand there is no assurance of forgiveness without repentance. Perhaps some of you are sitting there and you’re thinking, “Well, you know, weren’t all of my sins forgiven when I became a Christian? When I asked Jesus Christ to be my Lord and Savior and my heart was broken and I repented and I received Him as Lord and Savior, weren’t all of my sins forgiven at that moment—past, present and future?” And yes, I believe that is true. I believe that when we accept Christ as Lord and Savior, in that miraculous moment all of our sins are forgiven—past, present, future.
You see, Christ wants His people to understand if we, as Christians, continue in sin and we’re not repentant, there will be horrible consequences. You’re playing a dangerous game. If you’ve got some sin in your life right now, some addiction—it might be a pride sin; it might be gossip or slander; it might be a lustful sin, a sin of the flesh; it might be a sexual sin; it might be an addictive sin—if you don’t repent, you’re playing a dangerous game because Christ has called His people to holiness. You’ve got to at least WANT to change. Maybe some part of you doesn’t want to change but another part of you at least wants to WANT to. Maybe you can say your prayer with David each day when you come to confession. You at least can say, “Create in me a clean heart, oh God. Put a new and right spirit in me. Make me want to change. Create in me a clean heart. Put a new and right spirit.” Take sin seriously. Ask Christ to help you hunger and thirst for righteousness as Jesus has called people to holiness.
There’s a second and final teaching this morning, and that is this: There is no assurance of forgiveness without reciprocity. There is no assurance of forgiveness without repentance and no assurance of forgiveness without reciprocity. Of course, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught us to pray saying, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” Literally in the Greek, “forgive us our sins as we have already forgiven those who have sinned against us.” So there’s a reciprocity in forgiveness.
Of course, in the postscript to the Lord’s Prayer (that is rarely read unfortunately) in a kind of addendum, Jesus said these words: “For if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will My Heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses. If you DO forgive men their trespasses, then My Father in Heaven will forgive you your trespasses.” You understand there’s no denying this. Forgiveness requires reciprocity and there’s no assurance of forgiveness if we are not people of mercy.
Jesus gave the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew’s Gospel, the 18th chapter. Jesus, in this parable, described a king and the king represents God and the king represents the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Jesus says that the king made a decision to settle accounts with his servants and one servant was brought to him who owed the king 10,000 talents, a ludicrous sum. In the time of Christ, it took the average day laborer 15 years to earn one silver talent, 15 years. This guy owed 10,000 talents. It would have taken him a mere 150,000 years to pay it off. That was the point that Christ was making. The debt was impossible to repay. This was an impossible debt and yet he came begging forgiveness, and his king forgave him, Jesus said. The entire debt the king forgave.
Then this unmerciful servant went out and found a fellow servant who owed him 100 denarii, Jesus said. The average day laborer received a denarius a day, a hundred denarii, a little over three month’s income. The unmerciful servant seized the fellow servant by the throat saying, “Pay what you owe!” When the king found out, he went to the unmerciful servant and said, “I forgave you that entire debt because you besought me. Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you.” He had that unmerciful servant then thrown into prison and locked up.
It’s kind of a scary parable but the message and the meaning is clear. There’s a certain reciprocity in forgiveness and Christ wants us to know that if He has forgiven us, that is meant to prompt us into living lives of mercy so that when anyone sins against us and they come to us in repentance, we must forgive them. If we don’t, if we harbor hatred, if we don’t forgive, much is at risk because the King is watching. Much is at risk. There’s no assurance of forgiveness without reciprocity and Jesus is trying to create a different people. He wants His followers and His people to be different than the world.
So we come to Luke, chapter 6, which is kind of immersed in controversy because it’s very similar in its language to sections of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is found in Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 5, 6, and 7—three chapters devoted to one sermon. Luke, chapter 6, has some similar words and some Bible scholars believe Luke 6 is an abbreviated form of the Sermon on the Mount as found in Matthew. But other Bible scholars believe it’s just an entirely different sermon, preached on a flat place, as it says in Luke 6. And sometimes therefore it’s called the Sermon on the Plain.
Maybe it is an entirely different sermon or maybe it’s an abbreviated form of the Sermon on the Mount. It doesn’t matter. Jesus preached many sermons and I’m sure many of them had similar content. The tragedy is that some people, in the midst of the controversy, ignore the message. The point is, what is Jesus saying to us in Luke, chapter 6? What are His words? His words are these: “I say to all who hear, love your enemy. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other as well. From him who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs of you. From him who takes away your goods, do not seek them again but as you would have men do to you, do so to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much again but I say to you, love your enemy. Do good. Lend, expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great. You will be called Children of the Most High, for He is kind even to the ungrateful and the selfish. So be merciful as Your Father in Heaven is merciful. Judge not and you will not be judged. Condemn not and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and it shall be given to you.”
Jesus preached reciprocity. There’s not any doubt about it. He preached reciprocity. He wants us to understand this and so you see daily when we come to prayer and we get down on our knees or however we choose to pray, when we come to Christ in prayer and we confess our sin, remember it requires repentance and remember the principal of reciprocity. Judgement will be without mercy for those who have shown no mercy.
I know whenever I come to that section of the Lord’s Prayer and I’m praying my confession, I always am reminded that I want to be so merciful to people. I just want to be merciful to people because I long for Christ to be merciful to me. Jesus is trying to create a different people. He’s trying to create a people whose lives are characterized by love and by mercy and by grace.
