Teaching | Confess Your Sins | Community E03

Hello and welcome to the John Mark Homer Teachings Podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space. It's great to have you with us. We're continuing our community series, exploring what it means to practice authentic community in a culture of radical individualism. In this week's episode, John Mark tackles one of the deepest challenges we face in relationships.

the ancient enemy of shame that keeps us hiding from the very people we most need connection with, and how the practice of confession can set us free to be fully known and truly loved. Here's John Mark.

Good morning, everybody. Let's try that again. Good morning. May the peace of Christ be with you. Thank you. Please turn in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 2. There should be one in the seat in front of you if you did not bring a Bible along, but open that up if you can, a hard copy, to Genesis chapter 2. And once you are there, stand with me for the reading of Scripture.

Our teaching text for today is Genesis 2, verse 21 down to 3, verse 13. But before we read, let me just curate for you a short moment of quiet. to prepare your heart, just to open and surrender your inner being to God. Not to me, but though I appreciate the listening ear, but to what the Spirit of God may want to deposit into you. and doing you. Let me just give you a moment.

Genesis chapter 2 verse 21. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Look at 25. Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame. Next line. Now the snake was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?

The woman said to the snake, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden. You must not touch it or you will die. You will not certainly die, the snake said to the woman.

God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened. You will be like God, knowing good and evil. When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some. and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man. Where are you? He answered, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. And he said,

told you that you were naked. Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I hate it. Smart man. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? And the woman said, the snake deceived me and I ate. The story goes on. Look down at verse 21. The Lord God made garments of skin. for Adam and his wife, and he clothed them. Take a seat. The home community was the best...

anyone had ever been a part of. It was all the stuff we've been imagining over the last few weeks. It was 20 or so people who would gather every Wednesday night around a table for a weekly meal. It was like a family. And they were together.

all of the time, not just on Wednesday night for a meal together. They would sit together at church on Sunday. They would keep Sabbath together. They would go on a vacation together, make decisions together. They were vulnerable with one another. They would share... resources with each other in need. It was absolutely stunning until a global pandemic that we call COVID broke out and 17 of the 20 people moved away. It was obliterated.

The Ramirez family, beautiful family, they ended up befriending a single mom with full custody of her four kids who'd been through a really horrendous experience. And they really felt like, hey, we need to do something about this. So they invited her and the family to move into a rental that opened up just down the street from them.

And they invited them to join their home community, another similar kind of table-based community, and to just do life together. They began to help out and serve and share resources. And it was really, really beautiful until the mom's mental health. continued to deteriorate. Instead of getting worse, for some reason, instead of getting better, for some reason, it got worse.

And eventually she became quite divisive and the community was not on the same page about what to do or not do. And it actually ended up breaking the community apart. My friend Noah is a middle-aged pastor. He was a part of a church for many years in leadership and went through a really harrowing kind of leadership breakdown experience. that as a result made him need to resign from that church. Not only did he have to leave the community, but they had to move away.

And his children were significantly messed up by this experience. They lost their church. They lost their home. It was a traumatic experience for him. Now he's pastoring again at a new church in a new city. He's a really good man. But every time he walks through the door, he feels a fear in his body. Is the same thing going to happen again?

Is this leadership team trustworthy or not? Is this person who they say they are or not? Am I safe here? Will he heal by becoming a part of this new community? Or will the same wound re-injure him? Or will his own fear become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will it cause him to behave in ways that actually alienate him and put him crosswise with the very people? He's scared it may go wrong with.

These are, I've changed all the names and details, don't worry. Somebody's like, man, this is your friends. I don't want to become your friend. I've changed the names and details, and a few of these are composite. But these are all real stories of real people. that I know from real communities about community breakdown and relational rupture.

And I am sure that you could come up here and each of us, we could go down the line and we could all tell our own stories. Many of us have been hurt deeply by community. And yet the only way we will ever heal is by living again in community. It is so easy when you have been hurt in a relationship. Everything in your body at a primal level goes into self-preservation mode.

And it may travel up your brainstem into your left brain, and you may find some rational, like, cogent intellectual excuse for it, but really, that's not what it is. It is a fear in your body. You never want to get hurt like that again. And so we often do this to other people, to other genders, to church as a whole, whatever it may be.

Yet we can't give up on this. Even if there's a deep emotional allergy or fear or sensitivity, we have to move toward the very thing that we fear because that is the only way we ever heal. We have been tracing a vision of community through the library of Scripture over the last few weeks.

and learning together just how essential it is to our apprenticeship to Jesus. To be an apprentice or a disciple of Jesus is to, simultaneously, become a part of his... community called the church, which is likened all through the New Testament to a family. In this practice, we are covering five key skills for living in the family of Jesus. They are, number one, be family around a table. Number two, experience formation in relationships.

Number three, share your joys and your sorrows. Number four, confess your sins. And number five, stay together to grow. Up next is confess your sins, which you clearly were not aware of because you're here. To begin, living in community in a culture of radical individualism is not easy.

