Are You Confessed Up?

“Hey Whitlock, there’s a lady on campus who will walk right up to you and ask if you are ‘confessed up,'” one of my friends said, amused at the reported spectacle. We were students at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1980. 

It’s an excellent question we could all ask ourselves, even if not a Christian. Reviewing one’s day, for example, is a habit most recovery programs seek to incorporate into their daily structure, thanks to the 10th step of Alcoholics Anonymous: “We continued to take personal inventory and when were wrong promptly admitted it.”

Confession can be healthy, clearing the past of soul-burdening baggage, providing a clean slate for the path ahead. 

But on that day back in seminary, I hoped to avoid an encounter with that lady, for I wasn’t sure what I would say. “Yes, I’m all ‘confessed up,’ except, oops, I just had a resentful thought about you for asking a borderline inappropriate question.” 

I later learned the lady was a retired missionary named Olive Bertha Smith, whom Southern Baptists affectionately called “Miss Bertha.” She would have been in her early 90s when she visited Southwestern Seminary while I was there. Miss Bertha began serving as a missionary in China in 1917, ministering there until the government excluded Christians (she spent 6 months in a Japanese internment camp), which necessitated her move to Taiwan, where she became the Southern Baptist’s first missionary to that country. She preached there and in the United States, even if Southern Baptists would not call what she, as a woman, did as “preaching” but only as “speaking.” But truth be known: her “speaking” preached well. 

Miss Bertha authored several books emphasizing that a Christian must be “confessed up to date” to stay in step with the Holy Spirit. 

The back story is that as a missionary to China, she was at a prayer meeting in 1927 when a missionary stood and confessed his self-centeredness, jealousy, and hatred in his heart. One missionary after another stood and confessed sin in their lives. As a result, the Shantung revival started, which lasted until 1937, affecting every province in China.

Miss Bertha wanted these seminary students, future servants in the church, to be “confessed up” because she yearned for revival among this generation of preachers. 

Public confession can be dangerous. Generally, private sins should be kept private, and public sins should only be confessed to those affected— except when doing so would cause further damage to others. 

I think of the story about the four preachers meeting for coffee. One morning, they decided to confess their shortcomings to each other. One admitted to dipping occasionally into the offering for extra cash, another confessed to gambling, and a third smoked cigars. The fourth had remained quiet. Finally, he blurted, “I love to gossip, and I can’t wait to get out of here.” 

Christians need to remember that being “confessed up” is a matter of keeping in fellowship with Christ—provided one already has a relationship with Him. Private or public confessions concern the closeness of a walk with Christ, not the security of salvation. 

One can disrupt fellowship with a father, but he would still be the father. And so it is with our heavenly father, who loves us infinitely more than an earthly one.

We should certainly be wary of presuming on God’s grace, for such an attitude would reveal the lack of awareness of sin’s enormity and thus reveal a callousness to the price Christ paid for our forgiveness, resulting in a pridefulness which in itself would necessitate forgiveness. 

The fact that in Christ I am forgiven, now and forever, prompts in me a desire for fellowship with Christ, not the “freedom” to sin against Him. 

I never encountered Miss Bertha. But I have thought of her across the years, as if she followed me with her question hovering around me, prompting a humble reply, “Yes, I have, and Christ has absorbed and forgiven them, one by one, so that they no longer exist for me to recite, for He no longer remembers them.”