When Contrition is Missing from Confession
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Unfortunately I can count on one hand the number of times I have felt deep remorse over my own sin during the twenty years I have professed Christ as my Lord and Savior. By this I mean those times when my emotions matched my knowledge of wrongdoing, when I shed tears over doing something I definitively knew I shouldn’t have.
This is not to say that I have not regularly confessed known transgression against God’s law and asked for both forgiveness and the power to resist the temptation to transgress in that way again. What it means is that the sadness I have always thought true Holy Spirit conviction should bring has very seldom been a part of my Christian experience.
This is also not to say that I have not known what it is to grieve and grieve deeply and openly. I have cried many tears over the losses in my life, especially losses connected with the deaths of those I’ve loved. I’ve learned not to be afraid of the power of grief to cleanse my soul of some of the bitterness I’ve known in this life that originated in loss.
No, the thing that seems glaringly absent from my experience is the grief that comes from realizing deep in my heart that I have done real wrong, and in doing so grieved the heart of the God I call my own. It is one thing to pray a prayer of confession and ask for forgiveness. It is quite another to both feel and express the pain that comes from the long ago realization of King David; that it is against God, and God alone, that I have sinned. Every time we deeply hurt someone by our own wrong actions should we not feel remorse if we have truly “come to grips” with what we have done? Can we claim to have a “Godly heart” if this is rarely the case?
Perhaps the best thing those of us who have a hardness of heart in this area of our Christian life can do is get on our faces before our Lord and earnestly ask for the Spirit of true conviction to break that heart. Maybe we also need to ask that same Spirit to show us what we ourselves must do, if anything, to make that heart “breakable”. While we can do nothing apart from God it might be that we are responsible to become willing to face and truly forsake what may be a deeply held conviction that our sin just isn’t “that bad”.
The truth is all sins are horrible acts against a holy and loving God. We cannot decide some are minor and some are major. All represent terrible wrong that we should feel terrible about, at least until the Lord’s grace and forgiveness lifts up our countenance and wipes away real tears of sorrow for what we have done, and what we continue to do.
Our hearts should match our confession. Our spirits must show the contrition that represents real repentance for our wrongs. If this is not happening can we be sure that the forgiveness we ask for is forgiveness we even truly want? What if, deep down, we have no intention of giving up our sin? This is a fearful thing to consider but something, it seems to me, which we ignore to our soul’s peril.