By way of reminder, radical individualism, it's a label used by sociologists. It's the air we breathe in a place like L.A. It's just a way of saying that we have been socially conditioned. Those of us that grew up in America, in particular in California, we have been socially conditioned. from before we could speak to put our own needs and desires and preferences and pursuit of happiness over the needs and desires and preferences of any other group.

Be it our nation state or our city or our workplace job company or our church, certainly, or our home community, or increasingly over our marriage and even in many cases over our own children, our own parents. I was reading Gilead last night by Robinson. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner for a while ago. And I fell asleep early. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner, you know. And there's a beautiful meditation that I was reading right before sleep on the commandment to honor your father and your mother.

And I just thought, this is so alien to me. If you grew up in Korea or Nigeria, this is just the air you breathe. But I grew up in the Bay Area of California. And I think I'm an amazing son if I call my mom once a year on Mother's Day. Crushing it. Honor your father and your mother. Check. You actually explore the depths of what is there. It's so far from the world view of everything.

Everything's swimming around me. That's radical individualism. It is really difficult to follow Jesus in community in this kind of a moment. There are many challenges. Let me just name a few. The number one problem for most of us in the room is just busyness. It takes a lot of margin to live in community. Relationships take time. Most of our schedules are either at capacity or for honest.

over capacity. We don't have any time to spare. Remember Dunbar's Four Circles of Community from a few weeks ago? Dr. Jeffrey Hall is a research scientist at the University of Kansas. He conducted research on how much time it takes to move through these levels of relationships. His research would say that it takes about 50 hours.

to move from what he called an acquaintance to a friend, which in this paradigm is from like your village, about 150 people, to a kinship group or like a home community kind of level at church. And then it takes about 200 hours to move from a friend to a close friend or an intimate or a brother or a sister.

So let's say you just moved to LA. You rock up here at church on Sunday. You're like, I want this. I want to live in community. I want deep relationships in the way of Jesus. 250 hours per relationship. You want two or three friends? 750 hours just to get started. That's like to get to the starting line. How many of you have 750 hours? Well, actually, all of you do if you look at your TV time and screen time. But it's a lot of time. It can take years.

Secondly, on that note, is transience. Often, just as you're at like hour 247, somebody's like, you know what? I'm moving away. I'm leaving LA. As a general rule, our culture values career over community. People especially, quote, successful, put that in air quotes just in the American sense of successful, meaning upwardly mobile people, often move from city to city, working their way up the career ladder. And there's a place for that. I'm not moralizing it, but it is devastating to community.

Few of us are from, if we were to go around the room, I don't know what percentage of you were born and raised in LA, but it would certainly be the minority. And few of you will stay here long term. That is a challenge. Many others are getting pushed out of cities by gentrification and cost of living. But even if we can stay, even if we find a way, we manage to stay in Los Angeles long term, we still face the challenge of, number three, digital distraction.

Thanks to our devices, we know more people than our grandparents would have ever dreamed. And we don't really know people at all. Because, and this is the great lie of the digital age, right? Connectivity is not the same thing as community. Social media in particular has dramatically changed the way we do relationships, first by speeding up the process of making new friends, so it's easier than ever to find and make a new friend.

but then by simultaneously dramatically lowering the bar of what it actually means to be friends. Related to this is flakiness. Not only has tech made us, of course, less focused and distractible, we get that, but what's a little bit less intuitive, and there's research behind this, it's made us more flaky.

as we're conditioned to kind of always keep our options open. I was reading some of the research on this, and this is a true story. One of the sociologists I read, as he was researching, doing this massive study on the impact of text messaging, not even social media, just text messaging on flakiness in human behavior. He was specifically looking at millennials and Gen Z. He had a teenage kid who had a standing phone call with his grandparents every Sunday afternoon.

And his grandparents were like old school. They did not have cell phones. They had like, I don't even know where you buy a phone phone anymore, but they had like phone phones, if you know what I mean. And so every Sunday afternoon, his teenage kid was like, I don't want to talk to my grandparents. I mean, they're great. I'll see them at Christmas. I don't want to like call my grandmother. And again.

Radical individualism, honor your parents, that's outside of the paradigm, right? So he didn't want to call them, and he wanted to just text message and bail, but he had to actually call them. And he couldn't bail over the phone because then if you say, hey, Grandma and Grandpa, I can't talk today, what are they going to say? Why not? And then if you're actually on the phone, what are you going to say? You know?

Text messaging, it's beautiful. You can just like, you can go for, you can lie. You know, you can do that and nobody's there to know. Like, you're like, I'm sick and they don't know that you're like actually in the gym working out and whatever. They can't see you. But when I say you can lie, I'm not saying that's good, just to clarify. Or you can just like, my preferred option is just like kind of...

passive ambiguity, like something came up or I'm unable, I'm so sorry, but I'm unable to make it. You can get away with that over text message. It's kind of awesome. You can't get away with that with your grandma who's like, oh, no, what happened? Are you okay? Yeah, I'm totally fine. I just don't want to talk to you right now.

