Forgive us our trespasses

While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making my request to the Lord my God…

Daniel 9:20

There is a lost emphasis among Christians today — the personal ownership of the corporate sins of the Church as a whole. We need to recover this because it was the biblical examples given to us and because it is how Christ taught us to pray.

Daniel confessed not only his own personal sins, but the sins of his people Israel. He felt the pain and the shame of both his sins and the community’s sins and brought them all to God.

When we avoid personal responsibility and say that our problems are due to the failures of our fathers, or to say as the Jews did at one time, “The father’s eat sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2), then we have gone too far in blaming others for our own failures. They have influenced us, but we have had the last choice in what to do in this matter. God said, “the soul that sins, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4), to clarify that mistake in thought. We must confess our individual sins to God.

But today we are too far on the other side of this matter. We have only considered our problems and not considered our personal role in supporting, or failing to support our fellow believers. To a certain degree, the sins of any Christian fall at the feet of all Christians. We cannot, when we see our brother fail, say that we have had no part whatsoever in this. If only it was the failure to pray for him, if only it was a bit of laxity in our own Christian walk that influenced him, if only it was a failure to speak up for what was right and condemn what was wrong — as indirect as our role may have been — then we have each contributed in some way to the problem. But quite often we have done more than this to contribute to the temptation of another.

The Christian community is too often like an army that shoots its own wounded. We all need the grace of God to stand, and in that grace to support one another. We cannot remove the obligation of personal responsibility for each believer to follow Christ as individual believers. But neither can we remove the obligation of the Christian family towards one another — that we would love and support one another as well.

Who is our brother? Who is our neighbor? The one nearest us with the greatest need. Remember the ones who have encouraged you and seek to be an encourager to others as well. It is all by the grace of God that we live, and this grace should be shared with others.