Life Together: Confession & Communion

Hi, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast as we continue.
And in some ways,
as we finish at least the book that we’ve been looking at,
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Today is our coverage of the fifth chapter,
the last chapter in the book,
though we will add
one more podcast where Michael and I think through some of the implications of the book and some
reflections on what it is that we have seen.
We hope you’ve been enjoying the reading.
We hope you’ve been enjoying these podcasts.
We move – I think,
again, we see Bonhoeffer as a wonderful
pastor here, that he leaves us with these thoughts on confession and communion.
We’ve traveled some very rich ground in the four chapters of this book.
And now in this last chapter,
it is very interesting that he leaves us in this place,
confessing our sins and being assured of
our forgiveness in the practice of a sacrament.
Very poignant, I think, very profound place for
him to leave this work.
If you have the book or you’ve been following along,
you’re going to see
that this chapter is very short in terms of the absolute length of it if you compare it to some
of the other chapters that we’ve had,
which I think is interesting both by nature of the fact
that the chapter itself is short,
but it also addresses these two things,
the confession and communion.
And I think both of us have saw or at least reflected upon how surprising it is,
how little time he gave to communion.
We’ll maybe talk about that as we move towards the end of the
chapter because that’s really where the bulk of that emphasis lies as he comes to end the book.
But this first topic of confession is very interesting,
and I think it’s worth remembering,
going back to that very first conversation where we set context,
let’s remember that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a Lutheran pastor and a Lutheran theologian.
That puts him in the
reformed theological heritage, you know, when you think of that as the Protestant divide from the Catholic Church.
So what that means is Bonhoeffer is not writing out of the Roman Catholic tradition
where we think of confession as being a normalized,
almost liturgical part of the Christian life,
where confession is a regular practice expected as part of Christian devotion.
Bonhoeffer is existing in a tradition that does not have the same kind of historical recollection,
same kind of historical tradition that we might have in, say, Roman Catholicism.
So his emphasis, which is really thorough going in this chapter on confession,
is striking because of where it comes
from and who says it,
and I found that very interesting.
Yeah, I think it’s fascinating
that while Reformed Protestants particularly,
but Lutherans would join us in that,
have
talked a great deal about sin,
about acknowledging our status as sinful people.
We’ve not given as
much thought to what we do with that and how we manage that,
and it’s very interesting that so
often in congregations we gather with this assumption that we’re all sinners,
but then we essentially gather to pretend that isn’t true.
In fact, one of the most interesting lines in this
chapter came very early for me.
Halfway down the first page he says,
“The pious fellowship permits
no one to be a sinner.” It is a terrible irony in the Church that we acknowledge that we are sinners,
but we have a very difficult time acknowledging that I am a sinner because we are so prone to
this kind of idea that good people go to church and that we should not share our dirty laundry
and that things shouldn’t be messy,
and I think Bonhoeffer convicts us that the exact opposite
is true, that when we begin with the assumption,
when we tell the truth on the front end,
that we are sinful,
the Church then becomes a place where not for shock value,
but a place where we can tell
the truth about ourselves,
we can literally confess not just that we’re sinners,
we can confess our sin, which is very different and I think much more communal.
So it’s interesting,
the line that stuck out to me was just two sentences after that one,
Clint, where he writes, “Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is discovered among the righteous,” and it exposes
one of the very deep and sinful temptations of humanity to come into religious fellowship and
to make it into a moralistic framework in which we can succeed.
The idea when I come to church and
I try to make myself look holier than others is actually one that’s doing damage as opposed to
help.
We generally tend to think of going to church as a positive thing,
but if you use church
as a vehicle and mechanism to make yourself greater,
you’re actually cutting against the very
thing that church is supposed to do.
It’s supposed to connect you to a creator,
but when we fall to
our darkest and most sinful, prideful temptation,
we actually become much more staunch in our devotion
to ourselves, which is the antithesis to the gospel.
So I think this is an amazing insight.
Yeah, I think far too often, Michael,
we have substituted the idea in church of being nice
and being good for the deeper realities of being forgiven and therefore being faithful.
And when the church settles for nice and good,
we live in this false platform in which we just
all pretend that nobody really has problems,
nobody really has deep struggles,
nobody is actually broken.
Yes, we call ourselves sinners,
but we focus on the idea that we’re forgiven
as if the struggles of sin had somehow magically disappeared in all of our lives.