You can't get away with that. And so every single Sunday afternoon, this kid would call his grandparents. My point is, this has made us increasingly kind of flaky. We're socially conditioned to not even schedule more than a few days in advance to keep our...

options open to go for a better relationship or hangout or date or whatever it is the moment one comes along. We're socially conditioned to break our commitments all of the time. And then we wonder why it's a Friday night and we're all alone. Or we're out and we're in a crowd and yet we feel and we know in our bones that we are all alone. As my friend Jim McNeish in Scotland put it to me, intimacy only resides in the safety of commitment.

You can have radical individualism, you can bail on your friends, you can do whatever you want, and you can be lonely. Or you can have a deeply relational life, satisfying of soul, but it will cost you. And one of the prices that you will pay is commitment. Finally, the byproduct of all of this is decreasing relational skills.

Along the lines of the effect of technology, according to a recent study of more than 200,000 people across 160 countries, so meta-study, since 2011, which is right around when 50% of the population got a smartphone. And so there's lots of, if you study sociology, right around 2010 to 12, all sorts of charts go like, like this dramatic change right there on all sorts of levels.

Since then, there has been a steady decline in emotional intelligence by about 5% a year. Some of us were emotionally stupid to begin with. We did not have 5% to lose, much less 5% a year. Add to that the rise of easy divorce since the 1980s. And then multiply that by digitally distracted parenting if you're younger. And the result is many of us have never even seen...

emotionally healthy models of communication and conflict resolution. And all of this stuff is caught more than it's taught. You don't learn it from a sermon. You learn it by just watching your parents. This has created an entire generation that lacks the relational skills or the emotional maturity to go deep together. solve conflict when it inevitably comes up in all deep long-term relationships, and then stay together over years in order to grow into who we actually are.

My point is, we are just too busy, too transient, too distracted, too flaky, and too emotionally mature. And these are just a few of the challenges of radical individualism and the modern West. This is one of a thousand reasons that we can't just...

like wing it and hope for the best. This is how a lot of us, some of it, this is a weird thing, especially in cities. People devote an enormous amount of energy, intentionality, discipline, sacrifice to their career or their art. Yet when it comes to their disciples, to Jesus in church, they just kind of wing it and like just try to fit it in when they have time. This is not going to work if we just try to kind of wing it.

We have to live with a high degree of intentionality. We have to practice community, hence this time together. But here's the thing, and this is really what I'm driving to.

Even if you do this, you do all the stuff we've been talking about and we're still not done and you find a kind of subgroup of this larger group and you start to become a family and you do life together, it's beautiful. If you find a community, you set a weekly meal, you put the hundreds of hours in, all of it, there is a far more ancient challenge that you will face. Predates the iPhone.

predates radical individualism, predates Western philosophy, predates all of it by millennia. It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It is the problem of shame. People struggled with relationships long before easy divorce in the Western culture that we call home. Many of the challenges I just named, busiest, transience, they are symptoms. The disease itself is so much deeper.

To return to Genesis as the foundational text, we've been kind of in this for the last few weeks, right? Genesis 1 tells us that we were created in the image. and likeness of a relational God. I think I used the quote from Dr. Gary Beshears, who said, theologian, said, God is a family who makes family. We are created by community for community, by a relationship for. relationships.

Genesis 2 tells the story of the first humans in relationship, man and woman, created in this interdependence, even just to exist as a species. Relationality is built into our core. Adam and Eve are naked in the garden with no shame. This vivid word picture, nothing to hide. The full picture, totally open and vulnerable and honest and yet at peace with God and with each other.

But the story does not end there. In Genesis 3 that we read a few minutes ago, we read the story of what theologians call the fall into sin. And the literary scene... Between the two stories and two chapters in human history is that line, if you have your Bible still open, chapter 2, verse 25. If you're a literary type, this is a key salient moment. Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. Now, this line is the author's one-sentence summary of the state of humanity before sin.

utterly naked, and there's an archetypal kind of nature to this, before each other and God with no shame. The Hebrew Bible scholar Carissa Quinn interprets Genesis 2 this way, quote, the ideal picture is one of relational safety, vulnerability, trust, and acceptance of the other. This all goes away, one verse later, with sin. And in its place comes shame. Now, here, listen. Listen carefully. Think of how fascinating it is.

that the author of Genesis chose that word to name the fallout of sin. Of all the words he could have used, of all the concepts, of all the... consequences of sin, he could have put at the top to overview. He could have said they felt no hate or they felt no fear. or they felt no greed and covetousness, or they felt no anxiety or insecurity, or they felt no sadness or despair or hopelessness, or they felt no guilt. But he doesn't say that.

He says they felt no shame. Meaning, on the flip side, if you reverse engineer it, shame is the author's one-word summary for everything that comes after the fall.

Now, there's a fair bit of, I think, incorrect thinking about shame, particularly in the Christian church, where we often label it all bad, and actually it's not all bad. Shame is not just feeling bad about yourself. I think most of us would agree that there's actually likely, if that's what it is, there's likely a healthy version of it, right? Because there are times when the appropriate emotional response to my behavior is, I suck.

That's not self-hate. That's called self-awareness. There's times when feeling bad about yourself is not... We have a word for people that feel no shame. It's called... sociopath. It's not a great word. In fact, when we say to somebody, have you no shame? We're not like, what a great Christian you are. You're like, put some clothes on, person, or whatever it is, right? When people have no shame.

