The Promise of Forgiveness – June 22, 2020

[Jesus said] “For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Matthew 9:13

The Promise of Forgiveness

There is a website that invites you to confess your deepest, darkest secrets. It invites you to use their website to share with the entire internet the most shameful skeletons you have in your closet. On one recent day, there were thousands of individual confessions that had been posted.

There are proven benefits to confessing our deepest secrets. Holding onto secrets about yourself, especially the bad ones, dramatically increases your stress, drastically cuts into your amount of needed rest, and radically transforms your mood and emotions into an inconsistent mess. This website was created as a way for people to unload the heaviest burdens on their hearts.

Despite that, you might still wonder why anyone would choose to openly confess their darkest secrets to the entire internet. One reason may be that all of the confessions are anonymous. People are fine with the whole internet world knowing the most intimate details of their secrets, as long as no one can ever connect those secrets with their names.

And we understand why. We easily wonder what people would think of us, and what consequences would follow, if they knew the entire truth about our past, or about the thoughts and passions we so often indulge.

But Jesus is already aware of all of them, whether or not we confess them to him. When Jesus approached a man named Matthew to call him as a disciple, he was well aware of Matthew’s deserved reputation as a “sinner.” Yet he assured him that sinners like Matthew were exactly the type of people for whom Jesus had come. He came to call sinners into God’s kingdom.

Whatever your skeletons, whatever your secrets, whatever your sins, you don’t need to be afraid of them. Jesus calls you to confess those sins to him, knowing that he offers full and free forgiveness.

Prayer:
Father in heaven, as you hear me confess my deepest sins, draw my eyes to the Savior who forgave them. Amen.