Transformation: Confessing Weakness

Jesus picks up on this theme of our inability to get it all right by telling his followers to “be perfect.”[1]  Um….what?  Is this a command to do the impossible?  Rather, Jesus is trying to provoke us into the reality that we cannot be perfect based through our own resources or the mere exertion of our will power.  He is setting up a game with a clear endpoint in mind: our turning to God and saying, “No, but only in and through You!,” which is a move we must make and which he cannot force.  Then, in seeing God’s grace and mercy, the paradox continues: we can walk in His perfection, but through a grace that flows not from us but to us.

One of the greatest failures of my life was also one of its great turning points.  In grad school, frustrated with my failures and how I couldn’t get life to work how I wanted, how I felt, too, so full of contradictions and self-doubt and the inability to be who I wanted to be, and how I didn’t feel confident about God’s nearness and goodness, I prayed (in the shower, where all great prayers are prayed): “Okay, I’m done.  I’m going to try things my own way now.  I’m taking things into my own hands.”  By taking things into my own hands, I meant that I was going to do basically whatever I wanted to do.  It was brazen, but at least it was honest. 

I ended up trying all sorts of things I had never done.  I slept with and courted someone whose emotions I would ultimately trounce, and I returned to grad school for a further degree, even though my heart wasn’t in it.  Such was the depth of my confusion, all around.  I ended up with thousands of dollars in school loans for a program I had dropped out of, and all the shame, guilt, and sadness of deeply wounding another human being.  I failed, on most fronts. 

I still feel the sadness of what I did, and so I don’t write what follows lightly or tritely: the magnificence of my failure finally opened me to God in an entirely new way.  Indeed, in some ways, I think I became open to God for the first time.  I was no longer the person, in my own mind anyway, who “didn’t do this or that.”  I could no longer hang my coat on how hard I tried or how faithful (again, in my own mind) I had been.  I had gone from being the older, moralistic brother to the younger, hedonistic brother.[2]  It was the first time where I finally accounted that I couldn’t get everything right. And that is what finally caused the clouds of my long depression to part.  I actually needed God—or rather, I finally confessed my need for God.  “I was powerless to save myself,” as they say in the 12 Steps, and I finally acknowledged it.    

The oft missing piece in confession and repentance is exactly this: finally coming to accept our weakness, our limitations, and our inability to transforms ourselves, rather than resisting, hating, and judging it.  This is a true experience of “losing our life,” surrendering our self-reliance.[3]  It’s why Paul can write that we should “rejoice in weakness.”[4]  When we accept precisely this reality—that we don’t come to God by our strength, but by our weakness, we finally become open to God.  It’s becoming open to God, and not just through our will-power, that we are transformed.  The paradox and the both-and is that we should and we must engage our will-power!  It’s just that while our will-power is necessary, still it won’t be sufficient to transform us.  Paul writes about this eloquently in Romans 7, saying that the cycle of the war between spirit and sinful impulses are finally transformed by turning to Jesus.[5]  “Thank God!” he says.  “The answer is in Christ Jesus.”  It’s this turn away from our own efforts and into the mercy of God (and again, away from and into is the biblical picture of repentance) that postures us to receive the grace of God which transforms us. 

Let us remember that Jesus never talked about arriving, he talked about abiding.[6]  The focus is on the transformative power of being near him, not of us forever doing away with our human, selfish impulses.  The more time you spend judging yourself for the parts of your heart and mind you hold in contempt, the more time you keep yourself chained apart from the freedom that God desires for you.  God is trying to bring us out of judgment, even self-judgment, which can seem to our self-deceived minds so right.  You cannot experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit when you are in anger or judgment. 

None of this means we have license to forgo will power or the need to make wise choices.[7]  Rather, it means walking the middle path between religious rigidity and self-consumed hedonism.  In other words, it requires us to walk in maturity, at the leading of the Spirit.  This will be challenging and it means holding tension because, remember, many of us--and certainly the ego part within all of us!--would prefer a rule book to maturity.

Bottom line, if confession and repentance is really just a commitment to will-power ourselves forward and to “not mess up again,” as noble as that desire is, our life will just be a religious game of living within our own strength and ability, untouched by the waters of God’s empowering grace.  But when we understand the context of confession and repentance as revealed in Scripture, we can instead walk a path into freedom and transformation.

[1] Matthew 5:48

[2] Luke 15:11-32

[3] Cf. Matthew 10:39

[4] 2 Corinthians 12:10

[5] All of Romans 7 and especially verses 14-25

[6] See John 15:5

[7] Cf. Paul’s argument in Romans 6, especially v 1. 