Shame is not just feeling bad about yourself. It is a deep fear that you are unlovable. That if people knew who you actually were... they would reject you and cast you out. That's why it feels so scary. So next time you feel shame or even like an embarrassment is a mild form of shame, think about when you feel embarrassment. Happens to me a lot. I speak for a living. Happens to me all of the time.

But, like, I will feel hot. My cheeks will turn red. I'll feel like... If you actually, next time you feel shame or even embarrassment, just pay attention to the physical sensation in your body. Shame is not just a thought. And it's not just a, quote, feeling. It is a psychosomatic experience in your body. Next time you feel it, just pay attention. Like, take your mind's commentary away from it. Just pay attention to the feeling. It's almost indistinguishable from fear.

It is a form of fear. Our fear is not just that we are bad. It's even worse. It's that we could lose connection to people we love and need.

To give you even more bad news, this fear is not based on a fantasy, but on the reality of sin. Once sin enters the human story, the result is ruined relationships. Sin in biblical theology is not primarily about rule-breaking or a lack of moral perfection in some arbitrary platonic scale. There's a place for that. But sin is primarily about relational rupture.

And not only does sin disconnect Adam and Eve from God, it also disconnects them from each other. Blame shifting, gaslighting, fear, hiding. We often hear Genesis 3 as a story about sin. sin and it is, but it's also a story about sin's shadow of shame. What's the first thing Adam and Eve do after they sin? They make coverings for themselves and they literally hide in the bushes.

from God. They are scared of God. All of us are scared of God at some level. Even those of us that love and want God, it's a part of us that's still listening for his voice. behind the bushes. This is such a vivid metaphor for shame. Instead of moving toward God, what do they do? They move away. Instead of coming together over sin, what do they do? Drive away, blame shift, point the fingers. Sin is what causes us to reject another person.

We behave in sinful ways toward them and reject them. But shame over our own sin... is what often causes us to hide from other people out of fear that they will reject us. To perform, to project. No wonder we're all exhausted and burned out. Shame is a disconnector. It makes us hide from each other, blame each other, wound each other, gaslight each other, and it makes us hide from God. It even makes us hide from ourselves.

You know, it's easier to spot sin and shame in another person than in your own life. All of us, if you're in any kind of relationship, you end up with friends and you're like, man. Why do they just not see what a tool shed they are? Or why do they not see this aspect of their life where they really need to change and grow? And it's really easy to just critique or to label or to criticize.

Man, this person just can't, like, do the work and face their stuff. Sometimes it's because of ego. Sometimes it's because of narcissism. But honestly, even in those cases, it's almost always primarily because of shame. To even face the reality of who we are and how broken we are, that means we have to have a fairly well-developed sense of our belovedness.

to even look at the reality of who we are. If you don't have, if you were not granted and gifted, particular by your parents or your life story so far, a sense. that you carry deep in your body, that I'm a mess, but I am beloved. And that can happen for you. But if it hasn't happened yet, it can happen for you in Christ and in this room.

But if it hasn't happened for you yet, it's really hard to face the reality, the full reality of who we are. Many of us don't realize that shame is not only the byproduct of sin, it's also the cause. Many of us don't think about how much of our dysfunctional behavior in relationships is actually caused by shame. There's a surface motivation of anger or fear, but really at the deepest level, it's shame. We constantly self-sabotage our genuine desires for love and intimacy.

Psychologists use this phrase I love, self-betrayal, which is the way we provoke in others the very behavior we hate. I'm gonna give you a horribly embarrassing story that's not in my notes, but it's literally from, not even yesterday, it's actually from this morning. So I'm gonna tell you what a great dad I am, and then I'm gonna tell you how I'm a horrific dad, all right?

So yesterday morning, I have a teenage son, and he's right at that stage where he basically doesn't want to talk to me anymore about anything of the heart. And so I'm trying to stay connected to him. And if you have a teenage son, you know it's not easy. And he's a great kid. We have a good relationship. And so we kind of had a rough week. He got in trouble multiple times. I was pretty just...

irritated with him all week long. And so I was like, all right, I woke up yesterday morning. I was like, how do I make this up? And so he is obsessed right now with Taco Bell. I've not had Taco Bell since I was about his age. I am not just philosophically but theologically opposed to everything that Taco Bell stands for. Like, it's not even food, all right? Like, everything in me thinks, like, it's problematic at its core, right?

But I thought, you know what? All right, what do I do? So he's at that age where he sleeps in until noon on a Saturday. So I made sure I was ready. I was ready to go. When he woke up, I brought him a cup of coffee with a little extra sugar in it. I said, hey, bud, take 15 minutes, read your Bible, whatever, and then just throw in a hat, some sweatpants. I got a little surprise for you. Come on with me.

He's like, okay. And we get in the car, and he thinks I'm going to do some hard thing with him or whatever. And we just drove down to the PCH to the closest Taco Bell. We rocked up, and I was like, get whatever you want. I got nothing. I just want to clarify. I went home and had some organic eggs and an avocado and some kombucha, okay? But...

