Devotional 80: Repentance and the Sacrament of Penance: The Reformed Alternative

The Confession Read

As every man is bound to make private confession of his sins to God, praying for the pardon thereof; upon which, and the forsaking of them, he shall find mercy: so he that scandalizeth his brother, or the Church of Christ, ought to be willing, by a private or public confession, and sorrow for his sin, to declare his repentance to those that are offended, who are thereupon to be reconciled to him, and in love to receive him.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 15, Section 6

Introduction

Two men kneel in prayer. One kneels alone in the quiet of his chamber, the door shut, the world outside forgotten, and there before the God who sees in secret he names his sins — this lust, this resentment, this act of dishonesty committed three days past. He weeps. He turns. He rises a forgiven man. The other man kneels in a crowded assembly, his voice unsteady, his face burning with shame, and before the God who sees in secret and before the congregation that has heard the scandal of his fall, he names his sins — this adultery that shattered two families, this deceit that brought reproach upon the gospel. He weeps. He turns. He too rises a forgiven man, and the church that witnessed his fall now witnesses his rising, and together they are reconciled. The sixth and final section of the Westminster Confession's chapter on repentance addresses a dimension of repentance that modern Christianity has largely forgotten, and that the medieval church had grievously distorted: the horizontal dimension. Repentance is first and always a transaction between the sinner and God — the Confession has spent five sections establishing this with care and precision. But when sin has wounded other people, when it has brought scandal upon the church of Christ, when it has given the enemies of the gospel occasion to blaspheme, then repentance must also become a transaction between the sinner and those he has offended. The man who has sinned in secret may confess in secret. The man who has sinned openly must own his sin openly — not to earn forgiveness from God, for that was purchased at the cross, but to declare the genuineness of his repentance to those who have been wounded, and to seek the reconciliation that the gospel both requires and makes possible. The Confession's logic in this section moves like a careful physician examining a wound, touching first one side and then the other because both need healing. There is the duty of the offender: to be willing to confess and to sorrow over the harm he has done. And there is the duty of the offended: to be reconciled and to receive the penitent in love. The section is a bilateral command, and neither half may be softened without losing the whole. A church in which offenders will not confess is a church without repentance. A church in which the offended will not forgive is a church without grace. And a church without either is a church that has forgotten what its Lord taught and what the blood of the covenant was shed to accomplish: not only peace between sinners and God, but peace between sinners and one another. The Divines closed their chapter on repentance with this section because they understood that repentance, like every evangelical grace, is not complete until it has done its full work. The man who says he has repented toward God but refuses to make things right with his brother is a man whose repentance has not yet reached the ground. The vertical without the horizontal is incomplete — not because the horizontal adds anything to the merit of Christ, but because the same grace that reconciled us to God also reconciles us to one another. This is not a heavy burden laid on tender consciences. It is the liberty of the sons of God, who are freed from the guilt of sin and from the isolation and estrangement and bitter silence that sin creates between brothers. The section is about confession, but its end is reconciliation. And reconciliation is what the gospel is for.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle James, whose epistle the Reformers treasured for its insistence that faith without works is dead, delivers in a single verse the principle that governs this entire section: "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" (James 5:16). The Greek verb behind "confess" is exomologeisthe, a compound that strengthens the simple verb with a prefix carrying the sense of open, public acknowledgment. It is not a whispered admission behind closed doors; it is a declaration made openly, an owning of the fault in the presence of those who have been affected by it. James connects mutual confession directly to healing — not merely the healing of the body, though the context includes physical illness, but the healing of the whole person and the whole community. Sin sickens not only the sinner but the body of believers in which he dwells. When it is hidden, the sickness spreads underground like an infection no one names. When it is confessed, the sickness is exposed to the light, and the light is the beginning of the cure. James does not institute a new sacrament or a mandatory confessional. He describes the ordinary life of a healthy church, in which believers are honest with one another about their struggles, in which the strong pray for the weak, and in which the righteousness of Christ imputed to them becomes the ground of their boldness in intercession. A church in which no one ever confesses a fault to anyone else is a church that has forgotten James 5:16, and it is also — to speak plainly — a church where no one trusts anyone else enough to be honest. Our Lord Himself established the procedure by which sins that trouble the fellowship of believers are to be addressed. The passage in Matthew's Gospel is so well known that its familiarity can dull its sharpness, so let us read it afresh: "Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican" (Matthew 18:15-17). Several features of this passage are worth noticing. The first is the goal: "thou hast gained thy brother." The purpose of the entire process is not punishment but restoration. Every step, from the