Pt. 1 Are Confessions Biblical?

We're starting a new series tonight, and it's on the

London Baptist confession of faith. And what we're going to be doing for at least a couple of weeks before we get into looking at the confession itself is doing an introduction to the idea of confessions.

And what I want to look at first is the biblical basis for confessions, and there's a series of questions that I want to ask.

Firstly, I don't know if any of you noticed, on the rear of our bulletin is this statement.

It's under, we have our purpose, then we have our doctrine. And if you look at under doctrine, it says the scriptures alone in their entirety are the only rule we have for faith and practice.

But because of the increasing number of church groups who are drifting from the scriptures, we have committed ourselves to the 1689

London Baptist confession of faith as a guide to help express our convictions on the main points of Christian doctrine.

We are firmly committed to the doctrines of grace which exalt the glory of God and humble sinful man in the issues of salvation.

That's on our bulletin, so people can read it every single week, okay? Notice it on here, we declare ourselves to be a confessional church.

We do so unashamedly, so much so that we put it on here. If you're going to become a member in this church, you have to learn the main chapters.

There's 32 chapters in the London Baptist confession. But a lot of churches don't use confessions of faith.

And so the first question that we want to ask here, we want to talk about is there a biblical basis for confessions?

And so here's some questions that are frequently asked. We've just picked these questions up over time that we've been at church.

And these are some questions I'm going to ask and then answer briefly some of these questions, and then we're going to get into some of the scripture.

One, is the use of confessions merely pragmatic? I say that because notice in our bulletin it says that because of the number of churches who are drifting from the scriptures, we've decided to use a confession.

Is that the only reason we use a confession, all right? Is it purely pragmatic because it works?

And the answer to that first question is no, it's not merely pragmatic.

If we're merely using a confession because it works, we would be on shaky ground at best because we are concerned that whatever we do has a biblical basis.

So just because a confession can do certain things positively for us, unless we have a biblical basis for it, we shouldn't use one, okay?

Pragmatism, a lot of unbiblical practices are being put forth in churches today because they work, quote, unquote, because they work.

So just because something works doesn't mean that it's right, okay? Second question, doesn't every church have a confession?

In one sense, yes, but in a broad sense, no, okay? Most churches today across the

United States are not confessional churches. They will have a statement of faith which usually covers about one page, sometimes a little bit longer than that, but some churches don't even publish a statement of faith.

And so I've had people tell me, well, you know, we don't have a confession. And I say, well, there's your confession.

There you have it right there, all right? There's a reason why we have a confession of faith, one, that is old as it is, two, that it's as long, 32 chapters with multiple sections under each one, all right?

So then that leads to the next question is, is there a biblical basis for the use of confessions?

And the answer to that question is yes. That's what we're going to be examining this evening.

We will probably take up the whole evening just on this question alone, because if there was no basis for a confession, then we would be hard -pressed as a biblical church to use them, okay?

I do ask you to bear with me. This is the first time I've taught this particular course, so I'm not sure how the timing will fit.

And, of course, as always, I do anticipate that you would have questions as we go through.

Another question, doesn't use of confessions undermine the principle of sola scriptura?

Well, the answer to that would be yes if the confession is placed above the

Scripture, because then that would be an abuse of Scripture and an abuse of the confession.

But here's the interesting thing. The case is usually the opposite. The churches that use confessions biblically have the highest view of the

Scripture, okay? Most biblical confessions, such as the 1689, the

Westminster Standards, and many of the other Reformed confessions, state that the confession comes under the authority of Scripture.

And in our case, in the London Baptist Confession, Chapter 1 is of the

Holy Scriptures. And as we go through that, which will probably be in a couple of weeks, you'll see how the confession clearly makes certain that we don't ever elevate the confession above the

Scriptures, all right? And then the last question before we begin, doesn't the use of confessions erode the doctrine of the liberty of the conscience?

Well, this objection is usually put forth by those who have a low view of Scripture anyway.

They usually reject the biblical mandate for obedience as being legalistic, okay?

