It has been a few weeks now, and I’m exhausted.
Day in and day out I’ve been battling this relentless fear.
Just when I think I’ve conquered it and found peace,
it comes rushing back to the surface.
I’m afraid to read my Bible – a tough reality when you’re a seminary student.
My classes form both a distraction from the fear, and a potential trigger.
I constantly feel like I’m walking a tightrope.
Trying to engage with Scripture,
while fear tries to inject condemnation into every line.
It’s a Monday night and I settle in for my 3 hour New Testament class.
I claim my usual spot in the squeaky classroom chair,
Under the harsh fluorescent lights.
I brace myself for the roller coaster ride,
equipped with the arsenal of coping mechanisms I’ve built
to manage the anxiety and fear that constantly threatens to consume me.
We’re studying the book of Romans.
A famous book.
A book I know well.
Or at least that’s what I think.
Then I read along as the professor reads aloud a passage:
Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. However, to the one who does not work but trusts in God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: ‘Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will never count against them.’ – Romans 4:4-8
My vision narrows and everything around me fades away.
Suddenly it’s just me and God.
No professor, no classmates.
No squeaky chairs or harsh fluorescent lights.
I don’t know how much time passes.
Eventually the professor releases us for a break,
And I make a break for the door.
I step out into the crisp Colorado April air.
I find a dark corner, my back pressed against the cold stone building.
It feels like my very breath has been knocked out of me
by the power of those words.
Words I’ve read so many times before.
Or have I?
All these years, I’ve had it wrong.
Not in any formal way; those words did not challenge my stated beliefs about God.
But in one powerful moment, God opened my eyes to see that my life revealed a different set of beliefs.
My stated beliefs said that salvation was by grace alone, through faith alone.
My life said that I believed that I had to earn my salvation.
And if salvation was mine to earn,
it was also mine to lose through my mistakes and shortcomings.
And it was that belief that gave birth to the fear.
And fear left me hiding behind fig leaves like Adam and Eve.
Terrified to step into the light, to let God see me as I truly was.
Because I believed my mistakes would be met with condemnation.
But in that moment I sense God speaking something to my heart:
“try me and find out.”
Only it isn’t a hostile challenge, it is a gentle invitation—
an invitation to stop hiding,
to stop striving,
and to lay it all bare before Him.
It is an invitation to stop trying to cover up all my mistakes—
painting over them with “good works.”
An invitation to trust that in doing so I will be met not with condemnation but with grace.
It is an invitation that leaves me trembling
more from the fear than from the chilly night air.
But it is a different kind of fear than the one that has been plaguing me.
A Holy fear that I know will be the answer and the antidote;
If I have the courage to accept that invitation.
That night was a turning point for me. It was an invitation to the most foundational—and perhaps difficult—element of trusting God: confession.
In his book “The Silver Chair,” C.S. Lewis paints a beautiful picture that I think can depict what it looks like to come to the Lord in the vulnerability of confession. In the story, two children—Eustace and Jill—find themselves in the magical land of Narnia. In a moment of hubris and mocking pride, seeking to show up the boy who is terrified of heights, Jill approaches the ledge only to then find herself paralyzed with fear. As Eustace attempts to pull Jill away from the ledge he loses his own balance and plummets over the edge, at which time he is rescued by an enormous lion who blows him to safety. Jill is then left alone with the lion, who much to her relief walks into the forest. However, dying of thirst and in search of water to drink, Jill finds herself separated from the stream by the very same lion.
“Are you not thirsty?” Said the Lion.
“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
“Then drink,” said the Lion.
“May I—could I—would you mind going away while I do?” Said Jill.
The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked for the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience […]
“Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?” Said Jill.
“I make no promise,” said the Lion.
Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.
“Do you eat girls?” She said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh dear!” Said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.
Approaching God in confession can feel a lot like Jill approaching the Lion Aslan. It feels dangerous, reckless even. Scripture tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), and that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23a). If we take a serious view of sin and a sober view of the Holiness of God, the prospect of approaching God with our sin and failings is not something we will take lightly. In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah finds himself in the presence of the Lord and writes;
‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’ – Isaiah 6:5
This is the reality that we face in confession, one that should rightly strike a level of holy fear in our hearts. So why do it? Why come to God with our sin rather than seeking to remain hidden behind our fig leaves?
