Perhaps you’ve heard the story about Dallas Willard having dinner with a man from church who was ​“rough as a cobb.” After eating habanero peppers, the man declared ​“They were so hot they’d burn the hell out of ya!” Without missing a beat Dallas quipped, ​“Then give me a thousand of them.”

If you’re reading this I bet you share Dallas’s desire. We want Christ, the eternal Flame of Love, to burn out of us any pattern of thinking or acting that keeps us from the abundant life he promised. It can be painful at times to move toward that Flame, but the pain of moving away from it is exponentially greater. 

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, author of Glittering Vices, helps make this practical. In a strikingly honest interview with Nathan Foster, she dives into deadly sins and their remedies. And in an excerpt featured this week, DeYoung tackles lust and provides more than just surface-level solutions. One of those solutions is confession.

Bonhoeffer helps us here, too, pressing us to move from the isolation that sin and shame can cause into freedom and community: ​“In confession the breakthrough to community takes place.”