Concealed Sin
Therefore confess
your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The
prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. - James 5:16
Robert Wood Johnson,
former chairman of Johnson & Johnson, had a reputation for being especially
stringent when he inspected his manufacturing plants. One day, a plant manager
got a tip that Johnson was on his way and would arrive at the plant in 30
minutes.
The manager hastily
had things spruced up by ordering several large rolls of paper transported to
the roof of the building. When Johnson arrived, he was furious. His first words
were, “What in the world is all that junk up there?” Unbeknownst to the
manager, Johnson had arrived by helicopter and landed on the roof!
Many times in our lives,
we can find ourselves in a similar situation where we feel the need to clean
ourselves up in order to impress someone else. Perhaps we’re meeting with
someone whom we see as “extra spiritual,” so we move some things around in our
lives to make it look like we have it all together.
But the truth is,
when we rearrange our lives to look cleaner, we’re doing nothing more than
concealing the very things that need to be dealt with in our lives. So instead
of hiding the ugliness, find safe people who can help you address it. Open the
doors of those unkept closets in your life and invite
others to help you clean them out!
Questions
1. Why do you think
it’s so tempting to sweep our sins under the rug so we appear to have it all
together?
2. Who is one person
you can invite into your life to help you expose those sins and deal with them
in a healthy way?
Action Point
Pray that God would
open your eyes to any sin you’ve been concealing so you can deal with it in a
healthy way.