I bought him a chicken quesadilla. In fact, I'm like, you want two? Take two. We had this amazing chat all the way there. I disciplined myself to not ask too deep of questions, to keep it just kind of, not surface, mid-level and just, you know, it was... wonderful, beautiful, joyful connection. I'm a great dad. Then, I go to bed early last night, preaching today, reading Pulitzer Prize winner, fell asleep at 9.07. It was great.

wake up, 2.45 a.m., and I faintly hear hip-hop and talking. That's not good at 2.45 in the morning. I'm anxious. Like as a parent of teenagers, you're just like, what are they doing? My dad used to say to me, nothing good happens after midnight. I was like, you old fundamentalist. Now I'm like, nothing good happens after midnight.

Oh, that's not in the Bible, but it should be. If the Bible was written today, it would make it in, I'm confident. And so, like, I bolt up, and I literally, like, half unclothed.

Bolt downstairs, like we have this kind of house where there's a basement, you have to go outside to get into it, and he has a room down there. And so I bolt downstairs, the lights on, I hear hip-hop playing, and I walk in the door, and he's sitting at... at his little art desk, eating the leftover chicken quesadilla from Taco Bell, listening to hip hop, reading manga.

at 2.45 in the morning. Now, my brain just goes to people that stay up till 2.45 in the morning. He's never going to be employed. He's going to be a drug addict. He's probably going to go to prison if he makes it to 25 still alive and not as a cocaine. My brain is just like...

catastrophizing at 2.45 in the morning. I'm freaked out, and I lay into him like, what are you doing? You cannot have Taco Bell at 2.45 in the morning. I just lay into him, half unclothed, right? And he just goes, Dad, I... I'm not, it's the Sabbath. I'm not breaking any rules. And technically it's right. We don't have a rule that says you can't eat Taco Bell at 2.45 in the morning and stay up reading.

We don't have that rule. We, as of tonight, will have that rule in our house. This is where rules come from. There's actually a whole theology behind this. The more we misbehave, the more rules we have. But he actually was right. He wasn't technically doing anything bad other than just immaturity. But I laid into him.

Now, is he going to want when I get home today to just like share the vulnerable, tender places in his heart with me? Is he going to want to just be really honest about when he makes bad decisions and when he feels some shame? No, what did his body just learn? Dad can't be trusted. I have to hide part of who I am from him. So do I want that as a dad? No, self-betrayal. I provoke in him the very behavior. It's shame. It's shame. I fear I'm a bad dad.

I fear I'm not going to raise kids that can live in this world. I fear that his own behavior is because I'm too controlling. I'm too perfectionist. I'm too irritable. I feel shame over that. I have to control your behavior. You have to be good so that I can be good. good kid so that I can be known as a good dad. That's shame. That's shame. It's fear. I'll lose connection with him. I'll lose connection with you that I'll lose connection with that. I will. That's what it is.

This is in all of us. Call it self-betrayal, but it is shame. This ancient enemy wreaking havoc yet again. But there is, in the Christian imagination, good news.

Turn with me to Romans. I just want to read one famous line to you from Paul's letter to the church in Rome. This is one of the most theologically rich epistles in the New Testament. In Romans chapter 7, there's a famous passage that scholars debate a little bit, but it certainly has like an existential feel to it, where Paul is writing about the way that shame...

causes us to do the very thing we don't want to do and not do the very thing we want to do. Case in point, if you look at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul writes about this dynamic. So I find this law at work, kind of this rule. Although what I... want to do good. Evil is right there with me. For in my inner being, part of me, I delight in God's law, how God wants my life to be. But yet I see another law, like a power, an energy, a neuroplasticity at work in me, waging war.

against the law of my mind and making me prisoner to the law of sin at work with me. What a mess I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God. who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself and my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my body, in this broken part of me, a slave to the law of sin. Remember, there's no chapter, no verses in the original text.

Therefore, chapter 8, verse 1, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Jesus, because through Christ the Messiah Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. And he goes on. There is no condemnation. A perfectly valid translation of the Greek there is, there is no shame for those who are in Christ Jesus. And it would take a long time to explain the deep logic of his passage.

but to oversimplify it. When you are in Christ Jesus, when you are... utterly enveloped in the love of the Trinity, adopted into the family of God through our elder brother Jesus, made a son or daughter of the Father, the Spirit of God welling up in your heart saying, Abba. Father, when you are safe, as safe as a little child is in a healthy home where nothing they could ever do would ever cast them out, you can live without shame.

This is the gospel. It is the good news of Jesus. That Jesus the Messiah has come to set us free, not just of sin, but also of its corollary, shame. To reconnect us to God and to each other in a thick bond of attachment and love.

Through Jesus' birth and incarnation, His life and His teaching and His miracles, His death and His burial and His resurrection, His ascension to the Father's side, His... intercession at the throne room of heaven for you and I and the outpouring of his Holy Spirit upon all of his followers. freely giving you and I grace to be and to do all that we were made to be and to do but could not do on our own, to live reconnected and restored relationship to God, each other, and even the earth itself.

