Gloria writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, James 516 confuses me. It says, 'Confess your sins to one another.' Is it saying that we have to confess our sins like Catholics do to a priest? Can you please explain what this means?" Right. No, I don't think the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church to, number one, elevate a priest to the position of a uniquely suitable confessor has any roots in this text.

I don't think this text is a place you go to get that. In fact, I don't think there is a place in the New Testament where you can go to get that. So what this text does is to call us to something far more reciprocal than that, even when the elders are involved.

It might be helpful just to read it, just so people have the context. "Is anyone among you sick?" This is James 514. "Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he's committed sins, he'll be forgiven.

Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power in its working." So the first thing we see there is a plurality of elders, not a priest. "Call for the elders." If you think it's time to have the leaders of the church involved, the New Testament always thinks in terms of a plurality of elders.

There isn't any church in the New Testament we know of that only had one. They never used the word "priest" for the pastors of the New Testament Church. So go ahead, call two, three, four, whatever your church provides. Call the elders and have them pray for you. But here's the interesting thing.

After James describes that event with the elders and their prayer of faith and what will happen there, he seems to draw out in verse 16 an inference, and he moves from that specific situation, it seems, to something more general and more reciprocal. He says, "Therefore, confess your sins to one another." So there's something, some principal thing that was going on there about the way your sins emerged in that situation, and your sins got forgiven as well as your body got healed.

Now here's a principle I'm drawing out. "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that that would be happening more and more." So I don't see this text leading toward a narrowing down of a saint and a priestly confessor. I see this text broadening out to the body of Christ, saying, "Confess your sins to one another that you may be healed." And so I ask the question, "Now why would that be?

Why would mutual confession—it's like in a small group, or say you have a buddy that you meet for breakfast with, and you know you're struggling with some issue of anger or pride or lust, and you just lay your heart out for him in how you struggled yesterday. Why is that a healing thing?" And I think there's a beautiful example of it in the Psalms, and I know there's a beautiful example of it in my experience.

David said in Psalm 32, "Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, in whose heart there's no conceit." And then he says, "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long." So that's the condition of the non-confessing heart, the heart that's all bottled up, never tells anybody what it's dealing with, just hides and hides and hides away from people.

"For day and night your hand was heavy on me, my strength was dried up as the heat of summer." And then he says, "I acknowledged my sin to you, I did not cover my iniquity, I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity." So there's a sequence here of sinning, bottling up and having your bones dry up inside, then letting it out and going public with it, in this context to God, but in the principle behind it probably not just to God but to the person you sinned against or to others who could help you bear this.

So one another confessing is the principle here, and there's good warrant for why it is a healing thing. And I would just maybe very practically say, you don't have to do that to the whole church. One principle would be confess a sin against someone to that person, and that may be the place where it can simply end.

If it's something that you're dealing with more generally, you can share it with your small group or a confidant that you have. I think everybody should have, like Jesus, a beloved disciple and a Peter, James, and John and a 12 and a 70. In other words, there are concentric circles that we live in of intimacy, and some things we're going to share with the beloved disciple, and some things Peter, James, and John, and some things the 12 and so on, and God will make it plain.

There are times we confess openly to everyone, and there are times we are very careful lest we hurt anyone by our confession to be more discreet and confess to those who are very, very close to us. So no, my answer is no. This text doesn't give warrant that I can see to the practice of treating a pastor or a priest as uniquely qualified to be the place where we go to share our confessions.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. You can visit us online at desiringgod.org to find thousands of books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper, all free of charge. I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.