private conversation to the public announcement, is taken with this end in view. The second feature is the graduated nature of the intervention. The sin is not broadcast immediately; it begins in private, because love hopes all things and a sin confessed privately need never become a public scandal. Only when private admonition fails does the circle widen — to two or three witnesses, then to the church — protecting the sinner's reputation and giving every opportunity for repentance without public humiliation. The third feature is that the process assumes the possibility of reconciliation at every stage. The entire machinery of discipline exists for recovery, and central to that recovery is the offender's willingness to confess to those he has offended — precisely what the Confession's sixth section requires. If all the steps fail, the unrepentant sinner is to be regarded as "an heathen man and a publican" — one outside the fellowship, to be evangelized rather than pastored. Our Lord addresses the same theme from the side of the offended party in Luke's Gospel: "Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him" (Luke 17:3-4). The verb "rebuke" translates the Greek elegxon, which carries the sense not of angry denunciation but of bringing the fault to light with the aim of correction. It is the same word the Spirit uses when He convicts the world of sin. The rebuke is an act of love, giving the brother the opportunity to see his sin and turn from it. And when he does turn, the duty of the offended party is absolute: "thou shalt forgive him." There is no qualification about the gravity of the offense, no limit on the number of times. The forgiveness must be as ready as the repentance, mirroring the forgiveness of God, who keeps no ledger of how many times we have returned with the same sin. The apostle Paul reinforces this: "And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you" (Ephesians 4:32). The standard of human forgiveness is divine forgiveness. The measure is not what the offender deserves but what the offended has himself received — a debt of ten thousand talents canceled at infinite cost. The apostle Paul provides yet another angle in his letter to the Galatians: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). The verb katartizete, translated "restore," is a surgical term used of setting a broken bone or mending a torn net: something broken that must be put back into its proper place with care and precision. The restorer must act in meekness, not superiority, knowing his own frailty. The man who has never fallen into public scandal is not therefore a stronger man; he may simply never have been tested in the same way. That knowledge makes the restorer gentle, and gentleness is what a broken brother needs. Our Lord provides the most searching application of this principle in the Sermon on the Mount, placing reconciliation above even the act of worship: "Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift" (Matthew 5:23-24). The logic is arresting. The gift on the altar is directed toward God — an act of worship, of the vertical dimension of religion. Yet God Himself says: Leave it there. Do not offer it until the horizontal dimension has been set right. Worship offered by a man unreconciled to his brother is worship God will not receive. The reconciliation takes priority, not because it is more important than worship, but because true worship cannot be offered by a heart full of unresolved bitterness. To approach God while refusing to be reconciled is to ask for mercy while withholding it — and the parable of the unmerciful servant makes plain what the Lord thinks of that exchange.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines wrote Section 6 against the background of a century of controversy over the nature and necessity of confession. The medieval church had erected an entire sacramental system upon the practice of auricular confession: the requirement that every Christian confess all his mortal sins to a priest, in secret, at least once a year, as a condition of receiving absolution. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had made this requirement binding upon the whole Western church, and the Council of Trent, meeting in the century before the Westminster Assembly, had reaffirmed it with anathemas attached. The priest was not merely a witness to the confession but a judge who pronounced absolution, and the act of confession itself was understood as a work contributing to the satisfaction for sin in the sacrament of penance. The Reformed churches rejected this system entirely. They taught, on the basis of Scripture, that confession of sin is to be made to God alone for the obtaining of pardon, that no human priest has the power to absolve sin, and that the confession required in James 5:16 is a mutual discipline among believers, not a private audience with a sacerdotal mediator. The Divines' language reflects this rejection with careful precision. The first clause establishes the foundation: "every man is bound to make private confession of his sins to God, praying for the pardon thereof; upon which, and the forsaking of them, he shall find mercy." The confession that obtains pardon is made to God. There is no human intermediary, no required enumeration to a priest, no satisfaction performed by the penitent. The promise of mercy is attached to private confession and the forsaking of sin, not to any human pronouncement. This was the Reformation's great recovery of the liberty of the Christian conscience: the sinner may go directly to the throne of grace, through the mediation of Christ alone, with the assurance that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin. But the Divines did not stop there. The second clause — "so he that scandalizeth his brother, or the Church of Christ, ought to be willing, by a private or public confession, and sorrow for his sin, to declare his repentance to those that are offended" — addresses a distinct kind of confession. This is not confession for obtaining pardon from God. Pardon is already promised on the basis of Christ's satisfaction alone. This is confession for the declaration of repentance to those who have been