In Psalm 86, we can get insight in the nature of our forgiving God:
3 Be merciful to me, O Lord, For I cry to You all day long.
4 Rejoice the soul of Your servant, For to You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
5 For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, And abundant in mercy to all those who call upon You.
6 Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; And attend to the voice of my supplications.
We serve a God of mercy, who knows the needs of our hearts, and desires for us to bring our requests to Him, to call and cry out to Him, to confess our sins, and to receive His power and His grace. He is calling to us today to respond to Him and know Him better. If our hearts have been regenerated by Christ, then we can know that He has made it possible to access His throne of grace and to receive what He has in store for us.
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God invites us to come before Him, to experience His grace and mercy, and to recognize that He
wants us to communicate with Him. Hebrews 4 says:
10 For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His.
11 Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.
12 For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
There's a new film in development, and the premise is that people will visit what is being termed as a "pop-up confessional," set up in key locations around New York City.
The website describes this mobile confession booth as "a social experiment that uses real people to teach a computer program what it means to be human."
Inside the booth, "visitors chat with a prototype of an automated conversation companion." The conversations are unique and the exchanges are used to "improve and enhance the program using machine learning." There are two chairs inside, so you can go in and have your artificial intelligence conversation alone or with someone else with you. The environment is described as "stern, yet comfy."
Of course, everything is being recorded, and material gathered could appear in a forthcoming HBO series.
You can actually go online and register for your confession.
Yes, you heard me correctly - it's a robot. And, participants are apparently trying to teach human characteristics to the robot.
It has been said that confession is good for the soul. This is probably not what whoever said that had in mind, but it can remind us about the importance of Biblical confession.
A few thoughts here: First of all, God invites us to bring our burdens, the longings of our hearts before Him - if we have a relationship with Jesus as our Savior, we can know that we can come to Him at any time. The Bible tells us that we can approach His throne and receive mercy and grace to help in time of need. So, we can know that our God is a God of accessibility. We don't have to go anywhere to communicate with Him.
The Bible tells us that we receive forgiveness of our sins as we confess those sins before God. So, when we confess, there is a release that takes place in our souls, and we can appropriate the love and power of Jesus, who died on a cross so that we can experience His forgiveness. He is a God of absolution.
And, finally, we realize that the healing and restoration that we seek can come through a relationship with Almighty God, made possible through Christ. We know that He wants to transform us and to manifest His presence in our lives. He is a God of activity - He offers us the chance to release His nature in us.
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