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Confess Your Sins

             If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us [our] sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

          Confess: late 14c., transitive and intransitive, "make avowal or admission of" (a fault, crime, sin, debt, etc.), from Old French confesser (transitive and intransitive), from Vulgar Latin *confessare, a frequentative form from Latin confess-, past participle stem of confiteri "to acknowledge," from assimilated form of com "together" (see con-) + fateri "to admit," akin to fari "speak," from PIE root *bha- (2) "to speak, tell, say."

          Yes, one of the words in today’s verse is “con” word. In English, we tend to lose the sense of “with” or “together,” but originally, it had the idea of saying with or agreeing with someone. When I wrote about confession before, I pointed out that if a person boasted about having killed someone, while it might be a legal confession, unless the boaster agreed that they were wrong, evil, and/or sinful to do so, it wouldn’t be the sort of confession described above.

          If we agree with God that we have done something evil and agree with God about turning away from that evil and toward Him, or having the same attitude about the thing we’ve done, then God is faithful and just, because of Jesus’s death on the cross, to forgive us and to cleanse us. The problem is that if we return to that evil, the cleansing is of temporary value. God isn’t stupid. If you gladly return to the evil that you’ve confessed, you aren’t being honest in your agreement with Him about it.

          Some people see forgiveness as their “get out of jail free” ticket that allows them to keep sinning. That’s not what this passage is about.

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