We are in the midst of a six week series of sermons on prayer.  Last week I shared with you that prayer is the most ancient, widely practiced therapy on earth.  And yet, we can sometimes get stuck in its practice.  I have been helped by the 2959 Prayer Plan by Peter Lord, which has been revised recently.  This loose leaf notebook helps to guide me through the healthy development of prayer.  Peter Lord mentioned five components to prayer that were labeled on a drawing of a hand – awe (which is our response to the character of God), gratitude (which is our response to the goodness of God), confession (which is our response to the holiness of God), intercession (which is our response to the love of God for all people), and petition (which is my response to the power and wisdom of God for my life). Across the palm of the visual aid was written one word – listen – reminding us of the importance of pausing to hear God’s voice.  Today we move into the third aspect of prayer – confession. 

Confession is good for the soul, according to an old Scottish proverb.  Louis Cassels, a 20^th Century pastor and writer declared, “In confession... we open our lives to healing, reconciling, restoring, uplifting grace of him who loves us in spite of what we are.”  Confession is good for the soul, but exactly what is confession?  The first definition offered by Merriam-Webster is, “a disclosure of one’s sin in the sacrament of reconciliation.”  Even though as Methodists we do not have confessionals or a sacrament of reconciliation, I do think this definition gets at the heart of the intent of confession moving us toward reconciliation. There are three stages to confession that I would like to address today.  They are found in the prayer of Ezra and the people’s response as recorded in Nehemiah 9 and 10.  The three stages of confession that is good for the soul are recognition, repentance, and reliance.
 

The first stage of Confession is recognition of the reality.

The book of Nehemiah is a great book.  Nehemiah was the cup bearer to the King of Persia.  When he discovered that Jerusalem was still in ruins years after exiles were allowed to return, he became depressed.  The king sent Nehemiah to Jerusalem to address the situation, where he exhorted the residents to rebuild the walls and return to God.  For the first time in centuries the people celebrated the Festival of Booths and now they have returned fasting and wearing sackcloth and ashes – all signs of repentance and mourning.  They were deeply sorry for the sins of their people.  Nehemiah called a family meeting and held the Jews accountable for the violation of a sacred covenant.  The confession began in Nehemiah 9:6 in a prayer offered by Ezra the priest.  Throughout chapter nine there is a recognition of God’s goodness and of the people of God’s grumblings, ingratitude and blatant disrespect. 

Ezra began his prayer by recognizing God’s goodness in creation and in the call of Abram (whom God renamed Abraham as a sign of this childless elderly man becoming the father of many).  The prayer continued by remembering how God liberated the people from Egypt, sustained the people in the wilderness and led them into the Promised Land where according to verse 25, “they ate and were filled and became fat and delighted themselves in your great goodness.”  There was a recognition of the goodness of God.

There was also a recognition of the grumblings, ingratitude, and blatant disrespect of the people of God.  As soon as they were out of Egypt, they stiffened their necks and were determined to return to their slavery in Egypt. They were recipients of divine intervention and yet cast an image of a golden calf to be their god.  They were eating God’s provisions and casting God’s law behind their backs, disregarding all that it had for them.  Finally, they were dealt with and were taken into exile as a result of their faithlessness.  Ezra recognized the tragedy of the way things played out as he lamented in Nehemiah 9:36, “Here we are, slaves to this day – slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts.”  Ezra and Nehemiah expressed solidarity with their people to say that if it was being done in the name of who they were, then they shared in the culpability.  They were broken.  They had taken the goodness of God and responded with ingratitude.  They had taken the commandments of God and responded with disobedience.  They were broken and Nehemiah knew that it would take more than repairing walls to rebuild the city, he needed to repair the hearts and that started with a recognition of God’s goodness and their brokenness.  Brokenness mustn’t be ignored.

When I was in seminary I was driving a borrowed Datsun B210.  For those of you that can remember this very compact car, the sense that I had to borrow one tells you enough of my financial situation.  One evening I had a blow out in that car.  It was one of those days.  I got out of the car, looked at the tire, and went to slam the car door.  I came to my senses quickly enough and just flipped it closed.  Even with that the left front window shattered.  I could not believe it – a borrowed Datsun B210 with a flat tire and a broken window.  Did I mention that I borrowed the car from my mother-in-law? I just couldn’t tell Tammy.  We didn’t have the money to get it fixed, so I simply pretended that it wasn’t broken – for almost a year.  That made for a hot summer, a cold winter, and a very wet drive every time it rained.  One day, I made the mistake of taking Tammy’s car to run an errand.  For some reason she needed to make a quick run somewhere.  I had some serious ’splainin’ to do when I got home.  The window was fixed that day.  Of course, the first step to getting it fixed was to acknowledge that it was broken.

The same thing is true with our lives.  We get so accustomed to accommodating for our brokenness or blaming it on other people and participating factors, that we have a hard time standing in the presence of God and saying, “I am broken.  I am a sinner.  I have been ungrateful for what you have given me and have even consciously misused some of those gifts.” Perhaps what Ezra said in his prayer in Nehemiah 9:36 strikes home, Here we are, slaves to this day – slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts.  I invite you to take the first step to confession with a recognition of the reality in your life.  Confession is good for the soul.
 

