Most of us, if we're being honest, have a complicated relationship with the word confession. It either conjures up an image we borrowed from somewhere else — a darkened booth, a screen, a whispered ritual — or it sits quietly in the order of service on Sunday morning, something we move through on the way to the hymns. We say the words. We mean them, more or less. And then we move on. What I want to talk about over the next couple of weeks is why that's only half the story — and why the half we tend to skip is actually the most important part.
What Comes to Mind When You Hear "Confession"?
Start with the word itself. If I say confession to most people in our culture, the image that comes to mind is shaped almost entirely by the Roman Catholic tradition — the confessional booth, the priest on the other side of the screen, the formal opening, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, followed by an account of what went wrong, followed by an assigned penance. I know that's an oversimplification, and I say it with genuine respect for my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. But that's the image that floats to the surface, and it's worth naming because it shapes what we think confession actually is — and, more importantly, what it's for.
As a Lutheran pastor, when I talk about confession, I always go back to Luther's Small Catechism, because Luther does something clarifying and important here. He tells us that confession has two parts. Not one. Two. And here's the thing — most of us only ever think about the first one.
The Two Parts Luther Insists On
The First Part: Confessing Our Sins
The first part is the one we recognize. It's the admission of guilt — actually naming the ways we have broken God's law, violated his love, and failed to love our neighbors the way he calls us to in the Ten Commandments and throughout all of Scripture. This isn't a vague, general acknowledgment that nobody's perfect. It's a real reckoning with specific reality: I have sinned. I have done this. I have left undone that. My words, my thoughts, my actions — they have gone against what God has called me to, what he has called me to be.
This matters. Confession as acknowledgment of guilt is not a formality. It's a truth-telling exercise, and Scripture is unambiguous about why it's necessary. The Apostle John puts it bluntly:
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8–9)
If we say we have no sin, we are calling God a liar. We are saying, in effect, that Jesus didn't need to die — that the cross was unnecessary, that the whole drama of redemption was overblown. That's a steep claim to make. And yet functionally, that's where we end up when we skip confession, or treat it as a minor ritual warm-up before the real service begins. The admission of guilt is not optional. It's the honest starting point of every Christian's conversation with God.
We have beautiful models of this throughout Scripture. The Psalmist in Psalm 38:18 writes simply and painfully, I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin. And then there is Psalm 51 — take a long look at that one if you haven't recently. It's one of the most beautiful and extensive confessions in all of Scripture. David wrote it after his sin with Bathsheba, after the prophet Nathan came and confronted him with what he had done. What you see in that psalm is not just guilt. It's not just self-recrimination. It's a soul that knows its guilt and throws itself entirely on the mercy and faithfulness of God. That is what real confession looks like.
The Second Part: Receiving Absolution
And this is where most of us stop — at the guilt, at the naming, at the sorrow. But Luther insists there is a second part, and without it, the first part is, frankly, just misery. The second part is that we would actually receive absolution — receive forgiveness — for our sins. Not imagine it. Not assume it happened somewhere in the background. Not remind ourselves theologically that it's probably true. Receive it. Real forgiveness, applied. Christ's forgiveness, delivered.
The word absolution sounds technical, but the idea is beautifully simple: you are loosed from your sin. It is taken away. The debt is cancelled. The record is cleared. And the reason this second part matters just as much as the first is that confession without absolution is only half a conversation. What good does it do to admit your guilt if there's no remedy? Imagine going to a doctor, describing your symptoms in careful detail, and having the doctor nod thoughtfully and then send you home — no diagnosis, no treatment, no prescription. The visit accomplished nothing except confirming that something is wrong. Confession without absolution is like that. We've named the problem. We still need the cure.
Where Different Traditions Get Stuck
Different Christian traditions tend to struggle with confession and absolution in different directions, and it's worth being honest about this.
