Episode 2: From Shame to Wholeness
Season 1 · Episode 2
From Shame to Wholeness: Introducing Directed Confession & its Healing Power
Show Notes
Justin and Amy Howard continue their conversation on the priesthood, moving from the dangerous, contagion-guarding work of the Old Testament priests to the priesthood of all believers made possible in Jesus. Amid a very honest confession about knocking down walls in their own home, they hand you a practical tool called directed confession, along with the four Rs: repent, renounce, release, and receive. This is a warm, down-to-earth invitation to stop confessing alone in your bedroom and start bringing sin and pain out loud to Jesus in the company of a trusted friend, so that real healing, being known, and freedom from shame can begin.
In This Episode
- The priestly calling that began in Eden and ran through the tabernacle and temple was dangerous work, guarding the camp against the contagion of sin while standing between a holy God and a sinful people.
- Jesus, the great high priest in the order of Melchizedek, reversed the danger: his holiness was a safe contagion that healed rather than defiled, and he passed his priestly ministry on to all believers.
- The priesthood of all believers is bigger than 'I can reach God without a priest'; it means we get to continue Jesus's healing ministry for one another.
- Directed confession pairs honest confession with a compassionate friend who listens without judgment and asks good questions to find the root of the pain, like digging out a dandelion's whole taproot rather than popping off the flower.
- The four Rs give a simple framework: repent (agree the coat of sin is dirty), renounce (choose to take it off), release (hand the sin, its consequences, and the people involved to Jesus at the cross), and receive (take up your identity, cleansing, and the Spirit of God).
- Healing happens in community, not in isolation; being truly seen and still welcomed rewires our fear of rejection and is a frontline opportunity for the church and for Christian counselors.
- This tool is not optional for spiritual maturity and is the antidote to 'superstar' ministry, and it works for pastors, friends, and families alike, including with your own kids.
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- The hosts describe the priests as standing 'between heaven and earth,' guarding against the contagion of sin. Where in your own life or relationships do you sense that clash of kingdoms most sharply right now?
- Justin openly confesses that when he feels he isn't producing enough, he starts 'doing more,' even tearing down walls. What do you tend to do when shame or a feeling of not being enough rises up in you?
- Amy says the priesthood of all believers is 'more cosmic' than just reaching God without a priest, that we get to continue Jesus's healing ministry for one another. How does that reframe what your role in your church community could be?
- The episode contrasts confessing alone in your bedroom with directed confession in the presence of a trusted friend. Have you ever brought a sin or a pain 'out loud' to someone safe? What made them safe, or what has kept you from it?
- Walk through the four Rs (repent, renounce, release, receive) with something specific you are carrying. Which of the four is hardest for you, and why?
- The hosts use the dandelion taproot to describe getting underneath a sin to its real source, and the 'four or five whys' to get there. What might be the deeper root beneath a recurring struggle in your life?
- Amy and Justin say being seen in vulnerability and still welcomed actually changes your brain and ends isolation. Who is one person you could ask to practice this with, and what would it take to begin?
Full Transcript
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0:03Introduction
Welcome to Between Heaven and Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard, husband and wife and parents to six amazing boys. We're church planters, coaches, and leaders of a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We're thrilled to have you join us. Together, we will discover what it means to be a follower of Jesus bringing heaven and earth together in your family, neighborhood and community. In each episode, we'll explore how to cultivate an understanding of what the Spirit of God is doing in and around us. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and join Jesus in his great project of restoration until his glorious return.
This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, a mission agency dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. If you enjoy our conversations, please like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. Let's dive in. Okay, so welcome back, listeners. We are so glad that you're here with us again, Justin and Amy Howard with you. And we're going to dive in again to the topic of the priesthood. This loosely coincides with the session on sin, sin-sickness in the training manual. But we're going to actually dive a little deeper into this understanding of the priesthood that we covered last week.
1:40A Real Confession: Shame and Not Enough
But before we get started, I do need to make a confession. And that is that I definitely bit off more than I can chew, because, well, basically we're sitting in a massive construction zone in my house. And I had no idea how bad it was going to be. And Amy knows that if I'm left to my devices for any amount of time in my house, I begin to knock down walls. And yeah, my parents had an Aussie that used to do that. And if it was left home for too long—an Australian shepherd—if it was left home for too long, it started chewing the walls and the furniture and stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's not good. We don't want—yeah. So, and I don't want to chalk it up to my ADD.
