Valley Lights Church Podcast
Closer than You Think- Part 2 Confession
In this series, we're looking at the book of 1 John. So it's a good opportunity during the summer to look at the book of the Bible if you're looking for a book to read. This is a really good one. In this book, I wanna help people who have said, I wanna feel closer to God. Hopefully have an opportunity to not just feel closer to God, but know just how close they are to God. This is a book, 1 John was a book that was written for people who've decided to make Jesus the boss of their life. They've decided to become a Christian. And maybe somebody who was here last week has tried out some of the things we talked about. Maybe he tried out having fellowship with God. I hope that went well. Again, during this series, that should be something, there's a lot of things we'll be covering that hopefully we'll encourage you as you look to have fellowship with God. And today we're gonna be looking at something that may not be something that you really wanna think about or look at. It's actually the worst thing about us. But it's something that if we take a serious look at daily, we really think about, it really will help us know just how close God is to us and how much He loves us. So I wanna start with another story about my spiritual journey. It actually takes place very close to the season that I was talking about at the beginning of last week. But I was going through a time where God was just making me just very, very aware of the sin that was in my life. Very specific things too. This wasn't like this vague sense that I was just bad or just a bad guy. By nature, I'm not naturally a rule follower. I sometimes sometimes don't see that all the rules apply to me. So just obeying the rules is not very attractive to me. But during this season, I just really had this sense that there were things that God was putting His finger on and saying, this is sin. This is not right. And I was having a real struggle with this. And so I was having to give things up. I was ending relationships or I wasn't hanging out with certain friends. And so I met with my pastor, my old pastor at the time, his name's Randy. I say his name, number one, 'cause it makes the story, I guess, make more sense. But my son's middle name is Randall. And we actually named him after Randy because of the huge impact this guy made on my life. And the kind of person that he was is definitely the kind of person we hope that our son would be. But this is a guy that I really love him because he calls things like it is. And we were meeting together and I was telling him how I was just really having trouble because I was thinking, I've given up all this stuff. And some of this I really miss. Or I'm really struggling 'cause part of me doesn't wanna do these things. But part of me kinda does. I was really having trouble giving up these sins. And my pastor looked at me and he said, "Your problem is you don't hate sin." Well, that certainly floored me. And he was right. Yeah, you're right. I don't hate this sin. What's going on there? Why is it that on one hand, I really really wanna be about God's things. But on the other hand, I'm kinda just kinda feeling like I'm missing out on something by doing it his way. What's that about? Well, he was right and actually I knew, because I know who he is, I knew that this probably came from the Bible. This wasn't just his opinion. So I was reading in the book of Romans and one day I stumbled upon the verse basically that he's talking about. In Romans 12, 9 it says, "Love must be sincere. "Hate what is evil or hate what is sinful. "Cling to what is good." He was right and this passage is right. That wasn't my attitude at this time. I was kind of still kind of playing with the idea that maybe God's way wasn't the best. Maybe I knew I needed to do it, but maybe God was gonna rip me off if I didn't do things my way. So I bring this up because first John really forces us to take a look at sin and he doesn't really give us this opportunity to kind of play around with it. He makes it very clear to us what the relationship between the person who says, I'm all in, I'm following Jesus Christ. He's the boss, he's in charge, in sin. He's gonna make it very, very clear for us today. So how do you feel about sin? How do you feel about your sin? If there's anything that comes to your mind that you go, yeah, I've been kind of playing with that or here's a sin that God's kind of made clear to me. How do you feel about that? Do you have a lingering sense of guilt all the time? Maybe this is just kind of like your general spiritual sense. You've just had this sense of guilt and you don't really know how to get rid of that thing. You believe that you're saved from your sins, but you just kind of maybe don't know how you stand between you and God. Like there's maybe something that's between you and God, there's just lingering sense. Hopefully today we'll be able to clear that up, that lingering sense of guilt. Or do you think that there's something missing in your growth and knowing God? Do you feel like you're just not progressing in areas where you think you should be progressing in feeling connected to God or being connected to God? This may be a good message for you. Or maybe you've been walking with God for a while and you just need some encouragement to keep going in your walk with faith. Today, 1 John has a lot of really helpful things for us to do. So the goal of this series, like I've said, is that we want to help people not just feel close to God, but know just how close God is. So the first little blank there, if you're