Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 18 is still in production. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
Yesterday we talked about healing. Today, benefit number two of confession, and this one's a little more surprising, because it has to do with what confession actually proves.
Here's a question worth asking honestly: why is it often easier to confess to God than to a person?
An uncomfortable observation
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor during the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. He was eventually arrested for his resistance to Hitler, and was sent to a concentration camp. He was executed just a few days before his concentration camp was liberated. He wrote some powerful things about life in Christian community, in a book called Life Together. He asked exactly the question above:
"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?"
And yet it isn't. Most of us find it far easier to confess quietly to God, alone, in our own heads, than to say the same words out loud to another man's face.
Bonhoeffer's answer to why is the part that stopped me the first time I read it:
"But if we do [find it easier], 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 [forgiveness]..."
Think about what that means. Alone in your head, you're the one running the conversation. You bring up the sin, you feel appropriately bad about it, you tell yourself God forgives you, and the whole transaction happens entirely inside your own mind, under your own control, at whatever depth you decide is enough. There's no one there to ask a follow-up question. No one there to say, "wait, back up, tell me the rest." You are the confessor and the priest and the judge, all at once.
So here's what Bonhoeffer says next:
"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."
When you say the real words, out loud, to a real man, and he hears them and doesn't leave, doesn't recoil, stays sitting right there across from you, you experience something you cannot manufacture alone. You experience the actual presence of God, in the reality of another person. That's Bonhoeffer's phrase, and it's exactly right. Your brother becomes the place where the abstract idea of God's grace turns into something you can feel with your own body, sitting in a real room.
Experience grace, don't just believe in it.
A community built for exactly this: real confession, real men, real prayer.
Why private confession alone will only take you so far
It's not that private confession is fake, you can genuinely repent alone with God, and that matters. But there's a level of certainty, a level of real transparency, that only happens when another human being hears the whole truth and you watch grace unfold in the room.
This is what starts to happen when you actually do this: you stop being someone who manages his image even with God. You start being fully known, sins, failures, and all, by both God and man at the same time.
And here's the strange thing men find on the other side of that: it's not shame that grows. It's grace. You start learning what it actually feels like to be loved and known.
Because here's what God is actually after in all of this. He didn't send Jesus just so you could avoid hell, but to be well, right now, in this life, known, forgiven, and walking with other men instead of carrying this alone in the dark.
That's benefit number two. Confession isn't just how you get healed. It's how you find out, for real, not just in theory, that God's grace is actually true.
This is Day 18 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 19 →