Devotional 79: Repentance and the Backslider: Restoring the Fallen

The Confession Read

Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance, but it is every man's duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 15, Section 5

Introduction

There is a kind of repentance that repents of nothing in particular. It is the repentance of the man who kneels at his bedside each evening and murmurs, "Lord, forgive me all my sins," and rises with his conscience as undisturbed as when he knelt. He has named nothing, grieved over nothing, turned from nothing. His confession is a wide net whose mesh is too large to catch any living fish — a general admission of general sinfulness that never descends to the particular shape of his own particular guilt. The Westminster Divines, in the fifth section of their chapter on repentance, address this man with a single sentence of barely thirty words that cuts deeper than many a sermon. "Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance," they write, "but it is every man's duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly." The sentence has the force of a well-aimed arrow because it strikes at a universal temptation of the fallen heart. Sin is always particular — this lie, spoken at this hour, to this person, for this reason — but our confession of it would prefer to be general. Why? Because the general is safe and the particular is dangerous. To admit that one is a sinner in the abstract costs nothing; every man will grant the proposition. But to say, "I spoke that word of cruelty to my wife yesterday evening; I entertained that lustful thought this morning before breakfast; I withheld that kindness from my neighbour because I resented his success" — this costs the pride its life. The general confession lets the soul keep its distance from its guilt, observing it as a physician observes a disease in a stranger's body. The particular confession brings the soul into immediate, painful contact with the thing it must hate and forsake. And because the flesh shrinks from that pain, it manufactures a counterfeit repentance that has all the outward form of the real thing and none of its substance. The Divines were not inventing a new requirement. They were recovering what Scripture had always taught and what every awakened conscience instinctively knows: that true repentance names sins. It owns them. It turns from them one by one, not merely from the abstraction of "sinfulness" in which they all conveniently dissolve into a fog too thick to see through and too thin to feel. The gospel does not deal in generalities. Christ did not die for an abstraction called "sin." He died for sins — particular transgressions committed by particular sinners on particular days against particular commandments. And the repentance that answers to such a gospel must be equally particular, tracing each wound to its source and dragging each sin into the light where it can be confessed, forsaken, and covered by the blood that cleanses.

Scripture Foundation

The Old Testament law required particular confession as the very condition of atonement. In the opening verses of the Levitical code governing the sin offering, the Lord commands: "And it shall be, when he shall be guilty in one of these things, that he shall confess that he hath sinned in that thing" (Leviticus 5:5). The phrase "in that thing" is a Hebrew hammer stroke against generalities. The penitent was not permitted to approach the altar and say, "I have sinned in many ways; forgive whatever it was." He was required to identify the particular transgression: the oath he had sworn rashly, the unclean thing he had touched, the neighbour he had defrauded. The confession was as particular as the sin, because the sin was as particular as the commandment it had broken. The Hebrew verb for confess, yadah, is built on the root yad, meaning hand — as though confession were the act of holding the sin out before God, open-palmed, no longer concealed. The sinner was to take the specific transgression in hand, name it, and present it at the altar. Without this particular confession, the blood of the offering availed nothing. The sacrifice was not a general anesthetic for a general malaise but a specific remedy for a specific offense, and it required a specific acknowledgment of that offense to be effectual. The same principle appears in the Mosaic legislation concerning restitution. When the law addressed the man who had sinned against his neighbour, it commanded not only confession but particular restoration: "Then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall recompense his trespass with the principal thereof, and add unto it the fifth part thereof, and give it unto him against whom he hath trespassed" (Numbers 5:7). The confession named the sin, and the restitution undid it insofar as human effort could undo it. The amount restored was precisely calculated: the principal plus a fifth. There was no room for a general, "I have wronged men in my business dealings; forgive me." The man who had taken must return what he took — this sum, to this person, at this time. The particularity of the sin demanded a particularity of repentance that reached all the way into the ledger book. The wisdom literature presses the same truth from the negative side through the proverb that contrasts the man who covers his sins with the man who confesses them: "He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy" (Proverbs 28:13). The Hebrew verb for cover, kasah, suggests concealment, the active hiding of something