And they put virtually all things as a matter of conscience. And that view is running rampant in the church today across America, is everybody says, well, you can't, don't tell me, who are you to judge me?

And what they're doing is they're moving themselves out from under the authority of Scripture, and everything becomes a matter of conscience, all right?

So with that in mind, those are just a couple of questions I thought I would start with. And what we'll do is we'll begin firstly with what is a creed or a confession, all right?

And simply put, a confession is a statement of faith. A creed is usually a smaller, more concise confession, and what we would call a confession would be a larger, more comprehensive document.

But they all fall under, so I'm going to use creed and confession interchangeably tonight, even though there is a subtle difference between them, all right?

I want to say this, too, because a lot of people mistake this. It's not a prayer, all right?

Like we recite periodically in our church, we'll recite the Apostles' Creed, okay?

That's not a prayer, all right? It's a statement that is to be cleared and usually public and allowed, okay?

What you are doing when you recite a statement of faith or a confession is you are stating what it is that you believe about God in the

Bible, okay? So it's a summary of the doctrine of the church.

This is why it's so helpful to have a confession because when you put the confession out there before people ever come to your church, they know what it is that you stand for.

When you have a church that has no confession, you don't know what they stand for when you walk through the door, okay?

So having a confession is very important. Why don't more churches have confessions today?

I'm going to give you a couple of quotations. Dr. Robert Paul Martin says this.

He says, sadly, we live in a non -credal, even an anti -credal age, marked by existential relativism, anti -authoritarianism, and historical isolationism.

That's the age we live in. People want to break with the past. They want everything new and improved and packaged that way as well.

Yes, John? That's very true.

You see, and especially if it has the name Baptist in it, how many churches are removing the name

Baptist and removing the name church? This is not an entirely new concept, though, because here we have our good friend

Horatius Bonar speaking. In 1866, he said this.

Every new utterance of skepticism, especially on religious subjects and by so -called religious men, is cheered as another howl of that storm that is to send all creeds to the bottom of the sea.

The flowing or receding tide is watched, not for the appearance of truth above the waters but for the submergence of dogma.

To any book or doctrine or creed that leaves men at liberty to worship what God they please, there is no objection.

But to anything that would fix their relationship to God, that would infer their responsibility for their faith, that would imply that God has made an authoritative announcement as to what they are to believe, they object with protestations in the name of injured liberty.

I love the way those old guys talk. But that's why you find out we are living in an anti -creedal age.

So with that being said, we're going to go all the way back to the Old Testament, and what we would expect is if confessions are biblical, you would expect to find them in the

Old Covenant, because we know there's a continuity between the two covenants. And Deuteronomy 6 is considered by most theologians to be one of the earliest confessions, not necessarily the earliest, but definitely one of the earliest confessions of faith.

Now you have to remember, let's put this in context. Remember, whenever we look at portions of Scripture, you always want to make sure we get the context.

What's the context for Deuteronomy 6 is Deuteronomy 5. Can anybody remember what the content of Deuteronomy 5 is?

Very important. The Ten Commandments were repeated.

Remember, that's why the fifth book of the Bible is called Deuteronomy. Why is it called

Deuteronomy? Second giving of the law. Second, deutero, anomie, coming from the law.

So it's the second giving of the law. That's the context. All right. So now we come to Deuteronomy 6, and look at the first three verses.

Now this is the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it.

Now what's he talking about? He just finished re -giving the Ten Commandments. So that you and your son and your grandson might fear the

Lord your God to keep all his statutes and commandments which I command you all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged.

Again, remember, this is all in the context of the Ten Commandments. And he says,

O Israel, you should listen. Now that's an important phrase. You should listen and be careful to do it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly just as the

Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. The context again,

Ten Commandments re -given, what is coming right after the book of Deuteronomy? Entrance into the land, the promised land.

All right. Re -giving of the law. If you obey the law, if you live well, then you can expect for blessings.

And so Moses exhorts the children of Israel to heed the

Ten Commandments. He tells them they should listen and obey, they would prosper. And then he gives them these verses.

