Time for Some Knee Bends?

Do you enjoy browsing through antique stores? If so, you are not alone. On any given Saturday, thousands of antique shoppers stroll antique stores’ narrow aisles and peer into stall after stall stocked with items from a bygone era.
“Mother used a potato masher like that,” one shopper recalls.
“Grandpa kept a scythe like that one in his barn,” another shopper comments.
Another shopper asks, “Remember the penny scale in front of Murray’s Drug Store? When we were kids, we would step on the scale, insert a penny, and read our weight. And then a little fortune card would slide out of the scale. Those were the days!”
Not long ago, an e-Bay ad offered a truly unusual antique for the home that has everything! It was a hand-carved oak confessional c. 1880, measuring approx. 6 feet x 5 feet x 10 feet. It had been removed from the Church of St. Charles in Algiers, Algeria. Asking price: $2,000/OBO.
Perhaps a buyer would use the confessional as a backyard playhouse or a tool shed. Surely he wouldn’t place it in his living room for the convenience of family wrongdoers.
Like that antique confessional, genuine, contrite Biblically directed-confession itself seems to be almost archaic. Perhaps we have bought so thoroughly into the positive self-image, feel-good-about-yourself philosophy that we fail to acknowledge our sins and the need to confess them to the Lord.
King David understood firsthand the value of confessing our sins humbly and honestly. He wrote: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51:17). I’m sure David didn’t use a confessional booth, but he found just enough room to kneel humbly before a righteous God. In the twenty-first century, too, knee bends are a good spiritual exercise.