Confession
“Never disregard a conviction that the Holy Spirit brings to you. If it is important enough for the Spirit of God to bring it to your mind, it is the very thing He is detecting in you.”
- Oswald Chambers
Remember the gut wrenching guilt you felt when you knew you were hiding something wrong you had done from your parents? Or maybe you lied frequently as a child but deep down you wished you could just spill the truth and be done with it?
The weight that you felt on your heart was much like the ache that King David experienced after his sinfulness with Uriah and Bathsheba. After David sent Uriah to his ultimate death and realized his sin, David writes in Psalm 32:3, ‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.’
Isn’t that how we feel when we know we have hidden sin that lingers in our hearts? We feel ‘heavy,’ ‘dried up,’ and as if our heart is groaning for the truth to be revealed. We ache with deceit and we feel burdened.
When we bring our conviction brought by the Holy Spirit into the light, we will experience a freedom, much like the freedom we felt as small children confessing a wrong doing to our parents.
King David writes in Psalm 32:5, ‘I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave my iniquity of my sin.’ When the Holy Spirit brings a conviction, however small, to our minds, the Psalms say that we will experience preservation from trouble and shouts of deliverance from that which enslaves us.
During this season of Lent, examine your heart and ask the Spirit to detect even the tiniest of convictions that cause your heart to groan or feel burdened. Remember that it was for your burden that Christ died. As we move toward Easter and the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, we give up something during Lent but also add something to our lives. Practice confessing to Christ what it is that convicts your heart and experience deliverance!
Answer or consider these questions as a family:
1. Where do you sense the Holy Spirit showing you areas of necessary surrender and confession?
2. What hinders you from truly giving that to the Lord, gaining forgiveness, and moving forward?