following along, and I say this every time, 'cause I don't like to miss the blanks for all the blank people out there, is we can keep a clear relationship with God by confessing our sin. So very important. That's what this whole thing's gonna be about today. But let's look at the text today. I'm gonna jump into two different areas with the same passage of 1 John, but in 1 John 1, 5 through 7, it says, "This is the message that we've heard from him "and declared to you. "God is light and there is absolutely no darkness in him. "If we claim we have fellowship with him, "and yet we walk in darkness, "we are lying and are not practicing the truth. "If we walk in the light, as he himself is in the light, "we have fellowship with one another "in the blood of Jesus, his son cleanses us from all sin." So two things right off the bat that I wanna highlight is like we discussed last week, if our goal is to know how close we are to God, we must take advantage of just the unbelievable honor and privilege that we have to have fellowship with him. That's the first part of 1 John. We can have fellowship with God. That is unbelievable. We have the hottest ticket in town. We can spend time with God. Today, we're gonna look at, there's like a proof that we're having fellowship with God that it's really closely tied to this attitude with sin. How we relate to sin and our love for others is the same thing as following Jesus. So we're gonna look at those over the next two weeks, but you're gonna see that these things are just tightly, tightly bound in John's mind. And again, like I said last week, John's the expert. I've walked with God for a long time. I know some things that are just so clear to me because I've experienced it with walking with God. But John, reading his letter, it's just very, very clear. This guy touched him, he felt him, he watched Jesus teach, all this sort of thing. So we really wanna take it seriously when he highlights something that just seems kind of strange to us, how tightly he sees these three things tied together. So that's what we're gonna be talking about for the next two weeks. So at the beginning of this, it says, God is light in him is no darkness. Basically, he says it kind of positively, God is light, and in him is no darkness, kind of a negative way. By showing it this way, he's just trying to really clarify this idea of who God is. And he's not saying that God's character is light in the sense of like, oh, we turned on the lights in here today. It's really bright outside, so there's light. God's not like a light bulb. He's not only around when it's light outside. When it's dark outside, does God suddenly go away or he's not involved in our life? No, what he's talking about here is really God's moral character. He's just drawing kind of an illustration. God is light. When we see pure light, we know it. And when we see a little shadow, we can see that because of the light. And when it's just darkness, we know that. It's just darkness. We know the difference. He's trying to draw this contrast in God's moral character. The kind of person that God is, is morally light. It's just clear. He doesn't have even a shadow of what we have, sin. In the same way, if we have fellowship with God, we've decided, hey, we're gonna step into that light. We're not gonna be shadow people. We're not gonna be in the darkness. The people who walk with God, it's actually pretty clear in John's mind because they're people that walk in the light. They stay in the light. No darkness for us. So if we're serious, if this is how seriously John really saw sin, a question that we have to ask is, how seriously do we take sin? So I wanted to define sin. There's, this is something that the longer you walk with God, there was a time where I was like, oh, I know what sin is. This is easy. It's like, you do bad easily. Or you do good and it's not sin. That's the opposite. The longer I walk with God, every once in a while, as I'm reading the Bible, I'll find like a new little taste to sin that you kind of go, okay, this is stickier than I thought. This is harder than I thought to understand 'cause it's not just doing bad. The picture of sin, especially when you put it in contrast to God, is drastic, it's stark. I think that's probably why he's using this light in darkness, it's kind of like that. When we've decided to follow God, we've started a place of just complete hopelessness. And a way some people talk about sin is it's falling short of God. Obviously in Romans it says, falling short of the glory of God. So we fall short. And I was just thinking about this this morning, the Olympics has started. So this illustration's fresh off the press. My wife and I were joking yesterday how it's so easy to watch the Olympics and suddenly you become like this expert on the sport. I mean, they're telling you about, you know, oh, the gymnast needs to point his toes or he needs to, oh, that half step, that's a point one off. And we watched the men's gymnastics qualifiers, the only time of any given four year period that I watched men's gymnastics. And we're watching it and this guy Brody Malone, really great guy. Should I need to stop saying people's names 'cause it's like calling him out. He's a great guy, expert at his field, falls off the pommel horse. And what do I say? Oh man, he did better than I did. No, what I said was, oh, well, he should have done better. A little while later we watch another guy and he literally does the most magnificent vault that's ever been done. He does so many spins, it's almost mind blowing. And he lands and my wife says, he didn't point his toes. So the