Ephesians 5:14, “This is why it is said: ‘Wake up, O
sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”
We sleep and slumber
in the darkness. The darkness dulls our
senses—it’s hard to see things for what thy clearly are in the dark. The darkness dulls our reason—it’s hard to
think Biblically in the dark. So we
drift away, and the sweet, smooth empty words of the world take hold in our
minds and, without thinking, we find ourselves deceived.
No!
It doesn’t have to
be that way! The light of Christ
illuminates your darkness. It disperses your
mental fog and lets you think clearly once again.
“Everything exposed
by the light becomes visible.” Confessing
your sins—your specific sins—is like dragging those sins into the light: they
become visible. That troubles us, because
we’d rather hide our imperfections away.
We’d rather put on a good face, a brave face, for the world to see. After all, will the world ever listen to us
if we honestly admit we sin? That we
religious, church-going, Bible-reading people have actual, real, ugly, damning,
personal sin?
It’s natural to fear
confession . . . but the cure to fear is faith.
Faith that the light of Christ is the only thing that can overcome your
darkness. Faith that dragging your sins
into the light—exposing them!—will kill off your old sinful nature.
Faith that Christ
will be true to His promise and give you His life and light in return for your
darkness and death.
It’s time to stop
pretending we’re the righteous, and time to start telling people we’re the
redeemed. No longer hiding our sins, but
having them exposed for what they really are.
“Wake up, O sleeper,
rise from the dead, and Christ will
shine on you.”
"And this is
the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and
places us outside ourselves, so that we depend not on our own strength,
conscience, mind, person, or works but on what is outside us, that is, on the
promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive." -Martin Luther
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