Justifying Corrections (part 1)

When a customer approaches your coffee shop counter in the morning you are faced with a paradox of sorts: you need information from them that they will have a hard time clearly getting to you until you give them the product they are requesting in the first place. This task is made even more difficult with all the possible permutations available: do you want your latte flavored? which one? what kind of milk do you want? low foam? extra shots? Even a simple cup of coffee can be difficult: more or less room for cream and sugar? this blend or that? do you want a lid? a sleeve? Sometimes a craving customer will snap at you, “Just give me my coffee!”

With all these combinations- and the aforementioned paradox- mistakes happen. Since you are messing with someone’s addiction, people can become really angry with you. Maybe you made an assumption or they weren’t clear. Sometimes they don’t really know what they are ordering or are expecting you to make it like the large corporate store down the street. No matter where the mistake occurs, there is plenty of room for a correction.

This gives us the most common example of self-justification. When someone corrects you they are making a direct challenge to your righteousness- they are telling you that you are wrong! This can be a hard thing to take at 6:35 in the morning when you haven’t even had a chance to get your morning fix. It can be even more difficult when the customer obviously doesn’t know what they are asking for. A challenge has been made against your righteousness- how are you going to respond?

Our first instinct is to defend ourselves, and our righteousness. This can be blaming the customer’s ignorance or the coffee grinder’s volume not allowing you to hear them. Either way, we are trying to justify our mistake. This is hard to do, but if we remember that we have no righteousness of our own, but solely rely on the righteousness of Jesus for our justification we can freely admit the error and, rather than find the blame or make an excuse, apologize and fix it.

This brings out an important connection: the relationship between justification and confession. Throughout the scriptures we are told to confess our sins. Why? Do we confess sins to receive forgiveness? If so, what about sins that we forget to confess or don’t realize are sins? Not only that, but if we have to confess a sin to receive forgiveness, why did we need Jesus to die for our sins in the first place?

No- we don’t confess sins to receive forgiveness. Instead we confess our sins because we have received forgiveness. This is the connection of confession and forgiveness throughout the scriptures. The reason there appears to be a cause-effect connection between the two is because if we aren’t willing to confess our sins, have we really believed that Jesus has died for them? If we don’t believe that he has died for our sins, then we are left in them and have to stand on our own record. If we have to stand on our own record of sins, then they haven’t been forgiven. So, while we don’t confess our sins to receive forgiveness if we aren’t willing to confess our sins we have not been forgiven in the first place.

Justification allows us to confess our sins. We know that we have no righteousness of our own. Our only righteousness comes from Christ and his resurrection. This frees us from trying to defend ourselves and helps us to admit that the sin was ours. We can now confess our sins freely and embrace the loving righteousness of Jesus.