At our Life to Life leaders’ meeting last Wednesday we discussed how discussions are going at our different Life to Life groups. In order to know how they are going it’s necessary to know where they are supposed to be going, and that leads me to make a couple comments.

The goal of Life to Life groups is not transparency, though we cannot get to the goal without it. What is “transparency”? Let’s say that transparency is speaking and behaving in a way that matches reality. Transparency hates lying and posing. Transparency requires honesty and refuses to hide. No man redeems himself by keeping his sin in the shade regardless of what our reticence says otherwise.

One stock objection to being transparent in a group setting is that if you tell the truth about your problems, your problems might hear you. By that I mean, if you are having a hard time with your spouse or your kids or your co-leader, transparency will run them over in the disrespect bus.

But before we can answer that concern, we should remember what the goal of the meeting is in the first place. The goal is not transparency, the goal is obedience. And whose obedience? There’s the bus we really need to catch.

We don’t meet together at L2L (or elsewhere) to hear about the sin of your neighbor and pow-wow about how we might get him to change, the big jerk. He may really have problems that need addressing, but what we want first is our own obedience. I may flutter my Kindness Cape around since I’m not criticizing others, but I’m still missing the point if I’m not confessing the mess in my heart.

That’s one reason why our time of confession every Lord’s day is so important. God does not want our transparency only, nor does He call us to confess the sin of our neighbor that’s making our lives so damn hard. He wants our obedience and He sees under every pose and blame and tight lip and lie. He also forgives every one who confesses and forsakes his sin; He’s faithful to do it.