He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. — Proverbs 28:13

I’ll never forget a hard lesson that I learned when I was younger. I had a car and I knew that it was not necessarily driving the way it should be. It wasn’t that the car was going off the road or unsafe to drive. It had an ever so slight pull to the right as I drove it. I thought that I probably needed to take care of it, but I put it off.

Sometime later, I took the vehicle in for service and the technician came to get me. He said there was something I needed to see. He took me to the car where it was on the rack and showed me the driver’s side tire. The outside of the tire looked fine, but the inside was significantly damaged. While I tried to cover up what was happening with the car, the problem was still there and it had to be dealt with once and for all.

The same can be said for our sin. In this verse of Proverbs, we are reminded that there is no benefit in covering sins. Simply covering sin does not fix the sin problem that lies underneath. The sin must be dealt with once and for all!

There are certainly two applications that can be found in this verse. The first is obvious. Confessing our sin and accepting Jesus Christ as Savior is the most important thing we can do to deal with sin. But that does not necessarily keep us from sin in the future. In fact, many times we may find ourselves with sin that we attempt to cover up and refuse to deal with.

Anytime God shows us sin in our lives, we must deal with the sin once and for all. That means to confess the sin and then leave it behind. We cannot simply confess it and continue to do it. Are there sins that we may be holding onto in our lives that we need to deal with? If so, it is time to deal with it.

Jared Dyson