You, me, that guy over there- everybody, EVERYBODY. We're all selfish and short-sighted. ALL of us. So what do we do? We don't have to do anything, Jesus took care of it on the cross.
Confession is simply the act of recognizing that we need God, it is admitting to God that He is God and we are not.
Martin Luther thought believers ought to renew their baptism daily thus drowning the "Old Adam" (our sinful nature) every single day so that we could then start the day fresh as a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5).
You might say that we are ALL recovering sinners. We may not all be alcoholics or drug addicts, but like addicts, I think it might be healthy for all of us to pray as they do-
- Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable
- Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (JESUS) could restore us to sanity
- Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God (JESUS)
- Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
- Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
- Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
- Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
- Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
- Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
- Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
- Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
- Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs
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