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A good question came up about confession in our Setting Captives Free meeting that I would want to share.  All of our situations are so different, some are married, others are single parents, and still others have never been married.  So the question comes up with who and when should you confess.

I find the a couple answers that could help.  One deals with the who should I confess too.

Matthew 5
“Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, GO

1st Thess 4:3 It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; 4 that each of you should learn to control your own body[a] in a way that is holy and honorable, 5 not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God; 6 and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister

Ok, let’s follow the Spirit of the law now.  Make matters right, especially to the offended party.  Sure our sin is against God ultimately (Psalm 32, 51), but it is true also that we have offended people in our sexual immorality too.  Who is it that you have wronged?  Your wife?   Your girlfriend?  Your children?  Your parents?  For me it was 3 out of the four I listed.  In sexual sin (idolatry) I have followed a distorted view of sex, one that damages people around me. (That’s the consequence of sin)  So when we are off getting a sex fix, our kids are by themselves, or we are not honoring our parents by our actions of being deceptive or lying.  This should help you determine who you confess too.  Who was it that you offended.  Pray and then go to them.

The second questioned answered is when you should confess.  I have found that for those in a marriage it is best to get it out in the open asap.  If it going to be a real shock then you might want to have a counilor, Pastor, Leader available to sit with you both when you confess for comfort and perspective.  For young kids I would say this…I was young when my father told me about his own failures as a parent and it made me happy to know that what I felt as a kid was valadated by my pop.  What I mean is that when you are a kid you have feelings, but don’t know if there right or wrong, there just there.  When my pop came up to me and my brother and said, “I was wrong,” that really put my mind at ease knowing it wasan’t my fault my parents didn’t get along or that they were not going to live together anymore.  Sometimes confession needs to be in stages as well.  Meaning as youi share your stuggles, you will share about what you are doing about it for help.  The next time you talk there might be more that you share about what God is doing in your life etc…

The most important thing about confession is that it is for your benefit and joy and for the Glory of God.  If those around us do not see that we are overjoyed in Christ to draw closer to a right relationship with God and with our fellow mankind then it will be hard for anyone to believe that we really mean what we say.  It’s like having to do something vs. getting to do it!  God is not glorified if you have to confess, but because you want more of Him, we confess.  It certainly shows our weakness, but isn’t that the point…we need deliverance!  Psalm 50:15

 

Confession. A word that conjures up all sorts of emotional quandary’s within the body of Christ.  On one side we know it is the “right thing to do.”  But on the other, our pounding heart tells us to “keep it to yourself.”  Much fear is associated with this 3 syllable word.

My text is “But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”  John 3:21

This text is right after a judgement is pronounced on all those not only practicing evil, but not willing to come into the light to expose the evil deed(s).  Truth means coming into the light.  Coming into the light reveals a work of God in the individual.  Confession is a revealing of what was done in secret.  This, Confession, is a good thing, a God working, Spirit moving event in the life off all who have been made alive in Messiah!  I do not need to recount the wonderful testimonies out there, or my own, where the burden of sin, it’s weight, has been thrown off (Heb 12:1-2), by the powerful good news of Jesus, the Messiah.

So why have I thought about confession in a negative way, instead of such a positive?  Haven’t you every wondered about this?  Confession is work of God, yet we stuggle with asking God to, “search our hearts and see if there be any wicked way in me,” out of fear that God might just take us up on the offer and reveal something so disgusting in His sight that confession becomes the remedy.  And oh, what a remedy Confession is!  We get nervous to tell God about our sin, and even more nervous to come before a Church goer.  Why?

I’m afraid I have seen a pattern over my 21 years now of walking with Jesus.  Let me tell you a story, a true story that I feel is not the marginal, but the norm.  I was at a Pastors conference one year and during a Q & A time with a panel of 10 pastors or so, old and young servants of the Lord, a question was asked about dealing with a staff member or clergy that was in sexual immorality.  AH, there it is!  The sin of sexual immorality, everyone duck, because the rock throwing is a comin!  That’s what we think right.  Israel was sexual immoral, Abraham was, Solomon of course was, Judah, Rahab, Samuel, plus many, many more.  And God sure made their lives a wreak!