This is what comes next. Hear, O Israel, the

Lord is our God, the Lord is one. There you have one of the earliest confessions right there.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

OK. What is this known as? The Shema, the Shema of Israel.

They were to confess the truth. That's what he's saying. This is something that they were to confess.

All right. And what is the confession? This is one of the earliest confessions. The Lord is our God, the

Lord is one. In its purest and simplest form, that's a confession of faith.

So if you want to understand what a confession is, there you have it, in its simplest, simplest form.

All right. What is going on here? It's a summary of the Ten Commandments. OK.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart is not a summary of the Ten Commandments. All right.

And this became, this Shema became an important part of Jewish culture.

They were to recite the Shema every day, morning and evening. And in fact, in practice, what happened was they usually started with two benedictions, then they would recite the

Shema, and then they would close with two benedictions, morning and evening. OK. And then in the subsequent to this, that's the

Shema of Israel. It's a confession of faith. In subsequent verses, we find some of the uses of this confession of faith.

All right. Now we're going to cover some of the uses of a confession in greater detail in subsequent lessons.

But for now, look at what they were taught. As a result, after they recite the

Shema, after they give their confession of faith, we find that it was to be memorized, to be declared openly and to be taught to children.

All right. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.

Here's a basis for catechismal teaching. What do we teach in a catechism? We teach the confession of faith.

All right. To our children, they should be reciting it. We've gotten away from this type of teaching.

We don't want to catechize our children. Why? Catechism goes right back to the earliest days commanded by God.

Teach these things to your children. And when and where? Regardless, when you sit down in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, you should be teaching your children these principles so that no matter where they go, they can recite the confession of faith.

Okay. All right. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.

You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates. What are we getting the idea about a confession?

Is it something private that we keep our private worship at home? Look what it says.

Bind them on your hand and your head. Write them on the doorpost of your house and your gates.

All right. Well, I was just going to say, obviously, we know that the

Jews took things sometimes too literally and too formal, and that's what they would do. They would write the

Shema in a little piece of paper, put them in a little box, and put them across their head, and they were called phylacteries.

All right. Right idea, not necessarily something that we need to do.

The idea is what? That it's in the heart, in your head and in your heart.

All right. The confession, this confession, though, the confession of one

God is at the very heart of the Jewish religion. Throughout all of the history of Israel, no matter where you went, you would find that one

God, we have one God. The Lord, our God, is one. All right.

So much so that it was even incorporated into their architecture. Here's an interesting piece of information.

One of the things that they would do is they were carried off into captivity or when they were overrun, and by the various Babylon, by the

Medes and the Persians, by Greek, by the Greece, by Rome, or if they were carried away into captivity, when they would erect a structure, especially a synagogue, they would put one

God in the local language right on the doorposts or someplace in the architecture, because that was the one thing that differentiated them from everybody else.

Everybody else, polytheists, pagan gods, idolatry, and they wanted to make sure that they had their statement out.

So they took their confession so seriously that it was even put right into their architecture. That was their confession.

So one of the things that we find is that this is so integrated with them that look what

Josephus, everybody know who Josephus is? Josephus was a historian hired by Rome.

All right. But he was of Jewish origin. He says in the confession of one God, all the

Jews are united. This was something that was not a debate.

And in fact, the confession of one God was showing the difference between them and the pagan culture surrounding them.

And in fact, you've heard me say this before in another context, but one of the things that the

Jews and the early Christians were charged with by the Romans was atheism.

All right. You say, how is that? Because they rejected the pantheon of Roman gods and believed in only one

God. They also didn't believe that Caesar was a god. And so the charge was leveled against them that they were atheists because they only believed in the one

God of Israel. OK, so when Israel first entered the land of promise, they were continually seduced by cultures around them.

But here is something. If you go through the history of Israel, as this

Shema was ingrained in them, and later on when they returned from exile, you don't find them falling into the same sin.

When they first got into the land, what were the sins that they would get involved with? Do you remember? What were they always being seduced by?

The pagan gods. Idolatry. Remember? They didn't tear down the high places.