Rogers, we are now gymnastics experts because of the, what is it like, a couple, you know, an hour of watching gymnastics. Basically, if we, that's us judging these gymnastics and they're excellent, they're perfect. These guys are great. If I got up on the pommel horse, it would be a complete disaster. We know this. I mean, me stepping up on stage sometimes I trip. So you can only imagine me on the pommel horse, but when it comes to us living up to God's standard, we just fall short. The way the Bible describes it is that before Jesus Christ, before Jesus, on my best day, I might do things that we would look around and everybody would say, oh, I buried in some good things. On my best day, I always fall off the pommel horse. We always fall short of God's glory. Once we've accepted Christ, once we've decided to make Jesus the boss, we've turned our life over to him, we have a hope of staying on the pommel horse from time to time and it's completely tied to Jesus Christ's grace. So every once in a while, though, we're gonna fall off. And that's really kind of what Jesus, I mean, John is not talking about the Olympics. Let's go off that illustration for a second. But that's what he's saying with sin. In verse eight through 10, I have those up there as well. It says, if we say we have no sin, we're deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar in his word is not in us. This is the tension that we now live in in Christ. And this is actually one of the reasons I was really excited to do first, John. I've really, over the last few years, just been really in awe of God's holiness. And it's powerful to think of just how unsinful God is. Just zero sin, he is light, he's just pure. And if you would ask me 20 years ago, what I thought was like the coolest thing about walking with God, I'd say answer to prayer, right? Say being able to help somebody come to Christ. And those things are great. But this is naturally at this stage of my life, I feel like just so much more powerful about who God is that he has no sin. Because so much of my life, I have battled with this whole thing of I wanna do the thing that God says not to do. But this is a really helpful passage for us because it's saying, hey listen, if you say you have no sin, we've got a problem. You're deceiving yourself. And I've heard messages before on confession and I've had that weird thought that I probably wouldn't say in front of a whole group of people, but it's this thought that I go, well, I know I have something, but I can't think of it right now. I don't know, if we say we have no sin, and we've got a real big problem. It says actually we're deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. And again, John writes this, he's not just writing this to people who he wants to encourage in their faith. He's also writing this to counteract some lies that were out there in the church. There were some people that had left the church. And the kinds of things that they were saying is that, hey, listen, after Christ, there's no sin or a person can come to faith in Christ, they can follow God and continue sinning. Basically what John's saying is, hey, I'm taking that away from you. You can't do that. There is no way to do that. Like this is the guy that's, he was face to face with Christ. He walked with Christ. He followed Christ. He was inspired by God to write this. And he says, if we think we haven't sinned, then we're deceiving ourselves. If we continue sinning after following God, then we make him out to be a liar. We make God out to be a liar and his word is not in us. So we've got a real problem here. If we're at this spot where we can't really see that we have sin, we got a problem. If you can see that you have sinned, you're sitting there going, well, no, that's not my problem. I actually know that I have sinned. Well, then we can work. We can work together. There's some really real big hope that this passage hubs for you. I want to stress that John wrote this book to people who have already made this decision to follow Christ. And like I shared last week, John, if you read it, and maybe you've started reading it, hopefully you have, you go through, and it is kind of confusing at first 'cause it can kind of feel like he's jumping from topic to topic. And again, yes, you've seen it come and if you were here last week, I'm bringing up lasagna again. But it can feel like it's disconnected, like a bowl of spaghetti, like it's all together, just kind of, oh, he talked about this topic and then he talked about this topic. But it is like this lovely, yummy piece of lasagna. He talks about one subject and then another subject, but then he comes back to it. So there's layers to this thing. And I think the purpose of him building these layers is that he wants to, like a well-formed lasagna, bring it all together into one coherent thing and show you how tightly it's connected. I wanna share three verses, one that we just already read, and then two others that just kind of illustrate this a little bit closer together, like how tightly together John sees things tied together. So the first one is first John, one through seven, and it says, if we walk in the light, as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. So we see three things. I'm gonna walk up to the screen here. If we walk in the light, so that's fellowship with God, that's kind of like what we've talked about last week. We have fellowship with one another, so that's kind of like our love for others. And then the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. So that's our relationship to sin. So these three things are fellowship