Confession

Why is it that we are so scared to "confess [our] faults one to another" just like James 5:16 tells us to do? Why is it that when a group of sinners meet together they all act like they have not sinned all week long? Why are we so scared to reveal our sin to others?

"He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, not withstanding corporate worship, in common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are ALL SINNERS!"

"In confession a man breaks through to certainty. Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and feebleness of Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin; this can be accomplished only by the judging and pardoning Word of God itself. Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. One brother breaks the circle of self deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence or a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person. As long as I am by myself in the confession on my sins everything remains in the dark, but in the presence of a brother the sin has to be brought into the light. But since the sin must come to light some time, it is better that it happens today between me and my brother, rather than on the last day in the piercing light of the final judgment. It is a mercy that we confess our sins to a brother. Such graces spares us the terrors of the last judgment." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Together.

These are the things I have been pondering over today.