Confession’s Cleansing Power

In Australia, ‘real men’ (in their churches) meet to reinvent ‘the shed’ or have a ‘pie night’. This is an important part of male culture. It’s a time when men can be together and discuss their weaknesses, and their addictive or sinful natures; in relative safe privacy of their fellow kind. There is sure to be a similar process in other countries/cultures.

It is important for men, as well as women, to congregate together to hear testimonies of confession.

The power in confession is the vanquishment of the enemy. Satan hates it when we divulge our awful secrets, because, ironically, we become tremendously empowered, as we are not rejected. Indeed, we are ever more respected for having the intestinal fortitude—in plain language, guts—to ‘fess up’ in the presence of our fellow kind.

But one step better than accountability before a group is accountability before one individual. One individual has more power to affirm us, and to gently hold us to account, than a whole group.

Choosing a Mentor To Work on Our Problems

Mentors are crucial in discipleship. They play a critical role in leveraging our growth. And central to our growth is honesty about our weaknesses—our struggles at a sin level—for we all have them.

Think about this: if we have a person who is perhaps 10 years older than us, who is someone we look up to, preferably of the same gender, and we can trust them to hold our darkest secrets, to the point where they won’t reject us, but are prepared to push us to improve—we have our spiritual mentor. We can learn a thing or three from a person like this. Indeed, they, by their wisdom, will facilitate our growth out of these problem areas.

Where we have a will to improve, they, through their sponsorship, will be passionate to help.

And the body of work we collectively work on are the very things we will be confessing—our sins against the Lord.

Trust will work both ways and the power in confession will be realised by mutual courage and transparency within the relationship.

Mentors are wise in this: they know they will learn just as much as we will learn in being mentored. Not only that, but they will be blessed to be a blessing to us.

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Confession has the power to crush the enemy’s wicked design to ruin our lives in shaming secrecy. When we confess our sins God, who is faithful, will forgive us our sins and make us clean.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.