from view. The man who covers his sins is not necessarily the man who denies he is a sinner. He may freely admit to being a sinner in general. What he covers is the particular sin — the one that shames him, the one that would cost him his reputation if it were known, the one that he has no intention of forsaking because he has never named it. Solomon's promise is attached not to general confession but to the double act of confessing and forsaking, and both acts require particularity. One cannot forsake what one has not named. One cannot confess what one continues to hide. The mercy that follows is as particular as the confession that precedes it. The psalmist David, who learned the cost of hidden sin through bitter experience, describes the physiology of unconfessed guilt in language that has no parallel in Scripture for its visceral force: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer" (Psalm 32:3-4). The silence David describes was not a silence about his general condition. It was a silence about a particular transgression — specifically, his adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah her husband, sins he had committed perhaps a year before Nathan the prophet confronted him. During those months of silence, David had not ceased to acknowledge himself a sinner. He had not abandoned the forms of religion. But he had hidden the one thing that mattered most, and until that one thing was named, there was no peace. The bones that waxed old, the moisture turned to the drought of summer — these are the physical wages of a general repentance that conceals a particular sin. Then comes the turning point: "I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin" (Psalm 32:5). The singular "my sin" points to a specific deed. David named it — not in the hearing of men, but before the face of God — and the moment he did, forgiveness followed. The relief was as particular as the confession, because the confession had finally become as particular as the sin. Yet David also knew that there are sins hidden even from the sinner himself, faults so deeply woven into the fabric of the heart that they escape the notice of unaided self-examination. This is the burden of his prayer in Psalm 19, which the Westminster Divines placed among the proof texts for this very section: "Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults" (Psalm 19:12). The Hebrew nistaroth, secret or hidden things, refers to sins that are concealed from the sinner's own consciousness — the pride he mistakes for zeal, the envy he calls righteous indignation, the self-love he dresses in the language of legitimate self-care. The prayer acknowledges that particular repentance is an ongoing endeavor, not a one-time event. There are sins we do not yet know we have committed, sins whose particularity has not yet dawned on our conscience. David does not ask to be excused from repenting of them because he cannot name them. He asks to be cleansed from them — and the cleansing includes the Spirit's work of bringing them to light so that, once seen, they may be confessed and forsaken. The prayer is itself an act of particular repentance: it names the category of unnamed sins and asks God to do what the sinner cannot do for himself, namely, to make the hidden visible so that the work of turning may be carried forward into every dark corner of the soul. In the New Testament, the particularity of repentance comes to its fullest expression in the conversion of Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector of Jericho. When salvation entered his house, Zacchaeus stood before the Lord and declared: "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold" (Luke 19:8). Notice the precision of his language. He does not say, "If I have wronged anyone, I will make it right." He has already identified the particular shape of his sin — exacting money by false accusation — and his repentance takes a correspondingly particular shape. The Greek verb behind "I restore," apodidōmi, carries the sense of giving back what belongs to another, of discharging a debt that is owed. Zacchaeus does more than feel sorry. He opens his account books, identifies the men he has defrauded, calculates what he owes them, and restores it with interest. His repentance has teeth. It can be measured in the coins he returns to the hands he took them from. This is not a man contenting himself with a general repentance. This is a man whose repentance has descended from the clouds of sentiment to the hard ground of particular action, and our Lord's verdict on that repentance is immediate and unqualified: "This day is salvation come to this house" (Luke 19:9). The evidence that salvation had come was not a general confession but a particular restitution. The fruit proved the root.