Getting back to the panel of Pastors now.  The answer to the quesiton was a immediate stepping out of the position that they were in and a demotion, more than likely without the ability to get back to where they have fallen from.  Seemed like a too the point answer, from strong men who have never struggled with the sexual temptations that the forefathers of the faith have stumbled upon.  I seriouslly doubt that.  With so many Pastors on the internet today, it’s hard to imagine a Pastor not being tempted at some point with the false pleasure of internet porn.  Especially if they do not have a filter system on there computer.  I mean there open to the 420 million porn pages out there just like the rest of the world, right?  Right!  The statistics bear it out, many, many Pastor’s do have a temptation to pornography as they use the same medium as Bible teachers and porn producers in pushing their products; THE INTERNET.

But how this reaction by the Pastors effects an audience can be radical.  Just think of hearing the answer to this question!  Put yourself in the shoes of someone who makes such a confession to a Pastor of sexual immorality.  Your come into the office, sit down, look at the Pastor and blurb it out, heart pounding, blood racing…  God says that this confession is a work of HIM in you.  This is His work in you!  How great is that, right?  Then the Pastor tells you that your sins are forgiven but your fired?  Nice.

Now to give the Pastors some leaway, they could have thought about a situation where they come into the office area and find someone viewing pornography on the church computers.  No cofession there.  Different situaiton entirely.  But if someone confession to you, then we have to take a look at the passage of scripture above and dicern what it is that is moving this man or women to the point of confessing their sins.  They obviously know it is sin, and have been convicted of it.  The work of the Spirit in them has brought them to a place of coming and confessing to there leaders.  What a beautiful thing this is.

When I was listening to the Pastors at the conference I could just imagine what the 1000 leaders were saying in there minds while listening…,”I’m never going to tell anyone.”  They way the question was answered made you think that confession was not a God glorifying, benefit to the believer, move of the Holy Spirit in them.  Instead the answer given pushed down the idea of the pleasure in Confession, and placed it in the abyss of the person’s brain, never to be brought up again.

I have to understand as a minister that when the Lord is moving his child to Confession that this is a good thing, a great thing, a time to rejoice, for it is the Lord that moves in Him as the great deliverer of the soul.  (Psalm 50:15)  I am not to fire a person who confesses to me that he eats to much or is jealous of others am I?  The Lord is honored when we bring to him and others our struggles, for this shows our great need and  our weakness.  Though the church longs to be strong, God’s graces in our life our to reveal our weakness as to show His might and power working in us, so we cannot boast, and He is seen as the deliverer of our souls.  We win the war by being weak and vulnerable, not strong.

I had another encounter recently with a young man, who was serving at a church on their worship team.  As a up and coming leader in the ministry he observed a Pastor removing another young man from the leadership team after the young man confessed his sin of viewing porn.  Sad, really sad.  The lesson the young lad learned from observing this action/reaction from the Pastor was that if you confess to him anything, your fired.  Your time of serving the Lord is done.  You can’t help lead in music anymore because being in leadership means that we don’t sin or confess our sins, especially viewing a naked person.  This I believe is wrong, very wrong.  Leadership is moving in grace in ALL area’s of our life before the congregation.  I lead in repentance, cutting off sin and yes, Confessing sin.  Oh, it might take you down a peg or two in your mind, (and others) but then again….It’s not about you or I, is it?

Psalm 115:1 “Not unto us, o Lord, not unto us but to your name be the Glory.”

I was watching the previews to some of the new movies comming out and a comment caught my ears!  The movie being previewed was about the founder of the famous networking site Facebook.  You might have seen the flick by now.  But what did catch my eye was one of the motivation for him creating it. 

The movie showed the college student at his computer with some beers in him, no doubt, running his fingers on the compter keys like he was playing “war games,” with the thought of girls on the brain.  Oh, man…how shocking…a college kid with sex on the brain!  I went to a Cal State College myself, and I must say there is a a ton of sexual stimulus on campus and on the minds of America’s college students.

But what really got me was that once again porn, or un-satisfying sexual behavior (i.e. lust), won the day in a young man’s heart to move him to great things; richness, fame, all the girls he wants, a reputation, and of course rock and roll (well maybe not that).

Plase Pascal once said, “self-will will never be satisfied, even though it might be capable of achieving whatever it wills; but one is satisfied as soon as he renounces it.  Without it, one cannot be dissatisfied; with it, one cannot be content.  from Psacals thoughts on the Christian Life, section D

Our behavior of Sexual immorality has us untill we confess it (renounce) for what it is.  When the grace of God moves us towards this renounceing, then it no longer has hold of us, we are no longer enchanted with it’s fruit.  Another is better, far better pleasure than it!

