August 22 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy" (Prov. 28:13).

Devotional

It is important for you, O believer, to cultivate a habit daily of confessing your sins to your God.

First, a sense of guilt upon the conscience will invariably occasion distant views of God.

The moment Adam became conscious of having sinned, he hid himself from God. He sought concealment from the endearing presence of him with whom he had walked in sweet and confiding communion in the cool of the evening. It is also so now!

Unconfessed sin—guilt upon the conscience—imparts misty, gloomy, distorted views of God. You lose the clear endearing view of his character that you once had. You do not dare to look up with holy, humble boldness. You misinterpret his dealings and think harshly of his ways. Thus, if providences are dark and afflictions come, you quickly exclaim, "I have sinned and God is angry." And so you seek to hide from God. You sink the Father into the Judge, and the child into the slave.

A second evil that results from unconfessed sin is that it produces a hardening tendency upon the conscience. To a child of God, who has felt and mourned over the power of sin, we need not prove how hardening is the tendency of sin. You already know how it crusts the heart with a callousness which no human power can soften, and which often requires heavy affliction to remove.

O child of God, if you neglect the habit of a daily confession of sin, then, by slow and almost imperceptible degrees, your conscience will lose its tenderness. By this gradual process, it will become so hardened at length as to think nothing of a sin which previously would have filled your soul with horror and remorse.

We may mention a third evil. A neglect of this most important duty causes a fearful forgetfulness of sin without the sweet sense of its forgiveness. You lose sight of your sin, not because you know it to be pardoned, blotted out anew, but rather from a mere carnal forgetfulness of the sin.

The child of God, on whose conscience the atoning blood has been freshly sprinkled, cannot soon forget his sin. Oh no! Freed from a sense of its condemnation, delivered from its guilt, and looking up to the unclouded face of a reconciled God, yet you remember how far you could depart from the God who so loved you, and so readily and freely forgave you. The very pardon of your sin stamps it upon your memory. You think of it only to admire the love, adore the grace, and extol the blood that blotted it out. And thus you are led to go softly all your days. "My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me" (Lam. 3:20).

But, O believer, if you neglect the duty and the privilege of confession, then you lose the remembrance of your sin until your Father brings you under the rod of the covenant. Then some deep and heavy chastisement recalls it to your memory, and fills you with shame, humiliation, and contrition.

In this state, the Eternal Spirit comes into your soul with his restoring mercies and leads you—abased and humbled afresh—to the "fountain opened" (Zech. 13:1). And God, the God of all comfort, speaks in words of comfort to your broken heart, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

No, not despairingly come I to thee;
no, not distrustingly bend I the knee:
sin hath gone over me,
yet is this still my plea,
Jesus hath died.

(Horatius Bonar, 1866)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.