But this is a real confession, because I think when I'm not feeling like I'm producing as much as I need to produce, then I feel like I am not enough—riffing off of Curt Thompson's stuff around shame. And so I just start doing more. I start doing more. I wonder if we could redirect some of that energy. Instead of needing to tear a wall down, you could just go do the dishes or something. But we do have six little people that can do that. Can and do are two very different things. Right, no, that's—I'm just saying if you need an outlet for some of that, I need to make the world a better place. You could start with a kitchen. I know, but that's just—the dishes will always be with us.
3:06The Priesthood and the Contagion of Sin
Or you could exercise some priestly cleansing and start there. Yes. He's trying to be helpful. Okay, well, yeah, I agree, I agree. I do need to exercise priestly cleansing in this house because there's dust everywhere. Yeah, that's true. Speaking of priestly cleansing, last week we were talking about the priesthood. And we started in the Garden of Eden. We took a look at the tabernacle and the temple and John the Baptist and Jesus coming in, how John the Baptist actually took the priestly ministry outside of the temple walls and began baptizing people for repentance and purification in preparation for the coming of Jesus. So it was a baptism of repentance; he was preparing the way.
And we're gonna dive right back in. So, Amy, we were talking about the spiritual duties that were performed. Contagion. Speak a little more about contagion. The spiritual duties that were performed is that the priests needed to get rid of contagion. Their job was diagnosing sin-sickness, prescribing actions like ceremonial cleansing, sacrifice, or removal from the camp to reduce this contagion of sin. So it was always dangerous for the priests. Sin would make them contagious if they came in contact with dead bodies or leprosy. They had to themselves then remove themselves or cleanse themselves in some way. Yeah. Sin and sickness were dangerous.
So they were—they were even the priests who assumed the full-time job of functioning as priests. So last week we looked at, you know, what is that full-time job of priests? They were making the land and the emotional landscape and the—the justice landscape habitable. So they were working to make it possible for humans to come near God and live in proximity with God in the camp with one another. And so they—they—God gave them the jobs of like diagnosing illness and making sacrifices on behalf of unintentional sin and having a system in place to manage the fact that the world was really broken. Yeah. So they're managing the fact that the world is broken.
The camp is sort of a little Eden that's moving around where God is king. And he's—I think he's training their conscience. He's training their conscience and their—he's—he's training their attention to be toward him and toward the things that make for healthy community and living in proximity to a holy God. Yeah. Because being mortal really changed things, right? I mean, humans—we talked last week about how their telos, their—the end goal, one of their jobs forever has always been and will always be the priesthood. Right. We see that in Revelation that at the end of all days, you know, when Jesus comes back, we're going to be kings and priests on the earth. That's right.
And way back at the garden, the first man and woman were made to rule and order creation under God as representatives of God's good rule. And also they even then had the job of cleansing. They didn't do it. But it was there. They could have just—I'm going to imagine—picked that serpent up and marched it out of the garden and refused to listen. They were bigger than that thing. And they were given to rule over all of the creatures that were in the garden. So they didn't—they listened instead to its lies. And if you really want a good time, Josephus, who's really a Jewish historian, sort of circa the time of Jesus, wrote about the sort of garden situation.
And he maintains that all the animals back then could talk, just in case you were wondering why. It's kind of like Narnia. Yeah, kind of like Narnia. Like the serpent wasn't the only one. He was just the most wise. Like everybody could talk back then. But I digress. So—so—so the priesthood, this original idea was consolidated into the group of Levites. It's their job to make a little Eden possible for the people of God. But the job was dangerous. It was still dangerous for them. And it was so dangerous that when they came in contact with illness or impurity, they themselves had to treat themselves as unclean.
So they were considered a possible sort of vector, a bit of—of contagion. So they had to undergo ceremonial cleansing and/or staying away from people for a period of time. So their job itself, to make the land habitable, was still dangerous. And actually what's really fascinating is holiness itself was contagious and dangerous. Yeah, I was thinking about that, that it was dangerous for them on two fronts. Yeah. Okay, so they stood in the middle, you know, between heaven and earth. They stood in the middle between a holy God and a sinful people. Yep. And it was dangerous for them to serve the sinful people because then they could be unclean. They could be made unclean.
8:30The Danger of Holiness: Uzzah and the Ark
And it was dangerous to stand before holy God because the holiness of God was a tremendously dangerous thing to be around. Yeah. And so—there were some crazy stories about that. And you all tested it. Yeah, some crazy stories. Like in Second Samuel, right? Where Uzzah—uh, Uzzah. Mm-hmm. The Ark of the Covenant. So the box that God had his people fashion to hold the tablets—the stone tablets that the Ten Commandments were written on and Aaron's staff that had budded and a jar with some manna in it. So there's this box that was carried specifically by the priests and in a certain special way.