It saddens me a bit to find that the prelude to such a used tool like Facebook was started with a mind on porn pleasure.

There is one form of sexual immorality that is rarely discussed but, like most everything else that society once considered taboo, is slowly being slipped into our culture. The cycle seems to be this: introduce that which was hidden in the closet into mainstream media, create a public outcry from those who hold to conservative Christian values (and even non-Christians who have a sense of morality), spawn debates and counter-outcries from liberal-thinkers who derisively ridicule the morality of the past and put the question out there “who says it is wrong?”.  The debate goes back and forth between the 2 groups, but the battle is already lost by the “moral minority”. As the debates go back and forth, we find more and more people who are unwilling to stand for what they believe, or who are so weakly-grounded in their beliefs that they begin to question their own feelings on the issue. As this goes on, the issue is re-introduced through the media, and given enough time it is accepted. At least by society in general.

Acceptance doesn’t make it right, it just means we have lost the fear of God and His principals. We’ve seen it with sex on TV,  foul language in public, provocative (slutty) fashions, homosexuality, and now, making its emergence, is pedophilia.

Amazon.com recently released an electronic book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct,” on their online store. After public outcry and threats of boycott, they made the decision to pull the book. You can read about it at this link:

http://www.examiner.com/social-media-in-national/amazon-pulls-pedophile-s-guide-to-love-book-from-online-store

No matter what the author says, or those who defend what he says, his right to say it, and Amazon’s right to publish it, pedophilia is sin. Just as pornography, adultery, self-gratification, homosexuality, etc. are sin. Those engaged in it are in bondage to sin whether they believe it or not. The only way to break those chains of bondage is through Jesus Christ. Nothing but the Blood of Jesus can set us free, no matter what sin we are enslaved to.

I have no doubt that pedophilia will be accepted by American society, maybe not in my lifetime, but the shot has been fired. And it really should not be a surprise. We know that things will get worse and worse before the Lord intervenes. Until that time, the enemy is going to try to get as many in his camp as he possibly can. We need to pray for those in bondage and those who defend them.

I know this is a hard core statement, but I need to say it… The more I study the Bible the more I am convinced that all movies (whatever rated) are in a way just a retelling of Bible history.  For those into romance you have the book of Ruth and Issac & Rebekah.  If you like action, well then David’s life or Samson might be for you!  Others who love the gore stuff will find there way into Revelation and especially Leviticus with bloody lobes flying everywhere as animal sacrifice was quite the bloody mess.  And to top it off there is adult material, PORN, that is from start to finish… For this blog I point to the book of Lamentations where the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah is lamenting the destruction of Babylon at the hands of the Babylonians, and then in the first chapter we are given this analogy of the once glorious city of David, Jerusalem.

Chapter 1

9 Her uncleanness is in her skirts;
She did not consider her destiny;
Therefore her collapse was awesome;
She had no comforter.

“ O LORD, behold my affliction,
For the enemy is exalted!”
10 The adversary has spread his hand
Over all her pleasant things;
For she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary,

Now I don’t need to spell out all of the imagery here, but please allow me to share this.  My wifes sexual organ is pictured as a sanctuary in this imagery.  That means it is to be something special and holy (separated for me!)  Jerusalem was to be for the people of God, a Holy people, yet it was invaded and trampled by foreigners.  Jeremiah sees the city like a harlot, a prostitute.

The details are pretty intense…  The city was touched in the private, when it should have been a place of worship.  This brings me to a exciting point.  Christian marriage and intimacy should be a place of worship to our Lord, in glorifying his relationship with his bride, the CHURCH.

Do you see intamacy like this?  Or has your experience in intimacy so far been like Jeremiah describes?

Remember Jeremiah is Lamenting…  There is no satisfaction in your sanctuary being touched!  Keep the area sacred!

Newest Sex crime’s called sexstortion!!!  Read about it

The above link is from the newest safe eyes newsletter and will be of great benefit to you if you are interested in knowing what the latest is going on in the teenager world.

How to Deal with the Guilt of Sexual Failure for the Glory of Christ and His Global Cause :: Desiring God Christian Resource Library.

This is a must read for those that have struggled with sexual immorality!  Please read!!!

Freedom from Porn.

Check the above link to read a quick article on Apple’s CEO and his heart to curve P**n on it’s products.