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines framed this section against the background of errors that had made general repentance a comfortable substitute for the real thing, errors that were alive in the seventeenth century and remain alive in the twenty-first. The first error was the practice, widespread in the medieval church, of granting priestly absolution on the basis of a general confession without requiring the penitent to name particular sins. The formula of the confessional — "I confess to Almighty God and to you, father, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed" — became, in practice, a shield behind which the impenitent heart could hide. One could confess to being a sinner without ever confronting the specific sins that made the confession necessary. The generality of the formula allowed the soul to maintain its distance from its guilt. The Reformation's recovery of particular repentance was, at its heart, a recovery of the biblical pattern in which confession is as specific as the transgression it names. The Reformers were not introducing a novelty of scrupulosity. They were restoring what Leviticus had always required: "he shall confess that he hath sinned in that thing." The second error was the Antinomian tendency, present in England during the 1640s as it had been in Germany a century earlier, to reduce all religion to a general faith in Christ without any corresponding turning from particular sins. The Antinomian argued, with a logic that was formally correct but pastorally catastrophic, that since Christ had died for all the sins of the elect — past, present, and future — there was no need for the believer to confess or repent of particular sins. To do so, it was urged, was to cast doubt on the sufficiency of Christ's atonement and to reintroduce a form of works-righteousness through the back door of repentance. The Confession's response is devastating in its brevity: "it is every man's duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly." The word "duty" closes the door on Antinomian indifference. Particular repentance is not an optional exercise for the spiritually ambitious. It is the obligation of every man, grounded not in his subjective feelings of guilt but in the objective command of God. Grace does not abolish duty; it enables it. A third concern, subtler than the first two, was the growing influence of a philosophical tendency to dissolve particular sins into the general category of human imperfection. This was the spirit of the age then, and it remains the spirit of our age now. Men and women today are willing to speak of being "broken," "flawed," or "struggling." They are far less willing to say, "I told a lie yesterday at four o'clock in the afternoon; I entertained a lustful thought this morning before breakfast; I spoke a word that wounded my wife and dishonored my Lord." The general admission of imperfection leaves the conscience undisturbed because it spreads the guilt so thin that no one act carries any weight. The particular confession of particular sins wounds the conscience, and that wound is the beginning of healing. The Divines understood that the soul will always flee the particular for the general — the general is safe, the particular is dangerous — and they were determined to make the cost unavoidable, because they knew that only costly repentance is true repentance. The construction of the section's single sentence itself rewards careful attention. The first clause is negative and absolute: "Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance." The word "content" is the diagnostic term. The question is not whether a general repentance ever passes the lips of a true penitent. Every awakened sinner begins with a general sense of his sinfulness, and even the most mature saint, overwhelmed by the multitude of his transgressions, will sometimes cry out with the publican, "God be merciful to me, the sinner." The question is whether the soul contents itself with that generality, settling down in it as though the work were done. The second clause is positive and intensive: "it is every man's duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly." The repetition of "particular" — "particular sins, particularly" — is a rhetorical hammer blow from men not given to verbal ornament. When the Westminster Divines repeat a word, they mean for it to be heard. The sins are particular because each sin is a specific violation of a specific commandment by a specific person at a specific moment. The repentance is particular because it must address each sin as an individual act of rebellion rather than dissolving them into a general mist of regret. The word "endeavour" is as carefully chosen as every other word in the sentence. The Divines were pastors, not perfectionists. They knew that no man in this life repents of every particular sin with equal completeness. Some sins lie too deep for immediate discovery. Some are so woven into the texture of the personality that their unravelling is the work of a lifetime. The "endeavour" is the thing: the sustained effort, the direction of the will, the refusal to settle for generalities. The man who endeavours to repent particularly is the man who searches his conscience, names his sins as the Spirit brings them to light, confesses them, and turns from them — and then does it again tomorrow, and the day after that, until the day when particular repentance is swallowed up in the perfection of glory.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in his treatment of repentance in the third book of the Institutes, insists that the mortification of sin cannot be carried out in the abstract. Each sin has its own life, its own occasions, its own particular patterns of temptation, and its own particular remedies. To speak of putting sin to death in general, without naming the particular lust, the particular resentment, the particular habit of speech that must die, is to speak of a battle without an enemy. The soldier who fires his weapon into the fog may feel that he is fighting, but he is hitting nothing. So it is with the man whose repentance remains general. Calvin's point is not merely theological but eminently practical: the prayers of the truly penitent are shaped by the particular sins they are fighting. A general petition for