Spiritual Practice 2: Confession, or Telling the Truth
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In this video, Dr. Craig Pesti-Strobel outlines the basic practice of confession. Confession is about telling the truth, which has become a radical act in our time. Because knowing the truth will make us free, the practice of confession is essentially the practice of telling the truth—about ourselves to ourselves and about ourselves, and our world, to God. |
Confession Is Telling It Like It Is
Central to moving into the Bigger Mind of the Realm of God is a basic process for dismantling and disentangling ourselves from the destructive and maladaptive systems around us. The first step is that of confession, or telling the truth about our lives. This is a very ancient spiritual practice. The difficulty arises from the fact that we are uniquely blind to what truths about our lives that we need to tell.
Jesus said you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. But we are in era in which truth is being denied and destroyed, often by the very people who we would expect to be the upholders of truth.
What this means for us is that telling the truth has become a radical act. And it just so happens that telling the truth is at the heart of the Way of Jesus.
Confessing, in JP21 practice, is not about listing a whole bunch of sins or faults that some authority figure or popular notion prescribes for us. Rather it is a process of examining ourselves deeply within, coming to know who we are and who we are capable of becoming, and naming what is preventing us from becoming that.
We tell the truth because doing so grounds us in the living reality of Jesus Christ, who declares that He is the Truth, the Way and the Life (John 14:6). As we seek to follow the path of Jesus in the twenty-first century, we align our hearts with his by living and speaking truthfully. Living and speaking truthfully guides us into living lives of congruence and coherence, especially as we seek to be guided by the same Spirit that guided Jesus and infused his life and teaching. That same Spirit can infuse our lives as well, and can work through us to bring healing and wholeness to a world that is torn apart socially, politically and physically.
As we probe our inner lives by asking these questions and examining our outer actions, we may come to realize how our actions are not congruent with how we would like to be in the world, and with what we proclaim as our faith. The act of confession brings to the surface the discrepancies and incongruities of our lives in order to bring our actions into alignments with our deepest beliefs, to align the outer aspect with the inner aspect of our lives.
Telling the Truth:
- Begin with today. What has happened in your life today?
- What have your interactions with family, friends, co=workers, strangers been like?
- Where are the points of struggle? What is your history with those struggles?
- Where are points of joy, gratitude, contentment? What makes you feel this way?
- If you could change something about your interactions with people, what would it be?
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