Siblings,
I pray you’re well. With all that we face daily, we have gotta place our trust in someone. For me, that one is Y’shua Jesus. As the Son of the Living God, He also is God, and I know He’s got me covered. I pray that that’s your testimony, too. The joy of our testimonies lies in the fact that they tell others the truth as we know (and experience) it. As we reflect on Today’s Holy Nougat, I pray that we see the reason for testifying.
Romans 10:9 AMP
[9] because if you acknowledge and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord [recognizing His power, authority, and majesty as God], and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
Confession is Good for the Soul
Confession: telling what we know; an admission, either of a crime, i.e., sin, or of one’s beliefs. As a child, I heard the phrase, ‘Confession is good for the soul’, fairly often. Of course, then it applied primarily to my parents’ or teachers’ desire for me to testify to my own (or my knowledge of another’s) guilt for wrongdoing. Yet, in such instances, as with faith confessions, it is good for our souls.
How?, you ask. I’m so glad you did. Let’s start with confession in the negative. If/When we do wrong, it has the tendency to remain on our consciences. Confession takes that away. But the longer we ignore addressing the wrong (i.e., fail to be accountable), the more hardened we become to truth and integrity. Until, eventually, we might even find ourselves unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
Self-Check
Has any of that ever happened to you before? I didn’t get totally hardened, but I’d even convinced myself of my ‘innocence’, then God helped me see how far away I was drifting… and i got reigned in.
Application
Positive confession, the kind that relates to our faith, operates from a similar principle, but in the other direction. It deepens our relationship with God, so it becomes well with our souls. When we acknowledge (i.e., we recognize) God’s worth, it is likely that we are drawn heart first, into worship. Worship includes confession. It is about praising God for Who God is, for God’s God-ness.
While we tend to see confession as solely verbal (spoken) I however, I’d like to suggest that it is also nonverbal. Our actions must also be in worship, acknowledging God’s identity and character. In Aesop’s fable of the fox and the woodcutter, the tale ends with the fox speaking of the woodcutter’s insincerity. The fox said, while you denied seeing me with your dirty lips, you betrayed me with your fingertips. The fox was correct. What saved the fox was the hunters’ inability to read the clue.
But others looking on don’t miss our actions.
So we say, God is my provider, yet we’re always hoarding and worried about the next step of our faith journey.
So we say, Jesus is my deliverer, but at the first sign of trouble we try to craft our own solutions, or turn to psychics and prophets, instead of turning to Him in prayer.
So we say, forgive us our sins AS we forgive, yet we hold grudges and instigate wars against others forever.
Siblings, confessing Y’shua as Lord begins with acknowledgement within ourselves. It may even include confession of our wrongs as we make things right with God. It implies that we believe in Jesus’ divinity … which we’ll discuss next time, God’s willing.
Point to Ponder
If confession is good for the soul, what is the state of our souls, based on our positive and negative confessions about Christ?
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May all we seek be found in Christ
