Making Confession: More Is Necessary Than Saying “Yes”

There you stand in front of the church in the springtime of the year. Perhaps you are quite nervous. Soon your name, your baptized name, will resound throughout the congregation after four questions are asked of you. After your name is mentioned, your “Yes” will be spoken, either softly or loudly, in the presence of Him who knows the heart, and in the audience of the congregation. It was there where years ago probably your baptized name was also once spoken.

Saying “Yes,” and afterward?

To make confession has, we hope, caused you to be occupied in the weeks prior to this: in the conscientious preparation in confession class regarding the doctrine of Scripture, in the consideration in the presence of the Lord in respect to the consequences for your life by making confession, and in your secret prayer. For there is more necessary than saying “Yes” to live in comfort and to die happily.

For this comfort and happiness it is certainly necessary that the quickening work of the Holy Spirit be in your young life. It does not only involve your lips, the saying of “Yes,” but it concerns your heart and your life, for the present and the future, for the coming of the Lord which is drawing near. The Lord does not ask anything less than our heart!

Making confession is done in various ways and times, by what you say and do not say, by what you do or do not do. Evidence of your confession is always revealed in your life, either in words or without words. Indeed, it is in your conversation, in your behavior, and in your appearance. Confession is made prior to this day and, not to be forgotten, after this day; in words and deeds it is evident.

Not yet a confessing member?

Even if you have not yet made confession, you are testifying something. God forbid that it is a confession of indifference, of gradual alienation from the Lord and His Word and service, which is a pathway to disaster, step by step farther away. Under the impression of being free, there is in reality an ever-increasing captivation by the slave driver. Again, may God forbid this!

Ask for God's light and guidance if you have not yet been able to decide to make confession of faith. He directs you to the way of His institutions and the means of His grace, namely, the uniting with the congregation where you were once brought unknowingly and perhaps even crying. It was God's leading. Just as the family of Noah was set apart by the flood, and the nation of Israel by the Red Sea, so also your life was set apart by baptism under the proclamation of God's grace in Christ Jesus.

Personal responsibility

This responsibility you must now personally and with full awareness take upon yourself. You are no longer considered to be in your parents. Just as at a certain moment it is no longer possible in social life, it is likewise the case in church life. By making confession you express publicly that you take over this responsibility from your parents and, with the help of the Lord, assume it for yourself. How truly applicable it is here also that he that trusteth in himself is a fool.

We cannot of ourselves bring about anything rightly by our word “Yes.” However, may your eye be lifted upwards, also when you are standing in the front of the church with the prayer in your heart, “O Lord, take hold of me, for otherwise nothing will come of it. Convert me as Thou hast converted all Thy people throughout all ages, so that I may live and die with Thy people.”

Thy people

Confession is saying the same as the church of all ages. Confession is uniting of voices with the words of the congregation of all times. The four questions which are asked also emphatically point to this:

• the Holy Scriptures as having authority in every aspect of your life,

• the conviction of the doctrine according to Scripture,

• the resolve to live according to Scripture, and

• the submission to the church offices in regard to doctrine and life.

By making confession you express publicly that you take over this responsibility from your parents and, with the help of the Lord, assume it for yourself.

We are extremely happy when our young people in these times give notice of their desire and express by their “Yes” that they do not wish to join in singing with the choir of the world. What that must also be for a parent when his child, notwithstanding all the faults and shortcomings of the religious training, answers “Yes” in front of the church. By so doing they travel across the bridge of the three-fold religious instruction between holy baptism and making confession, in spite of everything which comes against it. May in this way God's converting grace be glorified in the following generations, so that the Lord may reveal among the youth of the congregation, “They shall come, and shall declare His righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that He hath done this” (Psalm 22:31).

How?

How shall I be able to appear before God, how shall I by myself make good my confession, how shall I be preserved from slothfulness and half-heartedness? By reasoning you will not solve this, and also not by merit and works. It is only by pleading that simple child's verse, which you learned in your youth, and, if it is well, which we never grow out of, “I will, if thou plead, fill thine every need, all thy wants relieving.”

We lack everything which is needed to appear before God. However, the Lord's design in demanding is to bring us upon our knees in need and impossibility, so that only this remains, “that He hath done this.” That is now sovereign grace in Christ for the most wicked person, unmerited and without obligation. That grace the Lord shall continue to bestow upon lost ones until the last day. This regenerating grace from the fullness of Christ we wish for you with our whole heart.

A good confession is alone a fruit of His mediatorial work, and not of our heart and life. In a dark time Jeremiah cried out, “And there is hope in thine end.” Would not the Lord also be able and willing to reveal this in our days? “Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it!”

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