Confession as Liberation

When Rachel Held Evans wrote about her journey back to faith, she described confession not as a transaction — say the right words, punch your ticket to heaven — but as a turning loose. "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord," Paul writes in Romans 10:9. But what does it mean to call Jesus Lord in a world of competing lordships?

Consider a woman sitting in a church pew for the first time in years. She left because she was told her wholeness depended on fitting a mold — the right politics, the right family structure, the right certainties. Now she hears Romans 10:9 again, and something cracks open. To confess Jesus as Lord is not to sign a doctrinal checklist. It is to declare that no empire, no system of exclusion, no hierarchy of human worth gets the final word. It is to believe, in the deepest chamber of the heart, that God raised Jesus from the dead — which means that every power that crushes and diminishes has already been overturned.

Salvation, in this reading, is not escape from the world. It is God's liberating work breaking into the world. Rob Bell reminds us that salvation is as wide as the universe and as intimate as your next breath.

This Sunday, ask yourself: What lordship am I still serving that contradicts the Risen Christ? Confession begins the moment we stop performing belief and start letting it transform how we see every single person God has made.