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5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
“Admit your faults to one another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” James 5:16
So now it’s all out on paper, even our most sordid secrets! It can be overwhelming to consider both the good and bad aspects of our lives all at once! At first it can be difficult to discover ANY assets, and our liabilities cause us to feel intense shame. We would rather hide most of it from God, even ourselves, and especially from another human being! Examining the exact nature of our wrongs and admitting them can be a huge RELIEF! When we can release ALL of our problems to God, He can handle it! Through Christ’s shed blood on the Cross, we are forgiven! When we finally get honest with ourselves, we begin the road to recovery. When we get the courage to “let it go” in the direction of another trusted human being, the chains of bondage are broken!
A. Principle of Confession:
- Psa. 32:1-5 James 5:16
- Gal. 6:1-3 Prov. 28:13
- James 1:21
B. Examples of Confession:
- 1 Sam. 15:24 Matt. 3:1-6
- 2 Sam. 12:13 Acts 19:13-20
- Luke 15:11-32 Neh. 9:3
C. Need for honesty:
- Rom. 12:17 Heb. 4:12-16
I wish to remain anonymous too. I am an overcomer in my sexual addictions and nicotine addiction, but am still battling overeating. I overcame the sexual addictions and nicotine w/o the 12 step programs themselves, but when I look back, I find I followed then through God’s leading and my reading of the Bible. There is one step I have not completed and would like to here where I can be truly anonymous. In my sexual addictions, I was encouraged by the books that I read. I thought they were innocent enough, just entertainment. I followed one particular sci-fi author and read every single book he wrote. Now this guy actually wrote short sci-fi for the boyscout magazine, so you’d think he’d be harmless enough, right? NO. His other books were much more adult oriented and gradually I found myself having the same opinions that were espoused by this author as they sounded so reasonable. He was promoting sexual sins in a fictional context. Sexual promiscuity, adultery, partner swapping, same sex partners, incest, and almost every other perversion you can think of. Polygamy was a big one for him. I actually started rationalizing my actions by his books, they sounded so reasonable . I cheated on my ex-husband with men and women, (he never found out any of my ‘escapades’,) eventually we divorced because the love was gone from our marriage and I lost all respect for him, maybe because he couldn’t see what I was doing practically under his nose, including cheating with his best friend whose wife was mine.
The worst happened years later as more books came out, really getting into the incest part of sin. I am ashamed and have shared this with no one else, but I sexually abused my own children. My daughter and my son.
When God finally started calling me back and I started reading the Bible again after denying God for so many years, I started seeing the truth and how terribly I sinned. I stopped all abuse, which I am ashamed to say I had continued into their teens, and sat them down one at a time and explained how wrong I had been and how sorry I was. I told them that God was helping me and I was praying that they could forgive me and not follow my actions with their own children. I must also add that I had been sexually abused by an uncle when I was 4, and raped when I was 8, and in my teens a few times, some were more of being taken advantage of by much older men who were basically pedophiles, but others weren’t. My mother was raised with her sisters to believe incest was normal. She didn’t find out until she was full grown and away from home that it was not normal for a father to have sex with his daughters. It was just accepted as normal by them, growing up in isolation, so I had this background which I am not using to excuse anything I did, just explaining another reason I found it easy to slip and fall into this particular sin. I know that God has forgiven me and I have learned to forgive myself. I feel though that I have to complete this step of confessing to another human being the exact nature of my sins so I can move on.