Within the Catholic tradition — and again, I'm speaking about impressions rather than making precise theological claims — there can be a sense that the satisfactions assigned after confession, the prayers or acts of penance, are somehow part of what earns the forgiveness. That the things I do afterward are what settle the account. There's a kernel of truth hidden in this impulse — when we've sinned, we genuinely want to do something about it, to make it right, to demonstrate that we're sorry. That desire isn't wrong. But the forgiveness itself is never something we earn. Not by prayers, not by acts of restitution, not by anything we do. It was won at the cross. It belongs to Jesus.
Within much of Protestantism, the tendency goes in a different direction. The reasoning sounds reasonable enough: I have a direct line to Jesus, so I don't need to confess to anyone. This is just between me and God. And again, there's a kernel of truth here — there is indeed one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus himself (1 Timothy 2:5). My sin is completely and fully forgiven because of what God has done in Christ. That's not in question. But here's what this view tends to miss: God himself appoints people to speak his forgiveness. He doesn't just forgive in the abstract and leave us to figure out whether it applies to us. He sends messengers. He speaks through people. He always has.
Jesus Gave the Church Authority to Speak Forgiveness
This is where I think we need to sit for a moment, because it's something our culture really resists. The idea that Jesus would give other human beings the authority to speak forgiveness sounds like it's inflating the role of the church — or the pastor — beyond what's appropriate. But this is not something we invented. Jesus says it plainly.
In Matthew 18:18, in the middle of a conversation about what to do when a brother sins, Jesus says, Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. He's talking about the forgiveness of sins. This authority to forgive belongs to the community of believers.
Then in John 20, after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room. He breathes on them — a remarkable, deliberate act — and says, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven. Catch that. Jesus, freshly risen from the dead, on the other side of the cross and the empty tomb, gives the church the authority to forgive sins in his name. That's not a minor thing. That's a gift — a gift specifically intended to ensure that real people in real time can hear, with real certainty, that they are forgiven.
James makes it practical when he writes that we are to confess our sins to one another and pray for one another. This is not merely a therapeutic exercise in vulnerability. It's the body of Christ doing what Christ empowered it to do — speaking forgiveness to one another, praying for one another's healing, bearing one another's burdens in the most profound sense.
Think about the paralytic in Mark 2. His friends tear a hole in the roof to lower him to Jesus, and the first thing Jesus says — before healing, before anything else — is, Your sins are forgiven. The scribes and Pharisees are offended. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And they're right, in a way — which is exactly the point Jesus is making. He is God. He has the authority. And he has chosen to extend that authority, through his Spirit, to his church.
What This Looks Like at Gloria Dei
This is why, if you come to worship at Gloria Dei, nearly every service begins with confession and absolution. We don't tack it on as a formality. We place it at the beginning because it is the right starting place — we come before God as we are, name what is true, and receive what he has promised.
What we do on Sunday morning is called corporate confession — the whole gathered assembly confessing together. And then I, as the pastor, speak the words of absolution. When I do that, I say that I am speaking in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ. That language matters. I am not forgiving anyone on my own authority. I am an ambassador — and an ambassador speaks on behalf of the king, carries the king's message, and delivers it with the king's authority, not his own. Paul describes this in his letters to the Corinthians — we are stewards of the mysteries of God, ambassadors for Christ. That is not a title of personal prestige. It's a description of a task: deliver the message you've been given, to the people you've been sent to, on behalf of the One who sent you.
So when I speak absolution to this congregation, I am doing exactly that. I am taking people back to the cross — to the place where Jesus stood in our place, bore our sin in his body, and died to atone for it — and I am delivering what he accomplished there into their lives right now, through proclamation. Your sins are forgiven, because he died and rose for you. As Colossians says, he cancelled the record of debt that stood against us, nailing it to the cross. Those sins are left there. He rose and left them behind. That's the word I'm speaking when I speak absolution.
