I meet with students on a Tuesday. We talked about the release that forgiveness can bring. I remember that my skeptical undergraduate professor Dr. Liz Stuart actually credited Christianity with having something to offer when it came to the subject of forgiveness. We all long to be forgiven. Fear of judgement has left me shy of confessing sin to my fellow believers. In strict fundamentalist circles the holiness police can be very cruel. However, God forgives me. He causes me to have an upright heart because he covers my sin.
Psalm 32
- Why is the psalmist blessed or happy?
- What happened to the psalmist’s body when he was silent about his sin?
- What happened when the psalmist confessed his sin?
- How can a person who has sin be godly?
- How can you be courageously vulnerable with the people you meet?
Going Deeper
Observation
- What does the blessed or happy man have in his spirit?
- Why should everyone who is godly pray to God?
- How does God preserve the psalmist?
- What animals have no understanding?
- How does the one who trusts in the LORD contrast with the wicked?
Interpretation
- Is it possible to have no deceit? How can the psalmist write that such a person is blessed?
- How exactly does confessing sin to a holy God bring release and not shame?
- From what is the psalmist preserved or delivered?
- How does God’s dealings with people resemble people’s dealings with animals?
- Why would a wicked person be sad and a godly person happy?
Application
- Are you happy?
- Are you resistant to God?
- How could unacknowledged sin be self-defeating?
- Why does confessing sin to God bring release and confessing sin to people often bring shame?
- In what ways have you lacked authenticity? How could you be more authentic?
Plymothian 
We must trust in the Lord. We must confess our sins one to another. If God’s will is truly that we do that, and if James was right in asserting that it would bring us healing, then why don’t we do it in North American church culture?The usual answers may follow. But underlying those may be something else.Perhaps the fundamentalist/evangelical approach to the Scriptures is a culprit in this scheme. We have too often treated the Bible as some repository of modernistically presented, monolithic Truth. The stories are interpreted for the theology behind them. Lamentations is broken down into merely, “What can I learn?”This is tragic. The Bible is not an unsorted puzzle box of systematic theology (credit goes to NT Wright for that image). That is not the book the Holy Spirit gave us.Within the Bible, stories are central. Stories that present their characters as the vulnerable, horrible, imperfect, sometimes-triumphant God-vessels that they are.We need to use the Bible like that. We need to emulate the Bible’s authors in lament, praise, poetry, story, and song.May we share our stories of porn and recovery, addiction and hope, despair and redemption. Maybe others will feel less threatened if we ourselves are vulnerable.May God bless and transform His bleeding Bride, she who was predestined to share His love for the world and live forever in His new world.