And it creates a layer of dishonesty,
I think is Bonhoeffer’s point.
It keeps us from the real truth and it keeps us from having and being a place where we can come and say,
“I am really struggling with my sin.
I am really battling some of the darkness that is in me,
and I need help.
I need to confess.
I need to be able to share.” And that makes things difficult.
Right, so that then brings us here to this core sort of inversion that happens in this section,
because when we talk about confession,
the reality is that we are tempted to see
the recognition and owning of our sin as inherently bad.
We attribute that, I think, to even that Genesis idea that when our sin is exposed,
we are exposed, much like Adam and Eve
saw themselves as naked.
They were ashamed of their bodies on the other side of that sinful action.
What we find here in Bonhoeffer’s writing is that,
“In truth to the sin-sick soul,
confession is nothing less than liberation.” He says,
“It’s liberation through truth.
You can hide nothing from God.
The mask you wear before men will do you no good before him.” This is absolutely true,
and yet this is the thing that we get wrong so often.
When we think of
other people’s understanding of who we are and what we show other people,
we are often incredibly
fixated on showing the good and hiding the bad.
And Bonhoeffer’s here is not talking about
life’s difficulties, right?
He’s not talking about when you have surgery and you need help.
He’s not talking about when things outside of your control go wrong.
He means the deep,
dark part of you that
is sinful, that is dirty, that you intend and try to not think about or show others.
I mean, it’s a very piercing vision,
but if you’re willing to hear it,
his point is that the confession of
that reality will connect you to the church through the grace of Christ,
and that is, of course, the gospel.
That’s what he calls the story of liberation.
Yeah, not to overstate it,
but it is a very different thing to say,
even to those I am in church with,
I am a sinner,
than it is to say,
“I failed.
I wronged you.
I passed on gossip.
I did something that I know isn’t acceptable in a Christian life.”
These moments of confession provide for us a humility and an honesty about who we are and
what we are.
And Bonhoeffer’s point,
in fact,
he wants to make sure that confession isn’t a
sort of glorification of our sin.
We shouldn’t think of it as something we can do to shock
people as if the worse your sins are,
somehow the more you know about Christianity.
That has existed in the evangelical church.
There have been times that we kind of overdo the idea that
I was this horrible,
rotten person,
and it’s almost as if that becomes a badge of honor.
Bonhoeffer’s point is not that at all.
It’s that until you go to the crux of the problem,
the heart of the matter being human sinfulness,
you cannot understand fully what grace truly is.
Until you have looked upon the perfection of Christ and therefore, in its reflection,
seen your own woeful shortcomings,
you do not understand what it is to be forgiven.
Until you know, until you accept the burden that you have wronged a brother or sister and apologize
and confess and ask for their forgiveness,
as well as he even goes so far as to say,
there’s a sense in which that is also God’s forgiveness.
That until you’ve done those things,
grace remains a kind of esoteric,
a kind of theoretical thing,
and it’s not the life-changing
new reality that we are called to embody.
We discover that Bonhoeffer’s understanding of
sin and confession is directly connected to his understanding of who Jesus Christ is.
These two things are sharing in their substance,
and the reason I point this out here to you
is because when Bonhoeffer talks about confession,
he’s not talking primarily about confession in
worship, though he says that that is an important part of the Christian life.
He goes out of his
way to say that he considers confession to a particular,
or in other words,
a real singular brother or sister in Christ to be an essential component of confession.
Why?
Because ultimately that person is to us a physical representation of the one who took on flesh,
died, rose again, and in whom we live sharing the good news to one another.
In other words, when a particular brother
or sister in Christ says to us,
“I hear your sins,” that is to us that incarnational reality of Christ
being spoken to us,
and he makes it very clear that the confession to the individual matters
because of that theological connection to our oneness in Jesus Christ,
that incarnational reality of the church,
and because of that then,
the particularity of finding in that human
relationship a connection becomes the mechanism by which our sins are then truly named,
heard, felt, and then we hear the forgiveness of Christ.
Yeah, it’s very interesting too that Bonhoeffer
has this section near the late,
middle, early end of his conversation on confession.
He has this
section in which he essentially holds that only the church,
only the faith, can truly understand
confession,
that psychologists,
that self-help,
that even as we “forgive ourselves,”
there may be benefits in that,
but all of those fall short of what the church offers,
which is to say,
not that I am good enough,
but exactly the opposite,
that I am unworthy of the grace I have
received through Jesus Christ.
