The central lesson we must learn as we approach God in worship is the lesson of honesty. Confession of sin is agreement with God over what constitutes sin, and in order to do this we have read two things rightly. We have to read the text rightly, which is harder than it looks, and we have read our own hearts rightly, which is impossible.
Only the Spirit of God can give you an accurate view of yourself, and He never does it apart from the ministry of His Word. He tells us in the book of James that reading the law of liberty, the Scriptures, is like gazing into a mirror. He also tells us that many of us come to that mirror with a fundamental unwillingness to remember what we see there. We look into the mirror, but as soon as we turn away, we forget what it looked like. Since this is unpleasant, it is not long before we start to avoid looking in the mirror at all.
Worship reminds us. Worship brings us back. Worship of the true God insists upon honesty before Him. And so here is the exhortation; here is the call. Place everything in your life on the table before God, and then, take your hands away.
Â
Pray to God that He would show you as much of yourself as you can bear, and ask Him to help you remembers the perfections of Jesus Christ as He does this. It is a very painful operation, but it is a glorious one. The worst thing in the world is to spend your life in the church as one long exercise in kidding yourself. This is the place for brutal, cleansing honesty. It is not the place for evasion.