This Lenten Season, Place Your Pride on His Altar

A Pleasing Sacrifice

Something inside us naturally resists confessing. It is easy for us to rise to our own defense. It is easy for us to blame someone else. It is easy to argue within ourselves that what we did was not that bad after all. It is easy to compare ourselves to others and conclude that we’re not doing as badly as them. It’s easy to be self-righteous and defensive when approached with a wrong. But confession is counterintuitive. Every parent knows that honest, humble confession is unnatural. If you ask your child why he did what he did, he won’t talk about himself. He’ll point to his sibling or he’ll point to the situation, but he won’t say, “It was me. I am a rebel and a sinner, and I alone am at fault.”

I have an embarrassing personal example of the difficulty of confession. I was on a speaking trip and staying at the home of one of the families in the church. It was a lovely, well-decorated house, filled with fine furniture. In my room was a large and beautiful leather lounge chair. When I speak, I like my clothes to be wrinkle-free, so, before the days when I would stay in hotels where irons are provided, I always traveled with a small iron. I looked around for a place to iron my clothes, and the big leather chair seemed like the best option. I put a towel on it, heated up the iron, and began to press my clothes. I had pressed my pants, set the iron upright on the towel, and walked over to get my shirt. I turned around only to discover that the iron had fallen, had landed facedown on the seat of that chair, and had burned the leather. I couldn’t believe it. I then spent way too much time thinking about how I would break the bad news of how my hosts’ beautiful chair now had a large burn mark, but I spent even more time trying to convince myself that this wasn’t actually my fault.

I was the only one in the room. I was the one ironing. I was the one who made the decision to iron on that beautiful chair. I had walked away and left a hot iron in a precarious position. It was my fault. I had to go downstairs and tell my host what I had done. The fact that it was so hard was a humbling spiritual lesson for me. This is why confession is such a pleasing sacrifice to your Lord. It requires you to silence all the self-aggrandizing, self-righteous voices in your life. It forces you to admit that you’re way more spiritually needy than you would like to think you are. It asks you to admit that you’re a person in constant need of forgiveness. It causes you to admit that your biggest problem is not your history, your family, your friends, your culture, your economic situation, your church, your neighbors, your age, or your physical condition. Confession requires you to admit that your biggest problems live inside you, in your heart. It smashes any delusion of comfortable independence. It yanks you away from spiritual self-reliance. Confession drives you to the feet of God as your sovereign Lord and Savior, to honor him for who he is, and to cry for help because of who you are. Confession is pleasing to God because it puts you right in the middle of the position you were created to be in: humble, honest dependence on him.

How about coming to God with the pleasing sacrifice of confession?

No passage captures this better than Hosea 14:1–3:

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
     for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
Take with you words
      and return to the Lord;
say to him,
     “Take away all iniquity;
accept what is good,
     and we will pay with bulls
     the vows of our lips.
Assyria shall not save us;
     we will not ride on horses;
and we will say no more,
     ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy.”

Hosea is a message of exhortation and warning to people who have wandered away from God. The word picture for this warning is marital adultery. God’s people have committed spiritual adultery. Spiritual adultery is loving something more than God, causing us to desire and do what God has prohibited. Sin is spiritual adultery. In the face of this, Hosea calls God’s people to return, as an adulterous spouse would return to the one he promised his lifelong love to.

But at the center of this call to return is this request: “Take with you words . . . ‘we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips.’” It is a bit hard in the English translation to understand what is being requested here. God is saying, “There is a sacrifice I want you to make; it’s the sacrifice of your lips, that is, confession.” God wanted them to do more than just bring the required animal sacrifices. He wanted them to bring a far more costly sacrifice: honest, humble confession, free of excuse or blame-shifting. Confession is hard, but it is simple. Confession only takes three words: “I have sinned.” Confession is naming and owning the sin with no contingencies added. But there is another part of the sacrifice of your lips. It is acknowledging that your only hope is the forgiving and transforming grace of the Lord. “Assyria shall not save us; / we will not ride on horses; / and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’/ to the work of our hands. / In you the orphan finds mercy” (Hos. 14:3). Sin is a mess we cannot independently get ourselves out of. Sin cries out for grace because grace is the sinner’s only hope in life and in death.

So this Lenten season, don’t just give up physical stuff. How about coming to God with the pleasing sacrifice of confession? Come to him this season and place your pride on his altar, confessing your wandering heart and acknowledging once again that you are a person in need of mercy, and the mercy you need is found only in him.

In this season of sacrifice, take words with you and return to your Lord.

This article is adapted from Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional by Paul David Tripp.

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