His concern is essentially,
I think, if I read it correctly,
that self-help and psychology is really about the self.
In fact, it’s in the title,
self-help, but for the Christian,
confession is not simply a path toward growth, which it is,
it is the path to understand both who Jesus is as Savior and who I am as follower,
and therefore it is necessary in the Christian life,
though I think, fascinatingly enough, he says it should not
be a routine burden.
Bonhoeffer is concerned that we sort of legalize or that we make confession a legality,
a routine,
something that we have to do, because for him,
the necessity of it is not
found in the regularity,
but in the understanding of it,
and his worry is,
if it is something we’ve
simply moved to click off our list week after week,
then we won’t do it with proper understanding
and the proper depth.
And I think it’s very interesting.
I think it’s extremely insightful
on his part to understand how easily we can take these life-giving things and take the life out of
them by making them into rules.
And we do that generally with good intention.
We want good,
but our inherent sinfulness draws us to do that in ways and places that actually cuts against the
goal.
And he explains this beautifully,
and I think it’s a thing to slow down and understand.
He talks about how ultimately the only way to be united to Christian fellowship
is ironically to confess the deeper,
darker parts of our hearts.
But interestingly,
when actually lived out in practice,
we generally do the exact opposite.
We want others to accept us.
We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
We want to come to church and have a place there.
And we feel compelled in order to do that,
to withhold,
to not show others the darker parts
of our life, to keep others from seeing the full picture in fear that they won’t accept
us into the fellowship.
We won’t have a place there.
We won’t be good enough.
Well, ultimately, that’s the problem.
The problem is that the only way to be reunited to the fellowship of the church
is to live in the truth of our fundamental shared identity,
which is as sinners.
And so when we fail
to live in honest confession,
the true reality of who we are,
what we’re doing is we’re living a lie.
We’re creating a mask that all of us feel compelled to wear.
And when we don those masks,
we’re no longer living inside the life of Christ.
Therefore, we’re living outside the
liberating message of the gospel.
That’s how this is all knit together,
this beautiful flow, because ultimately, confession is the way that we find the thing that is deeply connecting us,
ultimately, the grace of Christ.
Yeah, this is an interesting place for Presbyterians who practice,
at least in our fellowship,
in our church setting,
confession at the kind of broad level.
We would often have in this
congregation a prayer, which would include a confession that we’re all sinners.
It may even name some specifics, but rarely is it personal.
And my sense is,
Michael, that that’s where most
mainline modern Protestants live,
somewhere between there and say for us,
the far extreme of the Catholics who go into a confessional or a room and have this tradition in which they
are invited or even expected to name some of their very particular sins.
I had lost,
I got angry, I did this thing, whatever it is,
that they have a mechanism built in by which they have the
opportunity to say some of those things and therefore face some of those things about themselves.
And to be honest,
one of my regrets for Protestants is that because of how we
understood what they do in confession,
we made it very much more general and we lost that kind of
personal sting.
I mean, that reality of needing to sit down with a person who is tasked with
hearing us tell the things we know about ourselves that maybe no one else does.
And I’m not sure how that plays itself out in our experience of Christian community as Presbyterians.
I mean, I suppose that it’s out there in some inter-relational times.
There are probably times
when people get sideways with one another and they need to make apologies and confessions.
But as a general rule,
I think this is a struggle for us to enact in a church setting.
This work of confession on its surface sounds hard,
but it’s way harder than it sounds.
And ultimately, this subsection I think is very aptly named “Breaking Through to the Cross.”
That’s exactly what Bonhoeffer has in mind.
He is conceiving of confession as putting to death
what he calls the core human sinfulness of pride.
And just to back that up a little bit,
to give you a little context,
that is a very Lutheran understanding of original sin.
Luther wrote extensively about the danger of human pride,
how pride lives at the very heart
of the human temptation to run from God.
And Bonhoeffer really takes that core insight,
and he now applies it to community.
He says that to whatever extent we leverage community,
to tell ourselves a story about ourselves that we want to be true,
we are not allowing the shame,
the pain,
the sacrifice,
the difficulty of the cross to be the center of our life.
Ultimately,
the only way to be healed is to recognize the sinfulness.
And so his point is
that to get to the end of confession means to pick up your cross.
It means to live what he
calls the shameful death of the sinner,
which happens in confession.
