How Important Is It to Confess My Sin to Someone Other Than God?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.000 | Well, we Protestants don't use confessionals, and apparently Martin Luther thought the confessional

00:00:08.840 | booth was a good idea, but of course he was careful to make the practice voluntary and

00:00:13.680 | never binding.

00:00:15.200 | More recently, John Stott commended the practice of regularly confessing sins to a trusted

00:00:19.280 | pastor.

00:00:20.280 | So, maybe a rare Anglican church here or there has a confessional, but on the whole, Protestants

00:00:25.760 | don't practice auricular confession of our sins to a minister.

00:00:30.760 | So the question is, "What place should private confession of our personal sins to others

00:00:34.140 | play when we're talking about confessing our sins to fellow Christians?"

00:00:38.080 | It's the question that comes from Nathan, who asks this, "Pastor John, thank you for

00:00:41.800 | enriching my walk with Christ by your obedience to the truth, faithfully serving the body

00:00:46.720 | of Christ with your gift of preaching.

00:00:48.680 | For the past few years, I have been struggling with a text and a drumbeat sounding in the

00:00:53.400 | campus ministry I work for and the church I attend.

00:00:56.880 | James 5.16 is the drumbeat that we need to confess our sins to each other.

00:01:02.240 | Now I am thankfully aware of Psalm 51.4 and 1 John 1.9, as I have preached on 1 John 1.9

00:01:09.040 | many times.

00:01:10.040 | There is one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the righteous."

00:01:14.440 | Here are my main questions.

00:01:16.340 | What exactly is James commanding us to do in James 5.16?

00:01:21.020 | What does it mean that you may be healed, and could you give us a brief theology of

00:01:26.200 | relational confession practices on the whole?

00:01:30.880 | Okay, let's do the brief theology first.

00:01:35.520 | Let's begin broad and general and collect some building blocks for the theology of relational

00:01:42.320 | confession, and then get down to the specifics of James 5.

00:01:46.240 | So here we go.

00:01:47.240 | I would start with the truth that owing to our new birth and our new creation in Christ

00:01:54.760 | through faith, we are now children of God who is light, and in him is no darkness at

00:02:02.440 | all, and in him, in union with him, we are children of light.

00:02:10.800 | Ephesians 5.8, "At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.

00:02:16.600 | Walk as children of the light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and

00:02:22.560 | true and right."

00:02:25.080 | Good and true.

00:02:27.120 | So the fact that we are children of light, and part of light is truth, we will not—the

00:02:34.880 | Christian community will not—be marked by secretiveness or cloaking ourselves or our

00:02:42.360 | motives so that people don't know who we really are, we won't be hypocrites, we won't

00:02:47.920 | try to look on the outside what we're not on the inside, and that necessarily includes

00:02:55.160 | being truthful about our sinfulness and our struggle with sin.

00:03:00.840 | It doesn't mean you need to broadcast to the whole world your specific sins.

00:03:07.240 | That wouldn't be good for them, and it wouldn't be good for you, but it does mean that you

00:03:12.800 | need to be known as an open book appropriately read by accountable, mature people in your

00:03:21.840 | life.

00:03:22.840 | You're not a secretive person, a hypocritical person.

00:03:26.680 | Ephesians 4.25, "Therefore, having put away all falsehood, let us speak truth with

00:03:35.040 | each other, with our neighbors, for we are members of one another."

00:03:39.800 | That's going to include doctrinal truth, relational truth, truth about God, truth about

00:03:44.800 | others, truth about circumstances, truth about our own souls.

00:03:50.400 | We are people of truth.

00:03:53.000 | That would be a foundational building block in the theology of relational confession.

00:04:00.600 | Now what follows from this humble truthfulness about ourselves and others is that we will

00:04:08.600 | seek to confess and make right any ways that we have wronged others, Matthew 5.23.

00:04:18.660 | So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has

00:04:25.560 | something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go.

00:04:28.400 | Just be reconciled to your brother.

00:04:30.560 | Then come offer your gift.

00:04:32.960 | So confess it.

00:04:34.520 | Go tell him you wronged him and get it worked out.

00:04:39.640 | Being children of light also implies that we will not be ashamed to pursue reconciliation

00:04:46.440 | by drawing the attention to the sins of others against us in the body of Christ, Matthew

00:04:54.920 | 18.15.

00:04:55.920 | If your brother sins against you, go tell him his fault between you and him alone.

00:05:01.520 | If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.

00:05:03.760 | In other words, get a confession from him if you can, because then you preserve the

00:05:09.160 | relationship.

00:05:11.640 | So we try to help others confess when we know about their sin.

00:05:17.920 | And Galatians 6.1 generalizes it, "Brothers, if anyone is caught in a transgression, you

00:05:25.040 | who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

00:05:29.600 | Keep watch over your own souls, lest you too be tempted."

00:05:32.000 | So restoring somebody caught in a sin is clearly going to involve helping them confess it.

