Confess Your Faults

“Confess your faults to one another.” 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 pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner, so everybody must conceal their sin from themselves and from each other. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. In confession the breakthrough to community takes place. Sin demands to have a person by himself; it withdraws us from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a fellow Christian, we find the forgiveness of all our sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and a sister or brother. The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power, and the sin confessed has helped the person find true fellowship with his brothers and sisters in Christ. If a Christian is in the fellowship of confession with a sister or brother, he will never be alone again, anywhere.

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– from Life Together, 1939, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)

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