Because we don't live, at least those of us that grew up here, in an honor-shame culture. It's easy to miss the shame dimension to the gospel, even though it is central to the New Testament witness. But this raises the question of how. It sounds beautiful. It sounds pious and devout. And it sounds really nice and lovely to say that Jesus is the answer to the problem of sin and shame. To say that we're in Christ now. There's no more shame for you and I. And that's true theologically.

But if we are totally honest and there were no like theologian listening to our conversation to like, there's no buzzer anywhere. If we were just safe and honest. Many of us love Jesus deeply and have been following him for years, yet we still struggle a fair bit with sin. Not me, but I hear it's a problem for Gare. We hear there is now no condemnation. There is no shame. And yet, we feel shame. We feel shame in our own marriage. We're scared to be honest.

We feel shame with our closest friends. Certain aspects come up. We can't even make eye contact with people. We have to like look our body. We have to like look away. We can't even be around certain people that make us face. who we actually are. And that fear of rejection that we feel in our gut at an irrational subconscious level, it is not based on fantasy, but on the reality of our personal experience.

All of us could tell stories of when we have let our guard down, we have been honest, we've tried to be like the vulnerable. We've read Brene Brown and we're doing it. We're like being vulnerable, which is good, vulnerable with each other. And we were just a little too honest or too free or whatever. And we were rejected, ghosted, cut out or worse, betrayed, gossiped about, manipulated.

And then we think about our experiences. Many of us who even grew up around the church, our parents couldn't even stay married. Our last community group couldn't even like stay together because of... disagreements over immigration. Our last pastor couldn't even, like, be faithful to his wife. How does the gospel of Jesus set us, if this is true, how does this set us free from sin and shame? That's really the question. How does...

the truth of the gospel of Jesus, become a reality in our bodies, not just a theology in our minds. That is a question that we should ask until our dying days. Well, anyone who tells you the answer to that question as simple as likely selling you something. The wound of sin goes deep, and it is not easily healed. And relationships expose the raw edges of our soul where all of us are in process. That's one of the things that if you...

can figure this out and realize this is a feature, not a bug of church, community, friendship, marriage, family, it will free your heart from a vast neurosis that is unnecessary. If you can realize... Part of the role of every relationship is to show my sin and to show another person's sin. This is a gross analogy, and I need to come up with a better one before the next service so we can get on the podcast. But if there's like...

Like if you have a boil and there's pus there. Yes, it's disgusting. There's like, and there's even grosser analogies I could use, but I won't. Like there's stuff in you that needs to get... It's your body's way of drawing it to the surface. It's gross and it's nasty and it hurts. It's your body's way of getting toxins out of your system.

You're like, that's not the controlling metaphor I have for my small group or my marriage or my church. That's not all that Christian community is designed to do, but it's actually part of what it's designed to do. All of that is in you and I. We need a safe place where it can come up and be cleaned and cleared away. And often it is in our most intimate relationships that this stuff, the pus, the nasty stuff. that's in us, in our bodies, it comes up to be cleaned and cleared away.

But there's lots of reasons that we don't want that. Painful parts of ourselves that we would much rather just not face are exposed and laid bare. And in many ways, listen, this is the spiritual journey. This is long-term discipleship to Jesus. We walk this one step at a time over decades and years. And while there is no silver bullet to the problem of sin and shame,

that will just flip a switch and set you free in a moment. There is a practice that goes all the way back to Jesus' earliest followers. It's essentially a sub-practice of community that is... so powerful and joy-giving, and in my experience, liberating, that for over a thousand years, really more than that, it was considered essential to the church and to Christian discipleship, and really a key part of what it meant to be a part of a community.

Yet strangely, and there's a long kind of side story here, I won't go down the rabbit trail, but it's been lost in recent church history. And that is the practice of confession. The first Christian theologians... The controlling metaphor they often used for sin was that of like a disease and a wound to the soul, not as kind of a judicial metaphor about rule-breaking or merit or whatever it may be.

Often they would quote this famous line from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself, who said, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Notice, righteous sinners, his wordplay there isn't guilty or... not guilty or innocent or even clean or pure or even morally perfect or morally imperfect. It's sick and healthy.

For centuries, pastors were called doctors of the soul because their job was kind of like a doctor to kind of serve you and help your soul heal from sin and from shame. And confession has long been one of the most effective therapies. There's a saying in AA, which of course started as a Christian discipleship group, arguably back to these Wesleyan bands I'll talk about in a minute. And the saying is, we are only a six...

as the secrets we keep. The same is true of the spiritual life. For many of us, the beginning of our healing is to tell our secrets, or in the language of Scripture, to confess our sins.

Now, again, like shame, there's a lot of bad thinking about this. Contrary to what you think, a lot of us... Confession is not about beating yourself up or telling all the bad things you did that week to a priest to get off the hook or just self-hate. It is about courageously naming your wickedness and your woundedness. the sin done by you and to you and all around you in the presence of loving community who are walking with you on the long journey to wholeness.

It's not just about the confession of our sin, but also the confession of God's love for us in our sin. It's not just about saying how you messed up. It's about voicing who you are and who you are called to become in Christ. And hearing another trusted friend voice and tell you who you are by voicing God's love and mercy.

over you and saying, in Christ's name, you are forgiven by the cross. It's about coming out of the shadow and into the light and leaving behind not only sin, but also shame and confession. hear me, is our part in the healing of sin. If you're sick right now, you have to go to the doctor. If it's a small thing, your body will likely work it out.