wounded. When a sin has become public, or has directly injured a brother, or has brought reproach upon the church, the private confession to God, necessary and foundational as it is, is not by itself sufficient. The sinner must also be willing to own his fault before the human beings he has wronged. The confession to the offended party is the visible testimony that his repentance is genuine and that he desires the restoration of the fellowship his sin has broken. The word "willing" in the Confession's text is chosen with pastoral wisdom. The Divines do not say that the church must extract a confession from every offender by compulsion. They say that the penitent "ought to be willing." The willingness is the evidence. The man who has truly repented will not need to be dragged to his brother's door; he will go there himself, because the same grace that has broken his heart before God has also given him a tender conscience toward those he has wronged. If he is unwilling, if he makes excuses, if he insists that his private repentance is sufficient and that no one else needs to know — then the church has reason to question whether his repentance is genuine. The willingness to confess is not an addition to repentance. It is a fruit of repentance, and where the fruit is absent, the root must be examined. The phrase "private or public confession" acknowledges that not all sins require public acknowledgment. The brother who has sinned against a brother may confess privately to that brother, and if reconciliation is achieved, the matter need go no farther. The man whose sin has become a public scandal — whose adultery has been published in the community, whose fraud has been exposed in the courts — may need to confess publicly, because the offense itself was public, and the repentance must be as visible as the sin if the church's witness is to be preserved. The man who has sinned publicly and refuses to repent publicly wants the comfort of pardon without the cost of humiliation. And that unwillingness to bear the shame before men that Christ bore the wrath before God is a sign that his repentance has not yet been brought to completion. The final clause addresses the duty of the offended: "who are thereupon to be reconciled to him, and in love to receive him." The Divines, having required the offender to confess, now require the offended to forgive — and not merely in the abstract, but to receive the penitent back into fellowship "in love." The forgiveness required is not the grudging toleration of a brother who says, "I forgive you, but I will never forget." Nor is it the cold formality of a handshake that restores ecclesiastical status without restoring affection. It is love, the same love with which Christ has received us, while we were yet sinners, while we had nothing to offer but our guilt. The church that requires confession without requiring reconciliation has understood only half the gospel. The church that requires reconciliation without requiring confession has abandoned the gospel's moral seriousness. The Confession requires both, because the gospel supplies both — the grace to confess and the grace to forgive, both flowing from the same cross. In this careful balance between private confession to God and confession to the offended, between the liberty of the conscience and the discipline of the body, the Divines charted a middle course between the sacerdotal tyranny of Rome and the antinomian individualism that would reduce repentance to inward experience alone. Both extremes destroy the church; the biblical balance builds it up.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in his treatment of mutual confession in the Institutes, draws a distinction that has guided Reformed thought on this subject for five centuries. He distinguishes sharply between two kinds of confession: the confession that is made to God for the obtaining of pardon, and the confession that is made to men for the purpose of reconciliation or mutual edification. The first he calls the confession of repentance; the second he calls the confession of acknowledgment. The first is necessary for salvation and is directed to God alone through Christ. The second is necessary for the health of the church and is directed to those who have been offended. To confuse the two — to suppose that confessing to a man can obtain what only confessing to God can secure — is the error of Rome. But to reject the second because one has rightly understood the first is the error of the libertine, who uses the doctrine of free grace as an excuse for refusing to make things right with his brother. Calvin also addresses the objection of those who, having confessed their sin privately to God, feel no obligation to acknowledge it before men. His response is blunt: the man who has truly repented before God will not be ashamed to acknowledge his fault before men. Shame before men is a small thing compared to guilt before God, and the man who has faced the greater judgment honestly will not shrink from the lesser. Moreover, public confession is an act of love toward the church. When a man has sinned publicly and then refuses to confess publicly, he leaves the church in confusion. The weaker brethren are tempted to think the sin was not serious. The enemies of the gospel are given occasion to blaspheme. Public confession clears the air, vindicates the holiness of God before the watching world, and gives the penitent the liberty of a conscience that has nothing left to hide. Turretin asks whether the mutual confession of James 5:16 and Matthew 18 establish a human priesthood. His answer is a careful negative. Mutual confession is not a sacrament; it does not confer absolution. The elder or pastor who hears a confession declares the promise of God that those who confess will find mercy and prays with the penitent. The power is in the Word and the promise, not in the person who hears. Turretin further addresses whether the church may require public confession of a public sin as a condition of restoring the offender. He answers affirmatively, with important qualifications. The church cannot forgive sin — that belongs to God alone. But the church has been given the keys