They were sacrificing their children. They were doing all the pagan rituals and they were constantly being rebuked by God and disciplined by God for that.

Later on in their history, you'll find they lapsed into a formalism, but they were not committing the same.

They weren't seduced into idolatry, and one of the reasons for that was because they had this confession of one

God. And if you go through the history, you'll see that that's in fact the case. So the confession, the

Shema, is what distinguished the Jews from everyone else. So let's look now at confessions in the

New Testament. We see obviously with the Lord our God is one, we know that it was taught in the

Old Testament, and in fact the word confess is used 23 times in the

Greek translation of the Old Testament. At least 23 times we find that it's used.

Now it's also used numerous times in the New Testament. I'm going to put a couple up here, first using the noun version.

We find the Greek word that's used for confession, and it's pretty much the same word throughout the

New Testament. It can be used as a noun or as a verb.

Now it's interesting, let me see here. The noun version addresses the act of confessing, but usually not the substance of the confession.

All right, do you follow that? It addresses the act of confessing, but not the substance.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are some examples. 2

Corinthians 9, 13. Because of the proof given by this ministry, they will glorify

God for your obedience to your confession of the gospel of Christ, for the liberality of your contribution to them and to all.

Notice what it says. In that verse you don't have, well, what are they confessing?

That's not answered. It's the noun form, obedience to your confession.

In other words, the noun is saying it's the act of confessing that it's talking about, which is a noun.

But notice, they will glorify God for your obedience to your confession.

That's what Paul is talking to the church in Corinth about, that they were being obedient to their confession.

Let's look at a couple others. This is Paul, obviously, to young Pastor Timothy. In 1

Timothy 6, he says, Fight the good fight of faith, take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

All right. I charge you in the presence of God who gives life to all things and of Christ Jesus who testified the good confession before a conscious pilot.

Notice even Christ using a confession. OK, then look at a couple more.

Hebrews 3, 1. Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession.

I'll bet you've read these verses how many times and it went right over your head that it was talking about a confession of faith.

Hebrews 4, 14. Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the

Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. Notice how many times.

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for he who promised is faithful.

All right. Now, all of the above examples show the importance of holding to a confession of faith.

That's what they are being commended for. OK. The verb form is somewhat different.

Usually when you get into the verb form, it starts to tell you about what's in the confession.

All right. When the verb when we find something is is added. All right. The substance of the confession, as well as the act of confessing.

Here's one example. Well, it's then eight through 10.

Everybody knows this verse. These two verses. Well, three verses. All right. But what does it say?

The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith, which we are preaching.

That's the introduction to it. All right. Notice what the word is near you.

It is in your mouth. All right. What word? It's talking about the confession. All right.

And what is the complaint that if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is

Lord. Notice it's not only just that you are confessing something, but now we find out what is being confessed.

Jesus as Lord. All right. And believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

You will be saved. Notice. What do you have here? The Lordship of Christ. You have the resurrection of Christ. For with the heart, a person believes, resulting in righteousness.

And with the mouth, he confesses, resulting in salvation. You have to confess with your mouth.

What? I believe in Jesus. Jesus is

Lord. All right. We're talking about Jesus as Lord. And notice.

With the heart, a person believes, resulting in righteousness. Your salvation must lead to righteous actions.

All right. This refutes that whole subject of Lordship salvation that John MacArthur wrote about so many years ago.

OK. So this is probably the most basic of Christian confessions in the

New Testament. We have much more to say, but this is talking about just a basic one.

OK. And in fact, what's the context for Romans 10? You know what's right above this?

Again, remember, we always want to keep in mind context. Yeah. And they never rose.

They never arrived at salvation. Right. Why? Because they tried to do it by works. And then he goes into salvation by grace.

All right. And here and here we then that's how we get to this. Now. Many theologians.

Now this you're going to find this interesting, especially since we are a reformed Baptist church.

OK. You'd be surprised at how many theologians believe that this is talking about baptism.

The confession with your mouth. Jesus is Lord is what the person being baptized would confess in the early church.

