Day 3: Confess Your Sins

Living in community in a culture of radical individualism is not easy. There are many challenges.

The number one problem for most people is just busyness. Relationships take time. But most of us don’t have any time to spare. Secondly, transience. Just as you are finally getting to know someone, they often move away.

But even if we stay in the same place for a long time, we face the challenge of digital distraction. Connectivity is not the same thing as community. Social media has dramatically changed the way we do relationships: first by speeding up the process of making new “friends,” and then by dramatically lowering the bar for what it means to be friends.

And related to this is flakiness. Not only has tech made us less focused and more distracted, it’s made us more flaky, as we’re conditioned to always keep our options open. Finally, the byproduct of all this is decreasing relational skills. This has created an entire generation that lacks the relational skills to go deep and stay together with others over the long haul.

And these are just a few of the challenges. We can’t just wing it and hope for the best; we have to live with a high degree of intentionality — we have to practice community.

But here’s the thing: Even if you do this, there is a far more ancient challenge that you will still face: shame.

Genesis 1 tells us that we were created in the “image and likeness” of a relational God. Meaning: We were created by community, for community. But the story doesn’t end there. In Genesis 3 we read of what theologians call “the fall.” And the literary seam between the two stories is this line, from Genesis 2v25: “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame”. The Hebrew Bible scholar Carissa Quinn interprets Genesis 2 this way: “The ideal picture is one of relational safety, vulnerability, trust and acceptance of the other.”

But this all goes away with sin, and in its place comes shame. “Shame” is the author’s one-word summary of all that comes after the fall. Shame isn’t just feeling bad about yourself; it’s a deep fear that you are unloveable; that if people knew who you really were, they would reject you and cast you out.

Shame is not only the byproduct of sin; it’s often the cause. Many of us don’t realize how much of our dysfunctional behavior in relationships is caused by shame. We constantly self-sabotage our genuine desires for love and intimacy.

Read this from Paul in Romans 7: “Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7v21-25)

Next line, chapter 8 verses 1-2 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation [another way of translating that is: there is now no shame] for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”

This is the Gospel, or good news: Jesus the Messiah has come to set us free from sin and its corollary of shame, to reconnect us to God and to each other in a thick bond of love.

But this raises the question, how?

While there is no silver bullet to the problem of sin and shame that will set you free in a moment, there is a practice that is so powerful and liberating, that for over a thousand years it was considered a key part of what it meant to be a part of a community of Jesus: The practice of confession.

Confession is our part in the healing of sin. You have to go to the doctor and tell them what’s wrong in order for them to heal you. And when it comes to the deeper sins, where we are most in bondage, that’s often all we can do — set our sin before Jesus – only he can heal and set us free.

But the way he does this is usually through relationships. Which is why we don’t just confess to God; we confess to our community. The writer James says this in the New Testament: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” (James 5v16)

So — living in community in our time of radical individualism is not easy. We face all sorts of challenges — busyness, transience, and more. But the underlying problem we face is shame. And it is through the discipline of confession that we come out of the shadows into the light, where we can be healed. And in doing so, we can increasingly, year over year, become more and more free of sin and healthy in our whole beings. Simply through being loved as we actually are, with all our shadows.

So the question is not just ‘Will you love?’ but, ‘Will you let yourself be loved in community?’