Confession Flows

We are following an ACTS model on Monday nights for our prayer service. ACTS is Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, & Supplication. We try and incorporate all four of these types of prayer into the hour. Sometimes one of the facets will end up dominating the time. Monday night this week was heavy on the Confession side.

James 5:16 says:
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.

I think all of us would love to pray prayers that have great power and produce wonderful results. I hear the last part of James 5:16 quoted often. Yet the first part of James 5:16 I think sets the tone for the last. Before we can have great power and wonderful results in our prayers we have to be willing to confess our sins and pray for one another.

There is something about the confession of sin to one another that scares us. We are afraid of how we might be seen by others. In a public prayer gathering, isn't this someones fear, that their sins might become known or they would have to confess them.

Monday night something significant happened. After a worship set, that was purposefully slower than usual, we asked for people to come to the mic if they wanted to confess sin, either something they did or we as a group had done. As the leader opening a mic for confession of sin is one of those times where you hope you are hearing Gods guidance well. No-one could come up or someone could come up and spend the hour on their personal sin list. Neither of these is a good option.

I gave some guidance and asked our people to confess at the most two sins on the mic and if they had more then to spend time with God confessing others. It was one of those times that ended up leading itself. It took a minute for the first person to come up, but that seemed to release what God was doing and person after person came forward. A grade schooler asking for forgiveness for being disrespectful to her parents, a 40 something asking for forgiveness for taking over her life and not allowed God to be in control, a man asking for forgiveness for how he treated his girlfriend, a teen dealing with lust, a mom dealing with being ugly to her kids, another teen asking God to forgive the youth for getting distracted from following God, and on and on people came. They were vulnerable before God and each other.

Obviously because of how we spent the time, the night was heavier, it was convicting, it was challenging. We finished with some prayer ministry time for people dealing with rejection and for our staff.
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Elements that worked tonight:
Having a worship time that was more dialed down. This seemed to be conducive for a night of confession.

Opening the mics and asking people to come forward and confess sin.

Memorable moments & phrases:
To our youth: Take your place in this movement of God.