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The speaking of that Word is beset with infinite perils. If it is not accompanied by worthy listening, how can it really be the right word for the other person?
Moreover, the person who has really listened and served and borne with others is the very one who is likely to say nothing. A profound distrust of everything that is merely verbal often causes a personal word to a brother to be suppressed. What can weak human words accomplish for others? Why add to the empty talk? Are we, like the professionally pious, to ‘talk away’ the other person’s real need? Is there anything more perilous than speaking God’s Word to excess? But, on the other hand, who wants to be accountable for having been silent when he should have spoken? How much easier is ordered
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What a difficult thing it often is to utter the name of Jesus Christ in the presence even of a brother!
Where Christians live together the time must inevitably come when in some crisis one person will have to declare God’s Word and will to another.
The basis upon which Christians can speak to one another is that each knows the other as a sinner, who, with all his human dignity, is lonely and lost if he is not given help.
The more we learn to allow others to speak the Word to us, to accept humbly and gratefully even severe reproaches and admonitions, the more free and objective will we be in speaking ourselves.
Reproof is unavoidable. God’s Word demands it when a brother falls into open sin.
It is a ministry of mercy, an ultimate offer of genuine fellowship, when we allow nothing but God’s Word to stand between us, judging and succouring. Then it is not we who are judging; God alone judges, and God’s judgment is helpful and healing.
He has put his Word in our mouth. He wants it to be spoken through us. If we hinder his Word, the blood of the sinning brother will be upon us. If we carry out his Word, God will save our brother through us. ‘He which converteth the sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins’ (James 5.20).
Genuine spiritual authority is to be found only where the ministry of hearing, helping, bearing, and proclaiming is carried out.
description of a bishop (I Tim. 3. 1ff.). One finds there nothing whatsoever with respect to worldly charm and the brilliant attributes of a spiritual personality. The bishop is a simple, faithful man, sound in faith and life, who rightly discharges his duties to the Church. His authority lies in the exercise of his ministry. In the man himself there is nothing to admire.
Pastoral authority can be attained only by the servant of Jesus who seeks no power of his own, who himself is a brother among brothers submitted to the authority of the Word.
‘CONFESS YOUR faults one to another’ (James 5.16). He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone.
Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous.
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. ‘My son, give me thine heart’ (Prov. 23.26).
In confession the break-through to community takes place.
The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged.
confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother,
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.
The root of all sin is pride,
Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride. To stand there before a brother as a sinner is an ignominy that is almost unbearable.
It was none other than Jesus Christ himself who suffered the scandalous, public death of a sinner in our stead. He was not ashamed to be crucified for us as an evildoer.
We cannot find the Cross of Jesus if we shrink from going to the place where it is to be found, namely, the public death of the sinner. And we refuse to bear the Cross when we are ashamed to take upon ourselves the shameful death of the sinner in confession. In confession we break through to
in confession the Christian gives up all and follows. Confession is discipleship.
What happened to us in baptism is bestowed upon us anew in confession.
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.
whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution.
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.
in the presence of a brother the sin has to be brought into the light.
Our brother has been given me that even here and now I may be made certain through him of the reality of God in his judgment and his grace.
concrete sins.
Self-examination on the basis of all Ten Commandments will therefore be the right preparation for confession. Otherwise it might happen that one could
Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother.
The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here
is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants .to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness.
The death of the sinner before God and life that comes out of that death through grace become for him a daily reality.
Who can hear our confession? He who himself lives beneath the Cross.
There are two dangers that a Christian community which practises confession must guard against.
The first concerns the one who hears confessions.
The second danger concerns the
confessant.
he does so, it will become the final, most abominable, vicious, and impure prostitution of the heart;
The day before the Lord’s Supper is administered will find the brethren of a Christian fellowship together and each will beg the forgiveness of the others for the wrongs committed.
The fellowship of the Lord’s Supper is the superlative fulfilment of Christian fellowship.
