Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

Foster emphasizes that forgiveness is rooted in God’s yearning to redeem and restore. He explains that Jesus’s work on the cross—which he views as driven by divine love, not divine anger—ushers in a new reality where confession brings genuine healing. This is because Christ took on all the sin and brokenness of humanity, enabling individuals to be both reconciled to God and progressively transformed.

Foster clarifies that confession is both a grace and a discipline. On one hand, it relies on God’s initiative and mercy; on the other hand, it calls for concrete steps by believers, including honest self-examination, heartfelt sorrow, and a decision to turn from sin. Confession is not merely private. While each Christian can go directly to God, Scripture also exhorts believers to confess their sins to one another. Foster argues that honest sharing with other “sinners” breaks isolation and hypocrisy, freeing people from hidden guilt and shame.

The biblical call for Christians to forgive each other suggests that all believers participate in a “royal priesthood,” empowered by Christ to speak words of pardon. Foster illustrates how this mutual practice counters fears that confession is exclusively tied to ecclesiastical rites. Although formal, traditional confessions have value, he recounts his own experience of writing down childhood, adolescent, and adult sins and then sharing them with a trusted friend, who symbolically destroyed the written record.