Confession

by Terri

Writing books has its challenges. For one thing, your understanding develops, so what sounds perfect when you write it might not be exactly what you want to say years down the road. Or maybe you find a better way to say it after a while.

I’m feeling that way about Chapter four of my first book (No Other gods 2) tonight. And by the way, if you’re interested, you can actually download and read this book for free from https://www.amazon.com/Terri-Buckingham/e/B0839R824W for a limited time.

Anyway, I finished recording chapter 4 for the audiobook earlier this afternoon, but I although I know what I was trying to say, and I agree with what I did say from a certain perspective, I don’t feel like I said it very well. One of the reasons I was soooo glad when God began giving me the books in His voice, was that it eliminated my tendency to make a simple concept sound complex. I think I made chapter four a little more complex than it needed to be.

I thought about rewriting the chapter. The only problem is, the book is already published, the kindle is formatted, and now the audiobook is recorded. Rewriting a chapter at this point would throw off all the page breaks and be a major pain. It’s basically, like, not the time to be massively changing the interior of the book.

But, still, I’d like another crack at the issue, to see if I can say it better now.

Enter . . . the blog!

Yay! With the blog I can get my ideas out immediately, with much less fuss and bother than re-publishing, which, by the way, is a heck of a lot of work, even if you do have the world’s best help. (Thank you Franchise Content Creations!!!)

Anyway, the topic of this post is confession. There is a little known secret here. It’s a kingdom secret. When you get this thing down about forgiveness and confession of sins, it’s going to change your life.

First, pretty much everyone believes it’s a good idea to confess your sins. The Bible says to do it. That’s a good reason. It feels good when you do it. Yes, of course. That’s nice, too. Obedience. Yep. Okay, okay, you get the idea.Those are all good reasons.

But do you want to know the best kept secret about confession, the one the devil doesn’t want you to know about?

The most powerful thing about confession is—when you’ve confessed what God wants you to confess, when you’ve really understood your sin, and you’ve come clean before the Father, guess what happens? You remove Satan’s legal ground from your life. 

Ephesians tells us not to let the sun go down on our anger or we’ll give the devil an opportunity. That means we'll give him a place to operate in our lives. We open the door to him, so to speak. Well, confession is the one thing (besides God’s mercy) that lets you kick the devil out and close that door for good.

Don’t get me wrong. God’s grace protects us from probably 80% of all our sins. I have no idea of the actual amount, but I know God's grace is huge. We sin, and we don’t even know it, but God is merciful, and He doesn’t let satan nail us every time we slip up. But sometimes when we don’t confess right away, satan does get a toehold. And the only way to remove that toehold (which will quickly become a stronghold if we let it) is to confess the particular sin which opened the door.

And that’s the power of confession. If satan is pestering you, and you can’t seem to shake him, search your heart. Ask God to show you what allowed him to take these liberties in your life. He doesn’t have access to you automatically. God protects you. But sometimes he gets access because of your sin. God has so much to teach us through this process.

If you can’t shake free from a temptation, or an illness, or a propensity, or if you’re assailed by bad dreams, unclean thoughts, anxiety, or basically anything that isn’t perfectly peaceful in your heart, pray and keep confessing what God brings to mind until you can tell the enemy to go, and he actually leaves.

Go ahead, just say it, out loud, "satan, in Jesus' name, leave me now!" You'll know you've confessed what you needed to confess the moment the problem resolves. And it will! Trust me. This works! I've been doing it without fail for 20 years.

It's the best kept kingdom secret ever. But it's a secret no longer.