Still Carrying This?

There is a particular kind of weight that doesn't lift on Sunday morning. You've sat in the pew. You've spoken the confession along with everyone else. You've heard the pastor declare absolution over the congregation. You've come forward and received the Lord's Supper — the body and blood of Jesus, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins. And still, when you walk back to your seat, it's still there. That thing. The one you can't quite put down, no matter how many times you try. If you know what I'm talking about, this post is for you.

A Practice That Might Feel Foreign

If you've grown up in a Lutheran or broadly Protestant church, the phrase "private confession and absolution" might land somewhere between unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable. You probably have some kind of mental image of it — likely shaped more by movies than by any real experience. The darkened booth. The latticed screen. The hushed voice on the other side. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been six weeks since my last confession. And then the priest responds, and the whole thing follows its ritual course. Maybe that picture makes you curious. Maybe it makes you skeptical. Maybe it makes you want to click away entirely.

Stay with me. Because what I want to talk about isn't a foreign religious ritual imported from somewhere else — it's actually a gift that belongs to you as a Christian, one that Lutherans have always had, even when we haven't always done a great job of making it available or explaining why it matters. Private confession and absolution is not a requirement. But it is good for you. And for some of you reading this right now, it may be exactly what you need.

I want to start, actually, by acknowledging what I appreciate about the way Roman Catholic practice structures confession. There is a liturgy you follow. There's a predictable shape to the conversation — something to hold onto when the thing you're about to say out loud feels enormous. That's genuinely helpful. When you're carrying something heavy and you finally decide to bring it to someone, having a clear structure means you don't have to figure out how to start. The words are already there. You just have to show up and speak them. I think that kind of liturgical handrail is worth preserving, and as you'll see in a moment, our Lutheran practice has one too.

Why Sometimes the Usual Isn't Enough

In the previous weekly word in this series, we walked through the different ways a Christian can confess sin and receive forgiveness. You can confess directly to God, trusting his promise that if you confess your sins, he is faithful and just to forgive them. You can go to the person you sinned against — and if they're a believer, they can speak forgiveness to you on Christ's behalf. You can come to church, confess with the whole congregation, receive absolution from the pastor, and receive Jesus himself in the Lord's Supper. And for a great many sins, on a great many Sunday mornings, that is genuinely enough. If you walk away from the Table with a clean conscience and a settled heart, thank God for that. Don't manufacture guilt that isn't there. Don't torture yourself when Christ has already set you free. Live in that forgiveness.

But sometimes — and every honest believer knows this — sometimes the usual avenues don't fully reach the thing. There are sins that stick. They have a particular texture to them, a weight that doesn't respond to the ordinary means the way you'd expect. You've prayed about it. You may have even told someone. You've confessed it in church. And it's still there, attaching itself to your conscience like something that won't let go. In twenty-eight years of ministry, when people have come to me for private confession and absolution, it is almost always connected to some form of sexual sin — very often pornography. These are things that are deeply secret, that carry a particular kind of shame, and where the person desperately, urgently needs to hear not just a general word of forgiveness broadcast to a whole room, but a specific word spoken directly to them, about this thing, right now.

That said, it doesn't have to be sexual sin. It can be anything — any sin that has settled onto your conscience and made it feel unclean. Anything that has created that particular spiritual heaviness where you can't quite believe the forgiveness is really for you, for this. Private confession and absolution exists precisely for those moments.

Know Your Enemy

Before we talk about what private confession actually looks like, it's worth pausing to understand what's really happening when a sin lodges itself in your conscience and refuses to leave, even after you've confessed it and heard the absolution. Because that dynamic doesn't come from nowhere, and it isn't spiritually neutral.

There is an enemy at work. His name is Satan — and that name itself is a description of his primary activity. Satan means accuser. It's not incidental to who he is; it's his job. He goes about accusing. He points at your sin. He holds it up in front of your face. He rehearses it with you over and over. And his goal is specific: he wants you to doubt that the forgiveness Jesus won is really for you. He's happy to concede that Jesus died for the sins of the world in some abstract theological sense. What he wants you to believe is that your particular sin — this one, the one you can't shake — is somehow the exception. That this one was too much. That what you did is worse than anything anyone else has ever brought to the cross, and that even Jesus, in his mercy, couldn't cover it.

That's a lie. It has always been a lie. But it is an effective lie, especially when it attaches itself to genuine shame, and that shame has nowhere to go.