of the kingdom to judge the credibility of a profession of repentance. Public confession is not a work that adds to Christ's satisfaction; it is a fruit that demonstrates the reality of inward change. The church that requires it exercises the discernment Christ commanded, always with the goal of gaining the brother, never with the goal of humiliation for its own sake. Hodge, in his commentary on this section, treats the duty of the offended party with particular warmth. He notes that the command to receive the penitent in love is not conditional on the quality of the offender's confession. If the confession is genuine, the reception must be full, warm, and immediate. There is no probationary period in which the offender must earn back trust before love is extended. The love is the thing itself, reflecting God's love, which did not wait for us to prove ourselves worthy. Hodge warns against the temptation of the flesh to receive a penitent brother with cold and suspicious reserve — "We forgive you, but we will be watching you." Such a reception is not what Scripture requires. The father of the prodigal did not place his son on probation. He ran to meet him while he was still a long way off. He fell on his neck and kissed him, put the best robe on him, and killed the fatted calf. That is what it means to receive a penitent brother in love. The church that has forgotten how to do this has forgotten the gospel itself. Shaw, in his practical exposition, brings the whole section down to the level of daily life. He notes that private confession of faults to one another, in the ordinary course of Christian fellowship, is a powerful means of sanctification God has given the church, and its neglect is a chief cause of spiritual stagnation. When believers are honest with one another about their struggles — not parading their sins but confessing them humbly, asking for prayer, seeking counsel, and the result is mutual healing. When they hide behind a mask of respectability, the result is isolation, secret sin, and a gradual hardening of the heart. Shaw urges believers to cultivate friendships in which such honesty is possible: friendships in which you can say, "I am struggling with this temptation," without fear of contempt or betrayal. Such friendships are rare, because pride makes us reluctant to expose our weakness. But where they exist, they fulfill James's command in its most ordinary and peaceful form — not the crisis of discipline but the daily life of a healthy body.

Puritan Application

First, make private confession to God the daily foundation of your spiritual life, and let no horizontal confession substitute for what is missing in the vertical. The Confession's opening words make the order clear: "every man is bound to make private confession of his sins to God, praying for the pardon thereof." That establishes the order that must never be reversed. The man who busies himself with making things right with everyone else while neglecting to make things right with God is building from the roof down. The foundation is the mercy seat, where the blood has been sprinkled. Before you go to your brother, go to your Father. The private chamber, the shut door, the knees bent in secret — this is where repentance is born and nourished. If your horizontal confessions are not fed by deep vertical springs, they will dry up into mere social management. Examine your practice honestly. Do you confess your sins to God daily, particularly, with grief and hatred and a turning of the heart? Or have you substituted human conversations for divine confrontation? The horizontal without the vertical is not Christianity; it is merely civility with a religious vocabulary. Second, when you have sinned against a brother or sister, go to them — do not wait for them to come to you. The Confession says the offender "ought to be willing, by a private or public confession, and sorrow for his sin, to declare his repentance to those that are offended." Willingness, however, must become action. It is not enough to feel sorry or to confess the sin to God in your prayers or to resolve that you will treat the person better from now on. The sin created a breach, and love requires that you take the initiative to repair it. The word you spoke in anger — go to the one you wounded and own it. The promise you broke — go to the one you disappointed and acknowledge it. The resentment you harbored — go to the one you resented and confess it. Do not let pride, or the fear of humiliation, or the hope that the matter will simply blow over, keep you from doing what the gospel requires. The humiliation of confession is a small price to pay for the restoration of fellowship, and the Lord who humbled Himself to death on a cross will give you the grace to humble yourself before a brother. The longer you delay, the harder the confession becomes and the deeper the breach grows. Go today. Do not wait for a convenient time; there will never be a convenient time to admit you were wrong. Do it now, while the Spirit presses the duty on your conscience, and you will find that the relief of a cleared conscience and a restored relationship is worth the cost of the confession a hundred times over. Third, when a penitent brother comes to you, receive him in love — fully, warmly, and without reservation. The Confession requires the offended "to be reconciled to him, and in love to receive him." The command is not to receive him with guarded caution nor with a lecture on the gravity of his sin, however true the lecture might be. It is to receive him in love — the love that covers a multitude of sins, that does not keep a record of wrongs, that believes all things and hopes all things. If your brother has come to you, confessed his fault, and expressed genuine sorrow, then the matter is settled. Do not bring it up again next week when you are in a different argument. Do not file it away as ammunition for a future conflict. If you cannot trust the genuineness of his confession, speak to him honestly about your concern — but in love, with the aim of clarifying, not accusing. And if you have no reason to doubt his sincerity, then let the matter be buried. The blood of Christ covered his