A Confessing Community

Nehemiah 9 is almost all a long prayer of confession. The people have settled into the land, heard the Word, celebrated, and now they are confessing. But what is confession? Confession, maybe more than anything else, is confessing that we have not responded to God properly, to his work, to his ways, to his history and his grace. The problem then is not sins (that's just a pharisaic / fundamentalist take on sin); the problem isn't sins, it's sin. The problem is our response to God.