In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith – the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin – the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fundamentally an agreement with God, that he is right and we are wrong.
These confessions carry with them a lot of benefit for the individual human: first, by turning us away from the fake “reality” that God is wrong and we are right and orienting us to true reality, we can know that we are right with God; and second, this right orientation to God’s reality produces psychological comfort as the individual human begins to experience much less dissonance in his life as he moves throughout God’s world.
Chuck and Aaron also discuss the benefits of private confession to God, corporate confession, individual confession with a pastor, and confessing our sins to those we have sinned against.
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