Confessing sin

Lift Up Our Hearts!

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Confessing sin, Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, Joy

C.S. Lewis wrote the following in a corrective letter to his friend, the 78-year-old Don Giovanni Calabria [12/26/51; Letters, 3:152]:

. . . This emboldens me to say to you something that a layman ought scarcely to say to a priest nor a junior to a senior. (On the other hand, out of the mouth of babes; indeed, as once to Balaam, out of the mouth of an ass!) It is this: you write much about your own sins. Beware (permit me, my dearest Father, to say beware) lest humility should pass over into anxiety or sadness. It is bidden us to ‘rejoice and always rejoice.’ Jesus has cancelled the handwriting which was against us. Lift up our hearts!

Permit me, I pray you, these stammerings. You are ever in my prayers and ever will be.

Farewell.

C.S. Lewis

The Human Conscience

Tony Reinke Confessing sin, Conscience, Conviction of sin, Herman Bavinck

From Herman Bavinck in his Reformed Dogmatics, 3:173:

Before the fall, strictly speaking, there was no conscience in humans. There was no gap between what they were and what they knew they had to be. Being and self-consciousness were in harmony. But the fall produced separation. By the grace of God, humans still retain the consciousness that they ought to be different, that in all respects they must conform to God’s law. But reality witnesses otherwise; they are not who they ought to be. And this witness is the conscience. The conscience … is proof that communion with God has been broken, that there is a gap between God and us, between his law and our state. … The human conscience is the subjective proof of humanity’s fall, a witness to human guilt before the face of God.

Conviction of Sin

Tony Reinke C.H. Spurgeon, Confessing sin

From Charles Spurgeon, sermon 3369 (“Man Humbled, God Exalted”):

Conviction of sin is a wondrous puller-down. When a man begins to feel his sin lying heavy upon his heart, when his iniquity is continually before him, as David puts it in Psalm 51, then his high looks are gone.

Have you ever seen a rich man in the anguish of conviction? You would not know him from a beggar then. His purse-pride has gone; all his wealth gives him but little comfort. “My sin! My sin! My sin!” saith he. “Would to God I were as poor as the paupers in the workhouse, if I were but rid of my sin! What is my wealth while I have my sin?”

Have you ever seen the man of knowledge, the man who knows everything, the sharp, quick, critical man, who takes everybody up, and thinks he can set all the world right—have you ever seen him under a sense of sin? He feels himself to be a fool at once, and would sit down on a form with the infant class in a school if there he might learn of a Savior, being content to give up all his wisdom, and to be a babe in Christ.

Have you never observed the man who was naturally of a high and haughty disposition, who reared up among his fellows, have you never seen how he acts when God’s hand is on him! Why, he would fain hide himself anywhere, and he envies even the meanest and most obscure of the children of God.

Once get a sight of sin, and those things which now prop us up will all give way, and we shall be beggars in the face of all the world, when once we see how exceeding sinful a thing our sin is.

Spiritual Disciplines of John Bradford (1510—1555)

Tony Reinke Assurance, BR > Banner of Truth, Confessing sin, John Bradford, Spiritual disciplines

Bradford…Bradford had his daily exercises and practices of repentance. His manner was, to make to himself a catalogue of all the grossest and most enorme sins, which in his life of ignorance he had committed; and to lay the same before his eyes when he went to private prayer, that by the sight and remembrance of them he might be stirred up to offer to God the sacrifice of a contrite heart, seek assurance of salvation in Christ by faith, thank God for his calling from the ways of wickedness, and pray for increase of grace to be conducted in holy life acceptable and pleasing to God.

Such a continual exercise of conscience he had in private prayer, that he did not count himself to have prayed to his contentation, unless in it he had felt inwardly some smiting of heart for sin, and some healing of that wound by faith, feeling the saving health of Christ, with some change of mind into the detestation of sin, and love of obeying the good will of God. Which things do require that inward entering into the secret parlour of our hearts of which Christ speaketh; and is that smiting of the breast which is noted in the publican …

Let those secure men mark this well, which pray without touch of breast, as the Pharisee did; and so that they have said an ordinary prayer, or heard a common course of prayer, they think they have prayed well, and, as the term is, they have served God well; though they never feel sting for sin, taste of groaning, or broken heart, nor of the sweet saving health of Christ, thereby to be moved to offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving, nor change or renewing of mind: but as they came secure in sin and senseless, so they do depart without any change or affecting of the heart; which is even the cradle in which Satan rocketh the sins of this age asleep, who think they do serve God in these cursory prayers made only of custom, when their heart is as far from God as was the heart of the Pharisee.

—Thomas Sampson in the introduction to The Writings of John Bradford (Cambridge 1853), 1:33—34.

Prompt Confession of Sin

Tony Reinke BR > Banner of Truth, Confessing sin, Octavius Winslow

“I feel when I have sinned an immediate reluctance to go to Christ. I am ashamed to go. I feel as if it would not do to go, as if it were making Christ the minister of sin, to go straight from the swine-trough to the best robe, and a thousand other excuses. But I am persuaded they are all lies direct from hell. John argues the opposite way—‘If any man sins, we have an advocate with the Father;’ … The holy sensitiveness of the soul that shrinks from the touch of sin, the acute susceptibility of the conscience at the slightest shade of guilt, will of necessity draw the spiritual mind frequently to the blood of Jesus. And herein lies the secret of a heavenly walk. Acquaint yourself with it, my reader, as the most precious secret of your life. He who lives in the habit of a prompt and minute acknowledgement of sin, with his eye reposing calmly, believingly, upon the crucified Redeemer, soars in spirit where the eagle’s pinion [wings] range not.”

—Octavius Winslow, No Condemnation in Christ Jesus (Banner of Truth 1853/1991), pp. 79—80.