And it was taken by the Philistines, and during the reign of King David, King David brings it sort of halfway back into Israel. And it spends some time—you wanna pick up here? Well, yeah, no, it spends some time in the guy's house. Sorry, my brain just left the building. It spends some time in a guy's house, and the guy's house—well, Uzzah and his dad. Or Uzzah's dad's house? Yeah. Okay, I don't know if it spent time in his house. It did, it did. So he grew up with the Ark in his house. So it was actually sort of just around. And because it was around, I think there was a sense that, yeah, this is safe. This is safe to handle, even if I'm not observing the right way of doing this.
So David is having the Ark be brought back into the city, into Jerusalem. Into Jerusalem. And the cart that it's being carried on—the oxen stumbles. And Uzzah goes to steady the Ark and he touches it. And God's power breaks out and kills Uzzah. Right, and the whole situation was a mess because the holiness of God was only ever meant to be handled by priests. So it was not supposed to be dragged around on the back of an ox cart to begin with. So the whole scenario was already—this isn't the way that it's supposed to be. And then Uzzah—I would just say that the holiness of God was dangerous, that we saw the same thing with Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10, right?
They're Aaron's sons who offered unholy incense. Yeah, strange fire. Strange fire. And the holiness of God struck them down. So the priests are in this very dangerous situation, right? They are between heaven and earth and it's fraught. There's a clash of kingdoms going on and they're right in the middle of it. And this continues from the tabernacle in the wilderness to the temple that becomes the sort of center of the priesthood and priestly practice and worship, right up until John the Baptist.
11:28Jesus, the Perfect Priest for All Believers
Sorry, I thought you were gonna take up there. Yeah, so John the Baptist enters the scene and he's a Levite by descent. And he took his priestly ministry of basically mediating between God and man and ceremonial cleansing outside of the temple and into the wilderness and to the Jordan River. And so we then looked at the way last week about how Jesus came on the scene as a perfect priest and something remarkable happened. Jesus forgives sins. He heals diseases. But the contagion of other people's sin never seemed to impact him. So he would—you know, he would touch lepers, or the woman with the issue of blood reached out and touched his garment. That would have made him ceremonially unclean.
He touches dead bodies. Yeah. And not only did that—especially that incident with the woman with the issue of blood—not only did he not become unclean, holiness through him continued to be contagious, but now it's like it was a safe contagion. So he didn't even seem to know that power had—I mean, he knew power had gone out of him, but he didn't know where or why. It was like his own holiness itself, the holiness of God, the goodness of God was contagious. But now, not like in the Old Testament where the holiness of God couldn't be contained and made things unsafe. Now, through Jesus, the perfect mediator, people can come into contact with the holiness of God and not die.
And actually it's moving outward. So he, the great high priest, is now not subjected to sin and sickness. And actually, he didn't even seem to make provision for his disciples. He said, you guys go and heal the sick and touch the lame and the lepers and raise the dead. And there didn't seem to be any provision made for them being unclean either. Being made ceremonially unclean, that's right. Yeah. And we see that after the gift of the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, that the early church is grappling with some of the Jewish customs around ceremonial cleansing and eating food, certain kinds of food. And so they're still grappling. They don't really understand all the implications of Jesus's coming.
Yeah. And what actually—like how does this work? Yeah. And what is, you know, I mean, are these things unclean or are they not unclean? Yeah. And so—and who gets to handle the holy things? Yeah, right, right. So there's this biblical theology, this beautiful image that Jesus comes and the priestly ministry—he's the great high priest, priest in the order of Melchizedek, but he's the great high priest. And now this priesthood is given to all believers. And Martin Luther picks this up, the great Reformation writer in the 16th century.
And he really begins to emphasize the priesthood of all believers—not just full and free access to God, but that we get to continue Jesus's priestly ministry. Yeah. And I mean, you know, when we—many of us who maybe grew up in the church—we think of the priesthood of all believers and we think, well, that just means that I don't need a priest to get to God. I don't need to confess my sins to anyone. God hears me and forgives me when I confess alone in my room, which is true. Yeah, I don't need anyone to give me absolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and those are all very true.
But the priesthood of all believers is something actually a little more cosmic, a little more noble and dignifying than just "I can talk to God without a priest." And we see that actually, what it means to be a priest in the New Testament is that we get to continue Jesus's priestly ministry. Yeah, heal one another. That's right. And which is the healing of our telos. So the healing of who we were called to be, what we were created to do, our very beings that will be fulfilled in the age to come, that is being healed now and we are hurtling toward it. Right, and you were never meant to just do it on your own.
