 Now, there is a controversy to be addressed here. What exactly does John mean by confess? Is it, you know, what's the format of confession? Does he mean like a prayerful confession unto God? Or does he mean verbally confessing before men? What is the repetition of the confession? Is it just like a one-time confession? Like, you know, when John the Baptist baptized and people confess their sins, but then what, if it's one time, what happens if we sin after this confession? Is it an ongoing confession? What about the sins of ignorance? The thoughts of foolishness is sin, unpresuctuous sins, honest mistakes, struggling against the flesh, okay? If it's ongoing, you know, how does that all fit in there? Now, confession as a word in the Bible, interestingly, isn't actually as common as you might think. It appears just over three dozen times in all its different forms, like past tense, present tense, you know, its different forms. And the underlying Hebrew word, you know, if you look it up in a concordance, it can also mean like, if thanks or praise in English because the root word is to throw or cast, okay? And also confession doesn't always refer to sin either. It's just like, oh, did you do something? You know, yes, I did it. Or, you know, bring it to a tension that you did something. So let's start with a one-time confession. Could it mean a one-time confession? This is where we'd normally refer to baptism because in Matthew 3-6, it's explained that the people who were baptized by John confessed their sins, right? Baptism is a one-time event that ought to occur at or shortly after the time of conversion. And in Acts 2-38, baptism is explained to be the representation of the remission of sins, the forgiveness of sins, okay? So with this context in mind, people would say that confessing sin is an initial confession to admit that one is a sinner or, you know, if you're a sinless perfectionist, then, you know, repent of your sins for the purpose of believing on the Christ and getting saved, right? Because this is a one-time event, advocates would say that if you do some kind of an ongoing confession of sins, you're essentially denying forgiveness because you're not believing that Jesus Christ has already forgiven all of your sins, you know, past, present, and future. That's the terminology that they'll use, right? But then, you know, we're just asking the questions. That's all we're doing right now. What about ongoing confession or the confession of somebody who is a believer? So for example, James 5.16 instructs us, as brethren, to confess your faults, now the underlying Greek word is the same for sins, to one another. So that's a man-to-man confession for the purpose that you may be healed of that given sin. In Acts chapter 8, 22, Peter tells Simon this also, to repent of a specific wickedness that the thought of his heart could be forgiven and that that's a very specific issue. But this was not in a salvation context because Simon already believed and was baptized before this in verse 13. Now in Psalm 32.5, David declared, I will confess my transgression onto the Lord. So that's man-to-God. Now, a lot of brethren have a problem with this concept because it sounds like Jesus hasn't really forgiven us our sins if we have to carry on confessing them. But really, if you read the Psalm though, and just be honest about the language that David uses, he already starts this Psalm saying, blessed is he whose transgression is, present sense already forgiven and onto whom the Lord does not impute sin. And then in verse five, he says, I have acknowledged my sin onto these. So that's like, it's already happened. And that's quite an important interpretation. I think that'll probably give you a picture of what we're talking about. He also says, you forgave my iniquity, past tense. So that's a past tense verse right there, but he's still confessing his sins or he's still saying, I will confess my sins in the future, right, you know, future tense. So according to Psalm 32, it's not unheard of or unbiblical to confess sins to God, even though he already forgave you because that's what David did and your transgressions are forgiven, right. Now, but then we do raise another problem with this. If it does mean ongoing confession, and perhaps, you know, you might think that this is verbal confession, many people object to this because of the following problems it presents with. First of all, you cannot conceivably remember every single sin you have ever done. There's the first problem, right. Secondly, the Bible says we have secret sins, like Psalm 98, sorry, Psalm 90 verse eight. We may have sinned in ignorance, not realizing that something is a sin. Leviticus 4 talks about that. And under this point, you can see that there is a distinction between sins of ignorance and willful presumptuous sins like in numbers. And because of this, some sinless perfectionists might say that they'll just say that you have to turn from unknown sin. So they'll make like some kind of an exception to unknown sins. Think how Chafia said something like that. Some sins are open to interpretation about whether they really are sins. So, you know, drinking wine, if you sober and you don't actually get drunk, that's obviously something where Christians will disagree with that, or something like smoking where the Bible obviously doesn't mention the practice. Even the thought of foolishness is sin, right? And, you know, Proverbs 24, nine, and we all go through hundreds, if not thousands of foolish thoughts. You know, we all go through thousands of thoughts every day. So, you know, you think at least a handful of them are foolish. So then it does present us with this problem because what happens if we don't confess the sins, right? Well, now let's consider the language of verse nine. So it doesn't strictly say whether we confess our sins before men or before God. It doesn't give us that context, right? Confession is in the present tense, which you might say, if we were just to be unbiased about it, you would say that it perhaps makes a stronger case for an ongoing confession, rather than a one-off instance, just because of how we use that tense there. But also as well, remember that the word confess can actually itself have multiple meanings or applications. So, obviously it can mean to verbally disclose guilt, even if somebody didn't actually ask you to confess. But then on the other hand, you could just admit it if you were questioned about it. You know, even if it's not a moral issue, did you do this? Well, yes, either you confess you did or you deny, right? And so this is important is that it can mean just to acknowledge or admit a particular belief and actually very similar to the word profess, but with more honesty and sincerity. So obviously you could profess