First, confession of sin is based on acknowledging that you’ve done evil in the eyes of God by seeking His forgiveness. The essence of confession is the demolition of pride, arrogance, and dishonesty which are the very barrier to acknowledgment of wrongness. We need to understand that the most significant aspect concerning confession hinges on how we conduct ourselves before God later, after confessing a particular sin that we’ve committed.
Thus this is where repentance is of great importance, and our confession must be backed up by a strong willingness toward repentance. Bear in mind, the way we behave, or how we choose to live after confessing any given sin to God decides whether we were sincere during the confession.
Lot of times, people simply confess sin with their mouth while their heart and conscience which are the center of true confession are completely disengaged during the confession process. So they’re not driven by a genuine desire to change their ways of doing things. Sometimes we’re so dishonest with ourselves up to the point we even allow sinful thoughts of going back to continue to linger in our minds while confessing.
Repentance Should Ensue Confession.
True confession should always lead to repentance because if you acknowledge something that you’ve done is evil in the sight of a holy and righteous God; therefore, that alone should compel you to take necessary steps that will keep you from ever indulging in that sin again. It doesn’t make any sense at all when finding yourself into a situation where you keep on confessing the same thing over and over while it’s all because of your own fault.
The truth is when we sin, Christ is hurt terribly, so we cannot keep on hurting the very person whom we must esteem more highly than everything on this earth. However, the issue is that lot of times we behave just as though we had never made any confession to God by continuing to give in the same old stuffs we’ve been practicing all along.
Even worse, in many cases, we live our lives in such a sinful condition that’s far worse than how we used to live prior to our confessions, regardless of the promises we made to God concerning changing course. In this case, all God wants us to do is to take a look back and start thinking about the promises we made to Him while pleading for forgiveness. The grace and the love of God have become useless and worthless to us as a result of how we choose to live.
An Unrepentant Mindset Will Rob us of God’s Blessings.
Consequently, living in such fashion then places us in a condition where God cannot bestow His blessings upon us since He doesn’t reward rebellion. And if He were to bless us while living a sinful life before Him, that would equate to Him affirming our sinful lifestyle. In fact, it’s one thing to ask God to bless you, but it’s something completely different for you to actually position yourself in a receiving state by remaining obedient to Him. Oftentimes, it’s not because He doesn’t want to bless us, but our sins have kept Him from intervening in our lives (Isaiah 59:2). In other words, our sins have repelled Him.
We pray to God in order for Him to bless us, but when He is about to do so, He then finds ourselves meddling with sin, which is equivalent to us turning our back on Him by returning to the same evil things that we had already confessed to Him. Oftentimes, we’re so guilty and ashamed about the kind of life we’re leading, we cannot even maintain a strong or a consistent prayer life.
God doesn’t listen to prayers of those who are rebelling against Him since their prayers are an abomination unto Him (Psalm 66:18-19; Proverbs 15:8), except if they want to get right with Him by turning away from their wicked ways. If we really want to glorify Him, please Him, be useful, and be blessed by Him, we have to make sure that we are more serious about the kind of life we want to live before Him. Let’s look at these Scripture verses below regarding repentance.
He said, “Be sorry for your sins and turn from them! The holy nation of heaven is near (Matthew 3:2).
From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 4:17).
After confessing our sins to God, He’s expecting us to change course with our lives. By the way, God isn’t impressed that much by the words that you say in order to express your sorrow during a confession, but He’s impressed by the actions you’re willing to take in order to keep that from keeping on repeating itself which is nothing more than abusing His grace. Confession should walk hand in hand with a serious plan intended to keep you where God wants you to be, so that you’ll not satisfy the desires of the flesh as you used to.
Conclusion
So as you’re confessing your sins, you must be thinking about what you’ll do later in order to avoid the traps of the enemy that you had been falling into. The bottom line is that sinning against God was a choice that you had been making by deliberately yielding yourself up to whatever sin you’d been committing despite the fact that you knew it was wrong in the first place.
Therefore, you have to examine your whole life thoroughly and see where your weaknesses lie, what’s the main issue that has been driving you toward a particular sin, what’s the main motive behind your action, and then start working on how you’ll counter that by renewing your mind to the Word of God daily (Romans 12:2; Ephesians 4:21-24). The big issue is when you keep on acting out on your human weaknesses, it exacerbates them by strengthening them, which in turn make it become extremely hard for you to resist temptation.
The only thing that can give you an edge against any temptation is letting the truth of God’s Word to dominate your thinking. Most importantly, you need to nurture a genuine love toward the truth found within in the sense of being willing to let it decide your reaction to temptation. Lastly, you have to reject the deceptive mindset of the enemy which makes you feel that you just cannot stop doing something that has become part of your life because the fundamental of serving, glorifying, and pleasing God is based on abandoning the very sinful pleasures we used to enjoy.
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