00:05:39.680 | If they lie about it or hide it, then nothing is achieved.

00:05:44.640 | So confession is clearly implied in this brotherly effort to make right wrongs.

00:05:50.660 | We have done by confession and make right wrongs.

00:05:54.240 | Others have done by ruining our relationship by helping them confess.

00:05:59.320 | Then Ephesians 4.32, a real broad application, Paul describes a community spirit in which

00:06:07.720 | confession and forgiveness is regularly happening.

00:06:11.420 | He says in Ephesians 4.32, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another,

00:06:19.520 | as God in Christ forgave you."

00:06:21.960 | So the words "forgiving one another" assumes confession is happening, because you don't

00:06:29.640 | go around the church forgiving people who haven't given any indication that they've

00:06:34.760 | sinned against you.

00:06:35.760 | That would be the most offensive thing in the world.

00:06:37.720 | I forgive you, I forgive you, and they don't even know what you're talking about.

00:06:41.600 | So clearly forgiving one another implies there's confession going on.

00:06:47.940 | People have come to you, they've admitted they've sinned, and you're forgiving them.

00:06:55.120 | Which brings us now to James 5.

00:06:57.720 | James has just said that the elders are praying over a sick person, and if they are given

00:07:03.680 | the gift of faith for that person, they are healed, the person is healed, God will raise

00:07:09.280 | them up, and then he adds this, "And if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven."

00:07:15.840 | So it appears that in the encounter with the elders, sins emerge which were somehow connected

00:07:23.720 | with this illness.

00:07:24.720 | We're not told how.

00:07:27.440 | And it may be that James intends to include in the healing, which is literally the word

00:07:35.240 | "sozo," saved, you will save the sick man, he intends that healing happen in the fullest

00:07:43.240 | sense of spiritual as well as physical.

00:07:46.160 | That's why sins are brought up here.

00:07:48.840 | So there was physical healing, and then there was an emergence of these sins that were somehow

00:07:54.760 | involved and those were taken care of as well in this encounter with the elders.

00:08:00.400 | And then James draws out this inference generally.

00:08:04.640 | "Therefore," that's a key word, "therefore confess your sins to one another."

00:08:11.080 | So just like what happened when the elders were having that prayer meeting, you confess

00:08:16.040 | your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

00:08:21.920 | And I take this to mean simply that in the normal life of the Christian, honesty and

00:08:29.240 | truthfulness and purity of heart involve continual admission and confession of sin to appropriate

00:08:39.320 | people in our lives.

00:08:43.520 | The result will be greater than physical.

00:08:47.520 | It will include spiritual health as well, because Psalm 32 makes the physical and the

00:08:55.080 | spiritual clear.

00:08:56.840 | I had a real experience like this with a man in our church, so this text really came alive

00:09:02.280 | for me when he used it to describe his misery.

00:09:05.040 | It goes like this, "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all

00:09:12.320 | the day."

00:09:13.320 | See what happens?

00:09:14.320 | I'm silent, I'm not confessing, and it's having this awful physical effect on me.

00:09:19.400 | "For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.

00:09:22.680 | My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer."

00:09:25.720 | And then here comes the solution, verse 5, "I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not

00:09:31.760 | cover my iniquity.

00:09:33.520 | I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and you forgave the iniquity

00:09:40.680 | of my sin."

00:09:41.680 | Now, the principle there—I know it's confession to the Lord there, but the principle there

00:09:46.440 | between physical well-being and a locked-up sin that nobody knows, and you're trying

00:09:54.680 | to hide from the Lord, you're keeping from other people—the principle is dishonesty

00:10:00.080 | and hiddenness and privateness about our sins brings both spiritual and physical misery.

00:10:09.040 | And God would spare us that, and so he teaches us to confess our sins to God and to one another.

00:10:16.240 | Well, that was a brief but robust theology of personal confession.

00:10:19.480 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:10:20.480 | And thank you for listening and supporting the podcast.

00:10:23.540 | You can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes in our archive, and send

00:10:28.080 | us an email of your own, even questions related to church practice and how we apply scriptural

00:10:32.280 | principles in our lives together as brothers and sisters in Christ.

00:10:36.200 | You can do all of that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:10:43.120 | Well here is the next question on the docket, and it is quite a question.

00:10:48.280 | When it comes to temptations to sexual sin, Jesus says, "If your hand causes you to sin,

00:10:53.200 | cut it off."

00:10:54.200 | He also says, "There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs."

00:11:00.240 | So in reading these kinds of texts together a bit, does Jesus applaud surgical or chemical

00:11:07.040 | castration as a winning strategy in the war against lust?

00:11:12.560 | That is the question, and the answer should be very interesting.

00:11:16.480 | For that, I am your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you on Friday.

00:11:20.760 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:11:29.540 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

How Important Is It to Confess My Sin to Someone Other Than God?

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