MenuConfessing Original Sin and Actual Sins
“Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”- Romans 5:18-19
“Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone…”
What do we mean when we confess this at the beginning of the service?
Sin is simply not conforming to God’s Law. In other words, sin is simply disobedience to God’s command. In this way, sin is a condition of lawlessness where we set ourselves against God rather than submitting to God’s command joyfully, as His creatures should.
Martin Luther characterized our attempt to live apart from God’s Word as our attempt to live outside the paradise that God created – setting oneself against God’s Law (to love Him and love our neighbor) and against God’s will. Sin ruins our relationship with our Creator by denying our creatureliness in two ways: 1) original sin and 2) actual sin.
“Original sin” is our habitual inclination to defy God Himself, God’s commands, and even God’s order of creation. It’s the inborn lust of our hearts to think, speak and do evil ever since the Fall of “one man” – Adam. The Apostle Paul’s description of original sin shapes the first sentence of our confession that “we are by nature sinful and unclean.”
When we say “by nature,” we do not mean that God created Adam’s nature to be sinful and unclean. By no means! Rather, God created human nature to be good. However, ever since the Fall of Adam as recorded in Genesis 3, we have been separated from God and our nature is corrupted. We all inherit that corrupted nature from Adam and Eve. As Paul says in Ephesians 2:3, we are by nature “children of wrath” who were “conceived in sin.” Therefore, it is now our corrupted nature that we confess is sinful and unclean. In this first sentence we are confessing our instinctual desire towards evil, towards denial of our own creatureliness, and towards denial and defiance of God.
“Actual sins” are what we confess in the second sentence. Our actual sins show our disobedience towards God in our thoughts, words and deeds. These impure things – what we actually think, say and do – are sins of commission that we confess to God in the words “by what we have done.” The pure thoughts, words and deeds (in obedience to God’s commands) that we actually fail to have, speak and do are sins of omission that we confess in the words “by what we have left undone.”
Why do we confess both our original sin and our actual sins?
Confessing our original sin reminds us, honestly and before God the Father, that, by ourselves, we cannot escape from our sinful state. Left to ourselves, we are in bondage to a master who is not God. We live in a broken, corrupted world. We need mercy from our Creator. We need a Savior.
Overemphasizing only original sin risks making “sin” seem to be just an abstract, theological idea. So confessing also our actual sins reminds us that sin is concrete behavior that has consequences for ourselves and others.
Overemphasizing only actual sins, such as by trying overly hard to list them, risks:
– causing us to forget our ever-present sinful inclinations, making it easy to tell oneself “it’s OK if I think it as long as I don’t actually do it,”
– turning our confession into a good work by “how hard we try” to confess, and
– trivializing the act of confession.
So it’s better to confess both generally and specifically, and make specific, private confession of those sins that most trouble one’s conscience.
In our confession, whether corporate or private, we acknowledge and repent of our sinful state, and we ask for mercy. God in His mercy grants forgiveness, absolving our sin for the sake of Jesus Christ, whose obedience to God’s Law and God’s will restores us in our baptismal grace to the state of human nature that God created and intended.
~Pastor Nickel