That James Five passage that we talked about last week—right?—that you—yeah, you're absolutely forgiven when you confess by yourself in your bedroom. You don't need a mediator, you don't need a—a priest other than Jesus for your sins to be forgiven. But the reality is healing happens in the context of believers practicing their priestly calling for one another. Right, and God empowers us to do that ministry. And he empowers us to do it. So let's talk about how to do that. I mean, that's not something that you necessarily learn. I—at least I didn't learn.
I never learned how to—how to—even when I was training for the ministry, when I was training for ordination, still nobody actually taught me how to do this, which is kind of crazy. That's a little bit wild. I mean, there was a liturgy for confession. But no one ever really ever even talked to me about it. There was no class. Yeah. There was no—there was no seminary class on hearing confession and walking pain to Jesus.
There was no—so what we'd like to do today is give you some really practical tools so that you yourself can engage this priestly ministry on behalf of one another, so that you can begin to participate in what John called walking in the light with one another, so that we actually experience unity and being known and the ending of the despairing loneliness and isolation that comes from "I can never be truly known or seen because I'll be rejected." Then deep in the core of all humans is this fear of being abandoned and being rejected. Because really deep down we know it's possible and we kind of deserve it and we've experienced it.
So I mean, how many of us survived, even at its most mild, not being rejected in middle school? Like all of us know what it feels like to be rejected. Well, I think that that's one of the major consequences of sin is alienation. Yeah. It's alienation from God, alienation from ourselves, alienation from others. And then we're massively lonely and we can't figure out why. Right, so let's talk about what I think you like to call directed confession. Yeah. Because I think that, just to your point, most pastors don't know how to do this. They don't. I didn't know how to do this. It's not taught in seminary.
18:28Why No One Taught Us to Confess
Maybe you have a little bit of pastoral counseling coursework that you do, and maybe it's a nice thing to have someone feel like safe enough to talk about the vulnerable things. But what we're contending for here on this podcast and in the ministry of Encounter Culture is that this is not optional. It's not optional if you want to be emotionally and spiritually mature. If you wanna break the patterns of shame, if you wanna break the patterns of sin in your life, if you wanna see revival in your community, if you wanna see a healthy church culture begin to emerge, then this is like a cornerstone thing.
I think it's also the—what is it called—the lowest effective dose for the superstar culture. The lowest minimum dose for superstar culture in the church. Once we are actually all living in a place of transparent, confessional life, we don't get to keep those illusions of "there are perfect people out there that I just wanna be like them and I'm gonna put them on a pedestal." And then when it turns out they're not perfect, my whole world comes crashing down. Rather, it's not that we don't need leaders, it's not that we don't need organizers or shepherds.
We definitely need those, but it begins to shift this idea that there are perfect people and I'm just not one of them, and those leaders over there, those are the really perfect ones. And I just need to feel really crummy about my own bad parenting and my own messy house and my own crummy job because my life's not spiritual enough and look at them—they're so great. I actually think directed confession within the framework of a community is the antidote for superstar ministry. So you mean superstar ministry that just elevates one person and so often ends in disaster. It just does. It just—it's just a setup. It's not fair to the pastors that were graduating from seminary.
This is opinion world over here, but it's just not fair, it's such a disservice to pump someone through an education and never even consider, hey, have you confessed your sin? I mean, I was made—I was ordained into the denomination we originally ordained into without anyone requiring my confession. That's sobering. That is sobering. So I mean, I live a confessional life. So I mean, I had checked those boxes, but nobody required my confession. Yeah. And it's not even just confession of sin. No, it's being seen. It's being seen, but it's to be able to share the vulnerable things. Yes. This is what makes me afraid. That's right. This is where the pain is.
This is what I'm afraid to say or afraid to be in the world. And not every person is a safe place for that, but most people don't even have one person. Yeah. And if they do, a lot of times at this point in our culture, it's the therapy world. And I actually think that's a really great opportunity for the church. I think we need to be empowering therapists and counselors to do great deliverance ministry. Christian therapists and counselors. Yeah. I think it needs to be one of our priorities. Totally. Because I do think they live in a particularly frontline heaven and earth collision space. Like we're talking about here, they've normalized confession. Yeah.