And no one wants shame.
No one wants humiliation or humility.
No one wants all of the things that come with recognizing
human brokenness.
But this isn’t the kind of masochism.
It’s not a kind of reveling in what’s
bad.
You said that earlier,
Clint, it’s very helpful.
There’s a kind of confession that’s damaging,
a kind of confession that’s not really confession,
but rather self revelation,
where you’re revealing to others things about yourself,
sometimes even grotesque things that you,
you’re not really confessing the reality of brokenness,
you’re rather pointing to yourself
or you’re, you’re trying to curate a vision for others and what they should think about you or
what they should feel about you.
That’s not what Bonhoeffer has in mind when he talks about the cross.
The cross is that thing that we bear that is a reality of who we are.
And we give it to
others as brothers and sisters in Christ,
because we’re connected in Christ.
And that sort of
self giving act is a mirror,
a theological sort of faint glass of vision,
stained glass vision of what Christ did for us in reality in his own life.
Yeah, really interesting in a,
in a very short section called two dangers,
he lists the second danger of confession.
And he says,
let him guard against ever making a pious work of his own confession.
Confession as a pious work is an invention of the devil.
And so when we take some
pride in our sin,
when we take some pride,
when we think that confession in front of others
somehow elevates us in their eyes or elevates our story.
In other words, as we’ve seen in literally
almost every page of this book,
whenever we try to take the things of Christ and point them at ourselves,
Bonhoeffer is going to tell us we are woefully,
dangerously, offensively off track.
The other thing as we turn,
make the turn in this chapter,
Michael, I think is fascinating
that Bonhoeffer connects confession and communion.
Confession, this experience of sort of
heaviness,
of guilt,
but also of forgiveness.
And that we move from that moment,
if you asked people
how it feels to actually confess your real sins to real people,
almost all of them are going to say horrible.
And yet Bonhoeffer connects that with the experience of receiving the sacrament and
the joy that goes with that so that confession is a precursor to grace.
Confession prepares us to receive this beautiful,
wonderful sign of Christ’s grace at the table and functions for us as a kind
of absolutely necessary first step.
You can’t go right to the table.
You have to go through your sin
to get there because the table is about what you’ve been given.
And if you haven’t confessed,
you don’t understand what that is.
And so I think these are not two things I would necessarily
think to link together in the way that he did,
but I’m astounded at the way that they fit together
in his insight for doing it this way.
And as we started with that sort of confession at the
end of the book, in terms of words to communion in a book that is dedicated to life together,
to the Christian community,
one can’t rank sacraments,
but the Lord’s Supper is certainly
at the very center of Christian community.
As we come into the church’s life through baptism and
this covenant that’s made,
communion has a particular kind of,
it’s not merely a symbol,
but it does for us visualize the breadth of the church,
the sustenance of our spiritual nurturing,
the reality that it’s a round table that our family gathers.
It is by its definition fellowship.
And yet we only have two pages devoted to it.
And I think what is striking in this is that ultimately
if we do the work to tend the soil,
if we root out the weeds where we can,
if we invite others
to be part of our spiritual journey,
then as he says in the subsection,
the sacrament will be
joyful.
It will be a moment of celebration.
It will be a kind of homecoming.
And you don’t need
to write a lot about celebrations.
You don’t really need to wax long about the homecoming.
You’ve experienced it.
You have it.
And I think there’s something beautiful about the lack of words.
He doesn’t need a lot of words to communicate to us how beautiful the Lord’s Supper is
when it’s observed with those who have been honest about who they are and they’ve been
connected by the love and grace of Jesus Christ.
In some ways, both of these themes in this chapter are remarkably practical,
Michael, and I wonder if part of the point of the brevity is that some things are not discovered by
information, but by practice.
Some things can’t be gained in print.
They have to be lived into.
And the experience of confession and the experience of communion are really to
themselves a way of entering a lifestyle that you really can’t do justice to in describing
without living, without understanding the promise of reconciliation,
without making a heartfelt apology to God and to neighbor,
without receiving the graciousness of Christ
through a neighbor, and without coming to the table then in a moment where you’re no longer
disconnected because of sin,
but reconnected, reconciled through grace with that same neighbor and God.
I wonder if there are just some of those things that have to be experienced rather than
explained and all Bonhoeffer can do briefly is point us in the direction that leads us to
experience them.
