"The Lord God called to the man and said to him, 'Where are you?' And he said, 'I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.'" (Genesis 3:9-10)
This is the great sadness of sin: It erects a wall of fear and alienation between us and God. God calls out to us as a loving Father, who made us and seeks only our good. Our sinful ears hear Him as a terrifying and dangerous tyrant. Sin makes us afraid to submit our true selves to His gaze, afraid that He will spoil our fun, put us in a straitjacket, reject us. And so the deep joy of life lived with God eludes us. How can we recover this joy?
By contrition. God is full of mercy if someones heart is full of contrition, and sanctifying grace is restored. But still we have to confess in order to restore our relationship to God and His church, because sin also has a social aspect. It is not sufficient to restore our relationship to God, only, we also have to restore it to the other fellow christians in His church. And therefore it is so important that we become a member of His church, His visible and existing church, headed by the Vicar of Christ himself.
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