Hi, I am Caitlin Zick, with Moral Revolution, and this is God Today. I am so excited to be here and we are going to jump into one of my favorite topics that is not as often talked about. But, I kind of love doing that, I love jumping into hard topics. The topic is confession.
A lot of times, whether you have been a Christian for your whole life, or you are newly knowing the Lord or walking with Him, confession can be really challenging. I remember having so many different moments in my walk with the Lord, that I was like, “We got this, right Jesus? I told you…we are good…and then I would find myself in a cycle of that same thing. “Oh, again, here I am.” There is nothing wrong with that, but I do think the Bible is really clear on why we need each other.
We could do a whole different chat about community. But we need community for confession and James 5:6 honestly makes it really clear. I don’t know about you, but I like formulas. I wish there was a formula for everything. There is not. There isn’t even a formula for confession. I kind of made one up from the scripture. Just flow with me here.
It goes, “Confess one to another and pray for each other so you may be healed.” So, I am like, “Okay, Cait, so confess. Pray. Be healed.” I am like, “I can do that!” But I know even though that may sound easy and that is why I like formulas because it makes it feel really easy. But it was really challenging. Number one you’re like, “Who can I confess to?” It can be really easy sometimes to confess to a peer, a friend, who is like, “Me too!” and then you are in it together. And again, there is nothing wrong with that. That might be a good starting point. But if you feel yourself, then in a cycle where you just keep having “me too” moments and not breaking free and not finding breakthrough in those cycles, then something is a little off.
What is funny is that in the second part of James 5:16, I feel like I had heard that before and then you can hear that next part of the verse and you almost don’t even realize they are related let alone right next to each other. It says, “The prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective.” What does that mean? It means we need to find righteous people in our lives that we are confessing to. Because, remember it said, “Confess to one another, pray for one another so you may be healed. The prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective.”
Find your righteous people. How do you do that? I think it is looking at your life and saying, “Okay, who tells me what I need to hear, not necessarily what I want to hear? Who is willing to call me higher and to show me who God says I am when I am stuck in a pit? Or when I am just stuck in a silly, little, habitual cycle that is still less than who God has made me be? Again, even with confession, we can sometimes think it is this big thing. Like, “Oh! I messed up so big I have to go confess to somebody. What I like to do and even remind my own soul is, “No, no, no. I don’t wait till it gets big. I am going to confess those small little things so they don’t become a big thing.” Those are the things I think the enemy likes to trip us on. It is like, “Oh, that’s no big deal, you got it. You won’t do that again.” Then it grows, and grows, and grows, and you’re like, “It feels like a really big deal!” And then shame starts.
I am a mom of four kids, and I spend a lot of time on playgrounds. Like, I have them memorized. Here are the swings, we are going to do that when we are getting bored. Here is the rock wall…So, I like to think of the playground and came up with this analogy, just spending a lot of time there. It is kind of like the devil’s playground is darkness. So, we keep things in darkness and isolated. Which can be really easy to do no matter what season of life you are in. When you start to have a little bit of shame in an area, it is like, “Oh! I am going to hide that. I am going to bring that into the dark.”
When I think of the playground, it is like the enemy is swinging you in the silence. Like, “No, no no, hush, hush, hush. We keep that quiet.” Or I think of the slides and it is just a quick push, then a spiral into depression or overthinking. And thinking, “What if they really knew?”
Or the rock wall. I remember convincing my son he could climb it and thinking the devil would just love to be like, “You can’t climb that, you can’t get there, you can’t go there, you can’t reach it.” He is just tooling with us and playing with us when we are stuck in a dark place. But here is what is so powerful. It is one little moment of confessing. One little moment of saying, “I am going to let the light in.” Changes everything.
I will never forget the very first time that I really took that seriously. It was 1:00 am and I called my mentor, drove to her house, sat on her burgundy couch, and confessed everything that I had never spoken. I was like, “Oh, I handled this with the Lord, I thought I was fine.” And just really letting it out. What I found was that in the dark, the enemy was pushing me in the swings, pushing me down the slide, and it was tormenting. It was as if what’s hidden haunted me. Do you see that? Do you see what is hidden haunts you sometimes? Or do you think, “If they really knew…” And so the second you say, “No, I am not going to let shame rule my life, I am going to say, ‘it will not haunt me.’ I am going to let the light in and it is like it loses its power.” Those very moments, for me, it was a backseat moment with guys, and lots of promiscuity in my past. It felt awful to say at the moment. But the second it left my mouth, it lost all its power.
And so, here is the thing, my passion, and I hope yours is too, is that our past or our current sin, whatever it is, it would hold no unwarranted power over our lives. Because the enemy is not meant to have that power. God has all of it. It’s just a matter of you saying, “I am going to let the light in. I am going to let God in. I am going to find that righteous person to pray for me so that I can be healed.”
I just want to end God Today with you, by praying for you. Holy Spirit, we pray that even right now, they would be like, “Oh! I know who that person is! I do have that person I could talk to! Is that person perfect? Maybe not. But Holy Spirit, I pray you would highlight somebody and let them know they are not alone. They can start with you. They can confess right now, right here. They can write it down. They can say it out loud with you, Lord. But then give them that person to have as that follow-up, “I need you to pray for me so I can be healed.” I believe when we pray together it is powerful. And that we say, “No shame” over them. Those things that we’re like, “I already said I am taking that to the grave with me,” those word vows you made where you said, “I will never tell anybody,” God, I pray you bring it up and bring so much freedom, power, and authority in their own souls to be like, “Nope. No secret is safe with me. I know I am going to tell on myself because I know on the other side of that is healing, freedom, and breakthrough.” I bless you with that today. Have a great day.