I can’t help but wonder if we had the opportunity to ask Bonhoeffer two pages on communion,
he’d say you can’t understand it by reading it.
You have to do it with your Christian community.
And once you do that,
you’ll know that there’s nothing I could say about it that
you won’t learn by practicing it.
And that’s a theory on my part,
I don’t know, but it is
amazing, striking that when it comes to these two lynchpins of the Christian faith,
he doesn’t have,
particularly in the case of communion,
doesn’t have a lot to say.
Right.
And I don’t want to add word to words,
but do want to point out, isn’t it striking
how when you look at this chapter,
you see,
the vast majority of it is spent on confession.
And just just a tad bit at the end is spent on communion.
Isn’t it interesting how that even
reflects our lived experience of the world,
we spend so much time living life,
we spend so much
time in moments where confession is the only appropriate thing to do.
We only gather for
communion in fellowship so often that only happens with our brothers and sisters in Christ at certain moments and worship.
But truly, we’re called to live lives of confession.
We’re called to live
every day in the truth of who we are.
And there’s this, you know, sort of catch word that goes about
the culture right now.
How authentic are you as a person?
Bonhoeffer wasn’t speaking to that,
that word here authentic,
but the idea is very much close.
This this point that he’s making is
we do need to be authentic.
The problem is the authenticity he calls us to is an inconvenient
one.
It is one that recognizes the core problem,
that we are sinful.
And that is the kind of
authenticity that if we return to through the practice of confession,
we will then live in the sort of spirit,
the sort of force that the sort of inclination to grace that we’re called to,
because no one stands above another,
not not anyone under the cross,
no one under the cross
stands in judgment against another.
Only the crucified Lord is judge.
And so because of that,
we can operate with a kind of fellowship that doesn’t exist on the other side.
And so in that way,
I think Bonhoeffer’s message is incredibly contemporary.
People are desperately yearning for people whose lives are authentically lived,
who live honestly and transparently in the world.
And what Bonhoeffer is providing us is a roadmap,
or maybe even better,
a way to understand
how Christians could live that out.
Yeah,
and I think two things maybe bear keeping in mind.
And the first,
as we’ve said occasionally throughout this book,
is context.
Bonhoeffer is
acutely aware of the danger of a church forgetting that it is sinful,
of a church
short-sightedly viewing its own capacity to do,
I think we could go so far as to say, evil.
As Bonhoeffer looks at a church in Germany that is,
for all practical purposes,
being used by a government in pursuit of other goals and even
guilty of horrific acts,
Bonhoeffer understands the absolute threat that is the unrepentant
Christian or the Christian who heart-heartedly refuses to acknowledge their own darkness, their own brokenness.
Bonhoeffer has seen where self-righteousness can take people,
and I think it is frightening.
And so I think that needs said.
And the second thing that needs
said, and you may think this not strange,
maybe you read these two chapters on Communion and you
said, “Oh, that was nice.” But I just wanted to remind you in the broader context,
at this point in Christian history when this is written and Bonhoeffer has read them,
people have written
books,
books about books, arguing over bread,
juice,
wine,
what happens in Communion,
who should do Communion, who should take Communion.
There are myriads of arguments all centered on
this practice of the Lord’s table,
and Bonhoeffer does not mention a single one of them.
He simply doesn’t want to wade into this theologically because for him his soul focus is the spiritual
practice of what it offers the life of a Christian.
Undoubtedly, that is a frustration for scholars
who would love to know what Bonhoeffer,
an incredibly able thinker,
thought about those things.
And I’m not enough of an avid reader of Bonhoeffer to know how many places he did take up
those issues.
But you’re exactly right,
Clint.
The reality is that if you’re looking at this from a
more academic theological lens,
some of the gaps here are just fascinating because to a lesser
degree, to tease out some of these theological nuances and to ask questions of some of these
things that have been of great interest in the history of the church,
but with razor focus,
with an unbelievable ability to stay connected to his through line,
Bonhoeffer sees that that is not
the point of connecting Communion within the functioning life of the community.
This is what makes him not just an academic,
but a pastor,
someone who’s living and practicing the craft
of reminding the community who they are,
who we were made to be,
what it means to be a fellowship
of Christians who live under the cross of Christ.
It is striking sometimes to see not just the words
written, but the things that were left on the cutting room floor.
And I think that’s a very good point.
Let’s talk just briefly about where Bonhoeffer leaves us then in regard to this idea,
the last sentence of the last chapter.