sin against God; let your love cover his sin against you. The forgiveness you extend is a dim but true reflection of the forgiveness you have received. A church full of people who know how to receive penitent brothers in love is a church that preaches the gospel with its life. Fourth, do not shy away from the public dimensions of repentance when the nature of the offense requires it. The Confession speaks of "private or public confession" as the occasion demands, and there are times when only public confession will do. The sin that has become a public scandal, that has brought reproach upon the name of Christ before the watching world, that has wounded not only an individual but the whole body — such a sin requires a repentance as visible as the sin itself. This is not because public confession earns anything before God, but because the church's witness before the world demands it, and the sinner's own conscience will not be at peace until the circle of those who know the sin has been matched by a circle of those who know the repentance. If your sin has been public, do not seek a merely private resolution. Let the same humility that brought you to your knees before God bring you to your feet before the congregation. The shame will be real, but it will be brief, and it will be followed by the profound relief of having nothing left to hide. The church that witnesses your confession will witness also your restoration, and the visible cycle of sin, repentance, and forgiveness is one of the church's most powerful testimonies to the reality of the gospel's transforming power. Fifth, cultivate the ordinary, daily practice of mutual honesty and confession among trusted fellow believers. Not every confession needs to be a crisis. Not every fault needs to be announced to the whole church. The ordinary life of the body of Christ is meant to be one in which believers are honest with one another about their struggles, temptations, and failures. Find one or two fellow Christians with whom you can be completely honest: people who will not despise you for your weakness, who will not gossip about what you share, who will pray for you faithfully and speak the truth to you in love. Confess your faults to them. Ask for their prayers. Let them know where you are weak so that they can strengthen you. And be such a friend to them in return — a safe harbor for their confessions, a faithful intercessor for their struggles, a gentle restorer when they fall. This is the mutual discipline that James commands, and it is a means of grace the church too often neglects. Many Christians struggle for years with sins that could have been overcome much sooner if they had only had one person with whom they were truly honest. Do not let pride keep you isolated. Do not let the fear of disappointing others keep you silent. The body grows when every joint supplies what the others lack. Your confession may be the means by which another brother finds the courage to confess his own sin, and together you may find the healing that neither could find alone.

Prayer

O Lord our God, before whom no creature is hidden and from whom no secret can be concealed, we bow before Thee as those who have sinned against Thee and against one another, and who have too often been unwilling to confess our faults either to Thee or to those we have wounded. Forgive us for the sins we have hidden — from others, from ourselves, and even, in the folly of our hearts, from Thee who seest all things. Forgive us for the pride that prefers the safety of secrecy to the shame of confession. Forgive us for the cowardice that leaves breaches unhealed and estrangements unresolved because we will not humble ourselves to say, "I was wrong; I have sinned; forgive me." We bless Thee that there is a throne of grace to which we may come boldly through the blood of Jesus Christ, that we need no human priest to stand between us and Thee, that the way into the holiest has been opened once for all. Grant us the grace to use that access daily, honestly, particularly — bringing every sin into the light of Thy countenance, naming it, grieving over it, and turning from it in the strength that Thou dost supply. Let us never content ourselves with a repentance that speaks to men but not to God, nor with a repentance that speaks to God but refuses to speak to men when men have been wounded. Where we have offended a brother or a sister, give us the humility to go to them and own our fault. Let no pride or fear keep us from the hard work of reconciliation. Where a brother or sister has offended us and comes in penitence, give us the grace to receive them in love — not grudgingly, not with suspicion, but with the open arms with which the father received the prodigal, with the warmth with which Christ received us when we were yet His enemies. Let no root of bitterness spring up among us to trouble us and defile many. Let no unresolved conflict fester in the shadows of our fellowship. We pray for the visible unity of Thy church, which is the body of Christ and the bride He purchased with His own blood. Where sin has divided us, bring us to repentance. Where repentance has been offered, bring us to reconciliation. Where reconciliation has been achieved, let the healing be complete and the love be genuine. Make us a people who confess quickly, forgive freely, and walk together in the light as He is in the light, so that the world may see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven. We ask all these things not because we deserve them — for we deserve nothing but judgment — but for the sake of Jesus Christ, who knew no sin yet became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. He is our peace, who hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us, having abolished in His flesh the enmity. In Him we are reconciled to Thee, and in Him we are reconciled to one another. Let our life together be a living witness to the power of that reconciliation, until the day when every breach is healed forever and every tear is wiped away, and we stand before the throne, a multitude no man can number, perfectly at peace with Thee and with one another, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.