My guess is that many of you have never read the writings of Josephus. Josephus was a 1st century Jewish historian and we’re very grateful to him because he reveals much about the 1st century Jewish world. Josephus tells us that in the time of Christ, there were four socio-economic political religious groups. The first group Josephus calls the Sadducees. We don’t even know the etymology of the word. Some believe that it comes from the Hebrew, “tsaddikim,” which means “the righteous ones.” Some believe that Sadducee comes from “Zadok,” who was the High Priest under Solomon and so that the Sadducees were somehow descended from him. Perhaps.
Some actually believe the word Sadducee is a Hellenized word and that it comes from the Greek “syneudokeo,” which means “judge,” and was used as a title for the members of the Jewish Sanhedrin. We don’t know. We do know that Jesus disagreed with the Sadducees. Jesus disagreed with them. They were theologically liberal. They did not believe that the entire Jewish Bible was inspired of God. They didn’t believe in anything beyond the Pentateuch and so they rejected the prophets and the Psalms and much of the Old Testament. They were theologically liberals. They just threw part of the scripture out. They didn’t even believe in the resurrection of the dead. Jesus disagreed with them theologically, but Jesus also disagreed with them politically because they sold out the Jews.
In the time of Antiochus Epiphanes when the Seleucid King, Antiochus IV, sought to Hellenize the Jewish people, the Sadducees actually sided with the Seleucids. The Sadducees actually sought the Hellenization of their own people. Then in the time of Christ when the Roman Empire came and the Roman Empire held Israel as a vassal state, the Sadducees again sided with their enemies. The Sadducees sided with Rome and thereby the Sadducees became wealthy and powerful. But they had sold out their own people.
A second group mentioned by Josephus was a group called the Essenes. The Essenes were kind of ascetics, and they were monastic. They left the cities and they went to live in remote places in small kind of monastic communities. In fact, archeologists in this last century found such a community by the Dead Sea in the barren landscape there, a community called Qumran, and they believed that it was an Essene community, but Jesus didn’t support the Essenes either because if the Sadducees had sold out, the Essenes had bailed out. They just bailed out from the world. Jesus has called us to engage the world and the Essenes had just bailed out.
A third group mentioned by Josephus was a group called the Zealots, and the Zealots were militant and they sought the violent overthrow of Rome. They wanted to break these Roman shackles. And so the Zealots went around…they had assassins, they carried daggers and swords, and Jesus said to them, “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”
There’s one final group mentioned by Josephus, and you might guess the name of that group. It was the Pharisees. The Pharisees were theologically conservative. They believed every word of the Hebrew scriptures were inspired of God and they believed in the resurrection of the dead. Jesus was theologically very close to the Pharisees and yet you all know Jesus condemned the Pharisees more than all. He saved his harshest condemnation for the Pharisees. Why was that? It was because the Pharisees had no mercy. They were self-righteous. They looked down on people. They had no mercy and they thought themselves better than others, so Jesus saved His harshest rhetoric for them.
Of course, the truth is Jesus was not trying to create Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots or Essenes. Jesus was seeking to create a new people, a new creation, people who are known for their love and for their mercy and for their forgiveness and for their grace; people who were humble enough to have approached His cross. And so, as you come to the table today, Jesus would remind you that as you make confession, He requires repentance. You’ve got to want to change. He would also remind you that, as you make confession, there’s a principle called reciprocity and if you want Him to forgive you your sins, make sure that you show mercy to others.
As I conclude this little talk, I want to tell you a story. I don’t know whether this story is true or not. I read it years ago. I have no reason to believe that it is not true. It takes place in Georgia in the year 1965. There’s a man driving down the road in the midst of a rainstorm late at night. It’s 11:30 PM in the midst of a driving rainstorm in the State of Georgia. This man is driving his car down this Georgia road and he sees a black woman walking on the side of the road. She looks desperate and harried and hassled and she’s soaked and just drenched. The rain is torrential. The driver was white and of course this was 1965. Today as we’re in the midst of Black History Month and we celebrate across America African American history it’s hard to imagine in our nation’s history even as recently as 1965 that there was significant racism. It’s not completely gone today, either. It wasn’t just in Georgia, but in Georgia oftentimes white people and black people didn’t stop to help each other. But this man, Richard James, saw this black woman walking on the side of the road, desperate, and he had to stop.
He pulled his car over and he said, “Ma’am, what can I do for you? Let me take you wherever you want to go.” He took her to a place that she requested and made sure she was safe. As she left him, she asked for his name and she asked Richard James for his address. He thought that strange, but he gave it to her and she wrote it down. It was just a few days later that a delivery man came to Richard James’ house with some packages, big boxes. One box had a brand-new color television set in it. Another box had a stereo console in it. They were gifts from this black woman. She had written a note. She said, “Thank you so much for your kindness. Thank you for your mercy and compassion. I will always pray for you. Because of your compassion, I was able to reach my husband’s bedside before he died. Thank you.” It was signed Mrs. Nat King Cole—Nat King Cole’s wife, the mother of Natalie Cole.
You read from time-to-time stories like that and if there’s a beauty in them (and there is) it’s compassion reciprocated, giving reciprocated, and maybe, in the context of racism in the South, maybe even forgiveness reciprocated. I just think God wants to remind us today that we live in such a world, a world where there is this principal of reciprocity and God wants to remind us that sometimes He functions on this basis. He wants us to understand the words of Jesus for Jesus said, “Forgive and you shall be forgiven. Give and it shall be given to you.” Many times in the course of our church’s life, God has reminded us that we need to give and that as we give He will bless us. God wants us to know today that as we forgive, He’ll bless us. Let’s pray before coming to the table.