to him or maybe our belief in him. A lot of times as Christians, we in America, I would say, I don't know, again, maybe other places don't have that. And again, I'm thinking about the Olympics. I'm thinking maybe in other parts of the world, they don't have this problem. I know us here, we have this problem where we dissect the Christian faith to be like this part, and then this part, and then this part. Like you can come to church here on Sunday morning, and then you've done Christianity. That's it. What John is challenging us here is that it doesn't just end at our spiritual practice or saying that we believe in something or maybe even fellowship with God. The work of the Holy Spirit in our life produces some things. One is our attitude towards sin, and the other is our attitude towards our fellow believers. Now again, I say fellow believers, 'cause that's what John's talking about. It could be other people too. He wants us to love all people. But really our brothers and sisters, because this is the spiritual family we're a part of. Another one to highlight is 1 John 3, 23. It says, now this is the command. This is his command. So we're talking his commands, which that's kind of like your sin, or yeah, our sin is outside the command. So this is the command that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he commanded. So our attitude towards sin, our attitude towards Christ, and our attitude towards one another is tied together. Another one, 1 John 5, 2. This is how we know that we've loved God's children. Okay, so he switched it up a little bit. How do you know that you love God's children? Oh, by loving them, taking care of them, doing things. No, he says, when we love God and we obey his commands. So again, we see these three things. They're just tied together and he can change the order up over and over and over. How do we know that we haven't sinned? Well, we love God and we love people. It's tied together. This is the fruit and the product of life with God. I noticed this connection like 20 years ago. I had done this, we just recently got back from Louisiana. I went to the church that I grew up in. I pretty much stood in the spot where I taught this before. But it's amazing to see how much change God has made in my life. But there's a lot that maybe I've become more aware of. Really, the fact that these things are tied together should lead us to get really, really serious about not just having fellowship with God because we wouldn't have come to church today if we didn't want to know more about being close to God, having fellowship with God. But our attitude towards sin in our attitude towards loving others is deeply tied into that. So it's not a segmented thing. It's not something where we can say, I'm going to get really serious about having fellowship with God because the more serious you get about having fellowship with God and you're really fellowshifting with God, your attitude towards sin is going to change and our attitude towards loving others is going to change. So there's other places in the Bible that talk about the connection between sin and our relationship with God. And as I was kind of going through this, I think that the question that kept coming to my mind is what do I believe actually happens when I sin? Because if you follow Christ, your sins are forgiven. But what happens moving forward? Because it'd be really easy to say, well, if my sins are forgiven, then moving forward, I guess, I mean, I think it's, my pastor talks about, you know, getting serious about sin or, you know, not doing what God, doing things according to God's word, what God's commanded. But is that kind of like a sunny school like bonus? Like I get a sticker, if I continue, or is it just kind of like, well, just try to do the right thing, kind of, is there actually something that happens when I sin? There is. Psalm 66, 18 says, if I have cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. In Isaiah 59, too, it says, but your iniquities have separated you from God. Your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear. Okay, so if you're looking to have fellowship with God, just those two verses alone make it very clear that you're gonna have problems having fellowship with God if we don't take our sin seriously. In Psalm 51, 12, it says, this is, David has just blown it big time. He's committed adultery, murdered somebody, big sins, and he says, restore to me the joy of my salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. So Psalm 51 is a great passage if you've ever felt like you screwed up, it's a good one to read. But in verse 12, basically what he's saying is that he's lost the joy of connection with God because of his sin. So obviously we don't wanna do that. And honestly, it should actually cause us to say, is there an area where we've lost the joy that comes from relationship with God because of our sin? Something that we haven't been taking seriously. In Ephesians 1, 4, it says, for he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. He made us, he didn't just save us just so that our sins are forgiven, we can go about our life. He really is trying to make us into something and the goal is for us to be holy. So God loves us like a father. It says in Hebrews 12, 12, four through, actually, I'm sorry, I'm skipping ahead. But basically like a father, it says that the God disciplines the one he loves. And he does this specifically, it says in verse 11, "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." So God doesn't just discipline us just because he just wants to come down on us and make us feel awful or beat us