And Christian counselors in particular have normalized confession in a way that the church, unfortunately, in a lot of places and times hasn't done well. Like being seen in the place of vulnerability and still welcomed. Now, I think a lot of counselors even don't necessarily know what to do once the sin and pain come up. Like how to get rid of it. Yeah. So we're going to give you some tools today. Remember? So there's this—there's this kid that used to hang out at our house way back in the day. Do you remember? He was an Iranian student at the nearby university. Yep. And he loved hanging out at his—at our house, right?
Because his Persian family was like a super family. And so there was always chaos, and our house was chaos. And there was always food, and our house had food, and he was a bachelor that had no idea how to make—I think he kept a duck in his bathtub. Do you remember that? To eat. I don't know. No, I think—I think it was a pet. It was still like—anyway, anyway, I think—I think he might have thought he was going to eat it at some point. I don't know. Was he raising it to eat, was it his pet? I don't know. Anyway, he was desperate for some community. And I just remember one day, you and I were talking to him and he—he'd been a Muslim his whole life, a practicing Muslim.
And when we told him that our leaders—our religious leaders in Christianity—were trained to do their job in school and not by other pastors or priests, he—he had no category to put that in. He said, no, how do you learn how to do something unless you're learning from practitioners? Yeah. So we've been practicing this for a long time and we want to give you the opportunity just to maybe learn some new moves. So new moves—actually, before we get to the moves, because we got some good moves, I think there's something that holds us back. I think that there's a reason we don't like to have moves. I think there's a reason we like to just get a lot of information.
Well, I think that that's endemic in the church, that we want a lot of information. We think that we're spiritually growing if we get more Bible knowledge. Like there's gonna be a test at the end of the day and I've gotta answer the right questions and then I'm good. And when I—I really—when I get bored in churches, 'cause I've already heard that theme or I've heard that Bible passage preached on. Yeah, so we were like, okay, if I have more knowledge, if I have more content, then somehow—and I think as leaders in the church, we've expected that if we give content or information, people are going to innovate. They're gonna take that information and they're gonna go do stuff with it.
They're gonna—they're gonna follow Jesus more passionately and they're going to do the things that he did. But we really actually miss something really important. We miss the imitation piece. It's like we give them information, but there needs to be that imitation or apprenticeship dynamic, 'cause that's what discipleship is all about. Yeah, and I don't think that that happens overnight in a community. It's written deep into our kind of experiences of living in a broken world—is this idea that our value is attached to our performance. So if I—so I will not step out and try something if I'm not convinced I can do it absolutely perfectly.
And actually we kind of reinforce this as communities—if someone steps out and they do something that's immature, we don't necessarily have a category for "that was immature and I'm trying, now it's my job as a leader to welcome you forward into growth." We just have—I think a lot of times, I'll let that be immature until it really hurts something or someone and then I'm gonna just shut it down hard. And we do need some new leadership tools and moves for encouraging people to step out even when the stepping out isn't very old yet, even when it's young. Yeah, a pastor friend of mine calls them pastoral jiu-jitsu moves. Yeah, we need some pastoral jiu-jitsu moves.
Actually, I think I'm the one that says that. No, no, I learned it from him and then I told you and we're like, oh, that's great. Oh. He coined it. He's a pointy. He coined it, I know. It is disappointing. That's okay, he's a great guy. I actually know who you're talking about now. Okay, so we need a new paradigm for learning ourselves to even begin to apply this tool. So to begin to step out into this reality, first of all, you need to know not everybody is a safe person to confess to. And that's really true, right? Yeah, I mean, you need someone that you—that you know is wiser in the Lord, that have, you know, they've been living in Jesus for longer than you have.
And that doesn't always mean someone that's older than you. No, no, but somebody who has maybe a little bit of practice in what we're talking about. Somebody who has been vulnerable at times, who has been, you know, open about their own struggles and their own need for God's grace. Yeah. Oftentimes, I mean, I think those are the people that are the safest—the people that are vulnerable themselves. Yeah, and vulnerable with transformation in view. Not just, oh yeah, we all do that. Right, right. And remember, this person doesn't have to be, quote unquote, a priest, they don't have to be your pastor. Right.
27:24What Directed Confession Looks Like
And you can be—a fellow believer who is, you know, journeying with you on the pilgrim way of becoming kings and priests. But they know how to do this. And you can learn it. I mean, you can decide, hey, I've got a good friend and we're both on this journey together. We both want Jesus—decide to practice this together. Decide that you're gonna begin to be practitioners. Okay, so we're learning—we're learning to get back up when it doesn't go well. We're learning that there are, you know, safe ways and people to engage with. So what does directed confession look like? Take us through the process of directed confession. Give us a scenario. Yeah.
