Well, we Protestants don't use confessionals, and apparently Martin Luther thought the confessional booth was a good idea, but of course he was careful to make the practice voluntary and never binding. More recently, John Stott commended the practice of regularly confessing sins to a trusted pastor. So, maybe a rare Anglican church here or there has a confessional, but on the whole, Protestants don't practice auricular confession of our sins to a minister.

So the question is, "What place should private confession of our personal sins to others play when we're talking about confessing our sins to fellow Christians?" It's the question that comes from Nathan, who asks this, "Pastor John, thank you for enriching my walk with Christ by your obedience to the truth, faithfully serving the body of Christ with your gift of preaching.

For the past few years, I have been struggling with a text and a drumbeat sounding in the campus ministry I work for and the church I attend. James 5.16 is the drumbeat that we need to confess our sins to each other. Now I am thankfully aware of Psalm 51.4 and 1 John 1.9, as I have preached on 1 John 1.9 many times.

There is one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the righteous." Here are my main questions. What exactly is James commanding us to do in James 5.16? What does it mean that you may be healed, and could you give us a brief theology of relational confession practices on the whole?

Okay, let's do the brief theology first. Let's begin broad and general and collect some building blocks for the theology of relational confession, and then get down to the specifics of James 5. So here we go. I would start with the truth that owing to our new birth and our new creation in Christ through faith, we are now children of God who is light, and in him is no darkness at all, and in him, in union with him, we are children of light.

Ephesians 5.8, "At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of the light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and true and right." Good and true. So the fact that we are children of light, and part of light is truth, we will not—the Christian community will not—be marked by secretiveness or cloaking ourselves or our motives so that people don't know who we really are, we won't be hypocrites, we won't try to look on the outside what we're not on the inside, and that necessarily includes being truthful about our sinfulness and our struggle with sin.

It doesn't mean you need to broadcast to the whole world your specific sins. That wouldn't be good for them, and it wouldn't be good for you, but it does mean that you need to be known as an open book appropriately read by accountable, mature people in your life. You're not a secretive person, a hypocritical person.

Ephesians 4.25, "Therefore, having put away all falsehood, let us speak truth with each other, with our neighbors, for we are members of one another." That's going to include doctrinal truth, relational truth, truth about God, truth about others, truth about circumstances, truth about our own souls. We are people of truth.

That would be a foundational building block in the theology of relational confession. Now what follows from this humble truthfulness about ourselves and others is that we will seek to confess and make right any ways that we have wronged others, Matthew 5.23. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go.

Just be reconciled to your brother. Then come offer your gift. So confess it. Go tell him you wronged him and get it worked out. Being children of light also implies that we will not be ashamed to pursue reconciliation by drawing the attention to the sins of others against us in the body of Christ, Matthew 18.15.

If your brother sins against you, go tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. In other words, get a confession from him if you can, because then you preserve the relationship. So we try to help others confess when we know about their sin.

And Galatians 6.1 generalizes it, "Brothers, if anyone is caught in a transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch over your own souls, lest you too be tempted." So restoring somebody caught in a sin is clearly going to involve helping them confess it.

If they lie about it or hide it, then nothing is achieved. So confession is clearly implied in this brotherly effort to make right wrongs. We have done by confession and make right wrongs. Others have done by ruining our relationship by helping them confess. Then Ephesians 4.32, a real broad application, Paul describes a community spirit in which confession and forgiveness is regularly happening.

He says in Ephesians 4.32, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." So the words "forgiving one another" assumes confession is happening, because you don't go around the church forgiving people who haven't given any indication that they've sinned against you. That would be the most offensive thing in the world.

I forgive you, I forgive you, and they don't even know what you're talking about. So clearly forgiving one another implies there's confession going on. People have come to you, they've admitted they've sinned, and you're forgiving them. Which brings us now to James 5. James has just said that the elders are praying over a sick person, and if they are given the gift of faith for that person, they are healed, the person is healed, God will raise them up, and then he adds this, "And if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven." So it appears that in the encounter with the elders, sins emerge which were somehow connected with this illness.

We're not told how. And it may be that James intends to include in the healing, which is literally the word "sozo," saved, you will save the sick man, he intends that healing happen in the fullest sense of spiritual as well as physical. That's why sins are brought up here.

So there was physical healing, and then there was an emergence of these sins that were somehow involved and those were taken care of as well in this encounter with the elders. And then James draws out this inference generally. "Therefore," that's a key word, "therefore confess your sins to one another." So just like what happened when the elders were having that prayer meeting, you confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

And I take this to mean simply that in the normal life of the Christian, honesty and truthfulness and purity of heart involve continual admission and confession of sin to appropriate people in our lives. The result will be greater than physical. It will include spiritual health as well, because Psalm 32 makes the physical and the spiritual clear.

I had a real experience like this with a man in our church, so this text really came alive for me when he used it to describe his misery. It goes like this, "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day." See what happens? I'm silent, I'm not confessing, and it's having this awful physical effect on me.

"For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer." And then here comes the solution, verse 5, "I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and you forgave the iniquity of my sin." Now, the principle there—I know it's confession to the Lord there, but the principle there between physical well-being and a locked-up sin that nobody knows, and you're trying to hide from the Lord, you're keeping from other people—the principle is dishonesty and hiddenness and privateness about our sins brings both spiritual and physical misery.

And God would spare us that, and so he teaches us to confess our sins to God and to one another. Well, that was a brief but robust theology of personal confession. Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. You can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes in our archive, and send us an email of your own, even questions related to church practice and how we apply scriptural principles in our lives together as brothers and sisters in Christ.

You can do all of that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well here is the next question on the docket, and it is quite a question. When it comes to temptations to sexual sin, Jesus says, "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off." He also says, "There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs." So in reading these kinds of texts together a bit, does Jesus applaud surgical or chemical castration as a winning strategy in the war against lust?

That is the question, and the answer should be very interesting. For that, I am your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you on Friday.