Confess Your Faults to One Another

One of the founding fathers of the East African Revival Fellowship challenged Sempangi, author of A Distant Grief: The Real Story Behind the Martyrdom of Christians in Uganda, to see the confession of sin to others as the practice that brings brokenness and then grace. Here is my attempt at paraphrasing with efforts to maintain the powerful nature of the content (pp. 38-39):

Left to ourselves, we’ll never confess to one another. However, allowing grace to enter in through confession pushes pride into a corner. The power of the Holy Spirit moves when repentance is made through confession. “When there is repentance, pride gives way and in its place is conviction and confession, and then forgiveness.” Remember James 5:16, “Confess your faults to one another, and pray for one another, that ye may be healed.” Mongo (a Fellowship leader) went on to say that, “It is not the man who has the correct exegesis of the verse who knows its truth. It is the man who confesses his sin to his neighbor.”

Walking in the light means a total sharing with our brother of our secrets. Mongo reminded Sempgani of Jesus’ words to His disciples, “I no longer call you servants, a servant knows not the secrets of his lord but I have shared with you the secrets of my father.” Sharing our secrets brings total identification with one another, which forms a bond based on reciprocity. Consequently, gossip has no room because our confession is already in the light. Instead of gossip we make efforts to strengthen and defend one another.

Brokenness, even as Jesus was broken, means having no pride. Pride prevents confession and an absence of confession means an absence of forgiveness. “The broken one is he who is broken to heal a broken relationship. He is the one willing to ‘give in,’ who doesn’t find his identity in always being in the right.” Like the breaking of the five loaves and the two fishes, we must surrender our will to be broken so that God will use us, so that we don’t only remain a “nice loaf of bread.” Unless we are broken we would be too proud to lose our life for sinners, too proud to give our lives away for imperfect people. We would wait for the perfect person or the perfect community and never find it. “We would end up like Judas, making only a partial commitment to the body of believers to whom I belonged and finding my identity in my rebellion from them.”