What Jesus has actually done — in his death and in his resurrection — is give us a clean conscience. Not a conscience we cleaned up ourselves. Not forgiveness we earned or negotiated. A conscience that has been washed by Christ. In Romans 5 and 6, Paul describes what happens when we come to faith in Christ — through the hearing of his Word, through Baptism — as a death and a resurrection. We have been buried with him. We have been raised with him to a new life. And to use the language Jesus himself uses in John 3, we have been born again. Born with a clean conscience. Not because we made ourselves clean, but because Jesus washed us.

This is why, when someone's conscience is under assault, I keep coming back to their Baptism. You were baptized. That word — Baptism — primarily means washing. Your sins were washed away. Whatever the enemy is holding in front of you right now, the water of your Baptism speaks louder. That clean conscience isn't something you have to produce. It's something Christ gave you. Private confession and absolution doesn't create that cleanness — it delivers what Christ has already accomplished and gives you a place to actually receive it.

What Is Actually Happening When You Go to Your Pastor

Let me be clear about the theology here, because I think it matters practically. When you come to your pastor for private confession and absolution, you are not confessing your sin to him as if he were the one whose opinion about it matters most. He isn't the judge. He isn't the one who grants or withholds forgiveness based on whether he thinks what you did was bad enough to warrant it. You are confessing your sin to Jesus. The pastor is simply his representative — the one God has appointed to that congregation to speak Christ's forgiveness in Christ's name.

That distinction has real pastoral weight. The words the pastor speaks — in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit — those aren't his words. He's not authoring forgiveness out of his own authority or his own goodness. He's delivering something that belongs to Jesus and that Jesus has already purchased for you. The pastor is the delivery mechanism. The forgiveness is Christ's.

Can you do private confession and absolution with a brother or sister in Christ who isn't a pastor? Absolutely. Any believer can remind you of Jesus' atoning sacrifice. Any believer can point you back to the cross and say, Christ died for you. You are forgiven. But there is something particular and valuable about going to the pastor — because he is the one God has specifically appointed and ordained to your congregation to speak those words. There is a clarity and an authority to it that can cut through the noise in a way that is genuinely difficult to replicate in an informal conversation with a friend, however well-meaning that friend may be.

The Concern About Confidentiality

I know what the hesitation is. I've heard it enough times to have it memorized. What's to stop the pastor from bringing this up later? What if he tells someone? What if the next time I see him, he looks at me differently — like he knows, like it's just there between us, and everything is different now?

Let me address this directly. When I was ordained as a Lutheran pastor, I took a vow — a formal, binding vow — to never divulge the sins confessed to me in private confession. This is standard across Lutheran ordination; it is not unique to me or to Gloria Dei. The confidentiality of the confessional is not a courtesy. It is a vow made before God. And the theological reason behind it is exactly what I described above: you're not confessing to me. You're confessing to Jesus. I am his representative in that moment, and what passes between you and Christ in that room is not mine to carry out of it.

Here is what I can tell you practically: the next time you see me after a private confession, it will be as though it never happened. I will not bring it up. I will not reference it. If you bring it up, we can talk — but I will never hold it over you, I will never look at you through the lens of what you told me in that room. Because that's not my job. My job was to deliver Christ's forgiveness to you. Once I've done that, the matter is settled. Christ died for sinners. That's the whole work. You don't get to shock me by being one.

What It Actually Looks Like

If you've never done private confession and absolution before, you might be wondering what on earth happens when you actually sit down with your pastor. The formality of it can feel intimidating — and part of why it feels that way is that we don't practice it much, so it seems more unusual than it actually is. Let me walk you through what it would look like if you came to me.

You'd call the church office, and we'd find a time on the calendar. You'd come in. We'd sit down in my office, or perhaps in the sanctuary, depending on what felt right — somewhere private, with the doors closed. We'd start with a little conversation. How are you doing? What's going on? I want you to know you're welcome here and I'm glad you came. Then I'd pray, asking the Holy Spirit to be present as we go through this together.

Then I'd hand you a hymnal opened to page 292 — the rite of individual confession and absolution — and tell you to follow along. You don't have to have anything memorized. The words are right there on the page. You'd begin: Pastor, please hear my confession and pronounce forgiveness in order to fulfill God's word. I'd respond and invite you to proceed. There's a general confession that follows — acknowledging that you have dishonored God in thought, word, and deed — and that section ends with a crucial phrase: What troubles me particularly is… And that's where you speak it. Whatever it is. You name it. You put it into words out loud, in front of another person, and you let it be what it is.