Transformation: From Confessing Failure to Confessing Weakness

The prophet Jeremiah wrote at a time when the nation of Judah faced exile; they were about to be captured by the nation of Babylon, and God said this through His prophet:

   “Oh, Israel my faithless people, come home to me again for I am merciful.
   I will not be angry at you forever only acknowledge your guilt,
   admit that your rebelled against the Lord your God,
   and you committed adultery against your God by worshiping other idols.
   Confess that you refused to listen to my voice.”[1]

When you read the prophets you constantly read this theme of repentance.  It is one of the great scriptural patterns: repent and confess.  Turn and get explicit about your weakness/failure/need. 

The Prophet Ezekiel wrote during the time of exile said it every more succinctly:  “Tell the people of Israel this is what the sovereign Lord says, ‘Repent and turn away from your idols and stop all for your detestable sins.’”[2]

Repent and confess.  Turn and confess your weakness and your need.

Of course, we see this pattern in Jesus, himself.  “Repent and believe.”[3]

The turning point for our human sinfulness and selfishness is forgiveness and then transformation.  Repent from darkness, be transformed by light.  The church has often stopped at forgiveness, probably because it’s easier to legislate and control forgiveness than it is actually disciple people and deal with the underlying messiness.

But even if we understand the critical nature of confession and repentance, the words might become tainted for us if we don’t understand their full meaning, scripturally speaking.  To confess means “to acknowledge and admit,” and repentance means “to turn from one direction to another,” as in turning from death to life.[4]  But sometimes when we confess and repent, what we mean is, “I’m going to get it all right now!” or “This is never going to happen again!”  Oftentimes we relate to grace as a second change to get it right.  We often follow confession and repentance with a burst of will power and resolution, much like we would relate to a new diet or New Year’s resolution.

This is certainly how I related to confession and repentance for most of my life.  I would do something that violated my conscience—watching pornography comes to mind—and feel a sense of shame and frustration, followed by resolve to stop and turn over a new leaf.  Sin, shame, resolve, breaking point and sin again, shame, new resolve, breaking point, repeat cycle.  If will power is our only tool, it can be very hard to find our way out of this cycle.  But this was all I knew: my idea of having a Savior was that Jesus would tolerate me until I got things right.  I spent so much energy in The Human Paradigm, trying to arrive at a place where I was fully free of sin and selfishness. 

Will power is a good thing, of course.  As is the sincere desire to do better.  But will power alone will usually leave us feeling frustrated, at least when dealing with things at a deeper level of heart and mind.  The problem is that will power, when not coupled to a deeper, internal reckoning and re-orientation, is much like throwing paint on an un-sanded surface; usually, the results don’t last for long. 

The problem is that the necessary internal reckoning can feel quite uncomfortable!  Not to mention confusing.  The deeper things of heart and mind are often mysteries to us, evading our best efforts at understanding, let alone transformation.  Why does one reach into the cookie jar again, knowing it will ultimately lead to misery?  Why do we find ourselves in the same pattern of broken relationship….again?  The parts of our hearts “underneath the surface” need help much greater than the capacities of our merely mortal minds and will power.  What we need, in fact, is a source of transformative power outside of ourselves—God—which transcends our human faculties.  And becoming open to God means understanding confession and repentance at a deeper level.  That is: biblical confession and repentance is not just naming our failures so that we can resolve to try hard to do better.  Indeed, confession and repentance is more than just the confession of things we have gotten wrong, it’s the confession that we cannot get everything right.  It is not solely a confession of things done, but of our limitations as human beings.  It is not simply a doing thing, it is a being thing.  We move from confessing failure to confessing weakness.  

This is a truth with which we may agree and yet resist.  It’s a scandal to our minds and it makes little sense, which is why so much of Paul’s writing was spent trying to get people to accept this incredibly counter-intuitive reality: we don’t come to God by our strength but by our weakness.  In fact, Paul actually said that the Law—all the things that Israel was supposed to do and get right--was actually given to Israel to demonstrate and to finally convince them that they couldn’t get it all right![5]  Maybe Israel could master some prayers and practices and religious performance.  Perhaps the men could look fancy in their religious apparel.  But the only way real transformation happens is by becoming open to God, and that happens in confessing—celebrating, even—our weakness.

This is why following Jesus is founded on the scandal of grace.  We have to learn that the way into fullness is the way of emptying.  This is why Jesus says that we have to lose our life to find it. [6]  Confessing weakness can feel like losing our life, built as it is on our sense of strength and success.  But it is also the path into abundant life.  

