"Confess your faults one to another" (Jas. 5:16). He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, 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 sinners!
But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone.
That reminds me of myself and a lot of other Christians with a culturally Asian upbringing, b/c if someone sins or does something that makes everyone go O_O gasp!, we tend to keep it hushed up :-/ Sometimes it's even unintentional; talking about sins is always a bit unpleasant even though it's important to address it, so oftentimes it just sits there unnoticed.
ReplyDeleteAnd I feel like, regarding sins, we could, and should, only talk about our own sins. B/c if we talk about other people's sins, then we fall into the temptation of just gossiping -_- and it wouldn't be fruitful.