that Jesus, Lord, or you could confess that Jesus, Lord. The Bible uses both of those terminologies and obviously profess is more of a negative term, confess is more of a positive term, right? But what many people overlook is there's the blatantly obvious about these verses as I myself did, okay? We can easily define the word confess by its antonym, deny, right, their opposing words, confess, deny, they're the opposites. So either we confess or we deny, they're the two options, right? It's not, there's a third option. We just don't confess and don't deny. Either we deny or we confess, right? Likewise, we can easily define then by the same logic, we can define what John meant by confession because of how he contrasts it with its opposite, right? The opposite of if we confess is if we say that either we confess our sins or we say that we have no sin. We say that we have no sin. So then because of this perfectly simple dichotomy here, we can assume that confession in this context, it's not whether you've personally got down on your knees and confess, it's about what we admit. It's about what we acknowledge in our collective belief about our sins and how this relates to the Christ. So confessing our sins is very simple. It's the opposite of saying if we say we have no sin and we have not sinned, that's what it means, okay? So let's just try to illustrate these verses that are in the present tense without adding any presuppositions or doctrinal assumptions in their day-to-day application, okay? So it's if we, so I'm gonna illustrate this with a group of people, if we, okay? And then on any given day, because it's in the present tense, we don't need to look at past, present, and future. We just look at right now at any given time, whether you're watching this today, whether you happen to be watching it the next day or you watched it yesterday, that's not the point. On any given day, day one, day two, day three, we just apply this verse in its present tense state, okay? If we confess our sins, right? Or if we say that we have no sin. Now, in this wee crowd, on any given day, what happens if any man sin, right? If we, and if any man sin, whether it's him or whether it's him or whether it's her or whether it's him or whatever, well, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us, right? If we say that we have no sin, that's what we say, well, we deceive ourselves, they're the two options. So you see how simple that is, if you just take away any sort of predispositions that you already had about this passage. So really, you see how quickly and just how simple John's statements really are. There's so much controversy about how we interpret verses eight to 10. You know, these little verses, it's really quite simple. And just to clarify, if this is not already obvious, I am not suggesting that to obtain forgiveness, you need to be aware of and confess in heart and in word every single tiny microzin that you ever do and fall in your knees and absolute tears in it for reasons that were already given earlier in the study, such as the sins of ignorance, okay? That's not the point, that's not the point that I'm getting at. The point is the mentality, the belief that you have about your sins. Just acknowledge that you still struggle with your sins in your mortal body. And just a simple acknowledgement that you are not a sinlessly perfect, self-righteous I am, okay, because Mike Krakowski is an I am and Abide in the Word is an I am, okay? And Proger Frogger is an I am. That's all I'm saying. The mentality that John is tackling here don't be an I am, okay, about your sins. Then the point then is about the mentality that we have towards our sins, which fundamentally revolves around what we believe about salvation, okay? Do you acknowledge that you still sin in ignorance or just unintentionally? Do you just acknowledge it if confronted? Do you acknowledge that even the thought of foolishness is sin? If somebody confronts you about an obvious sin or a blatantly false claim that you made about the Bible, would you come up with a million and one excuses for it or just ignore the accusation and pretend you didn't hear it or would you turn it on the person confronting you and make it about them being a bad person? Or rather, would you just rather confess it and say that you were wrong? I mean, it's a lot easier that way really sometimes. Now, there will be certain circumstances and there's kind of a disclaimer that where a brother or a sister in Christ denies certain sins and does justify oneself. And yet the opinion of another brother or sister is that he did indeed sin, right? Now, this doesn't undermine his salvation because actually the Bible does prepare us for that to happen because in the New Testament, there's frequent places where Jesus or the apostles give instructions on how to resolve conflicts with one another and the church is required to settle these issues and were required to forgive each other, right? Because there will be conflict. There will be denial about certain sins even among safe brethren, right? That's why the church is there to resolve these disputes because the reason why we have a dispute is because one person's claiming that a sin happened and they were wronged and another person is denying it. So, you know, but we don't need to get too wrapped up in the legalistic thing of all our sins that we confess, but it's about the mindset that we have of acknowledging our sin generally, okay? So wrapping up chapter one then, we see how simple and comprehensible John's statements are really there are simply two types of people and either we end up fellowshiping with one type or we fellowship with the other type. So either we say we have no sin and we have not sinned or we confess our sins, they're the two opposites. So either we say we have not sinned and this could apply to both sinless perfectionists and those who deny being sinners or we just say, yes, we have sinned or we can say we have turned from all of our sins and we don't sin or we can just confess that we struggle with sin or we can say, well, we're not trying, we really have turned from our sins, we're still good people or on the other hand, we can say, we are trying most of us at least but we still fall short of the glory of God. And if somebody confronts us about our sins, well, either we end up in this camp where we just end up saying, la, la, la, I can't hear you, you're a false accuser or that's not really sin, God is okay with it or we just, on the other hand, we can say, yes, I was wrong, sorry about that. And consequently, either we lie and do not the truth, we walk in darkness, we deceive ourselves or we have fellowship with him and we walk in the light and he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us and we have an advocate.