Keep living. But if it's something more serious, your body will not work it out. You have to go to the doctor. What's the first thing you have to do? Tell them what is wrong. And when it comes to our deeper sins, where we are most in bondage, that's often all we can do. Again, there are layers in our struggle against sin.

Right at the top layer, all you kind of need is just like good preaching and biblical theology. You just need to kind of change your mind and hear Jesus' mental maps to reality and just say with your heart, I trust Jesus. And you just need to stop doing something. Some of you are like, how do I stop sinning? You just stop. Then there's another layer down where it's kind of like that, but it's really hard to stop. And so you require like a...

effortful intentionality with habits and with relationships around you. So it's like, man, you're going to, how do I stop dropping the F-bomb? I'm going to put sticky notes everywhere. I'm going to have my friend chat to me every, whatever. Did you use the F? F-bomb this week. Yes, four times. You're going to really work to clean up your language. But man, there are layers of sin that are so much deeper than that.

And no amount of hearing good preaching and reading scripture and trying really, really, really, really hard is ever going to fix it. Once you get to those deeper layers... You could use language of compulsion or addiction. Always you are dealing with a wound. Always you are dealing with pain. And that's not to like offload guilt and shame and blame somebody else. It's just to say.

If you don't deal with the rules. Why? If you go to AA, they don't just talk about behavior. They talk about your life. Because that behavior, that's just an inability to face the pain of your story. All addiction is an inability to face pain. All sin, you could argue at some level, is an inability to face pain. That's a questionable claim, but there's at least more than a little truth in it.

And the way, often when we get to these deeper levels, we can't stop. We can't. All we really can do is set our true self before God and our community. And wait for Jesus to do for us what we cannot possibly do for ourselves. Heal us and set us free. His job is to deal with our sin at those lower levels. Our job.

is to confess our secrets. Now, the way that Jesus normally does this deep healing is through relationships. Not through reading books. Not through attending events. not even through silence and solitude, though there's a place for that hugely, but through other people. which is why we don't just confess to God, we confess to each other. Now, this is key. The way that most modern Protestant Christians, and you're like, I don't even know what that means, kind of this, practice confession.

is normally by saying sorry to God in their minds at church or in prayer. So confession means like I come to church and once a month at Vintage, we have this beautiful Anglican liturgy of syndicants to you and word indeed what I've done, what I've left undone. And then we come forward to receive the bread and the cup. And as we're walking down, we're like just making this mental list of all.

all the bad things we've done that month, and we're saying sorry to God in the privacy of our mind. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's not a trick question. I'm not that mean. I'm close to it, but it's a good thing. It's a beautiful thing. It's not really a confession. Biblically. Doesn't quite qualify. True confession is a little bit less like what happens at church and a little bit more like what happens at AA. You sit down, small circle, there's no anonymity.

Hi, my name is whatever. Last Thursday night, I got sloshed, and then I did this. And you name it. And you're loved, and you're held, and you're held accountable. It's not just non-judgment. It's also community. That's why most of us avoid those circles like the plague. But that is confession. It is naming your sin to loving community. The writer James, the brother of Jesus, what does he know? He said this. This is a command in the New Testament. Confess your sins. Notice.

to one another, not just to God, not just in the privacy of your mind, tell God you're really sorry. That's beautiful. I'm not downplaying that. Confess your sins to, that's repentance. Confession is to another. And pray for one another that you may be, notice this language, healed. Not just forgiven. Healed. Set free the wound itself. Because confession is ultimately about experiencing the love of God.

through another person in such a way that, listen, what caused the sin in the first place, the deeper wound or pain, is often made whole.

God often waits to heal those deepest parts of ourselves until we are willing to come out of the prison of our radical individualism and actually open up to another brother or sister in Christ. Because God is a relationship. who makes relationships. For this reasons for centuries, and to this day in many streams of the church, serious Christians identify a confessor.

This could be, in certain traditions, a pastor or a priest, if you're a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, or a spiritual director or a therapist for a lot of people, or it could just be a trusted friend. What the ancient Christians called an anamkara or a soul friend. I go for a walk once a week, which again in LA means every three or four weeks, with a dear friend. And part of that weekly conversation is...

Confession. I know no matter what I say, he's not going anywhere. One of my mentors, this will sound like an extreme example. This is one of the godliest people I know. much, much older than me, literally just radiates the life and light and peace and joy of Christ. I mean, it's just one of those like, even I'm 45 and I'm like, when I grow up,

which is still future tense in my case. Like, I want to be like that. Every morning at 6.45 a.m., which, you know, he's like 70, so it's like noon for me, right? There's a joke, you know, old people, they get up early, it didn't land. All right, that's why I'm not a comedian. Every morning at 6.45 a.m., he calls his best friend of like 40 years.

For a 15-minute phone call, they confess their sins from the day before and quickly pray for the day ahead. Every morning at 6.45 a.m. That's a confessor. I'm in a three-person discipleship band where just me and two other guys, and once a month we spend a few hours on the phone, and we work through five questions, one of which is, do you have any sin? confess. And I know, no matter what I say, no matter what I've done, they are not going anywhere. And I know.

