We must continually go to God and men in confession and contrition. We must resist the temptation to give into sin and stop confessing it. Confessing and seeking to forsake sin is one of the means of Christian growth in grace. When we stop doing so, we have begun the first step toward backsliding or apostasy. It doesn’t matter how many times we may fall into the same sin, we must go back to the Lord and back to those against whom we have sinned in order to seek our forgiveness.

My family moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 1989 when I was twelve years old. One of the first things that I distinctly remember about that beautiful, little, secluded island was the fact that we could walk into a store, write our name on a ledger, and walk out with just about whatever we wanted in the store. I remember my dad and mom talking about needing to pay off their account at the hardware store every month. The owners and my parents both wanted to keep “short accounts.”
It was a peculiar and fascinating experience for a boy who moved there from a major city in which that would have never happened. The population of the island was small enough at that time for store owners to feel as if they could offer that service. Needless to say, it didn’t last long.
Within a year or two, you could no longer do so. It is somewhat tragic that this practice isn’t part of our culture anymore, because it serves as an illustration of an important aspect of our spiritual life. In the Christian life, we are—as the Puritans used to say—to “keep short accounts with God and men.” So, what do short accounts look like in the Christian life? Here are a few thoughts:
1. Confess your sins.
Believers are people who confess their sin. That is part and parcel of what it means to be a Christian. If a man or woman, boy or girl, never confesses their sin, they reveal that they do not believe that they are sinners in need of a Savior. A true believer is one who has learned, by the work of the Holy Spirit to say, “Will you please forgive me?” This is true in the vertical dimension of our relationship with God, first and foremost, and it is true in the horizontal relationships we have with others.
If we don’t confess our sin, we evidence that we are not sincere in our profession of faith in Christ. We must first confess our sins to the Lord. We learn this from Psalm 51 where David prays, “‘Against You and You only have I sinned’” (Ps. 51:4). Even though David had sinned against Uriah, Bathsheba, both of their families, his family and all of Israel, he viewed his sin, first and foremost, as that which he committed against the Lord. It was sin because he broke God’s law.
We too must first go to the Lord and then to others. When we go to others, but not to the Lord, we functionally act like the man or woman who goes to the priest in the confessional but not to God in heaven.
2. Confess your sins particularly.
The Westminster Confession of Faith has an intriguing statement about this in its chapter on repentance where we read,
Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance, but it is every man’s duty to endeavor to repent of his particular sins, particularly. (WCF 15.5)
In short, we must never conclude that it is sufficient to confess that we are generally sinners or that we have generally sinned. When we confess our sin to God and men, we are to confess our sins specifically. We are to own the guilt of the particular sins that we have done. We are to examine our actions against the Law of God (i.e. the Ten Commandments) and confess the particular ways in which we have broken his law.
My wife and I try to teach our boys to do this when they have sinned against one another. We teach them not to say, “I’m sorry.” Instead, we seek to teach them to say, “Will you please forgive me for doing x, y or z?” We also try to do so in our marriage.
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Among the many amicus briefs offered to the Supreme Court, likely the best at answering the claim of stigma mitigation against the constitutional right to free speech was offered by Robert George, professor of law at Princeton University. George compellingly shows that principles established by the Supreme Court recognize the constitutional right to free speech cannot be curtailed in the interest of hurt feelings, however strong the hurt is.

