CONFESSION

Chronic, unconfessed sin spreads like a cancer, sapping a believer’s strength, stealing their joy, and eventually bringing forth death (James 1:15).

Hidden Struggle

Do you think those around you don't struggle like you? Consider the number of hands that shoot up after the prayer requests for the lost, indigent, and sickly. You know, that point when the minister asks:

“Are there any unspoken prayer requests?”

Believers have no problem openly sharing prayer requests for fleshly needs, but when it comes to habitual sin, publicly, we plead the fifth. Why? For Scripture clearly tells us that if we submit to the Spirit and openly confess, He will bring our flesh into subjection (Romans 8:13), not by literally whipping ourselves or performing religious acts of penance, but as the Spirit uses the painful honesty of exposure to crucify our pride and break the power of hidden sin.

Confession exposes what secrecy defends.

This becomes most evident in how confession is commonly practiced.

Protestants and Catholics hold doctrinal positions on confession their camps insist are diametrically opposed. Yet the dogmas share a systemic premise. Each believes the way to combat recurrent sin is to confess privately and discreetly; one says, “to a priest,” the other, “directly to God.”

The distinction is not ultimately about whether another person is present, but whether the confession remains contained, kept within a controlled exchange that never fully exposes the self.

The Catholic Confessional’s Limit

Despite an act of contrition, confession to a priest, though involving another person, remains largely private, akin to pleading guilty to a traffic violation, paying a fine or taking a remedial class to keep your driver's license. Absolution is given, a penance is prescribed and performed, then what?

Rather than teaching a chronic sinner to abhor and shun sin, the subliminal message is they retain a license to sin; that they can simply “pay for” any and all subsequent transgressions by slinking back to the confessional. Lather, rinse, repeat...

Even the structure itself, often separated by a screen to preserve anonymity, reflects the instinct to limit exposure rather than bring it fully into the light.

Chronic sin does not persist merely because it is hidden, but because the self that protects it has not yet been exposed. True confession brings both into the light.

The Protestant Confessional’s Limit

Since God is privy to all our sin, private confession to Him sheds no new light on it. There is no ecclesiastical declaration of forgiveness in this scenario, only the assumption that one has been forgiven, the individual both confessing the sin and, in effect, absolving himself of it.

But more often than not this manner of confession does not alter the behavior of the soul caught up in a cycle of sin. The same self that commits the sin remains the one managing its confession, and just as quickly moving on from it. Sadly most leave as weak and wretched a state as they entered. Lather, rinse, repeat...

In both cases, confession remains contained; acknowledged, perhaps even regretted, but not fully brought into the light.

Bringing Sin Into the Light

That is not to say that confessing sin to God or a priest is wrong or that each sin we commit needs to be dealt with publicly. But those darling sins of ours, those we return to repeatedly to our shame and dismay, the surest way to be cleansed of them is to expose them to the light by freely and openly confessing them (James 5:16). Confession is the believer’s appointed way of joining Christ in the public death of the old self.

This is not coerced exposure, indiscriminate disclosure, or spectacle. Confession is governed by the Spirit and ordered toward death to self, not self-harm.

There is a moment in honest confession when every excuse, every justification, and every defense collapses. When a believer names their sin plainly, without softening or explanation, something in the flesh dies. The shame of exposure is not punishment. It is the breaking of pride. In that breaking, the cycle of sin loses its power. Light does not merely reveal; it destroys the hiding place where sin grew strong.

In the early church, confession was not dealt with in secret; it was brought into the open and witnessed. Acts 19:18 shows believers publicly declaring their sins and practices, and James 5:16 assumes mutual visibility. The biblical pattern is not concealment but exposure, not private murmuring but shared repentance. The Cross was public, and the death of the old self follows the same path.

Public confession is humiliating, yes, but unfettered honesty is cathartic (Acts 19:18). And lest we forget, God gives grace to the humble but resists the proud (1 Peter 5:5–6).