holiness, unaccompanied by specific petitions against specific sins, expects no answer because it has not troubled to name what it seeks. The drunkard must pray against his drink, the gossip against her tongue, the covetous man against his grasping after wealth. The particularity of the prayer is the measure of its seriousness. Watson applies this principle with the precision of a surgeon. He invites the reader to imagine a man who comes to a physician and says only, "I am sick," without describing his symptoms, without naming the pain in his side or the fever in his head. The physician, Watson observes, can do nothing for such a man, because the confession is too general to guide the remedy. So it is with the soul that comes to the Great Physician. To say, "I am a sinner," without naming the particular sin, is to present a complaint so vague that no cure can be directed toward it. Watson presses further: the man who confesses only in general terms may in fact be confessing another man's sins rather than his own. "I am a sinner" is true of every son of Adam. But "I have lied," "I have lusted," "I have defrauded" — these are my sins, the ones I have committed, the ones for which I alone must give account. The general confession lets the soul keep its distance from its guilt. The particular confession brings the soul into immediate contact with the thing it must hate and forsake. Watson adds a penetrating pastoral observation: the refusal to repent particularly is often a sign that the sinner is still in love with his sin. He keeps his repentance general so that he can keep his sin particular. As long as the sin remains unnamed, it remains unchallenged. To name it is to look it in the face, and to look it in the face is the first step toward hating it. Turretin addresses the question with his characteristic systematic precision, asking directly whether particular repentance is necessary for salvation. His answer is carefully qualified. He does not teach that a perfect enumeration of every sin is required — an impossibility in this life, given the blindness of the fallen heart and the multitude of sins committed in thought, word, and deed each day. But he does teach, with full Reformed conviction, that the penitent must not content himself with a general repentance that refuses to descend to particulars. The sincere endeavour to repent of particular sins is the evidence that repentance is genuine. The man who says, "Lord, I repent of all my sins," but takes no pains to discover what those sins actually are — to name them, to grieve over them individually, to turn from them specifically — is not repenting. He is performing a religious gesture that has the form of repentance without its substance. Turretin grounds this in the very nature of sin: sin does not exist in the abstract. It exists in concrete acts, words, and thoughts committed by concrete persons in concrete circumstances. Repentance that does not address the concrete is repentance that does not address sin. The logic is inexorable, and the pastoral implication is clear: examine yourself, search out the particular transgressions, and bring them one by one to the throne of grace. Hodge, in his commentary on this section, draws particular attention to the word "endeavour." The Confession, he notes, does not require that every man succeed in repenting of every particular sin completely and perfectly. That would be to demand what only glory can achieve, and the Confession is not in the business of crushing consciences with impossible standards. But it does require that every man make the sustained effort. The word is deeply pastoral. It acknowledges the reality of remaining sin, the difficulty of genuine self-knowledge, the blindness that clings to the fallen heart even after regeneration. The Christian will not discover all his particular sins at once. Some will lie hidden for years. Some will be revealed only through affliction, or through the honest words of a faithful friend, or through the slow work of the Spirit applying the mirror of the Word week after week. But the endeavour — the sustained, serious, prayerful effort to know one's own heart and to repent of what one finds there — is not optional. It is every man's duty, and no man who neglects it will grow in grace. Shaw, whose practical exposition of the Confession served generations of Scottish Presbyterians, provides a test of striking simplicity. He asks the reader to consider whether his repentance would be recognized as repentance by those who live closest to him. If a man claims to have repented of a sharp and wounding tongue, let his wife testify whether the tongue has in fact changed. If a woman claims to have repented of envy, let her neighbour say whether the envy has appreciably abated. Particular repentance, Shaw argues, produces particular fruits — and those fruits are visible to those who live nearest. The insight is devastatingly practical. General repentance can be performed entirely in the theater of the mind, where there are no witnesses and no accountability. But particular repentance, precisely because it names particular sins and turns from them in particular ways, produces a change that other people can see and verify. The husband whose repentance is real will speak differently to his wife. The merchant whose repentance is real will conduct his business with a different scale. The pastor whose repentance is real will prepare his sermons with a different humility. The particularity of the repentance guarantees the public visibility of the fruit.

