After Sin 3- Accountability

It's been too long*

If true conviction is the triumph of a greater love over a former love, and true repentance is the manifest change in desire that occurs with a new, greater love- then any form of Christian accountability must be more focused on our loves than on our actions.

We the church have long encouraged something called 'accountability groups'.  In highschool they were groups of boys/men gathering to discuss sexuality and lust. And this was the basic goal: get people around you who can ask you tough questions, encourage honesty and openness, and keep you from sinning.  And so, most 'success' came from behavioral management at best, and peer pressure and shame at worst.

I never participated in a so-called accountability group, but many of my friendships took on the same dynamics.  We'd sit down once a week and talk about our problems.  We'd say how well or poorly we were doing, how long we'd held out on one sin or another, or what seemed to help.  We'd give suggestions for better environmental controls.  And we'd pray together about it.  I have friendships that continue in this format.  And frankly, they never seem as victorious and life-changing as we wish them to be.

And I think I might know why: they center on our sin.  They focus on the visible problem, thinking that in the study of sin we might find its weakness, might defeat it.  But interestingly, they do not draw us to love anything more than sin, nor to think about sin less.  Instead it trains our minds to think about evil- and how quickly then we run to it again.  In the case that such a group actually reduces the number of sins we commit, we often grow proud of our outward progress and content  in our 'growing holiness', which in fact can leave us worse that we began, as we begin to think that we are truly becoming righteous.  But we cannot earn nor gain righteousness.  We must receive it.  And so any 'righteousness' that we create with behavioral or social controls is a poor imitation of that which is truly righteous- the love of God, given in Christ.

The true work of community, then, is not managing sin's behaviors, nor leveraging a greater weight of judgement over sin.  Both magnify sin's power, and emphasize its centrality in our lives.  No, the true work of community in dealing with sin in the believer is the recentering of the believer on Christ, and fostering within him a greater love for Christ, such that faulty and weak affections for lesser things are expelled.  We must draw that heart to the love of God, in scripture, prayer, worship, and fellowship, honesty, openness, and confession*, discussing how the love of God fills every longing that we fill with lesser things, and so present the weak heart of a brother desiring grace to the Spirit that he might be changed.

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* Going hiking to watch my friend propose, the visiting of family over the summer, renovations at Kudu, and some conversations at St. Andrews are all to blame for my hiatus.  Wouldn't trade a-one of 'em, but I've missed writing and engaging with you folks.

** 'Real Christian guys' are expected to talk openly about their problems.  'Real small groups' are expected to 'ask hard questions'  and 'dig deeper'.  But if things like honesty, openness, and confession are used to control behaviors, they will fail.  If instead they are used to show us where the gospel can be applied to our hearts, they may produce fruit in drawing us to love Jesus more than the weak things we cling to in sin.  I'll try to provide a case study in the next blog to clear things up, because this can be horribly abstract without some practical application.