In Genesis 3 we see Adam and Eve hiding from God out of fear, and God calls them out of hiding and into confession (albeit with a lot of finger pointing at the others involved). It’s interesting to me that Adam and Eve responded the way that they did—hiding from God. After all, apart from Jesus they were probably the people with the most intimate knowing of God in all of human history. If anyone ought to have known the character of God, it should’ve been them! But they recognized that they were naked, and they felt vulnerable and ashamed.
I’ll admit, for much of my life the call to confession has felt like a punishment in and of itself. It felt like being called to the front of the class to be scolded and shamed by the teacher, an experience meant to beat us down and leave us feeling poorly about ourselves. And I figured that was meant to deter us from behaving sinfully in the future. I viewed it as behavior modification through the use of fear and shame.
But as the Lord dismantled my distorted perceptions of Him through that season of fear, I began to see confession differently. I wrote this question in my journal: What if God leads us and commands us to confess our sins not as punishment so that He can shame us, but so that He can simply meet us with love?
In his book “Surrender to Love” David Benner writes that “It is not the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life-changing. It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally.” When we live in hiding behind our “false selves” we can never truly receive this perfect and unconditional love, because we always know that the love isn’t really for us as we truly are, but is for the “self” that we have manipulated them into seeing. Such love is tainted, not by the one who gives but by the one who receives. Benner goes on to write that “This [false] self can never be transformed, because it is never willing to receive love in vulnerability.”
Confession requires us to come to God in vulnerability; just as we are, no hiding or covering up. And it is in that place of vulnerability that we are finally able to encounter God’s love—in fact, I would argue that is the only state in which we can truly receive God’s love. But to approach God in such a way requires trust. We won’t come to God in vulnerability unless we trust that we will be met by love, not wrath and condemnation. In our story in Narnia, Jill is confronted with an unknown lion. She has never met Aslan before, and as such she does not know his character. Her companion Eustace had been to Narnia before, and had been transformed by an encounter with Aslan. And had he still been with her, he could have shed light on this Lion that Jill was encountering. Unlike Jill, we do not have to face the unknown—God has revealed Himself to us in Scripture. We are told exactly who He is and what His character is like.
We see God’s character revealed in His response to that first (flawed) confession. He curses the serpent and tells Adam and Eve what the impact and consequence of their actions will be, but then He provides garments of skin to clothe them and cover their shame. From that point the rest of Scripture is a story describing not God’s abandonment of humankind, but his plan to redeem and restore them. It’s a story that finds it’s culmination and climax in the work of Christ, who paid the ultimate price for our sin—making a way for us to be made right with God and receive grace and mercy rather than condemnation. And it is in this Truth that we find assurance to come confidently to the throne of grace, knowing that we will receive mercy and grace (Hebrews 4:16).
But as I’ve said before, it’s one thing to know that in your mind, it’s another thing to rest all the weight of your life upon it and live like it’s really true. And that’s where the act of confession comes in. Imagine in the story above that Jill is assured by the lion that he will not harm her if she approaches the stream to drink. It may have provided a measure of comfort, however the reality is that she would never know if it were really true until she tested it and found out for sure.
In confession and repentance we start with trusting that what the Bible says is true: that those who come to the Lord will be met with mercy and not condemnation. But that knowledge alone is dead and meaningless until we actually dare to do it — until we take that leap. Until we dare to try it and find out. And lest we hesitate to take that leap and rather seek to find life in another way, let us be reminded by what the lion says in our story—if we will not take that step of faith to drink from the waters of salvation that God has provided, there is no other stream.
What I learned in my season of fear was that the fear was a gift, because it stripped away my fig leaves, leaving me exposed and vulnerable before the Lord. Fear caused me to know in the very depths of my being the weight of my sin and the holy fear of God—without which I would have continued to pretend, never resting my full weight on the Truth that I claimed to believe.
May we truly know the weight of our sin and the magnitude of God’s mercy and grace that meets us in our confession.
Paramutheomai 