A Thought For The Week Of October 26, 2015

"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." (James 5:16) The idea of confessing our sins - and, more than that, "to each other" - is an intriguing one. It's a concept that I suspect many Protestants especially would rather set aside on the grounds that it sounds a little bit like the Roman Catholic confessional. And, of course, we've been conditioned as Protestants to the idea that we need to confess our sins only to God. We are our own priests; we have direct access to God; that's that. And, of course, I don't want to deny the belief in the priesthood of all believers. We do all have direct access to God. And so, I hope that we all take time to confess our sins to God. And if we offer them with a sincere and repentant heart and attitude, God hears those prayers, and God forgives us. After all, such prayers are powerful and effective. But what about the instruction that we should confess "to each other." There's probably a knee jerk reaction against those words - even, I confess, by me. Do I confess all my sins to other Christians? Well, of course not. I confess them to God, I believe they're forgiven, and I move on. I don't bare my soul to other Christians on a regular basis. But I do see the point and value of the concept. It's accountability within the community. I think it's probably even therapeutic to be able to unburden yourself to another person that you trust. But perhaps there's the rub. Trust. Do we really trust each other - even within the church? To an extent, certainly, but I'm not sure we trust each other enough to actually do what James tells us to do. Does that make us bad people? Or at least bad Christians? No. It makes us human, I guess. When there's something we find in the Bible that we just can't live up to, it's nice to know that God that God forgives us and gives us grace to move on.