If I want to be not just forgiven, if I want to be forgiven, I can turn to God and plead for mercy, and God is mercy. If I want to be healed, I know that I need to turn to God through his family. And while this may sound terrifying at first, it is a crucial practice for all those who want to make genuine progress in the spiritual life. If you want to do more, then just like cuss less.

and be a decent person, if you want to be made whole, it's got to become a part of your life. As they say in AA as well, I get drunk, but we stay sober. We generally sin on our own, but we heal together. And not only does the discipline of confession set our heart free from sin and shame, it also reconnects us to God and to each other. Shame is the great disconnector.

creates distance between us and God, makes us sin again. Confession is the great reconnecter, attachment, bonding, love, unity to God and to each other. So that is our exercise for the week ahead. Hopefully you have a companion guide. There's a lot more. I'm running over on time here. There's a lot more in there. This may be too much of a leap for you.

The exercise is basically just find a confessor this week. It doesn't have to be a therapist or a priest. It can be Bob or whoever like a trusted friend is. Sarah, I could just be an old friend of yours. But find a confessor. Get together. and unburden the true story of your life to them, the true reality of your life to them.

We're all at a different place. That may sound terrifying. You may be way back here where what that would look like for you is get together with them and just say, I had a hard week this week. and just talk about the reality of your emotional state. That may be the next step for you. Take that and do what you can, not what you can't.

And then our reach exercise for this week is to explore forming what, again, John Wesley and the Methodists called the discipleship band, which arguably later metamorphized into what became AA. This is a triad of around three to five people, same gender. who meet regularly for prayer and confession. This comes out of the Methodist tradition. In your companion guide, we put tons of resources on this.

The Methodists are still around. They're still doing really good work. They've created an app for it now and a PDF you can read. All of that's in your guide. Let me just read over you the five questions that if you're in a discipleship band, again, I'm in one of these, that you get together and you talk through. These go all the way.

way back to Wesley so we just haven't reinvented the wheel how is it with your soul what are your successes and struggles how might the word and spirit be speaking to your life Do you have any sin to confess? And is there anything you desire to keep a secret? You're like, dude, I'm never doing this in a million years. That's fine. You don't need to. Everything is invitational.

But some people have been doing this for hundreds of years and think it's one of the most transformational and profound things you can possibly do as a disciple of Jesus.

Whether you put it into a formal structure like this or just go hiking once a week with a trusted friend and be honest, you get the heart behind it. So to end, living in community in our time of radical individualism is not easy. All sorts of challenges, busyness, all of that. But the underlying problem below them all is shame. And it is through the discipline of confession that we come out of the shadows and into the light.

Grew up in Northern California, but spent the last few decades in Portland, Oregon. The beauty and the moody, rainy weather of the Pacific Northwest. Mold is a major problem in homes where I was. And mold causes all sorts of like... you know, horrific effects on bodily health. We were in a house once with mold, and I still don't know if we fully recovered from it. And you know, one of the first things you learn about mold is it hides in the dark.

Like sunlight is the great disinfectant, even like scientifically, cannot survive in light and in warmth. It breathes under a kitchen sink where there's a leak and it's dark. It bleeds in basements, in closets, in corners, in attics, and it permeates the atmosphere with toxicity that kills people or makes them deeply unwell. Sin is kind of like mold. It thrives in the dark. It thrives. Those broken, unattractive, leaky parts of ourselves thrive in hiddenness.

It cannot survive in front of a beautiful window in the living room just getting the morning sun. So too, sin cannot survive under the loving eyes of God and his community through the practice of confession. We can't live without sin, not 100%, not this side of resurrection, but we can live without shame. We can come out of hiding to know and be known, to love and be loved.

Tim Keller said it so beautifully. To be loved but not known is comforting, but it's kind of superficial. And that's a lot of our experience of Christian community. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. It's a lot of our experience of marriage or family. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. Let's stand together and pray.

I think this teaching really highlights the tension we experience with shame and confession. We're lonely and desperate for connection, but also terrified of opening up and being rejected. It's risky, but unless we take that step... we'll never experience the freedom and life that God desires for us. So to end, let's take some time to talk with the Holy Spirit about this. Start by taking a few deep breaths with me.

Become aware of God's presence. And now ask the Holy Spirit to bring to your awareness an area of sin or shame in your life. Remember that God doesn't bring things up to shame us. but rather to help us find healing and freedom. I'll give you a few seconds here to let that surface. And now ask, Holy Spirit, who is someone in my life who loves me enough to hold this with grace? And if no one comes to mind as you pray, don't lose heart.

Just ask the Spirit to bring someone into your life who could be a confessor for you. I'll leave more space here for you to listen and pray. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Thanks to Little Thoughts for our show music.

We're a crowdfunded non-profit so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by The Circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Heather from Westland, Oregon. Andy from Austin, Texas. Kim from Lakeside, California. McKenna from Avedo, Florida. And Veranda from Coppell, Texas. Thank you all very much.

To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. be with you all.