Guide 5: Vanity
Seven Deadly Sins
Review the practice so far (10 min)
Let’s begin tonight by pausing and reflecting on what God stirred in us through last week’s practice of confession around sloth. As a group, let’s share briefly:
Where did you notice yourself checking out, avoiding something important, or numbing out this week?
Did you take one small step toward engagement or responsibility? What happened?
Guide overview (3 min)
We’ve all come face-to-face with brokenness—ours and others’—and know the shame, frustration, and sadness that comes in the aftermath of not loving God or others with our whole hearts. Try as we might, though, willpower isn’t enough to make our sin go away. We need help to overcome what Jesus calls our slavery to sin. (John 8v34)—we need a Savior. The good news is that God has come to our rescue. John tells us that “if we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1v9). We partner with God in uprooting the corrosive power of sin in our lives through the practice of confession: telling the truth about what we’ve done so that we can receive God’s freely-given forgiveness.
During this series, we are exploring seven historically recognized root sins and inviting the light of God’s love to shine into our darkness by confessing our sin to him and to one another. While we may fear that confessing changes the way people see, respect, or even love us, hearing another person’s confession and praying God’s forgiveness over them is healing for both people. Sin is too strong for any one of us to defeat alone. But for us to confess together, we need to treat it with utmost care, which is why we’ve established some ground rules and are using an agreed upon framework each week to ensure safety, build trust, and grow together.
This week, we’re focusing on the sin of vanity. Vanity is a form of lust—not lust for another person, but lust for the perfection of our own body or image. It is the disordered desire to secure admiration, approval, or identity through how we appear. While it can look like confidence or self-focus on the surface, vanity is often driven by shame and insecurity underneath. It fixates on one visible part of us because we quietly believe that we are not enough as we are. Vanity is the attempt to assume responsibility for securing and maintaining an image that God alone can bestow.
So, tonight, we will continue in our aim to be a community of love and depth in a culture of individualism and superficiality through the practice of Community, by means of the exercise of confession.
Exercise for tonight (30 min)
One of the many reasons corporate confession is important is that it allows us to hold one another in the loving presence of God, preaching the good news of God’s forgiveness to each other that is often difficult to believe for ourselves. That said, it’s important to be on the same page about how we engage in our practice of corporate confession. As we experienced last week, every confession is vulnerable and sacred, so privacy and confidentiality matter as we keep building a sustainable rhythm together. To that end, we will use the same framework every week, beginning with reading our Shared Community Agreements for Safeguarding by talking about our posture, our promise, and our practice.
Our Posture: Every confession is sacred.
It is a privilege to witness the courage it takes to confess sin out loud. When someone confesses, we are witnessing the outpouring of God’s grace, mercy, and forgiveness. We are on holy ground together. So each confession will be met with God’s compassion by responding with something like: “Thank you for sharing. God loves you with an everlasting love and joyfully forgives you.”
Our Promise: Every confession stays in this room.
We build trust and safety and maintain each other’s dignity by protecting confidentiality. A sin confessed by someone is released to Jesus and should not be repeated by any of us. If a Community member is absent during a confession, the only person who gets to fill them in—if they choose—is the person confessing. The only caveat to confidentiality is if the confession reveals a threat of harm—in which case the Community Leader will contact a Communities Pastor (if the threat is less urgent) or 911 (if the threat is urgent).
Our Practice: Everyone participates.
We will show our support for each other by all participating in confession. Simply observing doesn’t help create a safe and vulnerable environment. Each of us is committing to participate in confession and declaring God’s forgiveness.
Do we all agree to this?
(Leader note: Go around and have everyone agree.)
Thank you all. We will keep reading and committing to this each week to build trust together. As you know, our framework for the evening is: a shortened Examen with silent confession, corporate confession, and then communion.
So let’s all find ourselves in a comfortable, open posture of prayer, and then we’ll take 3 minutes to pray the Examen—asking the Spirit to search us and draw our attention to a moment this week where the sin of vanity was present in our lives. As God brings something to mind, we’ll silently confess it to him, admitting where we sinned and asking for his forgiveness. And as we confess the fruit of our vanity, explore with God the root—where did that vanity originate?
A Condensed Examen. Holy Spirit, as we turn our attention now to the week we’ve lived so far, we ask for your help to guide us back through it with special attention to the particular sin of vanity. Take us to a moment when our desire to manage how we were seen was more important than living honestly before you. Take us to a moment when we tried to secure worth, approval or identity through our appearance, performance, or image—when we were trying to quiet shame or insecurity by controlling the outside. Come Holy, Spirit. We yield to you. Guide our minds, memories, and imaginations—not just to how we presented ourselves, but what we were trying to cover or fix. As you bring something to mind, we will silently confess it back to you and ask for the forgiveness that you so freely offer.
(Leader note: Set a timer for 3 minutes.)
God, thank you for bringing up our sin so that you can forgive it. Thanks that it is your delight to forgive and restore us back to right relationship with you. Thank you for rescuing us. Amen.
Corporate Confession. Ok, now that we’ve prayed about our sin, we’re going to participate in corporate confession by sharing aloud with one another by going around, one at a time, and confessing out loud in one or two sentences the sin we just confessed to God in prayer.
A confession for tonight might sound like “I confess my sin of vanity when I cared more about how I looked than how I loved by avoiding admitting a mistake because I didn’t want to seem incompetent,” or “I confess that I vainly obsessed over my appearance this week, feeling ashamed of myself and wanting to feel worthy,” or “I confess vanity in how I hid how I was really doing, trying to appear put together out of fear that people wouldn’t accept the real me.” We’ll go around in a circle, starting with me, and each make our confession. After each person confesses, the next person to go will begin by thanking that person for confessing and reminding them that God has forgiven them. This could be as simple as saying, “Thank you for your honesty. God loves you and God forgives you.” And then they will make their own confession.
(Leader note: Begin with your own confession. “I confess…” It’s possible that in the anxiety of the moment, someone may forget to thank the previous person for their confession or remind them of God’s forgiveness. If that happens, don’t interrupt them, but go back once they’ve finished to thank the previous person and remind them of God’s forgiveness. Once everyone has finished, move onto the next section.)
Absolution & Communion. As we have each confessed silently to God and aloud to one another, let’s take a moment in silence to come back to God’s loving presence to us—to the Father who runs to each of us, forgiving us and clothing us in robes of righteousness. Even now, draw your attention to his nearness to you.
(Leader note: Allow everyone about 30 seconds of silence, and then hand out the communion elements and speak these words of absolution before receiving communion together.)
Sisters and brothers, hear the good news: when we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He has removed our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. We have been washed clean of our sins by his love and restored to right relationship with him. Hallelujah! Thanks be to God! Take the body and blood of Christ, who poured out his love for us on the cross to freely forgive and restore us to himself. Let’s eat and drink and remember him.
Exercise for the week ahead (2 min)
As we look ahead to Ash Wednesday, we begin preparing for the Lenten practice of renunciation—the intentional laying down of a particular appetite or attachment in order to make space for a deeper love for God. Renunciation is not about rejecting good things for the sake of self-denial alone, but about loosening our grip on lesser loves so we can return to our first love. This week, prayerfully consider the following question, ready to begin your Lenten renunciation on Ash Wednesday:
What neutral appetite, habit, or activity do I want to lay down during the season of Lent in order to give God more room to speak to me? (e.g. social media, meat, sweets, caffeine, the news, video games, online shopping, podcasts, etc.)
Find someone this week to process and share this with. Also, in place of Community next week, please gather at Bridgetown for Ash Wednesday on February 18 at either 5:30 or 7:00 PM.