Puritan Application

First, examine the language of your private prayers for the presence or absence of particular confession. The words you speak when no one else is listening are one of the surest indicators of the state of your repentance. When you confess sin, do you say only, "Lord, forgive me my many sins," or do you name the particular transgressions of the past day — the word of irritation spoken to your child, the lustful glance indulged rather than arrested, the duty neglected because it was inconvenient, the resentment nursed in the silence of your heart? A general confession that never descends to particulars is a confession that has not yet cost you anything. It is the language of a man who wants the comfort of absolution without the shame of specificity. Begin this very evening. Before you sleep, review the day that is ending. Ask the Spirit to bring to your remembrance the particular sins you have committed, the particular duties you have omitted, the particular motions of pride, envy, or unbelief that have stirred within you. Name those things before God. Do not hide them behind the screen of generalities. The particular confession will be painful — the shame of naming what you would prefer to forget — but the pain is the pain of healing, and the peace that follows it is a peace that general repentance can never give. Second, make deliberate use of the Ten Commandments as a mirror for particular self-examination. The Puritans were masters of this practice, and they learned it directly from the Scriptures: "by the law is the knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:20). The law is the instrument the Spirit uses to convict the conscience of particular transgressions, because the law is itself particular. It does not say, "Be religious in a general way." It says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain." Take each commandment in turn, slowly and prayerfully. The first: have you loved God with all your heart, or have other loves — comfort, reputation, family, success — crowded Him from His rightful place? Name those rival deities. The third: have you taken the Lord's name in vain, not only in blasphemous speech but in careless worship, in prayers spoken without the engagement of the heart, in hymns sung while the mind wandered? Name the occasions. The seventh: have you committed adultery, if not in body then in the imagination, in the wandering eye, in the entertainment of thoughts that defile? Name the moments. Work through the entire Decalogue deliberately, asking the Holy Spirit to bring to light what your fallen heart would prefer to keep in darkness. This is the endeavour the Confession commands. It is not done in a single session or a single year. It is the labour of a lifetime, growing deeper and more searching as you grow in the knowledge of God and of your own heart. But it is every man's duty, and the man who neglects it will not grow in grace, whatever else he may do. Third, do not mistake the discovery of new particular sins for evidence that you were never truly converted. One of the enemy's most effective stratagems is to persuade the believer that the sight of particular sins — especially sins he had not previously recognized — is proof that his profession of faith has been hollow. The logic runs like this: if I am truly a child of God, how can such sins still dwell in me? How could I have been blind to them for so long? The answer that Scripture gives is that the very sight of those sins is the work of the Spirit, who takes of the things of Christ and shows them to the believer. The unregenerate man does not see his particular sins because he does not look for them. The believer sees them because the Spirit is at work, faithfully bringing to the surface what needs to be confessed and mortified. The discovery of a new depth of sin is not a sign that you are lost. It is a sign that the Spirit has not finished His work in you and that He is not content to leave you where you are. Do not let the sight of particular sins drive you to despair. Let it drive you to Christ, whose blood is sufficient for the sins you knew about yesterday and the sins you will discover tomorrow, and the sins you will not discover until the day you stand before Him and are made like Him, for you shall see Him as He is. Fourth, cultivate the habit of timely, particular repentance. The temptation, once a particular sin has been committed, is to delay confession. We tell ourselves we will deal with it later — when the circumstances are more convenient, when the shame has subsided, when we have gathered the emotional energy to repent properly. But delayed repentance is a dangerous indulgence. The sin that is not confessed immediately begins to harden in the heart like cement. The conscience that is not cleared quickly begins to grow calloused against the Spirit's voice. David learned this in the months between his sin with Bathsheba and Nathan's confrontation: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old." Those months were not neutral. They were months in which his spiritual life withered, his joy evaporated, and his physical health deteriorated under the heavy hand of God. Do not imitate him in his delay. When the Spirit convicts you of a particular sin — whether