up or he hates us. No, he actually loves us like a father. And like a father, he disciplines us because he wants us to do things not just right, like obey the rules and be good. He really wants us to be holy the way he is so that we could have the same joy that he has. So all these things, I could keep going. I mean, another one that I just really like is Matthew 5, Matthew 5, which says, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God." So a person that's pure in heart, pure from sin, will see God. So basically, if your goal is to see God, hear from God, fellowship with God, if your goal is to have joy in who God is and the relationship with God, if you're looking to not be disciplined by God, all those things would lead us to say, we've got to take our sin extremely serious. So for today, I just want to highlight the extremely good news that's found in verse nine. If John, if you could put back up, first John 1-9, it says in the middle, I put this all together. Sorry, this is my fault. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So if we believe that our sin separates us from God, if we believe that Jesus has paid the price so that our sin has been forgiven, when we sin moving forward, God gives us this amazing tool that's found only in Christ that we could be cleansed of sin in its basically confession. And we all need this. And we all need to be reminded of this because it's easy as we walk with God over a long period of time to forget that we need to take the time to confess sin. Sin is sticky, sin is deceptive. It's very easy for us to get lost in just the day-to-day life. And to miss the fact that we either even have sin, but God does give us a way that we could have a clear relationship with him. So why wouldn't we do this? I came up with a couple different things, but think about it for yourself. If you know that you could confess your sin, why would you be hesitant to do it? Maybe you're not ready to stop doing the sin that God has called out for you. I have definitely been here before. If you're not ready to give up that sin, then obviously it would make sense to confess it. I would challenge you to take advantage of what God's provided us and to confess that sin. Or you feel like you can't forgive yourself for what you've done. I actually hear this one a lot. You feel like you can't forgive yourself for what you've done, and you feel like you need to pay for the sin. This is a really, really sticky one. In this day and age where we focus so much on mental health and our self-care, the way we see ourselves, Jesus paid the price on the cross that we could be free from our sin. So if he says that he forgives us, what is that if we don't forgive ourself? That would have to be arrogance or pride. I know for me, I've definitely experienced this where I kind of had this lingering feeling like I couldn't forgive myself or something and I realized what it was. It was that feeling of, and I feel like this was my attitude through most of the 20s and 30s of my life has been, I know I should have done better. I know I should have done better. Or I could do better than that. Why am I not, that's all pride. It's really, really humbling to confess our sin. And it's definitely not something that's easy, but that's kind of the point. As we bring our sin to God, we're saying with God, God, I get the way you feel about this. I agree, I don't want it either. When we say it with God, God forgives us. 'Cause we get it. The other thing would be unawareness. Like maybe you don't confess sin because you're unaware. Well, today, hopefully you're aware. We're all, we've all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So that's one thing I know about the whole room. And me in general, in particular, is we've all sinned. So we need to be aware that we need to be about confessing sin. God has given us this letter, first John, to really give us this opportunity to encourage us in the fact that we're not gonna walk this perfectly. But we can confess our sin. So if you've gotten to the second layer of lasagna where John talks about sin, you might start getting confused at this point and saying like, 'cause it says, my little children, I'm writing you these things so that you may not sin. This can get kind of confusing. Well, he said he's writing this that we don't sin in verse three, which that's actually the second layer of the lasagna. In chapter three, he says, if we walk with Christ, we do not sin. It kind of starts getting confusing. What is he saying? He's saying like if you become a Christian, you don't sin, but you just said you're a liar. If you say you haven't gone on sinning. And this is kind of partially just confusing just because of the language. We're going from Greek to English so it gets a little confusing. But John has put enough clues in here to try to clear these things up. Is that we know that if we follow Christ, we're gonna sin. That's why he's saying that we can confess our sins and we can have clear. But basically the way John is saying this, if we could clarify the Greek, he's basically trying to say, hey listen, if you're a Christian, sin's not our thing. We don't sin. Not that we're not gonna sin, we may sin, we do sin. But that's not our thing. Like again, going back to the Olympics. If we put up a flag, the Christians today, if we band together under a flag, it's gonna have the cross of Christ, but we're not gonna have this side thing where it's like, well we also are about sin. There's no sin. That's not what Christians are about. So this whole letter is just trying to really encourage us to have the right attitude about our