Confession and Spiritual Growth

Alright, I know the readership here might not be a lot yet, but I'm working on my sermon for Sunday and I have some questions for you.  It would be very helpful to get some feedback here.  First, a little background...

I'm coming back to the last message in our "Deeper" series.  The point of the series is to explain that when it comes to spiritual growth, our depth problem is always a "me" problem.  In other words, we often have a tendency to blame other people, the sermons we hear, the Sunday school lesson, or whatever else for the lack of spiritual depth.  But we looked at the parable of the soils in Mark 4, where we found out that the "seed" of God's Word is always effective to grow when it penetrates the soil of our lives.  But it doesn't always grow because we don't allow it to grow--our soil is too hard.

So the process of spiritual growth happens when we cultivate our lives to allow God's Word to sink deep into our lives and begin to grow.  The end-result is love--not the fluffy romanticized love of our society, but self-sacrificial, relentless love of Jesus.  When God's Word sinks down deep, it automatically grows and bears fruit.

This week, we're going to talk about community--specifically confession.  Usually, when we think of confession, we think of one of two things.  First, especially if we grew up in the Catholic church, we think of confessing to a priest.  If we didn't grow up in the Catholic church, we might think about confessing to God.  But few of us think about confessing our sins to each other.  So here are some questions for you:

Why do we confess?  Should we confess only to God or should we also confess to people?  What is a time when you benefited from confessing sin to another person?