Step 5, Confess
“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” (1 John 1:7-9).
So, what has all this envy, anger, and fear wrought in me? Well, sin, of course. My indignation is not righteous. Envy is sin. Anger is sin. Fear is sin. And I, like Paul, am chief of sinners. It is pride that allows me to rail against the injustices caused by others and pass over those of my own. It is pride that sets me up on a pedestal of my own making to cast down aspersions at others I deem worse than myself. It is pride that causes me to publicize my own poison and infect the world with it, one visitor at a time. It is pride that encourages me to censure the entire world and think that I will not be punished for it. Truth be told, had Christ not commandeered my soul by the drawing of the Holy Spirit, through the effectual and gracious will of God, I’d have become a black supremacist. I was one for a while. Boy, how I loved Frantz Fanon. I’d have chosen the oppressors ways and marshalled them quietly against him, like the Invisible Man stealing power from the basement.
My sin is rebellion, plain a simple. And like satan, rebellion is the series of resultant actions taken from pride. I balk at authorities and speak evil of dignities. You know my relationship with my father by now; I feel no allegiance towards any man, that I should bow to him or his position. I think they are all embodiments of the Peter principle, promoted just beyond their capacity for effectiveness. And yet, in my heart of hearts, I believe I could replace them all. I believe I could do the job better, be it genocide or philanthropy. What exactly is the difference, anyways? The heart is wicked and deceitful, who can know it? Who can understand his errors?
Even of the ones I know, I’m horrified for Him to reveal to me the ones I don’t. It is enough to pause my thumb mid-scroll on the skin of a woman I’ve never met nor ever will meet and feel my hand descend beneath my waistband and tickle. It is enough for me to perceive the sneer of hatred in my heart when witnessing a man’s joyful exhibition of his God-given talents and abilities as I lust for the adoration of his spectators. It is enough to be made aware that I am often inflamed with anger over the incessant questioning of my own seed. That I am tempted to abandon my work, my church, my family, to dwell in the holds and caves of the mountains. That I wish the one who cut me off in traffic would flip their car somewhere up the road, though not in the lane I’m driving, so that I won’t be slowed. That if you threaten my family, I’ve a wicked and irresistible compelling to murder you first. That’s why I drank. And that’s why I smoked. To dead all these impulses. Foolishly, I thought it better to localize these thoughts and impressions within myself, so that no one else would be affected. But they were. Who knew that isolating myself from my family and medicating myself into a stupor wouldn’t be interpreted as an act of sacrifice? Who knew that they wouldn’t fully understand that I only meant to protect them from the violence boiling like magma in the bowels of my heart? Who knew that they’d still expect my love, my affection, my righteousness, my judgment, my attention when I was certain I didn’t have any at all?
Oh, thank you Jesus, for a transfusion of your Holy Spirit! Thank you for a new source of life, this blessed mystery of being born again of water and the Spirit, so that I might see the Kingdom of God! Thank you that I can consider myself dead to sin and alive in Him! Thank you for the power to mortify these deeds of the flesh and walk in the light as you are in the light! Thank you that the law of the spirit of life in Christ has freed me from the law of sin and death, which before reigned in my mortal body! Now it does not reign; but I can still sense it, coursing like the serpent upon the earth of my Eden, crouching at the threshold of the door.
Now, therefore, there is a loss I need to grieve: my conception of myself. I am my idol. And I must daily crucify him in order to be free. I want myself dead. It’s Freud’s Thanatos instinct on repeat, for me. I’ve got to remember, upon waking, to unplug from that old battery and plug into the new one. Like Paul told Timothy, “stir up the gift that is in you.”
“Take up the cross, Bryan. Follow Him.”
“Where?”
“The place of the skull.”
I have surrendered the idea that there is anything in me worth salvaging, that there is some trait or skill that I might yank from His consuming fire and present to Him as useful for His finishing work.
“Oh, Lord, I found this. I worked really hard on it for many years. I think it might fit somewhere in your plans.”
“A used tampon?” He replies. “Throw it back in.”
And I sulk off into a corner with my wooden figurine and paring knife, picking at its eyes.
“What is man, that though art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visits him?”
I am wretched and poor and blind and naked. And I am glad to be, for His sake. Because I have seen the best that I can do, and I confess, it is altogether idolatry and sin. “Let God be true, and every man a liar.” Especially, me.
theblackdostoyevsky 
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