sin. So my message today hopefully is not to depress us all, to get us down in the dumps. I wanna lift this up and encourage us that we actually can confess our sin. So I've broken it down pretty simply in the handout if you wanna look at that. Confession really does literally mean to say it with God. So the first thing that you can do is agree with God that what you've done is sin. Call it out. So if you agree what you've done is sin, then you just need to tell God that. Tell God what you've done. Doesn't have to be any, there's no magic words or just saying it the perfect way. It's sin, it's awful. We're just gonna just tell him, hey, this is what I did. I agree, it's awful. I don't wanna do this anymore. Ask him to forgive you. And then this last step is more just kind of an internal step, something that I would encourage you to do today, is just know you're forgiven. It says that we're not just forgiven of it, but he cleanses us from the unrighteousness. It says though we didn't do it. So those are some things that would be helpful. I would encourage you just to try that out this week. If God's brought something to your mind, try it out. One more thing that I would encourage you in that may be really helpful for you is there are sins that are particularly difficult that maybe you've been struggling with something for a very, very long period of time. And you feel like you just can't make any traction. I definitely say start by confessing that. Get it out there, bring it to God. But something that God's also given us is each other to help us in this process. So it says in James 516, it says, therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is very powerful and effective. Is there a sin that you just feel like you're stuck in? Maybe something that you could do that would really help in this process is in addition to confessing to God, confess it to a friend, somebody that can be trusted, obviously. We're not confessing to just anybody on the street or something like that. Confess it to somebody that you can trust. And there is some powerful help that comes from it. James brings this up not because it's any magical thing, but there is a connection between us involving the body of Christ and what we're doing. And so like I said earlier, it's very humbling to confess sin, but confessing sin to a brother and sister sometimes might feel harder. I don't know. Maybe that says something about our conception of God, but it may be harder for you to do. But I've found a lot of power in bringing this to friends. I've seen sins that I was stuck in for a long period of time that suddenly it's like the wheels get a little greased when I take it to my pastor, take it to friends. It's embarrassing. It makes me sweat just thinking about things that I've had to confess to other people. But it really, really can't help. There's power in it. That's why God gave us the church. So as we wrap up this morning, has any sin come to your mind? I would really encourage you to take advantage of what God has provided us and confess it. As we kind of think about what, as we wrap up kind of what would happen if we actually did this? If we did it, some of those things that I brought up that happened when we sinned, that God disciplines us, that there's joy robbed from our relationship with God, that our connection, our hearing from God and experiencing Him is blocked, what would happen if we made the commitment to not just say, I'm gonna be a good boy or girl and I'm not gonna sin. But we just genuinely said, hey listen, I'm gonna have the attitude that I'm gonna know what God says, I wanna do it the right way, but when I sin, I'm gonna take it to my father, I'm gonna confess it and I'm gonna turn. What would open up to us that isn't there currently? Maybe you felt like something's been blocking you in your relationship with God, this might be it. Maybe there's joy that you're missing out on because there's sin that you're not confessing. Maybe you've just got, again, this nagging sense that there's something you're not doing. Maybe confessing sin might be the start of something really powerful in your life. And I would encourage you, what would happen if we took this serious? Probably one of our, actually I say probably, one of our goals at Valley Lights really would be that we would be the kind of church that people would say, wow, those people take God's word seriously, not just in knowing it, but actually doing it. Confessing sin is a major mark of somebody that's decided, I'm gonna take this really seriously because it is humbling, it's hard. So as we wrap up, here are three things that maybe might be next steps for you today. The first one confesses sin. Maybe there's something that's come to your mind. The second one would be pray and ask God to make you aware of your sin. I would encourage you, if you feel like you have not sinned or you can't think of something, just see, ask God. The final thing is just kind of an encouragement. Continue reading first John this week. Maybe you've started it, continue doing it. Let's see what God does as we take his word seriously. As we wrap up, let's say a word of prayer. Dear God, we thank you so much for your goodness, for your love. The fact that you didn't just die on the cross and then just leave us, but you gave us a way that we can know what you want from our lives and you gave us a way of clearing up our fellowship with you that we can be right with you and we can live closely with you. God, I pray for this church, that we would take confession very seriously and that you would be ultimately glorified, by the way we treat it.