This Lenten Season, Place Your Pride on His Altar

A Pleasing Sacrifice

One thing inside us naturally resists confessing. It’s straightforward for us to rise to our personal protection. It’s straightforward for us accountable another person. It’s straightforward to argue inside ourselves that what we did was not that unhealthy in spite of everything. It’s straightforward to check ourselves to others and conclude that we’re not doing as badly as them. It’s straightforward to be self-righteous and defensive when approached with a unsuitable. However confession is counterintuitive. Each guardian is aware of that trustworthy, humble confession is unnatural. For those who ask your youngster why he did what he did, he gained’t speak about himself. He’ll level to his sibling or he’ll level to the scenario, however he gained’t say, “It was me. I’m a insurgent and a sinner, and I alone am at fault.”

I’ve an embarrassing private instance of the problem of confession. I used to be on a talking journey and staying on the dwelling of one of many households within the church. It was a stunning, well-decorated home, crammed with advantageous furnishings. In my room was a big and exquisite leather-based lounge chair. After I communicate, I like my garments to be wrinkle-free, so, earlier than the times after I would keep in motels the place irons are offered, I at all times traveled with a small iron. I seemed round for a spot to iron my garments, and the large leather-based chair appeared like the most suitable choice. I put a towel on it, heated up the iron, and commenced to press my garments. I had pressed my pants, set the iron upright on the towel, and walked over to get my shirt. I circled solely to find that the iron had fallen, had landed facedown on the seat of that chair, and had burned the leather-based. I couldn’t consider it. I then spent method an excessive amount of time fascinated about how I’d break the unhealthy information of how my hosts’ lovely chair now had a big burn mark, however I spent much more time making an attempt to persuade myself that this wasn’t really my fault.

I used to be the one one within the room. I used to be the one ironing. I used to be the one who made the choice to iron on that stunning chair. I had walked away and left a scorching iron in a precarious place. It was my fault. I needed to go downstairs and inform my host what I had accomplished. The truth that it was so exhausting was a humbling non secular lesson for me. Because of this confession is such a lovely sacrifice to your Lord. It requires you to silence all of the self-aggrandizing, self-righteous voices in your life. It forces you to confess that you simply’re far more spiritually needy than you wish to suppose you might be. It asks you to confess that you simply’re an individual in fixed want of forgiveness. It causes you to confess that your greatest downside just isn’t your historical past, your loved ones, your pals, your tradition, your financial scenario, your church, your neighbors, your age, or your bodily situation. Confession requires you to confess that your greatest issues stay inside you, in your coronary heart. It smashes any delusion of comfy independence. It yanks you away from non secular self-reliance. Confession drives you to the ft of God as your sovereign Lord and Savior, to honor him for who he’s, and to cry for assist due to who you might be. Confession is agreeable to God as a result of it places you proper in the midst of the place you had been created to be in: humble, trustworthy dependence on him.

How about coming to God with the pleasing sacrifice of confession?

No passage captures this higher than Hosea 14:1–3:

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
     for you’ve gotten stumbled due to your iniquity.
Take with you phrases
      and return to the Lord;
say to him,
     “Take away all iniquity;
settle for what is sweet,
     and we can pay with bulls
     the vows of our lips.
Assyria shall not save us;
     we is not going to experience on horses;
and we are going to say no extra,
     ‘Our God,’ to the work of our arms.
In you the orphan finds mercy.”

Hosea is a message of exhortation and warning to individuals who have wandered away from God. The phrase image for this warning is marital adultery. God’s folks have dedicated non secular adultery. Non secular adultery is loving one thing greater than God, inflicting us to need and do what God has prohibited. Sin is non secular adultery. Within the face of this, Hosea calls God’s folks to return, as an adulterous partner would return to the one he promised his lifelong like to.

However on the heart of this name to return is that this request: “Take with you phrases . . . ‘we can pay with bulls the vows of our lips.’” It’s a bit exhausting within the English translation to know what’s being requested right here. God is saying, “There’s a sacrifice I would like you to make; it’s the sacrifice of your lips, that’s, confession.” God wished them to do extra than simply carry the required animal sacrifices. He wished them to carry a much more pricey sacrifice: trustworthy, humble confession, freed from excuse or blame-shifting. Confession is tough, however it’s easy. Confession solely takes three phrases: “I’ve sinned.” Confession is naming and proudly owning the sin with no contingencies added. However there’s one other a part of the sacrifice of your lips. It’s acknowledging that your solely hope is the forgiving and remodeling grace of the Lord. “Assyria shall not save us; / we is not going to experience on horses; / and we are going to say no extra, ‘Our God,’/ to the work of our arms. / In you the orphan finds mercy” (Hos. 14:3). Sin is a large number we can not independently get ourselves out of. Sin cries out for grace as a result of grace is the sinner’s solely hope in life and in demise.

So this Lenten season, don’t simply quit bodily stuff. How about coming to God with the pleasing sacrifice of confession? Come to him this season and place your delight on his altar, confessing your wandering coronary heart and acknowledging as soon as once more that you’re a individual in want of mercy, and the mercy you want is discovered solely in him.

On this season of sacrifice, take phrases with you and return to your Lord.

This text is customized from Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional by Paul David Tripp.

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