YouthFire Blog

I’ve been meaning to blog on here since about Friday, but I’ve just been busy or not in the mood or distracted or whatever. In fact, I don’t even remember what I was going to blog about. Then something came up today that I deemed more “blogworthy.”

Tonight I was at my campus ministry meeting, and the praise band was leading worship. The songs were great and seriously, the praise band was probably the best that I had ever heard. I was standing and singing…and…that’s just it…I was just singing. I was not worshiping. I felt like there was some sort of barrier between me and God.

I left the room, found a secluded spot, and just spilled my sins to God. I had done some pretty bad things during the day, and I’d been doing some pretty stupid things with my life in general. I just needed to confess that and get it out to God.

I went back to the group to listen to the lesson. Guess what the minister was talking about? Confession. There are just things in our lives that keep us from having a healthy relationship with God, and those things also prevent us from having honest relationships with other people. Remember how I wrote about the church last week and how we thought the church should be about openness, honesty, and vulnerability? Sin is just one of those things that we need to get out in order for us to be true to God and true to those in the church.

There are things we can do about the sin and guilt in our lives. First of all, we can confess it to God through prayer. Not only should we confess our sins, we should confess them right after they happen. I know sometimes we wait until right before Communion to “get ourselves right” with God or that we wait until our special “prayer time,” but I really don’t think we should wait that long. That sin can affect a relationship with God until the time of confession.

Next, writing about sin and temptations is good. Talk about how it made you feel, how you should respond next time, that sort of thing. Keep it private and really let your feelings out. You can burn the paper later if it makes you feel better. Writing about things just helps to sort stuff out. Later on, if you happen to save your journal, you can look back to see how you’ve overcome something or how you’ve grown or how much you still need to learn.

Finally, it’s good to talk to others about what’s going on in our lives. James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.” Also, in Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 it says, “Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble.” It’s good to have someone around to share the load.

Confess.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 1:01 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.