'Cause I think we need to bring it down to just like, okay, let's say this happens and then we do X, Y, Z. Yeah, okay. So some of the models that are out there—this idea that I'm gonna confess to a priest, a traditional maybe Roman Catholic model. And a lot of times the priest will then prescribe next steps—say these prayers or do these different actions that kind of act as a sort of an opposite force in your own life or to work towards reconciliation. The difference between directed confession and confession alone in your bedroom, or the model that I just talked about that's kind of, you know, here's some stuff to do—
this directed confession involves a person listening without judgment and compassion, asking some good questions. And that's a really critical bit. So not asking questions for just information or for gossip, but asking questions to help mine out where the pain is coming from. So asking in order to be helpful. So I can confess, and I can just kind of give you, you know—I'll give you a scenario. I was working with a young woman one time and she was confessing—the way that I'm massively masking the story, so you would never be able to trace this back to an actual human.
But in and amidst all of the names and places that I'm changing, the basic storyline was she was desperate to go and get pregnant out of wedlock. And I thought that was kind of odd. And so she came and confessed, you know, "I've had a lot of illicit relationships and I'm ready to be done." And so I just asked some questions like, so why, you know, why? Why are you doing what you're doing? And as we just asked compassionate questions, the story began to unfold about how her parents had been through this long season of suffering. And I think one of her parents had died, if I remember the story correctly. And she was full of anger with God.
And so there was just the sense that God didn't care and somehow she was gonna act out loud enough to get him to care. That you wouldn't have gotten from just the like, hey, I'm ready to confess that I did these things. Now that first layer, that's great. You can start there. But a few questions might get to the source of the pain. And the way that we pray once we have some good answers is different than the way you pray if you just take everything at face value. So if I took that at face value and wanted to talk about the four Rs, I just take, you know, hey, you're sleeping around, let's do the four Rs of that, fine.
But if the root cause for that sin, that pain, is actually a sense of abandonment and deep grief and anger toward God, that's a different—I'm handling that differently. Right. So I'm walking rage toward God back to God. I'm forgiving dad for dying. I'm—like, I'm making room to grieve for a season with people who can help. I'm, you know, my moves are very different when I've engaged that little bit of question asking. So, you know, tell me more about that, or where did that start? When did you first start feeling that way? Yeah. And I mean, that's like a counseling move, right? I mean, so if—it doesn't have to be super insightful. It doesn't have to be like, when did that start? You're right.
31:37The Four Rs: Repent, Renounce, Release, Receive
And, you know, we're not diagnosing mental illnesses or anything like that. But we may need to do a few episodes here because I think we're zeroing in on the repentance piece here. Yeah. So if you've never heard of the four Rs—these are—this is the part of directed confession. It's very simple to remember: four Rs in directed confession—repent, renounce, release and receive. So we like to say that repentance is acknowledging that the coat that you really love, that you've had on for a really long time, is dirty and disgusting. Right? It's a metaphor for sin. And so you've got to agree with God that what you have believed and what you have worn is sin. It's gross.
The second R is renounce, and to renounce means to take it off. That's right. I'm choosing with my own will to break agreement with this. I am choosing to take it off. And that's a Pauline statement, right? He says, we take off the old and we put on Christ. So there—my will is involved. And that is sometimes the hardest bit and where we really need one another. Because when I've been stuck in a way of sin or shame or pain for a long time, my imagination gets bruised by that. And it's hard for me to imagine that I even can take that old coat off. Right. Or we kind of—we imagine that we're just passive recipients. Right. That God's going to take it from us.
So we ask him to take it from us. But really it's our job. We have to take it off. Because you're part of the priesthood. That's right. You have to do the cleaning work. That's right. And then the healing comes. That's right. So you have to do your part and then the healing part is God's job. That's right. That's the miracle. That's right. So then the third is to release. That's right. And releasing means—so you have this: repent, you're agreeing with God that the coat, your sin, is gross, or the shame or the whatever. Renounce, you're taking it off. And then release: you are choosing not just to put it in a closet or walk away or hand it into the ether.
You are actually giving the sin and its consequences—and the people that were involved—to Jesus at the cross, which is where the miracles happen. Right. Yeah. That's where the justice and the miraculous and the healing takes place. It's not just in the act of saying sorry. It's actually in the transactional reality of his body at the cross. Right. And that's also the place where you forgive. So you release people that sinned against you. Right. Or you release yourself to him, not to the universe. Right. You release to Jesus because he's the only safe place for the pain. That's right. We love to say that. He's the only safe place for pain. That's right.
