Confession - Good for the Fellowship (3 of 4)

Greetings from snowy southwest Pennsylvania. Why is it snow makes everything feel so much... warmer? It's 27 degrees outside, snowing, and it's wonderful!

Anyway, back to our series on confession.

Unconfessed sin destroys fellowship, and without fellowship, what’s the church?

Back to Bonhoeffer: Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him . . . Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person . . . [but] in confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. [1]

We strongly grasp our right to keep secrets because we wrongly think our sin affects no one but ourselves. There is no sin in thought, word, or deed, no matter how personal or secret, that does not inflict injury upon the whole fellowship. [2]

Keeping my confession between me and Christ does nothing to defuse the secret. It is still a bomb waiting to detonate when it can do the most harm. But in confessing to another Christian, what was a secret becomes merely a private matter. There is little fear of exposure, for the power of sin has been broken in our being accountable to another. If the private matter becomes public, there is great freedom in being able to say, Yes, I’ve confessed that to Frank, and it’s made a world of difference in my life.

How have you experienced confession as the defusing of the ‘secret bomb’?

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1954), 112.

[2] Ibid., 89.