Welcome to Verity Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Himer, and I am here to

teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it

graciously to the world around you. I believe that women are ready to go deeper

in their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it.

I am so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because

everyone is a theologian. Hi friends and welcome back to Verity Podcast for our mini-series

on prayer. This week we are going to talk about confession and confessing in prayer.

Now, I feel like I've talked about this at length in the episode what is biblical repentance,

so I don't want to repeat myself. That episode is 40 minutes long, and this one will be around 10

minutes. So if you want a full-scale treatment of repentance and confession, that's a great

episode to listen to. But in this episode I want to specifically hone in on confession and prayer

and what that can look like practically. Sometimes when we talk about confession, I think we make

it something very formal. We feel like we have to be talking to God like we would be confessing to

a priest or that we have to kind of list out everything that we've done, or conversely maybe we

say, why should I confess anything? God already knows what I did. But if you remember that prayer

is about intimacy and relationship, it makes sense that you would be bringing all of yourself

to God. And that's what confession is. So in other traditions they call this the prayer of

examine, E-X-A-M-E-N. And there are different parts to this prayer practice. There's a simple

examination of yourself and how God has been present during your week. But then there's an examination

of your own conscience and where God may be convicting you. And this is something that I have practiced

extensively in the last few years, but it was also a big part of my own prayer practice when I

first came to faith. Because if you listen to my testimony episode, you know that I came to faith

...