That's where the forgiveness part happens. And then the fourth R is receive. Yeah. So salvation is like a gate—it's not—forgiveness and those first three R's are like a gate. They are meant to lead you somewhere. They are not the point. It's like John the Baptist's ministry. John the Baptist's ministry wasn't the point. It was making it possible for people to then encounter Jesus. The first three R's are the lead-up to the point, which is the fourth R, which is receiving. So in the fourth R, we—if I'm participating in directed confession, if I'm helping someone else bring their pain to Jesus, I've just walked them out loud—we say out loud—
we'll talk about that in a minute—through "I'm sorry I did these things. I renounce them. I choose to take them off. I hand them to you at the cross." Now out loud, I'm going to choose to receive the things that you say you've done for me. And I'm going to wait on you to interact with me now. I'm going to, by faith, choose to receive the good and true things: that I am clean and holy before you. I'm going to receive the Spirit of God that makes me alive to the things of God and teaches my heart to cry. It teaches me where home is. It teaches me that I am beloved, loved by my Father in heaven and I'm no longer a slave. I'm going to receive the Spirit of Christ.
My identity, the gifts of God, empowerment to live a holy life—and in concrete ways, with real words. Right. So this is all included in directed confession. That's right. The four Rs are sort of the framework to help you engage directed confession. You don't have to follow it word for word, but it really is helpful to have some sort of guardrails in place to say, "Where is this thing headed? How do I know I'm going in the right direction when I'm leading someone out loud?" So somebody says to me, "Hey, I've done this," or "I—this is a struggle in my life," or "I'm bitter and I'm tired of being bitter," or "I'm stuck."
How do you ask good questions and then lead them to Jesus? You're going to ask them good questions, listen compassionately, ask them good questions to help tease out where the pain is coming from, and then use the four Rs to help bring the stuff to the bruised, to the bleeding side of Jesus, to his hands, to his feet, to the cross where actual justice takes place. Right. And then receiving from him in return. Yeah. That's really good.
37:14Getting to the Taproot: Asking the Whys
So we were talking—I just thought maybe it would be good to give everyone the context of what the four Rs were, because we were drilling down into the first R of repentance and asking the good questions, because someone may have a sin pattern in their life, but really there's a lot to unpack underneath that. I hate dandelions. I just do. I know a lot of people that love dandelions. They'll say more about that. Well, I mean, that was unexpected. I know, I know. But whenever I think of the four Rs, I think of a dandelion. Because oftentimes there's a really, really large taproot. Yeah. And you see it—the dandelion, the flower, is up there and it's very irritating to see.
But if you just confess the sin, it's like basically just, you know, popping the head off the top. That's right. And it's just going to regrow. Yeah. The taproot's still there. If you let that sin stay there for long enough, it'll begin to multiply, take deep root and become really difficult to dislodge. Yeah. That's right. So asking these questions in the repentance part is important. Yeah. Because it's like sticking one of those cool little spades that are really strong and narrow underneath that taproot and starting to kind of move it around. Wiggle it around. So you can easily pull the whole foot-long taproot. I've seen some really large ones. And sometimes that takes time.
So it's also just this acknowledgement that there is a destination in mind. But also we are on a journey. It's called sanctification. So we can actually exercise some patience with ourselves and with one another, knowing I may not get the full story yet. I may not have enough self-knowledge. I may not remember the right thing. I may not be able to even deal with some of this pain yet. But I'm going to just begin to walk in the light in this direction and trust that the Holy Spirit is a good leader, leading me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yeah. And the friend or the mentor that's helping you through directed confession—
I mean, if they don't—if they're not familiar with this, you can just take the four Rs to them now or have them listen to this podcast. Yeah. And you can both learn together. Yeah. I would recommend probably not doing this with someone that is struggling with the same patterns as you are. It's like standing in a mud puddle, trying to wash each other off. Right. It's like—yeah, it's like two pigs trying to wash each other off. And it's not hopeless. You just—yeah, just have a little like—yeah, someone with a little hope. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Who's not jaded and cynical about a current situation. I actually did that.
I actually—not the pig thing, I'm sure I've done that too, but when I first heard that there was sort of a model for bringing sin and pain to Jesus out loud and ending the isolation instead of just living in the cycle of my own mind, I was so convinced. I was like, "Oh my word, I'm seeing such freedom in myself and my friends." I was like, "All right, the next time I sin, I'm doing this." And so I went to a pastor and I confessed. And I was so naive. I was very, very young—23.