The 303 Creative vs. Elenis case, which will presumably be announced near the end of June, is one of the most crucial, perhaps the most crucial case to be decided by the Supreme Court in the war between sexual liberation and religious liberty. It is being analyzed by the court as a free speech case, although freedom of religion and conscience really lie behind it, and was reviewed by this writer in two articles late last year, one before, and one after oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
As noted particularly in the second article, the free speech claim against requiring the proprietor of 303 Creative, Lori Smith, to provide web design for same-sex weddings is strong. Providing web design for same-sex weddings is now required by common court interpretation of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA). But free speech for what is obviously expressive behavior seemed to be strongly defended by a majority of justices at the December 5 oral arguments.
As the secular and religious left has attacked the Judeo-Christian tradition in recent years, both in law and in society, with antidiscrimination laws and (where possible) speech restrictions, the Supreme Court has defended both, although free speech is much stronger in current jurisprudence. While the Left has condemned this as favoritism to the Right, it is actually simply the straightforward application of the law, as was noted more than a year ago by Mark Rienzi of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and allows Americans with sharply different opinions to live together.
Using Social Stigma Claims to Overcome Free Speech
Faced with a court intent on protecting freedom of religion and speech, the Left has turned to the claim that civil rights law, and behind it, the Fourteenth Amendment, mandates pro-active government measures to remove social stigma. This is really a very blatant effort to gain what social conservatives have complained about for years, the claim of a right not to be offended. It was recently discussed by well-known researcher in sexual behavior and the family, Mark Regnerus, of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture in a Public Discourse article.
The challenge to defenders of free speech in the wider society is daunting. The majority of Americans now accept both homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and as Regnerus notes, “All of the major American medical, sociological, and psychological professional organizations endorse LGBTQ claims, including gender medicine for minors, an industry now buttressed by over 400 clinics.” When one considers that ten or twenty years ago, many of these very intelligent people would never have thought of endorsing the sexual mutilation of minors, and their professional associations (if not the majority of practitioners) advance it today as “science,” the extent of cultural conquest is staggering. To be against LGBT claims from the standpoint of common sense (and certainly religious belief) is to be against science. The American Psychological Association presented an amicus brief in support of the State of Colorado’s claims of a right to compel speech in requiring Lori Smith use her artistic talents to provide same-sex wedding web design.
Regnerus pointed out that this situation proves Chief Justice John Roberts was correct in his doubt, expressed in his dissent from the same-sex marriage decision, Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015), that the promise in the decision of free speech protection for opponents of same-sex marriage would be honored. Roberts said the majority decision “graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to ‘advocate’ and ‘teach’ their views of marriage.” However, the APA claims that social stigma adversely affects the health of LGBT identifying persons. It proposes denying free speech to Lori Smith by requiring compelled speech. When this bridgehead is established, speech against homosexuality (or silence in place of approval), could become illegal in many situations, as is the case in Canada and other Western countries.
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Naomi Wolf is a fighter – a freedom fighter. And when we see basic human rights and civil liberties being stolen away from us at an alarming rate, we need all the freedom fighters we can get. Well done Naomi for sounding the alarm. May many millions of readers heed your call to action.

That those who greatly fear the rise of Big Brother statism in response to things like Covid craziness include people like Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and in this case, long-standing leftist and feminist Naomi Wolf shows that this is not just something that those on the right are deeply concerned about. Numerous intelligent and savvy individuals have great fears about what has been unfolding over the past few years.
Wolf has been speaking out about the lockdowns, the mandates, the forced vaccinations and the like for some time now, and she does not hold back in her brand new book. The subtitle tells us of where she is heading: “The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human.” Her main concern is the erosion of our freedoms and basic human rights – not to keep us safe, but to grant unprecedented powers to elitist minorities and globalist bodies.
In 20 meaty and well-documented chapters she makes the case for why we all should be very afraid of where things are heading as Statists exploit crises or even make them up in order to further consolidate power and control. Wealthy and powerful elites gain in such scenarios while the masses suffer – greatly.
Although focused primarily on America, Wolf has plenty to say about England, Europe and even Australia. And the facts, figures and stories she shares about the scene in the US should be of help to whoever is reading this book. The overall thrust of it remains the same regardless of what country you are in.
She reminds us that America has had many, and often much worse, outbreaks of infectious diseases in its past, such as the smallpox outbreak of 1775-1782 and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Europe too has had such outbreaks. Yet even then freedoms remained intact and total lockdowns never took place.
Never mind that early on many experts were warning against lockdowns and other coercive measures. Says Wolf, “The masking, the enclosure, the isolation, the lack of community, fresh air and exercise, the fear, the cabin fever, the generations piled on top of one another, the alienation engendered by computer screens – they all took their toll. People grew pale, fearful, obsessive, phobic, and sad. And unsurprisingly, many got sick and many died.” 
Of course the elites and politicians and ‘health experts’ calling the shots never paid the price for any of this. While we were all locked in our homes (here in Melbourne we were held prisoners for 23 hours a day, with only a 5km travel allowance), the elites were still living the good life.
They were not only getting their cushy salaries paid for by the tax payer, but for the most part they could freely roam about at the beachfront properties. Lockdowns were no biggee for them. Says Wolf: “This somber catastrophe … morphed into a uniform, top-down, almost cozy ‘lifestyle’ that was, as a form of house arrest, tolerable. That is, if you were affluent. What we did not know was that the ‘academic’ studies, the media messaging, and the tools for the cozy lifetime all derived from, and then benefited, the same group.”
And we need to avoid the misnomer “quarantine” – what used to happen to the sick. What happened to us who were mostly healthy were lockdowns?
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