[1] Jeremiah 3:11-13

[2] Ezekiel 14:6

[3] See, for example, Mark 1:15

[4] The Hebrew word shub, often translated “to repent,” means literally to turn back or to return

[5] See, for example, the argument surrounding Galatians 3:24.

[6] See Matthew 10:39

Transformation: Marrying Spiritual Practice to Confession

Words are beautiful things.

Cockamamie.  Flibertyjibitt.  Balderdash.  Kerfuffle.  Not only do they hold meaning, they can be fun to say.  

I like to make a note of words of phrases I want to remember or, even better, incorporate into my vernacular.  Merlin’s Mushrooms.  Good gracious, Ignatius.  Gallopin’ grimalkin.  Codswallop.

And (I confess), I like puns.  My favorite being: there’s this cat trying to catch a mouse, but the mouse keeps eluding him.  So the cat comes up with a brilliant plan: he eats a mouth-full of cheese and, his breath laced with the savory scent, the cat goes up to the mouse’s hole and breathes into it, luring the mouse out of hiding.  Then he waits, with bated breath.

[Rim-shot, cymbal crash.]

Words are malleable, too.  Their interpretation and meaning can change over time.  The word “awful” now means “terrible,” though it used to mean that something was worthy of awe, as in “the awful majesty of God.”  The word “fizzle” used to mean “to flatulate quietly,” now it’s means “to fail” or “to come to an end.”  (And yes, we should bring back that original meaning.)  Words, then, are dynamic.  They often change over time.

The focus of this reading is on the spiritual practice of confession and repentance.  I am placing the practice of confession and repentance in its own category, as the first spiritual practice, because I believe it is the foundation for transformation.  At its heart is humility, which is both a grace of God and the posture that allows us to become open to God. 

A potential problem in embracing confession and repentance is that both “confession” and “repentance” can sound like such heavy, church-y words.  Perhaps they are words which, by over-use or over-simplification or even mis-interpretation, have become tainted or corrupted.  After all, Jesus’ message of repentance was an invitation to hope: “repent and believe the Good News.”[1]  But I have often seen signs held up, at a football game, say, or at a well-trafficked stoplight, reading, “Repent or Perish.”  It brings to my mind the image of a bearded man on 5th Avenue holding a sandwich board that reads, “Repent, the end is near!”  Not exactly Jesus’ message of hope and new life.

These interpretations of confession and repentance reflect our human tendency to see God more as an angry judge than a kind father.  In a Google Image Search of the word “repentance,” I found (and near the top of the page) a picture that read, “WWJD: Who will Jesus destroy?”  And I have seen on my local freeway a sign that read, paraphrasing: “Keep using my name in vain and I’ll make rush hour longer.”  We tend to see God not as He is but as we are.  And this is a big problem through which Jesus must lead us to freedom.

As John Colquhoun said:

"When a man is driven to acts of obedience by the dread of God’s wrath revealed in the law and not drawn to them by the belief of his love revealed in the gospel; when he fears God because of his power and justice, and not because of his goodness; when he regards God more as an avenging Judge, than as a compassionate Friend and Father; and when he contemplates God rather as terrible in majesty than as infinite in grace and mercy; he shews that he is under the dominion, or at least under the prevalence, of a legal spirit."[2]

Words like “confession” and “repentance” may evoke in us a picture of Whom God is that does not reflect reality.  It is a marvelous demonstration of our freedom as human beings that we can attach to Jesus whatever meaning or interpretation we are most comfortable with.  Indeed, often we have to re-claim words, placing them back in their original or proper context as well as submitting our old ideas of God to a new picture revealed by the Holy Spirit.[3]

When we look at the ideas of confession and repentance in their biblical context, it’s clear that, together, they constitute the first and indispensable step in the process of transformation.  Only when you name and label something is it able to be transformed.  As Peter Scazzero says, “We cannot change what we are unaware of.”[4]  And, further, God cannot transform something which he is not invited to touch.  Confession is this very process of giving something its proper name, perhaps for the first time; it is labeling something so that it can be dealt with directly.  It is stepping out of fantasy and into reality.  Reality, as painful as it may be, is also the only place in which freedom may be enjoyed.  

This is why confession and repentance is such a big idea in the Scripture. 

[1] Cf. Mark 1:15; Jesus does warn about repenting or perishing in Luke 13, where the warning comes in the context of a specific situation and in the broader context of turning to true belief in God. 

[2] John Colquhoun, qtd. in Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller.  Viking, New York, NY, 2015.  p 47.

[3] See, for example, John 16:13.

[4] One of Peter Scazzero’s 25 Truisms of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, as found at http://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/25-ehs-truisms/