closing the circle.

wanted to share a bit of what I read in "Tramp for the Lord" by Corrie ten Boom; a Dutch woman who was imprisoned in a death camp for smuggling Jews to safety during the Holocaust.  After her release she throughly traveled the world to share the Love and Joy and Peace of knowing Christ personally.
In Chapter 30 she writes:

It would seem, after having been a Christian for almost eighty years that I would no longer do ugly things that need forgiving.  Yet I am constantly doing things to others that cause me to have to go back and ask their forgiveness.  Sometimes these are things I actually do-- other times they are simply attitudes I let creep in which break the circle of God's perfect love.  I first learned the secret of closing the circle from my nephew, Peter van Woerden, who was spending the weekend with me in our little apartment in Baarn, Holland.
"Do you remember that boy, Jan, that we prayed for?" Peter asked.
I well remember Jan.  We had prayed for him many times.  He had a horrible demon of darkness in his life.  Although we had fasted and prayed and cast out the demon in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the darkness always returned.
Peter continued, "I knew God had brought this boy to me not only so he could be delivered, but to teach me some lessons too."
I looked at Peter.  "What could that boy, Jan, so filled with darkness, teach you?"
"I did not learn the lesson from Jan," Peter smiled.  "But from God.  Once in my intercession time for Jan, the Lord told me to open my Bible to 1 John 1:7-9.  I read that passage about confessing our sin and asked the Lord what that had to do with the darkness in Jan's life."
Peter got up and walked across the room, holding his open Bible in his hand.  "God taught me that if a Christian walks in the light, then the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses him from all sin, making his life a closed circle and protecting him from all outside dark powers.  But--" he turned and emphatically jabbed his finger into the pages of the Bible--"if there is unconfessed sin in that life, the circle has an opening in it-- a gap-- and this allows the dark powers to come back in."
Ah, I thought , Peter has really learned a truth from the Lord.
"Tante Corrie," Peter continued, "even though I was able to cast out the demon in Jan's life, it always crept back in through the opening in the circle--the opening of Jan's unconfessed sin.  But when I led Jan to confess this sin, then the circle was closed, and the dark powers could no longer return."...

the chapter goes on with more examples of how this scriptural truth plays out in our lives.