And I anticipated that everybody knew this and that I was just late to the game, that everybody else knew, "Oh, you bring this stuff out loud to Jesus and you hand it to him and you name it, and then you receive from him instead." Apparently, I found out at 23 that not a lot of people know. Even the ones that aren't super nasty and judgy still don't have good tools. So I brought this sin. I'm like, "I did this!" And I'm full of shame and sorrow. And they said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that happens. We do that." And this is—we all do that. I don't know what that means, "we all do that." Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember just internally—put—stomping my foot, not out loud. I didn't do it visibly.
I just dug my heels in and I said, "No, I found a way to—" And I taught the pastor right then and there this model—this is what we're now calling the directed confession model. And I made them lead me through it out loud. Yeah, yeah. That's really good. That's awesome. And I've been doing it ever since. Yeah, yeah. So just in the last few moments here—I think sometimes to get down into that taproot, you know, if you have a besetting sin or you have something that you're ashamed of, or there's just something that is uncomfortable for you to think about, and you really want to bring this into the light—one of the things that I found helpful is to ask like four or five whys.
Yeah, why did that happen? Why did I do that? Or what was I feeling? Okay, so like, why did I do that? Why did I think that? Why did I tear apart the hallway? Why did I tear the hallway apart? I did deconstruct the hallway in the middle of the day. Yeah, and bite off way too much. And make everyone in my family very uncomfortable. I have done the whys. Yeah, I know you did. He did a great job. There's a really—full circle. Yeah, yeah. It is Lent. Yeah, so I have to get—I am getting in touch with my weakness. I admire your transparency. Yeah. Well, there's more. Well, there is more. There is more. I'm looking at the hallway and it kind of speaks for itself, really.
Well, this isn't a secret. Yeah, well, I feel like—I feel like the way that the hallway looks right now is indicative of my interior life. Yeah. You know, there is more light in here than there was. There is a lot more light. That's nice. Yeah. And a lot more dust everywhere. Yeah, I feel like there's a metaphor there too. Yeah, but—but more light. I like—I like to ask the why questions. So, you know, I got really angry and I said something I really regret saying. Well, why did you do that? Well, because the other person really made me mad. No, no, no. So what happened in you? What was triggered in you? Someone gave a really courageous confession the other day and I was so blessed.
They were like, yeah, I really wanted to blame my chemistry and my brain and, you know, my diagnosis, because I kind of could. But I realized I just—I'd woken up that morning and I thought I could do anything and I—I should be able to do anything. And they just owned the rebellion of it. I was so blessed. I was amazed. Like, yeah, I just—you're looking at me funny. Well, I mean, it just—I, yeah. That is a thing, isn't it, for some people? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just—I'm gonna—I'm just gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I was gonna do it. I think I should be able to have my own way. Yeah, yeah. In the world. Repent—change your mind. And then break agreement with that thing. Yeah, yeah.
Pride of life. Yeah. And then—and then—and then the grace of God rushes in to the, you know—yeah, and you get to see it in someone else's eyes. That's right, yeah. You get to see welcome. And actually your brain changes in that place. That's right. Your brain needs to see welcome in the place of your vulnerability from somebody else's eyes. And how powerful when the presence of the Holy Spirit is there, where two or three or more are gathered, to actually begin the genuine healing and being known and restoration in community. That's right, that's right. Yeah, so this tool's great for pastors. It's great for families and with your kids. Yes. Four Rs. We love the four Rs with our kids.
I was a little bummed—I've been teaching this for years. And one of my sons—he won't mind my telling this—he went to a camp, and we had done a seminar with the leaders of this camp years before and taught them the four Rs. And I was a little sad that I somehow missed this in parenting, but he came home and he was like, "I learned the best tool." And then he taught me the four Rs. It was so beautiful. It was just so great. Also, I was a little sad that I hadn't done it myself, but I think you do need a community to hear it from. I'm not sure you could have heard it if I'd said it. Well, so that's a wrap.
We're going to come back next week and take a little bit of a deeper dive too. And we are really excited to see you again. Well, we don't actually see you, but we do hear you. No, you hear us, but we would love to hear you. You should just end it now. Just kill it. No, we would love to hear you. You can reach out to us at podcast@encounterculturene.com if you have any comments, suggestions or questions, and we will do our very best to address them on this podcast. We can't wait to be with you next time. Bye. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven and Earth.
We hope that you are stirred to curiosity and courage as we explored bringing Heaven and Earth together right where you are. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life and responding in obedience to his good leadership. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and questions with us on our Facebook page or by email, podcast@encounterculturene.com. Your support helps us reach more people who are eager to join Jesus in his great project of restoration.
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