And so many people believe many theologians believe. Usually the reformed Baptist ones believe that this refers to specifically the confession made at baptism.

OK. And then I'm going to show you why.

Some of them would would do that. All right. Again, this is one of the most basic one.

Remember the context. Jews seeking through works. Paul refutes that.

OK. Many theologians believe this confession is referring to believers baptism.

OK. Now, Jim Renahan. That's Dr. Jim Renahan, who is the dean of our seminary down in Texas.

Points to another confession referring to baptism, not the one in Romans 10.

Look at this one. And I think you're going to see how this really makes sense. This is

Paul writing to Timothy in his first letter. Remember, Timothy is a young pastor. All right.

Remember what has gone on. Timothy had been under the instruction of his mother and his grandmother.

And he had come to by reading the scriptures. He had come to faith. All right. Came to faith as a young man.

All right. But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness.

Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.

And you made the good confession. So he's talking about the time that he made a confession in the presence of many witnesses.

Jim is convinced that this is talking about Timothy's baptism. Because that's the time that he would stand publicly and make a confession and a profession of faith in Jesus Christ, doing it publicly and aloud.

Isn't that just what we do here? When we have a candidate for baptism, they come in, they get into the tank, they read their profession of faith publicly in front of the entire congregation, in front of the presence of many witnesses.

So I think I'm very convinced that I think Jim Renahan is right.

Now, what I'm going to do now, I'm going to give you just a series of scripture references that all talk about confession.

All right. This is a list of others. Now, look, this is just a sample list. It'll be on here.

I have it in my notes if you don't want to take it down now. But look at John 9 .22, Romans 10 .9

and 10, Philippians 2 .11, 1 John 4 .15, 1 John 4 .2 and 3, Matthew 10 .32,

Luke 12 .8, 2 John 7. All basically saying the same thing, talking about the acting of confession.

Now, we would also expect if somebody confesses the truth, that there are those who deny the truth.

And one of the things that we find in the New Testament is the opposite.

And that is the action of denying or renouncing the faith. So you have those.

Remember, two kinds of people in this world. Those who are in Christ and those who are out of Christ.

All right. And we see several things. In 1

John 2 .23, we see the denial of Jesus as the Son. John talks about that.

Denial of Jesus as Master, 2 Peter 2 .1. Denial of our

Lord and Master, Jude 4. Denial of Christ's name,

Revelation 3 .8. The denial of God, Titus 1 .16.

The denial of the Christian faith, 1 Timothy 5 .8 and Revelation 2 .13. All right.

All of these are the opposites of confessing. They are renouncing the faith. Now, I want to get back to what a confession is.

And I'm going to give you a couple of quotations here from Dr. Jim Renahan. Because he says it so well.

Remember, what he's really doing here, he's giving you the heart of what is a confession of faith.

Confession is an open declaration of the Christian's relation to Christ.

Not just a statement of doctrine. Doctrine tells us who

God is and what our relation to him is. And so a confession is an open declaration of the

Christian's relationship to Jesus Christ. And Dr. Jim goes on further.

He says it requires intelligent profession of Christ. It requires submission to his lordship.

All right. Now, I want you to notice those two concepts involved that he just talks about here.

There's two concepts involved in confessing Christ. First, intelligent profession.

You can see how this is most definitely geared towards believers who are confessing

Christ. There has to be an intelligent profession. Secondly, a submission to his words.

Professing Christ and then not submitting to his word is what?

It's hypocrisy. It's hypocrisy. And one of the things we find out in scripture, that man is not a

Christian. So you need both aspects of this. All right. By confessing

Christ, you are devoting your life to him. Okay. Now, notice again, we're coming back here again.

Romans 10, 9 and 10. Okay. Confessing with your mouth, Jesus is Lord. Believe in your heart,

God raised him from the dead. Remember we said this was kind of like the most basic confession in the

New Testament? Notice something. Oh, here we go.

In 1 Corinthians 8, 6. For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things exist for him, and one

Lord, Jesus Christ, for whom all things, et cetera, et cetera. What does that look like? Yeah.