And this isn't limited to pastors in a formal sense. Any Christian can and should speak forgiveness to another — that's part of what it means to be the body of Christ. When you tell someone, I forgive you, and so does Jesus, you are doing something real and holy. But it has been given to pastors to do this in a public, authoritative way on behalf of the whole congregation — to stand up and say, with the weight of ordination and the clarity of commission, your sins are forgiven.
Why Does It Matter That Someone Speaks It to You?
You might be wondering — if Jesus has already forgiven us, why does it matter whether someone speaks that forgiveness out loud? Can't I just know it in my head? And here I want to be direct, because this question is worth taking seriously.
First, this is genuinely hard to believe. Not in a merely intellectual sense, but in the sense that touches the deepest places of guilt and shame. Think about the thing you're most ashamed of. The thing you circle back to in the dark. How does one man's death on a Roman cross atone for that? For the specific thing you did, said, thought, became? Faith is always a miracle. It doesn't arise naturally from within us. It comes from outside us — through the Word, through proclamation, through someone speaking the truth of the gospel into the particular circumstances of your particular life. You need to hear it. God knows you need to hear it. That's why he set things up the way he did.
Second, God wants you to know — really know, not just vaguely hope — that your sins are forgiven for Christ's sake. Not as a general theological proposition, but as a personal reality that belongs to you. And so he sends messengers. He ordains men to this work. He gives you the church — your brothers and sisters in Christ who pray for you, encourage you, and speak the gospel to you — because he knows how easy it is for that certainty to erode, for doubt to creep in, for shame to whisper that surely it doesn't apply to this.
What About Sincerity?
There's a question that almost always comes up here, and I want to address it honestly: doesn't the person confessing have to actually mean it? What if someone just goes through the motions — says the words, hears the absolution, and walks out unchanged? Is the forgiveness real?
A couple of thoughts. First, if someone comes to me and confesses a sin that's been weighing on them, or if they participate in the corporate confession on Sunday morning, they might fool me. I'm looking at the outside. I can't see the heart. But God is not fooled. He knows, and I trust him to do what he does in spite of my limitations as an ambassador. He's the king. He can work beyond the ambassador's knowledge.
But the second thought is more important: even when our sincerity is incomplete — and it often is — Jesus is sincere. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He spoke plainly throughout the Gospels about what he had come to do: to die, to rise, to atone. He meant every word of it. He went through with it. And in Revelation, he declares, Behold, I make all things new — that is a man who means what he says.
The truth is, we will always struggle with our sincerity. We are, as Paul writes in Romans 7, simultaneously saint and sinner, and that tension doesn't resolve itself cleanly this side of eternity. We want to want to repent. We're sorry, and also we're not entirely sure we're sorry. Augustine put it memorably in his Confessions — he prayed for chastity, he said, but not yet. We know that pull. We live in it.
And this is precisely why God gives us the church, our brothers and sisters, and pastors who speak absolution week after week — not because we have it all together, but because Jesus does. His faithfulness covers our inconsistency. His sincerity fills the gap left by ours. The gift of absolution, the gift of forgiveness spoken out loud into your actual life, is there because God knows how much you need to hear it — even when you're not entirely sure you deserve to.
Which, of course, is the point. You don't deserve it. That's what makes it grace. And grace is not abstract. It comes through words, through people, through the church gathered on a Sunday morning saying the hard true thing together and then hearing the even harder, even truer thing spoken back: I forgive you all your sins.
Confession is not the whole story. It's only the beginning. The part that changes everything is what comes next — the door that's already ajar, the light already coming through. Absolution is not a formality at the top of the service. It is the gospel delivered to you, by name, in your pew, in your actual life, this week. Don't skip it. Don't rush past it. Receive it. That's what it's there for.
As you think about your own practice of confession — whether in corporate worship, in conversation with a fellow believer, or in the quiet of your own prayer — ask yourself: am I stopping at the guilt, or am I actually receiving the forgiveness Christ won for me? Because he didn't die so you could feel bad. He died so you could be free. And he wants you to know it.
Transcript generated by A.I. Original by the author.
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