Each week or so, I will be posting some quotes from something I've been reading or that has been a particular inspiration to me.  This week I am posting the quote from the sermon this weekend.  It comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his book Life Together.   This week we talked about forgiving debts and being forgiven of debts.  Bonhoeffer gets to the point about the importance of our confessing sins to a brother or sister and how it protects us from confessing our sins to ourselves and absolving ourselves, verses confessing our sins to God and being forgiven by God.  

Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution...Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person... As Christ bore and received us as sinners so we in his fellowship may bear and receive sinners into the fellowship of Christ through the forgiving of sins.

At Crossroads, we regularly practice the confession of sin both in worship and in community groups. And we do this, because we want to recognize the corporate nature of both sin and forgiveness.