a word spoken in anger, a thought entertained in lust, or a duty wilfully neglected — confess it at once. Name it before God. Grieve over it. Turn from it with a renewed purpose of obedience. And then go forward in the confidence that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from that sin as surely as from every other. The timely confession of particular sins keeps short accounts with God and preserves the soul in a state of peace and watchfulness. The longer the account goes unsettled, the harder it becomes to face. Fifth, let particular repentance bear fruit in particular restitution wherever it is possible. The example of Zacchaeus is not an optional extra for the especially devout. It is a pattern for all who have truly repented, because it demonstrates what repentance looks like when it reaches the will and the wallet, not merely the emotions. Where a particular sin has injured a particular person — through theft, slander, broken promise, or neglect of a duty owed — the repentance that does not seek to make it right, so far as lies within the penitent's power, is a repentance that has not yet reached the will. This does not mean that every wrong can be undone. A word spoken in anger can never be unspoken. A trust betrayed can never be perfectly restored. The damage done by a lifetime of sinful habits cannot be reversed in a day. But the direction of the heart must be toward restoration. The man who has stolen must return what he took. The woman who has slandered must go to the one she has wounded and seek forgiveness. The child who has defied a parent must acknowledge the defiance and ask for pardon. The repentance that stays in the prayer closet and never walks into the neighbour's house, the estranged friend's presence, or the family member's company is a repentance that has not yet learned what it means to turn. Particular sins require particular fruits of repentance, and those fruits, wherever they can be produced, must be produced. This is not salvation by works. It is the evidence that the salvation which is by grace alone through faith alone is a salvation that transforms the life, and among those transformations is the particular undoing, as far as may be, of the particular harm that particular sin has caused.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who searchest the hearts and triest the reins, and from whom no creature is hidden — all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do — we come before Thee as those who have sinned against Thee in ways more numerous than we can count and more particular than we have yet confessed. Forgive us for the years we have contented ourselves with a general repentance that cost us nothing because it named nothing. We have said, "Lord, have mercy upon us miserable sinners," and we have risen from our knees unchanged, because we never brought a single sin into the searching light of Thy countenance. We have loved the safety of generalities. We have dreaded the exposure of particulars. And in doing so, we have grieved Thy Holy Spirit and stunted our own growth in grace. Pardon, O Lord, our lazy confessions and our cowardly repentances. Grant us, we beseech Thee, the Spirit of particular repentance. Search us, O God, and know our hearts; try us, and know our thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in us, and lead us in the way everlasting. Bring to our remembrance the particular sins we have buried in forgetfulness: the harsh words we have spoken and then excused, the lustful thoughts we have entertained and indulged, the dishonesties we have practiced and rationalised, the resentments we have nursed and justified. Let none of them remain hidden any longer. Let each of them be named before Thee with grief, grieved over before Thee with tears, and forsaken by Thy enabling grace. And where our sins have wounded others — where we have stolen, slandered, deceived, or neglected — grant us the humility to make particular amends, to seek particular reconciliation, and to bear particular fruits worthy of repentance. Teach us to use Thy holy law as a lamp to search the dark corners of our hearts. Let the Ten Words be a mirror in which we see not only the general outline of human sinfulness but the particular features of our own transgressions. And when the sight of so many particular sins threatens to overwhelm us with despair, lift our eyes to the cross, where every particular sin of every particular sinner who ever turned to Christ was borne by the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. Let us never despair of mercy, because the blood that cleansed David and Zacchaeus and the thief upon the cross is the same blood that cleanses us. Yet let us also never presume upon mercy, as though Thou wert a God who overlooks what we refuse to name. Make us a people who keep short accounts with Thee and with one another, confessing sin promptly, forsaking it resolutely, and walking in the joyful liberty of those whose debts have been cancelled at infinite cost. We ask all these things for the sake of Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Redeemer, who knew no sin of His own yet bore the particular sins of all His people in His own body on the tree, and who ever liveth to make intercession for them. Amen.