I might ask some questions as we go. Not to pry, and not to make the experience more difficult than it needs to be, but because sometimes when we confess our sins, even with the best intentions, we hold something back. There's a part of us that wants to confess the general shape of it without naming the actual thing. So I might gently press — not to extract information, but to help you get the whole thing out, because I want you to leave knowing that the whole thing is forgiven. Not most of it. Not the version you were comfortable saying out loud. The whole thing.

After that, I speak the absolution. I speak God's forgiveness to you, directly, specifically. Then we might talk for a little while about practical steps — things you might change, habits that could help, ways to build some accountability or structure around whatever situation contributed to the sin. Not as a penance. Not as a condition of forgiveness — the forgiveness has already been spoken. But because we are God's people, and we want to repent. We don't want to keep walking back into the same sin indefinitely. We want to turn. We want to live differently. So we talk about that, practically and honestly.

Depending on what's going on and how heavy the guilt has been, we might celebrate the Lord's Supper together — receiving Jesus' body and blood one more time, for the forgiveness of sins. I'll speak a blessing over you. And you'll leave.

Luther's Own Words on This

I want to say something about the history here, because I think it's important for Lutherans especially to understand. During the Reformation, one of the complaints lodged against the Lutheran reformers was that they had abandoned private confession and absolution. And Luther pushed back hard on that. He wrote an admonition — an urgent exhortation — insisting that Lutherans should practice private confession. His argument was essentially this: when I urge you to confess your sins, I am urging you to be a Christian. The practice is a gift.

What the reformers objected to was not confession itself, but the requirement — the mandatory, compulsory nature of it in the medieval church, where people would torment themselves trying to remember and enumerate every single sin so they could be sure they'd covered everything and were eligible to receive forgiveness. That kind of anxious, exhaustive self-examination became its own spiritual trap. People weren't coming to confession to receive a gift — they were coming to complete a transaction, and the anxiety of whether they'd completed it correctly undermined the whole point.

So yes, there was an overcorrection. A lot of Protestant Christians concluded that because private confession was no longer required, it was no longer necessary, and quietly let it go. Luther himself was frustrated by this. The right response to removing a burden isn't to throw away the gift underneath it. Private confession and absolution is not required. You will not be denied communion if you haven't done it. God's forgiveness is not withheld from you until you've sat in your pastor's office. But it is genuinely, substantively good for you. It is a means through which Christ delivers his forgiveness to you in a concrete, specific, spoken word — and for some situations, for some weights, that specific word is exactly what's needed.

You're Not Going to Shock Me

I want to close by speaking directly to whatever is holding you back right now — because something probably is. Maybe it's the fear of judgment. Maybe it's the assumption that what you've done is so serious, so unusual, so embarrassing, that your pastor will look at you completely differently once he knows. Maybe you're afraid of the look on his face, or the pause before he speaks, or the way the conversation might feel afterward.

Let me be honest with you. I stand up every Sunday at Gloria Dei and tell you that you are a sinner. That's not rhetorical. I believe it. You are a sinner. So am I. Every person who has ever sat in front of me in twenty-eight years of ministry has been a sinner. The person who came before you was a sinner. The person who will come after you is a sinner. After nearly three decades of hearing confessions, I genuinely doubt that what you're carrying is something I've never encountered before.

And here's the thing about pastoral ministry — this is the work. Delivering forgiveness to sinners. This is not a side task or an awkward addition to the job description. This is the heart of it. Christ died for sinners. That's the whole Gospel. And your pastor's job is to make sure you know that his death was for you, specifically, for this particular thing you've done, and that you don't have to carry it anymore.

If you have prayed about this thing. If you've talked to someone about it. If you've confessed it in church and heard the absolution and received the Supper and it is still sitting on your conscience, still making you feel unclean — come. Make the appointment. Sit down. Say the words. Let the pastor speak forgiveness into your life. Let Christ's representative tell you, face to face, that your sin really has been atoned for. That it really is forgiven. That the blood of Jesus really does cover this, and that you are clean.

You were never meant to carry this alone. Christ didn't die to leave you under the weight of it. He died to take it from you — and private confession and absolution is one of the specific, tangible, concrete ways he has given you to receive that freedom. Don't leave it sitting on the shelf because it feels unfamiliar or risky or more than you can bring yourself to do. It's a gift. It's for you. And whatever is on your heart right now, there is a pastor who will listen, speak forgiveness, and walk out of that room carrying nothing of what you told him — because you didn't tell him. You told Jesus.

What would it mean for you to actually make that appointment this week?