The Strength of Open Confession

Fact of the matter is there is not a more grace-full and patently scriptural way to claim God's promise of being cleansed of chronic sin than open, honest, inglorious public confession. The point is not to dangle future humiliation as a threat, but to step willingly into the Light where the old self dies, pride is stripped away, and the Spirit establishes new patterns of obedience in the very places where we once hid.

Confession does not justify us, and it does not sanctify us by itself. However, it is often the place where the justified believer finally stops protecting the self that sanctification must put to death.

Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43) reminds us that sincere believers and pretenders grow side by side until the harvest. Public confession does not wait for a perfectly safe room full of perfectly mature saints. Some will respond with grace, others with discomfort or even scorn. That risk is part of the Cross. We don’t confess because others are worthy; we confess because Christ is.

There may never be a congregation that feels “safe enough” for confession in human terms, but there will always be a Savior who is strong enough to meet us in the light. Healing begins wherever fear ends and honesty begins.

If you’re wrestling with hidden sin, The Darkness That Follows You Home, a featured study in the Faith Works section, serves as a doorway into the Spirit’s revival of Apostolic Confession. It reveals how sin survives in secrecy and calls the Church back to the early-Christian pattern of bringing darkness into the light.

Tertullian's dictum, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” certainly rings true in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While most church leaders refused to openly oppose the Nazi regime and criticized colleagues who did, this brave minister and theologian stood firm and fast with the “Confessing Church” in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church. The Church lost a true visionary when he was martyred at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp scarcely a month before it was liberated.

From the theology of Bonhoeffer I gleaned this idea: that confession—honest, humiliating, self-disclosing confession—is often the place where the believer finally encounters cleansing victory over chronic sin and unrighteousness. Below are some excerpts from his writings, which were published posthumously:

Bonhoeffer on Confession and Community

“Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed, it poisons the whole being...”

“Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It hurts, cuts a man down, it's a dreadful blow to pride. To stand there before a brother as a sinner is an ignominy that is almost unbearable. In the confession of concrete sins the old man dies a painful, shameful death before a brother. Because this humiliation is so hard we continually scheme to evade confessing to a brother. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and the glory in such abasement...”

“Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution...”

Editor’s Note: This is not meant to condemn every private prayer of confession, but to expose how easily we can talk around our sin in safe, pious language while never actually bringing it into the light. Bonhoeffer is warning against self-absolution, not against honest crying out to God.

“Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we're not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person...”

Clarification: Here Bonhoeffer is not making a fellow believer the source of forgiveness, but highlighting how God often uses a brother or sister to shatter our self-deception. The authority and absolution belong to Christ alone; the other believer simply bears witness to the truth and to the God who meets us in it.

“The Cross of Jesus Christ destroys all pride. We cannot find the Cross of Jesus if we shrink from going to the place where it is to be found, namely, the public death of the sinner. And we refuse to bear the Cross when we are ashamed to take upon ourselves the shameful death of the sinner in confession. In confession we break through to the true fellowship of the Cross of Jesus Christ, in confession we affirm and accept our Cross.”

Clarifying Bonhoeffer’s Intent

It should be said, however, that Bonhoeffer primarily envisioned confession in the context of one believer opening their life before another. His aim was to destroy isolation, not to practice the kind of open, corporate confession we see in Acts 19:18–20 or the communal exposure implied in James 5:16. Even so, his insights strike at the very root of the problem: sin survives in secrecy, and the flesh dies when it is exposed. In that sense, his work points toward, though it does not fully reach, the bolder, public practice of confession that the early church embraced and that this teaching seeks to recover.

Dear reader, do you have something you would like to confess and receive prayer for? Would you like to speak to someone directly about how to address and resolve the issue of recurrent sin in your life?

Hearts & Spirits Prayer Line: (678) CLEANSE

Healing begins wherever fear ends and honesty begins. Stepping into the light is frightening, but it is also where grace meets us with power.