So these are the concluding words of the book.
“Here the joy of Christ and his community is complete.” And this is the last sentence.
“The life of Christians together under the word has reached its perfection in the sacrament.”
So what do we see in this?
We see Bonhoeffer’s idea that when Christians come together to the
table, who does the table belong to?
Jesus Christ.
What have they done in preparation?
They have read,
they have prayed,
they have done so privately and publicly, they have studied,
they have interceded for one another,
they have confessed their sin to one another,
and now they stand united in the grace
of Jesus Christ at the table of Jesus Christ with him in the center,
not about us,
but about our Lord.
And here he says we see the perfection of Christian community.
And I think if you understand what
Bonhoeffer has been trying to say in these chapters,
you can see the power of a statement
like that, that at the table we really do see.
You might say, “I don’t understand how having communion
together makes us the perfect community.” It does not.
What makes us the perfect community is that
we come together under the name of Christ,
making it about him, elevating his work,
and minimizing our struggles, minimizing our temptation to get in the way and make it about us.
And in that practice, we see this invitation to the perfection of community,
not something we will likely attain
on this side of the Second Coming,
but a beautiful description.
I think Bonhoeffer paints a
wonderful picture here as he leaves us these final words in his book.
Don’t be misled that the perfection he speaks of is found in a physical thing.
This is core to
Bonhoeffer’s understanding of what it means to be Christian,
and we cannot underestimate,
we cannot say too little of.
You cannot,
you do not understand Bonhoeffer unless you understand
that the incarnation of Jesus Christ was a real thing, that he,
God,
enfleshed, is the only hope of salvation.
He reminds me very much in this book,
though it’s not really connected in themes,
but the emphasis we find in 1 Corinthians where Paul speaks very strongly about if the resurrection
is not true, we are above all people to be pitied.
That
same sentiment lives here.
I think if Bonhoeffer
would join his voice with Paul and say,
“If Jesus Christ was not God in flesh,
if that was not true,
then we have no hope of salvation,” then this community that we seek to be part of is nothing
more than an idea.
But for Bonhoeffer, every chapter has been a different way of saying
that church is only lived out with real people.
You cannot bring your idea of church or what you
think you would like church to be and make that the de facto order of the community because then
you’re hoisting your own idea,
ultimately your prideful vision of what church should be upon
the reality of what is.
That is exactly what happens on the table.
The table is what it is.
It is only the elements that are there and the only hope that you have is in the one
who makes those elements more than what they are to themselves.
It’s the physicality of both that supper,
but also the truth that is in that supper.
It’s this beautiful blend of what we
might call the spiritual and the physical in a way that is neither one to the exclusion of the
other.
It is an intermingling and that is not an accident,
but that’s the perfection he leaves us
with at the end of the book.
Yeah, said another way.
When Bonhoeffer says perfect community,
he does not mean a place that is doing community perfectly.
He means a community that is formed by
and fostered by the one who is perfect.
That is our perfection,
not in our practice of community,
but in our experience of Christ,
which we see supremely guided by and guided to the table
in these other practices.
So again,
anytime we try to make that about us,
Bonhoeffer is going to have
strong words and strong warnings for us.
Even at the table,
I think his point ultimately
is that at the table,
we perhaps most clearly see that this community is rooted in Christ and not in
us, and in that is how he can use a word like perfect.
Don’t let the length of this chapter
keep you from seeing the incredible depth that it contains.
We’re glad that you have joined us
for another conversation here today.
We’re going to have one more in this series where we’re going
to tease out a few of the implications,
maybe some broad themes in this book,
sort of a concluding
note as we look back on some of the things that we’ve seen in this book.
But for today,
we’re glad that you’ve joined us.
Hope that this has been encouraging.
We’d love to hear from you both in
the comments if you’re watching this live or all the way to just send us a message,
an email.
You’ll find a link to the description of that here wherever you’re listening.
We’d love to hear from you about
both reflections you’ve had about this or maybe other series you’d be interested in us covering.
We would love to hear topics and
ideas that you might have because we always love engaging that as well.
Yeah, that kind of marks the end of the reading that we’ll do together,
but we hope you’ll be able to join us for one last session as we reflect on what we’ve learned and what we’ve
seen in this book and some thoughts about how it might be helpful as we move forward as Christians.
Thanks for being with us.
We’ll see you again next time.