To wrap this series on obedience up for now, I return to 1 John 1:9: “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
And now I turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his urgency to have at least one or two people with whom you actually name your sins…
The root of all sin is pride… I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God … In the confession of concrete sins the old man dies a painful, shameful death before the eyes of a brother. Because this humiliation is so hard we continually scheme to evade confessing to a brother. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and the glory in such abasement…Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother… Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.”
“Sin is something that wants to possess us. When we sin, we pridefully reject God. We do not become neutral, but we give up our God-give freedom in exchange for a lie. Christian community in the church is God’s idea. Man did not devise it. And God promises us in Matthew 18 to be with us in this community life together, whenever even 2 or 3 of us are gathered together.”
I found this quote on the A Deo Lumen website but was not able to find the author’s name.
Thanks for the link! That quote was from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book Life Together.
I have read Bonhoeffer’s Christ the Center and would certainly recommend it. But I am most excited to read Eric Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer. http://ow.ly/2cVBi
Metaxas’ biography of William Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, was one of the most moving biographies I’ve read. http://ow.ly/2cVEd
I expect the book on Bonhoeffer to be similarly impactful.
We live at a time when the lives of these two Christian men provide the kinds of examples I think many of us will need to draw from as we contemplate cultural engagement in a world falling further and further into the kind of experience of sin that Bonhoeffer describes in your quote.
And that is precisely the world in which the faithful presence of the Christian community will shine brightest, and point back to Christ as the light…the only light that sets us free from sin in all of its world-ensnaring folly.
– Mark (A Deo Lumen)
Thanks so much, Mark. Loved your site. I am a big Bonhoeffer fan too. Loved Life Together and that whole portion on confession and community. I too am looking forward to the biography also.