Daily Prayer - A community of grace

Good Thursday morning, my friends.

 

Do you have a place of grace where you can confess your sins, be prayed for, and healed?

 

James 5:16 says "Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective."

 

Is yours a pious faith community or a community of sinners?

 

Read and consider these words from the great 20th century theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

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…In confession the break-through to community takes place.  Sin demands to have a man by himself.  It withdraws him from the community.  The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.  Sins wants to remain unknown.  It shuns the light.  In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person.  This can happen even in the midst of a pious community.  In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart.  The sin must be brought into the light.  The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged.  All that is secret and hidden is openly manifest.  It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted…The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power.  It has been revealed and judged as sin.  It can no longer tear the fellowship asunder.  Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother.  He is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handed it over to God.  It has been taken away from him.  Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.  Now he can be a sinner and still enjoy the grace of God.  He can confess his sins and in this very act find fellowship for the first time.  The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship, made all his apparent fellowship a sham; the sin confessed has helped him to find true fellowship with the brethren in Jesus Christ…If a Christian is in the fellowship of confession with a brother he will never be alone again, anywhere… (Life Together pp. 110-13)

 

Do you have a safe place to confess your sins, to cast them off, to be prayed for and healed?  A community of grace is essential for a healthy spiritual life.  If you don't have it, you need to find it.  I urge you to share this message with one or two others whom you believe want (or need) this kind of community and see what God does.

 

If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.  If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:6-10)

 

Grace and peace and healing be yours in abundance,
Bruce

 

God of Grace,

We are deeply aware of the sin in our lives. 

We are aware of the darkness of our hearts.

Help us to walk in the light, to shed the darkness of sin by confessing it to one another.

Heal us through our confession, cleanse us from unrighteousness.

Give us life - life in abundance - in a community of grace.

In the unmatchable name of Jesus we pray.

Amen.