Notice the similarity to the Shema, which is exactly what we would expect because we understand the continuity of the

Old and New Testaments. It just takes on a different form because of Christ coming into the world.

All right. So what I want to do now, we've got a few minutes left, and I think the timing is going to work out just about right.

I'm going to go through some of the early confessions in Scripture just to show you, and then we'll call it a night for there, and then in the next couple of lessons we're going to look at the history of confessions, and then how do we get to the 1689 and why do we use that confession, but those are for the future.

All right. So here's a few more early confessions in Scripture. All right.

For there is one God and one mediator also between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Notice the similarity again.

Again, you've probably looked at these verses how many times? Hundreds of times, and if you're not looking for it, you're not going to see that this is actually a confession.

There is one God. Ephesians 4, there is one body, one spirit, just as you were called, and one hope of your calling, one

Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father over all who is over all and through all and in all.

That's a confession of faith. That's what we believe. Now here we have 1

Corinthians 15. Why should everybody be familiar with 1 Corinthians 15? It's the gospel in a nutshell.

Here we have it. It's the most definitive exegesis and explanation of the resurrection and the meaning of the resurrection by the

Apostle Paul. Look what he says. Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel, so we know it's coming, the gospel is coming, which

I preached to you which you also received and which you also stand, by which also you are saved. You can't be saved apart from the gospel.

If you hold fast the word which I preached to you unless you believed in vain. Now look at what he says.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what

I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Now there's four elements in the gospel as Paul makes it known here.

This is the first two, first one. First, Christ died for our sins according to the

Scriptures. That's the first element that Paul gives us. That he was buried, there's the second one.

And that he was raised, there's the third. According to the Scriptures, then he appeared to Cephas, and twelve, there's the fourth.

Notice, I like to call this the gospel with proofs. Why did they bury

Christ? Because he was dead. That's simple, right?

But it was necessary for him to be buried. Why? To prove that he died, because he had to die for our sins.

Then he rose from the grave. He rose on the third day. How do we know he rose from the grave?

What's the proof here? He appeared to Cephas, the twelve, 500 brethren at one time.

You've got all of this proof that he rose from the grave. So you've got the proof of his death, he was buried, proof of his resurrection, and all the way down to appearing to Paul.

That's the gospel, and notice it's a confession. The gospel is a confession.

1 Timothy 3, I'm writing these things to you, hoping to come to you before long, but in case I am delayed,

I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living

God, the pillar and support of truth. That's going to come back up again.

We're going to see that phrase. This is an important verse, looking at the church as the pillar and support of truth, all right?

By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness. Oh, and here, in fact,

I want to point this out to you. Look at this. Probably, if you look in your Bibles, after verse 16, by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness, the next series of phrases are indented and put in like a column.

Whenever you see that, the translators are trying to tell you something, that this is special.

It's not just, okay? This is by common confession.

Look at what it says. He who was revealed in the flesh, what do you have there, the incarnation, was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

That's a confession. And then, of course, this is the last one

I'm going to look at. Look how good I am. It's just about 8 o 'clock. Boy, I pat myself on the back.

This is the first time I've taught this class. I can't believe it's right on time. This portion of Scripture is considered by many either an ancient hymn that was sung by the church and or another confession of faith.

Here you have the states of Christ built right into Philippians 2, 5 to 11.

Another confession. So I hope you can see that as we've worked our way through this, that confessions is something that goes right back to the earliest of days.

And right through the life of Israel, the early church, and as we'll see in future lessons, right through the history of the church, we'll talk a little bit about some of the early creeds and confessions leading up to our own confession that was formulated in 1689.

Actually, that's not true. It wasn't formulated in 1677. And we'll get into why.

Any questions on the biblical basis for confessions of faith? Yes. A profession is what you can profess a lot of things.

A confession has a very specific connotation talking about what we believe about God. That's what we're talking about, all right?

We're not just talking about your confessing to having committed a crime or something, but in a biblical sense, it's what is it that the

Bible reveals about God that you have to confess in order to be saved. Yeah, yeah.