“But if you fail to keep your word, then you will have sinned against the LORD, and you may be sure that your sin will find you out.” (Numbers 32:23 NLT)

When I was a kid, I got caught stealing. I thought I was being sneaky, but my sin was discovered. My stepfather Oscar took me to a local jail to “scare me straight.” The problem was, through the eyes of a child, jail seemed pretty cool to me. So that didn’t go as planned. Thankfully, I didn’t pursue a life of crime. But I realized that secret sins don’t always stay secret.

“Your sin will find you out” may be the oldest lesson in human history. Adam and Eve learned it when God asked them, “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?” (Genesis 3:11 NLT).

The warnings are clear in God’s Word. So why is it tempting to try to hide certain sins instead of confessing them? Fear is one factor. We’re afraid to face the truth of our “dark side.” We worry that our reputation—or self-image—would suffer if our secret sins were revealed. Or we convince ourselves that our secret sins aren’t serious enough to do any harm. As long as no one else knows about them, no one gets hurt, right?

The reality is that secret sins do tremendous damage. Maybe no one else knows about them—but we do. We know they’re wrong. And if we know they’re wrong, that means we’re experiencing guilt at some level. The Holy Spirit, who lives in us, works through our conscience to help us understand the seriousness of what we’re doing. We ignore His work at our own peril. Guilt doesn’t go away on its own. And it can’t continue to build indefinitely. If we don’t address it, it will find an outlet—often one that undoes all our careful work to keep our sins secret.

Secret sins create distance between us and God because they’re committed in darkness, figuratively speaking. We go to great lengths to make sure that no one can connect us to them. In contrast, “God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all” (1 John 1:5 NLT). We can’t embrace sin and God at the same time. If we become too comfortable in darkness, we start to avoid God’s light. 

Secret sins are illusions. Hebrews 4:13 says, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable” (NLT). We may hide the truth from others, and maybe even ourselves, but God sees everything. And His opinion is the only one that truly matters.

Secret sins keep us from reaching our true potential as disciples. Hebrews 12:1 says, “Let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us” (NLT). Secret sins are the weights we refuse to strip off. No matter how hard we try to navigate the course that God has laid out for us, our secret sins cause us to stumble. We can’t achieve our personal best until we remove those hidden sins by confessing them to God.

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