Let's start the week with a bang. I think the number of American Christians who struggle with this gut check question is in the millions. Sadly, the answer for many people is yes.

Will you lose your standing at church
or the support of Christian family and friends
if you finally, publicly confess
the sin you've kept secret for years?

Protestantism broke from a corrupt Roman Catholic Church that turned Jesus into "Jesus and…." I don't support the idea that we need to add anything to Christ's finished work, so I don't support the RCC. However, if there's one area that the RCC has dealt with far better than any Protestant sect, it's in the area of confessing sins. 

Imagine always having a flesh and blood human being available to hear our confession! Although the usual advice to repeat some pointless "Hail Mary's" isn't the recipe for repentance, what do the Protestants offer? The Bible has this to say:

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
—James 5:16 ESV

Too few Christians are willing to hear another's confession, and even fewer are willing to confess. Yet what power, healing, and freedom resides in that confession!

I've known Christians who literally wound up institutionalized because they kept secret sin secret. Or they worried that whatever they'd done was somehow treading on "unforgivable sin" territory.

In a way, who can blame them? We talk a lot about our sinfulness, but when someone sins in a way unfamiliar to our own experience, our first reaction is usually judgment.

Many years ago, a much younger Dan was part of a men's group. One day, we studied passages on confession and decided that we would confess our sins to each other. By the time it was all done, self-righteous me had been traumatized by the utter depravity of the guys around me. They shared things I couldn't even imagine, making my sins seem small.

However, as I grew older, I better realized the depths of my own depravity and saw that while my sins were indeed different than theirs, mine still deserved hell. The same Christ who cleansed me had cleansed those men, no matter how awful their confession might have been. In time I learned that none of us is pristine, even the most devout. There's not much difference between my 100 percent sin and their 100 percent sin, no matter what gradations we assign to a certain moral failure.

Too many of us learn the hard way on this one, though. We need to be more ready with grace and less with our high and mightyness, because that superiority we wield like a club is the reason so many are in bondage to secret sin.

The bulimic pastor's wife. The lauded Christian businessman who lies to clients. The self-help expert who hates herself. The porn addict. The judgmental. All need a grace-filled environment that encourages confession and remembers the Golden Rule.

Frankly, I think a private confession booth is a good thing. Our self-righteous attitude imprisons too many others in their jail of sin. Those folks need us to listen and offer grace first, not judgment.

I'm listening. The comment section is open—and during this series, anonymous. 

{Image: a Gaboon viper in its typical surroundings} 

Other posts in this series: