Are Confession and Repentance Important? 2

I posted a few weeks ago about Rob Bell and Don Golden's book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians. I really appreciated Jearim's comments (on my Facebook) about confession and the scripture that he used was very inspiring to me.

I finished reading the book a while ago and really appreciated it. I realized that the whole idea of confession and repentance are extremely important to Rob, and that in fact may be one of the main points of the book. The whole book is about how followers of God throughout Biblical history have fallen into exile because they choose not to cry out to him, and when they do, God rescues them from that exile.

This is near the end of the book:

...in exile we can slip into despair,

or we can reimagine everything.

Confession.

Repentance.

A fresh start.

A clean
slate.

We cry out in our exile and God hears us and we experience
rebirth. (p. 174)

According to my understing of the book the difference is that compared to what I have learned there is a deeper understanding of what repentance means. Sometimes we get this idea that confession and repentance are just about praying the right words to God and then we receive his forgiveness. This book is saying that it is much deeper than that. How we live proves our confession is true, repentance is the action that follows the confession.

The book talks specifically about how we as North American Christians are living in a world where we have an overabundance and many in our world do not have enough. How can we call ourselves Christians and allow for this to happen?

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