The second stage of Confession is repentance of behavior.

The last verse of Nehemiah 9 reported that the leaders of Jerusalem signed and sealed an agreement with God. No longer would they wander around broken, they were determined to repent.  Repent means literally to turn around and go a different direction.  The people of Jerusalem committed themselves to three basic changes in behavior.  They would keep their faith pure and not intermarry with the people of the land who brought their own religion into the marriage.  This did not work in Solomon’s times and it would not work in Nehemiah’s time.  The people of God had a long history of accommodation and becoming more like the people around them than being the light to the Gentiles that they were called to be.  So they determined step on the first act of repentance was no more accommodation.  The next change was to observe the Sabbath.  For decades merchants had arrived at the city gates every day with food and merchandise.  No more.  On the Sabbath the gates would be closed to merchants.  No more violation of the Sabbath.  A little note on this matter – generally those of us who forget the Sabbath, forget who is God.  We think that we can’t afford to take a day off every week and fool ourselves into thinking that it “all depends on me.”  The second act of repentance was no more violation of the Sabbath.  The third change was to give proportionally.  The people of Jerusalem had become lax in their giving.  The Temple had not been provided for and the Levites had been neglected.  The leaders repented of this behavior and turned back to the proportional giving of a tithe, a tenth of that which God had given to them.  No more misappropriation of God’s gifts.  Three clear acts of repentance to correct their course as a people – no more accommodation of the faith, no more violation of the Sabbath, and no more misappropriation of life’s blessings.

This past Sunday our Youth Group brought a resolution to the Church Council encouraging us as a church to think before we buy.  It is possible that in an effort to save some money, we may actually be costing another human being great pain.  You see, many of our everyday commodities are produced by some of the 27 million slaves that exist in the world today.  Forced labor is not a thing of the past limited to our 19^th century America.  In fact, there are more slaves today worldwide than there were in the mid-1800’s, and with the global economy it is much easier for us to participate in this injustice than ever before.  Our youth want to repent of this wrong.  Like Nehemiah and Ezra they feel a strong solidarity with us and with our country in our participation in modern day slavery.  But repentance is not easy.  Our discussion last week demonstrated that we actually have to do our homework on this so that in our effort to right a wrong, we do not cause greater harm.  So a group of individuals in this church are looking into modern day slavery and what the church, what this church can do to help abolish it. 

It would have been a lot easier for the people of Jerusalem to just keep things as they were – blend their religion with the others and they wouldn’t stick out in society, buy every day and they wouldn’t be out of supplies, give what they wanted and they wouldn’t run out of money. But they knew confession is good for the soul.  Confession is not only a recognition of the reality, but also a repentance of behavior.
 

The third stage of Confession is reliance upon the presence of God.

It is just one line found at the end of Nehemiah 10, but it stood out to me as a profound line.  It reads, “We will not neglect the house of our God.”  F. Charles Fengham pointed out in his commentary on Nehemiah that the Temple united all those loose elements of Jewish families returning from exile.  It bound them in service to God and in their service to others.  “We will not neglect the house of our God.” I know this is talking about fixing up the Temple and restoring proper worship there, but it seems to mean even more.  It is an awareness that we do not do this alone.  It is an encouragement to be in relationship with God and rely on God’s presence and power to enable us to live properly.

Last week I was up at the church one evening and a student whom I had never met walked into the Welcome Center.  He said he wanted to talk with a pastor and I introduced myself.  He began to talk about a great deal of shame and guilt that he had been carrying around for some time.  He told me that he thought he had done things for which God could never forgive him.  I tried to listen with my soul as well as with my ears.  It was as if the Lord began to speak to my soul, “He is not afraid that I cannot forgive him, but fears that I will forgive him and begin transforming his life.”  I don’t remember ever thinking about that before, but it dawned on me at that moment that forgiveness from God is amazingly simple.  God has already arranged for that, but not simply forgiveness for forgiveness sake.  God wants to transform our lives – live through us, change the world, communicate divine care and love – all through us. 

We will not neglect the house of our God, the people of Jerusalem proclaimed.  The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians in I Corinthians 3:16, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s spirit dwells in you?”  Are you ready for God to live through you, forgive you and transform you?  Confession is good for the soul.

When I did a search for the origin of that quote, I found another curious quote from Peter DeVries.  DeVries was an editor and novelist who died 17 years ago.  My favorite quote of his is, “Everybody hates me, because I’m so universally liked.”  Regarding confession he wrote, “Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.”  I tend to agree with him if confession is limited to the first stage discussed here.  To reach the remedy we must accomplish all three stages of confession: recognition of the reality, repentance of the behavior, and reliance on the presence of God.  As we offer ourselves to God with this level of honesty and commitment, I believe that we will discover that indeed Confession is good for the soul.  Amen.