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Confession

In James 5, the apostle writes about confessing our trespasses to one another and praying for one another. "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." (James 5:16 NIV)

Confess is another way to say “speak it out.” You can’t confess to somebody else and not use words. I have seen this attempted in families. Somebody horribly offends another family member and it is just never spoken of again. People refuse to verbally confess their sin against each other. Rather than doing this, they suddenly bring home flowers or cook a special meal or do something which is supposed to say, “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me? Can we be friends again?” But they don’t use their words. They don’t speak it out and when we don't speak it out, we are never quite sure what those flowers, or the meal, or the chocolates, or whatever, mean.

But we know what words mean. When you say, “The way I spoke to you this morning was wrong and I have been convicted about it all day. Before God, I ask your forgiveness. Will you forgive me for saying what I said to you and the way I said it.” There is no confusion about that.

The word which is translated "sins" in the James passage is not the word which refers specifically to gross moral sin. It has the idea of falling short of God's righteousness, a deviation from the truth, or a lapse in uprightness. It's about our on-going weaknesses, our character flaws.

There is something about speaking your weakness out to someone else that is very healing. Perhaps it is because refusing to confess something that is wrong with us helps us stay in denial about it. Living in any form of unreality is draining, and pretending to be stronger than you are, deeper than you are, better than you are, and so on, slowly sucks the life out of you. Confession sets the record straight. It moves us from living a lie to living the truth. We may lower oursleves in their estimation, but we live in a coherent world and have peace in ourselves.

Note that James is not promoting big showy public confessions of gross immorality. That is pathological. It sometimes happens. I’ve seen it happen. But that is not what we are talking about. Proper confession is a solemn private thing. It's value is not in the shocked reaction of the people we tell. It is valuable because it creates a pathway of accountability. If I know that somebody else knows what my weakness is, that will help me avoid the things that person knows about.

One day, I got a phone call at the office and a Christian brother asked me to meet him for lunch. When we got to the restaurant, he asked for a table in a private corner and said “Ron, I want you to know that I have problems with the Internet and I look at things I shouldn’t. I am telling you this so that you can keep me accountable. You can ask me anytime how I’ve been and I will tell you the truth.” With these words, he made himself vulnerable and accountable. He will be more careful about what he does on the internet now, because he knows I might enquire at any time about what he’s been looking at.

This kind of verbal confession of weakness is totally against everything that falls into the “normal” category of human behaviour. That is why we are commanded to do it. We would never do it naturally.

Keep in mind that confessing our faults to another person does not grant us forgiveness. As we’ve seen, this kind of confession provides accountability. But confessing our sin to God and putting it under the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ does gain us forgiveness. 1 John 1:9 reminds us of the importance of confessing our sins to God and gives us the promise of His forgiveness and cleansing.

I strongly recommend finding a private place where you can do this out loud. Too often, when we pray in our minds, we excuse ourselves. But when we say the words out loud we take responsibility in a whole other way. Many of us have raised children and we know that when that little person in front of us is holding out, we want to hear words. We want to hear him say he did it. We want her to admit she disobeyed. Sometimes it is hard to extract those words from a child, but no harder than it is for an adult to say those words to God. We’ve had a lifetime of experience not speaking words of confession. We’ve always hated saying, “I did it. I’m guilty. I was wrong.

You’d think that being a Christian would make this a lot easier. It helps, but for most of us our natural inclination to justify ourselves kicks in and we find a way to excuse it. We might pledge to try to not do it again, but to confess it as sin? To admit we were wrong? That’s hard. Hard, but necessary.

Ron Hughes
© December 2007