Stuck in Confession

Do you ever get stuck in confession?

Like a stuck tire futilely spinning in mud, you continually confess but never find freedom. You’re always trying to discern whether you have sinned or not, whether you need to confess or not. And because your conscience is predisposed to condemn you, you’re likely to err on the side of confession. Because OCD feeds off of uncertainty, any time you’re not sure (which is most of the time), you’ll confess just to be safe.

But then, you wonder if you truly confessed properly. When you prayed that prayer of confession, did you say everything you wanted to say? Did you confess every sin you could think of, and did you confess every facet of how that one sin played out in your heart?

Maybe you feel the need to confess in order to be right with God. You know theologically that this isn’t true—it is God in his grace who saves, not the strength of your confession—but still you feel the compulsion to confess. It’s better to be safe than sorry, right? You should probably just confess that thing, because you don’t want to risk having a hardened heart. If you don’t confess, you most certainly have a hardened heart, and that probably even means you’re not a Christian.

So you confess. But instead of bringing the freedom and peace you expect true repentance to bring, it just makes you feel even worse. You feel like you didn’t do it right. Your heart wasn’t in it. Your feelings were all wrong—maybe you felt numb (lip-service means nothing without heart change!) or maybe you felt a lot of remorse (but really, that was probably a worldly sorrow and not true repentance, so can you really count that?).

You find yourself confessing not only the particular sins that come to mind, but your attitude about those sins. And then you wonder if you were prideful about your humility, so you confess that. But maybe you were falsely humble about recognizing how prideful you were about feeling humble.

It’s a mess, and you feel you can never plumb the depths of your sin enough to sufficiently confess. I’ve even thought before, “I wish I sinned less so I wouldn’t be so worried about whether or not I need to confess.” What a twisted version of the gospel!

See how a good thing like confession can be twisted? A means of deepening relationship with the Lord becomes a task with which you berate yourself. Something meant to bring you into light and lift your gaze outward and upward instead ensnares you in further introspection and self-flagellation.

This is one of those OCD things that can be so hard to separate from Christian life. It’s a good thing to confess, and it’s good to be tenderhearted. Likewise, if we are convicted of a specific sin and shown concrete steps to repent, we should repent. So, with scrupulosity, if I feel that maybe this is conviction but doing the opposite means that I must ignore it, then I could be ignoring God’s conviction! I could be grieving the Holy Spirit (or so I think).

This extremity of struggle is not normal or desirable. You probably realize that other people are not crushed under this weight of self-condemnation. This is not a sign of their extreme faith and your lack, but rather it’s a sign of what you’re suffering from: scrupulosity.

When fighting intrusive thoughts, it’s important to identify the struggle as scrupulosity. You’re not an especially wretched sinner, nor are you hardened beyond forgiveness. You are a sinner, and you also have a disorder that tries to convince you that everything you do is sin. Part of growth is learning to strengthen your overly tender conscience to recognize true conviction from self-condemnation.

You can also confess what you’re certain about. Confession is good, so I would never say that you should stop altogether. Confess those things that you don’t have to think twice about, that you don’t doubt, that you don’t ask about. If you find that you’re frequently saying “maybe” or “what if,” those are warning signs that OCD is at work.

Another helpful tool is to ask others if uncertain. We don’t want this to become a compulsion in itself as we continually ask for reassurance over the same issues, but we can still ask others for their perspectives, as they often see things we don’t see. And having an objective perspective outside of your own self-condemning one is helpful. One rule of thumb I’ve heard OCD experts say is that we can do as others do: if most people in your life, who love Jesus and seek to follow him, would say that a particular obsession is not a sin, you can trust them on that. It’s not that they’re always completely right, but they have the Spirit in them, and trusting them is one way we can lean on the body of Christ.

Perhaps you struggle with confessing to people. Perhaps they’ve noticed your sensitivity to confession, and perhaps you regularly confess to others only to find they have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s okay to be tenderhearted, and we all have varying levels of sensitivity to how we might have hurt others; but consider asking people in your life if your confession to them feels over the top. This can be a helpful reorientation for you.

Finally, as I wrote about in my last post, you can leave ultimate responsibility in the Lord’s hands. We are finite beings, and we can’t even see our sin unless the Lord reveals it, and in his mercy, he usually reveals it to us a little at a time, not drowning us in revelation but continually reminding us of our need for him.

If God is truly as gracious and forgiving as Scripture testifies to, how can it be that he requires exhaustive confession from finite humans, whose sins are more numerous than we can number and deeper than we can perceive? Surely we must not have to rack our brains for every sin we’ve committed. Surely he does not demand perfect confession. As my counselor has reminded me, all of us will die with unconfessed sin.

When you find yourself stuck in endless confession, consider a prayer like this as an example of what it looks like to drive a wedge underneath the tire to free it from its futile spinning in the mud:

“Lord, I do not know whether this thing is sin or not. I do not know whether I should confess it. But I do know that you alone see all. You know every intention of my heart. Make clear to me where I have sinned, and in the ambiguous places, help me trust that it isn’t up to me to secure my standing with you. You are gracious and merciful. Please make that truth more and more an experienced reality. But when it’s not, help me trust that it is reality, even if I can’t feel it.”

There is risk in all I’m saying. There’s risk in trusting others’ judgment instead of your intrusive thoughts. There’s risk in choosing to end your confession when your thoughts are continuing to spiral in self-condemnation. But it’s a risk taken on the character of God. Is he as our intrusive thoughts say he is: exacting and unforgiving? Or is he as he defines himself: gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love?

So we can confess what we’re certain about. And for those sins we do confess, we need not wonder if he will forgive us. There is no waiting period between our confession and his forgiveness. He is faithful to forgive our sins (1 John 1:9). Not we are faithful enough to confess perfectly, but he is faithful to forgive us. Like the father who runs out to meet his prodigal son returning home, so our God prepares a feast and clothes us lavishly the minute we turn to him. There is no hesitation in him.

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I’ve been enjoying this song by Paul Zach on Psalm 103. I hope it’s a reminder to you of how merciful the Lord is, who both knows our frame and loves us and is so quick to forgive.